Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Then, as I say, on Saturday, Kenny (whom I’ve become fond of—I hardly know why) called to say that Sister had died, quite painlessly, in her sleep.

  Today was a hot morning and I arrived at the temple in a bad mood. I’d been horrible and unkind to Caskey before I left the house, because I’m worried about our money and I keep feeling he ought to help us earn some more. (Which is true, in a way, but no reason for being unpleasant.) There was the usual atmosphere of pre-puja fuss. All kinds of people arriving with flowers, and women in various degrees of elegant mourning. Swami sat on the sofa. You couldn’t exactly say his face looked tragic. But the brightness had left it, and today it was almost frighteningly austere. The eyebrows drawn down at the corners. He seemed impersonal and forbidding, like a thundercloud. He took my arm and led me into his room, where he told me about Sister’s death. Just before it happened, Swami found himself “in a high spiritual mood,” and then they called him in, and at that moment the breath left her body with a faint puff, through the lips.

  “She was a saint,” Swami said. He believes she passed into samadhi. He told us how, latterly, she had told him that she never left the shrine room until she had seen “a light.” She thought this quite normal. She supposed everybody saw it.

  Sudhira came to the ceremony—grey haired now, but still with her pale sad slap-happy beauty. An almost legendary figure, whom we embraced like a visitor from the dead. She is living in Long Beach with her husband, and has been doing surgical nursing. And then there was Web, fat and thirtyish looking, with his homely wife. And Tito [Renaldo] in his neat blue jacket with gold buttons and his clean slacks, and Bill Forthman—neither of them emotionally involved; they had scarcely known Sister at all. And Aldous, whom I had lunch with, later.

  August 17. Something stopped me from continuing my account of Sister’s funeral, and now I have forgotten the details, but the point is that I came away from it in a calm, happy “open” mood which lasted for several days—and I felt a real horror of my unkindness to Caskey—or of any unkindness to anyone.

  And so things were better for a while; but then came another bad patch, which we have just passed through. Catherine, Caskey’s mother, left three days ago, and Caskey says that his drinking and neurotic laziness were largely due to her being here. She is a bright, chattery little lady, genuinely kind and helpful, but terribly wrong for Caskey because she is determined to regard him as the model son, no matter what he does. I think—in taking this attitude—she is somehow trying to spite her ex-husband, whom she has never forgiven, and is probably still in love with. Her obviously excessive (and insincere) praises make poor Caskey quite frantic with guilt. He says that he has never had enough discipline in his life. He wants to be loved and yet criticized. Oh—it’s very difficult; but obviously we are in this together and I must keep trying. All that stuff I wrote about leaving him is beside the point. I can’t. I must not. At least not now. The day may come when I ought to. I don’t know. I certainly don’t want to.

  Lesser [Samuels] and I have practically finished the movie story. Shall we sell it? How shall I manage if we don’t? Will Mrs. Strasberg28 let us have the house for another year? All these questions will be decided in September—the month of decisions.

  The great thing, at the moment, is to restart my novel. “Stephen Monkhouse” has got to be me—not some synthetic Anglo-American. The few circumstances can so easily be imagined—his ex-wife, his Quaker background, etc. But it must be written out of the middle of my consciousness.

  Prayer, meditation, thought, creation, are the only refuge and stronghold. Without them, I am nothing. Without them, life is really an agony. And I say this with absolute authority, because, at the moment, my life is, by all external standards, extraordinarily fortunate and pleasant. I’m blessed with great graces—independence, constant occupation in work I have chosen, a home, a companion, wonderful friends, a teacher who is a saint. Who has more—or as much? Oh, for shame! How dare I fail, or complain, or waste a single instant of these beautiful days? I must try to keep this diary. It is an act of sanity.

