The Sixties

by Christopher Isherwood

  When I got back yesterday evening, there was a packet of my lecture transcripts from Santa Barbara, plus some photos a boy in London took of me and Don, plus a long letter, full of love and work and so all is well. The packet took so long to arrive because it was opened by the customs, which is rather embarrassing, considering the tone of the letter. But probably all this Kitty and Dobbin stuff bewildered them.

  Aside from the worrying about Don, the visit to Trabuco was a great success. It is very agreeable down there now. Franklin [Knight] (Web Milam’s cousin) the only brahmachari,fn239 Jimmy, Eddie [Acebo] the Mexican boy, Len [Worton] the British ex-sailor,fn240 Richard Thom and a Richard (Epstein?) the son of one of the Epstein brothers who used to work in movies.fn241 Franklin sort of holds the place together, as solid as a barn. Jimmy says he is much happier down there, because the work is more varied. Eddie wishes he could study more; and he complains that at the meetings of the Vedanta Society[,] Trabuco is always slighted and given the smallest allotment of funds. Len just gets on with the job, navy style. Neither of the Richards will stay, probably. Richard Thom is as sly and enigmatic as ever. Richard Epstein is frankly only there on a short visit, “to acquire merit”; he is a good-looking, […], compulsively talkative boy with a sloppy figure, a chain-smoker.

  Ritajananda, who came down with us, is leaving this week to take over the French center in Gretz. He is marvellously placid. Vandanananda is still sulking whenever Swami is present. But he made a point of saying, “Welcome to Trabuco,” as soon as we arrived. A possessive act. And it obviously gave him great satisfaction that I went out walking with him both mornings. The Trabuco ranch is baked hard and grassless by the sun. There are big patches of cactus, full of rabbits and snakes. A fire probably couldn’t even take hold here. It’s going back to desert. But, in a few years, when the water is piped in, the whole surrounding country will begin to be built over.

  As we sat in the cloister, with that marvellous, still empty prospect of lion-golden hills opening way into blue distances and the line of the sea, I said to Swami: “You’re really certain that God exists?”

  He laughed. “Of course! If He doesn’t exist, then I don’t exist.”

  “And do you feel He gives you strength to bear misfortunes?”

  “I don’t think of it like that. I just know He will take care of me.… It’s rather hard to explain.… Whatever happens, it will be all right.”

  I asked him when he began to feel certain that God existed. “When I met Maharaj. Then I knew that one could know God. He even made it seem easy.… And now I feel His presence, nearly every day. But it’s only very seldom that I see Him.”

  Later, when Ritajananda had joined us, he said, “Stay here, Chris, and I’ll give you sannyas. You shall have a special dispensation from the Pope.” He said this laughingly, but I have a feeling that he really meant it. I said, “Swami, that would be a mistake worthy of Vivekananda himself.” Just the same, it staggered me.

  Swami says that the Hindu astrologers predict that the world will come to an end next February 2. (Rosamond Lehmann told us the same thing in London, only according to her it was merely the destruction of California and it was to be on February 5, I think.) However, even the astrologers are praying that it shan’t happen. I remarked to Swami that Ramakrishna had predicted another incarnation for himself on earth and that this, in itself, contradicted any such prophecy. He agreed.

  November 12. I now hear from Don that the New York show of his drawings at the Sagittarius Gallery has almost certainly fallen through, and that he’ll probably be back for Thanksgiving. I can’t be sorry that he’s coming back, but it is bad about the show, because he ought to follow on from the London one, right away. Maybe we’ll go to New York for Christmas and arrange something. In any case, there’s always the prospect of going to the White House, unless Gore is being wishful.

  This jaw thing of mine has gone on and off, and for the time being I’ve decided to do nothing about it, at least unless it gets worse. I can never forget Kolisch’s advice (though I certainly haven’t taken it), “Never go to a doctor again. It’ll only be necessary once, and then it’ll be too late.”

  Then there was a blow from Sidebotham in Stockport. He says the Estate Duty Office has discovered some new grounds for taxing M.’s estate and that he may have to ask me for part of the $14,000 back. This makes me angry as well as dismayed. Wrote him a chilly letter hinting that I had practically committed all of the money and that he might not get paid back for a long time.

