Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  January 27. Have been up at Trabuco since January 9. (Caskey left for San Francisco on the 6th and I haven’t heard from him yet, which worries me. I don’t know if he has a ship or is in prison, or what.)

  Very fine weather, hot, utterly unlike this time of year.

  Today I finished the rough draft of my novel—all the way from the beginning of chapter five, part two, till the end of part three. About eighty-eight pages in eighteen days.

  This has been one of the strangest of all my literary experiences. A sheer frontal attack on a laziness block so gross and solid and almost sentient and malevolent that it might be the devil as an incarnation of tamas—or Goethe’s fault-and-obstacle-finding, all-denying Mephistopheles. What with having given up smoking, having no drink (except an occasional sherry with Swami before lunch) and no sex, I was nearly crazy with tension. I actually said to Ramakrishna in the shrine: “If it’s your will that I finish this thing, then help me.” And so we began to move. But it was a hard push all the way through; and what I’ve written is the crudest nonsense. It is only slowly taking shape as a novel. Much, I now see, is completely irrelevant. … However, this isn’t the place or the time to go into all that.

  What matters is a genuine victory; and I am very grateful for it. I feel as if my whole future as a writer—and my sanity, almost—had been at stake. And yet I daresay I seemed quite cheerful, relaxed and level headed to the boys. These struggles go on deep underground.

  It’s a hard life they have here, in spite of all outward advantages, and I feel great respect and sympathy for them. Tito seems to be wearing himself down, overstraining and fighting every inch—but that may be only temporary. There are strange sudden unexpected let ups. I feel fond of all the boys—John [Schenkel], Ken, Phil [Griggs], Mike, Lee (whom I feel I know least); and they all seem as if they had a chance of staying the course—but it’s nearly impossible to know. This worship of Ramakrishna—its Indianness—still bothers me often; and yet I find the actual dualistic-devotional relationship quite natural in itself. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t live here permanently at present, though—much as I like coming here on visits.

  March 6. Why, oh why, can’t I keep this journal regularly?

  After January’s industry, February has been a truly wasteful, manic month. Despite my rough draft, I’ve only done twenty-six pages of the revised chapter four, part two. Terrible arrears of letters.

  Oh yes, I have alibis. Jim’s [enthusiastic socializing] with Earl [McGrath], which meant a lot of drinking, the garage fire on February 5, and Ted Bachardy’s breakdown, which lasted from about the 20th until he was committed on the 26th. But all that is no real excuse.

  I woke, around 2:30 a.m., from a nightmare that I was being chased by Nazis who’d seen me watching them bury the corpses of murdered children. There was a strange unpleasant smell which I didn’t immediately identify as burning, but when I went to the door—hearing roaring, crackling sounds in the high wind—the garage was full of fire. Half asleep still, I ran to warn the Hookers, and banged on the wrong door, the one I know is always locked, until I realized what I was doing. I never once thought of my novel, or of taking anything with me. I don’t know what this proves. I’m sure I wasn’t that scared.

  But, looking out of the Hookers’ window and seeing the blaze and thinking that for sure everything I owned was burned, I felt a very curious exhilaration. It was almost as if I understood, for the first time, the meaning of the homa fire. “Okay—a real fresh start, then, if that’s your will. What do you want now? Tell me. I’m ready.”

  But when the firemen arrived, and I knew my little house was safe, then I was frantic, lest water might have come in through the ceiling and spoiled something! But it hadn’t. This is as near as I’ve ever been to a miracle: I honestly feel I was “protected.”

  The Ted Bachardy case was very ugly and horribly tragic. The way his gentle charming face became thin and wolflike and crafty. I found I could only handle him by relaxing toward his madness, making myself become quite passive and silly and weak—seeking his protection, almost. I understood how deep the relationship is between Lear and the Fool. “You’re like me, Chris. We both get pushed around. But I’m not going to stand for it. I know how to play my cards. I can handle anyone.”

  The parents sent for the police, and Ted was dragged away, screaming and fighting, in handcuffs. And his little brother Don cried in my car afterwards: “Chris, he’s really insane.”

  I feel a special kind of love for Don. I suppose I’m just another frustrated father. But this feeling exists at a very deep level, beneath names for things or their appearances. We’re just back from a trip to Palm Springs together, which was one of those rare experiences of nearly pure joy. There’s a brilliant wide-openness about his mouse face, with its brown eyes and tooth gap and bristling crew cut, which affects everybody who sees him. If one could still be like that at forty, one would be a saint.

