Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  A terrible, shameful, almost insane attack of self-pity and despair. “I hate this place,” I told Vernon, “I hate all Americans. I don’t belong here. I shall have to go back to Europe.” Poor Vernon was much distressed. And of course, I didn’t mean what I said about the Americans or the ranch. I meant: I hate myself.

  Actually, in my sane moments, I love this country. I love it just because I don’t belong. Because I’m not involved in its traditions, not born under the curse of its history. I feel free here. I’m on my own. My life will be what I make of it.

  I love the ocean, and the orange groves, and the desert, and the big mountains around Arrowhead, where the snow comes down to the shores of the lake and you see the eagles circling above. Nature is unfriendly, dangerous, utterly aloof. However hard I may try, I can’t turn her into a stage set for my private drama. Thank God I can’t. She refuses to become a part of my neurosis.

  April 1. Dinner with Frieda Lawrence and Angelino [Ravagli], her Italian ex-cavalry-officer lover. I had expected to find Frieda intense and domineering. Actually, she is already an old woman, with a croaking, witchlike laugh. She is very lively, interested in everybody and everything. Her figure is a lump. Her grizzled blonde hair is cropped very short. She and Angelino are a charming couple—living, apparently, in a state of continual unmalicious bickering, like children.

  She wanted me to help her with an outline of The Plumed Serpent which Dieterle65 has requested for a possible film. Obviously, the material is hopelessly undramatic, in its present form. Frieda wandered through the story, stopping at intervals to squabble with Angelino, who kept throwing cold water on the whole scheme. Finally, I suggested that Berthold was just the man to help them, and thus slipped gracefully out of the noose.

  April 9. German troops landing in Denmark and Norway. All day long, the radio and the special editions were full of sinking ships, occupied towns, air raids, scares, rumors and lies. Felt too depressed to write the new scene for Rage in Heaven. Appropriately enough, it plays in a deathhouse cell.

  Vernon left, this morning, for New York to visit his mother. Berthold also left for New York, two days ago. He has been asked to produce a play, called Thumbs—a thriller, starring Oscar Homolka.

  I’m about to sign a contract which will tie me to Metro for a year. It’s a long prospect of drudgery, with the Chopin film as a beginning.

  Saw Gerald in the evening. We talked about the enlargement of consciousness. Three stages: first, you see something—some single object—as it really is, “in its own right”; then you see that the object is part of a plan—its position in time and space is inevitable—it isn’t there by accident; then, in the highest state of illumination, you see beyond objects altogether—you trace, as it were, the line which connects them all with a single focal point, the absolute Reality.

  Experience of the first stage is quite common to artists and other observant people. I have often had it myself. It may be achieved, for example, by an accident of light, or a disturbance in the normal laws of perspective. The door of Chris’s bedroom is set at an angle to the wall, and this gives it—at moments when you happen to notice it—a most disturbing air of being, somehow, “outside the picture frame.” Gerald told me how, the other day, he was looking into the bowl of the toilet: a green light fell on the porcelain, through the leaves outside the window, and it appeared to him “as it really was.” “Nothing else mattered to me at that moment. I could have gone on looking at it for ever.”

  June 1. Throughout last month, this stunning avalanche of disasters—while I sat at Metro, studying the letters of Chopin and Sand. Victor Saville getting more and more desperate, day after day—then suddenly brightening into childlike faith, because [Hans] Rameau, the Metro writer who dabbles in astrology, has told him England won’t be conquered. In the daytime, I’m blinded by anxiety and see nothing—although I now “sit” regularly. Ten minutes of comparative sanity—and how you have to plot to get them! Berthold writes frantically from New York, urging me to record everything. I know it is my duty; Horatio’s duty.66 But I can only keep this diary if I discard all fear. Every day must be described quite objectively, not as a history of moods. Leave literature to the war correspondents. Record. Record.

  The other morning, an intensely clear waking vision of the futility of all literature—somehow epitomized by the title of James Branch Cabell’s book, The Cream of the Jest, which I have never read.

