Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  “How vise it is to hafe much money!” the Baron de Nucingen says.148 How wise it is to have much love!

  (Am drinking brandy again—the second glass—as I write this.)

  March 27. Yesterday night, Don got almost hysterical because he couldn’t get the movie projector working to show the four films we have just had developed—of our visit to New York, our sightseeing in Washington on the way to Philadelphia, etc. Later he told me he’d decided to “give up feeling insecure.” That’s what’s so lovable and truly admirable about Don. He never takes refuge in self-pitying sulks for more than a few hours—always he comes out of them and accepts responsibility for his life.

  Today was dull and cloudy. Don had to read Six Characters in Search of an Author. I cleaned house, shopped. Then Harry, Speed and Marguerite came, and we showed them the films. Harry was in a bad mood—partly dysentery, partly jealousy of the fun Marguerite had had in New York, where she went for the triumphant opening of Cat. Truman took her to a lesbian bar which is guarded by gangsters, where he claims to have escorted Garbo and Jennifer Jones. But, this time, he wasn’t let in, and neither was Marguerite.

  After supper, I saw Jo and Ben, back from their tour of the uranium-rush country. They had slept out in bags, under Mount Whitney, and talked to lots of prospectors. Jo was triumphant—despite her bad back, they had had fun, and her way of life was vindicated.

  A fortune teller in New York has told Marguerite that she made a bad mistake in her marriage, but not to worry, because in June a big change is coming. Her husband, who has been doing work he doesn’t like, will start doing something congenial and be very happy.

  March 29. This morning I’ve decided not to go to the studio—“to work at home” as it’s called—unless I’m called in to see some film of Pedro Armendariz in Lucretia Borgia. David Niven can’t play Francis in our picture—he’s sick—so there’s a desperate search for someone else. Or we’ll end up with John Williams, who has to be paid anyhow.

  Have just vacuumed part of the straw matting. It looks no better for it. Don is still in school.

  Last night I had supper with Peggy and Bill Kiskadden. Chris Wood was there too. Both Peggy and Bill looked well. Peggy in a Chinese gown almost indecently sexy, showing glimpses of leg up the thigh, through the side slits. Bill thinner and tanned from his Oriental trip. He went right round the world, via India, Hong Kong and Japan. Peggy turned back with little Bull at Beirut, because she realized from Maria Huxley’s letters that she was getting worse. Sentences stopped in the middle. And it seems that Maria would sometimes say very strange things in conversation, too. Over the phone, she told Grace Hubble, who was coming to lunch: “Always wear lipstick.” (Peggy thinks that this expressed her own preoccupation with keeping up appearances—trying to look well and pretty so as not to alarm Aldous.) Bill says this wandering of the mind was probably due to Maria’s toxic condition.

  Peggy says that Maria wasn’t scared at the end, but that she was terribly scared in Paris, while they were on their trip. (I suppose Maria told her this.) Once, while Aldous was away in England, Maria went into a restaurant and ordered coffee, and then suddenly had this sense of utter isolation—knowing she must die soon—and rushed out into the street.

  Peggy’s old mother, who has had both breasts removed for cancer, is still alive and perfectly well at eighty. She had written to Peggy “touchingly” about Maria’s death—saying that it seemed so strange that Maria should have been taken first, and that this was no doubt because Maria had done all she was appointed to do in this life, and because, “I, apparently, haven’t.” One saw that Peggy hasn’t forgiven her mother yet, however.

  She snorted at me a little—first when I told her jokingly how scared I’d been when the doctor made such a mystery out of what proved to be the amoebic dysentery—and Peggy retorted: “Knowing you, dear, I can imagine!” And then when I described our various trips, she said: “Somehow, I can’t imagine doing that sort of thing after twenty. It seems Peter Pannish, sort of.” She is such a bitch. And yet I’m fond of her.

