I have bought one of Chris Wood’s bicycles. Went down to Hanns Ohrt’s today to pick it up. I plan to do a good deal of cycling—because it’s healthy and I like it, and because, with gas rationing, my car isn’t going to be much use anyhow. I may sell it later.
November 29. With John van Druten to have tea with the Beesleys—Dodie Smith the playwright and her husband Alec. They live in Beverly Hills, on Palm Drive. Johnny has often talked to me about them—they used to live up in Carmel and have only moved down here lately: Dodie, it seems, is wildly neurotic about ants and bathroom taps. She lies awake fearing that the ants will be killed or the taps left running. Also, she and Alec have two extremely nervous dalmatian dogs, who run the house and are waited on hand and foot.
Dodie reminds me a great deal of Forster. She has his nervous, touching eagerness to communicate with you, to be friendly, to understand what you mean. She isn’t tense, like Peggy. And if she’s a bit crazy, at least it’s about something demonstrably silly, which is a great advantage. Craziness is only sinister when it’s concerned with something apparently reasonable. Better ants than America, any day.
Alec is a very good-looking man with prematurely grey hair. It seems quite natural that he’s a C.O. He has that peculiarly British kind of individualism which takes the unpopular side as a matter of course. He’s no crank, either. He didn’t talk much today, because Dodie and Johnny were chattering away about the theater: they both know every actor in the cast of every play since 1900.
November 30. Started work with Samuels at Paramount on The Hour Before Dawn. I’ve never had an easier job. Lesser does everything. I merely have to let myself be cross-examined on the C.O. position. But I see already how terribly hard this will be to dramatize. Because, when you’re dealing with an actual character, you can’t be content with reasons and argument, otherwise he’s just a lifeless prig. Behind all that, there has to be the simple, human decision not to kill. And this decision must be dramatically explained. Bill Dozier, the pleasant but extremely dumb story editor, wants a prologue in which the hero accidentally shoots his pet dog and thereby gets a horror of firearms. Even Lesser can see how fatal this would be: it reduces the man to a pathological “case.” But what’s the alternative? We’re not allowed, of course, to suggest that conscientious objection is “right”; and yet this guy is the hero of our story and his sincerity must be above question. I think we’ll simply have to say he’s a C.O. and go on from there.
(On December 6, I saw the Beesleys again, and from then on began to visit them often. It soon became clear that we’d be real friends. Dodie and Alec both made me feel perfectly at home with them. Dodie was extraordinarily sensitive and intelligent—though I saw her more as a novelist than a dramatist. The kind of plays she wrote apparently didn’t make sufficient demands on her sensibility: much of her was left out of them. She had a tremendous nostalgia for England. She kept saying that she’d missed everything, because she wasn’t in London during the blitz, and that she hated California. In fact, she was determined to hate it. She couldn’t go back, however, because the British authorities discouraged the return of C.O.s. The dalmatians were also a problem: Dodie was sure that the wartime quarantine arrangements would be inadequate. The two of them, Buzzle and Folly, were very handsome animals, but their nervousness was extraordinarily irritating. You had to be careful to avoid sudden movements and extravagant gestures, or they’d leap from their places barking hysterically.
Alec was a most reassuring person. You couldn’t imagine him flustered or bored. He always had something to do, some little chore, even if it was only writing a letter or fetching more hot water for the teapot. Some months after I met him, he became a kind of unofficial legal adviser to C.O.s on the technicalities of the draft law, and spent a good deal of time downtown, attending C.O. trials. Boys were always calling him on the phone, in utter desperation, expecting they’d be arrested at once; and Alec, in his clear, energetic voice with its very faint Cockney twang, would reassure them: “Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about that, if I were you. They can’t do a thing to you, really. If they make any trouble, just tell ’em to look up paragraph 47, section 3. Got that? The trouble is, they don’t know their own damned law …” Dodie greatly respected Alec’s activities and joked about them continually. When the telephone rang, she’d say, “There’s another of Alec’s schizophrenes!”)
