February 25. Yesterday was Ramakrishna’s birthday. I was up at Vendanta Place for vespers, and I open this to record a resolve made then—that I’ll write in this book at least twice every week until the birthday comes round again next year. That is, barring genuinely grave obstacles.
All the details of my present situation and of the lives of my friends are duly recorded in my pocket diary. Such as Maria’s death130 and funeral, the departure of Jo’s sister Jerry for Oregon with Bryson her husband, Don’s switch to Theater Arts at UCLA, the return of his father to live with his mother, etc. So I’ll start square with the present moment.
Met Lesser Samuels in Marian Hunter’s bookshop today—after, I think, a year and a half of not seeing him. He seemed absolutely unchanged. Told me a typical Samuels story, about a man who found the number 5 recurring so often in his life that he took it as an omen—looked up the fifth race on the sports page—found a horse called 5–5–5—backed it, and—it came in fifth. On hearing I was working on Buddha’s life, he said: “In other words, it’s a bread-and-buddha assignment.” But, alas, I didn’t hear him correctly, so he had to repeat the pun.
March 1. Yesterday we decided to buy a Ford convertible, and had supper with the Stravinskys. Igor told me he’s worried about Aldous, who is being too brave. He hasn’t yet mentioned Maria’s death to Igor. Igor has a fear that he’ll suddenly break down.
They are all three going away shortly on one of their complex trips, darting around Portugal and Spain, mingling concerts and sightseeing, then to Rome, where Vera will show her pictures, then somehow or other—or did I get this mixed up?—over Greenland by air to or from California.
Marguerite [Lamkin] called up in the middle of the night, excited because we were coming to the opening of Ten’s play.131 Actually, I no longer want to go, one little bit. There has been too much fuss over the whole project.
Nerves bad. Feelings of strain and rush. Why? No reason. Nothing could be easier than the life I’m living now.
Writing this sitting in my office at MGM, waiting for Knopf to arrive and show me the test of Marisa Pavan which they shot last week. Betsy Cox, my secretary, sits in the room, as good as gold, reading books about Buddha. She’s a nice girl, but I often wish she’d go away and leave me alone. I guess she has no place to go, except the script department.
I feel very dissatisfied with myself, right now. Fattish (I weigh nearly 150) and pouchy faced, I look much older than I did two to three years ago. That wouldn’t matter, except that the change seems entirely for the worse. I look like a toad, or a man who is being slowly poisoned to death. My mind is dull, and my spirit is blunted. This, of course, makes me bad for Don—whose hair-trigger nerves need constant soothing.
After Maria’s funeral, I cried all the way to the studio, and I was really crying for myself
March 3. Am writing this rather drunk on vodka and tonic in the evening after work, having faithfully started the barbecue fire for fish, brought lots of books from Saltair in the brand-new Ford convertible, purchased this morning, and done all my studio chores. To be domestically busy is for me le bonheur, happiness as the French see it—and that’s not such a bad way to see it either.
Marisa Pavan was in the studio today—she has been given the part of Catherine de Medici,132 definitely. She told us about her sister Pier [Angeli]’s accident: how she broke her pelvis in the ladies’ room on a plane flying to Palm Springs. But she was smilingly firm in refusing to go to classes with MGM’s dramatic coach. Knopf was rather provoked. He said: “I’m not a European, I’m an American, and I believe in saying exactly what I think.” In other words, he was going to tell the dramatic coach that Marisa didn’t want to go to her. Later he said: “She’s going to make some man very unhappy.”
Last night I had supper with Swami. After supper, he had a class in the living room and was asked what it was like to live with an illumined soul—i.e. Brahmananda and Premananda. He said: “What attracted me was their wonderful common sense.” Then he talked about how few people really bothered to come and see Ramakrishna while he was alive, though most of them became ardent devotees after Ramakrishna was dead. I couldn’t help applying this to Swami and myself. But at least, I told myself, I do see him sometimes. When we were alone in his room, he talked about Ujjvala—how terribly afraid she was of dying. “And then, when it happened, she didn’t feel anything. How very merciful they were to her!”
