Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  August 15. Georgia O’Keeffe’s house. The massive adobe walls—big round pine beams with cross rafters of aspen or cedar. In some rooms, old cedar has been used; it looks like bundles of firewood. The pastel colors of New Mexico—pinkish brown or grey of adobe, pale green of sage. The black modernistic chair sitting like a spider in a corner of the hot patio.

  Up in the rock-littered hills—covered with piñon and weeping cedar—there are parklike clearings, great outcroppings of lichen-green rock, rolling uplands swept by a cold wind. The country is so empty that it makes you uneasy—it refuses all associations.

  August 19. Reading F[ord] M[adox] Ford’s Parade’s End54 has somehow shown me, once again, that I must not make any conditions, any plans as to my relations with Billy. Billy is a human being in trouble, and so am I. We are not Truman and Stalin, or a pair of businessmen. We cannot settle anything by bargaining. We have to live this through, with great patience, but without any of that “neither-do-I-condemn-thee” stuff. Oh, I shall never, never get out of this rut until I do that, once. The funny thing is—it’s exactly the subject of my novel (which looks promising, at present).

  That’s enough about myself. And the war? I’ll attend to the war when I get back to Santa Monica—Tuesday night is scheduled for our arrival; we leave Monday morning.

  The day before yesterday, Georgia drove us up to Taos. (The cottonwoods get a disease called chlorosis which makes them turn the most breathtaking, flaming yellow.) We saw Carl van Vechten again, and his friend Saul [Mauriber] at the awful vulgar over-planted estate of his niece Duane. We saw the wonderful church at the Rancho de Taos. We saw the pueblo. We saw [Dorothy] Brett, and shrill blonde-white witchlike Frieda [Lawrence], who is very sympathetic, and Angelino [Ravagli], who is rather too sleek and suave. Also, his Latin sex act bores me. He picked Peggy up in his arms, and this excited little Bull so much that he bit her in the buttock—“the haunch,” Peggy calls it.

  We went up and spent the night sleeping out of doors at the Lawrence ranch. It is exactly as Lawrence described it in St. Mawr. Brett came up with us. I really love her, with her hearing aid and her enormous ass and absurd bandit’s jacket. I said how good I always feel in the mornings, and she said, “Yes—but by the afternoon one has worried oneself into a fit.” She slept in the house—the new one Angelino built, blocking out the view from the old Lawrence house behind it, from jealousy, probably. It has a very squalid atmosphere, whereas the older house seems strangely joyful. The dead bees on Lawrence’s bed, and the yellow santo,55 and the string mat Lawrence made to sit on by the fireplace. A reproduction or small copy of the awful Lawrence painting Frieda has down in her house—the great tortured German frau dragging a factory after her by a harness of ropes, and straining up towards a bearded Lawrence figure, who is rolling his eyes with horror and apparently fighting off another frau with a sword, maybe, or a radioactive rolling pin. All of these Lawrence paintings are surprisingly dirty. Brett says she and Lawrence did all the work, while Frieda lay on the bed smoking cigarettes. But you can’t believe a word these women disciples say of each other.

  (I like some of Brett’s Indian paintings, though. The portraits of Stokowski are absurd—rather like Van Meegeren.56) She had a very beautiful Union Jack, faded to rose pink, on the wall; and on the garage doors the arms of her family.

  The night began cloudy, with wide lightning flashes and approaching thunder. Some drops of rain fell, nearly driving us indoors. Then the sky cleared and swarmed with stars. Peggy identified Vega and Cygnus. I recited Shakespeare to make her and Georgia go to sleep, but could think only of unsuitable murder and ghost scenes. Brett’s dog began to bark and we pretended to fear the spooks had got her. Little Bull was delighted, because he was going to bed the same time as the grown-ups.

  Lawrence’s tomb is very amateur-dauby. Peggy was shocked because I signed the guest book. Didn’t tell her that I also took two red flowers from the hillside in front of it and pressed them in my billfold for relics. Georgia went striding off through the morning woods, “walking the ditch,” to keep it clear of undergrowth. Some animal had died in the tank, and the water stank badly.