  Then we saw a picture of Derek [Bok]’s fiancée—the daughter of two famous Swedish political economists, the Myrdals.149 A very pretty blonde, except her chin looks too pointed. Peggy exultantly reported how strict her principles were and how uncompromising she is. She takes it for granted that Derek will give up his inherited money as soon as he’s through college. And she’ll keep him from being a corruptly successful young lawyer. In any case, it would seem that Derek can’t possibly work for the State Department at present, because the girl’s brother is a communist.150 [Derek went] to Spain for a week or two and [presumably thought] over whether he wanted to make a marriage which [might] be so bad for his career. Well, Derek decided he did. […] As for Peggy, I’m sure she’ll end up fighting this new daughter-in-law. All this praise of her now has a masochistic note.

  We also looked at dozens of photos—three-dimensional transparencies—of the trip. A marvellous rose-colored tower somewhere in India. Little Bull looking out over Istanbul from a hotel balcony on which half a dozen doves were perched. Little Bull standing proudly in front of airplanes; wearing short pants—I suppose Peggy thought them suitable as European “native costume.”

  April 3. The day before yesterday, I spent the evening at Gerald’s, and tried, for the second time, inhaling a mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide (70% oxygen, 30% carbon dioxide). The first time I tried this was on February 8. Then, after a couple of breaths, I got a most unpleasant feeling—that the oxygen cylinder was breathing me, forcing me to inhale and inhale, and preventing exhalation, until I thought I would choke and had to take off the mask. Gerald ascribes this to a fear of death—that is, a fear of losing one’s sense of identity. Naturally this explanation irritates me, and, in all honesty, I must say that I don’t believe I have the least fear of such an experience, though I may well have a fear of this particular apparatus—the rubber mask. Anyhow, this time it went better and I did partially go under. The effect was that the ceiling above me seemed to open and the black dome of the sky appeared, full of stars. Not realistic stars, but stars arranged in a formal pattern. Other than this, I can’t say that the experience was particularly exciting or interesting. There is a terrific sense of “lift,” that’s all.

  Gerald talked about the two satellites and “MOUSE,” the one we are making to go up and investigate them.151 Also about the group of imprisoned homosexuals near San Luis Obispo who meet for discussions.152 Also about the latest flying saucer sightings. Also about Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian, which he, also, admires. Also about Salinger’s stories.153

  Windy today and yesterday. On the shore the sea glittered and the light was bright and hard. The red storm flag on the pier flapping against the blue sky. The crowds of sandpipers. And always the thought: after I’m dead, all this will still be going on.

  Don felt very badly yesterday. Today he was sorry. If only everybody could be as frank and self-critical and unresentful as he is! But I mustn’t forget Knopf, who completely changed his attitude toward Pedro Armendariz after seeing him in Lucretia Borgia. Now he wants Armendariz to play Francis I in Diane.

  April 4. Just back from supper at the Weingartens’—mostly great doctors, research scientists and their wives. One of them told me how a woman once sued the City of London for rape, because she had swum in a public pool after men had used it and had become pregnant. The doctor had had to give medical evidence that you can’t become pregnant by swimming in water even if it is full of semen.

  He also said he thought he’d rather die of cancer than arterial sclerosis—because the latter produces personality changes, and makes you ga-ga and a nuisance to your relatives.

  Jessie embarrassed me by talking about me to her woman guests, just out of earshot.

  Speed came to lunch with me at the studio. He is writing an original, with Lennie Spigelgass’s encouragement, which he hopes to sell. He expressed concern over Don. Don, he said, must have friends of his own and n
ot rely on me. He went over and talked to Tony Duquette about the possibility of Don getting into interior designing. I was very embarrassed, but Tony was nice about it and said he’d be glad to talk to Don.

  The worst of Speed is that his motives are so mixed. I have a lot of faith in his intuitions about people, but there is always a little bit of him that wants to stir the mud up to the surface and make a mess, just for the hell of it.

  Another of the guests at the Weingartens’, a very nice doctor, had just started reading nonscientific books. He had only started two years ago, and his favorite so far was South Wind.154

  April 6. Marvellous warm weather. We’re getting steadily into the preproduction rush. The picture starts filming in three weeks.

  Am trying to get Tony Duquette to do something for Don, to help him get into the theatrical designing profession.

  A boy who runs the sports department at Magnin’s was at Jo and Ben’s last night. Whenever he heard an anecdote he liked, he said, “Good enough!”

