Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  June 24. The Schindlers left. They have been a great trial, recently—especially since their little son Andy arrived. Andy was girlish and affected, and he played upon his mother’s hysteria—thoroughly enjoying himself. Whenever he was late for school, Schindler would bellow “An – dree – as! An – dree – as!” until one longed to hit him.

  Schindler was a Catholic—he reminded you of this repeatedly (being a very obvious Jew)—and he used his Catholicism quite cynically to help himself to useful introductions. He liked to boast of his “escape” from Germany—when, actually, all that had happened was that he’d had the luck to meet a comparatively decent Nazi official, who’d helped him. He boasted also of having gotten himself the best room in an Italian concentration camp, by flattery and wire-pulling.

  They left their room so untidy that Stern, who is helping us get the house tidy, remarked severely: “Such people are not fit for the school of tragedy.”

  June 25. Went down to the college settlement on Christian Street, for supper with Gretl and Hermann. It was sad and embarrassing, but Hermann wanted it, for some obscure masochistic reasons, and there was no way I could refuse. We drank a good deal, and Hermann got sick, and kept murmuring in a maudlin tone, “Ja, ja—who knows if we shall ever meet again …” I got away as early as I could.

  June 28. Wystan is staying at Caroline Newton’s house at Daylesford. Today he gave a poetry reading to a large party of rich women. Nobody understood a single word; but they were very impressed. Wystan’s untidiness and brusqueness impress them. He is never untidier than when he is wearing his best suit. He read in a loud bored indistinct voice, repeatedly looking ahead to see how much further he had to go.

  June 30. Medical examinations at the draft board. All these kids seem so utterly helpless, so unprotected. You feel, “Let me go, instead of them.” Their nervous little jokes. The old-timer who scares them with his army tales. The boy who’s afraid he’ll faint when they take his blood. (He didn’t.) The young Negro’s beautiful body, perfectly dignified, stark naked; nearly everybody else wore undershorts.

  I had to wait till last, because, for me as a C.O., this wasn’t just a preliminary but the only examination I shall get. They didn’t do much beyond establishing the fact that I was alive.

  Am writing a potboiler story for The New Yorker, called “Take It or Leave It”133—chiefly because René demands that I produce something before leaving Haverford.

  July 1. Drove Gretl and Jeanette over to Mrs. Johnson; the old lady with whom she’s to live and work this summer. Hermann is going elsewhere. A parting which was all the more painful because I couldn’t help feeling relieved. We could have been real friends if it hadn’t been for this business. Perhaps we will be, one day, when she gets over it.

  I see René every day, now. In the afternoons, he holds his wrestling class on a mat out on the lawn near the college library. I find him sitting there, sulkily regarding the naked, sweating boys, like a tyrant. “Come on,” he growls at them, “for Christ’s sake—haven’t you any guts left? God, you’re getting a belly on you. Stand up, man, for the love of Jesus. Now—now grab him: that’s better—”

  The college campus has great charm now, at the height of summer. At dusk the air is full of fireflies, circling up, up, to the very tops of the trees. They look so like stars between the branches that you get a shock when they move.

  July 4. Vernon came down yesterday, left today. He’s still set on the idea of Holy Cross monastery; and they’ve accepted him. The snag is that his stepfather has gone into the army, and so he may have to work for his mother. And meanwhile, of course, the draft may get him before he can plead exemption as a theological student.

  July 6. Last day at Haverford. When it was time to leave the Yarnalls’ we shed tears. Mr. Yarnall said, “I’m an old man, Ishy. You were kind to me.” But Caroline was so busy packing and fussing that she hardly bothered to go into an act. Lately, there’s been a coldness between us: we should have parted earlier. I left Elizabeth faced with the double problem of getting Caroline out of the house (they’re driving together back to Ohio) and of saying goodbye to Stern. He went on hoping, I’m afraid, right to the last. But Elizabeth told me, in a curiously intimate conversation we suddenly had yesterday, that she doesn’t care for him “in that way.” She assured me she didn’t realize how seriously he felt about her: but I don’t think this was quite sincere.

