“Heights unknown” referred, of course, to the smokestack. Swami and I went round to interview the principal of Hollywood High this morning and plead (unsuccessfully) to have Rich taken back. The principal was like a bank manager on the day of a crash: a desolate, shattered figure in the midst of utter confusion. One had the impression that he and his staff had long since lost control of the huge, hygienic, rowdy school and its gang of husky, sexy, tramplike students. Wearily, he pointed out to us that Rich has scarcely attended a single class in any subject: some of his teachers don’t even know what he looks like. As for the principal himself, he is entirely resigned to rudeness, ignorance, inattention, rowdyism, venereal disease, illegitimate babies and sex in every form—but he still has one proud boast: no student has ever actually met a violent death on the premises. And no one shall, if he can help it. Here he is really obstinate. “Why,” he exclaimed, “it would be in every newspaper in the country!” He seemed to take it as a matter of course that Mr. and Mrs. Thom would have sued the school, if Rich had fallen.
As we were driving away, we passed the celebrated smokestack. It looked horribly dangerous. The scaffolding seemed insecure, and the fall could only have been on to asphalt, or a spiked iron fence. Swami folded his hands, glanced upward for a moment, and murmured, “May I have that courage!”
So Rich is to stay home, and study Vedanta and try to be a real monk. For a month’s trial.
Yesterday, I had lunch with Peggy, up at Alto Cedro. Bill Kiskadden was there, on leave from the Santa Barbara Hospital. He’s bored and dissatisfied, as well he may be. He gave up his private practice to volunteer, but so far he’s had no surgical cases whatsoever. They are all sent elsewhere. Most of the wounded who come home from the Pacific are suffering from nerves or shell shock.
Peggy, who has been hunting the city for a new cook, seemed as tense as ever. She makes every topic of conversation an excuse to let off steam. Today it was the movie In Which We Serve.146 Peggy liked it: I didn’t. So she analyzed my motives for disliking it—proving that they stemmed from guilt feelings, snobbery and anti-British prejudice. All this, of course, in her sweetest, most “unbiased” tone of voice.
March 5. Yesterday and early this morning, we had the Shiva puja, or series of pujas, preceded by a twenty-four-hour fast. You are not even supposed to drink water. Fasting gave me a seasick headache. I couldn’t work and sat in the living room in a daze, listening to an almost endless description of the New York production of Our Town by Bill Roerick. Roerick is a very nice, dark, extremely handsome young actor who is in the military cast of This Is the Army: right now, they’re making it into a movie at “Camp Warner Brothers”—every player is required to spend at least one night under canvas, on the back lot, every week! John van Druten brought him up to a lecture ten days ago, and since then he has visited us twice. Sarada, that incurable monk- and nun-grabber, is already convinced that he’s a candidate for the yellow robe. And everybody is charmed by his looks.
Shiva is represented by a little knob of clay (which I suspect of being, originally, a phallic symbol). After the puja and the huge 4 a.m. meal were over, one of the devotees had to drive down with it to Santa Monica and throw it into the ocean. It mustn’t be kept.
March 9. Allan Hunter came over to see me this morning. A crisis has arisen up at camp, because of Denny’s behavior. Not only is he a subversive influence, but he’s accused of bringing in liquor and even marijuana for the others to smoke. I said I didn’t believe this. Because I saw Denny the other day, and he would most certainly have told me about it. Allan then revealed the purpose of his visit, which was to have me sit in on a conference on Denny’s case. We drove clear across town, to the house of Phil Wells, the camp doctor, a self-satisfied Quaker with a know-all smile. The camp director was there, and a couple of other senior C.O.s: dead-serious juvenile prigs. I could have smacked their earnest, good-looking faces. I could have smacked Denny’s, too, for involving me in this mess. However, I confined myself to sarcastic politeness. The charges against Denny (and also his colored friend Collins George) proved to be pretty vague. The camp director had to admit that everybody liked Denny, that quite a number of the boys drank hard liquor, and that there was no clear evidence of the marijuana smoking—or, as he put it, “I can’t say that I actually saw them—er—partake.” In fact, the long and short of it is that Denny has simply been talking about his gay life in Paris and making them discontented. He will probably be gotten rid of. If the draft board medical examination for C.O.s hadn’t been so superficial in those days, he would probably never have been inducted at all.