  August 18. Visit last night to the Down-Beat Café on Central Avenue, with Bernie Hamilton29 and his girl friend Maxine. The sax player, a colored boy of about eighteen, sweating, with eyes closed and an expression of great suffering—the agony of self-explanation by means of blasts and toots. He was blowing his whole personality out through the instrument. It was a language—and sometimes you felt his triumph at having stated something exactly as he wished to state it. He was obviously full of marijuana. The two handsome white boys did not presume to interrupt with their clarinets—they regarded him with respect, and the audience with a certain scorn. The bass player peeped at us round his great engine like a squirrel. The drummer never tired. The piano player flickered his thin stiff fingers over the keys, without paying the least attention to anybody. When the sax player wasn’t playing, he kept opening and shutting his mouth like a fish gasping for air—as though he could only breathe music.

  Extraordinary difficulty in restarting my novel. The problem of the opening sentence.

  November 8. Initiation Day—the day Swami gave me my mantram, in 1940, the day I became an American citizen, in 1946. (Today I did my duty in the latter capacity, by voting on our twelve state propositions.)

  I must, I will keep up this diary—no matter what shames and failures I have to report. This summer has been really disgraceful. I don’t think I can ever remember having been so idle, dull, resentful and unhappy. The novel is barely at page eighteen, creeping along against frightful resistance. My life with Bill has reached such a point of emotional bankruptcy that he is leaving, by mutual consent, in a day or two, to hitchhike to Florida to see his sister. Will this solve anything? It didn’t with Vernon. Well, anyhow, we have to try it.

  I feel sick, stupid, middle-aged, impotent. I have just got to make an effort, and not wail and weep. I bore myself beyond tears. Work, work—what else means anything? But work is all emptiness if I can’t get back the sense of direction.

  It is an untellable boredom, even writing this down; but I must do it. I must take my boredom and impotence and cram myself full of them until I gag and vomit up all this poison.

  Jobs—to write something about Klaus Mann, for the memorial volume;30 to write an article for Gerald, about Vedanta and Christianity;31 to write an article about Santa Monica Canyon, for John Lehmann.32

  And get on with Patanjali.

  And my novel.

  And see if any kind of a job, preferably short, can be obtained.

  Now then, let’s see you make the effort.

  November 15. Bill left on Friday last, the 11th, and thank God for that. It certainly is a relief having him away—but I’m still messing—accomplishing very little. This amazing hot spell has something to do with it. And my throat is very bad, sometimes I can hardly swallow. I’m already tired of wasting money in restaurants, making infinitely cautious overtures to prospective affairs, etc.

  Well—that’s all there is to confess, but I can only repeat that I have got to snap out of it. Let’s try again.

  November 18. No smokes at all since the night before yesterday. Somewhat dumb and dazed. I only want to sleep—although I slept nearly ten hours at Jimmy [Charlton]’s, last night: it was so wonderfully peaceful, we just dozed off after supper and only woke long enough at 3:00 a.m. to get into bed. This morning, the noise of the dredger, which had been going all night—lighted up like a cocktail party—reminded me of how it is on board ship, when you wake and hear the engines and know that no time has been wasted; they’ve been working for you while you were unconscious.

  Thoughts about Bill still resentful—with a kind of wondering horror: how did I ever stand it? The great thing, now, is to relax. Sure, I have endless chores awaiting me—but don’t worry too much. See how they work out, but your health comes first. You’ve got to get that battered old engine running again. Last night, my throat was closed, it seemed, to an aperture the size of a pinhole.<
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  Woke, a few mornings ago, murmuring: “Into each drain some wife must fall.”

  Jim—his foxy nose, his pale washed-out stiffly ironed army pants, his skivvy shirts, his bright pretty socks, his old blue sneakers, his lonely air when he is opening a can, like a prospector out in the desert. He is one of the Dog People. Sometimes he smells very strongly of Airedale terrier. His large smooth body, clumsy, boyish, with very small buttocks and big rather weary shoulders. He has the weary face of a young officer—a boy prematurely saddled with responsibility. When women are around, he puts on a knitted wool tie and laughs with his front teeth. He grunts in the morning—surly. But likes it when I say, “You old cow” or, “Okay, Miss Nosey.” The Dog People share this quality with real dogs—you mustn’t kid yourself that their devotion is personal. If you go away and someone else feeds them for a month—well—that’s all the same. And, after all, why not? The vanity of loving a Dog Person is expressed by Cocteau’s remark about Radiguet—“Le ciel de mes mains te protège.”33 That’s sheer megalomania, and deserves the punishment it will receive. I know so exactly how it would feel to be a father.