December 9. Dinner with Huxley and van Druten at Romanoff’s. The choice of restaurant was Johnny’s idea. He wanted to meet Aldous again, and I suppose he felt that only the best was good enough: he admires Aldous enormously. Johnny seemed very young: an admiring boy in his teens. One of his nicest qualities is his entire humility in the presence of someone he considers his superior: he assumes, as a matter of course, that all his plays and his success are just so much junk in comparison with Aldous’s least word, and yet he never once flattered him or said anything embarrassing. Actually, Aldous has a lot of respect for Johnny’s kind of technical ability, and he set himself out to be as friendly as possible. He was very amusing about psychical research—imagining a society of ghosts endeavoring to prove the existence of human beings. The evening, despite our ritzy surroundings, was a great success.
December 12. Last night, Ben and Tis had a party up at the house, so I spent the night at Johnny’s apartment in the Chateau Marmont. This wasn’t just altruism. Ben’s friends are apt to make a fearful noise, and it’s nearly impossible to sleep. The party seems to have been a knockout. The boys got very drunk, and Tis had to retire up to Peggy’s room with her girlfriends and lock the door to protect their honor. Ben’s friend Douglas Rose stripped stark naked and ran all around the neighborhood, diving into people’s pools. Doug is the Micky Rooney type; an erotic, herculean dwarf. When he necks with the gigantic Tis, which he does at the drop of a hat, it’s like a man trying to climb a totem pole. Ben stayed in bed all day, with a terrible hangover.
December 21. Ben and Tis left for Nevada today to join Peggy and Dek. Two nights ago, I took them out to the Florentine Gardens. It was a flop. I made the fatal mistake of being absolutely sober and of not giving them a couple of drinks at home before we started out. Ben and Tis wanted sherry and I very stupidly ordered it, and of course the manager spotted them and came and asked their ages, and I looked foolish. We pretended very heartily to be having a good time.
We’ve finished the treatment on the picture, and now I won’t have to work any more until, at any rate, after Christmas. Every day, I’ve been cycling to and from the studio, leaving my car at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Lesser regards this as an almost unheard-of athletic feat, and seems to expect I’ll drop dead of heart failure any minute.
December 30. Well, Darlan got shot, even sooner than Saville wanted, as a Christmas present for the Fighting French. Here I am, writing in the patio of Chris Wood’s Laguna villa, with the sun streaming down nearly as warm as summer, and the Pacific morning all one wide vague blue smile beyond the glass screen. I arrived here on the 27th. Gerald is upstairs. Chris is at the piano. Paul is washing his hair. The perfect maids are dreaming up a perfect lunch and supper. This place seems to be one of those favored nooks in the midst of the tempest which the Destroyer has been too busy or too merciful to shatter.
In the afternoons, I go cycling with Chris and Paul. As the result of all this exercise, I’m in marvellous health and have a huge appetite. This quite shocks Gerald. “I’d no idea,” he said, looking at me yesterday with involuntary distaste, “that you had such a grip on life.”
On February 6, Brahmananda’s birthday, I’m scheduled to go and live at the Swami’s and at length begin the monastic life. No word has ever come from the draft board about my application for reclassification. But now, since the age limit has been dropped to thirty-seven, I’m automatically let out of the liability of being sent to camp. It’s very odd to glimpse—or fancy one glimpses—the workings of the karma mechanism. If the question of my going to CPS camp had never arisen, I would probably never have actual
ly signed on with the Swami at all.
Not that I want to kid myself that going to live at the Swami’s, or anywhere else, will do more than fifty percent toward keeping me on the tracks. But it will help. Allan Hunter asked me, a short while ago, why I was going up to live at Ivar Avenue, and I answered, “Because I’m so bored with not being innocent.” That was a terrible phony-sounding reply: but what I meant was that I’m feeling, increasingly, the misery of not being all of a piece, of living my life in a number of compartments with connecting doors which are narrow and hard to open. Not that I have done anything hellishly wicked during the past two months, but my life has been a mess and a lie, a messy lie—everything I’ve said and seemed to represent has been tainted with disingenuousness. If you’d spoken to me as a stranger on a trolley car and asked, “What are you?” how could I have answered? “A would-be monk,” “A writer at Paramount,” “A celibate as from February 6,” “A vegetarian, except on Christmas Day.” That state of affairs has got to stop, finally, when I settle in at Ivar Avenue. I’ve got to belong to the Ramakrishna Order with as few reservations as I can manage. I know that that’s the best way for me. The obstacles have been cleared from my path, one by one. Well—what am I waiting for, now?