When it was all over, the most priggish of all the boys staggered me by telling me how much he had enjoyed Mr. Norris Changes Trains. What goes on in their minds? They are mysterious to me as the Chinese.
March 18. I’m down at Laguna Beach again, staying with Chris Wood. Gerald is here, and Aldous, and today we expect Karl Hoyt, who’s being inducted into the army next week. I return to Ivar Avenue tomorrow.
Chris just got a telegram to say that Paul Sorel is returning to California from New York. He hates New York, although he’s been staying at the Hotel Gotham on an allowance of eighty dollars a week. Chris is black and tense with worry over Paul. Also, a couple of days ago, he heard that his best friend, Mark Palmer, has died in England.
The atmosphere in this house is bad and squalid. Something is wrong with Gerald—partly, it’s that he’s upset because Paul is returning. He gives forth no light. His conversation with Aldous at breakfast this morning seemed particularly sterile, bookish and malicious. He described Queen Victoria’s deathbed with almost fiendish relish: “At the end, she was broader than she was long, and quite blind.” What’s so unpleasant about Gerald’s aversions is that he hasn’t the guts to come out with them openly. He hasn’t the guts to say, “I loathe that dreary old imperialistic bitch, and I hope she’s frying in hell right at this minute.” It’s the same when he talks about Paul. Always cautious. Even Aldous seemed less of his kind, decent self than usual.
I shouldn’t have come down here. Perhaps I shouldn’t leave Ivar Avenue at all, just now. I feel shaken and insecure.
March 26. Woke murmuring a line from Yeats’s translation of the chorus from Oedipus at Colonus: “Even from that delight memory treasures so …”147 I am reading and thinking often of Yeats, just now: he represents a most elegant kind of sexual sublimation.
Felt a bit heavy after Sudhira’s B1 shot, last night. (She has decided that we all need pepping up, and goes around at bedtime with the hypodermic, visiting her “customers.”)
Tried to think that the real Self was already sitting in meditation before the shrine, as I herded my sleepy but obedient body out to the washroom, emptied its bladder and sponged its face. Webster, who had called me, was in the boys’ bedroom, finishing his homework by electric light. Thought: “Shall I point out that it’s already daylight outside, if he’ll lift the shades?” Decided not to be such an old fusspot. “But surely,” I said to myself, “it’s time he went into the temple?” And I answered, “That’s his affair, not yours. Shut up.” As usual, I raised the shades in the living room, thinking, with a kind of maudlin self-pity, how much I love the daylight. In this mood, I think of myself as a wistful prisoner—the type that watches the swallows and waters a flower with his tears. A grey morning. Noticed that the pittosporum outside my window has no more blossoms. But there are blossoms on the big acacia on the lawn in front of the house, and the Indian hawthorn is in bloom all round the temple steps. My nose, as so often, was stuffy. Tried to clear it, before going into the shrine room, with bastrika and alternate breathing. Not much good.
Arrived to find the shrine room empty. Tried to pray for my friends, but could feel absolutely no affection for anybody. The only thought which almost always seems valid is of the boys fighting each other all over the world: that gives me a sense of responsibility. Because of their suffering, even if for no other reason, I must contribute my tiny effort towards this other way of lif
e. Then the usual bad feelings—vanity, because Swami came in late and saw that I was already in the shrine; self-accusations, because I’m not in England (these still sometimes recur—although I know perfectly well that, whatever my duty may have been in the past, it is now to stay here; and that I only wish to return because I still care what the world, the readers of The Daily Mail and The Los Angeles Times, thinks of me). Then satisfaction, because, technically, I’m still keeping all the rules. Then sex thoughts. Then resentful feelings toward Chris and Gerald and Peggy and Paul Sorel. A mental conversation with Chris, in which I told him that I resent Paul’s association with him chiefly because I fear it may bust up the household at Rockledge Road and thus deprive me of a holiday home. I imputed similar motives to Gerald and felt angry with Peggy for trying to interfere, calling her a nosey bitch. We all, I thought, conspire to keep Chris a little boy with toys.
