El Paso. Then northward, up the Rio Grande. The hills of Mexico, colorless in the glare. We got to Albuquerque late this afternoon. …
Next day, we went on to Flagstaff, where we spent the night and visited the Grand Canyon. I would have liked to stay there, but Vernon was in a hurry to finish our trip. We had a quarrel, because I wouldn’t let him climb out on a dangerous pinnacle to be photographed. He is absolutely without physical fear.
When we reached Needles, a patriotic lady passenger began to sing: “California, here I come!” It seemed little enough to arrive at, after such a journey—the furnace-hot, quivering, untidy desert, and then the gigantic truck-garden. Every orange and onion seemed already stamped with the exporter’s trademark. I think one’s disappointment, on first coming to the West, is really due to its size. The European mind cannot grasp such distances, such prodigality, such barrenness, such riches. It grows weary and bored. The eye refuses to look and the ear to listen.
Toward evening, we came into downtown Los Angeles—perhaps the ugliest city on earth. It was a Saturday night, and the streets were swarming with drunks. We saw three sailors carrying a girl into a house, as though they were going to eat her alive. From the hotel, we telephoned Chris Wood. “How wonderful,” he said, “to hear an effeminate British voice!”
Next day, we took a taxi into Hollywood. I was amazed at the size of the city, and at its lack of shape. There seemed no reason why it should ever stop. Miles and miles of little houses, wooden or stucco, under a technicolor sky. Miles of little gardens crowded with blossoms and flowering bushes; the architecture is dominated by the vegetation. A city without privacy, where neighbors share each other’s lawns and look into each other’s bedrooms. The whole place like a world’s fair, quite new and already partly in ruins. The only permanent buildings are the schools and the churches. On the hill, giant letters spell “Hollywoodland,” but this is only another advertisement. It is silly to say that Hollywood, or any other city, is “unreal.” But what the arriving traveller first sees are merely advertisements for a city which doesn’t exist.
We had arranged to meet Chris Wood at three o’clock, outside the Owl Drugstore, at the corner of Hollywood and Highland. (I mention the rendezvous because it seemed, at the time, as bizarre as Stanley’s meeting with Livingstone, or a date made with one’s maiden aunt outside the Potala in Lhasa.23) We had an hour to spare, and we spent it finding an apartment.
We chose an apartment house called the Rose Garden, at the bottom of the steep hill on Franklin Avenue, between Cahuenga and Vine. It was a Spanish style building, with a courtyard full of trees and flowers. We had a big living room with a pull-down wall bed, a bathroom, a tiny dressing alcove and a kitchen—all furnished, for thirty-five dollars a month, with gas and light extra. Most of the tenants were small-time movie actors and ex-actors (if there is such a creature as a live ex-actor). The place was run by a family named Lundgren, who kept the radio on all day, shouting reports from the various racetracks. Its atmosphere was quite familiar to me: I’d seen a house exactly like it, in a movie about a girl from the Middle West who sets out to conquer Hollywood. It seemed just the right starting point for our adventures in this city.
Chris Wood didn’t look a day older—although he was now a Hollywood Chris, in blue linen shorts, with a walnut tan face, lean and lined, and streaky blond hair. His eyes were the same as ever—extraordinarily brilliant, intimate, mockingly amused. It was wonderful to see him. Instantly, I felt safe. The old world still existed. Everything was going to be all right. Chris took charge of us, as a matter of course. We’d dine together that evening. Tomorrow, we’d go swimming, and visit Hellmut [Roder] and Fritz [Mosel].
I forget whether we saw Gerald Heard, that day. The strange thing is, I can’t remember our first meeting at all. I only know that Chris prepared me for the shock of seeing Gerald in a beard. He had grown it a few months previously, while he was lying in bed with a broken collarbone—he had fallen down some icy steps, somewhere in the Middle West, during a lecture tour.
