The Sixties

by Christopher Isherwood

  Aldous was so sick yesterday that Laura asked Gerald not to come. But he will be moved back home today, just the same, she says.

  Last night, while we were reading—Don hating [James Baldwin’s] Another Country and calling it dull and self-conscious—I found in Rozanov’s Solitaria the passage Aldous quoted to me when I saw him. It’s when Rozanov says “private life is above everything.… Just sitting at home, and even picking your nose, and looking at the sunset.… All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance.”

  The feeling in this seems to me kind of Zen.

  A mad picture sent me by a fan named Dolores Giles. It’s called “Pregnancy: The Fourth Month.” Shall try to give it to Jim Cole.fn485

  November 11. On the morning of the 7th, Peter Schwed called from New York to accept the book. He seems to like it very much indeed; said it is one of my best. He only suggested cutting one line, about wiping the belly dry, and wasn’t positive about that, even. He isn’t sure if the title need be changed. They will talk it over.

  An exhibit from The Age of Innocence; this letter from Lee Prosser—

  I hope my letter finds you as happy as I am. I am the most happy individual alive! I finished my novel, and my only hope is that it’s art. I hope it’s a good one. Would you read it and advise me? I would like to know what you think.

  Talking about alternative titles for my novel with Don in the car. I remembered Paul Is Alone and wondered if George Is Alone would do. Something wrong. How about He is Alone? Or maybe It is Alone? It couldn’t be It, I said to myself; because It is the Atman. And the next moment, Don said, “It couldn’t be It.” He had thought exactly the same thing. At such moments, our rapport seems almost supernatural.

  But, alas, these moments have been few, lately. Terrible mood-storms about Henry, since my last entry. One thing came to me very strongly. I must be more positive in my attitude; not just wait to be offended and take offense. So I called Ben Underhill in San Franciso and asked could I stay with him. He is coming down to L.A. on business at the end of this week. Maybe I’ll go back with him for a few days. Meanwhile, I have tried to warn Don that he is actually starting to destroy the cohesive element between us, the “ultra-clay.” I don’t think he quite understood me or quite believed me, if he did understand. But temporarily—after staying out three nights in a row—he is all solicitude. I have said definitely that I do not want to see Henry any more, under any circumstances. I also asked Don to please take the photo of Henry into his studio. He had put it up on the desk in the back bedroom.… God, how I hate lowering the boom, like this! And yet it is, ultimately, the only decent and truthful and friendly way to act. The alternative is sulks and silent reproach.

  Aldous nearly died, a couple of nights ago. Yet he still seems unaware of his condition. He said to Laura that he was worried how he would spend the rest of his life, if he couldn’t write: and he implied that he expects to live at least five more years. Cutler doubts he will last through this month. Gerald says that Laura gave him lysergic acid a little while ago. According to Gerald, this ought to have made him realize his condition; but apparently it didn’t.

  November 30. Such a strong disinclination to write anything about Black Friday the 22nd. But I ought to. To remind myself.

  Don and I were still in bed, around eleven, because we had had Cecil Beaton to a farewell supper the night before (he left for New York next day en route for England) and Paul Wonner and Bill [Brown] and Jack Larson and Jim [Bridges] had been there too, and we had stayed up late. Henry phoned (even now, I mind that it was Henry—he seems to take possession of everything—pushing in in his thick-skinned German way) to say that the president had been shot. And we plugged in Harry Brown’s old radio, which we otherwise never use, and lay listening to the reports coming in and soon confirming the death itself.

  When Roosevelt died, I was sad but thought, Goody, we’ll get the day off from the studio.fn486 This was quite different. Just disgusted horror. When I think of it, I keep being reminded of that time in Calcutta when, in the so-called first-class hotel, some kind of black slime began to ooze out from under the toilet. Also, there was the feeling—journalistic as it may sound to say this—that some sort of nationwide evil was functioning. It was something we had all done with our hate.

  Aldous seemed an anticlimax; I suppose partly because it wasn’t our fault. He died without pain. At the end he asked for lysergic acid, and was given it. His mind was quite clear. The day before, he had finished and revised an article on Shakespeare and religion which Laura says is very good.

