Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Caroline didn’t say anything outright, but there was an atmosphere of reproach because Pete and I were out all night—not on moral grounds, but simply because we didn’t happen to be there when the crisis occurred. Actually, I think Caroline herself feels guilty—and for a very queer reason. This is her fifth fire. In two others—both unexplained—one in Russia and one in Yellow Springs—she lost nearly everything she had. She has an absolute obsession about fire, not unnaturally; and spends a lot of time every night emptying ash trays and dousing smouldering coals on the hearth. And, of course, one can’t help wondering—does she, in some extraordinary way, attract them? Is she even perhaps a kind of schizophrenic pyromaniac?

  (This sounds absurd; but the fact remains that, in the next two months, there were two more near fires at the workshop. On one occasion a big carton of wood shavings left by the carpenter was found already in flames; on the other, an electric iron, with the current switched on, was left on the ironing board, and the cloth was burnt and smouldering. Rachel and Elizabeth, who were inclined to share my theory, both swore that Caroline had been ironing, shortly before this happened.)

  March 2. The Schindlers have arrived: a big ham actor who used to work with [Max] Reinhardt, and his rather charming but neurotic, spoilt, babyish wife. Also Mr. Oppenheim—a very sympathetic hysterical sissy, who begs everybody to stop him when he gets too excited.

  Caroline abounds in emergency regulations to prevent another fire, or the possible collapse of ceilings, due to the damage. Her slogan is: Business hysterically as usual.

  The workmen have put a tarpaulin over the hole in the roof. Tonight it broke loose in the wind. Later, rain began, heavily. So I had to sit up nearly all night, watching the buckets in Caroline’s bedroom, and emptying them every few minutes. When we were alone together, around midnight, Caroline said suddenly, “I can’t help it, Christopher … I know she just set herself to catch him!” This would have been the beginning of another diatribe against Leah Cadbury if I hadn’t managed to persuade her to go off to bed, in one of the other rooms. Toward 3 a.m. the rain got so violent that I could no longer deal with the buckets. I had to wake Caroline, who called Bradford, the colored man who does odd jobs for us. We all mopped and emptied frantically for about an hour. It was like taking part in a very realistic performance of The Flying Dutchman:123 the great sail flapping overhead in the storm, and the spray showering over us. Toward morning, the rain stopped.

  March 16. There’s no doubt about it: this group is altogether inferior to the last. These new people are just middle-aged, middle-class pension guests: they grumble, they gossip, they dodge their share of work, they are thoroughly selfish and dishonest. Mr. Philip is probably the worst of the lot—and yet I don’t dislike him: he’s so crafty he makes me laugh. He came here to be made comfortable, to eat heartily, to take walks, to practice his fiddle. (He plays beautifully. Right now, he’s working on the Kreutzer Sonata,124 which gives me so much pleasure that I forgive him everything.) He has already told the Yarnalls that he won’t join us at Sunday morning breakfast—obviously because our company bores him. He won’t do anything that puts him out. When I suggest English lessons, he either says curtly that he’s too busy, or insists on talking German to me throughout the hour. We are all a bit flabbergasted by his nerve, and consequently unable to deal with him.

  Of my regular pupils, Mr. Lippman is rude and offhand. He receives me in his room, when I come to teach him, as though I were a client to whom he was doing a favor. He is a humorless prig. He writes immense letters to his teenage son about Zionism. Is opposed to intermarriage between Jews and gentiles, calling it “racial suicide.” In his wandering journey from Germany to America he was helped in all sorts of ways by fellow Esperantists: apparently, they are like Masons. Caroline says Lippman is a Don Juan. He disappears into Philadelphia from time to time, rather mysteriously.

  Mr. Buchs is very cocky, too. As a representative of Gallic wit, he scorns all Teutons. He pours out his contempt on the Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy of Haverford. According to him, every Quaker should have a mistress: then they wouldn’t be so stuffy.

  Pete, whose patience with his pupils is a real lesson to me, has found out a great deal about Mrs. Abel. She had a son, nineteen years old, extraordinarily handsome, who was a kind of communist saint. He joined a collective farm in Palestine: it was a terribly tough pioneer life. Then, one day, he was killed by a bomb the Arabs had planted. Mrs. Abel herself is a remarkable woman, and maybe a very good psychoanalyst: she knows a great deal more than the usual Jung stuff. She’s a mystic. Has visions, but unfortunately insists on telling them to everybody.