  July 5. For several days now, the coast has been muffled in thick fog; a mile inland there is brilliant sunshine. All yesterday, the firecrackers detonated invisibly. It seemed wicked, heartless to be making these harmless explosions while people are being blown to bits in western Europe. My right buttock still aches from Kolisch’s latest shot—a kind of artificial cramp, which clenches the muscle into a hard, painfully sensitive lump. The Chopin film has been abandoned—it is too expensive a project for these times—and Metro has laid me off; I mayn’t be working again for several weeks. Finished the Goncourt journals. Here, gossip achieves the epigrammatic significance of poetry. To keep such a diary is to render a real service to the future.

  With Vernon to dinner at the Huxleys’. Aldous was in bed. Kolisch has given him a fever. Just now, we have our ailments in common. We compare notes on the symptoms produced by Kolisch’s treatment—those intensely unpleasant sensations of restlessness and fatigue which make one feel, as Aldous says, “like an aviary.” A kind of nervous deconstellation, with the frantic aimless activity you experience in a nightmare.

  Maria had arranged a “children’s party” of sandwiches, cold meat, hard-boiled eggs and flat champagne. Matthew was there, and Sophie (who has just joined the Reinhardt drama school) and Matthew’s friend Sid. Afterwards, we went down to the swimming pool on the Uplifters’ estate. There were fireworks. The rockets were beautiful in the thick fog—like drops of vividly colored liquid melting into water. A tenor sang “God Bless America,” while a searchlight pointed at nothing in particular and someone rang a model of the Liberty Bell.

  News of the battle between British and French warships at Oran. U.S. newspapers support the British action. This is the sort of thing statesmen describe approvingly as “realistic” and “in accordance with the logic of events.”

  A couple of days ago, on Sunset Boulevard, I picked up two youths who were thumbing a ride. One of them carried a radio. As soon as they were in the car, he asked me: “Say—when you stopped to pick us up, what did you think this was?” “I don’t know,” I said, “I didn’t notice it particularly.” “You didn’t think it was a suitcase?” “Well—yes, I probably did. Why?” “You see?” The boy turned to his friend and grinned: evidently this decided some argument they had been having. “It’s like this,” the other boy explained to me: “If some folks notice you’ve got a suitcase with you, they won’t stop—because they think maybe you might be carrying a gun in it.” I pointed out that he might just as easily be carrying a gun in the pocket of his pants. The boy thought this over for a moment, quite seriously. “Yes,” he said at last, “I guess you’re right.”

  Extract from a letter in today’s issue of Time magazine, signed Ethel H. Barrow, Brooklyn, N.Y.: “Recently I spent a long vacation in one of America’s most advertised resorts. There I got a concentrated picture of America’s new generation and their attitude towards life. They have no respect for women; they have a shockingly immoral attitude towards them, and while defending America and a moral attitude towards women may not seem analogous, basically they are the same. … I firmly believe that wars are nature’s way of getting rid of bad people, and as far as I can see the young men of America deserve to be shot.”

  Lunch with Hugh Chisholm, who has arrived here with his wife Bridget to organize war relief. He is working at the Goldwyn studios—where Sam, with no pictures to make, is devoting all his terrific and obstructive energies to the job. He vetoes every suggestion, argues, curses, makes scenes; then gives way and apologizes. Hours and hours are wasted in futile conferen
ces. Goldwyn, in order to keep control of the project, has thrown open his empty offices and dressing rooms to the committee. And the film stars, Hugh says, are equally tiresome. Each one thinks only of his or her own publicity. Cooperation is made impossible by local private feuds.

  Hugh looked plumper, whiter, older. His little cat’s nose screwed up into a tiny point of scorn as he poured out his woes. He has all the airs of a harassed committee woman, breathless with indignation and greatly enjoying himself. He writes letters to the President. He knows just what is going on in Washington. During his flying trip to Italy, he talked daily to Count Ciano67—“Until I saw it was hopeless. Nothing we could do would keep them out of the war.”

  He predicts the destruction of England, followed by a monster fifth column offensive in the U.S. He is sure that all the key cities will easily pass into the hands of the bundists. America will become fascist during the winter, under Wendell Willkie.

