The Sixties

by Christopher Isherwood

  I got to Los Angeles at 11:15 p.m. last night on the Chief and Prema met me and drove me up to Vedanta Place, where I spent the night in one of the apartments of their apartment house. This morning, just before six, I saw Swami, and then we went into the shrine for Swamiji’s breakfast puja and I read the Katha Upanishad; vain, I have to admit, of my rendition. Then I had breakfast with Swami—he has been pestered by another of these madwomen; she broke into his room in the middle of the night and later wrote letters accusing him of forcing her into samadhi against her will, and of teaching her masturbation by remote control. He gave me mahaprasad,fn281 a grain of rice from Jagannath Temple,fn282 which, said Ramakrishna, is, like Ganges water, Brahman made visible. Swami has a whole store of these grains and takes one first thing in the morning, every day.

  I left New York on the Manhattan, at 1:35 p.m. on Thursday last, the 25th. After we got out of the city, there was snow all the way, right across the Plains and the mountains, until we began to descend toward Needles.fn283 Chicago was like some awful raw-black stark snow-slushy city on the tundras of Soviet Siberia. But how snug it is to shit in your roomette, watching the land roll by! I tried very hard on this trip to enjoy everything. I sat for long spells in the vista dome, just watching. But alas, I feel that I have dulled the organ of my delight. Only occasionally nowadays will it respond.

  Read O’Hara’s Sermons and Soda Water, which is readable but somehow grubby, and Ian Fleming’s Dr. No, which I really enjoyed until the boring tortures at the end, and finished off The Scarlet Letter, with effort but a certain respect.

  Yesterday evening, at sunset, in the midst of my first scotch, as we rolled through the California desert, I wrote this draft of a letter on the envelope of my ticket:

  Won’t write a Dobbin and Kitty letter. That’s sentimental. Though it’s a beautiful poetic sentimentality. But I think we can still talk to each other by our own names—I mean, even when we’re not mad.

  I realize I am deeply selfish. You admit that you are. But that doesn’t stop me loving you. And perhaps we would get along better on the basis of being admittedly selfish. I said a true thing when I said I didn’t like being “good” any more than you like being “bad.”

  You are so much the reason for my life—my writing, the house, my teaching. You say, that’s just accident. Anyone could have been the reason. No. You know that’s not true.

  My selfishness is that I want you to stay with me. Your selfishness is that you ask yourself, couldn’t you do better; considering you are young. So my selfishness is really much more sinister than yours.

  Am writing this halfway through my first scotch of the evening, in the vista dome, going through the desert beyond Needles. But I’ll copy it out if I mean it tomorrow.…

  I did mean it but I didn’t copy it, because this afternoon Don called from New York. He now plans to come home in two weeks instead of a month. (I find that, as of now, I am ever such a tiny bit disappointed, but that will pass, I know.) Also, he is considering buying six chairs for the dining room at the cost of six hundred dollars. So he certainly seems to mean to stay!

  A Jew on the train […], in advertising. He sells advertising spaces. And studies biology on the side; cell structure. And writes poems. Is married, for the second time, to a two-time-loser wife, and has six children (I think). He judges, Jew-like, every man, including all the poets of the past, who didn’t settle down into a well-adjusted marriage. Doing so he calls “finding youself.” This is the great heresy of the psychiatrists, and it has brought us to the population explosion. He bored and bored me. I hid from him in my roomette. But he caught me at meals.

  February 12. I have been bad, drinking too much and staying out too late, and thereby knocking myself out next day and failing to work. Then there has been this massive rain storm: three days of solid downpour, plus the beginnings of it on Wednesday and the considerable parting showers yesterday. Now the sun’s shining—at least, down here at the beach. But we’re threatened with another storm in a couple of days.

