Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  August 11. To Peggy’s, for tea and dinner. They are going away soon. We shall miss them terribly. Gerald was there when we arrived, walking about the garden, looking at the flowers. “It’s so odd about beauty,” he said. “One can’t quite see where it fits in.” Meanwhile, Derek dashed up, fighting Vernon and Ben and screaming, “I challenge the winner!” He chatters to himself all the time, like a radio commentator: “He’s down! No—he’s up! Leading with his right. He’s down again! Local boy makes bad! Ladies and gentlemen, the winner is—!” When he goes off to bed, he is still talking. All night long, he mutters in his sleep. The other night, Ben went into his room and tried to start a conversation with him, in the nonsense language he babbles. “Woozle woggle?” Ben suggested, by way of an opening. But Derek, still sound asleep, answered firmly: “No. Fuvvel.”

  August 12. I have noticed several times lately that if I go to bed right after meditating I get very unpleasant, confused, noisy dreams—like static on the radio. It is best to wait at least half an hour.

  Meditation night and morning. It is much easier now, since Swami’s new instructions, because I can begin with the external world and work inward. I start by thinking of the British and Nazi airmen fighting over the Channel. Then Hitler, Churchill. Then Teddy, our dog in Portugal. T. Y. Liu. Admiral Byrd. The ocean with all its fish, etc.

  Miss Reeves, my new secretary at Metro, startled me by quoting Traherne. We spent the whole afternoon talking seventeenth-century poetry.

  August 13. Huge German air attacks on England. Invasion is expected hourly. I feel terribly depressed—as everybody does these days, who cares at all—but not frantic. It is amazing how much my “sits” help, however badly and unwillingly I do them. They clear the mind of that surplus of misery which is entirely subjective and unnecessary, and helps no one. Which, in fact, merely poisons the lives of everybody around you, and makes their own troubles harder to bear. Too much unhappiness over external tragedies is as bad as too little. Hardening and softening of the heart are both vicious. I begin to understand what T. S. Eliot means in “Ash Wednesday”: “Teach us to care and not to care.”

  Lunch with Tony Bower, Jean Connolly (Cyril’s wife) and Denham Fouts. Jean and Denny have just arrived here from the East. Jean is much thinner and really beautiful, with her big gentle cow-eyes. She has a way of suddenly looking up at you, smiling in a wistful, shame-faced way, and exclaiming hoarsely, “Hi-de-ho!” The effect is positively spectral: the voice of the ghost of a prohibition party. Both she and Denny had hangovers, which they nursed with the greatest satisfaction; while steadily tanking up for the next blind.

  We ate at the Beverly Brown Derby, with its atmosphere of overstuffed dullness and melancholy midday rum. They were much amused at my collection of Kolisch pills, and very gay, because I was paying for lunch and smelt agreeably of Metro and dollars. The terrible, almost insoluble problem of choosing what to eat. The frowns over the menu. The waiter’s smiling patience.

  (If I try to remember how Denny struck me when he first came to California, I think of the lean, hungry, tanned face; the eyes which seemed to be set on different levels, slightly overlapping, as in a late Picasso painting; the bitter little rosebud mouth; the strangely erect walk, almost paralytic with tension. He had rather sinister clothes—wash-leather jerkins, bell-bottomed sailor’s trousers, boxer’s sweaters. They were sinister because they were intended for laughing, harmless boys, not as a disguise for this tormented addict, this wolflike inverted monk, this martyr to pleasure. His goodlooking profile was bitterly sharp, like a knife edge; his Floridian drawl seemed a sinister affectation. Goodness, he was sour! For a while, his sourness was stimulating: then you began to feel as if you were suffering from quinine poisoning.)

  August 14. Lunch with Salka. She is very unhappy: weary of her job at Metro, her friendship with Gottfried, Berthold’s endless jitters. She is enormously strong, but the strength is leaking out of her and being lost in the ground. She is warm and generous, primitive and superstitious, emotional and intuitive. Her men have all been intellectuals. They have tried to make her into something she isn’t and never could be.

  She says she wishes she could go into a convent. She wants to know about yoga. Promised to introduce her to the Swami.

