Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  I’m afraid Bodo didn’t get much for his work with us—perhaps twenty or thirty dollars. I doubt if I got more than a hundred and fifty, altogether. Berthold, who privately considered himself a shrewd business man, had, as usual, displayed the innocence and trust of a ten-year-old child. In New York, he had met a producer named Al Rosen, who had offered him this job. Berthold was to get so much for writing the picture, and a further sum for directing it when written. There was a legal contract to this effect, but unfortunately this contract was already invalid—both parties had delayed their negotiations so long that the deadline date for delivery of the script was already passed. Correspondence began, to fix a new date; but, in the meanwhile, Berthold heard, from a private source, that Rosen hadn’t yet raised the money for the production, although he had declared, months before, that it was already in the bank. He seems to have been one of those shoestring producers who build up a production on promises and sales talk, hoping that some writer will do them a script on which they can actually raise money, or that some backer will provide money with which they can buy a script. This method may be dishonest, but it often works. Ellis St. Joseph (of whom more later) got involved in a similar deal with his play Passenger to Bali; but the play was finally produced, and paid off.

  However, Berthold was furious. He embarked on a whole series of letters, accusing, threatening, demanding. Rosen answered, counter-accusing. The letter writing took up a great deal of time (I had to translate them into English, with much search for the mot juste). Berthold really enjoyed this correspondence far more than doing the script itself. There was much barking and little biting. (The biting came two years later when, appealed to desperately by Berthold, I had suddenly to settle with Rosen out of court, for nondelivery of the script. This cost me several hundred dollars—but, at that time, I could well afford them.)

  About this time, I gave a radio talk at the Beverly Hills “Station of the Stars,” KMPC. It was an interview, in a series called “Meet the Author.” “The Author,” in each case, had to prepare his own script—and, reading through my colleagues’ efforts, I had to admit that few of them suffered from inferiority complexes. “Mr. X., how do you explain the secret of your success with the public?” “Mr. Y., how did you get that marvellous idea for your novel?” etc. etc. However, I was able to avoid this kind of thing. I simply talked about our journey to China.

  The talk got me two fans. The Viertels’ Japanese maid, who listened in, was delighted because I said that the people of Japan certainly didn’t want the war. And there was a very attractive dark girl, whorishly dressed in black silk and reeking of perfume, who waylaid me as I left the broadcasting studio. Could she speak to me alone? Not here. Wouldn’t I come to her apartment? I made some excuse. Well then—would I answer just one question? “Certainly—” I began to get nervous, “That is, if I can—” The girl was now so close that I was practically holding her in my arms. She had me pinned against the wall. The station attendants were grinning in the background. She raised her face to mine, as though for a kiss. “Tell me, Mr. Isherwood,” she murmured voluptuously, “is communism the only way out?”

  At the beginning of August, Auden came out to the Coast, with Chester Kallman. They were going to stay in Laguna Beach, so we didn’t see much of them. They had been in Taos, where they met Frieda Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Both of them were very untidy, dirty and in the highest spirits: they looked curiously alike.

  Auden went up to see Gerald. They had a long but rather unsatisfactory talk. Gerald commented later on Auden’s jittery behavior and chain-smoking, and predicted that he would end up as a Catholic. Auden accused Gerald, as always, of being a Manichaean, a life hater. They were fond of each other, and respected each other sincerely. Their opposition wasn’t really philosophical but temperamental. Auden had an excellent digestion and loved his dinner. Quite simply and frankly, he enjoyed comfort, wine and sex. Gerald was a dyspeptic who had passed the change of life. That was all. It would have been better to admit it, instead of defending their tastes with dialectics.

  Gerald had already introduced me to Swami Prabhavananda. The following entry from my diary describes our second meeting, by appointment, alone.

  August 4. The Swami was in his study when I arrived. He is smaller than I remembered—charming and boyish, although he is in his middle forties and has a bald patch at the back of his head. He looks slightly Mongolian, with long, straight eyebrows and wide-set dark eyes. He talks gently and persuasively. His smile is extraordinary. It is somehow so touching, so open, so brilliant with joy that it makes me want to cry.