  Yesterday we visited Mabel Dodge Luhan—a great disappointment, after all the stories about her witchlike fiendishness, jealousy and ruthless egotism. Such a dowdy little old woman—as Peggy said, “She’s reverted to Buffalo.”57 She looks like a landlady. And her house is full of the stupidest junk. It was very sad; the feeling of the old days gone—John Reed gone—Lawrence gone—and this old frump stuck with her fat Indian man, building houses and drinking whiskey in the morning. And yet the stories persist. The woman who lent Mabel a jacket. Mabel wore it all summer, then returned it. One night, the woman was out riding in the jacket, and a bullet whizzed past her. She dismounted, ran to the nearest bush, where a young Mexican, whom she knew, was crouching with a gun. “Forgive me,” he gasped, “I thought you were Mrs. Luhan.”

  When we got home again, there was a young Jewish girl, Doris Bry, just arrived from New York. She is Georgia’s secretary. Pale, tall, thin, exhausted; just a trifle murderee, but nice, I think. An argument between Peggy and Georgia about the Woman’s Party—Peggy being antilegislation and in favor of women getting their way through men. Georgia and Doris on the other side, and telling me later that of course Peggy didn’t understand. She had always been so attractive and had never had to earn her living.

  Peggy is much concerned with the change of life and anxious not to try to be attractive anymore. (She will, though.) She is transferring her sexual vanity to her children, as bankers transfer money from a city which may be bombed. (This is happening in New York, also with the pictures at the Met—evacuation plans are being made. And yet rents in Manhattan are actually rising, Doris tells us.) Peggy goes on and on about her children until one could scream. She oversells everything she admires. So does Georgia—that sturdy old beautiful weather-beaten cedar root. (Georgia gave me a cedar root she found at the Lawrence ranch.)

  Remember how Georgia had a cat which used to catch rats and eat only the heads, leaving the other half for the kittens. So Georgia kept the half rats in the icebox till they were needed. (A good scene: two drunken people raiding the icebox. One of them nearly eats the rat.)

  Georgia’s feminist approach to art. She had a very handsome, much spoiled elder brother—so got the feeling, “Anything you can do, I can do as well, or better.” She keeps apologizing, half humorously, for being “cruel.”

  Abiquiu is less than thirty miles from Los Alamos, so it might well go up in the air at any minute. Los Alamos now employs thousands of people, making Española into a boomtown. Los Alamos is referred to as “the mountain.”

  Stieglitz58 was fond of insisting that the artist only needs a minimum of material for his work. A great number of his best pictures were taken within a radius of a few yards at his house on Lake George—the interior, the exterior, the view from the porch, the poplars, the clouds.

  November 30. Speed Lamkin took Bill and me to dinner with Marion Davies. (Bill, actually, arrived late because he had to go down with Lennie [Newman] to the court at Manhattan Beach, where Lennie got fined for drunk driving.)

  The Hearst house is guarded by several cops. Only the servants’ entrance, on Shadow Hill Drive, is open. You go in by the little office from which, Speed says, the whole Hearst empire is controlled. He adores this smell of power, in a sort of Balzacian way. With his vulgarity, snobbery and naive appetite for display, he might well become a minor Balzac of Hollywood. There is something about him I rather like, or at any rate find touching. He is so crude and vulnerable, and not malicious, I think. He reminds me of Paul Sorel, but he is much more intelligent; and he has energy and talent.

  The inside of the house is heavily ornate baroque Spanish. The full-length portraits of Marion in her most famous roles. The murals in the dining room: an Eskimo woman seeing a vision at a totem pole, a Renaissance painter at work, an Asiatic prince out hunting. Gold plate on the sideboard. Six armc
hairs facing each other, three to three, each with ashtrays and cigarettes, as if for a game.

