Liberation

by Christopher Isherwood

  July 30. I’m in a curious state of anxiety about what I’m to say at Ken’s memorial service. (He is being buried in England, because that was his wish. I must say, this preoccupation with one’s grave place does seem strange to me, if it’s anything more than a merely sentimental caprice. Sure, it’s kind of nice to leave a monument— but, in the case of writers and of makers and creators in general, isn’t that to be found in the work they leave behind? And why preserve, even temporarily, the remains of a mortal envelope?)

  Ah—I knew it, or at least I hoped it: as I sat down to write this entry, I began to see how I could speak about Ken. . . .

  Begin by saying that I believe in survival of some kind. Speak of Swami’s death and what I feel about his continuing presence.

  Speak also perhaps about Wystan and how I read his poetry after hearing he was dead.

  Say I believe that Ken is with us here, at this service—but that the degree to which he is present depends quite as much on us as on him. Therefore we should dwell on the aspects of Ken which each of us finds most positive and most inspiring. As far as I’m concerned, Ken’s most inspiring aspect is his appetite for experience, etc. etc.

  And then maybe I’ll quote the William Penn extract from Some Fruits of Solitude: “They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. . . .”6

  August 1. Well, it didn’t turn out like that. I decided to read Ken’s diary extract from Show People about his feelings for Louise Brooks. I said a few words about this and then read the William Penn, and that was that. Not a distinguished tribute, but many of the guests liked it because I spoke briefly and clearly, which neither Shirley MacLaine nor Penelope Gilliatt did. Both of them were embarrassing. Shirley looked upward and addressed Ken directly as though he was hovering under the roof beams.7

  Afterwards we went to the Tynans’ house, where a secretary told us about a pornographic screenplay which is one of Ken’s last works—very S. and M.—and Kathleen began to tell us about Ken’s last days—saying that he had been terribly scared. Unfortunately she was interrupted in the midst of this.

  From there, we went to the Veterans’ Hospital to see Tony Sarver, who will have his tumor removed in a few days. Bill Scobie had already told me that he thinks Tony’s case is nearly hopeless—the cancer is almost certain to recur, and anyhow Tony will be an invalid for a long time after the operation. Tony was much thinner but seemed in fairly good spirits. Bill Scobie was with him. God, the sadness of it. And Tony talking brightly of how he wants to sell his business and devote his time to Art, as soon as he’s better.

  We cheered ourselves up (partially) by going to see Strangers on a Train.

  August 3. Newsweek publishes a summary of a report on the world’s prospects in the year 2000, prepared by the State Department and the Council on Environmental Quality: The world’s population will have increased by fifty-five percent, nearly all in the less developed countries. Hundreds of millions will be hungry. The world’s forests will have been largely cut down, farmlands will have become sand dunes. Prices will be enormous. Hundreds of thousands of species of plant and insect will have become extinct.

  And that’s even if we don’t have any nuclear wars!

  Meanwhile, fat old Dobbin eats and drinks and trots down to the beach and often dips in the ocean, and is starting preliminary reading of diaries for his next book—because, after all, what else can he do?

  August 7. A letter from Alan Ansen8 (July 24) tells me that Caskey had been dead for about a month when he was found in his apartment. There were no signs of foul play. But the police did find a telegram dated early June informing him of the death of his mother.

  What shocks me—I don’t mean that I’d necessarily mind it for myself—is the vision of Billy leading a life so utterly without friends. He did refer to himself in one letter as being lonely. No wonder he got drunk and let his old resentments seethe in him. Today I’ve been going through the carbon copy he sent me of a letter in which he furiously attacks me for not having answered his letters and then goes on to demand the Tarascan figure (which was a birthday present but which, according to me, he agreed should be included in my share of our belongings when we split up). It’s so characteristic of him that he sent me a copy of the letter—getting all ready for a lawsuit, it seems, in his Irish way. Now the copy has faded so much that parts of it are unreadable. I have “restored” them in ink where I am able, but there are some sentences I can’t reconstruct. I suppose the originals will go to Billy’s surviving sister, whom he hated. However, the sister must have at least two later letters showing that we made it up. And now, are we to haggle with the Caskey family over the Tarascan figure?