  I felt terribly awkward—like a rich, overdressed woman, in the plumes and bracelets of my vanity. Everything I said sounded artificial and false. I started acting a little scene, trying to appear sympathetic. I told him I wasn’t sure I could do these meditations and lead the life I am leading. He answered: “You must be like the lotus on the pond. The lotus leaf is never wet.”

  I said I was afraid of attempting to do too much, because, if I failed, I should be discouraged. He said: “There is no failure in the search for God. Every step you take is a positive advance.”

  I said I hated the word “God.” He agreed that you can just as well say “The Self” or “Nature.”

  He talked about the difference between yoga, meditation and autohypnosis. Autohypnosis or autosuggestion makes you see what you want to see. Meditation makes you see something you don’t expect to see. Autosuggestion produces different results in each individual. Meditation produces the same result in all individuals.

  This is what he told me to do:

  To try to feel the presence of an all-pervading Existence.

  Send thoughts of peace and goodwill toward all beings—north, south, east and west.

  Think of the body as a temple, containing the Reality.

  Meditate on the Real Self.

  The Self in you is the Self in all beings. I am infinite Existence, infinite Knowledge, infinite Bliss.

  I explained how I had always thought of yoga as silly, superstitious nonsense. The Swami laughed: “And now you have fallen into the trap?”

  August 5. I find number one the easiest—especially at night. It would be quite easy in the desert. Here, you keep hearing cars, steam hammers, distant radio, the clock, the icebox motor—and have to remind yourself that the Existence is also within these mechanisms. Number two is easy as long as I think of typical people in each country. For some reason, it is most difficult to send goodwill toward the South Americans. The points of the compass bother me, too. Where is everybody? This would be easiest on top of a mountain or a skyscraper. Number three very difficult. Much involved with thoughts of sex. Number four: relatively easy. When I think in terms of writing, I can easily see that the writer taps a great store of universal knowledge. The more daring, the more persistent he is, the more he finds out. “Infinite Bliss”—infinite possibility of bliss inside each of us. Why do I make myself miserable? Fear and desire are simply a blockage in the pipe. Get them out and the water will run. It’s there, all the time. I am always trying to reassure myself that there is nothing and nobody in the universe I really want. Hence, my sexual adventures. To be able to say, “Oh, I’ve had X.” So X. is taped, X. is eliminated. Then jealousy—because X. won’t stay taped.

  This evening, on bedroom floor, in the dark. Unsatisfactory. Stuck at number one, because I couldn’t get over the feeling that everyone was asleep and therefore no longer part of “Consciousness.” Posture is difficult. My back hurts. But I feel somehow refreshed.

  August 6. Last night, a peculiarly horrible dream.

  I was walking through what must have been a fairground, although, actually, the scene resembled a parking lot: a blank, grimy brick wall in the background, with trampled earth under foot. I saw a boy, about sixteen years old, stark naked, pale, unhealthy looking, with sloping shoulders and stocky, clumsy legs: there was a certain stolid, ungraceful toughness about his whole body. I knew that he was a fairgroun
d boxer. He had to fight all comers, for ten cents. He had a father who was very cruel to him whenever he lost.

  At that moment, he was fighting a much larger boy, coarse looking and ugly, his face covered with pimples. This boy was also naked. They fought with their bare fists.

  Then I noticed that the smaller boy was wearing a repulsive kind of truss or girdle, with an electric light switch projecting from his thigh. He was crippled, in some way. He was getting the worst of the fight. The larger boy hit him, drawing blood. The boy snorted up the blood through his nostrils and spat it out into a glass jar. The absolute stolidity with which he accepted his injury was what filled me with horror. I knew that his whole life would be like this—one cruel, stupid, savage fight after another—until he died.