  René drove me to Daylesford to say goodbye to Wystan. Then I caught the train at 7:22 from Paoli. I’ll be in Chicago in the morning. In spite of leaving behind so many people I’m fond of, I must admit that I’m wildly, indecently happy. My only thought is, I’m going back to the West. Hurrah. Hurrah. …

  I arrived in Los Angeles four days later, on the morning of July 10. Peggy Rodakiewicz met me at the station: we had arranged that I should live at her house until I heard something definite from the draft board. Being back in Los Angeles dazed me with joy. Everthing seemed delightful: the hideous streets around the Union Depot, the heat, the shabby houses. I picked up my car, which I’d left in a garage on Sunset, and was immediately plunged into the dangerous football game of Los Angeles traffic (Angelenos are among the worst drivers in the world): even this seemed amusing. When we arrived at Peggy’s home, up on Alto Cedro, I was nearly overpowered by the luxuriance of the flowers and bushes. Had California always been like this? It seemed ten times more beautiful than ever.

  Peggy couldn’t have been sweeter, or more thoughtful. She had planned everything in advance, to make me feel at home. I was to sleep in the library, a charming little room with a glass door opening on to the terrace which overlooked the ocean. As she darted about, fixing things, helping me unpack, she told me all the news, questioned me about Haverford, laughed and joked. I think we talked for the rest of the day without stopping for a moment.

  The next three days I spent reestablishing contacts. I drove down to the beach and lay in the Solarium. Denny arrived on leave from the San Dimas camp. Tony Bower (now a sergeant, and transferred to a camp near San Diego) came up to visit us. We had lunch with the Huxleys, at the Farmer’s Market.

  On July 13, my draft board informed me that I’d been classified 4-E. This meant that I’d be sent to CPS camp soon—probably within the next six weeks. While still at Haverford, I’d applied for the Los Prietos camp near Santa Barbara: you were allowed to state your preference. I chose Los Prietos for two reasons. It was run by the Church of the Brethren, not, like San Dimas, by the Quakers; and I was then in a violently anti-Quake mood. Also, remembering La Verne, I wanted to keep away from Denny. Each of us would get along better alone. When I met Denny again, I felt very glad I’d already made the decision: otherwise, I’d certainly have surrendered to the charm of his company and joined him, against my better judgment.

  On the whole, Denny seemed to be having a wonderful time at San Dimas. He made the place sound like a madhouse, a zoo of freaks and cranks. But he liked several of the boys, and I think it reassured him to find he could get along in a group and be accepted and popular. He spent money wildly, on all kinds of luxury equipment—waterproof wristwatches, super-sleeping-bags, fur-lined jackets—for himself and as presents for his friends. His bad back excused him from most of the heavy work, and he got plenty of leave. He looked very well, and grumbled furiously.

  Peggy and her daughter Tis left for New York on the 14th, to visit Henwar, who was busy on some documentary film. Next day, I went down to stay with Chris Wood, who had moved from Arlene Terrace to 1 Rockledge Road, Laguna Beach. (The house will be described presently, in an entry from my diary.) Gerald was there, too, and a friend of Chris’s, named Paul Sorel.

  As Paul Sorel’s real name was Carl Dibble, it is hardly surprising that he’d changed it: yet his doing so was characteristic: he was a strange, bogus creature, verging dangerously on paranoia. Very thin, very blond, he had a long smooth face which sometimes looked quite handsome, sometimes hideously ugly. Vanity surrounded him like a perfume—a vanity so exaggera
ted that it seemed both sinister and ludicrous: a smile of total self-satisfaction seldom left his large, expressive lips. What was behind this smiling, absurd mask? A peeping demon of mischief—ruthless, nihilistic, cowardly, cruel. Yes, but also a desperately unhappy, frightened, sensitive little boy.

  Paul was undoubtedly a borderline case. One day, he might easily go mad. Perhaps he was even capable of murder. On the surface, he was usually friendly, a bit patronizing, a chatterbox, rather a bore. Occasionally, he had bursts of utterly irresponsible rage, when he screamed and threatened. Then he would fast, for several days at a time; or pray and go to mass.

