Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  July 24. Dreams: Ted MacCrea, seen from a courtyard window, is late for mass and in a hurry. He begins to say mass as he runs. I kneel at the window and follow his example. Feelings of sympathy.

  At Venice, California. Stormy sea. Going to visit a crippled boy. Then with Morgan Forster to see his mother, who was quite blind. Dr. Upward (Edward’s father) also partially blind, came too. Morgan’s mother turned into a man. He, too, was a doctor: he had cataract. Dr. Upward examined him and said, “I wish I could do something for you, old chap.” This dream, also, had the right feeling.

  July 29. Woke remembering the text, “learn ye from me; for I am meek and lowly of heart.”101

  Allan Hunter talked about the methods of his discussion group. During the period of silence, they try to think of each person as having come to seek the truth, not to debate social questions. They study techniques of personal behavior: for instance, how best to keep your temper. And simple applications of nonviolence: Phil Basher making friends with the police dog that scared him.

  They turn out the lights and sit on the floor facing the fire, as a focus for the surface attention. No one is looking at my face. Silence. Then extempore prayer, aloud. At least once each day, each person in the group must think of every other in turn—as a fellow seeker working toward the same goal.

  “There can never be a psychology of apes. There must be a psychology of each separate animal.” [Wolfgang] Koehler.

  How big should a group be? No more than five Japanese meet for tea. The Jewish service requires ten. The Buddha limited his group to eighteen. Limited groups for the agape in the early church. “A dinner party,” said Samuel Rogers,102 “must be more than the Graces and less than the Muses.” Porters at the Gare du Nord divided into groups of twelve for work organization. Rachel DuBois commented that if you used a larger group you could still get a sense of oneness, provided you had a leader.

  The problem of personal relationships. What is one to do with one’s antipathies? “I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.”103 A frontal attack is no good. “I said I will love that man—and I did—desperately.” (The Gondoliers.104) How to deal with spiritual vampires: the pupil who takes up all your time?

  Today I had what has been my most vivid experience at La Verne, so far. I walked out, after lunch, into the little park in front of this building, feeling very much alert and aware. The park was empty in the midday heat, but it seemed crowded—every shrub and tree was an individual presence, a distinct, daring essay in self-expression. The big eucalyptus and the palm stood up like statements, apparently contradictory yet confirming each other. The flowering bush, which at first glance seemed motionless, had its own tiny oscillation in the scarcely perceptible current of rising air. (Allan has taught us to watch for these movements: every plant, he says, has its characteristic swayings and rustlings and agitations.)

  And then I thought how, if this Force, which is behind all life, could ever become the consciously controlling factor in myself—if I could ever surrender myself to it completely and fearlessly—then my life would become the most amazing adventure, every moment would be incalculably strange and new, because then everything would be possible, there would be no limitations, no habit patterns—in fact, it wouldn’t be my life any more. I should be an instrument, absolutely dedicated, absolutely safe in the worker’s hand.

  Holding this mood for a while, I jumped into my car and drove toward the mountains along the Camp Baldy road, high into the coolness of the upper timberline: the great pine forest, where the waterfall spills over the precipice. Swam in the pool at Snow Peak Camp. Came down feeling very happy. But the shutter had closed again.

  We talked about meditation. Most people, except myself, agreed that they found group meditation more satisfactory than solitary. But Harry Farash thought the group should be smaller. Etta Mae Wallace said she wanted some images to help her comprehend the transcendence of God, his “outsideness.” People suggested: an Alpine peak, with the wind driving over the summit, blowing up the snow; a waterfall, in its solitude; the vastness of the spiral nebulae. I told of a technique I’ve found useful when meditating alone in a room. Mentally remove yourself from the room. Then try to feel the aliveness, the intense awareness which is present in the room even when it is empty. Also, you can picture the deserts of the moon—the craters standing around—the meteorites plumping down noiselessly into the sand—and this Consciousness, the sole, total inhabitant.

  Harold Stone Hull, to whose condition this word weaving didn’t appeal, asked sarcastically: “When do we stop the motion pictures and start meditating?” Gerald explained the theory of discursive meditation. But, somebody objected, wasn’t it all autohypnotism? “Ah,” Gerald retorted with a sly smile, “but whom do you mean by the ‘auto’?”