  March 7. Supper at the Huxleys’, with Gerald, Chris Wood, Eileen Garrett and a young man named Rolf who’s a friend of Eileen’s. She had wanted this meeting, and it was certainly a feat, getting Chris to come clear up from Laguna Beach for it. But, now it’s over, I don’t really know just why Eileen wanted to see us all. She’s an odd creature, with many purposes and lots of blarney. She keeps going on about how she sees a light all around me. Her sittings in the Faraday Box produced shingles which turned into cysts. She saw Stalin dead in a dream and predicted it for this year, four years ago—she says.93

  Gerald is quite transformed. His health has become wonderful. He is very lively and greatly interested in the problem of what he calls the “intergrade.”94 He’ll drink sherry, and eat meat sometimes. He seems to have so much more warmth and charity, and less malice. Eileen told us that Gerald and Chris must never let themselves be separated.

  I told Gerald how I believe that Ted could have been cured, or at least temporarily brought to himself if someone could have (a) provoked him to a friendly fight, a wrestling match, and (b) gotten him to perform an active sexual role. That’s the only way I could imagine his aggression and his pathic fear being gradually dispelled. Ted could only fight in anger and when he was in this manic phase, but all he really wanted was to assert himself as a man. He could only approach sex passively, but he really longed to be the aggressor.

  April 20. Coming back at 10:45 from supper at Jo and Ben’s, with talk about the war, This Is My Beloved,95 and Jay [de Laval] and the old Canyon—the nice smell of redwood as I lifted the garage door. And the feeling of impotence—or, what it really amounts to, lack of inclination to cope with a constructed, invented plot—the feeling, why not write what one experiences, from day to day? And then, as I slid my door back, this sinking-sick feeling of love for Don—somehow connected with the torn shorts—and the reality of that—so far more than all this tiresome fiction. Why invent—when Life is so prodigious?

  Perhaps I’ll never write another novel, or anything invented—except, of course, for money.

  Write, live what happens: Life is too sacred for invention—though we may lie about it sometimes, to heighten it.

  Oh, if I could have the wisdom to spend these last twenty years in some better way—not messing with this crap.

  Let me try.

  April 21. I was more than somewhat drunk when I wrote the above, but that doesn’t signify. It’s how I feel.

  I’m really very dissatisfied with the novel—it’s so lifeless. None of the characters are unique, like the best in my other books. And I don’t feel I have put anything of importance into the book itself: no deep thought or sincere feeling.

  What a strange time this is for me! Perhaps a sort of change of life doldrums. My head feels so dull. (Just looked at the small knob on the second hand of my wristwatch and thought it was an insect—wondered how it ever got inside the watch glass!) I feel impotent—though I’m not, physically. But there’s a kind of gone feeling.

  The situation with Billy is so strange. I mind, and yet I do
n’t. My only nostalgia seems to be for the pain he caused me. Am I really such a masochist? Have I ever had any relationships of this kind that weren’t painful—and is that because I feel guilty about them anyway; feel that they alienate me from God? Am I still a monk at heart? Ramakrishna will hound you, Swami said.

  [On a separate sheet dropped into his diary notebook, Isherwood recorded a car trip with Don Bachardy to Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada during Bachardy’s spring vacation in early May, as follows.]

  May 4. Picked up Don at City College and we left, at 1:30 p.m., for Blythe, arriving 6:55, 223 miles. Stayed at Monterey Motel. Supper at Chicken House.

  May 5. Left Blythe 6:55, via Prescott, Jerome, Oak Creek Canyon, Flagstaff, to Gallup, arriving 7:45. Stayed at Log Cabin Lodge. Supper at Luigi’s. 434 miles. Lost spectacles.

  May 6. Left Gallup 8:12, via Ganado, Canyon de Chelly, Rough Rock, Chilchonbeta, Kayenta, arriving Monument Valley 7:00. Stayed at Harry Goulding’s Lodge, 217 miles.

  May 7. Toured Monument Valley in jeep stationwagon, 8:35 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Left Monument Lodge 3:15, via Kayenta, Tuba City, to Cameron, arriving 7:00, 121 miles. Ate supper at Cameron

  Trading Post. Stayed at Cameron Court Hotel. Gale with sandstorms.