  But he doesn’t really believe a word of this. For, with the next breath, he plans to take a little house in Washington and settle down. Bridget is going to have a baby next winter. When Hugh heard that I am earning six hundred dollars a week, he threw his arm around my neck with a little scream of joy—as though he were actually embracing a sack of treasury bills.

  July 6. “We have got to take them by the back of the neck and kick them into it if they won’t do it willingly. If they won’t fight we can make them dig trenches. We send a gangster to the electric chair, but we do not treat these pacifists as traitors.” Rupert Hughes,68 speaking last night before the Rotary Club, in the ballroom of the Biltmore.

  R. E. Smith, twenty-one, of Baldwin Park, staged a sit-down “love strike” outside Deanna Durbin’s home. After being refused admittance, he sat down in her automobile. He told the police officers: “I feel as if I were glued here, I love her so.”

  Dinner with Hugh and Bridget Chisholm. John van Druten and Carter Lodge came in afterwards. Johnny has just received, from England, a copy of a poem attacking the “traitor,” Leopold of Belgium. It’s called “The Changeling.” Lord Dunsany is supposed to have written it—but Johnny thinks it may be a fake or a joke; it’s so incredible.

  If fairies, jealous of King Albert’s fame,

  Once, in the cradle, changed his eldest son,

  Surely in Elfland with a fairy name

  There fights some hero till his war is won.69

  Hugh was full of his scheme to organize a series of weekly broadcasts by the best talents of America to the English people—to cheer them up, asssure them of American sympathy and promote international friendship. He has already drafted an appeal letter, calling on prominent Americans to assist—in glowing journalese. Johnny tactfully tried to tone it down, a little. Carter, who was drunk and aggressive, untactfully declared that Americans loathed the English and always would. A quarrel might have started, but everyone was too sleepy.

  July 7. Vernon and I drove to Laguna Beach with Tony Bower. Why does one make these excursions? Tony had to visit some friends, and we found ourselves with nothing to do. We went to a movie. Tony, meanwhile, was playing bridge in a room full of youngish men who had nothing in common but their tan and their immense boredom. Their too-communicative eyes light up hungrily at the entrance of a stranger. They are all waiting for something to happen. Gin is drunk, cigarettes are smoked, and they sit and sit and sit.

  Sunday—that aimless trek of ten thousand cars along the wide black well-marked roads. Fifty miles out, lunch, supper, fifty miles home. The only incidents—the unexpected size of the bill, or a minor collision, or a police ticket. Grumbling, the sententious repetition of opinions from newspaper articles, dyspeptic nostalgia awakened by a glimpse of lithe figures running on the beach. The reliable image of the ocean. The men are nervous and irritable; the women placid. They have their eternal themes: clothes, illnesses, the neighbors’ habits. Ritual behavior surviving an extinct art—the art of enjoyment. What we have left are the habits, and the machinery which serves the habits.

  Few of us any longer know how to enjoy anything—a game, a glass of wine, even a swim in the ocean. Gerald speaks of the “boy-meets-girl” group as though these people were happy, at least on their own level. But they seldom are. Because boy no longer knows how to meet girl.

  July 8. This morning, the embassy called on all British actors between eighteen and thirty-one to return to England.

  Lunch with the Manns, at the new house they’ve leased for the summer on Rockingham. A big, half-empty place with an Italian garden and swimming pool. Klaus and I immediately got into an argument about the war. It seems that Wystan is being very cagey in New York—not telling anyone what he really thinks. I tried to explain my position and asked Klaus what he thought I should do. He said that I should “make a definite statement” in support of the Allies—since my silence is being misrepresented. Just a little statement; once or twice would be enough. I answered that, even if I believed this, I would hesitate to make propaganda, at a safe distance of six thousand miles, encouraging other people to get killed in my place. Klaus said I was being too “objective.”

  Of course, he added, he himself was a pacifist: he couldn’t possibly kill anyone personally. But pacifism couldn’t possibly be applied to every case: if you let the Nazis kill everyone, you allowed civilization to be destroyed. I quoted Aldous’s argument, that civilization dies anyhow of blood poisoning the moment it takes up its enemies’ weapons and exchanges crime for crime. Klaus replied that this view—that no war is always better than any war—seemed to him “merely cynical.”