March 4. An argument with the Breen office133 about Diane. They claim that the picture condones adultery. Diane has broken “God’s law.” Although the office representatives kept protesting that they were only explaining the workings of the code, you could fairly smell their black pornographic Catholic spite. If they had their way, adultery would be punished by stoning, and homosexuality by being burned alive. It was interesting to watch how this pained and disgusted Knopf’s liberal Jewish soul. “It’s a great love,” he said. And they kept replying, “It’s adultery.” “Stop using that word!” Eddie exclaimed.
March 8. We’re in Philadelphia, at the St. James Hotel. We arrived here yesterday—plane to Washington, train on—to see Ten’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which opened at the Forrest Theater last night.
I still think it’s a very good play, but the performance was awful. An awful arty expressionistic set by Jo Mielziner. This play absolutely demands realistic staging. It is not symbolic. It means exactly what it says. Ben Gazzara was all wrong as Brick. Actually he was playing someone like Golden Boy134—an intense Jewish-Italian character from New York, without a vestige of charm, laziness or humor. Mildred Dunnock was all wrong too. She ought to have been fat. Burl Ives is just a gifted amateur. And Kazan (who’s chiefly at fault for all of this) had made him address the audience as if he were M.C. at a stag party. A lot of lines came out dirty which were perfectly all right when Tennessee read the play to us in Key West.
People who were there: Carson McCullers, Mikey Leopold and Henry Guerriero, Jay Laughlin,135 Gore Vidal, Maria Britneva,136 Paul Bigelow.137 Maria’s hair was dyed blonde for playing Blanche in Streetcar. I liked Carson—who kissed me when we were introduced. But she displays the most alarming kind of masochism. She lost all her money when she came down here. She wears a quite unnecessarily repulsive brace on her paralyzed arm. And she really ought to powder her nose. She belongs to the same psycho-physical type as Marguerite and Mikey Leopold. Mikey looked older, but was quite sweet. Marguerite kept giggling inaudible secrets to us—chiefly about Kazan having pinched her leg and William Faulkner being drunk somewhere in town. We haven’t seen him yet.
March 10. Got back here yesterday evening—one of the longest plane rides I’ve ever endured—twelve and a half hours. Marguerite came back with us. She slept throughout the flight, or just lay collapsed in a hangover daze. I read Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel about Hadrian,138 which bored me at the time, but which I now feel has penetrated quite deeply into my consciousness at some other level. There are books like that—they give you radium burns, as it were.
What I chiefly got from the book was a sense of the quality of growing old—something that’s very real to me now. For aren’t I too a sort of tacky aging emperor, with an Antinous perhaps not so unlike the original? On the flight out to Washington, I thought a great deal about my future as a writer—the fact that I’m so much out of touch with “average American life.” Does this matter? When one sees Carson, or even Tennessee, one wonders, “How far out of touch can you be?” And yet they function triumphantly. No. Everybody has something to write about. The problem is: find it.
March 15. Knopf is away, so my life at the studio centers around David Miller, who’s a nice guy, though a little too glad-handed and anxious to keep us all happy. He spent hours on Saturday trying to get Lana Turner to accept the line: “I know your majesty has a heart, and I fear it. But your heart is ruled by your head … etc.” Finally we found a solution: Diane now says: “I know your majesty has a heart, and I should fear it …”139
Don is much wo
rried. What shall he do? He hates school. Doesn’t want to be a student. Doesn’t seem to have any specific ambition, yet is guilt ridden—as I am—at the thought of idleness. Like me, he suffers from neurotic laziness.
What am I to tell him? I can’t advise—only say: I’m here, as long as you need me.
And it seems Ted is going to have another attack. He is exhibiting the usual unnatural excitement, hyperenthusiasm. He has given up his job at Ohrbach’s140 and wants to get an agent and try his luck at acting again. Neither of the parents can do anything. And this of course upsets Don horribly—especially as he fears Ted will vent his jealousy and resentment against him, as he did last time—hitting him in the face as they were walking down the street.