  With Dana Woodbury’s help, the yard is gradually being cleared. Yesterday I broke my glasses. I keep dipping into Mark Schorer’s life of Sinclair Lewis; I’m drawn to it by horror-fascination. He calls it, “an American life,” and it is, in the most horrifying and depressing sense. The boyish drunkenness, practical jokes, lack of self-assurance—even the awful shaming skin trouble.

  Coupled with what Howard Warshaw told me about his mother’s journal (see October 29) I keep thinking of a possible father-son novel, about Don and me, more or less. What puts me off, at present, is fear of being sentimental, and also the mistrust of presenting one relationship in terms of another. But the answer to this latter objection is: why do you have to think in categories of relationships at all? Why not simply describe a relationship?

  November 14. Yesterday morning, Nehru’s press secretary, or whatever he was, called me and invited me to lunch. “The Prime Minister’s suite,” he said. For a moment, I thought he’d said, “The Prime Minister’s sweet,” and was somewhat at a loss for a reply until he added, “at the Ambassador.” I went off rather in a spirit of martyrdom, expecting a mob including Robert Hardy Andrews.fn242 But no—there were only fourteen of us, and that included everybody, Nehru, his daughter,fn243 a whole bunch of Indians, Will Durant and his wife,fn244 Irving Stone and his wife,fn245 Marlon Brando and Danny Kaye!fn246

  Nehru looked old and skinny. He didn’t wear his little hat. At first he was very quiet and attentive, watching. His manners were much better than those of the other men present; he never sat down while any lady was standing. He seemed tired and slightly irritable but not viciously so; it was just that he didn’t think in our terms. He is like an old schoolmistress, and all the other world leaders are boys in his class. It’s almost incredible that such a person could be one of the most influential men on earth; it is also extraordinarily reassuring.

  Mrs. Durant, who is like a very very bad imitation—so bad that one is embarrassed for her—how dare she try to get away with that accent[?]—asked him, “Mr. Prime Minister, do you still enjoy doing your job?” Nehru winced ever so slightly—it was a Krishnamurti kind of wince—and said, “Well—one would have thought that the word enjoy was hardly the most suitable one, under all the circumstances—” When Durant talked about “The West,” Nehru said, “Will you tell me, please, why do you use that expression? What is the West?” Brando (who was wearing an absurd little ducktail curl at the back of his neck; his sailor’s pigtail for Mutiny on the Bounty) said that the nature of man is evil. When I objected, later, that the nature of man has produced the Buddha etc., he answered that such people were really produced by a repression which was due to fear.

  Nehru quoted with approval what Vinoba Bhavefn247 had said to him, that politics and religion are both out of date, they must be replaced by science and spirituality. “In ten to fifteen years’ time,” he said, “We’ll be either different or dead.” He found Russia much more stable than ten years ago, with relatively greater freedom of speech, and rather conservative. Most of their slogans were just lip service to the Marxist dogmas. All their admiration was for American technology. Russians and Americans were very alike; by nature they should be friends. The Chinese, on the other hand, were in their first revolutionary fervor. Also, they consider every one else on earth barbarians. When they are on top, it is natural for them to expand. The USA was more socialist than India.

  Khrushchev had said to Nehru, “You’re such friends with the Americans and E
nglish, can’t you bring us together?” When Khrushchev came to visit India, he was delighted by his reception. He expanded and became a different person. But then a British journalist was rude to him and he was furious and aggressive again. When Nehru told him he shouldn’t get upset so easily, he said that Russia had been isolated so long, fearing attack, that Russians are suspicious of everyone. Nehru says that Indian nationalist propaganda always discriminated between the British imperial system and the British as individuals[—]so effectively that an Englishman could walk through an Indian crowd in the midst of the rioting and not be harmed.

  Durant talked about the warmongering of the Los Angeles Times. Stone, who had been touring the country, said that Americans don’t want war. He agreed with Durant that there is an evil competition in the business world to scare the public into buying fallout shelters, even calling it a patriotic duty to do so. I quoted the radio announcer, the night before last, who told us as though it were grave news that the fallout from the latest Russian bomb test hasn’t been nearly as big as was anticipated.

