The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969
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118 I.e., Faulkner’s Sanctuary and its sequel Requiem for a Nun, which Richardson amalgamated for his film.
119 Adjacent to the UCSB campus.
120 Professor of English at L.A. State, 1955–1978.
121 Kennedy’s victory, November 8, was slim. In fact, when absentee ballots were counted a week later, Nixon was to prove the winner in California. See Glossary under Presidential Election 1960.
122 At the Sarada Convent, Montecito; see Glossary.
123 Probably Kimmis Hendrick, Pacific News bureau chief from 1947 through the 1960s.
124 See Glossary under Presidential Election 1960.
125 Harry Girvetz (1910–1974), first Chairman of the Philosophy Department at UCSB, from 1957 to 1964, wrote books about liberalism and the modern welfare state, served on the California State Democratic Central Committee, and wrote speeches for Governor Edmund Brown in 1959 and 1960.
126 Administrator of the Arts and Lectures program at UCSB; from 1959 to 1981, she planned theater, lectures, and arts events to complement the academic program.
127 Genevieve Watson Haight (1904–1964) joined the English department in 1941 and mostly trained teachers of English. Her children’s literature course had legendary popularity.
128 William Harrison Ainsworth’s The Tower of London describes the tower in its account of the imprisonment and beheading of Lady Jane Grey, the nine-day child queen, by her cousin Mary I. Isherwood tells more about the book in Lost Years: A Memoir, 1945–1951.
129 He was being asked to lecture there during the coming year.
130 At Berkeley.
131 C.P. Snow (1905–1980), novelist and Cambridge scientist, knighted in 1957 and made a life peer (Baron Snow of Leicester) in 1964, was a grammar school boy and the son of a shoe-factory clerk. His wife was the English writer Pamela Hansford Johnson (1912–1981).
132 First section of Down There on a Visit.
133 Not his real name. An occasional bed partner. He was a schoolteacher.
134 A Vedanta devotee at the nearby Santa Barbara Vedanta Society.
135 Academy Award winning costume designer (1902–1982), then working at MGM.
136 Minelda and Bob Jiras.
137 Auden and Isherwood had worked on the musical before (see D.1); now the London impresario Oscar Lewenstein was interested. See Glossary under Curtis Brown, Auden and Isherwood’s New York agency, where Cindy Degener handled drama, and under Carter Lodge who had rights in John van Druten’s play I Am a Camera.
138 Lambert had already helped Isherwood (in 1959) to revise this film script, originally written by Isherwood with Lesser Samuels in 1950.
139 Dr. Max Cutler, trained at Johns Hopkins and the Curie Institute in Paris; head of the Tumor Institute in Chicago before opening his practice in Los Angeles. He had previously removed a papilloma from Michael Barrie.
140 Homosexuals.
141 On December 30, Laos requested U.N. help, claiming North Vietnamese troops had crossed its northern border; see Glossary under Laos Crisis.
142 Henry V, III.vi.
143 Ted’s Grill, a local restaurant.
144 Also by Cather.
145 By Thomas de Quincey.
146 By John Ford.
147 Robert B. Haas, on the staff of the UCLA University Extension.
148 The lectures were announced as “The Forefathers: Dickens, Conrad, Brontë, and Others,” “Our Group and Its Older Brothers: Joyce, Hemingway, and Others,” “The Young Novelists: Williams, Capote, Kerouac, Mailer, Bradbury, and Others,” for three Sunday evenings in March.
149 Random sample.
150 February 14 (Valentine’s Day), 1953, when Don Bachardy first spent the night with Isherwood. The building is on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.
151 His sexually explicit 1959 short story (never published); see D.1.
152 Now J.F.K.; Isherwood typed Idyllwild, like the town in the San Jacinto mountains where he stayed in John van Druten’s cabin in the 1940s. See D.1.
153 Canadian-born American stage and film star (1914–1992).
154 Revelation, 18.21.
155 September 1948–December 1950 when Isherwood lived with Bill Caskey at 333 East Rustic Road. Caskey was often away; see D.1.
156 Isherwood tells in D.1 and in My Guru and His Disciple about differences between Heard and Swami over asceticism, women, the role of the guru, drugs, and mysticism. And see Glossary under Heard.
157 At Evelyn Hooker’s, 400 South Saltair Avenue, Brentwood, where Isherwood lived in 1952–1953.
158 E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946), Edwardian spy writer.
159 I.e.,wings which carry the immortal soul upwards, toward Truth; see Henri Estienne (Stephanus) edition (1578), pp. 246–257.
