Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  During this time, I saw a good deal of Tony Bower, Johnny Dickinson, and Denny. Denny and I went down twice to the county jail, to see Joe Valentine—the boy whose behavior had given his landlady so many headaches in January 1941. Poor Joe—he seemed to have gotten sillier and sillier: he’d been going around town under the name of “Danny Malone”—an alias which corresponded to his wish-dreams as closely as “Paul Sorel” did to Carl Dibble’s. And now here he was, on a charge of rape. The girl was also a minor, and, as it later appeared, a whore with a blackmailing mother. Joe had been framed: he boasted sky-high, and no doubt they thought he had money. Joe told us all this through the bars, as we stood in a row of visitors: you had to shout to be heard above the din. “I wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t begged me to,” Joe yelled. “The dirty old bag. I screwed her for four hours, and she liked it fine. Then she starts yelling for her Ma.” His case was handled by the juvenile court. We weren’t allowed to be present but we sat in a waiting room, confronted by five Mexican gangster youths who had knifed somebody to death and had the faces of El Greco saints. Joe was finally released, on condition that he either went back home to Pennsylvania or joined the navy. He chose the navy.

  (The navy didn’t do much for Joe, I’m afraid. He was around town for a while, very rowdy, pugnacious and drunk. On one extraordinary occasion, he made a pass at Peggy, who had taken an interest in his case and was driving him somewhere in her car. Peggy was furious—as with Paul—and all the more so when Denny tactlessly hinted that she ought to be rather flattered, at her age. After that, Joe went overseas, and didn’t show up again for a couple of years, when he’d become a minor black market racketeer.)

  On August 11, Peggy returned from the East. I don’t remember whether she told me at once, but I soon learnt that her marriage with Henwar was going to pieces. They were really quite unsuited to each other; there wasn’t much beside the physical and romantic attraction; and Peggy couldn’t go on indefinitely pretending to herself and others that Henwar was the kind of man she approved of. I think Henwar was sorry to break with her, in his lazy way, but not sorry enough to do anything about it. Also, there was another girl in the background.

  And another man. Some time before this, Peggy had been a great deal worried about her elder son Ben, who had now turned into a large muscular youth with spots and the bushy eyebrows of a caveman. Ben was a bright, intelligent, athletic boy, but he had strange streaks of sullenness and violence in his character. Peggy had discovered, to her great alarm, that he would buy […] revolvers and hide them in his room. Maybe she exaggerated the danger, maybe she didn’t. She certainly inspired the most violent love-hate in [various people she was close to]; and it wasn’t impossible to imagine [someone] killing her […] with a gun or an axe. [Ben] wasn’t a coward either, like Paul Sorel. And he was completely reckless.

  In her distress, Peggy had consulted a doctor named Bill Kiskadden. I don’t know exactly why—because Bill was a surgeon, one of the best plastic surgeons in the country. Probably they met socially and she found him sympathetic. He was a very tall man of fifty, with silver hair, chinless but extremely distinguished looking, with a most reassuring drawl: he inspired confidence, at a time when Peggy desperately needed it. And now, it seemed, the two of them were falling in love with each other. Bill was in the Medical Corps. He was stationed somewhere out in the desert, and could come in and see her sometimes.

  On the afternoon of Peggy’s arrival, we drove out to visit the Huxleys, in their new home in the Mojave Desert, at Llano. Llano now scarcely exists, but, at the beginning of the century, it was the scene of an experiment in cooperative living; quite a large party of people went out there, built houses and even started an orchestra, which played at night, under the stars. The experiment failed, however—chiefly because the community had no particular purpose, ideal or religious belief to hold it together. Its members failed to develop any self-supporting agriculture; all the vegetables had to be brought out from Los Angeles, and this was too expensive. Now only a few ruins remained, among the kerosene bushes and the dying walnut trees. The Huxleys had reconstructed an old house which used to be the post office, and had built a study for Aldous and a bedroom for Matthew, about a hundred yards from it. They had their own windmill well and their own self-starting electric light plant. The latter was half sunk in the earth, under a wooden door, on which stood a terra-cotta bust of Gerald made by Angelino, Frieda Lawrence’s lover. Aldous called it, “Gerald’s Tomb,” and that was exactly what it looked like.

