Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Supper with Chris Wood and his friend Karl Hoyt. We went to the Club Gala on the Strip. My farewell visit to the End of the Night. I haven’t been to a place of this sort in ages, and it was so nostalgically reminiscent of all the other times—the baroque decorations and the cosy red velvet corners, the sharp-faced peroxide pianist with tender memories and a tongue like an adder, the grizzled tomcat tenor, the bitch with the heart of gold, the lame celebrity, the bar mimosa, the public lovers, the amazed millionaire tourist, the garlanded cow, the plumed serpent and the daydream sailor. … I have loved them all very much and learnt something from each of them. I owe them many of my vividest moments of awareness. But enough is enough. And here we say goodbye.

  Or do we? Isn’t this entirely the wrong spirit in which to enter Ivar Avenue? I am not going there to forget such places, or any other part of life. No—if this training really succeeds, I shall be able to return to the Gala, or any other scene of the past, with the kind of understanding which sees what it is really all about.

  February 4. Went down to Santa Monica in the morning and walked along the front. The cool winter sunshine. The big shabby hotels, now taken over by the navy. The reek of hamburgers, popcorn and pickles. The tumbledown bathhouses, smelling of old men, sweat and urine. “Muscle Beach,” with the Mexican boys doing back flips. The great engines of amusement, standing idle. The pelicans and the human anglers. Goodbye. Goodbye. I shall see you often—but differently, I suppose.

  Soldiers everywhere. The army will soon have absorbed all other types of life. Civilians will creep around the streets like clergymen, rare and queer.

  February 5. Last day. Walked up the firebreak road with Peggy. The sun went down into the stormy blue sea of hills. Peggy said she saw shapes rising out of it as it set. I saw them too. It was the optical illusion produced by staring. She said, “They’re lotuses.” To me they looked like black derby hats. …

  Before I go on quoting from my diary, I must write something about the general setup at “the Swamitage”—as Ben or Derek christened it.

  Up to the end of 1942, the Vedanta Society had no other accommodation than the house at 1946 Ivar Avenue and one small room at the back of the temple, the twin to Swami’s study. Now, however, the house next to the temple had been bought and refurnished: this was number 1942—henceforward named, but seldom called, “Brahmananda Cottage”: we usually referred to it as “the monastery.” It had two bathrooms, a washroom, a living room and four bedrooms, and was to be used exclusively by the men: Asit Ghosh, George Fitts, Webster Milam, Richard Thom and myself.

  Asit, the Swami’s nephew, was a slim, lively, attractive Bengali boy of about twenty-five. He had come to America on a visit, some years previously, and now he couldn’t go back because of the war. He studied at the University of Southern California, where he had already graduated in cinematography. He wanted, eventually, to return to India and become a movie director. He was quite religious in his own way, but he hadn’t the least intention of becoming a monk, and his presence in this more or less intentional household was certainly a trial—to himself and everybody else. He was gay, lazy and wildly untidy; a shameless flatterer and beggar. Americanized as he was, he still stuck to the good old Indian tradition that women should wait on men, and he got plenty of service out of the girls, who petted and cursed him by turns. He excited my fiercest sadism (as this diary will show) but one couldn’t be angry with him for long: he was much too charming.

  George Fitts was a man of about my own age, nearly bald, very much a New Englander, taciturn and rugged, with surprising stabs of catty humor. He had something very strange the matter with his neck. It seemed, somehow or other, to keep getting out of joint, and he would jerk it back into place with weird grunts and groans. They sounded agonizing, as though he were in great pain—but nobody could be sure of this. Nor were they entirely involuntary. Sometimes, when we were all in the shrine room and George was making his noises, Swami would whisper reprovingly, “George!”—and George would quieten down at once. The family accepted George’s infirmity as a matter of course, and even sometimes joked about it, quite unmaliciously, to his face. It was generally understood that he had been this way since youth, as the result of unskillful treatment by various chiropractors.