160 Othello, V. ii. Isherwood typed, “the pearl.”
161 I.e., Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher.
162 Viennese actress (1885–1983); she played Fräulein Schneider in the original stage production of I Am a Camera, appeared in other Broadway shows, worked in T.V., and later had small film roles.
163 Civilian Public Service camp, for conscientious objectors during W.W.II.
164 Isherwood’s mother, Kathleen Isherwood, died in June 1960. Sidebotham was the family solicitor.
165 I.e., to Johnny Zeigel.
166 Softened and receptive—as to the light and power of God or inspiration of the Spirit—the sense which Isherwood learned from the Quakers during his early years in the U.S.
167 Masselink’s novel.
168 Not their real names.
169 Fran’s daughter.
170 Pianist and composer head of Columbia Records and his wife, ballerina Vera Zorina.
171 Irish-Catholic American star Rosalind Russell (1907–1976).
172 Merula; see Glossary.
173 Richard and Sybil Burton’s house.
174 Spender, his son.
175 Fifteen hundred U.S.-trained Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, counting on a sympathetic uprising to overthrow Fidel Castro’s revolutionary socialist regime; they were killed or captured by his troops.
176 Referring to the red “L” on a white plate that British learner drivers must display.
177 The 1949 book was by the 11th Marquess, Francis Archibald Kelhead Douglas (1896–1954), with Percy Colson, but he was no longer the present Marquess. Lord Alfred Douglas’s father was the 9th Marquess. Gide’s book was Les Nourritures terrestres (Fruits of the Earth, 1897).
178 Lazy. See Glossary under guna.
179 Earlier in April, four retired French generals led an uprising against independence for Algeria. Of the military men captured, including other generals, some were imprisoned. Others were sentenced to death in absentia and later captured and imprisoned. None was executed.
180 Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth on April 12, the first person in space.
181 An imaginary Cambridge contemporary who is the author of a successful light novel.
182 Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, and Dudley Moore in the satirical revue they wrote for the 1960 Edinburgh Festival and which made them famous in London’s West End and on Broadway.
183 Released as Conquest (1937) in the U.S.
184 It was eventually published as “A Visit to Anselm Oakes” in Exhumations (1966).
185 Jacob ( Jake) Schwartz, a dentist living mostly in Paris, dealt in modern literary manuscripts from, roughly, the 1940s to the 1960s.
186 Lady Diana Cooper (1892–1986), socialite and beauty, daughter of the 8th Duke and Duchess of Rutland, widow of politician and diplomat Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich (1890–1954); she was a longtime friend of Iris Tree.
187 Maria Fiore de Henriquez (1921–2004), known as Fiore, born in Trieste, raised and educated in Italy, settled in London from 1949; she sculpted hundreds of portrait busts, including the Queen Mother, Stravinsky, Olivier, and John Kennedy.
188 The opera by Pietro Mascagni.
189 The 1956 Lana
Turner flop for which Isherwood wrote the screenplay, as he tells in D.1.
190 Never published.
191 Before decimal money was introduced in the U.K. in 1971, there were twenty shillings in a pound and twelve pennies in a shilling. A half-crown was two and a half shillings or two shillings and sixpence.
192 Premier Khrushchev and President Kennedy held talks in Vienna on June 3 and 4, reaching limited agreement on Laos but disagreeing on the future of Berlin. See Glossary under Berlin Crisis.
193 Penguin published the first unexpurgated English edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, and acquitted; Forster testified for the defense.
194 Possibly Arnim (Mitto) Sampson, a poet and specialist in Caribbean folklore, from Trinidad; evidently Jonathan Cape never published the book.
195 By Peter Mayne (1908–1979).
196 Grindea (1909–1995) was a Romanian critic educated in Bucharest where Adam International Review (for Arts, Drama, Architecture, Music) began publication in 1929. He took over in 1938 and brought the magazine to London in 1939. (Chapter 1 of Upward’s novel, In the Thirties, appeared in The London Magazine in 1961.)
197 Where, evidently, he was mugged, though this is not confirmed.
198 Where the Beesleys lived in the 1940s; see Glossary.
199 A Patriot for Me, refused a license in England because of the subject and staged privately in 1965; it ran in New York in 1969.
200 I.e., Elegy for Young Lovers.
201 Weidenfeld & Nicolson was publishing Beaton’s The Wandering Years, Diaries: 1922–1939.
202 Al Alvarez (b. 1929), English poet, critic, novelist, educated at Oxford; he was then (1956–1966) poetry editor of the Observer, and he was about to publish The New Poetry (1962), an anthology.