  August 10. Yesterday was the first day of a Golden Anniversary celebration of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. So I went up to the center for the first time in months, and read snippets from my commonplace book and answered questions—many of them about the early days of the society.

  During these doings I kept feeling what I’ve recurringly felt this year—while making publicity for My Guru in San Francisco, here, and in London—that I was seeing myself as others see me. Seeing the spry little old man who is “wonderful,” merely because he hops around, is still quick with his answers and jokes, and looks perhaps ten years younger than his age. These external glimpses of myself aren’t reassuring, indeed they make me feel all the more death-conscious, that is to say, all the more conscious that I am surviving, rather than just simply living. This is a deadly bad attitude, and I have to rally Swami and Holy Mother and the power of the mantram to my aid. I have to remember, as Forster advises, to behave as though I were immortal—which means get the hell on with my work.

  Darling has been so wonderful lately. He has shown me his love so strongly, and that never seems dated or different. He has a genius for expressing love—the genius is in his utter lack of embarrassment.

  August 20. Angel has had terrible pain from strained muscles in the chest and shoulder, but got almost instantly better yesterday after he’d at length persuaded Elsie Giorgi to prescribe him a muscle relaxant instead of codeine.

  This morning I went to Dr. Dayton because my vision in the left eye is getting worse; I wondered if this could be because the opticians had made a mistake in preparing the lens. No, says Dr. Dayton, my left eye has now got quite a big cataract in it. And my right eye also has a small cataract. I’m to show them to him again in January.

  Then I went to see a Richard Meador who wrote and phoned me some time ago—while in Detroit, he met Collins George, who told him about Denny Fouts.9 (Collins has died since them.) This made Meador want to write a book about Denny—or rather, to write a book about the androgyne, having decided that Denny was an example of one. By this, he means a person who gets artistic insights out of being androgynous.

  Meador is a slim, quite nice looking coffee-colored black boy in his early thirties, soft mannered, with a wispy, much-too-long moustache. He sculpts—representationally, but one couldn’t judge how well from the tiny transparencies he showed me. He looks after his grandfather, who is blind and very deaf and nearly bent double, but does barbell exercises every day and cooks for himself. He is 102, and white.

  Am depressed because Candida Donadio’s office tells me that they still haven’t sold October Diary to any magazine. If they can’t do this, maybe Farrar Straus won’t agree to publish it in book form, and then even Methuen may back down.

  August 24. Almost the whole of my morning was consumed by two monster phone calls—one from Phil Grant,10 the other from Haridas (I can never remember who he is except that he belongs to the Vedanta Society and is a nonstop [. . .] gossip). He had been in India, where, according to him, My Guru has shocked some, pleased others. He threatens to visit me, with Bob Baldwin,11 whom I’m supposed to know and doubtless do. He says that Amiya wrote or (more likely) intended to write a letter protesting against a review of Guru in either The Sunday or The Daily Telegraph. The one in the Sunday was by John Lehmann—the worse o
f the two and (I thought) intolerably superior, thick-skinned and offensive. So I hope that’s the one Amiya dislikes. But I fear she’ll never write to say so.

  Phil Grant’s call—much the longer of the two—was full of deathly serious holy Jewish scruples about love and sex. But at least he’s got himself a lover who’s passionate and probably as humorless as he is. Anyhow, they seem to be most sacredly involved.

  August 30. I’m writing this under rather odd circumstances, sitting on a bench outside Melnitz Hall, inside which Darling is watching an Alice Faye movie. When it gets dark, I’ll probably go in and join him, unless there’s enough light in the foyer to write or read by.

  My birthday was a bit tense, as my birthdays usually are. They always seem to upset Don in a way of which he is perhaps not even aware. Anyhow, it’s over and all is happiness again.

  I think I’ll risk making a confession here—I say “risk” because there is a risk that, by making it, I’ll somehow break the spell of my successfully (so far) sustained resolve.