  “If you want to find God, go and look for him at the spot where you lost him.” Eckhart.

  July 30. Discussion on friendship. Allan said, “We’re always pelting people with our thoughts.” He quoted Boon’s description of hearing a bird singing—“And then the bird flew away, without looking back to see if it had been heard.” And this from Emerson: “What you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you say.”

  July 31. Discussion on Grace. Denny said, “When you become aware of the pattern, that’s Grace.” Gerald quoted from Ruysbroeck:105 “Grace is a synthesis of God’s love and will, which pours like a mighty torrent through the universe.”

  August 1. Subcommittee, headed by Denver Lindley, reported on the question of diet. Meat should be omitted from diet because:

  You can do quite well without it. There are adequate substitutes.

  A degree of cruelty is involved in its preparation.

  We should show reverence, as far as possible, to other forms of life.

  There is some evidence that a nonmeat diet is better for meditation.

  Without meat, the risks of intestinal infection are reduced.

  All the saints support vegetarianism.

  But, it is very important to find substitute values—milk, eggs and cheese. Milk, even when skimmed, has all the proteins and minerals. Take at least a quart a day, at least one egg a day, and some cheese. Fish might be included. It is lower down the life scale, and much less suffering is involved in killing it. Fats are not necessary. They must be balanced by at least double the quantity of carbohydrates (fruit or sugar). Brown sugar is better than white. There are not many carbohydrates in bread. For cereals, get any kind of grain and grind it in a handmill. Oatmeal has more calcium, for those who find it difficult to take milk. Soya and peanut are good sources of protein. If possible, get whole wheat bread enriched by vitamins. Carrots, onions, tomato, lettuce, beets and potato are the best vegetables. Bulk is very important.

  August 2. “And what do you get out of all this?” He answered: “A better order in all my living.” (Jacopone da Todi.106)

  “Why do we go wrong in our relations with other human beings? Because of a basic inattention.” (Royce.107)

  “Every time you destroy a species, you put out one of the eyes God gave you to see the universe.” (?)

  Felix Greene has a chart of the electromagnetic radiations, prepared by a commercial company. It is drawn to scale, and it is very suggestive because it shows the relatively tiny place occupied by the spectrum—the only wavelengths directly visible to our eyes. So how can we trust the evidence of the senses?

  The arrangement is like this:

  Electric waves.

  Radio waves.

  Infrared rays. (Heat.)

  Visible spectrum.

  Ultraviolet rays.

  X rays.

  Gamma rays. (Radium.)

  Secondary cosmic rays.

  The secondary cosmic rays are so “hard” that they go through us like an express train through fog. Felix quoted cases of X-ray vision occurring, for short periods, in human beings. Not understanding this phenomenon, they usually went crazy.

  The electric waves, said Gerald, at the other end of the scale, get huger
and slower—“until there is perhaps one vast wave that comprises all time and space.” This chart, he added, shows us how consciousness and matter are one.

  Other points in Gerald’s talks:

  Recollection in reputation: stop constantly asking the world for its approval. Resolve: I won’t ask the approval of anyone in this matter who hasn’t tested it out for himself.

  Try to avoid negative emotion. Most newspaper reading, especially in wartime, is crying over spilt milk.

  Exultation in the fact of God’s existence. Use the collect: “Therefore with angels and archangels—” Begin to lead the rationed life: no more toys, only tools. There isn’t any such thing as human nature: we can rise to anything because we can sink to anything. God is the only coordinator. We can judge nobody: life is sailed under a sealed handicap.

  I must balance my acts of treason by acts of affirmation. Our ideal should be to accept unlimited liability for all the acts of all our fellow human beings. We are all members one with another. …

  On August 3, more than half of the group left La Verne for their homes. The ten of us who remained until August 7 decided to try a more intensive schedule, with four whole hours of meditation, including an hour from midnight to one. It is quite easy to take your sleep in two installments, and maybe more refreshing.