  August 18. Today, I finished an almost unbroken week of “sits.” My chief effort is to stand outside the Ego, to try to catch a glimpse of the world with a non-attached eye. But the Ego, with its gross body and great swollen, sullen pumpkin head, is like a man who will stand right in front of you at a horse race: you can only catch glimpses of the race by peeping under his arms or between his legs. It is terribly difficult, but the mere discipline of trying brings its own rewards—cheerfulness, long periods of calm, freedom from self-pity. Vernon is the invaluable barometer of my failure or success. Yesterday afternoon, when we were laughing together, he suddenly said: “If only it could always be like this!”

  Guard against feelings of self-congratulation, or holiness. Self-congratulation is of the Ego. The real self can’t boast of its advance toward wisdom: it is wisdom. Real progress can never be attended by self-congratulation, because it is against the Ego’s deepest interests. As Gerald says: “Love God without fear and without hope.”

  We are to have a house: 8826 Harratt Street, just below the Sunset Strip, behind the “English Village.” Vernon found it, and has arranged everything. It will be his toy. We move in next week.

  Furious scenes at the studio between Saville and Samuels. Saville turning purple and yelling: “You sonofabitch! I give the orders here!” Samuels wounded in his “dignity as a writer.”

  Willkie has plumped for conscription in his acceptance speech; so conscription we shall have. Chris Wood has gone to San Francisco, with Tony, Denny and Jean. Gerald described, last night, how sometimes in meditation he sheds tears of relief when he realizes that, “This thing is true, after all.”

  August 24. We’ve moved into the house, which is actually a little wooden shack, daintily camouflaged with pots of ivy, white fur rugs, painted furniture and frilly curtains, like ballerinas’ petticoats. Vernon’s bedroom (which used to belong to a Mrs. Blumenthal, wife of a movie writer) is a little bower of muslin and silk. We have a gardener and a colored maid. Once again, I feel the dreadful guilt of ownership. But Vernon is delighted. He runs around from morning till night, unpacking, paying bills. The noise of the neighbors’ children makes meditation very difficult. Oh, the fuss and worry of it all! If I could join Gerald’s future monastery, I think I’d regret the world less than at any other time in my life. But I have my problems right here, and it’s no good running away from them.

  Always, behind everything, the dull ache of this war. The deadly pessimism of the refugee writers: “America will be in it before the elections. Then they’ll reintroduce slavery for Jews and Negroes.” The endless beastliness of the air raids; and the amazing cheerfulness of a man like Samuels, who believes in “hedonism” and pinches typists’ fannies. How can there be any happiness, nowadays, except in God? But, of course, all real happiness is in God.

  (It must have been around this time that Vernon and I flew to San Francisco for the weekend. We saw the World’s Fair, which had a very fine exhibition of paintings, and most of the other sights. But what I chiefly remember was a visit to the aquarium, because of an experience I had there. It is very hard to describe. I was looking at a small tank of damselfish—tiny, vivid specks of brilliant blue. All at once, I saw them, as it were, within a universe of their own: embraced, sustained by an intensely living “presence.” And I said to myself: “He cares for them, too.” This wasn’t just a charming, romantic notion—otherwise it wouldn’t remain with me as I write this, six years later. It was a realization of a fact. At the moment, I was so much moved that I almost burst into tears.

  The awful, stony isolation of Alcatraz, out there in the bay, viewed by the wealthy terraces of the city, the cocktail lounge of the Mark Hopkins.83 Society’s ultimate, public confession of fa
ilure. We talk idly about cooperation, brotherhood. For these men, we can do nothing. They are excluded for ever.)

  September 7. London had its biggest bombardment since the war began.

  Rush work on A Woman’s Face. Samuels’s hypochondria. This morning, a mysterious rash spread suddenly over his cheek and forehead. He was pleased when I urged him to go to the doctor at once. We continued our script conference in the car—Samuels preoccupied and anxious about his symptoms. By the time we reached the doctor’s, the rash had practically disappeared.