  So we argued, each contradicting himself and slipping, as one always does, from one language to another—from the language of ethics to the language of politics, and back again. Klaus said that pacifism nowadays merely assists the work of the fifth column and the Nazis. That, I answered, is why I prefer to keep my mouth shut. Our talk was quite friendly, and I was glad, at any rate, to have had it out in the open.

  At lunch were Thomas and Frau Mann. Despite their terrible anxiety over Heinrich and Golo (who were interned in France and may have been handed over to the Nazis) Thomas was urbane as ever. If the English saved democracy, he said, he would gladly tolerate all their faults, even the Oxford accent. He remembered how kind Galsworthy had been—lending the Manns his car while they were in London, and himself travelling by bus. Thomas told me how a sanatorium for consumptives in Colorado had invited him to visit them, adding as an inducement: “We have tried to make everything as much like The Magic Mountain as possible.”

  He looks wonderfully young for his age—perhaps because, as a boy, he was elderly and staid. With careful, deliberate gestures, he chooses a cigar, examines a cognac bottle, opens a furniture catalogue—giving each object his full, serious attention. Yet he isn’t in the least pompous. He has great natural dignity. He is a true scholar, a gentlemanly householder, a gracefully ironic pillar of society—solid right through. He would be magnificent at his own trial. Indeed, he has been making his speech for the defence ever since he left Germany.

  Klaus looks very tired. He is paler, fatter and has a bald patch like a tonsure on the crown of his head. He chain-smokes nervously. But, as always, there is something very attractive and even stimulating about him. He isn’t a despairing loafer, like so many of the others. He’s always on the alert, always working. He has energy and courage. He says he has started writing in English. He speaks very fluently nowadays.

  July 9. To the Solarium, with Tony Bower and Chris—that dreary little sanded prison yard where the naked slaves of the sun lie all day long, in the crucified attitudes of the Inferno. Tony is much upset by the possibility of my return to England. As long as Wystan and I are here, taking the blame, the smaller escapists are safe from notice.

  We walked along the beach and met a boy named Leslie Swaddling, an actor. Was he going back to England, I asked. No, of course not. He was an Australian. And, anyhow, nothing would induce him to risk his skin. “That swine Pétain,” he continued peevis
hly—with the little flare-up of spite I know so well, “he betrayed us. He ought to be shot without trial. This is no time for mercy.”

  This is no time for mercy. We are all terrified, and so we twist about, striking at each other, wounding, killing. I am suffering—so everybody else shall suffer. Thus the poison spreads.

  Overheard at the Solarium. Three men are discussing an actress. “At least,” says one, “you’ll admit she knew how to walk. She walked beautifully—like a swan.”

  July 10. To have lunch with Gerald, who has just returned from a lecture tour. For weeks he has been suffering from diarrhea, caused by his worry and misery about the war. “The Buddhists,” he joked, “call it The Lower Form of Compassion.”

  While Gerald was travelling, he met a man named Starr Daily, an ex-gangster and convict who has written a book about his mystical experiences called Love Can Open Prison Doors. Daily had trained himself to hate everybody and to use hatred as a kind of stoicism whenever he was getting hurt. It made him able to bear great physical pain. Then, while he was in solitary confinement, he had some sort of glimpse of the Reality. Another time, when ten detectives were giving him the third degree, he suddenly stopped holding himself together by hatred and began to feel sorry for them. Immediately, the detectives stopped beating him.

  The book is terribly sentimental, and far too breezily written. It recommends “Love” as the universal cure-all—without ever properly explaining what “Love” is. But there are some very remarkable passages dealing with what Daily calls “passive violence”—the ingrowing, impotent hatred which consumes the hearts of cowards and ultimately destroys them. Leslie Swaddling’s remark yesterday was a good example of passive violence. And God knows I am devoured by it myself. As Gerald says, hate and fear are two halves of the same thing. And fear is the worse half.