  Woke, sweating. I know this dream was somehow about a European war. …

  And now, throughout August, we dropped rapidly toward disaster. There is little one wants to say about such a time. The radio broadcasts claimed large portions of each day. Liesl Frank (wife of Bruno, the writer) carried a portable set about with her, like a sick baby. She nursed it in her arms, bent over it as it muttered its advertisements, tuned it up loud for each new bulletin. But most of the Emigration didn’t really expect war. They were sure England would “betray” them, as at Munich. Salka, Berthold’s wife, was away in France, at Metro’s expense, getting material for Madame Curie, on which Aldous Huxley had been working for Garbo. The Russo-Nazi pact was announced, and Berthold went into one of his biggest tailspins. He declared that he was through with politics. “You were right. Huxley was right. Even Heard was right.” This mood lasted about twenty-four hours—at the end of which Berthold was right back on his feet again, defending Soviet policy like a wildcat.

  October 1. Exactly one month since England’s declaration of war.

  The unimaginable has happened—and, of course, it’s utterly different from anything we had pictured. One looks ahead to a war and imagines it as a single, final, absolute event. It is nothing of the kind. War is a condition, like peace, with good days and bad days, moods of optimism and despair. The crisis of August was actually, for us in Santa Monica, worse than this month which has followed the outbreak. I see Frau Frank’s face, contorted with hate. I hear Gottfried Reinhardt yelling, Klaus Mann chattering like an enraged monkey, Berthold snorting like a war-horse. The night war was declared, Vernon and I sat listening to our radio at home. It was as though neither of us were really present. The living room seemed absolutely empty—with nothing in it but the announcer’s voice. No fear, no despair, no sensation at all. Just hollowness.

  A week or two later, we moved to these two rooms in a house above Santa Monica Canyon—303 South Amalfi Drive. They are airy and pleasant, with a view of the ocean. Our landlady’s name is Mrs. Bayley. She lives with her mother, and her younger son, a schoolboy named Happy. Happy is very happy indeed, although he has diabetes. The Huxleys live on Amalfi, too; but their house is a mile further up the hill.

  Whatever happens now, I am so glad to be out of that dreary Sycamore Trail house. We sold all our furniture at a seventy-five percent loss. I am tons lighter in consequence. Before we left, I buried Jacky’s champagne cork in the hillside, behind the back door.

  Vernon has caught my depression at last. He is very sick with it—like a South Sea islander who nearly dies of a common cold imported by a trader. He can’t eat, can’t work, can’t enjoy anything. He drives our already battered new car into Hollywood, to visit his various friends. I spend my whole day at the Viertels’, in a coma of nicotine poisoning, planning the film—which still hasn’t started. Berthold, grimly pugnacious, flares up at the least imagined insult from any member of the family. He imagines a huge conspiracy against himself. He says he will take a room, out. Poor Hans, the eldest son, bears the brunt, because of his irritating deafness. Frau Steuermann gets quietly drunk. She is afraid to go into the kitchen, because the cook is her arch enemy.

  Of course we are all as mad as hatters. What else can you expect? The radio works day and night to undermine the foundations of sanity. We all know by heart the advertisements for Packard cars, Borden’s milk, Bulova watches, which precede the news. The European correspondents, trained in the literary school of Sheean and Farson,36 broadcast local color: “The Paris sky is blue. The leaves in the Bois are turning yellow. A lark is singing over Montmartre.” I hate them more than anybody else in this whole business. I swear that, if peace ever returns, if I am ever again freed from their clutches, I will never open another newspaper, never listen to another radio program. I feel about them the way some bums must feel about the Salvation Army worker who forces you to take hymns with your soup.

  The madness of this war infects us all. But the war itself and its sufferers are utterly unreal. Morgan Forster, Heinz, Stephen, M. and all the others are inhabiting a different world. It isn’t that I daren’t think about them; I can’t. Shall I go back to England? I don’t know. Wystan is still in New York and wants to remain there. Unless America comes in, no decision is forced on me. I must make my own choice. Very few English residents have left California yet.

