Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Lincoln is so big that he has the air of protecting everybody, of holding up the world. He is like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. We seem to fascinate him. Lincoln regards Pete with painful, jealously affectionate intensity—like a savage who finds a tiny, brilliant bird in a wood, and stands holding it in his hand, uncertain what to do with it. Shall he eat it? Shall he worship it? Shall he simply let it fly away?

  Pete alternates between a birdlike gaiety and a strange Mexican mournfulness. When he is sad, he seems to move far, far away from us, to sit huddled in his own private blanket, under an Aztec pyramid. Partly Spanish, partly Indian, he has very beautiful old manners. He moves with the compactness of a dancer; this makes him seem even smaller than he is. He has extraordinarily expressive eyelashes. All his gestures are graceful and comic. He is a walking parody of the ballet.

  April 2. The day before yesterday, Wystan, Vernon and I moved into an apartment on East Eighty-first Street. Chamberlain announced England’s support of the Poles. Yesterday, to forget it all, I went with Lincoln and Pete to Philadelphia, to see Orson Welles’s Five Kings. At lunch, we got wonderfully drunk. We went to the Camac Turkish Baths, to sober up. The masseur slapped my face, as hard as he could, Pete says, but I only grinned. Then he threw me into the ice-cold plunge, where I sank like a stone and had to be fished out. We arrived late for the peformance, which was no loss. The stage revolved faster and faster, with the characters scrambling over it, in frantic pursuit of the play. They never caught up. The only really enjoyable day I’ve spent in America, so far. …

  Eighty-first Street is on the edge of Yorkville, which, in those days, was a predominantly Nazi quarter. There were Nazi Bierkeller, Nazi bookshops, and Nazi films showing in several of the theaters. Our apartment was on the top floor of a made-over slum house. A lady named Mrs. Lowndes had furnished it with valuable knickknacks which I felt sure we should break. There was a hall with a marble-topped table, at which we ate, a big living room, a bedroom for Auden, a bedroom for Vernon and myself, and a little room which Auden used as a study, and which was soon ankle-deep in crumpled manuscripts and letters. In order to ignore her squalid neighbors, Mrs. Lowndes had covered the living room windows with heavy drapes and shades which wouldn’t pull up—so that the electric light had to be kept burning all day—an arrangement thoroughly agreeable to Auden, with his womb fixation, and hateful to me. If you did look out, it was into backyards, planted with giant poles as high as masts, supporting innumerable clothes lines. On laundry days, it was really beautiful—like a harbor full of sailing ships.

  Auden loved the apartment—partly because it had an English fireplace on which you could burn coal and logs; partly because we now had a colored cook of our own and could enjoy what he called “civilized meals.” The cook’s name was Elizabeth. She was enormous and cheerful, and her specialty was fried chicken.

  We hadn’t been in the place very long before we discovered that it was haunted. I forget which of us noticed it first, but we all had to agree—the footsteps were as loud as life. I’d be in the living room or my bedroom—it might be at night or in the middle of the day—and hear them distinctly, climbing the stairs, reaching the door of the apartment, passing into the hall, pausing, as if to look for mail, then going into one of the other rooms. They fooled me every time. “Vernon? Wystan?” I’d call. No answer. Then I’d look around and find the apartment empty.

  We decided not to tell Elizabeth, fearing that she’d get scared and walk out on us. But she found out, somehow. One day, when I went into the kitchen, she told me grinning: “Ah’m jest sittin’ aroun’ waitin’ fer that ole ghos’.” About a week later, she claimed that “something” had actually passed through the room, behind her chair: “But ah didn’ turn ’roun’, because ah thought ah mightn’ like what ah saw.”

  A small group of actors produced The Ascent of F615 in a studio in the Village. Their director was a boy named Forrest Thayr. No scenery was used. The mountain climbing was done on a staircase which led to a gallery at the back of the room—most of it in darkness, with electric flash-lamps. Thayr used one very clever trick. Lamp, offstage, is in danger of being trapped by an avalanche. The other players, watching him, shout futile warnings, louder and louder, more and more desperately. Then, suddenly, a door slams, with terrific force. Dead silence. You had the impression of final, irrevocable disaster.