  Oscar Levant, at lunch yesterday, wanted to know about classical Greek homosexuality. He usually seems dopey from sleeping tablets. But I’m never sure if acting dopey isn’t part of his particular kind of humor. “I like you,” he said—in the tone drunks use—“I always enjoy our meetings.” But perhaps he meant this, and was merely too shy to say it in any other way.

  April 9. Don will be out late this evening. It’s his last night of scene shifting at UCLA, and he will have to stay on after the performance and help strike the set and maybe go to a party for the cast as well.

  Now, in thirty-five minutes, it will be Easter. I feel sad and apprehensive and unsure of myself—without any particular reason. It’s just that I don’t want things to change, and yet I know that they must and will—quickly.

  If only I could help Don more! All my sympathy and understanding, all my quite genuine knowledge—through my own past experience—of what he is feeling—no, they just don’t help. I’m not him. Thirty years are between us, and so much else. Our lives are like two quite different diseases from which we are suffering. We enquire sympathetically about each other’s symptoms from time to time, but for the most part we keep quiet—because one can’t keep on and on saying, “Oh, my head!” or, “Oh, my poor back!”

  Have just finished Colette’s The Vagabond—the best thing of hers I’ve read. But—no, it doesn’t “speak to my condition.” I guess it’s some sort of romanticism in me that makes me despise people who “refuse to suffer.” Even when the refusal is so beautifully prepared as it is in this book.

  How I wish this Easter could be a complete renewal for me! This is the turning point, if there’s to be one. Or my middle age is going to be just a waning of powers, a narrowing, an increase in squalor—messy—better brought to a quick close.

  Well—come on. Nobody’s stopping you from trying.

  I remember how, on Easter Sunday lunches, darling Dodie used to greet me at the door with, “He is risen!” And that takes me back to that Russian Easter service I went to with Wystan in Hankow—seventeen years ago! I was telling Don about it at breakfast, this morning.

  Thick fog all day on the beach. We went shopping in Beverly Hills. At William Riley’s155 we met a boy who had known Derek Bok. He raised his eyebrows meaningly when we talked of the marriage.

  April 12. Yesterday morning, Catherine Caskey called me and told me tearfully that she thinks Billy is “sick” and that he wants to give up the business.156 Today I talked to Jim Charlton on the phone. He says he thinks Billy is crazy. He’s running some kind of beach wear shop down near the Tropical Village157 and living in squalor with Lou Strong. Jim (who always manages to introduce the note of silent reproach) also said that Billy was drunk for a week because I walked out of Henrietta Ledebur’s party (on March 19) as soon as he came in. Now I know quite well that I’m behaving badly, even cruelly, to Billy. And I know that, in a way, he respects and appreciates this. That’s the awful complexity of dealing with someone who’s a masochist and self-destroyer. If I were on my own, perhaps I could do something. But I doubt it. And, anyhow, I’m not on my own. There’s Don to be considered and he can’t be expected to put up with Billy—especially with his big-brother act, which is nothing but sheer bitchery.

  April 16. This in great haste and just in order not to break my two-entries-a-week record. Marisa Pavan, her boyfriend Arthur Loew Jr.,158 Salka and Virginia [Viertel] are coming to supper.

  Last night I went to dinner with the Knopfs, where Walter Pidgeon told how his mother kept a tin of “blue-mold bread” and used to moisten bits of it and bandage it on to family cuts, long before the days of penicillin. Pidgeon himself had had his hand possibly saved by this treatment.

  Meanwhile Don went with Speed and Marguerite and Harry to dinner with Marion Davies. She did her usual performance, it seems. Speed, said Don, was vulgar—that’s to say, he acted as ringmaster to the show and encouraged Marion to act up.

  April 17. The supper party last night was quite a success—except that Arthur Loew didn’t eat more than a few morsels—but it made both Don and me feel that Marisa is [bitchy]. Her venom is astonishing and dismaying. Not only against Magnani, but almost anyone you mention. As for Loew—didn’t like him. He’s one of the ones who “continually deny.” Always sneering at himself and his work—and therefore at everybody else. But Salka was wonderful as usual, and Virginia seemed very lively.