  There is a lot more I might write about the seminar, but it all boils down to this—it’s perpetually amazing to find what a long way even a very little goodwill and good intention will take you. The majority of the group remained, socially speaking, almost strangers to me throughout our stay at La Verne—and yet, when I later met some of them again, I felt a curiously strong bond with them. The only subject we could discuss, the only experience we had in common, was prayer; the most intimate of all.

  The seminar left Gerald terribly tired. He hadn’t slept much throughout the whole period. I suppose he worried a lot, and lay awake composing his talks. He even left La Verne two days before it was absolutely necessary.

  Meanwhile, Denny had received his call to the San Dimas camp at last. We spent a melancholy two weeks buying his ugly trousseau, the stiff blue denim work clothes and the clumsy boots. He left on August 21. I drove him as far as Glendora, where the camp director’s wife would come down to fetch him. As we approached the scene of parting, Denny began to talk nostalgically about Paris, and his former loves and triumphs at big society balls. Next morning, I left Los Angeles by strato-liner to visit Wystan in the East.

  The flight was very beautiful. Falling asleep in the high cold air, at seventeen thousand feet. The blue of the morning sky, when you looked into it, seemed only a reflection of light upon millions of particles of ether, beyond which gaped the illimitable, bottomless vault of black.

  Earl “for whom the belles toil” Carroll108 was one of the passengers, an elegant death’s-head. He rested his eyes with favor on a floppy-haired blonde, and at Albuquerque, where a storm delayed us for four hours, he and his bodyguard took the blonde around the night spots. Carroll left the plane at Chicago, and the blonde, very late out of her bunk, swept down the aisle in her wrap, with a defiant you’d-have-done-the-same-if-you-could expression on her face, and disappeared into what the air line calls “the Charm Room.”

  Wystan and Chester Kallman were staying near Jamestown, Rhode Island, at the house of Caroline Newton, daughter of the late Edward Newton, the book collector. Caroline was a silly, snobbish, well-read woman with very little taste, often pathetic and always kindhearted. She was in love with Auden. The atmosphere was in the highest degree embarrassing. Wystan and Chester were in a state of great tension, and there were occasional explosions. We had no privacy, except that of our bedrooms. I had to keep going on walks, alternately, with the three others, to discuss the latest developments. Wystan was in a difficult, strained, provocative mood, and kept attacking Gerald and talking theology.

  I was glad when we returned to spend the last few days in New York, at the Brooklyn house which Wystan shared with George Davis: an attractive, insanely untidy place where, owing to some freak of plumbing, the water in the toilet was nearly boiling. The weather was overpoweringly hot and sticky. I spent a day in Philadelphia, interviewing Caroline Norment, director of the Cooperative College Workshop, an AFSC hostel for refugees at Haverford: Harold Chance had suggested I might work there, later that fall. Caroline and I liked each other at sight, and I was accepted. In every other respect, my visit to the East had been a dismal failure, but poor Wystan cried when I left for Los Angeles, toward the end of September.

  As our plane neared Chicago, one of the passengers noticed a strange glow in the sky ahead of us. She pointed it out to the stewardess, who looked slightly worried, I thought, as she answered reassuringly, “It’s probably summer lightning.” A few minutes later, however, she went forward to talk to the pilot, and returned with a message that these were the northern lights. The pilot, who had flown this route for ten years, had never seen them before. Soon, they were all around us—luminous, flickering curtains, gigantic and forbidding, hanging earthward in folds of icy green. The plane seemed to shrink, to become tiny and lonely, a droning insect lost in the arctic solitude. That night, the northern lights were seen as far south as Jacksonville, Florida.