  Burgess Meredith16 was interested in the play, and might have done it in summer stock, if it hadn’t been for the war. He was a nice man, with a blotchy red face, always friendly and usually drunk.

  The European crisis hung over us, all that spring, like a thunderstorm which won’t burst. I alternated between manic flares of excitement—usually when drunk at Lincoln’s—and fits of almost insane depression, in which I refused even to answer the telephone. One Sunday afternoon, a newsboy came down our street yelling, “War! War! War!” We raced downstairs for the paper. It was merely an interview with some American general who had said that there might be war within forty-eight hours.

  Meanwhile, Vernon and I were planning a trip to California. For a long time, I’d wanted to get away from New York and into the “real” America. The real America, for me, was the Far West. All my daydreams were based on D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr. But I knew that I should only be able to see America through the eyes of an American, and Vernon was the only portable American within reach. Vernon had run away from home at the age of fourteen and hitchhiked to Texas; this made him seem a specially suitable traveling companion. At first, we thought we’d hitchhike this time, too; but someone persuaded us that America is best seen from a bus.

  Also, I wanted to talk to Gerald Heard. Gerald, Chris Wood and the Huxleys had gone to California some years previously and settled there. We often joked about them, and the mysterious practices which we vaguely described as yoga. We pictured Gerald levitating in a turban and floating out over the desert, at a great altitude. Nevertheless, I still took him seriously—at any rate as a pacifist. We exchanged letters. Gerald wrote that every pacifist should acquire medical knowledge. Order and creative accuracy must be opposed to disorder and destruction. We must create a doctorate of psychologically sound, well-equipped healers. This sounded authoritative and exciting—if rather vague. I had to know more about it. Certainly, my own life badly needed some kind of discipline. I was still suspicious of the occult, however, and hated anything which sounded like “religion.”

  Pacifism was also the basis of my newly formed friendship with John van Druten. I met him, for the first time, at the Gotham Hotel, where he was recovering from an operation on his arm. He was easy and funny and charming, very much in his theatrical element. Ruth Chatterton, the actress, came in. John told her he had started on the new play (Leave Her to Heaven) in which she was to star. I have never seen anyone put on such an act. “Johnny—!” she tearfully, joyfully gasped, “Oh—Johnny, darling! Oh—I’m so glad!” John handled her perfectly—he was cool and pleasant, submitting to her kisses without a sign of disgust. I admired him as one admires an expert animal trainer.

  After some discussion, John and I formulated the following questions, and John sent them to Rudolf Messel, Runham Brown (secretary of the War Resisters’ International) and George Lansbury.17 They were:

  What is a pacifist to do in wartime (apart from merely refusing to fight) and what activities are permissible to him, by way of defence or otherwise, if he is (a) in England, or (b) in a noncombatant country?

  What permissible alternative is there to war in opposing an aggressor whose pledge cannot be relied upon?

  If none, does one open all doors to the aggressor and let him take everything he wants?

  Brown began his reply by saying that a pacifist should at all times try to be a useful member of society, doing his job as well as he can. In wartime, he should work harder than ever. He should do relief work, but not under governmental auspices, and not as an alternative to military service. He should practice civil disobedience to the aggressor, no matter
what the consequences.

  Messel was rather more militant. He wanted the pacifist to sabotage the war machine. He felt that one probably shouldn’t take part in ambulance drill—in order that people might ask you why you weren’t doing so, and thus give you a chance to answer. He thought it was important for the pacifist to be in England when war broke out, to be able to demonstrate with the maximum effect. He wanted total disarmament—unilateral, if necessary. He hoped the war would turn into a revolution—“I just couldn’t miss that.” He thought we should let the aggressor into the country, because a bloodless victory wouldn’t be an advertisement for fascism, anyway. The pacifist, he concluded, should take no part in defence schemes, since defence is impossible anyway. If people realize that it is hopeless, they won’t start a war in the first place.