  On the following Sunday, Laura and Rose, Maria’s sister,fn487 and Maria’s mother,fn488 and Rose’s son Siggy,fn489 and Matthew Huxley and Peggy Kiskadden, and a few others including me, all went for a walk down toward the reservoir—instead of having a funeral. It was Matthew’s idea. Peggy and I were polite but barely spoke.

  I’m just writing down anything that occurs to me.…

  Heard at last, this morning, that Methuen’s are taking my novel; but this was only from the agent. Meanwhile, the day before yesterday, I finished revising Ramakrishna and His Disciples, and shall take it up to the center tomorrow, just to get it out of the house. I know it’s not really right, yet, but I can’t do any more.

  Don feels the president’s death passionately. He really burns with despair. This is partly because he is feeling miserable anyway. He can’t paint. And (I suspect) Henry is either away or they have had a quarrel. But I refuse to ask him about this.

  I keep thinking: Well, the books are done now. Maybe I shall die soon, as the colored girl in New York said I would. If not, let’s wait anyhow till this Indian horror is over, and then see what gives. Life goes on, or stops. If it goes on, it will change for me.

  December 11. Beginning of the countdown. A week from today we are off.

  The usual sloth which follows finishing books. Now that I have got Ramakrishna and His Disciples out of the house, and there is nothing more to be done about A Single Man, I can hardly bring myself even to write a postcard, or to go to the gym or to walk on the beach, though the weather is heavenly, though cool. (Looking out the window, I feel, like the man in the Icelandic saga, “Beautiful is the hillside—I will not go!”fn490)

  This morning, a blow. Roger Angell of The New Yorker has refused A Single Man, either whole or in part. “While I can believe this novel, I don’t find it particularly interesting.”

  Nothing yet from Methuen.

  Yesterday evening, we went up to see Laura Huxley and Virginia Pfeiffer. They are really nice, both of them; and now I feel our friendship will survive Aldous’s death and increase in strength. Also the children are enchanting. The only children, Don says, he has ever liked. Went over the proofs of Aldous’s last article (for Show Magazine). If some frog like Romain Rolland were writing his life, I’ll bet the book would conclude, “The day before he died, he wrote the last word of his last essay. It was—Shakespeare.”fn491 (Actually Aldous dictated the second half of the article, in a ghostly scratchy voice which we listened to on tape. Don said that, listening to it, you felt the great barrier between him and Laura; she sounded like a journalist.) But Laura spoke beautifully about Aldous, saying how ridiculous it was to suggest that his life was unhappy; he was always so full of enthusiasm. Virginia criticized Stephen’s article about him.fn492 (So did Gavin.) Stephen says that Aldous never got over Maria’s death and the burning of his house. The publisher had suggested John Lehmann should write the biography. Laura asked me what I thought of the idea, so I had to tell her that John disbelieves in, and is aggressive toward[,] the metaphysical beliefs which Aldous held. All he would describe would be a clever young intellectual who later was corrupted by Hollywood and went astray after spooks.

  December 16. Gore says that once he was at a horse show with Kennedy, sitting beside him. He remarked to Kennedy, “How easy it would be for someone to take a shot at you—and, of course, if they did, they’d be certain to
hit me.” Kennedy grinned and said, “That’d be no loss.” Gore thinks that Kennedy was beginning to lose his grip at the time when he was killed. After the death of his son,fn493 he became subject to crying jags; and he seemed to be losing his confidence that he could succeed in getting people to see things his way. Gore approves of Johnson but feels sure he won’t live through his full term if reelected; he will have another heart attack.fn494

  Don is in New York. Talked to on the phone last night, he was very despondent. Why on earth had he come there, he wondered. And he finds Marguerite’s apartment so depressing.

  Woke up in a big flap this morning; travel-dread gripping me. So, following Gavin’s advice, I have started taking Librium in advance. The idea is that I shall be riding high before the take-off. So far, it doesn’t make me sleepy, like Miltown.

  Dorothy (who moves in here on Friday to keep house) said, as we embraced, “For God’s sake be careful!” I know she is having big death presentiments. “You do the travelling and I’ll do the praying,” she said.