The Hoerners are now almost reunited. Mrs. Hoerner141 has her husband and her younger son Griff with her for the rest of this week—all three packed into the tiny garage apartment. She cooks for them on a hot plate which she keeps inside a closet, lest the Lights142 shall denounce her for breaking the building code.
Marguerite is going back East, for the New York opening. It seems she has already talked Harry [Brown]143 into this. We still don’t know her real motive. Ben Gazzara?
March 18. Angst. Partly to be rationalized by the fact that Ted is having another of his attacks. He left home last night, after pulling his father’s hair, and is to be expected down in the beach area today. His nice friend, Don Eliot (?), has obviously behaved very decently about all of this, but he won’t be able to restrain him.
But, aside from the Ted situation, I feel a formless unease and dissatisfaction. Yesterday night we fixed dinner for Aldous, Gerald, Chris Wood and Michael Barrie—and somehow it didn’t go well. Aldous, particularly, was tired after an excursion to Pasadena to see Mrs. Hubble, the astronomer’s widow. He yawned and kept closing his eyes, and his face was thin and grey. Also, they arrived early and had to wait an hour till the fish was cooked. And there was no real relaxation. Aldous refers without hesitation to Maria and the times they were together, but he is utterly lacking in any other kind of intimacy. He just voices negative opinions—how Bernard Shaw hasn’t lasted, or how much he and Maria were disappointed in Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian after the first sixty pages. He described her French as “elegant”—which sounded somehow strange in his mouth.
Gerald, far more sociable, told us that the collision of two galaxies—so far away as to be invisible to any telescope—is nevertheless the strongest vibration that listening devices can pick up in the universe. You can hear the planets grinding together.
Aldous referred several times to the Buddha film. He objects to our telling Siddhartha’s story at all. “It’s completely uninteresting. Before the enlightenment, he was simply a young millionaire.”
Later. Ted was picked up on Hollywood Boulevard this morning. Apparently, he started to undress on the street. He has been taken to General Hospital.
March 21. First day of spring. Yesterday was to have been a great event. Bette Davis was coming to lunch with us. But she sent a telegram at the last moment to say she had a cold. So we had John van Druten and Gerald. It went very well. Gerald talked about mescaline—saying it was the greatest experience he had ever had; and about Maria’s death, which greatly upset Don. Johnnie went on excitedly about Edwin Drood, which he had just read.
In the evening we went to Luchita Paalens’s.144 The highbrow group from the school of cinematography at UCLA. Bearded men and flowsy women. And no food served till eleven! We both woke up with stomachaches.
March 23. Well, I’ve done all my homework—a chunk of The Wayfarer (Buddha) which I dislike, and a rewrite of a scene for Diane—and am now waiting for Knopf’s call.
Have just been up to see Lennie Spigelgass, to ask him if he thought there was any chance of Speed getting a job in the studio. Lennie said it was impossible. Speed got here two days ago and has decided to settle, and take care of all our lives.
Donny started Monday night scene shifting for a production at UCLA. This is a compulsory chore for Theater Arts students. He’ll be at it about twenty nights.
This is the ominous spring period—a feeling of impending war in the Pacific, cancer danger from atomic fallout, etc. etc. At the same time, prosperity as never before. For the first time in my life, I’ve bought some savings bonds—$15,000 worth of government E.145
Now I must pull myself together in every way. There is plenty of time to exercise, study Spanish, sort my files and, above all, start thinking about my novel. I ought to welcome these evenings at home, alone or while Don is studying. Instead, I drink to relax into dullness.
Remember what Gerald told us—how Maria said to him: “I’m perfectly happy, except that I’ve got a little cancer.”
Monday evening, I ate with Don at Ted’s Grill. He had brought two bottles of Dietonic quinine water which he’d mixed half and half with vodka. These we drank, under the waitress’s nose.
Ted is being sent to Camarillo again. Mrs. Bachardy insists on this. Her husband wants him put into the care of the psychiatrist he went to—or rather, didn’t go to—last time.
Speed gave me a teddy bear called Bunchbaby which belonged to an Englishman who lived in Cyprus and Istanbul, and who recently committed suicide. The bear moves its head if you move its tail.