  In the short time I had to pack and say my goodbyes, I managed a last trip with Vernon. We stopped at a snake pit along the road to Palm Springs and talked to the proprietor. The rattlesnakes were crawling all around him and over his boots. He picked them up and held them in his arms like babies, weaving dumbly and sniffing blunt-nosed towards us across the low wooden barrier. When a snake had been in the pit for twenty-four hours and had gotten accustomed to him, he told us, it would no longer rattle at all. So he kept one in the dark, under a carton, for the benefit of visitors. “Now watch,” he said, “I’ll show you something.” He lifted the carton. The snake began to rattle angrily. The man walked slowly backwards and forwards in front of it, getting nearer and nearer. The snake twisted and feinted with its head, until it had to lean over backwards to avoid the man’s boots. “You see?” he said. “It hates to strike if it can avoid it.” He told us that baby rattlers are the deadliest right after birth, before they have been fed: they can kill a man. He also declared that the Black Widow spider has only become dangerous since 1930. (This sounds fantastic, but Aldous told me later that the musk plant suddenly lost its perfume during the nineties, all over the world, and has never recovered it.)

  That night we spent at a cabin on the Salton Sea and went rowing in the moonlight. Next day, we drove up to Idyllwild and stayed at another cabin, high in the forest on the slopes of San Jacinto. I read Vernon stories from The Beast with Five Fingers,109 sitting before a roaring log fire. Next day we climbed in the mountains. The next, we returned to Hollywood.

  I will never forget that trip. I knew that I loved this country more than any other since my boyhood in the Peak District. I didn’t care if I never went back to Europe again, never crossed the Mississippi. I had become a Californian.

  I also knew that I really cared for Vernon. The bond would always exist. No matter what either of us did, or where we went, we should be, in some way, responsible to each other for the rest of our lives.

  On the evening of October 11, I left Los Angeles again, for Philadelphia and the hostel at Haverford. Vernon and the Huxleys came down with me to the Union Depot, but it was Aldous who actually saw me on to the train. “God bless you, Christopher,” he said, patting my shoulder with a shy, near-sighted gesture. Coming from him, this so touched me that I nearly burst into tears.

  My first impression, as the local electric train took me out of Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, down the Main Line to Haverford, on the morning of October 15, was that all the people in the coach belonged to one of three or four distinctly recognizable families. Maybe this was only the contrast between relatively homogeneous Pennsylvania and the ever-changing polyglot population of Los Angeles—but not altogether, because I noticed the same thing again and again during
the months that followed. One of these “families” or physical types my imagination immediately identified as Quaker. The men were tall, bony, big shouldered, fair haired and quite nice looking, but somehow fatally “pithed,” as though the marrow had been drained from their bones. They had an air of quiet anxiety. They spoke slowly, prudently, selecting their words from a small, odd vocabulary. The women were bright and energetic. They used no makeup, and their white thick skin was dotted with freckles. They had sandy gold hair, dragged back and twisted into a knot. They wore flat heels, cheap sensible dresses, and, in summer, straw hats which obscurely resembled sunbonnets. Everybody was married, with plenty of children, and more to come.

  The country through which we were passing couldn’t possibly have been less “my sort”: it was tame, suburban, pretty, a landscape without secrets, inhabited by people whose every word, thought and action would bear thorough investigation by the FBI. But my spirits didn’t sink: they had already reached subzero. I had turned my back on California and my friends. I had made up my mind for anything. Nothing could touch me any more. Haverford Station, when it came, was actually a shade less depressing than Ardmore and Narberth. I telephoned the hostel, spoke to Caroline Norment, and was told that her secretary, Elizabeth Porter, would be down with the car to get me. She arrived five minutes later, a fair-haired girl with a slightly foolish shy smirk and a pale longish face which just missed being beautiful, in the Madonna style. We shook hands, but the clatter of a passing train drowned what we said. “All right,” I told her, after it had gone by, “now let’s do that over again as a talkie.” I have felt ashamed of that Hollywoodish crack ever since.

  I didn’t get much out of Elizabeth as we drove up from the station. She seemed shy and quiet, but obviously full of submarine currents—the typical secretary of a Dominating Personality.

  Caroline Norment strikingly resembled the actress Sara Allgood. She was Maryland Irish, sandy haired, dumpy, homely, with beautiful deep-searching brown eyes. Later she told me that, as a girl, she had been delicate and tubercular; now, it seemed, she had made one of those subsconscious “decisions” to be healthy, and her body had grown out of all shape: it was solid and vital as the trunk of a tree. She moved quickly and alertly, with great decision, and her eye, with its merest flick, detected all that was lacking.