  May 8. Left Cameron 9:33, for Grand Canyon Village, arriving 12:07. Left Grand Canyon 2:25, via Williams, Kingman, to Boulder City arriving 8:25, 330 miles. Ate at Bob’s. Stayed at Black Canyon Motel.

  May 9. 9:20. Left Boulder City to visit Boulder Dam, Lake Meade. Then to Las Vegas, arriving 12:25, 40 miles. Stayed at Gateway Motel. Supper at Last Frontier. Saw Marge and Gower Champion96 at the Flamingo.

  May 10. Left Las Vegas 9:30 a.m., via Barstow, Victorville, San Fernando Valley for home, arriving 5:00 p.m.—294 miles. Total trip 1,704. Supper at El Coyote. Saw The Glass Wall and part of The Four Poster.

  June 23. Supper with John van Druten, after a day at Santa Barbara, with Swami and John Yale.

  Johnnie (van Druten) and I ate at Musso Frank’s. Johnnie sententious—how he felt about Syngman Rhee97 and Korea, how—when he and Starcke were waiting for a decision on Camera as a movie, he thought, “What have I ever suffered in comparison with what the Rosenbergs are feeling, waiting for execution?”98 I guess, when he talks like this, one is supposed to fall on one’s ass with amazement at such charity and cosmic sensibility.

  He announced, with great dramatic pathos, that he no longer felt Dodie was a great friend. But actually what he never realizes is that Dodie felt this years ago. He says he told Charlie Brackett, and Charlie said that it was Henry James’s fault.99

  After supper, he was drunk in the Pickwick bookshop and announced that he had written an essay on Arnold Bennett.

  He is very proud because he meditated four times a day in Honolulu with Joel Goldsmith. He and Starcke. Another guy they met there only meditated twice. And then the other guy was seen dining with Johnnie and Starcke at Chasen’s, and the people who saw them thought it must be business—something to do with Camera, and this proved to Johnnie that his least action is news.

  Good. I got that bitchiness off my chest. I feel better. I understand Johnnie and am fond of him, up to a point. At least he goes out on a limb and is human. But oh my God what a stuffed shirt!

  August 25. Three or four nights ago, I dreamt that I was sharing a bed with Swami in a hotel which I knew to be a male whorehouse. Except that we were sharing a bed, our relations were as they always are. I was full of respect and consideration for him; asking him—we were just getting up—if he wouldn’t care to use the bathroom first.

  But then Swami said, “I’ve got a new mantram for you, Chris. It is: ‘Always dance.’” “What a strange mantram!” I said. Swami laughed: “Yes. It surprised me too. But I found it in the scriptures.”

  The feeling of this dream was very good. The highest kind of camp.

  September 22. Bad: Don damaged the car in an accident with a trolley car yesterday evening, and so I will have to pay about forty-five dollars. Ivan Moffat still owes me two thousand, and Caskey, Jim and others another thousand or more between them. And Bob Linscott of Random House wants changes in the novel, and Alan White of Methuen hasn’t even written me yet, which looks sinister.

  I’m very happy in my father relationship with Don, except that he makes me feel so terribly responsible. It’s nearly as bad as Heinz all over again. Nearly, but not quite, because Don is a lot brighter, and really much more able to look out for himself.

  Good: I still have over six thousand dollars clear of income tax, even if none of the above-mentioned debts are repaid. Also, I have plenty of time to write something else or get a job before the money runs out. (It’s unlikely I will earn anything from the U.S. edition of my novel for quite some while, because I owe Random House three thousand dollars.)

  As usual, of course, all this material bookkeeping is utterly beside the point. The point is that I’m going through another period of alienation from God, and that’s why I’m worried, anxious, unhappy, pessimistic. I could do a lot with this time, while Don’s at school and I can come down here to work. Why don’t I? Fear-sloth. Come on, now. You got that book finished, even if it does have to be revised. One spell is broken. Why weave another?

  November 19. Maria Huxley, describing how she’d reacted to Audrey Hepburn, who came to dinner with them the other night and was a great success: “When she put her head on one side and looked through those eyes, it was very natural and quite first-rate.”

  December 8. I think I will write down my memories of Dylan Thomas now. After he died, Stephen asked me to write something about him, and I replied that I couldn’t, because my memories were unsuitable for an obituary notice, too much involved with other people, who would be offended. But I’d better record them here, before they get too vague.