  He was a genius, he told us. Actually, he had a considerable but undisciplined talent for painting and drawing, and a flair for writing verse. He also played the piano, not well. All these occupations were highly compulsionistic. He’d announce, for example, that he was going to paint a picture a day for fourteen days, working only two hours on each. And he’d do it.

  Paul and Chris had a very curious relationship. They had known each other a long while, and Chris had somehow come to feel himself responsible for Paul. Chris gave him money—far too much—and let him go to New York and stay in expensive hotels, where he ran up bills which had to be paid by telegram. He was fond of Paul, but in a strangely impersonal way. He saw all Paul’s weaknesses and could talk about them with the intelligence of a good psychologist. And yet, when Paul made his outrageous demands for money Chris would give way to them in a way which seemed feeble and cowardly. He depended enormously on Paul’s companionship; and at the same time he loved him, quite disinterestedly, without illusions, like an elder brother. Paul also, I’m sure, was fond of Chris. Part of him was enormously grateful for Chris’s affection. Part of him resented this gratitude, and was set to exploit and blackmail Chris’s feelings to the utmost limit. He’d be as sweet as honey one minute; sneering and brutal the next. Chris suffered terribly, and covered it by making nervous jokes.

  Peggy said that Chris’s friendship with Paul was one of the most startling instances of karma she had ever known. For years, Chris had been charming but selfish—never really committing himself to anybody, always keeping a little wall around his privacy and his possessions. So now he had to meet someone like Paul who would break the wall down and ride roughshod over his life. This didn’t prevent Peggy from disapproving violently of the whole relationship. She detested Paul, in her aristocratic way, for being middle-class, vulgarly ostentatious, essentially small and cheap. “It’s such an inferior little tragedy,” she’d say. Not long after this, Paul made their relations even worse by insulting Peggy personally: he went to see her and made a florid, half-mocking declaration of love. Most people would have found this behavior merely crazy; but Peggy was genuinely disgusted—you might have supposed he’d tried to rape her. She was outraged in her dignity as a woman. Really outraged—and quite cross when I laughed. Paul must have sensed this weakness in her. He had an amazing instinct, and always knew the right place to stick a pin in you. I’m sure he insulted Peggy deliberately—knowing she didn’t like him and itched to interfere and influence Chris against him.

  Gerald hated Paul also, but in his deeper, more subtle manner. He hated Paul because he was jealous of his influence over Chris, and because he was sure he would do Chris harm. However, at the time of which I’m writing, he was very careful to hide his feelings as much as possible, and I think he prayed hard to overcome his aversion. Paul, who was well aware of the situation, teased him in all sorts of malicious ways, and kept poking fun at Gerald’s religion and spiritual exercises—but, for the present, he avoided any open quarrel.

  It was during this visit that I first saw Trabuco. It was a big ranch lying about twenty miles inland, under the mountains. Its very name indicated its loneliness: nothing noteworthy had happened in that area since a day in the seventeenth century, when a Spanish soldier had lost an arquebus there—a “trabuco.” There is something weird about the emptiness of these South California uplands. The foothills and creeks and woods look deceptively tame and inhabited. You could wander for miles, always expecting there’d be a ranch house around the next slope, just out of sight, with a little town beyond. But there are no towns, and very few houses, in the whole neighborhood. A local architect named Van Pelt (who was also the designer of the house Chris Wood had bought in Laguna) had evolved, with Felix Greene and Gerald, a long, straggling building: a series of cloisters which mounted, in flights of steps, the slope of a little hill. The total effect was beautiful. The buildings fitted perfectly into the landscape. Gerald said they reminded him of a small Franciscan monastery in the Apennines.

  You entered a big courtyard which was also an orchard, planted with fruit trees. To your right were garages, toolsheds, and the pumping house; a long, low dormitory for married couples, and the circular meditation hall, which had no windows and was built on three levels, so as to hold the maximum number of people. You entered the cloisters through a pair of big wooden gates, with a bell turret above them. All along the cloisters were bedrooms and bathrooms, comfortable but very plain, with built-in closets, and a minimum of furniture. At the top of the cloisters were three big rooms, a library, a living and dining room, and a kitchen. When you were in the courtyard, your view was bounded by the irregular line of red tiled roofs against the sky. But when you opened the big gates and entered the cloister, you found yourself at the edge of a hill, looking away over the woods and hollows to the distant ocean.