March 24. Don is at UCLA, scene shifting. I’ve just eaten at Ted’s Grill. Am drinking too much too regularly. Tonight—two vodka and tonics and a bottle of Schlitz, my minimum nowadays. I find myself missing smoking after eight, nearly nine months, quite acutely. The jitters set in every evening and my face twitches.
What a curious phase of my life this is! A coarse, American-way-of-living kind of happiness which nevertheless is happiness—not because of the new Ford or my accumulated books and other possessions, or my savings in the bank—but because of Don. The possessions represent “security,” which—however reassuring it may be—makes me, in the last analysis, feel guilty and insecure. But Don, who is the soul of insecurity, makes me feel unguilty because he stops me thinking about myself.
Perhaps the real trouble is simply that I never heard or knew of anyone whose life was like mine. Therefore I’m naturally uneasy and feel: “There must be something wrong, surely?”
I wish, I wish I had the leisure and occasion to sit down quietly and figure all this out!
Jo and Ben Masselink are off, this weekend, to observe the uranium rush in Kern County. They have no Geiger counter—only an ultraviolet lamp which makes rocks glow with marvellous jewel-lights which are quite invisible ordinarily. Jo has terrible pains in her back and leg. And these are all the worse for her because of her obvious fear of not being able to keep up with Ben. She looks older and more wrinkled as he grows younger and sleeker.
(At this point I’m taking a shot of brandy—making a definite step in my untergang,146 as I scarcely ever drink when absolutely alone. In bars or restaurants is psychologically different.)
Am rereading—after about thirty years—Hope Mirrlees’s novel The Counterplot, which I got here, after long advertisement. I find I know whole passages of it nearly by heart. It must have been one of the truly “formative” books in my life. And yet it represents so much that I used to imagine I hated and was fighting to the death—Cambridge cleverness and the whole Waste Land technique of describing moods by quotations from the classics—in fact, indulging in moods that were nothing else but the quotations themselves. It’s a second-rate book, but I still feel some of the charm it used to have for me. And just because its “sophistication” is transparently naive, I find it warmer and more sympathetic than that of the early Aldous Huxley.
There! I’ve dropped some brandy on the opposite page. Yet I can’t leave the ground, as I’d hoped to, and go into a mood of utterance rather than notation. Well—that’ll come some other time. I’m at least happy that I’m keeping my resolve to write in this book fairly regularly. Everything develops out of exercise.
Have just looked up “fescennine” in the dictionary—I found the
word in The Mint,147 which arrived the other day. Haven’t started it yet.
March 25. Don came home last night depressed because another student had told him his voice was too high. Also, he broke half of the glass steam-saucepan. Also, he’d told the captain of his scene-shifting crew that he had to work in a movie theater over the weekends and he didn’t like it when I told him that this lie was silly and unwise. (The whole study of Don’s minor dishonesties—lies like this one, and sneakings into loge seats with general admission tickets—would reveal, I suppose, a mixture of insecurity and wilful exclusion of the outside world, denial of involvement with it. And I suppose the denial of involvement has something to do with his curiously sheltered teenage years, when he and Ted and his mother went to movies together, every available moment.)
Good notices of Cat this morning in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. It opened last night.
Later. Floods of tears from Don this evening—why, I don’t yet exactly know. The given reason was that he’d been to lunch with Speed and met Eddie James at the entrance to the restaurant, and Speed had asked Eddie to join them, and then he had talked to Eddie all through the meal about people in England, completely ignoring Don. And, on top of that, John van Druten had written thanking me but not Don for lunch last Sunday. So Don feels left out of everything, ignored, overlooked, slighted. And what am I to say? It’s true. That’s how the world treats young people, and it hasn’t changed since I was twenty.
Personally I suspect that Don is suffering on a much deeper level the backwash of Ted’s breakdown. The terrific undermining shock to his security such a disloyalty—for Ted’s breakdowns are a kind of disloyalty, or refusal to cooperate—must be. I can only be glad that Don is able to cry about it, because I believe that’s a safety valve.
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 73