  I think I really only had two meetings with Dylan. The first was on Monday, April 10, 1950, while I was living down in Santa Monica Canyon, at 333 East Rustic Road. Bill Caskey was away at the time, in Kentucky—it was after his father had died.

  Fairly early that morning, the telephone rang. It was Dylan, whom I’d never met. Someone had given him my number. He sounded terribly lost and remote. “I’m down here,” he said in his beautiful deep little voice—“down here” might have been purgatory, the way he sounded, but it turned out to be the Biltmore. I then learnt that he was to give a reading at UCLA that afternoon, and that the English department had provided no transportation, simply telling him that there was a bus. I was suitably indignant—partly because I really thought this an outrageous rudeness, partly because I knew I had to go down and get him myself.

  I found him alone, in the morning desolation of the long bar. He was a touching, but not in the least pathetic, little figure in a blue serge suit which looked as though he often fought and slept in it. (He often did.) The front of the jacket was sprinkled and smeared with cigarette ash. The impression he made on me was, primarily, of struggle: he seemed to be right in the midst of his life—not off on one side looking at it—and he grappled with it as though it were a policeman.

  He told me that he’d arrived in Los Angeles the night before—called me several times in vain—as a matter of fact, I was out with Speed Lamkin, our first meeting, too—and then gone on the town. A taxi driver had taken him to some after-hours place, in the Negro section, and they had become such friends that he had given Dylan a ring. It was a very cheap one, but Dylan showed it [to] me with pride, and it was plain how greatly he valued friendship, no matter who offered it, if the offer was sincere. He adopted me as a friend immediately, on the strength of my having come to fetch him, and very soon he gave me a present—a small crab inlaid in a half ovoid of plastic, with a key ring attached. This I treasured until I lost it last year, drunk, at Long Beach. Now I have only his signature in two of his own books.

  As we drove out to Santa Monica, Dylan gradually heightened the steam pressure of his indignation against the English department of UCLA. He also kept pressing me to stop for
a drink. This I evaded, because I was afraid he was going to get so high that he wouldn’t be able to give his reading.

  Dylan also talked about his wife and children, and again I felt his great warmth. He seemed eager to enter into the lives of his friends and understand their relationships, too. When I showed him my workroom he at once noticed Denny’s photograph on the wall and said respectfully, “He’s very beautiful.” I felt quite sorry that I had to explain the mistake. Dylan then told me how, in San Francisco, a party of queens had taken him around the bars—and how, being grateful for their kindness, he had tried to enjoy himself but had longed for a woman. At last, in one bar, he saw a most lovely girl, alone amongst all the men. He had run to her eagerly and seized her in his arms—only to find that this was a boy in drag. He seemed very gentle, now, and trustful. There was also, in him, a kind of apologetic Colonel Blimpishness. “Of course, the Russians are rather awful,” he said, “but one can’t very well say so nowadays, when all these swine are attacking them.”

  Then it was time to go to lunch with some of the English department before Dylan’s reading, which was set for the early afternoon. I already knew and disliked the head of the department, a bogus, oily, sanctimonious creature named Majal Ewing, who had married money. But, oddly enough, I can’t be sure if he was at this lunch, which was eaten at a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, called the Fox and Hounds—or some such Olde Englishe title.

  Lunch was tense. Dylan had had some drinks at my house, and now accepted more—unwillingly as they were offered. The nice clean youngish-oldish blank-faced anxious English teachers sat around, waiting for the volcano to erupt. Actually, it never quite did; but there were some powerful rumblings. Somebody remarked that Los Angeles was a big city. “Very big,” said Dylan ominously. “Especially if you have no friends.” He was asked his opinion on various literary matters; I forget what his answers were, but they were peppered with four-letter words which made the academics wince. They were pretty contemptible, altogether; and yet I could see the farcical side of their prissiness. They had conjured up this dangerous little creature, excited by the dangerousness in his poems, and now that they had him there in the flesh, he terrified and shocked them by those very qualities which are so admirable as long as they remain merely literary. How many times the same thing must have happened with Rimbaud! But the dilemma really exists in childhood. It’s the attitude of the small boy who would love (he thinks) to have live roaring tigers leap into the room out of his picture books, but who doesn’t want to be afraid of them if they appear.