  We had a miserable lunch of tepid overfried food. Durant was the only total vegetarian present. No alcohol except sherry. Someone managed to spill ice cream all down the back of my jacket. Nehru parted from us very agreeably. I haven’t the least idea why we were invited. The only serious question Nehru asked me was what I was writing now. I told him about the novel and then mentioned the Ramakrishna book. He just barely flicked an eyelid, though this would have seemed a good conversational opening for us. And the questions he asked the others were equally unsearching … Ah well, no doubt he got something from just watching us.

  Supper yesterday evening with Evelyn Hooker. The fire the other day got so close that she moved out “The Project”fn248 into cars, and it took days to put back again. The people next door have just had a fallout shelter installed. Evelyn says that the treatment of homosexuals in Oslo is actually worse than in London. True, it is legal but there is very strong feeling against it socially and in business, and the homosexuals have to have their clubs more or less in secret. There are no queer bars. Evelyn wrote a paper about “The Homosexual Community” to read to a psychological convention in Copenhagen last summer. I must say, she makes it sound madly glamorous and thrilling, a mixture of the Mafia, the Foreign Legion and Alice Through the Looking-Glass. She refers to a heterosexual as “a representative of the dominant culture”!

  Glorious weather today. I toted wood up from the walk below, where the men had left it after cutting it up for firewood, and stacked it against the retaining wall behind the house. Then I lay in the sun. Then I went to the gym, where Richard Eganfn249 works out in a hooded sweater with a mackintosh pair of pants over it, presumably to make him sweat that much extra. Dogged work at the Ramakrishna book; right now, it’s boring me nearly to the point of paralysis. But one can always just struggle on.

  November 16. Talked to Pat O’Nealfn250 in the steam room at the gym. Chiefly about Kevin.fn251 How aggressive he is, and how he hates being so small and how his I.Q. is just below that of genius, and how he loves to box. Kevin is working out like a maniac, these days, because he is building himself up after an operation he had two months ago, on his bladder. It was taken out and manipulated to get it into the normal shape, and now he is permanently 4-F.fn252 He has three scars branching out from his penis—two old ones at the sides which are because of hernia, and the new, vertical one in the middle which goes straight up from the root of his penis to his navel. Pat called Kevin in to show me these. Kevin said, “Three scars, all pointing to the same thing—that’s symbolism.” Pat said that sometimes he wants to kill Kevin; the rest of the time he loves him so much that Kevin kids him about it.

  Working out is already having its effect on me, though I haven’t lost one ounce of weight. But I do feel very good, all except for my jaw, which is just the same as ever. I get scared about it, and then I relax and decide to postpone having it looked at until Don gets back.

  Yesterday, I went to see Judith Anderson and Bill Roerick doing their snippets from Macbeth, Medea and The Tower Beyond Tragedy.fn253 I was chiefly impressed by Bill, whom I’ve never seen act before; he held his end up very well, has a nice resonant voice, and humor. But afterwards, when we talked in the dressing room, he told me about some money he had just inherited or otherwise acquired, and said that he was so happy because now he could help struggling young actors, etc.—and oh, it was false, false.

  This from Aronowitz and Hamill’s Ernest Hemingway: The Life and Death of a Man. I think it’s one of the craziest sentences I ever read: “Cuba, of course, was then, as it remains, only ninety miles away from Key West.…”

  Have just remembered how Bill Roerick also told me how he had prayed for Morgan, when Morgan was sick in Cambridge, and how he feels that Morgan is somewhat changing his agnostic attitude in his old age. He told a wonderful story of a dream Morgan had. Morgan dreamed he had died, and went upstairs to a room full of corpses of hideous old men. The corpses all got up and welcomed him, and he forced himself to embrace and kiss them. And then they told him to go downstairs again and out into a garden, where his mother was waiting.