  The Reisners, like the Dunckers, had a son who committed suicide. Gretl says it was because he was homosexual. Mrs. Reisner and Mrs. Abel, like two faded flowers, are reopening in the sunshine of Pete’s outrageous charm. Psychologically, Pete does more for the group than any of us, simply by being gay and kidding the dreary ones out of their depression and gloom.

  March 21. Two days ago, Pete and I moved to the big bedroom upstairs at the Yarnalls’, leaving my room for a new arrival today, Mr. Jacoby—a pudgy bibliophile who used to be a district attorney in Berlin. Yesterday I went to bed with a cold, and shall stay here till tomorrow at least. I have never enjoyed being sick so much in my life. Pete spends practically the whole day with me. He dresses up in blankets and clowns around, or he sings Mexican songs, or we tell each other stories. Caroline came up to see me, yesterday. She didn’t know what to make of us—particularly of me, because my workshop personality had entirely disappeared. I was another person, whom she’d never met. I couldn’t switch off the giggles. In a corner of the room, there is a little colored reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Caroline, who is rather nearsighted, asked what it was. “Oh that—” I said: “It’s just a little party I gave last New Year’s, for a few business friends.” Caroline went over to examine it. She was rather shocked, though she tried not to show it.

  March 30. Mr. Jacoby is the oiliest man I’ve ever met. He washes his hands in the air all day long, and ties his legs in knots, sidestepping and bowing. If only these people could realize how rude their phony insincere politeness is!

  Wroe Alderson lectured on “Competition, Conflict and Cooperation.” Goodness, how boring! We moved the furniture out of the living room afterward, so the plasterers can fix the ceiling. Caroline in a tailspin of nerves.

  April 1. The Levys arrived: a short fat Berlin physicist, with cropped hair, who suffers from acne; and his wife, a girlish little witch, who plays the violin and thinks she resembles Elisabeth Bergner.125 Levy entered the United States with introductions from Einstein and Millikan:126 he seems to be quite a big noise. During the last war, he invented a way of determining the position of an enemy battery by its sound. This is now used, in some form or other, by all the armies of the world.

  April 4. Into Philadelphia with Pete. The usual program: lobster, whisky sours, the Camac Baths. (There is always a psychological moment at which I remove the AFSC button from my coat, so as not to be seen wearing it drunk on the streets.) I revolt against these outings more and more and am beastly to Pete in consequence, because I’m mad at myself. Pete is getting pretty sick of Haverford, too. The Quakes just distress his Mexican soul. I get greyer and more Calvinistic by contrast, and all our spontaneous gaiety is disappearing.

  April 5. Talked to a group from the Chestnut Hill Meeting about La Verne and prayer. They would have had fits if they could have seen me last night, and yet I’m not exactly being hypocritical: as far as I am able, I try to tell the truth about myself and impart information without suggesting that I’m holy. The worst of it is, you can say you’re lazy, vain, sensual, full of resentment and hate, and your audience doesn’t turn a hair. But if you illustrated these statements by describing your actions, they’d die of horror. And yet the actions are merely symptoms: they’re the least part of the trouble.

  April 7. Drove over to West Town with Douglas Steere, returned from his tr
ip to California. He is very anxious that Trabuco shan’t be in any way a monastic institution. He wants lots of married people around—and children.

  (When Steere suggested the children to Gerald, Gerald is supposed to have murmured wanly, “Later … later, perhaps …” On being asked, after Steere had left, what he’d meant, he explained: “After my death.” My informant is Denny, in a letter.)

  Steere is a good speaker, and awfully glib about Christ’s love, passion, death, etc. But it just doesn’t have any teeth in it. One looks at his wife and his job and his nice little house, and says, “Oh yeah?”