  Meanwhile, the weather is heartlessly beautiful—after the flood which nearly washed the half-completed WPA37 canal project into the sea. The great heavy pelicans skim over the waves, and dive into the water with a huge splash. The wind thrashes the eucalyptus trees. The drugstore is kept by an ex-actor called Doc Law, with a Napoleon III beard, who was an intimate friend of Will Rogers. Chris goes every morning to the beach, renewing his tan. Gerald’s eye is a little wilder, his nose a shade redder. Vernon has just done a drawing and thrown it into the waste basket. Now he is reading to me from the two-volume Oxford Dictionary.

  Courage, calm. I must restart my meditations.

  October 16. Another heatwave just ending. Russia threatens Finland. I have just returned from seeing Gerald—to our empty rooms. Vernon has started working with his friend George Arnold at his pottery business. Sometimes he stays away for two or three days. I hardly see him, except when he is dead tired, late at night, or sleepy at breakfast.

  I can’t remember any time in my life when I seriously believed in God. At Repton, when I got confirmed—before I met Edward—I was a cautious, diplomatic hypocrite. While I was constantly with Edward at Cambridge, I achieved a more or less continuous state of awareness which was religious in character, although we expressed it in terms of Art. But it was mostly at second hand, through books. Then came Wystan, preaching Homer Lane. I made more contact with the outside world. And when my books were published, I really felt I was doing what Life made me for. In actual fact, I was only giving a performance of the Ego as Artist. “To create, to love, to suffer.” The “love” part of it was pretty phony. But still, all those legs and arms and bodies were parts of people. The people, when I got to Berlin, belonged to a certain class—poorer than mine. I had to spend money on them, and therefore doubted the love. So I became political. Marxism said, “I’ll remove the barriers.” Okay.

  Marxism also said, “I’ll kill the Ego”—but it didn’t—even in the noblest of my revolutionary friends. So I despaired, and started to pretend that the Ego didn’t exist. But the Ego did exist, and became stronger than ever. It ate up all the “love,” and even began to paralyze the creative powers. It grew weary of itself, loathing its own tricks—so weary that, when I finally did get loved, really loved, the Ego was so nauseated by its own flattering, distorted mirror image, that it had to turn away. It was afraid of being found out.

  That’s my position now. And, however I may boast to Gerald, nothing has changed—except that the way out has become dimly visible. But what a way out! The Ego shivers. It smells the wind of its destruction.

  “I love you,” says the Ego, doggedly. How well I know that tone! It means, “I hate you and mean to torture you.”

  November 5. Still this wonderful weather. The beach is nearly empty now. Only the surf-riders linger, with their paddleboards. They are like a different race of beings,
beautiful and golden, with their graceful, relaxed attitudes, as they balance on the brilliant crest of the wave. The other evening, I was walking along the shore at dusk, and one of them came sliding in through the foam—right to my feet. For a moment, we looked at each other, without speaking or smiling. He was so wet—his almost black skin saturated with water—that it was like meeting some marine animal, not a man. Then, without a word, he turned and paddled back into his element, until he was lost in the gathering darkness. …

  John van Druten was in Los Angeles for a while, this autumn. Before he went back to the East, he introduced me to his friend Carter Lodge. Carter had an apartment in Westwood Village. We saw a good deal of each other. Being with him was easy, gay and pleasant—because he insisted on my being cheerful. Carter liked cheerful people. He didn’t want to hear any complaints. Underneath, he was quite tough and efficient. And he knew exactly what he wanted, without any nonsense. His only sentimentality was about success, so he had taken up astrology—rather in the same spirit as a sailor studies navigation. He was determined to take care of all the angles.

  I always remember a weekend when Carter and I visited Palm Springs. We drove out to the Salton Sea by moonlight and sat on the beach. A big Alsatian dog followed us. It belonged to the motel proprietor. After we had sat in silence for some minutes, the dog came circling and sniffing around, and finally lay down beside us. It was one of those moments that seem printed in our memory for no apparent reason, uncannily distinct. The tiny lake waves licking hurriedly at the white sand, lick, lick, lick, lick, lick. The black and silver-splashed levels of the water. The dry desert scrub behind us, and the reaches of the desert—a submarine garden, abandoned by the sea. The mountains all around—felt rather than seen, like furniture in a darkened room. And overhead the brilliant, uninhabited moon.