  Today there’s a high wind. The sea is bright and covered with whitecaps. We were down on the beach. I read extracts from my commonplace book at the temple, this morning.

  April 18. Jim came to lunch and we looked at the sets of Forbidden Planet, saw an attractive robot getting into his rubber suit and Pidgeon’s home on the planet, which looked like a home in the San Fernando Valley, furnished out of the “Home” supplement in The Los Angeles Sunday Times.

  Supper with Peter Viertel. He told me that a lawyer, quizzing him on his “loyalty,” actually suggested that he should say he’d divorced Virginia because she was a communist! A glimpse of the Lower Depths.

  We went to see Aldous—who’s leaving in two days to spend the summer with Matthew [Huxley] and his wife on the New England coast. He looked so thin and wan. Almost a death mask. The Kiskaddens were there. And Father McLane.159 And his wife.

  Billy told Jim that his happiest times were at Laguna Beach. To me, these were the most awful. Mine, I told Jim, were at Rustic Road while Billy was away in Kentucky. But, I said, those times were like the great pauses in the middle of Beethoven’s sonatas. They wouldn’t have been possible if Beethoven hadn’t provided the sonatas—awful as they were.

  This morning, in Georgian Poetry 1911–12, I read a poem by James Stephens about the garden of Eden that I don’t believe I have ever read before—though I have owned the book at least thirty-five years.160 How strange that seems!

  Aldous remarked this evening how some new kind of radiation had produced an entirely new kind of cancer in mice. Peggy winced, as if this were in very poor taste. Aldous no longer has the right to mention cancer at all!

  April 19. Worried. Not seriously but chronically, because of Don’s restlessness. It’s very natural, no doubt, that he should want parties, excitement. But underneath this demand, I seem to detect a certain hysteria—something unhealthy, like the peevishness of a sick, spoiled child. Also—as is always the way in such situations—he is inclined to show a resentment—only partly conscious—against me, as the personification of whatever it is that keeps him bored and quiet.

  Well, I only hope something comes up for him with Tony Duquette.

  Costume tests, this morning. [Lana] Turner looking svelte but quite definitely fortyish in a wonderful cherry-red velvet and silk gown with long sleeves of fur. [Roger] Moore is fine in his beard and magnificently embroidered doublets, but I do wish he could borrow another pair of legs!

  Lunch with Arnold [Dobrin], who would like me to write something about the underworld of the studio—all its little holes and corners, odd
jobs, minor people—which he would illustrate. It would be fascinating—for this is really a small town—but I don’t see how I could do it except by working all over the lot and spending my nights at meetings of the studio club, etc. etc.

  April 20. After writing what I wrote yesterday about Don, I should record that when I came home last night I found him quite relaxed and not in the least peevish, having washed about thirty pairs of socks, done all kinds of other chores and some homework. We spent a quiet pleasant evening together—as so often. As so often—that’s what I must remember about this period. It is not like living with Caskey, or with anybody else I’ve known. There really is a quality of “home life” in it, and there’d be much more, if my temperament weren’t so mistrustful of any happiness in the present tense. (How I lie to myself about the past and fool myself about the future!)

  Am writing this at the studio. Spent the afternoon at work on our Buddha treatment—Knopf shows signs of impatience, as yet disguised in a bantering tone and a kidding smile. Betsy Cox just fixed coffee on the electric coffeepot and we each ate one of the Huntley & Palmer imported oatmeal biscuits. Outside the studio, a bunch of teenage girls in those hideously unbecoming knee breeches are waiting to hold up stars for their autographs. One has red stockings and a cap with a coonskin tail attached to it. She’s fat and bespectacled and very brash.

  April 21. Rain—the first in months, or so it seems to me. Don has gone to see his mother tonight. He suggested bringing me along but she didn’t want me to come because, she said, she was too fat!

  Worked on Buddha, talked to Dorothy McGuire on the set of Trial, listened to Richard Brooks,161 at lunch, dogmatically describing the function of the ideal screenwriter. A day I have failed to make memorable. But now I’m going out to supper with Jo and Ben, which will at any rate be cozy and cheerful.