  April 22. Pete left yesterday. He has gone to stay with his friend Wilson in Washington, as a thorough change of air. (Specimen of Wilson’s conversation: “My dear—I was so humiliated I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.”) Haverford seems very dull and empty. I miss Pete terribly, and yet I’m curiously relieved that he’s gone. Now I can get back into the thick Quaker gloom which I hate but in which I feel strangely at home. I often detest the Quakes and the Jews for being so stuffy and cautious and safe; but I understand them because, at bottom, I’m stuffy and cautious, too. I’m a cautious old auntie who, in her heart of hearts, rather hates being jostled around and disarranged by her lively, rowdy nephews, such as Pete and Denny. That’s the truth.

  Lunch with Teddy le Boutilliere at his shop. He’s getting terribly impatient because the call hasn’t yet come for him to sail for Africa, and he’s already said goodbye to everybody three times over. He relieves his feelings by violent outbursts against the Quakes and the C.O.s, and by reproaching me “as a writer” for trifling with this nonsense.

  (Why do one’s friends almost invariably object to whatever kind of life you happen to be leading, on the grounds that it’s bad for you as a writer? As if any kind of life, considered as subject matter, could be either better or worse than any other. And as if, too, that strange shrewd little self that determines the pattern of our life didn’t know its own business.)

  Saw René Blanc-Roos later. He teaches French and Spanish at Haverford College and coaches the wrestling team. We are meeting more and more often. Like Denny, he is sour. It’s a relief to suck his sourness like a lemon, after too much sweetness and light. He is small and muscular and quietly furious, with a perpetual frown between the eyebrows, bulging sulky light grey eyes and a French lisp. His mother is French. He injured his spine wrestling and has to wear a brace, which he loathes—along with the Quakes, Haverford, his students and everything “decent.” He drinks whisky savagely when the pain in his back gets bad.

  René has separated from his wife, Esther: they maintain a queer, teasing relationship. She comes down to visit him every now and then, and they make love violently, after which his back hurts more than ever and they quarrel. Esther is very attractive and intelligent and funny. I met her the other day.

  René lives in an apartment at the top of a house built in what Pete calls “Early Frankenstein.” It has queer Gothic dormer windows and black eaves like the wings of bats. In the daytime it merely looks shabby; at night it is terrifying, especially by moonlight.

  René’s attitude to myself is possessive, admiring, bullying. He doesn’t make the mistake of supposing that life with the Quakes is necessarily bad for my “art,” but he sternly demands that I write something. He fears I shall get out of condition, like one of his wrestlers. He takes an immense interest in everything I do or say, which slightly embarrasses me: I cover this by pretending to think he’s unconsciously in love with me—which infuriates him.

  We talk a great deal about French literature: especially [Céline’s] Voyage au bout de la nuit, which René loves and I dislike, and Rimbaud, whom we both love. He reads French beautifully. Over and over again, I get him to recite: ‘Si je désire une eau d’Europe, c’est la flache / Noire et froide. … etc.”127

  April 26. Walked on the college campus with Gretl. She tells me that, now Tanya Korbett has gone, Jurkat is having an affair, or at any rate a flirtation, with Miss Bloch. We met a white-haired lady and her twelve-year-old son busy destroying the nests of the tent caterpillars on the campus fruit trees. They look like very thick spiders’ webs. All the fruit blossom is out, now. The dogwood and lilac are just beginning, the forsythia is nearly over.

  I have swapped rooms with Mr. Philip. He grumbled a great deal about this, but Mr. Yarnall insisted, because if Mr. Philip is on the top floor his playing isn’t so audible. Also, Mr. Yarnall wanted me to have the better room: he has taken a violent dislike to Philip and wants to spite him. Mr. Philip is certainly intolerable, noisy and rude, but I always end up finding him rather sympathetic and touching. He turns up the cuffs of his trousers to save them from getting frayed. He economizes with every cent, because his family is paying for him here (actually, we discover, his wife insisted on his leaving Pittsburgh for fear he’d make trouble and lose her her job), and yet he bought candy for Gretl and Elizabeth after a concert the other night, and showed them how to eat ice cream (he knows a “right way” of doing everything) because, as he said, he felt as if they were his daughters.