  Don wrote again, very sweetly, but puzzling and disturbing me a little because he utterly ignores all the things he said to me in New York. It’s just Kitty and Dobbin as it was in the beginning. He is supposed to be out here before or on Wednesday, our anniversary—he referred to this, unprompted, in his letter. And then what? My guess is that we shall postpone the next crisis by building him some sort of studio. He won’t have to face the problem of his work until it is finished. Well, at least we have some money to do this with. Just heard from Sidebotham today that he is sending another $5,000 (approximately) as the balance of M.’s legacy. And then there is still the money from the trust fund. So the money position is exceptionally good. About $21,000 in the bank here. Not a penny of Simon and Schuster’s advance touched. Earnings soon due to me from L.A. State College. Not to mention the possibilities of doing The Vacant Room with Gavin, doing “The Beach of Falesá” for Richard Burton, getting money if Carter negotiates a deal for making I Am a Camera into a musical. And then there are Don’s earnings to help out.

  What do I feel about his coming home? Gladness. Yes, always, in spite of the strain and hostility. Much as I have come to love this house and to enjoy, in small doses, living alone in it, the whole affair would still have no reason to exist without him. He is the ultimate reason why it’s worthwhile bothering at all.

  And what’s left, if Don goes out of my life? Swami and Ramakrishna: yes. As much—more so—than ever. My japam has been getting more and more mechanical. But, when I told Swami this, he didn’t seem worried. He assured me that I will get the fruits of it sometime or other; and I really believe this. The only thing that sometimes disturbs me a little about his teaching is the idea that we—all of us who have “come to” Ramakrishna—are anyhow “saved,” i.e. assured of not being reborn. This disturbs me because the idea seems too easily optimistic. But then—who am I to talk? Swami says it, and I do honestly believe that he somehow knows.

  Last week, I started at L.A. State College. I feel dissatisfied with my Twentieth-Century British Literature course. I hadn’t prepared it properly and was sloppy. Understanding Literature went better. And the Creative Writing, which I was looking forward to with a sinking feeling, seems off to a good start, because nearly all of the students are cooperating with great energy.

  (Incidentally, the drive to college last Thursday was a nightmare. The cars on the freeway threw up a mist of spray and exhaust fumes so that you couldn’t see which lane you were in. I remembered with fury how Gerald, the day before, sitting safe at home in his garden house, had acted gently superior because I complained of the weather and had said how beautiful the rain looked through the oleanders. Fuck aestheticism!)

  A good word-of-mouth beginning for my novel, which is now out in a number of bookstores, although not to be officially published till the end of the month. Jennifer and David Selznick, Ivan Moffat[,] Alan Campbell and Dorothy Parker, and Chris Wood are particularly enthusiastic. Also, Time sent a man to interview me, and apparently they don’t do this if they are going to give a book a bad, or even a cursory notice.

  Yesterday, the tooth I had recapped in London started to disintegrate—a big bit of it crumbled and broke off and now the ugly metal peg is showing. And today’s Lincoln’s birthdayfn284 so I have to wait until tomorrow before I can get it fixed, and tomorrow’s a school day.

  Some raw material for a novelette:

  X., a middle-aged writer, comes to a college campus as guest professor. Part of his duty is to read and criticize students’ manuscripts. The first student who brings him a manuscript is a tall blond somewhat prim and owlishly bespectacled boy of twenty, named Y. The manuscript is a partly finished novel and when X. reads it he finds that it is a story of frustrated homosexual love, set on what is obviously the campus of that very same college, with characters who must almost certainly be based on real students. X. is hugely intrigued. He even wonders if Y. is playing an elaborate practical joke on him. X. has never made
much secret of his own homosexuality and it is probable that the students may know about it. Is Y.—maybe in collusion with friends—using this manuscript as a bait, hoping X. will jump at it and commit some amusing indiscretion? X. doesn’t underestimate the cruelty of the young, but he is inclined to doubt this. He senses that Y. is a bona fide homosexual. Nevertheless, he resolves to play it cool. When Y. comes around to discuss the manuscript, X. is the detached, objective unshockable, disinterested professor. He tells Y. calmly that the story needs more action; the two boys in it ought actually to go to bed together. His tone, as he makes this suggestion, is positively clinical. Y. agrees—but X. can’t figure him out: is he surprised, shocked, amused? He is deadpan and demure, and thanks X. most politely for his advice.