  Immediately after I got back here from England, on July 12, I resolved to stop what I call “making faces.” This is a habit which I have had for many many years—at least since my early manhood, if not earlier. My face making is of two kinds, which might be called “gloating” and “hating.”

  I “gloat” over possessions, situations which please me, achievements of which I am proud. For instance I might gloat over our home, or the life we lead in it, or a manuscript which I have just written.

  I “hate” individuals who have done either of us harm, or whole groups of people whom I regard as hostile and hateworthy.

  The face making which accompanies these emotions is different, of course. But it is expressed by tense grimacing, a flexing of the facial muscles, clenching of the teeth. I never look at myself in the glass when I am doing this. I, in fact, don’t wish to admit that I am doing it. But Don has often caught me at it—especially when I’m “hating.” When he does, he checks me by saying, “Dobbin’s thinking something bad.”

  I have always been conscious that “face making” is a negative unconstructive occupation. It wastes time, and, in the case of “hating,” it tires me. Yet I have very seldom managed to stop it for long. I do clearly remember that I once gave it up for just over a month in 1963, while I was in San Francisco during part of April and May, lecturing at U.C. Berkeley and working on A Single Man.

  At that time I was so aware of my will to abstain from face making that my awareness actually tempted me to “gloat.” This time, my resolve didn’t require such a conscious act of willpower. It was founded on weariness, after the exhausting ordeal of book signing and interview giving in England and Holland. It was an instinctive move to conserve my remaining strength. There was in it, as it were, an acknowledgement of old age.

  But, oh, it is worthwhile. As long as I don’t relapse into face making, I can fill much of my time with japam—with the result that I feel calm, loving, nervously relaxed. My mind is far clearer than before, because it’s no longer dulled by the toxins of hatred. You might say, in fact, that “face making” is a kind of antijapam.

  I have very seldom described the practice of “face making” to anyone. I can only clearly remember telling one person about it and that was Gerald Heard, to whom I confided so much. To my amazement, Gerald said that he had practised it but that he had now given it up. I wish I had questioned him more—to be quite certain that we were talking about the same thing.

  September 2. Well, once again I give thanks that the summer is over and the beautiful fall, the work season, begins. Only, now I have to work. This morning I wasted in financial arrangements which seem nearly intolerable and also quite difficult to me—just transferring money from one account to another; the sort of thing which even Don, who God knows is no financier, takes care of frequently without the least fuss or complaint.

  I have kept slowly drawing up a list of contents of my 1939–1942 diary—this is a preliminary to getting started on the next volume of my autobiography. But, thus far, I haven’t managed to feel any appetite for my material. Then there is the prospect of doing a screen treatment of “Paul” for Michelle Rappaport(?)—I’m still not sure how she spells it; the telephone book shows that there are at least three acceptable ways: pp, ap, op.12

  My eyes are getting worse all the time—particularly the left one; it rather scares me, and yet I can’t somehow for one moment believe in blindness as a condition I could find myself in.

  September 9. Rather depressed—partly because of the deterioration of my eyes—partly, I think, because I have been reading Tom Cullen’s book on Gerald Hamilton13 and the Gold–Fizdale book on Misia Sert14—both of them ultimately downers. Also, we’ve got to go to New York at the end of this month. I wouldn’t dream of not going—it’s for Darling’s show at the Robert Miller Gallery. But I dread New York, that hell of squalor and hostility.

  A letter from the American vice-consul in Athens, saying that Caskey’s body was only discovered after several weeks, when the neighbors reported his absence, that no cause of death was diagnosed by the coroner because the body was in an advanced state of decomposition, and that it was buried in the Zografou Cemetery on July 21.

  The letter ends, “Please accept my sympathy for the tragic loss of your friend. Richele Keller, American Vice-Consul.” Now I must try to find out if Richele is a male or female name, so I can thank him or her.15

  We have been intimidated by a rat which eats the dry cereal when it can get into the closet. Otherwise, it shits over the beds and floors. Now we’re trying to deter it by keeping all the doors and windows shut—which means sleeping in Don’s studio!