203 Historian and, later, Conservative peer (b. 1931); his many books include The Spanish Civil War (1961).
204 Among his books on German and English culture and politics were translations of Lukács and Zuckmayer and The Writer and Commitment (1961).
205 English newspaper journalist, author, radio and television broadcaster (1903–1990); he contributed to “Panorama,” 1953–1960, and then hosted “Appointments with Malcolm Muggeridge” in 1960 and 1961.
206 Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) had depression and underwent electric shock treatment before shooting himself on July 2.
207 Their house in the Hollywood Hills was destroyed by a brush fire on May 12; see Glossary.
208 British drama critic (1912–2005), for the Daily Express in the 1950s and for The Daily Telegraph from 1969 to 1986; in between, he was a literary agent at Curtis Brown.
209 Harvard-educated American playwright (b. 1938); his black comedy Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad was staged in London in 1961.
210 My Place.
211 Isherwood wrote “Royal School of Art.”
212 Minton (1917–1957), who appears in D.1 and Lost Years, taught painting at the RCA; “The Death of Nelson” (1952), after the 1864 wall painting of the same title by Daniel Maclise (1806–1870) in the Houses of Parliament, belongs to the RCA, but no longer hangs in the dining room.
213 Probably in 1936, when Isherwood and Heinz settled in Ostend for a month; Forster visited them in September, crossing the Channel from Dover where he was staying with his mother.
214 British journalist, critic, surrealist novelist, and mystery and humor antholo-gist (1907–1978).
215 Leftist English theater director (1914–2002); a founder of the Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal in London’s East End, where she was the first to produce Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey in 1958. Her productions of Brendan Behan, Frank Norman, and the musical Oh, What a Lovely War! (1963) transferred to the West End in the 1950s and 1960s.
216 André and Olive Mangeot’s London house, in Chelsea.
217 I.e., Jean Ross; see Glossary.
218 Hilda Hauser was Olive’s cook. Hilda’s daughter, Phyllis, was raped by a black G.I. and gave birth to Amber. See Glossary under Olive Mangeot.
219 She suffered continuing pain following a hysterectomy, but later recovered.
220 In February 1956; Isherwood tells about the visit in D.1.
221 41 Ladbroke Square; Grant (d. 1998), was an interior designer and collector and edited Great Interiors (1967).
222 As Elaine Dundy, she published “City Manners” in Queen, Oct. 12, 1960, and “Dr. Strangelove and Mr. Kubrick,” Dec. 4, 1960. No short story has been traced.
223 Hired by Kathleen Isherwood after her first stroke to keep house for her and Richard.
224 See Glossary under Wyberslegh Hall.
225 The Peak, Derbyshire (roughly between Buxton, Castleton, Matlock, and Ashbourne), now generally called the Peak National Park (since 1951) or the Peak District.
226 British government survey map, highly detailed.
227 Before they named it Mortmere, Isherwood and Upward called their fantasy world “the rats’ hostel”; “rats,” used as an adjective, meant spooky, weird, surreal.
228 I.e., The Royal Court.
229 Where the Inland Revenue has offices, in the east and west wings.
230 New only to Richard’s fingers; it was a 1939 hit for Perry Como and later for Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, and it was the title song for the 1947 movie I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now about Joseph E. Howard, who composed it in 1909.
231 Elizabeth von Arnim (1866–1941), a cousin of Katherine Mansfield, published Elizabeth and Her German Garden anonymously in 1898 and twenty subsequent novels as “by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden” or just “by Elizabeth.”
232 British poet and novelist (b. 1928), then known for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and a short story collection The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), featuring rebellious working-class heroes.
233 American poet Ruth Fainlight (b. 1931).
234 Greek-born painter (1923–2001); he trained as an architect, designed ballets, operas, and plays, and taught stage design at the Slade.
235 “Nothing but nonsense,” playing on bêtises, from bête for beast, fool.
236 “The U.S. and Berlin,” by Richard H. Rovere, Aug. 4, 1961, p. 4.
237 Aug. 4, 1961, p. 157.
238 British poet, novelist, journalist and broadcaster (1920–1973); he reported for “Tonight,” the BBC’s first evening-news magazine, and was later book critic for the London Evening News. His works include The Bootleggers (1961).
239 The English dust jacket drawing shows Isherwood looking at a younger self in a mirror.