After worship, there was just time to drop my cushions and wrapper on my bed before the chimes rang for breakfast. A special delivery letter was brought by the mailman as I was going across to the other house, from Mr. Thom to Swami. I touched it in mock salutation to my head, before giving it to Swami, and immediately felt the joke was silly. Swami read the letter, which had an enclosure for Rich, while I watched him inquisitively and Sudhira brought in spoon bread and eggs and we ate our prunes. Swami passed me the letter to read. Mr. Thom wasn’t sure if he should take Richard’s decision to leave Ivar Avenue seriously, since Rich hadn’t mentioned that he and Swami had discussed the matter. Rich didn’t read his letter, but took it away with him from the table. Sister remarked that she’d have to hire a gardener, now that Rich is leaving. When we got up from breakfast, I urged Swami to get Rich away as soon as possible—chiefly because this interim period, with Rich smoking up the living room and listening to jitterbug music, is getting on my nerves. Also I know that he’s planning some kind of sex excursion for tomorrow night—as why the hell shouldn’t he? But it makes me feel so insecure.
Asit put me into a good temper by flattering remarks about my laugh and my new haircut. Returned to the other house, to burn trash in the incinerator—very little this morning, except faded flowers, which have been used in the worship and then laid in front of the photographs of Ramakrishna and the others in our bedrooms. I often feel mad at Asit when I’m burning the trash, because he’s apt to leave razor blades among the paper, and once or twice I nearly cut my hand open. However, this morning, he hadn’t, and when I met him and Rich I suddenly felt a warmth towards both of them, and asked, “Haven’t you old smokers got a match?” The first decent feeling of the day. Lit the incinerator and threw the flowers on to the compost heap which Web has started.
Returned to the kitchen to help with the dishes—after starting a letter to Paul Cadmus and asking Asit, as politely as I could, to turn down his radio with the news. George’s recording instrument was shouting away next door, accompanied by queer animal noises from George himself. Sudhira said she’d been having an argument with George about Richard. George thinks that Richard should be forced to stay here, no matter how, because the Lord is sure to work on him gradually if only he sticks around. Sudhira disagrees. She told about a marmoset she’d had as a pet. It bit, and the vet filed its teeth, and it got toothache and sat with its paw to its mouth and the tears running down its face. And Sudhira, who had hated it, began to feel sorry for it and got codeine for it from the hospital and it turned into a dope fiend, and died. She was so beautiful as she described this. I love her very much. I love Yogini too, with her air of a burlesque Ophelia: she always wears flowers in her hair. She came in, and I told them about the games Edward Upward and I used to play, years ago, pretending to be Professor Koehler’s apes building towers of boxes to reach a banana. There was one picture captioned “Grande achieves a three-storey structure.” So we all tried it and laughed a lot.
Dishwashing is always a pleasant part of the day. I make up verses to amuse the girls—particularly Sarada, who is very sensitive to words. The charm of this sort of humor is simply that it is so specialized—like the jokes of airmen or scientists. Nobody outside Ivar Avenue could appreciate it. Some specimens:
With many a mudra and mantram, with mutterings and mouthings and moans,
The rishi flew into a tantrum, and rattled the avatar’s bones.
After reams of ridiculous ritual, after offerings of ointment and eggs,
The cripples were kissed by Rasputin, and recovered the use of their legs.
So the Swami has put her in purdah, we may none of us speak to her now.
Perhaps she’s committed a murder, or even insulted a cow!
Or this—to the tune of “Deutschland über Alles”:
Never smoke before the Swami
For he hates a bad cigar,
Water pipes would be pretentious—
They are for the avatar:
Only saints may stoop to cigarettes,
Only rishis dare to chew,
Therefore, if you see the Swa-ami,
Hide that Camel undernea-eath the pew.
Returned to my room, finished my letter to Cadmus, and went into the temple to watch Sarada doing the first part of the ritual. Swami wants me to learn it. I had the book of instructions open in front of me and followed. Then I went in to see Swami, who showed me the rest. He had been talking to Richard, who had said he wanted to be a military policeman and shoot someone in the belly. “He’s an egomaniac,” Swami said—but he couldn’t help smiling: he loves Rich very much. In the middle of our conversation, Paul Sorel rang up, from Hollywood, very polite and elaborately friendly. I think he wants to get me on his side in the forthcoming battle with Gerald. He and Chris are leaving for Laguna at once.