  George, in his own eccentric way, was very nearly a saint. He accepted Hinduism with fewer reservations than any of us. He was a natural devotee. He adored Swami and followed him about like a dog. If Swami went away and didn’t take George along with him, he would become utterly miserable and even sometimes shed tears. He would write down Swami’s most trivial remarks in a notebook—although Swami would try to stop him doing so. He had a recording machine and made records of Swami’s Sunday lectures and Thursday night classes. During the week, he typed them out, religiously including all the sound effects—such as “er, er,” or a cough, or the noise of a plane passing overhead. As he typed, he chanted at the top of his voice, or shouted “Jaya Sri Ramakrishna!” He could be heard all over the block, but the neighbors didn’t seem to mind.

  George’s rooms formed a separate apartment, walled off from the rest of the house. He had paid for the reconstruction himself, being extremely jealous of his privacy. The place was like a museum. Every inch of wallspace, every table and chair was crowded with photographs—enlargements, in all sizes, of the few existing pictures of Ramakrishna, Holy Mother, Brahmananda and Vivekananda, together with dozens of snapshots of Swami, taken by George himself. There were also busts and statuettes and altar lights and sticks of smoldering incense. And glass jars full of withered flowers which George collected every evening from the shrine and treasured for months. They made his room smell terrible. In the midst of all this, George sat on the floor, with the typewriter before him and the recording instrument playing back Swami’s voice at full blast—as happy as a child.

  Webster Milam was a square, plump, muscular boy of about seventeen, prematurely going bald, very hairy and strong as an ox. He was deadly serious, very obstinate and very good-natured. He had a great aptitude for carpentering, building and fixing things. He was a champion at jujitsu. He had decided to become a monk at the age of fourteen: that was all there was to it. His mother was interested in Vedanta, so she didn’t oppose him. It wouldn’t have made any difference if she had.

  Richard Thom was about Webster’s age. He was a nice-looking boy, curly haired and brown eyed, but with a strangely crafty expression: he reminded me of a bear. He had a magnificent body, developed by barbell exercises. His father and mother, a bank manager and his wife from Portland, were pupils of Swami from way back, so Rich had come to Vedanta naturally. He had an undoubted vocation, which he violently resisted: we never knew from one day to the next if he would stay at Ivar Avenue. He didn’t seem to know, himself. Webster loved Richard dearly, and used all his influence to keep him on the tracks. When Rich disappeared for hours into Hollywood, Webster would cover up for him, or go off and fetch him home. Actually, Rich was usually eating ice cream with his friends; but he was so secretive about it that he might just as well have been to a brothel. Both he and Webster were pupils at Hollywood High School—not the ideal place for would-be monks.

  There was much going and coming at Ivar Avenue, and I can’t remember exactly which of the girls were there when I arrived. I’ve described Sister, Amiya and Sarada already. There are only two others I need mention here: Yogini and Sudhira.

  Yogini was a Mrs. Brown. She had come to stay with us provisionally, while her husband, Yogi, was in the army. She was about thirty years old and quite attractive, in spite of a long, comically shaped nose. She had a good figure and lots of frizzy hair. She was very lively and gay: it took me a long time to realize how serious and intelligent she was about religion, and how much it meant to her. I grew very fond of her indeed. We had a teasing, brother-and-sister relationship which improved throughout my stay.

  Sudhira’s name was Helen Kennedy. She was a trained nurse, who had worked for Dr. Kolisch, and she had first come to Iv
ar Avenue in a professional capacity, to nurse either Sister or Amiya—I forget which. She was an Irish Californian: one of the most beautiful women I have ever met—in the same class as Garbo and Virginia Woolf. Her beauty wasn’t so much in her features or her figure as in her manner, her voice, the way she carried herself: she was physically aristocratic.