  When I first saw Trabuco, a great deal was still lacking, but the buildings were there and inhabitable—a miracle in itself, considering that this was wartime. Felix Greene had worked all winter, with his superhuman energy, collecting materials, bullying contractors, grabbing the last available supplies of wood and metal fixtures before the government froze them. Trabuco was three-quarters his creation, physically—ideologically also—for I soon began to realize that this place, this institution, was altogether in excess of anything Gerald’s timid conservatism had ever planned or wished. The snug little anonymous retreat for four or five people, “Focus,” had been swallowed up by “Trabuco College,” which was capable of holding fifty. Already, Felix was talking of a printing press to issue pamphlets, and was planning next year’s seminars. For the present, Gerald went along with all this, a little dazed, a little unwilling, but tremendously impressed and excited. It seemed to me that a new cult, Heardism, was being born, with Felix, a sunburnt and smiling Eminence, holding the real power behind the throne.

  Such, however, was far from Gerald’s intention. However much he might enjoy the limelight, the prestige of leader, I am sure that his intentions were sincerely democratic. He spoke repeatedly of Trabuco as a “club for mystics”—nonsectarian, nondogmatic, strictly experimental, a clearinghouse for individual religious experience and ideas. Its members were to be colleagues, not masters and disciples, superiors and inferiors. I suppose this was an impossible ideal—maybe even an undesirable one. The Quakers have maintained a large degree of democracy (though they do have elders or “weighty Friends”) but only at the price of diverting their attention from really businesslike mysticism to social service: their standards of meditation are low and vague. The Swami, on the other hand, would have said, “Nonsense, of course they must have a teacher”: he would only have questioned Gerald’s suitability for the job. But, at Trabuco, it was Gerald or no one. And so, eventually, inevitably, it was Gerald.

  Chris regarded Trabuco with a kind of wistful amusement. He was like a child who does and yet doesn’t want to play with the others. His status was that of a sort of honorary outcast. He could go there whenever he liked—for the afternoon—but he wasn’t really welcome: Felix was heartily polite to him. When the building fund ran out, Chris had contributed several thousand dollars, and this made things extra awkward. “Well, anyway,” he’d say, with his twisted, little boy’s grin, “their kitchen belongs to me.” At that time, Gerald was commuting regularly between Trabuco and Rockledge Road—a fact which made for furth
er embarrassment, since several members of the college knew and disapproved of Paul. Just how Gerald spoke of Chris and his affairs when he was up at Trabuco, I shall never know: but the general effect of his remarks must have been deplorable—for the Hunters and many of his other friends regarded Chris with horror, and sympathized with Gerald as one sympathizes with the victim of an unhappy and impossible marriage. Chris knew this, and took it very well and humorously, without the least humility or resentment. From this time onward, I began to like and respect him enormously. With all his babyish weaknesses, he was a living demonstration of the one cardinal virtue Gerald lacked—charity. Also, I began to realize that I had never once heard him tell a lie. The truth—however shameful or embarrassing—seemed to blurt itself out of him, accompanied by a nervous, apologetic laugh.

  On July 20, I returned to Peggy’s house in Beverly Hills: Peggy was still in New York. Matthew, the Huxleys’ son, came to stay there, too. He was a pink-faced, jovial, loud-voiced boy with a good deal of lingering British pomposity, extremely sweet-natured and kind. Neither Aldous nor Maria knew quite what to make of him: he wasn’t, in their sense of the word, an intellectual at all—that is to say, he was neither sensitive nor retiring: he was an extrovert, a natural “mixer.” At this time, he was greatly worried by the problem of conscientious objection. As the son of his father, he couldn’t bring himself to fight, but he equally didn’t want to take 4-E and go to CPS camp. Finally, he got himself classified 1-A-O, and took noncombatant service in the Medical Corps.

  Peter Viertel, too, was getting into the war—at last. He joined the marines, and later served in the Pacific.