  November 24. Last Sunday, I think it was, Glenn Ford came around and talked about Hope. How they’d had an affair and she said he was the best sex she’d ever had and she loved him, and how now she said she was out of love with him and didn’t want to see him again and how nevertheless she did keep seeing him and they’d have a marvellous time together and then she’d say it was no good, he frightened her, she didn’t want to get involved. Glenn said he couldn’t sleep and couldn’t eat. He loved her so, he demanded nothing from her, but she ought to marry him because otherwise she’ll go to pieces, she’ll destroy herself. She’s running around with young kids; mind you—he’s not saying she’s necessarily going to bed with them. But just the same, it’s all wrong, she’s nearly thirty, she’s got two children, she ought to get wise to herself before it’s too late. He told me all this low voiced and self-righteous and weepy and presently he actually burst into tears, moved to the heart by self-pity. I couldn’t feel sorry for him, but I was helpful and encouraging, and now I’m stuck with interviewing Hopey tonight, buying her supper and pumping her to find out if she really loves Glenn or not. Ivan Moffat and Kate feel sure that she is really tired of him; he’s too solemn and noble. No—I am sorry for Glenn. How can I not feel for him, having so often been in the same boat? But I do see how dreadful to be dull, and how hopeless it is, as soon as someone decides you are.

  Jaw the same; neither better nor worse.

  Don may be coming home next week. I cabled him asking him to do that and then we can plan about going to New York.

  Laughton and I have reopened the Plato project. It looks very promising. I haven’t shown him what I’ve written, yet. He and Elsa are at dagger points; poor Brucefn254 looks like a mortician’s assistant. However, Terry is coming in January, to go on another reading tour with Charles.

  Saw Gerald Heard yesterday. He was in the highest spirits. Told me that the Luces don’t expect war now. But in September they were very seriously alarmed. Clare Luce had told him how you know when a crisis is really bad. First, the volume of short-wave radio communication increases enormously between the capitals of the countries involved; then suddenly it stops almost altogether. This is the fatal moment when a decision has been taken. There is to be no more compromise; so embassies and other agents stop asking for any more secret instructions.

  Yesterday was Thanksgiving. As always, there are only two basic reasons for me to give thanks: Prabhavananda and Don. Though, of course, I’m glad that I have written such a good novel. I do believe it is good, this time. Had supper with Jo and Ben. Gavin was there, also Bill Harris, who has been staying down at La Jolla with his mother. We talked about the “great” days of the Canyon, which was a bore for Gavin and anyhow sad; especially because I got the feeling that Bill had only really lived then. What an amazing animator of other people Denny [Fouts] was,
and Bill Caskey!

  Have attacked the three Henry VI plays of Shakespeare again and am on the second. They are interesting as long as you don’t stop reading for long. Have also just read right through the poems of Cavafy. Have decided that, for the Enjoyment of Literature course at LASC,fn255 I’m going to give them Macbeth, Wuthering Heights, A Farewell to Arms. My twentieth-century British books will be [Forster’s] Where Angels Fear to Tread, [Greene’s] The End of the Affair, [Lawrence’s] The Virgin and the Gipsy.

  November 26. When I had supper with Hope, the night before last, I got a pretty strong impression that she won’t go back with Glenn whatever happens. But of course I couldn’t tell him that. Why in hell should I? I compromised by telling him to play it very cool when they were together, always be gay, never make any demands, etc. This is utterly impossible for Glenn, anyhow. His heartbroken attempts at gaiety are the weepiest thing imaginable. Even while he still did have Hope, they were nearly as depressing.

  Last night, I took Stanley Miron out, the nice and attractive Jewish doctor we met in London.fn256 Well, he was even nicer and more attractive and he assured me we’d had a great time and that I was one of “the most beautiful people” he’d ever met. Funny, I can remember so clearly, the last person who said that to me was Eddie From, back in the forties. Maybe it’s a Jewish thing to say. I drank far far too much and saddened myself hideously today. There’s nothing that saddens me more than putting on my act, as I did last night. Yesterday it rained quite hard, today it’s clear and beautiful; but Don is absent from the sunshine. I am needing him so much, and somehow uneasy that he will delay his coming.