  This afternoon, I had a sudden desire for an ice-cream cone. This sucked the detachable plate out of position, and, before I could stop myself, I was munching it up. So now I have to fly to Dr. Stevens first thing in the morning. I strongly suspect the diencephalon of trying to give me appendicitis[,] because I swallowed the jagged corner of the plastic backing.

  (What follows is transcribed from a pocket diary I kept during the trip. I should first say that we took off, as planned, on the morning of December 18 and arrived in Tokyo on the evening of the 19th, because you lose a day crossing the date line.)

  It is no annihilating condemnation of the devotees—about fifty of whom had come to the airport to see us off—to say that they would have felt somehow fulfilled if our plane had burst into flames on take-off, before their eyes. They had built up such an emotional pressure that no other kind of orgasm could have quite relieved it. The parting was like a funeral which is so boring and hammy and dragged out that you are glad to be one of the corpses. Anything rather than have to go home with the other mourners afterwards!

  Swami wouldn’t leave until Franklin [Knight] arrived; he had had to park the car which brought the boys from Trabuco. The fact that it was he who arrived last seemed to dramatize his role as The Guilty One, and his farewell from Swami was a sort of public act of forgiveness. He was terribly embarrassed, with all of us watching—especially all those [women] who know what he did.fn495

  So we got into the plane at last and it took off. Swami said, “To think that all this is Brahman, and nobody realizes it!” I sat squeezed between him and Krishna; the Japan Air Line seats are as close together as ever. Despite my holy environment, I couldn’t help dwelling on the delicious doings on the couch, yesterday afternoon. I didn’t even feel ashamed that I was doing so. It was beautiful.

  A fierce hot breeze blowing through the Honolulu airport. People looking impatient of their heavy loveless leis. Then the long long flight northwestward, passing from Wednesday to Thursday through the almost infinitely extended afternoon, with the red sun dying so slowly over the ocean cloudfield. Tried to read Cather’s Song of the Lark, but could concentrate only on Esquire magazine articles—Calder Willingham’s reply to Mailer; Mailer’s threats to write a novel; Gore on Tarzan of the Apes.fn496 Very good food on the plane. Swami took a drink, but I refused; determined to keep this trip dry. In the evening, there were steaks. When Swami and Krishna said they couldn’t eat them, they were given stuffed chicken from the first class.

  December 20. At the Hotel Nikkatsu. Last night I slept more than ten hours. Swami slept badly and has spent most of today in bed.

  Today, for the first time, I felt a real intimacy with Krishna as we shopped and wandered around Tokyo. He bought a camera and a tape recorder. I made an excuse to stay browsing in the Jena bookstore because I wanted to look at the U.S. physique magazines. There was a swarm of Japanese teenage boys giggling around them.

  There’s a blizzard up north and the atmosphere is bracingly cold. I feel wonderful. Wore my new painful shoes to stretch them.

  The city is being torn apart for the 1964 Olympics. Deep crevasses in the streets where a subway system is being put in. The workers still wear cloven socks and baggy knickerbockers, and you still see tiny old women in trousers toting huge loads of bricks. The traffic is as mad as ever. And the air around the palace is just as blue. And the dollhouse bars in the narrow lanes are just as inviting. I would like to live in this town. All the stores are sparkling with Christmas—more or less of a camp here, presumably, and for that very reason far more attractive than in the States.

  December 21. Swami still feels unwell, fears kidney trouble, has fever and pains. He says he’d go right back to California if it wasn’t for all the people who’d be disappointed.

  I don’t feel anything about anything, particularly; no doubt because of the Librium. If this is how “ordinary” people feel, well, good for them.

  A brisk walk with Krishna, who slyly admitted he wanted to get a plug of some type for his recorder. His shopping has an air of juvenile naughtiness. We found the plug and then peeked into the Imperial Hotel. I felt a wave of sentiment for the old place. Wystan and I first saw it in 1938,fn497 and my memory clings to an improbably symbolic tableau: under a chandelier (which certainly isn’t there nowadays though that in itself proves nothing) stand two figures in uniform, a Japanese officer and a Nazi gauleiter; in fact, The Axis. As I regard them, the chandelier begins to sway—and this is my very first earthquake!