  Peggy was more talkative than ever: she radiated energy, resentment, optimism and worry. She was energetic about my approaching departure for camp, bought me work clothes, darned my socks, sewed in name tabs. She was resentful against Henwar and against Gerald—the latter because he hadn’t invited her down to Trabuco, and now she wouldn’t go if she were asked. She was optimistic about the future—largely because of Bill Kiskadden, though she wouldn’t yet admit this, or the possibility of their marriage. She was worried about Ben. She watched him anxiously, all the time—although, as far as I could see, he seemed normal enough. Her great fear was that he might do some harm to Derek, his younger brother. Ben adored Derek, but often lost his temper with him and hurt him more than he meant to. Derek was a bit of a murderee: he had reached that bumptious, bitchy stage of early adolescence when small boys would rather be hit than ignored.

  In the middle of August, I spent another week at Laguna Beach, visiting Chris Wood. All this while, I was revising my old diaries—working at breakneck speed, like a dying man, because I expected the draft board’s call to camp at any moment. I wanted to wind up my old life, as it were, before starting on a new one.

  I returned to Peggy’s house on August 22. Judge Curtis Bok, her first husband, was staying there: every summer, he either came West to see his children or had them to visit him in the East. He was a tall, handsome, athletic man, still very pink and collegiate despite his greying hair. He wasn’t unintelligent, but he seemed somehow emotionally undeveloped, and, in a sense, young enough to be Peggy’s son. I wondered if their marriage had failed simply because she had outgrown him. He made bad puns and told silly, funny stories which delighted the children. All three of them loved him dearly, without any of the neurotic love-hate they felt for Peggy. Two days later, he took them down with him to Balboa, where he had rented a house, to go sailing. Peggy supervised the move, providing bed linen and kitchen utensils, like a careful grandmother.

  Someone had bought Ben a beagle, named Cerberus. It had been sent to Larry Trimble, the trainer of Strongheart, to be housebroken. We went to visit it, at Trimble’s farm in the Valley. Trimble’s specialty was training unruly or “mean” dogs. He had worked, not very successfully, with some of Salka Viertel’s. He was a biggish, middle-aged man, whose curiously quiet strength of character was only apparent when he was working with animals. He told me that Strongheart used to receive a lot of fan mail, which he had had to answer. One fan asked, “How can I train my dog to attack burglars?” Trimble had answered, “According to present statistics, a burglar will enter your home about once in a hundred years. Your friends come to see you every day. Wouldn’t it be better to train your dog to welcome them?”

  (Allan Hunter had described a visit to Trimble when he was training six large police dogs to jump over a table. One of the dogs failed to do so. Trimble put the other dogs out of the room and practiced with him until he could make the jump. “I had to send the others away,” he told Allan, “otherwise this one would have been humiliated, and he’d never have learnt the trick.”)

  On my birthday, the Huxleys came up to supper. Denny showed up later, unexpectedly, with a boy from camp named Jim Pinney. Denny was in one of his bad moods, extraordinarily aggressive and sulky. Jim I’d met before, at Allan Hunter’s church. He was a rather nice-looking, extremely sanctimonious boy—the “seeker” type—with elaborate middle-class manners: he was continually asking us to pardon him. A couple of days after he left, Peggy re
ceived this note:

  Dear Friend,

  Every now and then one comes, a stranger, into a home where the welcome is a rare combination of easy, unthinking simplicity and very evident elegance, and the wonder is increased on awakening there the next morning with an established sense of being at home. The mistress of such an eventful home is indeed an artist, and I find I must thank you again for permitting Denny to share your artistry with me. It was also a great joy so unexpectedly to meet your other guests.

  In the Presence, Jim Pinney

  This letter provided Peggy and myself with household gags for weeks. I used to call her “my artist-hostess,” and wrote her notes signing myself “eventually yours,” or “with evident elegance.” But the real payoff didn’t come until nearly two years later, when an extremely frank and experienced girl I knew was discussing her lovers, and summed up as follows: “But I must say—the best boy I ever had—the only one who was really sensational in bed—was a Quaker. I don’t suppose you ever met him—Jim Pinney?”