But, even aside from the beard, I found Gerald strikingly changed. The Gerald Heard of the London days had been, as it were, exaggeratedly clean-shaven—barbered and tailored with a sort of fastidious understatement—carefully unemphatic, witty, catty, chatty, sly. William Plomer, in a letter to me, had once described the two of them perfectly: “Met Gerald and Chris in Regent Street yesterday. I like their dry eyes and voices.” That was the point. One had thought of them, in those days, very much as a pair of brothers, this Anglo-Irish couple. Chris was the spoilt, wayward younger son, with his airplane, his musical boxes, his superbicycle, and all his other dangerous or expensive amusements and toys. Gerald was the elder brother, the guardian presence who lurked somewhere in the background of their London flat. Now and then, he would pop his head startlingly around the door, take in the appearance of Chris’s latest visitor with a sly gleam in his eye, murmur something polite and disappear. The Gerald of those days had been essentially an agnostic, a liberal, a cautious investigator. He was much interested in psychical research. Some of the experiments impressed him, but he wouldn’t go so far as to say that he was sure. He wrote books about evolution and prehistory, and broadcast once a week on popular science.
And now here was Chris, who hadn’t changed in the least—he was just recovering from an accident to his latest plaything, an autoglide,24 and kept picking, like a fidgety little boy, at a scab on his ankle. And here was a new Gerald—disconcertingly, almost theatrically Christlike, with his beautiful little pointed beard which tilted the whole face to an upward, heaven-seeking thrust; artistically, even dramatically shabby, in a sort of blue painter’s smock, washed-out blue jean pants and sneakers. Sitting forward, alert as a bird, on the edge of his chair, his exquisitely formed hands folded in his lap, he was like someone who listens intently to sounds which are nearly inaudible. One could imagine him as a radio operator, with headphones on his ears. When he spoke, you often got the same impression: he was repeating a message which he had just received. (This was probably because Gerald was in the middle of writing a book, and he naturally tended to quote passages from it, trying them out on his various listeners.) His eyes, of an intense pale blue, had a trick, in thoughtful moments, of seeming to lose focus, and go blind. His dyspeptically red nose, with the beard and the high temples, gave him a slight resemblance to Bernard Shaw.
Chris and Gerald lived at 8766 Arlene Terrace, a curving lane high up the hillside of a branch valley, above Laurel Canyon. It was part of a building project which had petered out. Beyond the last houses, the pavement ended, but you could follow the road right up to the top of the ridge, where a gate led to a firebreak dirt track, which skirted the whole range of hills between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. This was Gerald’s favorite walk. In the evening, the scenery reminded me of Hong Kong Island. Weird feelers and tendrils of fog twisted around the summits and coiled down the deep abrupt canyons, which were choked with chaparral, poison oak and yuccas. Far below, vast constellations of lights spread over the plain. Although these hills were in the midst of an enormous city, they were still quite wild; walking on the firebreak, you often saw coyotes, and rabbits, and deer, or a fat, sleepy rattlesnake, enjoying the warmth of the ground after sunset.
Gerald didn’t actually live in Chris’s house, but in an annex which he had built on to the back of it—a small bedroom and a tiny shower and toilet. There was no communicating door between the two establishments. To go from one to the other, you had to pass through the garden: an inconvenience in wet weather and at night. But both Chris and Gerald seemed to prefer it that way. They respected each other’s privacy like cats.
When I came to know Gerald’s habits and ways of life, I suspected that they formed a deliberate, or subconsciously intended picture of himself as a mendicant, an Irish “poor relation.” For example, if Gerald invited you to dinner, he took the most exaggerated precautions not to disturb Chris. You couldn’t go into the kitchen until Chris
had driven down the hill for his evening meal in Hollywood. As the sound of the car died away, Gerald would stage-whisper, “Himself has gone away now. The coast is clear.” Then we would tiptoe into the house, after a short bout of bowing in the doorway, which Gerald invariably won. The kitchen, according to Gerald, had more taboos and forbidden places than the most superstitious South Sea island. You soon learnt which shelves were sacred to Chris’s bread, and Chris’s imported English marmalade, and which dish in the icebox contained Chris’s butter, which must never, never be touched, even if you were starving. Chris certainly had his fads and quirks of possessiveness—but Gerald’s exaggeration of them must have made him seem, to strangers, like an ogre.