  [Two editors from] the New York office of some Hearst publication. [The wife of one], much younger, a Catholic, an orphan raised by [wealthy benefactors in California]. She was given everything she wanted. The two men were called upstairs to see Hearst and stayed a long while. They are almost unbelievably paranoiac. Everybody is accused of being either a Jew (President Truman, Roosevelt, etc.) or a Red (Dorothy Parker, the CBS news analysts, the Hollywood producers). General MacArthur is the Galahad of their mythology. His portrait hangs in the office. [The woman], though a Catholic, approves of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Marion Davies, thin, pink, raddled, with luxuriant dead-looking fair hair, very innocent blue eyes, came in drunk. One wanted to say, like a Shakespearean character: “Alack, poor lady. …” She stumbled a little and had to be helped to her chair; but she made a lot of sense, and talked seriously to the two men about business. Between whiles, she spoke of the stage; with Speed drinking in every word. Later, in the office, very drunk, she danced with Speed and Billy, and did the splits to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” until her nurse (who sits reading in the toilet) came to take her to bed around 3:30 a.m.

  December 11. We came down here—31152 Monterey Street, South Laguna—last night. And now I’m writing this on the porch outside; partly because Bill has driven down to the lumber company to get wood for bookshelves, and I have to stay home waiting for a man to come and put in the telephone and there isn’t anything else for me to do; partly because I want to signalize our move from Santa Monica and our settling here by an “act of composition,” no matter how slight.

  I like this house, despite its knotty pine walls, because it fits into a picture I have of the atmosphere of “Old Laguna”—the original colony of third-rate watercolorists, mild eccentrics, British expatriate ladies who ran “Scottish” tea shops, astrologers, breeders of poodles, all kinds of refugees from American city life. Also, this whole area of small houses, gardens of flowering shrubs and sheltered winter sunshine, sandy lanes winding up and down the steep hillside, takes me back to early memories of Penmaenmawr59 and Ventnor.60 I have an agreeable feeling of having come to the very last western edge of America, looking out over the pale bright Pacific—much cleaner than at Santa Monica—with nothing between me and Catalina but mist and a huge telephone pole.

  Like all our other moves, this one takes place at a most alarming moment, under the shadow of total war, regimentation, hysteria and panic. On top of that, we have very little money and not much prospect of making any. And I’m worried, of course, about the prospects of Bill’s getting drafted. Yet I have often been far more depressed with less reason. The weather is perfect. And Bill, working like a beaver on all the details of fixing this place up, is at his best—cheerful, funny and energetic. I know that he means to make this “a new start,” though we don’t discuss it much, and I’m eager to meet him three quarters of the way. Sometimes I begin to venture to say to myself that maybe we have passed some kind of danger point and are now on our way to better times. But that’s still wishful thinking. I do know that if it were true, and if the political situation improves, and if we can get enough money to live on, this this might be the start of one of the happiest periods of my life.

  And, let me repeat it, that so largely depends on myself. Calm, meditation, work, regular habits, study, discipline, proper exercise; the absolutely necessary regime for middle age. The past two years have been so incredibly wasteful. I’ve been like an engine with the belt slipping. And yet I know quite well how to employ the proper technique. (I certainly ought to, after impressing everybody with the clarity of my comments on Patanjali! What an old hypocrite, if I don’t follow them!) The whole art of intentional living is in variety. You don’t want to write your novel? Very well, do some other work, answer letters, get on with translating, read something instructive, take exercise, fix something in the garden, and fill every crack, every odd moment, with japam. Never loll and smoke and go into tense rigid daymares. Don’t waste an instant on hate or anxiety. Practice Benoit’s exercise of disconnecting the imagination.61 Never bear down with your will on Billy—willing him to do something, to be active, just because that excuses you from guilt at your own idleness.

  Anybody who can sit on this porch as you’re doing right now, and work in the sunshine (hurrah, here comes the telephone man!) is luckier than ninety-nine percent of the population of the world today.

  1951

  March 6. This afternoon is chilly but brilliant—the ocean glittering and lazy, the big clouds piled along Catalina, Clemente and Palos Verdes visible. Bill has gone shopping in the Anglia.62 I’m dull and wretched, so weary of my stupid aging slothful self in its alienation from God. It comes to me, again and again, how I have deteriorated into a dull-witted selfish useless creature—the most shameful failure, since I asked the way to God, was shown it, and then didn’t take it. Even now (but for how much longer?) Swami stands ready to help me if I’ll even raise one finger. But I won’t. I won’t go to live at Trabuco.