  He calls Harriet, his secretary, “la Dog.” Painfully raising his corpulent body from the chair, he tells me sadly: “I carry a great deal of insurance.” Saville, acting the he-man, laughs at Samuels’s ailments, and tells Samuels he’s too much tied to his family—he should call them once in a while and say he’s not coming home to dinner; he should take the plane to Mexico City or New York and have himself a bloody good time.

  Saville’s malapropisms: “You see, in this scene, the crooks are trying to circumnavigate Anna.”

  On Saville’s desk, a list of actors and actresses who have had filmtests, with comments by the assistant director. Of one girl: “All she had to recommend was a couple of Adohrs84—nothing else.”

  Driving home through the evening traffic along Sunset Boulevard, I was attacked by one of those spasms of cramp which often follow a Kolisch injection. It was so violent, and so unexpected, that I exclaimed “Oh God!” aloud. And now something extraordinary happened. The word, which I have misused ten million times, produced a kind of echo in my consciousness. Like the vibration after a bell has been struck. It seemed to vibrate down, down into the depths of me. It was so strange, so awe-inspiring, that I longed for the cramp to return. I thought: “I have called upon God.” After a moment, I had another spasm, but this time there was no echo. The word was just another word.

  This was quite different from the experience I had in San Francisco. It was briefer, but much more intimate. I seemed to open a crack of consciousness within myself. Whereas, looking at the damselfish, I was simply an observer. I saw the unique, absolute importance of each single fish as an entity and as a part of total Consciousness; but this realization, vivid as it was, only seemed to apply to myself at second hand. “Not one sparrow falls to the ground without my Father,” was my feeling. Only I should have said, “their Father,” and added, “he’s mine, too,” as an afterthought.

  The Swami now says I must sit for an hour every morning, half an hour every night. And in contemplating the white light at the top of the head, I must meditate also on the sound, “Om.” It’s hard to do this, but a little easier after my experience today. Because I got an inkling of what is meant by “the power of the Word.”

  Looking in through the glass door of the sitting room at Ivar Avenue, I saw the Swami, sitting alone. He must have been meditating: his face was utterly transformed. It was very still, and almost frighteningly attentive—like a lion watching its prey before it jumps. Then he became aware of my presence and rose to greet me, his usual, gay, polite, Bengali self.

  October 26. Well, I’ve finished two months of more or less continuous work on the meditations; missing pretty often, but doing something practically every day. This week, because I haven’t been needed at Metro, I’ve been able to go to the temple most afternoons. Concentration there is a lot easier. The atmosphere is extraordinarily calming, and yet alive, not sleepy. Elizabeth Hunter says it’s like being “in a wood.” This is a very good description. Just as, in a wood, you feel the trees alive all around you, so in the shrine the air seems curiously alert. Sometimes it is as if the whole shrine room becomes your brain and is filled with thought. Of course, the smell of the sandalwood also helps. It induces a special mood, by association—just as the smell of ether induces the pathic mood of the hospital patient.

  The Swami has been away this last fortnight and isn’t expected back for another week. Kolisch gallantly takes the Thursday evening class, tying himself into knots and bewildering us with his vagueness and bad English. Gerald speaks on Sundays. He always has a big audience. Much bigger than the Swami himself.

  Despite all my failures, I’m surprised to find what a long way I’ve come already. There is no longer any question, now, that “this thing” works, as far as I’m concerned. Whatever happens, I don’t think I shall ever quite lose this knowledge.

  I am trying now to concentrate on the personality of Ramakrishna. He is “my friend.” I try to feel him always beside me. This is not just a sentimental fancy, if you do it properly. What you have to realize is that a part of yourself is Ramakrishna (or Christ, or Buddha, for that matter). Just as a part of yourself is Himmler. The cult of a great teacher and saint only seems to be dualistic. The dualistic approach is just a convenient way to realization of oneness, identity. That’s why it doesn’t matter in the least if the real historical Christ never existed. He’ll exist in you, if you want him to.

  No use fussing about my life with Vernon or my job, and complaining that I can never do anything as long as I am “in the world.” Keep your mind on God, and the world will fall away of its own accord. Poor old Ego, stop moaning over your wrongs. Lie down and go to sleep. You’re not as indispensable as you imagine.