December 31. Today, I wrote a story for the Swami’s magazine, Vedanta and the West. It’s called “The Wishing Tree.” I read it aloud to Gerald, Chris and Paul this evening. Paul, with his usual flair for malice, commented that it was “very delicate.” It sure is. You could blow it over with a Bronx cheer.
I’ll be returning to Alto Cedro in two days’ time, and Peggy will be getting home on January 5, or thereabouts. I’ll have to go back to work at Paramount almost immediately.
Today a year from now, I wonder how I’ll be feeling?
1943
January 29. Today I finished work at Paramount. I think that, between us (ninety percent Lesser) Samuels and I have done quite a decent job on the script. Susan Dewees—of all people—has helped us a good deal. I wrote her at Haverford to find out about British C.O. tribunals, and she was efficient as ever and sent us lots of material. The worst of it is, the Quakers are now on the watch for the picture, with high hopes that, at last, the C.O. position is going to be fairly presented.
Two scenes I quite like. The hero is waiting for his hearing before the tribunal, which is to take place in a small English market town. His father and his uncle, who deeply disapprove of his opinions, make a last effort to dissuade him. They take him into the local hospital, where the crew of a torpedoed minesweeper are being treated for various injuries. One boy of sixteen has been blinded: he is writhing in pain and crying out, and it’s very horrible and distressing. When they have walked right through the ward in silence, the hero’s father says to him, “Well—do you feel the same way now about refusing to fight? Don’t you think you owe these boys something?” And the hero answers, “Yes, I do. … Don’t you see, father? Now, more than ever—just because of those boys—I can’t back down from what I think is right … They didn’t.” And then, at the tribunal, he is asked what he’d do if he came back home that afternoon and found the Nazis there. He answers, “I’d try to remember that they were human beings.” Nevertheless, he gets a big shock when he does return home, opens the front door, and there are two Nazi officers in the hall, drinking cocktails with his sister. The explanation is that his sister’s an actress: they’ve been on location, shooting a movie, and she’s brought two of the actors back with her, still in costume, for supper.
(Unfortunately, the front office didn’t like our script. They got in another writer and changed it utterly, scene by scene, word by word. Sometime later, I saw the finished product, in the projection room at the studio, with a man who was Paramount’s representative in England. It was ghastly. “What’ll they think of it, over there?” I asked him. “Oh, they’ll like it all right.” “But how can they?” I protested, “it isn’t like England at all.” “That doesn’t matter,” he told me calmly, “they never expect that. Not since Mrs. Miniver.”)
The opening of Brahmananda Cottage (as the Swami has rechristened the house where we’re to live) is still fixed for the sixth of February. At the moment, this, and all that it implies, seems utterly remote and unreal. As I told the Swami some weeks ago, “I’ve been ten thousand miles away from you.” And I have. These are the real journeys—the journeys of the mind. Stone-dull, frantically tense, I’ve lost all hint of the mood in which I made my entries of last September in this diary. That calm is as far from me as London is from Los Angeles.
What keeps me from my prayers? The poorest, most compulsionistic daydreams of a “last fling.” Some part of me is secretly, irrationally convinced that somehow someone will show up to give me a glamorous final twenty-four hours in the best Elinor Glyn140 style.