  I won’t write much about Sudhira now, because she is mentioned so often in the later parts of this diary. I suppose that, within the limitations of our respective neuroses, we were in love with each other. I had a kind of metaphysical feeling about her—especially after I had been sick a couple of times and she’d nursed me. To me, she was the universal, cosmic Nanny; the beautiful, mysterious figure whom we meet twice in our lives, at the entrance and the exit, the midwife and the hospital nurse, the life-giver and the bringer of death. Sudhira exercised what was really a most dangerous kind of fascination over me. In a way, she was death, and our relationship could only really exist as long as I was sick. She was addicted to death, as people are addicted to drugs—and, like every addict, she was always looking for a convert: the convert had to be somebody she loved. I tried to write a poem about her, but never got beyond the first line: “Is that the needle, Nanny, you are bringing?”

  I know all this sounds like a purely literary, subjective fantasy; but it was more than that. Sudhira’s death addiction had grown naturally out of the circumstances of her life. When she was a girl, she fell in love with a young flier. They got married, and three days later he was killed in an accident. Sudhira became obsessed by the fact of his death. She wanted to know what death is. She was already trained as a nurse, and now she made a point of getting assigned to hopeless cases. She wanted to watch people die. The only trouble was, she was so good at her job that she frequently saved them, and immediately lost interest. She had worked at the county hospital, downtown, where she had managed to catch most of the infectious diseases, as well as getting involved in a number of bad automobile accidents; but she survived them all. I think it was just this very death addiction that gave her abnormal powers of recovery. She loved to wander along the frontier, but she had no intention of crossing it.

  In fact, she was Irish, in the best and worst sense of the word. Wonderful, amusing, soothing, funny, infuriating, unreliable, malicious, hysterical: a born liar, a ministering angel, a bitch. She caused more trouble at Ivar Avenue than everybody else put together, and the place would have been intolerable to me without her.

  I’m pretty certain she must have been away, for some reason, when I moved in there on February 6: there is no reference to her in my diary for some time. But this may merely be because I was so obsessed by my own problems that I scarcely noticed anybody at first, except the people who actually inconvenienced my life.

  The opening of Brahmananda Cottage was, of course, a big event. Most of the Swami’s regular congregation attended the puja at which the house was dedicated. Peggy came, in her smartest clothes, like a mother to a prizegiving at her son’s school. The homa fire was lighted in the living room fireplace. Everything was clean and new. Amiya had worked for forty-eight hours at a stretch—cleaning, scrubbing, dusting, fixing up curtains, laying carpets. It took us nearly a week to undo all her tidying.

  Asit had the best room—the one I was to move into later. He had obtained it by alternative sulking, coaxing and bullying. Web and Rich were in the big bedroom. I had a dark little anteroom, with nothing but a door between me and Asit’s radio, which he was apt to play all day and most of the night. This radio was the cause of endless friction between us: a friction which became a curious microcosm of Indo-British relations. Asit reacted quite differently toward me, just because I was British. He was altogether more resentful, more suspicious, more flattering, more deferential than with the Americans. He never lost any opportunity of making me responsible for the British policy in India. Sometimes this was a joke, sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes I was amused, sometimes I lost my temper. But I’d better get back to the diary. …

  February 8. Well, now that we’ve slept two nights in Brahmananda Cottage, now that the mimosa is withering in the vases and the homa fire leaves no traces beyond a stain of clarified butter on the hearth—is there anything I can say about the monastic life?

  No. Nothing. As a matter of fact, my subconscious hasn’t even cocked an eyebrow or twitched an ear, yet. And, for the next two or three weeks it probably won’t. Like a drunk who has been pitched into the lockup, it just lies there snoring, quite unaware that it can’t get out. When it begins to wake up, I suppose the trouble will start.

  Richard is the chief problem in our little world, at the moment. He’s so like a bear, with his muscles and his slowness and his long, sleepy, crafty eyes. He trusts no one an inch. Today he came in and asked me if I’d ever heard of an American poet named Richard Brimstone. I racked my brains, consulted reference books. Then he told me he’d made up the name himself, for a story he has to write in his homework.

  February 11. Two mornings ago, we were sitting in the shrine room in the half-light of dawn. Two kids delivering the newspaper peeped in through the temple window and saw us. “Gee—” said one of them in a loud whisper, “for a minute I thought they was real.” There was a pause, then a gasp: “Gosh—they are real!”