  Lansbury wrote that he agreed with Brown’s replies. He added:

  When the sun is shining the world is fairly easy to live in; when the clouds are very heavy and thick, we always find it difficult to think as brightly and clearly as in the other days. So you, like many others, find it extremely difficult to realise your idealism in the midst of the kind of world in which we are living. All the same, comrade, whatever was true yesterday, is true today. Conditions may alter tactics, but they can never alter facts, and the fact is that war never has, never can and never will settle anything. If you and millions of other young men of all nationalities are once more thrown into this hell of war, nothing will come out of it but more and more confusion. Even though you, or I, or anyone else can show you an immediate way out, the fact that I have already stated still remains true. But this other thing is true, our way of passive resistance has never yet been tried out, but war has been tried through all the centuries and has absolutely failed.

  Both John and I were more or less satisfied with these replies. Later, John changed his attitude, as Auden did, and provisionally supported the war. More about that, later.

  Vernon and I were now ready to leave. We had very little money. Even if I got the offer of a movie job in Hollywood, I shouldn’t be able to take it until I had a quota visa and became a permanent resident.18 There would be all sorts of formalities to go through, first. In fact, the future seemed to be so full of difficulties that I preferred not to think about it, and just hope for the best.

  May 6. Vernon and I left New York by Greyhound bus at 7:45 in the morning. The buses are built like streamlined Martian projectiles; they seem designed to destroy everything else on the road. When a new driver comes on board, he brings his nameplate with him, and hangs it up in view of the passengers. “N. Strauser. Safe. Reliable. Courteous.”

  Out through the Holland Tunnel, Jersey City, Newark. The Pulaski Skyway lifts you across the flat brown marshes and drops you into a country of factories, pylons, transformers, gas stations, hot-dog stands, tourist cabins (seventy-five cents to a dollar), used tire dumps, milk bars, cemeteries for automobiles or men. The stream of traffic is so swift that it is dangerous to swerve or stop. The road has eaten the landscape. Travel has defeated itself. You can drive at eighty miles an hour and never get anywhere. Any part of the road is like all other parts.

  “Folks,” says the driver, “the next comfort stop is Wilmington. You’ll have fifteen minutes.” Everybody must get out while we take in gas. The first rush is to the toilets, where an old man tells us indignantly that the rear seats are hard on the kidneys. Then we line the counter for hot dogs, milk, Coca-Cola.

  We cross the Maryland state line. The country begins to come alive. A little town with a leafy street of frame houses. The minister sitting on his porch under a sign which says “Marriage Licences,” waiting, like the other tradesmen, for business. The war memorial has two separate columns of names—the white and the colored dead.

  We got to Washington at 4:30. We shall stay here several days.

  May 9. There is something charming, and even touching, about this city. For the size of the country it represents, it is absurdly small. The capital of a nation of shrewd, conservative farmers. Everything has to be made of solid marble. The public buildings are covered with quotations from the family bible—some of them, apparently, chosen quite at random. “The desert shall blossom like a rose” is engraved above the portal of the Union Station. The town is terribly conscious of its dignity.

  The Potomac River curves around the city, through the moist, nostalgic woods of Virginia. Mount Vernon overlooks it—a grave white wooden house with frugal pillars and severe four-poster beds, in a formal garden; it suggests a furtive homesickness for tyrannical England. It must have been strange, in the eighteenth century, to sit among the English teacups and look out of these windows, feeling, at your back, the immense, savage, unexplored continent. Lee’s home at Arlington is grander and more self-assured. The columns of its portico are thicker—as though civilization had now taken a firmer root.

  Vernon has gone on an all-milk diet for the remainder of the trip. This seems to give him the energy of a demon. He loves the heat, which is humid and overpowering, and never tires of sightseeing—the White House, the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Supreme Court, the Smithsonian Institute, the Catholic Monastery, the Library of Congress (with that incredible series of frescoes called The Poets’ Boys19). At the Bureau of Engraving and Printing we bought (for Lincoln Kirstein) a head of Abraham Lincoln made of old dollar bills.

  We had a letter of introduction to Senator Frederick Hale, of Maine. A dried-up little reactionary, violently anti-Roosevelt. He has been a senator for twenty years and boasts that he has never changed his opinions. He gave us a bunch of folders, like a travel agent. He took us to lunch at the Senate with an ex-congressman named Stetson, and introduced us to Garner20 and Vandenberg.21 Garner is an old Texan crab, with the thickest eyebrows I have ever seen. Vernon disliked him, because he shook hands sideways, not up and down.