As soon as you were inside the kitchen, Gerald—talking very rapidly to distract your attention—would try to maneuver you into sitting down and doing nothing while he prepared the meal. It was like a game. If he didn’t succeed, his next endeavor was to get you to eat “something solid”—eggs or canned soup—while he supped messily on scraps. His part of the cupboard was full of stale oddments—bits of old cake, very dry sandwiches, morsels of dusty cheese, rotten fruits, moldy cookies—which he had somehow acquired; usually they were the remains of some picnic with his friends, the Huxleys or the Hunters. “I’m a scavenger, by nature,” he would tell me. If, as often happened, he had been given a specially made cake or pie, or a pat of home-churned butter, he would take what seemed a malicious pleasure in feeding it to a guest. In this way, he resisted Maria Huxley’s attempts to “feed him up,” while, at the same time, he kept alarming her by confessing to night sweats and otherwise hinting at TB. When you had finished the main course, Gerald would press you to raisins (“Why doesn’t everybody prefer them to chewing gum?”) and to raw carrots which are a corrective, as he invariably explained, to night blindness. The meal always ended with tea (“perhaps the only permissible stimulant”). Tea certainly stimulated Gerald. His most brilliant flights of conversation followed the fourth or fifth cup.
When I knew Gerald well enough, I ventured to lecture him on what I dared to call the pretentiousness of wearing jackets with ragged sleeves and going around with holes in the knees of his pants. (Sometimes he even wore them in the style of Robinson Crusoe, chopped short with scissors just below the knee—because, as he explained, the cuffs had become so badly frayed.) Gerald wasn’t very pleased at my rebuke—although he tried to defend himself by saying that he couldn’t bear to see anything wasted—and he got back at me on later occasions by ostentatiously changing his jacket whenever I came to visit him. Gerald was not only a puritan but an inverted dandy. Some devotee once prepared a “list of Mr. Heard’s works, in the order of their relevance to the spiritual life.” At the very bottom was Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes.
Gerald’s chief trial was the ordeal by noise. His six hours of daily meditation were done in his bedroom, and there he was exposed, from seven-thirty onwards, to the neighbors’ quarrels and the neighbors’ radio, which continued separately or together throughout the day. To this was added Chris’s piano playing, morning and afternoon.
Chris, too, had his routine. He breakfasted at ten-thirty, and left around eleven for the beach—or rather for Hanns Ohrt’s cycle shop in Beverly Hills, where he kept his bicycle. (Hanns Ohrt was a famous Hollywood character, a great apostle of the Wheel, a teacher of movie stars, whose shop was painted with inscriptions: “The bicycle is the safest, cheapest and healthiest mode of travel,” “Cycle now and retain the health and youth which you will not be able to regain ten years hence.”) From Beverly Hills, he cycled to the beach and back, making remarkably good time, for long practice had keyed him almost to champion pitch. Chris always went to the Solarium, a sunbathing court with an unpleasant smell, where elderly men, prima donnas of suntan, lay for hours, frying slowly in their own grease. He didn’t stay there long, however. He pedalled hurriedly home, as if for an appointment. At one-fifteen, he would explain, there was a radio program he had to listen to. Did he, literally, listen? It’s hard to say. If I happened to come in while the radio was on, Chris would be wandering about, ceaselessly restless, from room to room, picking up scraps, from the carpet, fiddling with something in the kitchen, changing his clothes. He ate no midday meal. After the program, he would sit down at the piano and practice till teatime. Practice for what? He seldom played for his friends, and would never have dreamed of giving a concert—although he was a very fine performer. After tea, which he made himself, there would be more radio, more piano playing. And then the evening in Hollywood.
Chris was very kind to us, those first days. He took us to all the best restaurants—Chasen’s, Musso Frank’s,25 the Vine Street Brown Derby (where we saw Charles Boyer without his wig) and the Beachcomber where we drank Zombies amd Missionary’s Downfalls in semidarkness, while the artificial rain drummed on the roof and streamed down the windows. He also interrupted his routine to take us to see Hellmut Roder and Fritz Mosel, who had landed up here after wanderings through France, Spain and Mexico. They had opened a restaurant on the Sunset Strip, with Chris’s financial backing, but it had flopped. Now they were just lying around in the sun, and Hellmut was always sick. (I remembered Stephen’s classic remark: “Du solltest nicht Hellmut sondern Dunkelmut heissen.”26) He dragged himself about the house, reproaching us mutely with his patience. Now and then, he retired to a clinic, for treatment or a minor operation—and Chris paid and paid.