  At the beginning of September, I drove back to Laguna, where I finished revising my diaries, and made the first entry since leaving Haverford:

  September 16. Still nothing from the draft board. The Swami and Gerald have both suggested that I apply for reclassification as a theological student, 4-D. I’m certain it won’t work, at this late date—but when I tell the Swami this, he just giggles and says, “Try.” I think I shall. If the board were to reclassify me, I could work with the Swami on his translation of the Gita, and I could spend part of my time at Trabuco. But maybe I should at least spend some months in camp, first.

  Paul, Gerald and I walked to Treasure Island rock, this afternoon. As we were picking our way over the rock, Gerald slipped and fell. Instead of getting immediately to his feet, he lay there, quite passive and peaceful—almost as if he hoped his back was broken, and was unwilling to be reassured to the contrary. Actually, he had nothing but some scratches on his hands, which bled a good deal. He held them up all the way home to stop the bleeding, and this made him look like a Christ crucified in blue jeans. In spite of these precautions, a good deal of blood got on to his pants, but he refuses to change them, saying that the effect is rather decorative.

  September 23. Finally decided to write to the draft board today, asking for 4-D reclassification. There’s no harm in trying. Actually, if I were working with the Swami—even if I continued to live up at Peggy’s—I should be a theological student within the meaning of the act; because a boy at Swami Ashokananda’s center in San Francisco has already been passed as 4-D by his draft board, thereby establishing the precedent.

  Yesterday, the Swami drove down to visit us. The day passed off quite pleasantly, although there were some embarrassing silences. The Swami, as always, was very quiet and polite. We drove him up to Trabuco. “Iss smoking parmitted here?” he asked. It isn’t. But he smoked.

  How beautiful this house is! I feel as if I could never tire of being in it. It has a wonderful air of privacy—from the moment you enter the garden, with its high cypress hedges, bottlebrush trees and Cape honeysuckle. At first, you see only the tiled roof of the house, below you, on the very edge of the cliff. It comes gradually into view as you descend the steps, terrace by terrace, past the oleander bushes and the pomegranates and the orange and scarlet zinnias. On the balustrades of the garden stairs are two green Chinese dragons, and four elephants, two white and two green, with long crafty eyes. Gerald calls one pair of elephants “Apoplexy” and the other “Liver.”

  At the bottom of the steps is the patio, with a banana plant, a fish pool full of big goldfish and lotuses, an ugly blue and white Della Robbia plaque half-hidden by the ivy on the wall, and an outdoor fireplace with antique Spanish fire irons, within which a monster fern is growing. Behind the waxy white blossoms of a gardenia in a tub, a great glass screen shows you the terrace and the ocean: a blindingly illuminated picture which seems as unreal as back projection in a movie. The walls of the house are netted with quivering light. At the foot of the curving staircase to the balcony, there is a dwarf monkey puzzle in an Italian majolica pot, on which a sportsman is painted, out hunting with his gun and dogs. The balcony leads to Chris’s and Gerald’s bedrooms: there is an old ship’s bell hanging above it, which is used to summon Gerald down to his meals. A corkscrew staircase, cut out of the rock, takes you from the patio to the bedroom in which I sleep. The steps are pitch-dark, even in the daytime: for some reason, they remind me of Macbeth. They would do as an air-raid shelter, if necessary. Chris keeps his musical boxes there.

  The front of the house rises sheer above the cliff. The ocean is right at your feet, bubbling and creaming over huge lava reefs. The house stands on an outcrop of lava, which makes a firm foundation and enriches the soil of the vegetable garden. The air is so full of salt that very little can be gotten to grow on the terrace—only the cypress, and the aloes, like twisting green octopi with bloodstained tentacles, and an Australian tree with white blossoms and a flaky bark. The ironwork has rusted away to thin wires.

  The day begins, usually, with thick fog—blowing up against the cliff face or standing out to sea in a dark wall. There are times when the ocean is clear, but grey and empty and unspeakably forlorn, with a single great gull flying across it—like the Spirit moving upon the face of the waters. Rarely, the sunshine comes early, lighting all the coast as far as Seal Rock, with fishing boats standing out white and far against the hard blue edge of the morning. The sun usually emerges around noon, and by teatime it has left the patio, and the seaward terrace is too hot to sit in. When the sun sets into a clear sea, with a low bar of cloud down along the horizon, its disk grows distorted, bulging and flattening into a glowing pyramid of red coal, without a top. Then, within half a minute, it slides away under the edge of the world, and suddenly the ocean seems enormous and cold, teeming with wrinkled waves, unutterably wet.