  The Senate seemed very informal. The senators wear light summer suits. They lounge and chat, hardly pretending to listen to the speakers. Around the president’s chair22 sit a bunch of messenger boys, in black knickerbockers, who giggle and whisper.

  May 10. We left Washington yesterday evening, at 11:30. Bus travel by night isn’t at all uncomfortable. The seats tilt far back, and you can doze without slobbering. We ran through hilly, wooded Virginia, getting deeper and deeper inland. Villages of shacks. The store porch, on which the inhabitants lounge all day, their eyes alive with malign curiosity in impassive sunburnt faces. Special waiting rooms and toilets for Negroes at the bus stops. Tennessee is more thickly wooded, and the hills are steeper. Knoxville, and the Great Smoky Mountains. Nashville. These towns still seem like settlements, isolated. Memphis, beside the broad, muddy river. They were holding the festival of King Cotton. All the cafés were decorated with dirty, fluffy festoons of it. We had hoped to travel down the Mississippi by boat, but the steamers don’t run any more. We took the bus on to New Orleans, at midday.

  The state of Mississippi seems terribly poor, flat, featureless. The earth is blowing away into dusty desert land, and nobody can afford to stop it. Negroes everywhere. Wretched, unpainted shacks. The poor little towns try to lure tourist custom, like elderly whores. The dirt and meanness of the South. We reached New Orleans at 11:30 in the evening.

  May 15. Nothing much to say about this city. At first sight, it is too quaint, too consciously like Marseille. One would have to stay here much longer to get to know it. Vernon wanted to go on an alligator hunt, but we couldn’t arrange it. There is a charming restaurant called The Court of the Three Sisters, where you eat by candlelight, out of doors.

  We leave this evening, for a two-night stretch on the bus, to New Mexico.

  May 16. The country toward Lake Charles is swamp landscape. The trees are bearded with moss, evil looking, very old and withered. Bluebonnets grow along the roadside. Beyond Baldwin, I saw my first oil field—the flame fluttering from pipes in the gathering darkness. The monster advertisements still follow us—“Coca-Cola: thirst ends here
.” The girl saying: “He’s tall … dark … and owns a Ford V8.” The pillow sellers: “C’mon, folks. It costs no more than a packet of cigarettes.” Or “Pillows—all sizes, milk fed, Dominciker hen feathers, natural curls …” Someone remarks: “He’s so black, you can’t see him.” Negro passengers have to wait until all the whites are on board. They sit at the back of the bus. But the driver treats them quite civilly.

  Houston soon after daybreak. We turned north. Texas is dull and flat. Torrents of rain. Rain is headline news in The Fort Worth Telegram. A newspaper vendor, at Marlin: “I’d be glad to sell someone The Houston Chronicle. If you want one, come right down and get it.”

  Fort Worth is just another of these ugly, unplanned American cities. A few skyscrapers, too big, completely out of proportion, and without any functional necessity, since this is not an island. The rest is flat-topped garage architecture, cheeky and shiny when new, but ageing quickly into drab dumps.

  Then cattle country, undulating, deserted. The cowboys in overalls, and half-boots with queerly sinister crooked heels. As it grew dark, lightning flickered along the horizon. A boy and a girl got on the bus—both deeply sunburnt and about fifteen years old, going through to California. The boy seemed utterly exhausted and rather lost, but his sister was lively. She flirted precociously with an unpleasant man in a straw hat. There was also a baby, apparently travelling alone. Everybody wanted to take charge of it. In a curious way, the atmosphere of the covered wagon survives. We were all pioneers, on this adventure together.

  May 17. When I woke, the country had changed. We were in the badlands. Ahead of us, the bare hills were purple and mauve in the sunrise. The plain was deserted, but not empty; it was crowded with mesquite bushes, each a little individual presence, aloof from its neighbors, not forming a landscape. The hotel at Van Horn had Indian pots and blankets, and painted gourds for sale in the lobby—the gaudy, sterile art-fruits of the desert.