Chris seemed to be paying for everybody and everything. I suppose I had known perfectly well that he would pay for me, too—although, when the moment came, I put up a decent show of protest. But the logic of the case was unanswerable. How was I going to eat? By working in the movies. And how was I going to work in the movies before I had a labor permit? Obviously, I would have to get on the quota. Obviously, we would have to have some sort of car; our friends couldn’t ferry us around indefinitely. I ended by borrowing two thousand dollars. (Chris, who was extremely generous in large matters, never reminded me of the debt and seemed genuinely suprised when, eventually, I paid it back.)
But to get back to my first meeting with Gerald. As I have said already, I can’t remember a word of our conversation. But the sense of it was like this:
“Well, Gerald—so you’re really doing all those things we heard about—meditating, and studying yoga, and so on?”
“Yes, Christopher, I really am.”
“And you believe in it? You think it’s worthwhile?”
“For me, it’s the only thing that matters in the world.”
Yes, he really believed. I could see that. Other people believed in mystical religion—but I had always been able to dismiss them as cranks, simpletons or sex maniacs, creatures of another breed. Gerald was different. He was one of us. He spoke the same language. He accepted the same values. He might be theatrical, affected, vain, eccentric, but he certainly wasn’t crazy.
But if—and this was a terribly disturbing thought—if Gerald was sane, then I couldn’t afford to ignore his ideas. I should have to study them—perhaps act upon them. Gerald, I could see at once, was expecting that I should. He had the air of having waited for my arrival. Very few people, he hinted—he hadn’t forgotten how to flatter—could come to “this thing.” (His favorite way of referring to the subject.) Only one man in ten thousand takes an interest. And of ten thousand who take an interest, only one does anything about it. “It’s only when the sheer beastliness of the world begins to hurt you—like crushing your finger in a door,” (Gerald’s face contracted with pain as he spoke, for he always mimed out his remarks), “it’s only then that you’ll be ready to take this step.”
And was I ready? Well, I had certainly been miserable enough, lately. My bridges were broken. I saw no way out. But still I couldn’t honestly say that I’d reached the despair line. My ultimate remedy for everything was sleep, unconsciousness—produced no matter how—by Seconal, alcohol, a movie, a crime story, or sex. And now here was Gerald urging me in the opposite direction—towards greater
wakefulness, consciousness, awareness. All my laziness hung back.
Nevertheless, what he now put before me was the most exciting proposition I had ever heard. He told me what Life is for. “And why was I never told this before?” I kept asking myself, almost indignantly. It was an absurd question. I had been told “this” many times. Every moment of my conscious existence had contained within itself this riddle, and its answer. Every event, every encounter, every person and object had restated it in some new way. Only—I hadn’t been ready to listen.
Life, said Gerald, is for awareness. Awareness of our real nature and our actual situation. The day-to-day, space-time “reality” is, in fact, no reality at all, but a cunning and deadly illusion. Space-time is evil. The process of meditation consists in excluding, as far as possible, our consciousness of the illusory world and turning the mind inward, in search of the knowledge which is locked within itself—the knowledge of its real nature. Our real nature is to be one with life, with consciousness, with everything else in the universe. This fact of oneness is the actual situation, the only absolute reality. Supposed knowledge of individuality, separateness and division is nothing but illusion and ignorance. Awareness is increased through love (or, as Gerald preferred to call it, “interest-affection”) and weakened by hatred. Hence, all positive feeling and action toward other people is in one’s deepest interests, and all negative feeling and action finally harms oneself. Free will does not operate, as we like to imagine, in the sphere of events—averting this danger, choosing that advantage. No—there we are tied hand and foot, though we do not know it. “At the moment of action no man is free”—because our present problems are created by our past deeds and thoughts. Free will consists simply in this: that we can, at any moment, turn toward or away from the search for our real nature.
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 12