  After this X. and Y. see quite a lot of each other. They go for long walks and talk in a relaxed and almost intimate manner—but always only about books, poems, plays. X. is very well aware that the eyes of many people are upon him and he is determined not to do anything which might give rise to the least breath of scandal. Just the same, Y. is more intelligent than the majority of the students, and the tacit knowledge of each other’s homosexuality is a bond. X.’s conscience is eased by the fact that he doesn’t find Y. in the least attractive.

  By degrees, he finds out quite a lot about Y.’s background. He is the son of wealthy parents from the East and has always lived in an atmosphere of comfort, big cars, parties, travel. He knows stage and movie stars, plays bridge with them, and goes dancing, but obviously without any particular thrill. X. becomes aware of another side to Y.’s persona: the prim student must become a different person, worldly and sophisticated, when he’s back at home. Y. also admits casually to drinking a lot at parties, and X. gets the impression that somewhere in him there’s a surprising amount of wildness. Altogether, X. no longer feels quite so sure of anything about Y. Maybe Y. isn’t even homosexual. He always comes to X.’s seminars in company with a girl named Z., and X. keeps meeting the two of them together around the campus. Z. is no beauty, but she’s intelligent and has a kind of sweet eagerness. You can see that she is violently stuck on Y. He doesn’t seem particularly responsive to this, but maybe that’s just male superiority or a fastidiousness about showing affection in public. The relationship between them rather irritates X. Because Y. seems to be a “deserter” from the homosexual ranks? Maybe a little. But much more so because Y. and Z. whisper together during the seminar, exchange notes and altogether fail to help make things go. This is all the more irritating because the seminar group is ill-assorted and X. has to work hard to keep them even halfway interested. Y.’s failure to help seems a betrayal, considering his relative intimacy with X. X. can’t but resent this and he stops going for walks with Y. And this isn’t the worst. Toward the end of the semester, a skit appears in the students’ magazine, making fun of X.’s seminar and the atmosphere of boredom and embarrassment which surrounds it. The skit is poorly written and malicious rather than funny. From various clues, X. is quite certain that it is by Y., or, more probably, by Y. and Z. in collaboration. X. is a bit hurt but also puzzled; he hasn’t been prepared for this hostility, it even rather intrigues him. Is Y. anxious to disown him, for Z.’s sake, he wonders. But of course it is beneath his dignity to show Y. and Z. that he has even noticed the skit. And, when term ends, X. even casually tells Y. that he is welcome to call him and bring him the novel, when it is finished. He does this not because he particularly wants to see Y. again but because he has the impulse to show Y. and Z. that he’s not a poor sport or a bad loser. Y. agrees to come, but he doesn’t seem much pleased or impressed by the invitation.

  Many months later, however, Y. calls X. and asks if he may send him the novel, which is now completed. X. says yes and the novel arrives. It is clumsily written and dull. But X. can’t help being interested in it, just because of its subject matter, and he feels a revival of interest in Y. He invites Y. to dinner. When they have both had a good deal to drink, X. says that, now he is no longer on campus, he wants to ask some personal questions about the book. Y. is ready to answer them. He tells X. that he was indeed in love with another boy student, just like the one described in his novel. But the other student, though fond of him, was not interested sexually and nothing ever happened between them. This leads X. to ask Y. if he has had any sexual experience at all. Yes, says Y., but nothing satisfactory. Once, after a beach party at night, he has managed, without much enjoyment, to screw Z. on the sand. And several times he has been down to a queer bar on the other side of town. There he has met a hustler who has sex with him in a parked car, always asking to be paid his ten bucks in advance. Obviously, these furtive visits to the sex underworld thrill Y., purely as adventures. He wears his oldest clothes and shudders with fear that he’ll be recognized and involve his prominent family in a newspaper scandal. But he doesn’t much enjoy the hasty commercial act itself. Y. tells X. all of this with the utmost frankness, and this evening is far more intimate than any of their previous meetings. When X. has finished his questions, Y. asks him, “Why did you single me out, on campus?” X. is rather surprised by this question. He reminds Y. that it was he who started their relationship by bringing this manuscript. X.’s answer seems to disappoint Y. a little. Later, just before leaving, when Y. is very drunk, he says something incoherent about being much more daring when he’s sober, and he leaves X. with the impression that he is somehow frustrated. It does of course go through X.’s mind that Y. may have been trying to make a pass at him; but he dismisses this as another example of his middle-aged vanity. And, anyhow, Y. doesn’t interest him sexually. Which is not to say that he wouldn’t have been flattered and pleased if Y. had propositioned him. The Young are still the Young.