  Tonight, the evening was grey, with sad steamy clouds and sharp gold gleams on the sea. The gulls winged past silently, just after sundown, northward. A small black dog ran out across the lawn of the villa on the headland with the striped garden umbrellas, and barked wildly, too late. Down below on the reef, on old grizzled gull was standing. He looked up at me, as I leaned over the terrace railing. “Don’t trust that facile feeling of oneness,” he warned me. “Oh yes—I know we’re brothers—in a sense. But you wouldn’t care for our life.”

  Gerald and I breakfast together every morning at 8:30, in the pink octagon dining room with the venetian blinds. Gerald very quiet, in deep blue, slyly trying to make me eat twice as much as he does. We talk about Vedanta, Trabuco, the difficulties of purgation, the failings of the Quakers and the Catholic doctrine of sin. At about 10:00 Chris in his dark blue silk bathrobe and Paul in his rainbow-colored robe come down; Chris looking bung-eyed with sleep, Paul sprightly and frisky. Swimming is at 11:15, lunch at 1:00—Gerald and myself inside the dining room, eating vegetables, served by Josephine, the ancient, skinny, talkative Irish cook; Chris and Paul outside on the terrace, taking their beer and sandwiches on two trays. Later, we drive up to Temple Hill and walk there, or we stay home, and Chris and Paul go cycling. Paul does water colors all day long—bringing them in for us to inspect. At present, he has made a rule to do six water colors a day for twenty-one days. Then he’ll switch to oils. And, in October, he’ll start a novel—writing five thousand words a day for a hundred days.

  We have tea at 4:00. At 7:00, tomato juice is brought on to the terrace and we sit drinking it and watching the sun sink. Supper is at 7:30. Afterwards, we sit out of doors—in darkness, for we are not allowed to show any lights to seaward; or we go into the living room, and Chris plays the piano or the phonograph with the big horn. Sometimes Gerald or Chris reads a manuscript aloud. Gerald writes with incredible facility, sometimes finishing a full-length novel in a couple of weeks or less. He has already published two crime novels and several short stories: he says he gets the ideas while he is meditating, much against his will. C
hris has started writing ghost stories again, as he used to in London: they are very good, but he won’t publish them. Two or three times, I’ve written and acted one-minute monologues for Chris’s recording machine, and I play them back to the others in the evening—a man in a telephone booth, desperately calling the police, as gangsters close in to murder him; a homicidal madman in an asylum, talking to a visitor; a husband raging at an unfaithful and sulky wife. The action must be noisy and simple.

  Incidentally, Gerald has decided that this house is haunted. On the terrace stands a carved fifteenth-century Italian dower chest. Gerald says that he was sitting writing in the living room one afternoon; he happened to look up and saw the lid of the chest slowly rise and then close again. He thought some large animal, maybe a raccoon, had gotten into it, so he called the gardener. But when they opened the chest, it was empty.

  The living room is rather beautiful. It is paneled in pine which has been scraped, leaving a surface like the woodwork of old sailing ships. The floor is darker, of Brazilian walnut. And, let into the paneling within baroque frames, are six paintings by Guardi (or a pupil) which the lady who built the house brought back from Italy: scenes of eighteenth-century Venice—colonnades, streets, bridges, picturesquely ruinous, with waving grasses growing from cracks in the plaster of archways. All of them are somehow furtive, sinister in feeling. The two cloaked gallants getting into a gondola at dusk to keep some dangerous assignation. The queer, mature little children, like dwarfs. The beggars lurking in the noonday shadow. The enigmatic figures who watch from windowsills, over which great colored cloths or bed linen are untidily draped. The pimp waylaying the young man. The gentleman in sky blue satin bowing to the lady in the three-cornered hat. In the background are tall cypresses, rising above the walls of graveyards, or white sails on the hidden lagoon, like scarecrows’ shirts, ragged and uncanny in the Venetian sunshine.