  Billy drinks a lot at weekends, comes back in the middle of the night, and keeps me awake playing records. I hate him for this, hate him for refusing to take a job. But I won’t help him. I’m probably bad for him, but I don’t leave him.

  Self-accusation is useless. There is absolutely no sense in writing all this down, and I’m really only doodling, trying somehow to induce a more lucid mood. I know exactly what I ought to be doing. I ought to make japam, go for a walk, write letters, get on with my novel. I ought. I ought. I ought. How sick I am of that word!

  Good. Now do something.

  April 27. Thy will be done—how often must I say it?

  Every day, every hour, every moment.

  What I really am trying to run away from is myself.

  What I am trying to impose—under the disguise of “reasonableness”—is my own will. “Nothing burns in hell except the self,”63 and I am miserable because the self is burning.

  In the simplest, most terrible manner I am being taught that no other kind of life is possible for me. The monastery is here, is wherever I am. When Swami said: “Ramaskrishna will hound you,” he wasn’t kidding.

  And yet, how merciful life has been to me; and how happy my life could be, if I would just give it to him! I have my duty, my dharma, so clearly set before me. Write, work, meditate, offer everything to him.

  Leave Billy, and what’ll you get? Another Billy.

  I should be glad of all this agony, which only shows me that I’m at grips with my problem. Let go—can’t you? Are you crazy, to torture yourself like this?

  Oh Master; let me know the peace of doing your will. Help me to stop judging, criticizing, hating. Help me to know and live within your love.

  Never mind how far I’ve fallen back from what I once seemed to know so clearly. As long as I struggle, I’ll never be lost. I can start every instant. This very instant.

  May 6. It is so terrible, so criminal to be unhappy, the way I’m unhappy now. Just tamas. Oh Master, deliver me from it. I just wrote and burnt a letter to Jim. It was a cry for help, and I mustn’t cry for help to anyone except you.

  After the last entry in this book, all sorts of people came down for the weekend, and I was cheerful and it “went” very well. But afterwards I felt—well, sort of disturbed in my inmost nest. It was hard to settle down on the eggs again. (The eggs, this week, were a rather stupid review I did of a book on Katherine Mansfield.64)

  The kind of life Billy wants to make me lead isn’t hellishly wicked or degraded—it would even allow for a certain amount of work—but it isn’t my kind of life.

  Well, what is my kind of life?

  I must confess, I want to be looked after. I want the background of a home. I see now how well the arrangement at Pembroke Gardens65 suited me, during the last year or so in England (much as I complained about it). I could go out as much as I wanted to, but I had the snugness of a bedroom and b
reakfast. Now, I suppose I must admit that this arrangement is really almost impossible to set up again. One needs an undemanding aunt. A wife would be no good, because she’d demand all kinds of things.

  What I really want is solitude in the midst of snugness.

  Well, you won’t get it, Mac.

  Why do I dislike it here?

  Partly because I feel no security. Maybe Bill will stay home, maybe he won’t. Maybe I’ll get a night’s sleep, maybe Bill will come back late and play the phonograph. Maybe I can work. Maybe I can’t.

  I suppose I ought to accept the idea of being alone. It doesn’t really terrify me as much as all that. And, of course, if Vedanta means anything to me at all, it should not.

  But when I see myself in my daydreams of freedom, I am always traveling—alone at the rail of a boat, with my coat collar turned up. Or traveling toward New York, London, etc. And, of course, there’s someone I meet, en route.

  There is absolutely no doubt, I really ought to leave Bill. I am only plaguing him. And yet, somehow, to leave—just like that—as the result of a “sensible” decision—or in a towering rage; both seem wrong.

  Oh Master—give me a sign. Help me. Please help me. You won’t desert me. Help me now.

  Two stories Eddie James told about Tallulah Bankhead.

  1. Tallulah was at a party at which Peggy Kiskadden was also a guest. Tallulah and Anita Loos were wisecracking, and Peggy, feeling somewhat left out of things, turned to the man she was with and said: “Aren’t they amusing?” Her tone must have sounded patronizing, for it annoyed Tallulah who turned on her and retorted: “My good woman, we are no more ‘they’ than you are!”