Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Drove up to see Gerald, who had prepared the usual lunch of eggs, raisins and tea. We talked about Kolisch. Gerald says his energy and powers of concentration are amazing. He drives a big car at terrific speed—dashing up from his office to spend an hour with the Swami, then tearing back to his patients. By nature, he is intolerant, intellectually arrogant. But with Swami he is gentle as a lamb.

  We discussed my film career and life in general. I can see that Gerald, in his sly, prim way, expects it to end in disaster. But “of course, you may be able to do it,” he says: “Theoretically, it is possible to live in both worlds, and recognize that one of them is unreal. I shouldn’t dare to try it myself. I shouldn’t venture to poke that long red nose of mine outside. The danger is, of course, that one simply disintegrates—one might even become insane.” He remarked that Aldous is getting more and more involved with MGM—making the excuse that it is “very interesting.”

  Then we talked about reincarnation. Gerald spoke so dogmatically that I protested. I simply can’t swallow it, yet. Gerald agreed that one shouldn’t lay down the law about these things. He himself was convinced—but only because he believed in the truthfulness of those who claim to have had actual mystical experience.

  Gerald has thought a great deal about the problems of the sincere social worker—he did a lot of slum work and prison visiting in England, himself, years ago. “What we have to realize is that none of us can hope to do good to anybody. We can only avoid doing harm.” But he doesn’t dare say this in public.

  If Gerald is right, life is evil. But the last person to be able to realize this is a member of an oppressed or underprivileged group. An Okie migrant or a Chinese coolie naturally believes that everything would be all right if only he had enough money. As for those who do have enough, and who enjoy all the autohypnotic “pleasures,” they often realize in the end that they have been cheated, but only when it is too late. Their strength is gone. They have no energy left for the evolutionary advance. “And it is incredible,” said Gerald, “how much energy you need to enlarge consciousness even the least little bit.”

  Gerald gives me to understand that he is making some progress. How much, and of what kind, he won’t or can’t say. Probably it is impossible to describe to anyone who hasn’t had similar experiences. He admits that the effort involved is intense and sometimes agonizing. He has periods of discouragement, even of despair, but there is no question of turning back.

  And now it is for me to decide: am I going to follow him? I am very lucky to have met him and been shown the way. And I am under no illusions. I know the alternative. If I don’t go on, I shall have nothing but my own weakness to blame.

  Today, the Nazis are showing definitely that they may back the Soviets in the Russo-Finnish war.

  January 5. Two visits to Dr. Kolisch. He keeps his patients waiting for hours. I was reduced to reading Fortune, the most depressing magazine in the world. After taking the powders he gave me, all symptoms of gonorrhea have completely disappeared. I feel better altogether.

  Supper at the Viertels’. The Huxleys were there. Aldous held forth against the appallingly low standards of western American universities; in the East, he admits, they are far better. This was the typical stage setting of an “intellectual” party. The men stood a little apart, scowling at their shoes, in prophetic condemnation of existing society. The ladies, seated, talked scandal and dirt. Maria Huxley’s charming Belgian schoolgirl niece Sophie [Moulaert] sat on the arm of Maria’s chair, plainly and becomingly dressed, with a small gold cross around her neck. Maria held her hand, as if to protect her from the dangers of the conversation.

  I like all of them, and I am deeply fond of Berthold, Salka and Peter—but why the hell we met this evening is more than I can say. I suppose that people of Salka’s temperament actually prefer to talk to their intimate friends when they are surrounded by a chattering crowd. She creates huge, expensively fed gatherings of bores as a background to her meetings with Gottfried.

  January 6. Lunch with Ellis St. Joseph in his hotel bedroom. Ellis, very pale and unwholesome looking, in his brown velvet bathrobe and teddy bear bedroom slippers, wanted to consult me about his play. That is to say, he wanted to think aloud to someone who had a sympathetic wavelength. I know myself how helpful this is. Sure enough, we soon arrived at a solution of the difficulty that was bothering him.

  After all, perhaps I have been rather hard on Ellis. I think he’s genuinely well disposed. I hope his play will be a success, because I believe success will be good for him.