  November 22. Getting ready for this party.34 I’ve invited far too many people and God knows how they’ll all fit into the house. Well—Leif [Argo] and David [Robertson] will help out. Sixth day of disintoxication. It is nearly impossible to write anything—that’s the hardest part—but otherwise I feel wonderful. I’m only scared because I have to meet a deadline for the magazine35 and for the piece on Klaus. Oh dear—

  It’s shameful and petty to have to confess it—but I despise Jim just the least bit for his behavior the other evening. Anyhow, I despise his self-pity over it. Also, he looks so silly, all banged up.36 But that’s unkind, and I must be very careful not to show it.

  Sometimes I feel I’ve gotten myself into a position vis-à-vis the younger generation, where they are always saying, “You show me”—well, I’m tired of showing them.

  He was guilty of conduct befitting an old auntie.

  Names—Waldo Angelo, Hank Burczinsky, Hanns Hagenbuehler, Nicky Nadeau, Victor Rueda, Leif Argo, Russ Zeininger, Ted Baccardi,37 Amos Shepherd. American names.

  Question of the hour: how to stop sex murders. Suggestions: arrest everybody and keep them in jail for life. Isolate all children on islands until the age of eighteen.

  December 6. 8:20 a.m., and a fine morning. What are we going to do with it?

  I feel a bit stale, because I woke and got up at 5:00, not being able to sleep after drinking last night with Tito. Now that he has left Trabuco, Tito feels sad and lost between two worlds. He sits in his horrid moderne little apartment, waiting for the call to work at the studio, and drinking […]. Soon he’ll start having sex again, then asthma. Poor kid. He clings to me, as the only person who can understand the particular kind of mess he’s in. But I can’t really help him.

  When I got up it was dark, of course, with the peculiar dead darkness of the late night. I came down into the kitchen and there were more ants: I doggedly destroyed them with the Flit gun, and then made myself a too-large plate of scrambled eggs, thinking how that nursery jingle, “Poached eggs on toast are very nice / If you try them once you’ll want them twice,” makes me feel horribly sad. Because it is such a terribly limited objective. You hear a cheery little voice saying it—a voice which takes no account of the atom bomb, the Sermon on the Mount or Beethoven’s C-sharp minor Quartet. The false snugness of the tiny nursery pleasures; and all around, the howling wilderness of life. The utter brutality of those cops, the night before last, and my guilt that I didn’t handle them properly—wasn’t wonderful and poised and mature. I ought to have called their bluff, insisted on being locked up, hired a lawyer, taken the case to the Supreme Court, started a nationwide stink.38 Why didn’t I? Because I’m cowardly, slack, weak, compromised. My life at present is such a mess.

  Well—that’s not too important.

  But my novel—that’s sitting in front of me again, undented, unformed—like some rubbery bit of material which pops back into shapelessness the minute you take your hands from it. The approach I’ve been trying is no good. I simply cannot believe in Stephen Monkhouse, or any other fictitious character, as the narrator. I can’t narrate this myself. And so I’m driven to the conclusion—I discussed it with Dodie on Sunday—that the novel must be written in the style of The Memorial: third person, and viewing the action from inside one or other of the characters—Stephen, Sarah, Gerda and the doctor, probably.

  This method would have certain great advantages. Stephen’s complicated past could be told by him to Gerda. The way I have it now, with Stephen as narrator, there is a certain false unpleasant coquetry about his withholding this information from the reader as long as he does. Also, the doctor’s point of view could be expressed so much better from inside the doctor. And Gerda’s and Sarah’s too, for that matter. Also, Stephen has to be much more violent, more unhappy, more confused, in the beginning. As long as he was the narrator, you got that emotion-recollected-in-tranquillity tone, which took the sting out of everything.