  Another considerable time lapse, and Y. calls X. and says he has written half of another novel. May he bring it around? When Y. arrives, X. is at once struck by the change in him. His appearance has enormously improved. He has filled out. He looks positively handsome. He has a new sexiness. Also, he seems full of vitality and joy. He announces right away that he is going to take X. to the same restaurant to which X. took him at their last meeting. He has left college now and is just about to go to Europe for a long stay. He tells X. that Z. has gotten married to someone else and implies, with smirking self-satisfaction, that this was on the rebound; she was trying to forget him. Y. also implies that he now fully accepts his homosexuality and is determined to live in his own way, not according to other people’s rules. He is wearing a sexy but blatantly faggoty sport shirt, and this seems like a declaration of his independence. When they get to the restaurant, Y. wants to sit with X. for a while at the bar, and X. learns that this is another act of defiance, because, only a short while before this evening, Y. has visited this same bar and someone has made a remark about him which he has overheard; Y. was referred to as “that queen.” X. is amused and touched by all of this. For the first time, he really likes Y. For the first time, also, he finds him attractive; quite powerfully so. At dinner, he pays Y. a couple of physical compliments, on his shirt and his appearance. Y. is drunk already and talking rather wildly. His declarations of queerness are mixed in with curiously puritanical statements. For example, he says that he hates going to men’s rooms and he can’t pee there if anybody else is present. This, he later confesses is because some kids once laughed at him—or he fancied they did—because his cock was so small. As dinner goes on, Y. gets more and more disturbed. There is something, he tells X., which he wants to say, but can’t. X., of course, encourages him. Finally Y. blurts out, “I want to go to bed with you.” By the time they’ve reached this point, X. has pretty well guessed what Y. is about to say. He responds with the tact of long practice, telling Y. that he’s most flattered, that he’d love to, but asking Y. if he is really sure that’s what he wants. Y. says, “It must be, because I’m shaking all over. I always shake like this when I go down to that bar.” So X. tells him he can relax now, because it’s all settled; they’ll do it as soon as they get hom
e.

  On the way back in the car, X. tries to remove any fears Y. may be suffering from. He holds Y.’s hand firmly like a doctor or places his own hand on Y.’s thigh. He suspects that Y. may fear impotence, so he says that one never knows how these things will work out—but what does that matter? They’ll just play around for a while and have fun. Nothing drastic has to happen. Actually, X. is also guarding himself. He’s not quite sure if Y. really attracts him enough to make him potent. Suppose he can’t do anything? That’s sure to hurt Y.’s feelings. Well, it’s too late to worry about that now, X. reflects. They will just have to go through with it and hope for the best.

  When they get back to the house, X. insists on going to bed at once. Y. is a little nervous, but he undresses as he’s told and throws himself down on his belly on the bed, naked except for his jockey shorts. Obviously, he wants X. to tear them off. “I defy you to excite me!” he giggles. He now seems ridiculously feminine. But more attractive than ever to X., who has no trouble at all in responding. As they take hold of each other, Y. becomes absolutely transformed. He seems to go almost mad with joy. It is quite obvious that this is the first time he has ever experienced a compatible sex act. He screams until X. fears the neighbors will hear him, then breaks out into wild laughter. Once or twice, he brings out some half-sincere remark about his own ugliness, but X., with the earnestness of lust, reassures him: he is a gorgeous boy, perfect all over. X., by this time, is nearly as wild as Y. Y.’s terrific innocent crazy lust has excited him far beyond his normal powers, and his lovemaking is twice as convincing as his words. At last, when they are both thoroughly satisfied, X. asks Y. if he enjoyed himself. Y. says, “This is the first time I ever realized I had a body.”