  September 15. I got around the problem of Richele Keller’s sex by addressing him/her as “Dear Vice-Consul Keller,” even though that isn’t the prescribed form and sounds a bit like a character in an Ibsen play.

  Sometime soon—maybe as early as next week—we’ll be taking off for New York. If we fly direct from here to there we wouldn’t have to leave until Sunday the 28th. But we may make a short whiz-tour with David Hockney—one which he has made already and strongly recommends—to drive from Los Angeles through the mountains to Denver and take the plane from there to New York.

  Today I finally got Basil Bunting’s Collected Poems out of the Santa Monica library and have read some of “Briggflatts,” which Thom Gunn specially recommended, saying that it’s “about as good as Eliot when you get down to it.” Cyril Connolly, I now find, praised it too. Don’t know what I think, yet. But at least and at last I’ve looked up “oxter” which I first came upon in early Auden, “axe under oxter,”16 and now know—but for how long?—that it means “armpit.” Bunting uses it here.

  [The gardener’s helper] has a sore throat, is afraid it may be clap. Poor angel, he really is a martyr to V.D.

  No sign of the rat or rats lately. But Tom Long is to put a screen door on our bedroom window.

  September 25 [Thursday]. Yesterday, Curt Klebaum17 phoned and said, “At David’s party on Saturday, I kissed you.” “That was a rare pleasure,” I told him politely, not getting his drift. He then told me that, since the party, he has developed hepatitis [. . .]—so now Don and I would have to get gammaglobulin shots. Elsie Giorgi gave them to us yesterday afternoon. She said we were probably immune anyway, since we’d already had hepatitis—at the time, we were told that this would make us more, not less, liable to reinfection—but gammaglobulin is to be recommended also as a protection against flu.

  Well, we’re still due to leave on Sunday—that is, unless we switch the reservation to Saturday night. A series of foggy mornings makes us fear we might arrive late and not get to see David Bowie’s performance in The Elephant Man, to which we’ve been invited for Sunday evening.

  Oh, the fuss and the tension, the minute one leaves this haven of peace!

  On Sept 19, Don had lunch with The Downer—after their long separation. He got the impression that The Downer would be happy to come back to him,
if asked. No comment.

  However, Don has now met a really attractive and bright and rich young man named Don Carr, whom he likes, and who likes him. They were together last night. Dobbin is keeping his hoofs crossed. Carr worked for the Mark Taper Forum people, in the casting department.

  October 7. On September 28, we were driven to the airport by Jim White where we met Jack Woody, complete with two just-bound copies of our book October, and we took off with him for New York. A perfect flight with a tail wind so strong that we put down nearly three quarters of an hour early, with plenty of time to move into Paul Sanfaçon’s apartment, get changed and washed and still arrive at the theater punctually to see David Bowie in The Elephant Man. He was quite good despite the special cutely distorted “elephant” voice which he used throughout his performance. But his supporting actor and actress were far inferior to the ones in the off-Broadway production, and the play itself seemed preachy and second-rate, especially toward its end.

  There was a reception afterwards at which Bowie appeared and made himself charming, and I don’t mean that snidely. As I told him, when he phoned a few days later, he is the politest person I have ever met, and that includes Michael York with his great line, “Why, you’re just like me—no, I mean I’m just like you.”

  This reception was held at the top of some grim old warehouse which had had its top floor dressed for the occasion with hangings and pictures and potted trees and buffets. During this affair, both Don and I became aware that relations between David Hockney and Peter Schlesinger were still much more tense and complicated than we had imagined. [. . .]

  On the 29th, we had lunch with Andy Warhol and Bob Colacello18—largely because they had just published extracts from the October diary in their magazine Interview, along with Don’s drawing of me projecting hostility. Was much impressed by the dining room of their office, which is walled with eighteenth-century(?) paneling from England. However, it smelled unpleasantly because of the plates of unfresh cold meat which were to be our lunch. Andy seemed unexpectedly benign—almost what one might describe as a “good man.” But that didn’t mean that the usual tape recorder wasn’t in action. The difference was that, today, Andy entered into the conversation in a way he never used to—at least, not in my presence. He seemed almost benign, very friendly to us.