  The only loss, as I see it, is that we can’t have an epilogue or bridge passage connecting the whole narrative with the present day.

  December 13. Stuck. I can’t get the right technique for writing this book. Stephen can’t narrate, and yet, if he doesn’t, I can’t say half the things I want to. I don’t know—

  Helen [Kennedy]’s story of the rattlesnake that got into the boat. The fishermen dove into the water, lost all their equipment. The rattler rode to the shore, driven by the outboard engine, disembarked and disappeared into the woods.

  December 14. I think there is no doubt about it, I’m going through the “change of life.” Gerald Heard put that idea into my head the other day, and I take it on as a sort of reassurance—for I’m really alarmed at the state I’m in. (This despite what I told Gerald: that one of the chief benefits that remain to me from the Ivar Avenue days is that I have learned not to be alarmed by any mental symptoms, however violent and odd.)

  Certainly, my mind is softening, weakening. I have so little coordination that I putter around like a dotard. I’ll go upstairs to find a book, forget all about it, pick up something else, start to bring it downstairs, leave it in the kitchen and then hunt for it for hours.

  Then there is this constant sexual itch, which never seems to be satisfied—or very seldom—because it is accompanied by a certain degree of impotence. And there is a hyper-tension, worse, I think, than I have ever experienced.

  And so I fail to write. I put it off and put it off, and I do nothing about getting a job, and I drift toward complete pauperism, with nothing in sight. I am lazy and dreamy and lecherous. I hate being alone. I don’t exactly want Billy back—at least, I certainly don’t want him the way he was when he left. And I am fundamentally unserious in my approach to other people. I don’t believe in myself or my future, and all my “reputation” is just a delayed-action mechanism which only impresses the very young.

  Well—there is only one answer to all this. I’ve repeated it a thousand times already, and I’ll repeat it till I die: just keep right on trying and struggling. The situation is very bad but not hopeless. After all, you did get that thing about Klaus Mann written. That was something. Don’t be scared.

  1950

  January 2. Some ideas for stories:

  A dope addict is nursed devotedly by a younger man, a character of great warmth, innocence, sweetness. The dope addict dies. A third person, who is in love with the young man and hates the dope addict as an evil influence, is delighted, thinks, “Now he won’t be able to do any more harm to anyone.” But the young man, going through the dope addict’s belongings, finds a small packet of heroin. This starts him off. He becomes an addict.39

  Relationship between a middle-aged, “established” writer and a very young writer, still unpublished. The middle-aged writer is going through a period of complete impotence, but the young one doesn’t know this. He is tremendously
impressed by the older man and quite overwhelmed when the latter asks him to stay. Every morning, the young man sits down joyfully in the living room, thinking, “We are working under the same roof,” and writes as never before, in a fever of inspiration. Meanwhile, the older man goes up to his study and stays there all day, pretending to work. Does the young man unconsciously “cure” him? Perhaps.40

  The Strongheart story—the very mean dog who is trained, given a wonderful disposition, so that it turns into a canine saint and finally dies trying to understand and mutate.41

  January 3. Now, after months of pushing and pulling, this way and that, I must try to discover just what is wrong with my novel and why I can’t write it.

  What elements do I have?

  There is Stephen, with his past marriages, his terrible resentment against Jane. The “plot” of his development is simply that he comes to accept the failure of his marriage with Jane and to see that this was largely his own fault.

  Why was it his fault?

  Because he is a split personality. He’s torn between his Quaker background and the urge toward “bohemianism”; the misery of dilettantism keeps him in a perpetual state of guilt. He is chronically guilty. That’s his innermost meaning as a character: he is the embodiment of guilt, impotent guilt.

  How does he get over this?

  By understanding the lives of those who aren’t guilty—Sarah, Gerda, Dr. Kennedy and the best of the refugees.

  His story ends with a decision—to do something. Something antidramatic. I’m not sure what this is, but I can explain, in general, what I mean. For instance, if it’s pacifism, the temptation would be to refuse to register for the draft and to go to prison. The antidramatic decision would be to go to a CPS camp.