March 30. Harold Ehrensperger (the editor of the magazine Motive148) writes this morning that he’s coming out to the Coast in June and would like to meet me and have me meet George New, “a distinctly worthwhile younger chap.”149 I quote this phrase because it’s so typical of the fast young religious set in this country.
After that sour crack, you can guess that I’m not in the best of moods. I have a cold coming on—a throat infection apparently caught from Web, but actually my usual defense mechanism because Swami has given me too much work (on the magazine, etc.), because I feel fussed, because Rich is still messing around (he has the most uncanny knack of slipping off the premises whenever he’s wanted) and because tomorrow I was to have done the worship for the first time, under Swami’s supervision. Very bad sex tension, the past few days, and complete dryness.
April 4. Headline from The Los Angeles Times: “Uniform Veal Ceiling Near.”
Lunch with Bill Roerick and two of his friends named Bruce and Tommy, both naval air gunners. Bruce is a thoughtful, gentle, rather charming boy, who used to be an architect; Tommy is small and square and lively and rowdy. They made friends the first day in boot camp and have been together ever since. Now they’re in the same aircraft, and, as Tommy said, “At least, if we go we’ll go together.” He keeps telling Bruce, “I don’t know what in the world you’d have done, if you hadn’t had me to look after you.” They love each other so much, and are so open about it, that it makes you want to shed tears. I had an awful feeling that they are both doomed; but I hope this is just romantic sentimentality.
The log cut from the walnut tree which used to stand by our back door has begun to sprout leaves. Sister said, “Somehow, it seems pathetic.”
Have bought a Remington electric razor, on the excuse that a shortage of blades is expected; actually, as a toy.
Carter Lodge was up here yesterday. He offers me a job at the ranch, if the draft board refuses to classify me 4-D and wants to get me into CPS camp. That way, I’d have agricultural deferment. I think this would be about the worst alternative I could possibly choose—so maybe I’ll find myself choosing it.
April 6. Talk with Sudhira this morning, while washing dishes. About Rich, who is still supposed to be leaving next Saturday, and about Web and his sister Jean�
�a fat, charming, slightly hysterical girl who often visits us and is in perpetual indecision whether to marry or sign on here as a nun. Rich is now spending most of his nights out—at all-night movies, or with friends. However, he keeps dropping hints that he’d like to stay on here. Swami says no, he’d better leave. Web, thinks Sudhira, is suffering on Rich’s account much more than he shows. His throat is chronically inflamed. Jean, according to Sudhira, has said she doesn’t believe he’ll be here in three years’ time. Jean herself shed tears on Saturday night, because there’d been so much talk at supper against marriage, and she’s engaged to a boy named Jack, who’s in the army.
I must say that none of this bothers me much. Let those who want to leave leave. I can’t agonize over straying sheep. Whatever else the spiritual life is, it isn’t tragic, because every effort and discomfort is purely voluntary: you can stop whenever you wish. And this talk about the world’s pleasures being wretched and tasteless is just silly, as far as I’m concerned. Sure, you have to pay for them, but they’re marvellous while they last. You can’t wish them away, and groan, and say you never did like them, really. They have extraordinary beauty and significance, and woe to the wetleg who denies it. The world at its best isn’t miserable, isn’t hateful—it is mad. The pursuit of worldly pleasures as ends in themselves is madness. Worldly-mindedness is madness because it presupposes a purely imaginary situation, instead of acknowledging the real situation, which is the presence of God. To be sane is to be aware of the real situation. The desire, the homesickness for sanity, is the only valid reason for taking up a religious life.
If there’s anything I’m sick of, it’s personal relationships, on which I and the rest of my friends used to expend a positively horticultural energy. Ah, what a coldness there was, underneath those “darlings,” those kisses, those hugs, those protestations! Here, I’m happy to say, all that seems meaningless. You plow your own furrow, and the most lovable is he or she who most unswervingly plows theirs. The only worthwhile thing we can do for each other is to set an example.
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 46