Then there are all sorts of tensions, resentments and fears in connection with Ivar Avenue itself. I’m scared that Peggy will somehow control my life at long range, by brightly passing hints to the Swami on the telephone, or getting him up here to lunch for a “good talk” about my case. I’ve already had a violent row with her on this subject. The other day, she and Swami were out together in Swami’s car. It came on to rain very heavily. Swami was late and he couldn’t drive her all the way back to Alto Cedro, so he put her down at a drugstore in Hollywood and very naturally suggested she should phone me to come down with my car and pick her up. However, when she phoned—instead of explaining all this—she cooed archly, “Swami’s orders!” I was absolutely white with fury and wouldn’t speak to her for the rest of the day.
Then I’m scared that Swami’s nephew Asit, or maybe the other boys, will somehow disturb me—perhaps by playing the radio all night, or when I want to work. I’m scared that I may behave badly and possessively about my books—the last belongings I cling to. Oh, I know myself so well, with all my thousand weaknesses of vanity and self-indulgence and chatter, that I wonder, “How can I possibly not fail?” To which the answer is, as always, that all such weaknesses are nothing beside the strength that each of us can call upon when he chooses. I simply have to pray.
There is plenty to do, this coming week, in preparation. I’m lucky not to have to go to the studio. Above all, I’d like to get started on the first of the stories I’ve planned—the one about Berthold Viertel and Gaumont-British.141 If I could write even a few pages, it would be such an encouragement.
February 3. The time is running short, and, despite what I wrote above, nothing has altered. I’m still in a dither, still banking on some wild, last-minute adventure, which, intuitively, I know won’t take place, because things aren’t lined up that way. However, I doubt if I’ll be able to snap out of this state before I’m actually installed at Ivar Avenue.
McNutt142 has just given notice that he may raise the draft age again, if it becomes necessary—and I still don’t have that 4-D classification. So I’d better not flatter myself that I’m taking a final step.
This weekend, incidentally, promises to be quite eventful for several people. For Peggy—because Henwar may be arriving in Hollywood to take a job with Twentieth Century-Fox, and because Bill Kiskadden may get leave. (Bill has given Peggy an album of songs of the African veld; and one of them is tacitly accepted as his theme song—“Here am I, here am I, and I’ll stay here till I die. I’ve come for you, I’ll get you too.”) For Matthew Huxley—because he is being drafted on the 8th, and Sophie is giving a party for him and all his ex-girls. For Felix Greene—because he is leaving for England on the 5th. He is to inspect the work of the English Friends, and return to report on the result to Philadelphia. The astonishing thing is that the British authorities have, apparently, granted him permission to come and go, despite the draft. I’m anxious to see him before he leaves, because I want him to visit M.
(Felix did visit my mother and Richard. The results were not satisfactory. He struck the wrong note. My mother was repelled, in spite of herself, and therefore alarmed—wondering what kind of a bunch I had gotten myself
mixed up with.)
Lunch with Berthold Viertel at the Brown Derby. He is anxious about my move to Ivar Avenue. He disapproves of it with all the jealousy of his fatherly affection and his liberalistic Marxism. The Quakers he could understand, an ivory-tower literary retirement he could understand—but what am I doing with this old, unfashionable Indian stuff? What relation can it possibly have to America and 1943? Also, I think, he feels a deep, intuitive suspicion of Gerald, whom he naturally associates with Vedanta and the Swami. He asked, “Would you be doing this if you’d never met Heard?”—as though the question would be likely to throw me into confusion and rage. “Would I have written for the movies,” I countered, “if I’d never met you?”
In the afternoon, Peggy and I read an article by park planner Moses143 on postwar problems. Moses takes his stand on a patriotic, reactionary plea for “the middle of the road,” and don’t let’s pan imperialism. In other words, he’s completely pessimistic about the chances of implementing the Four Freedoms,144 and pretty smug in his pessimism. And this is the man who transformed Manhattan Island in the teeth of capitalistic vested interest!
Peggy is very anxious that I shan’t rely too much on the Vedanta Society as an institution—and of course she’s right.
We talked to Denny on the phone—for the first time in weeks. He seems to be completely (even rather mysteriously) happy up at camp. He has been skiing. Is still busy with his correspondence courses. He showed no special desire to come down and visit us. That’s all to the good, I think.
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 44