  Not having read the whole play, I can’t possibly judge how it will be on the stage. There is no characterization. All the characters are baldly symbolic; but a lot of the action is theatrically effective, I should think. (The stupidity of this paragraph is due to Happy Bayley, who has started to practice on the piano upstairs.)

  This evening, I read After Many a Summer. The idea of the plot is magnificent. If only Aldous, with all his talents, were a real novelist! Here is one of the few people who write about something genuinely interesting, and he simply hasn’t the gift—which scores of the dreariest little hacks possess—of “making his characters live.” And so, instead of a great novel, we get a prim, chilly morality play, interrupted by philosophical conversations. Because Aldous isn’t a novelist, the conversations are very poorly contrived. But if you read them simply as lectures, ignoring Aldous’s clumsy attempts to dramatize them, they are brilliant.

  January 7. In the early morning, as I lie in bed, too lazy to get up, the demons start whispering in my ear:

  “You’re trying something impossible. Even Gerald admitted he couldn’t do it. You’ll just slither back on to your old tracks. Why not give up? Get sick. Stay in bed. Develop paralysis or TB. Wait a minute—isn’t that a pain in your lung, right now? Your heart isn’t strong. You’ve had rheumatic fever, remember. It wouldn’t surprise me if you collapsed altogether—considering the strain you’ve been under. Well, what if you do? It’d serve everybody right. They’d have to look after you. You’re sick. You’re very sick. Come on—let’s have breakfast in bed for a start. …”

  “Oh dear, oh dear. I’m so worried. So many responsibilities. So many debts. Can I hold that job down at Metro? When does the car insurance fall due? How shall I ever pay for everything? Aren’t we being too extravagant? Oughtn’t we to economize? Oh dear, oh dear. …”

  “Ssh! Rockabye baby. Don’t listen to that guy. Take it easy. Sure, you shall have your yoga. Sure, you shall have your job at MGM. And dough—lots of it. Buy that nice typewriter. Get yourself a new suit. Meet the stars. Forget the war. Have yourself a swell time. Confidentially, I think you’re pretty smart. You get around. You know how to make the best of all the worlds. Your stars are set right. You’ll always succeed. Sure, we’ll take the kid along with us for a while. Always ditch him later. Always deal with yoga later. Always have time for everything. Lots of friends, lots of dough, lots of fun, lots of enlightenment. Just leave me to fix everything. You and me is going places.”

  “It isn’t fair, I tell you—it isn’t fair! You’re too kindhearted. Too much of a sucker. Everybody takes advantage of you. Everybody. Don’t let them! They don’t understand you. They don’t know your problems. If they had to spend one day in your shoes, they’d collapse altogether. What right have they to criticize? How DARE they? How DARE Gerald sneer at you for taking a movie job? How DARE the Viertels treat you as a child? How DARE Vernon go to art school, when you’re slaving, killing yourself, giving up your work, sacrificing everything to support him? He ought to be slaving for you, waiting on you hand and foot! It’d be an honor to do it. You’re a genius. You’ve more talent in your little finger than this whole crowd put together. Don’t stand for it. Throw everybody out. Tell them to go to hell. Shoot them down, to the last man. Nobody exists but you. Nobody has any rights, but you. Nothing matters but your comfort, your will, your slightest whim. It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair!”

  At length
I have to jump out of bed and escape from them into the bathroom. And so the day begins.

  Lunch at the Viertels’. Berthold in a very nervous, difficult mood. Salka has been coaching Mausi in Gretchen’s prison scene from Faust, which she is to recite at her school next week. Mausi was proud because she’d made the lady next door cry. “And did you cry?” Salka asked. “No,” said Mausi: “At the beginning I felt bored, and towards the end I got goose pimples.”

  It is appalling how near some of the refugees live to the starvation line. There’s Stern, the poet. His girlfriend acted in a play the other night for ten dollars, and was glad to get it. Little Guttchen, whose kidneys were injured in a Nazi concentration camp, asked Berthold for a job. Berthold did nothing for three weeks. Then he wrote to Guttchen, who got the letter on the very day he’d decided to commit suicide. He had only seven dollars left in the world. Berthold forced him to borrow twenty. But where is he to find work?