  Lunch with Denny, who is anxious to start a new life as soon as the Swami gets back. He means to take a big plunge—get a shack in the hills, a menial job (as somebody’s servant) and immediately renounce everything: sex, drink and the Gang. He’s very nervous and much worried about his motives—is he wishing to do this for the right reasons? But surely, at the start, the reasons don’t matter? If you are doing this for the wrong reasons, I told him, you’ll very soon find out.

  Meanwhile, Denny still goes to parties and gets drunk and talks nothing but religion, to the great amusement of Tony Bower and Jean Connolly, who call him “the drunken yogi.”

  Today, I took him to the temple, where we sat for some time in the shrine (or “the box,” as Gerald calls it). I couldn’t concentrate—I was thinking all the time of Denny—trying to “introduce” him to Ramakrishna, and hoping he wouldn’t be put off by the photographs on the shrine, and the flowers, and the ivory and brass figures of Krishna, Buddha and Shiva. It does look rather like the mantelpiece in an old-fashioned boudoir. Actually, Denny liked it all very much, but was dismayed because he had thought what a wonderful place it would be to have sex in.

  (Some days after this, the Swami returned, and Denny went to see him. I wasn’t present at the interview, so I don’t altogether know why it was such a disastrous failure. No doubt Denny’s manner was aggressive and “wrong”—it usually was, with strangers. In any case, Swami rather discouraged him from attempting any drastic change in his life, and told him that what he needed was not meditation but hard work. He’d better go out and get himself a job.

  Denny was terribly disappointed and hurt. As soon as we got back to his room—he was staying at the Highland Hotel—he threw himself down on the bed and burst into tears, sobbing that he was rotten, everybody despised him, and he’d better kill himself with heroin as soon as possible.

  I protested, of course—as anybody would. In fact, I said far more than I meant. I told him that I didn’t despise him, that I admired him and liked him and wanted to be his friend.

  This episode had very far-reaching consequences, as will appear later in this story. It not only involved me with Denny—so that, in a little while, I really did become very fond of him—but it also threw Denny into the arms of Gerald. I took Denny up to see him, and told him the whole affair; and Gerald, all too humanly flattered and pleased at being able to demonstrate his superior charity, immediately accepted Denny as his protégé and disciple. What followed was all most unfortunate and quite inevitable—the break between the Swami and Gerald, the break between Denny and Gerald, and the lasting antagonism which made Denny oppose the Swami’s influence over me on every possible occasion.

  Looking back over it all, I’m inclined to think that the Swami
showed very sound psychological judgment; although he might have been more tactful. Like most good spiritual directors, he is opposed to shock tactics in the religious life. He mistrusts hysterical “conversions” in nearly every instance, and has repeatedly told me that, if you try to do too much in too great a hurry, you are sure to have a reaction.)

  November 7. Well, the elections are over, Roosevelt is in, and we settle down to the campaign for “national unity.” I am still on a layoff from Metro, possibly for five weeks. But Edna Schley may get me a job at RKO.

  Tomorrow morning, I’m going down to the temple, to be initiated by the Swami. I know he is only doing this to encourage me (because, he told Gerald, I am “arnest”) but I feel terribly inadequate. Lately, I’ve been getting up too late and missing my morning hour.

  The Swami has given me a breathing exercise: in through the left nostril, out through the right, in through the right, out through the left, and so on. As you inhale, you are to think that you are drawing in the Spirit through the nostril and down the left side of the spine; as you exhale, you are expelling all impurities up the right side of the spine and out through the nostril—and then vice versa. This is very useful for calming the mind before meditation. I am supposed to do it after sending thoughts of goodwill around the world. “We must think of others, fusht,” the Swami explains.

  Vernon has been sick, with a bad throat. He has moods of depression, little ailments, fits of rudeness. Underneath them all, he’s sweet natured, generous, affectionate, and utterly unsure of himself. He is in the mess of being nineteen, and I can’t help him out of it. Sooner or later, all his problems will be brutally solved from the outside: he’ll be shoved into the army or some social service camp and have to make the best of it. If this happens, I believe he will actually be much happier: he has plenty of guts. But it’s tragic—that we always have to find our solutions the hard way.