  At our “at home” tea, we were visited by a boy named Bronson Clerk and his wife, both rather charming: they were students at Antioch College in Caroline’s time. Bronson’s attitude to the C.O. problem is hotheaded and quixotic. He feels it is vitally important that the Japs shouldn’t have India, so he wants to go there and help Gandhi with his passive resistance. In this way, he hopes to learn techniques of nonviolence which he can apply in strikes and labor disputes in the U.S. later. Naturally, Bronson is quite well aware that the British, not to mention the State Department, will never give him a passport or a visa to enter India with such intentions. So he and his friends are planning to buy a fishing boat and set forth from some port in New England, sailing clear around the Cape of Good Hope! When I pointed out that this is wartime and they’ll almost certainly be stopped by the Coast Guard, he replied gaily that they’ll sneak past somehow. Why wouldn’t I come with him, he asked accusingly. I said I thought they’d simply fail to leave the country. “And would you,” said Bronson very severely, “call that a failure?” I think actually that he’s bored stiff and dreads the prospect of a C.O. camp. His wife takes the whole idea very calmly. She has a shrewd idea that nothing much is going to happen.

  To supper with the Briens. Donald Brien is a boot salesman and a collector of Henry James; his wife, who is comfortable and fat and cute, used to sing in the opera under the name of Louise Lerch. They have a four-year-old son who is terrifically husky and noisy. Mr. Brien told me that narrow-toed shoes are generally worn west of Harrisburg, because a lot of the inhabitants come from Central Europe. He says the shoe trade in general doesn’t seem aware of the war; the retailers are still demanding competitive styles. One and a half million pairs of boots are being made for Russia.

  Henry James’s nephew, who was jailed for agitating at the time of the Sacco and Vanzetti case,128 has been arrested again today for attacking the President and inciting to sedition. He is an isolationist. He wants to throw out Roosevelt and frame a new constitution on the banks of the Mississippi.

  April 28. Caroline is getting worse and worse, as the spring advances and the date of the Cadbury-Furtmueller wedding draws near. She goes around with a look of agony on her face and keeps explaining to all of us that she is nearly distracted worrying what Carl and Leah are going to live on; neither of them has any money. Everybody in Haverford can see that this is nothing but raving sexual jealousy, and yet Caroline doesn’t realize it, or won’t admit it to herself. Meanwhile Leah, who has plenty of the bitch in her, has had her hair cut short and waved. She looks like hell, but it maddens Caroline, who has responded by announcing publicly that she is going to lose twenty pounds. She tells this at table to Mr. Jacoby, who replies with some gooey Prussian gallantry that had whiskers on it already in 1900. And Caroline smirks. I couldn’t be more ashamed if it were my own mother.

  Caroline’s lectures on the “American Way of Life�
�� have become more and more frequent: they are simply a means of venting her irritation against different members of the group. The prize, so far, is: “This water’s so hot that only an American WOMAN could put her hands in it.” (I stuck both my hands in at once, and stifled a yell: it was nearly boiling.)

  A true story, from one of the other refugee hostels. An American social worker is approached by a German lady, who asks, “Please—where are the classes for Jews?” The American is puzzled, “But we don’t have any classes for Jews, what do you mean?” “Oh, but you do! You had them yesterday.” “Classes for Jews? You must be mistaken.” “Oh, no, I am quite sure of it.” “But, Mrs. Goldschmidt—what an extraordinary idea! Why should we have classes for Jews? Surely—I mean—that isn’t a thing you have to learn. You are Jews, already.” Finally, it’s explained that Mrs. Goldschmidt was trying to say “glasses for juice.”

  In heaven, the day after a pogrom. A big party of Jews are expected. St. Peter can’t understand why they haven’t arrived. They must have gotten lost. Angels are sent out to search. Just outside the heavenly gates, they notice a door marked “Lectures on Heaven.” All the Jews have gone in there, in preference to heaven itself. Our group loves this story. I’ve been told it a dozen times—which I think shows an admirable capacity for self-criticism! How dearly they love theorizing! I remember, last winter, I was watching a football game on the Haverford campus, with Mr. Caro and Mr. Seidemann. We got into a discussion of Shakespeare. I claimed that the English Shakespeare and the German Shakespeare are two entirely different writers. The German Shakespeare is a philosopher, the English one isn’t. Caro and Seidemann protested energetically. We became so absorbed that, when a newcomer among the spectators asked us the score, we hadn’t the slightest idea. He stared at us, thinking we must be crazy.