  Mrs. Bayley, who works in the old-age pension department of the state office in Los Angeles, tells me that old-age relief here is higher than anywhere else in the world. Thirty-five dollars a month. You can find houses which board and lodge roomers for seven dollars a week—nine for a room of your own. Living is much cheaper here than in the East. But, aside from the movies and oil, there’s less chance of earning big money. Marion Davies’s Great Danes, which are kept at her house on the beach, get sixteen dollars’ worth of meat a day.

  January 8. Heavy torrents of rain yesterday. Rain again today. Started work at Metro—that is to say, I was installed in an air-conditioned office where I wrote letters. Gottfried Reinhardt is still away and not likely to return for three weeks.

  Lunched with Frau Bach, Gottfried’s flirtatious secretary. She tried to explain to me how Metro’s organization works. But, to understand it, one would have to have the mind of an Einstein. How, except in the language of relativity, is one to define the importance of Mannix in terms of Lichtman, or Hyman in terms of Katz? Even L. B. Mayer himself is not an absolute. He can only be stated as an equation: Mannix times Lichtman to the power of Katz equals Mayer over X. (X. being Wall Street somehow related to a number of individuals named Schenck who appear to be presided over or owned by a mathematical abstraction called Loew’s Incorporated.)

  (I find I haven’t yet referred to my agents, Leonardson and Schley. I switched to them on the advice of John van Druten. They were his agents, too. Edna Schley was short and dumpy, with white hair cut very close—almost an Eton Crop—a red face, and thick little legs. Dan Leonardson, her husband, was also tubby and small. There was something rather endearing about him: he was like an underground animal whose whiskers were always a bit grubby from digging: one imagined him burrowing down under the city and emerging, very dirty and breathless, with a torn dollar bill in his paws. He had been a doctor. Then he had gone into aviation, and later into the show business.

  Edna had once been a movie writer and director. She was always talking about her connections around the studios. “Why, I’ve known Jack ever since he was in the prop department!” Whenever she and Dan came to visit me at work, she would ask anxiously: “How yer feelin’, Chris?” as though I were a boxer before a fight. As long as we had dealings together, she never actually got me a job—that I did myself, through friends—but she was full of activity, especially after the contract with Metro was safely landed. And when some footling little adjustment had to be made, she would become very politic, gravely weighing tactical considerations. “I’ve been thinking it over, Chris. Maybe we’ll let it ride another week. I have an idea … I think I’ll say a word to Ken this morning—but nothing definite, y’understand.” She yessed me unblushingly: “That’s right Chris. That’s what I’ve always said—” even when she’d been saying the exact opposite. “I’m working on it,” she would tell me, when, obviously, she had done nothing: “I’m going right ahead now. Firing on all six cylinders.”

  Edna and Dan seemed constitutionally incapable of speaking the truth, especially in minor matters. Both van Druten and I found this very embarrassing. For example, Dan would tell one of the studios that Johnny was in New York, when actually he was in Hollywood and everybody knew it. He never did report his lies to us, and so we always appeared to be a party to them when they were found out. If you argued with Dan, he merely grinned and said: “I didn’t want them bothering you, see?”

  Edna and Dan had married fairly late in life—both, I believe, for the second time. They were deeply attached to each other. Johnny told me that he had once seen her inscription on a Christmas present—“Santa loves Danny, but not as much as Edna does.”

  These two “handled” me, as the trade expression goes. Sometimes I needed quite a lot of handling. I used to get mad at them and bully them unkindly, but they accepted it without rancor, as a matter of course. Probably nearly every writer gets mad, from time to time, at his particular bunch of parasites—but it’s useless and stupid to do so. They have to be what they are. The system makes them that way.)