  Last night was bad. The first of many, no doubt. My nose was like a brick wall, with sinus trouble. Went into the living room and stood a long time looking at Vivekananda’s photograph, with its wonderful glare of burning determination. This made me feel much better.

  But, good or bad, this is the place for me. It will be tough here, but easier than anywhere else. Not because of Amiya, or George, or Sister, or Sarada (though they all help, in different ways, by their mere presence). Not even because of Swami. It’s the shrine that really matters. The fact of its being there, always, right in the midst of our household. It’s particularly wonderful at night. You feel so safe there. So strangely reassured. And there is such a sense of contact. Like sitting face to face with someone you know very well, and not having to speak.

  February 26. In the next room, Asit and Richard are discussing Rich’s future: I can hear every word through the door. “Well, go ahead,” giggles Asit, “marry—get some keeds!” And Rich, who is thoroughly enjoying the conversation, answers, “But I don’t want that. I want to be a vagabond.”

  He is always telling us this. His daydream figure is the Hobo—the wandering, drunken philosopher. Somehow or other, he found out about Rimbaud and pestered me until I lent him my copy of A Season in Hell. (It never occurred to me that some of my books might become liabilities in a place like this!) Now Rich keeps repeating, “The best thing is a good drunken sleep on a sandy beach.”145 If Swami hears him I shall have to do a lot of explaining.

  Sometimes, at home in Portland, he used to disappear for several days at a time and sleep in the woods.

  He was suspended from school the day before yesterday—for doing handstands on the scaffolding of a sixty-foot smokestack in the Hollywood High playground. It was during the lunch hour, with a big crowd watching. Now, of course, he’s the students’ number-one hero. He says he wants to leave Ivar Avenue, get a job at Warner’s Theater as an usher and enjoy the pleasures of “the world.” I should be the last to laugh. If anybody can understand Rich, it ought to be myself.

  And yet it’s a disaster. Imagine discovering this place and this way of life at seventeen, and not being able to hold on to it! And then having to crawl back, inch by inch, at my age or maybe older. I’m still hanging on by the eyelids, myself, after nearly three weeks. I’ve got to convince myself practically that the shrine can give me strength to do what I could never do alone. If I stay here, I shall know that I’ve been helped by something outside the scope of my personal will. Swami insists that Brahmananda is actually present here, actually watching over us. I can accept this, in a way—but only as a kind of symbolic truth. If I were actually to see him, I’d be as amazed as the crassest materialist could ever be.

 
; Last night, Swami said, “Meditate three times a day and pray to the Lord in between—and you will become a saint.” I laughed and asked, “In how many lives?” Swami was quite indignant: “In how many lives? In this life! How can you say in how many lives? You are here, aren’t you? That means Ramakrishna has chosen you.”

  The shrine is like a bank, in which we have put all our money and can never get it out again. But it pays interest—so the only thing to do is to invest more and more and more.

  March 1. Richard finally decided to stay, after a last-minute interview with Swami in which they apparently went through every mood known to psychology. What an extraordinary character Rich is! Part of him is so sincere that it makes you want to cry; part of him is quite cynically cunning—as for instance, when he plays up to Swami and pretends to be under the influence of Swami’s hypnotic power. The other day, while Swami was out, he sat in Swami’s place on the living-room sofa and imitated him puffing at his cigarettes and curling up his toes. Sarada and Yogini and I pretended to be disciples and asked him questions. And Rich, catching Swami’s tone perfectly, answered us. “Swami,” said Sarada, very wide-eyed, “what shall I do? I don’t have the time to meditate. I’m so involved in the cares of the world.” “Aw wairl,” replied Rich, absolutely dead-pan, “jarst try to think of God okkezzionelly …” When Swami heard about this, he was delighted.

  The other night, Sarada found a prose poem which Rich had typed out and hidden in the shrine. It was headed “A Farewell to Vedanta.” I can’t quote all of it, but there was a bit about, “As I lifted my weights, may I lift the weight of my ignorance … As I climbed to heights unknown, so may I climb toward Thee.”