  The Japanese genius for life is expressed by the perfectly harmonized tone and texture of blue doors and off-white ceramic in the men’s room at the Tokyo airport. But the Air India plane is crowded and shabby. There is also something squalid in the fact that it goes all the way from here to New York. Unchic.

  A five-hour delay in awful Kowloon, with its bright trashy cleaned-up slums. Then the plane was filled so full that I thought we’d never get off the ground; most of them disembarked again at Bangkok. The Calcutta airport in the dead of night. Swamis, flower garlands, pranams, namaskars. Prema and Arup.

  As we drove through the empty lanes and streets to the Math, I felt a magic begin to work. You both smell and feel the strange perfumed softness of India. Two men seated before a charcoal pot at the roadside. A booth, brilliantly bright and noisy, in which a kirtan was being held. People of the dust. Houses of the dust. Dust to dust.

  December 22. Belur Math is far more delightful than I’d remembered it. The light is so soft.

  At three-thirty this afternoon, the grounds are crowded. The people just sit on the grass or peer into the temples. The strollers don’t embarrass the worshippers or vice versa. Some of the women are in very bright saris. All kinds of craft pass along the swiftly flowing river; small steamers, high-prowed barges, boats with huge square sails like junks, galleys rowed by standing oarsmen which look as if they were straight out of Cleopatra’s Egypt.

  Soft, soft brown, these people. Prema loves them. Says he never wants to go back to Hollywood. Arup isn’t so charmed.

  Swami, enthroned in Shankarananda’s former room, seems like the head of the whole orderfn498—more kingly, gracious and assured than any of the others. He showed us that exact spot—on the upper balcony outside his room—where he first met Maharaj. Swami had been looking into Vivekananda’s room, next door, and Maharaj said to him, “Haven’t I seen you before?” (Which, incidentally, was exactly what Holy Mother said to him when he met her as a young boy.) Swami told Maharaj, no, they hadn’t met. Then Maharaj told him, “Take off my socks,” and he asked, “Can you massage my feet?”

  A small black cow walks by as I write this, sitting under a tree. Various groups shoo it away. They are not respectful at all. Ah, the horizontal evening light; it makes the pink and yellow houses on the opposite shore look like gaily painted toys. Children play shouting around the porch of the temple of Maharaj. The factory chimneys are old-fashioned and not ugly. Sitting on the grass, under
this tree, I am almost absurdly in the midst of India; yet quite quite isolated.

  I am staying at the guesthouse, just outside the compound, along with Nikhilananda’s party. Nikhilananda and Prabhavananda both eat with us. I foresee friction between them. A huge vegetarian lunch. Now that I’ve cut out liquor, my appetite is enormous.

  Later—because at that point I was stung by several red ants and had to get up off the grass.… My room in the guesthouse is bare but clean, with its own bathroom. You are brought buckets of hot water to slosh over yourself and then shower with cold from a shower. It all floods over the floor, and in the morning you lock the door between bedroom and bathroom and open the outer door of the bathroom so the boy can come in and clean it. Many such precautions against theft; when the girls from Santa Barbara were over here, one of them had her clothes stolen through the window by means of some kind of a fishing pole.

  The door of my bedroom is protected by a bolt like a Tower of London dungeon’s, with a huge padlock. Also, you can bar it with a wooden bar from inside. I take a peculiar pleasure in doing this, not because I fear midnight intruders but because the bar gives me a sense of snug individuality in the midst of all these surrounding millions of people. It is very snug to be barred in, and then get inside the mosquito curtains into bed, and read.

  Nikhilananda’s party consists of: the Countess Colloredo, who is British-American, rich and known as Nishta (Nikhilananda, who is a fearful snob, always calls her “Countess”), she acts as his secretary-hostess; Mrs. Beckmann, a timid rather sweet woman, who is the widow of the painter Max Beckmann; Chester Carlson, who is the president of Nikhilananda’s New York Vedanta Society and has invented some kind of process for duplicating manuscripts which is used everywhere;fn499 Al Winslow, a young doctor, maybe queer, who blinks a lot and is utterly Nikhilananda’s slave. They are rather like characters in Forster.