  A bundle of letters from England—from M., Stephen, and Tony Hyndman—and a copy of Horizon, the new magazine which Cyril Connolly and Stephen are editing. Horizon makes me feel homesick for what is, after all, my only real home, “the gang.” There they are, gaily and boldly standing up for their opinions—as long as they are allowed to. Stephen writes that he has planned all his work till October—a journal, a long novel, a play, a book of poems—“and then they can shoot me or do what they like, I will have had my little say.” Tony’s letter is equally sweet and touching. No word of reproach for those who are lucky enough to have escaped in time; only a rather wistful envy. Absolute fatalism toward the war. Utter disbelief in its “ideals” and “aims.” Belief only in affection, friendship, art. A growing disgust with “politics” and a feeling that some kind of spiritual readjustment is absolutely necessary. But Heard and Huxley are still regarded with suspicion. And the real nature of yoga is, as you might expect, completely misunderstood.

  January 9. Rain, on and off, all day. Sat in my office at Metro, writing letters and at last, out of sheer boredom, beginning to read James Hilton’s novel Rage in Heaven on which the picture is to be based.

  Lunch with Huxley. How kind, how shy he is—searching painfully through the darkness of this world’s ignorance with his blind, mild, deep-sea eye. He has a pained, bewildered smile of despair at all human activity. “It’s inconceivable,” he repeatedly begins, “how anyone in their senses could possibly imagine—” But they do imagine—and Aldous is very, very sorry.

  He told me of two new novels he is planning—a “brave new world” which really is a utopia, based on Gerald’s program of decentralization and “intentional living.” And a novel which explores the problem of the meaning of words and the utter inadequacy of all existing language. He mentioned, for example, how schizophrenes are sometimes cured of their fear of dogs when it is explained to them that the dog which bit them in childhood isn’t identical with the general concept ‘dog’. That all dogs do not bite, in other words. But, unfortunately, there are no other words: just dog.

  I talked about my early morning demons, and Aldous admitted that he has them too. Particularly a demon which suggests brilliant remarks for him to make on future occasions. He is still very much the prize-winning undergraduate, the nervous, fastidious, superintellectual boy. Stupidity afflicts him like a nasty smell—and how eagerly he sucks at the dry teats of books! I see how utterly he must depend on Maria, how blessed must be the relaxation in her thin Belgian arms—and I like them both, much better than before. I think Aldous knows that I like him. This is our only bond. We talk such different languages. Every time I open my mouth he is obscurely pained and distressed. I am such a hopeless ignoramus, such a barbarian. “And yet,” I can imagine Aldous saying, “one supposes there is something. … These young men who imagined they understood socialism, when, all the time, of course, one saw perfectly clearly—”

  This afternoon, I went to Kolisch. He has finished
the treatment, but now he wants to start in and clean me up properly.

  January 10. Heavy rain. Sat all day in Gottfried’s office. I am to be given a new one tomorrow, without air-conditioning. Wrote letters. Frau Bach popped gaily in and out, flirting and snooping. We did a crossword puzzle together. She asked me about China, communism, etc., buttering every question with coquettish flattery. She is very happy at present, because of a mild conspiracy—Gottfried left secret instructions that I was not to work with Thoeren on the story until he came back. He doesn’t want Thoeren to influence me. But Thoeren mustn’t be told this, so I have to stall and make excuses.

  The roads are all beginning to flood: the entire town seems to drain down into Culver City. Early listless supper with Vernon at the smelly Red Door restaurant, where the phonograph plays endless Strauss. Whiffs of expatriate Berlin. From the kitchen comes the tired gossip of exiles. A Wiener schnitzel which seems specially designed to convince you that meat eating is wicked.

  January 11. Still raining, but not continuously.

  My new office is on the ground floor, with a big window that opens. In the late afternoon, I had to go in and see Bernie Hyman, who is a nice, worried-looking little man. He has a round, gentle face which somehow appears damaged, although there are no visible scars on it. The face of a man who has been sent to prison for life.

  Hyman wanted to know my “reactions” to the story. I bluffed, not having read the treatment—until I realized that Hyman hadn’t read it, either. We regarded each other with gentle reproach, across an enormous writing table, on which stood a bronze statuette of three horses. On the wall, a big colored reproduction of a Renoir little girl. A grand piano in the corner.