Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Talking over impressions, I find that Don and I agree that the sight of the Leaning Tower, together with the Baptistery and Duomo, was one of the very strangest we’ve had on our trip. We stayed at Pisa the night before last. The night before that was at Lucca, which I remember principally for its town walls. You can drive along the top—all the way around the city.

  Talked to Mario Soldati this evening, in Alessandria. He and King Vidor are shooting there till Saturday on War and Peace,264 then they go up into the mountains in search of snow. We’ll probably go to see them in Alessandria the day after tomorrow.

  This evening is the opening of the Scala—[Maria] Callas in Norma. Chuck promised heaven-high he’d get us in, but needless to say the two rich bitches on whom he relied—Signora [Something-or-Other] and her daughter—weren’t about to help us.

  Milan seems a big gloomy un-Italian sort of town—more like I imagine Switzerland. The cathedral is very impressive, until your eyes get used to the dark.

  Don and I have given up wine—to see if that’s what makes his tongue black. Already it seems better.

  December 8. A bad night with a full nose and aching sinuses. I feel better up than in bed. Don’s tongue gets cleaner and cleaner. He is greatly occupied with Wuthering Heights.

  Waking at night, particularly when I’m sick, I terribly fear old age and death. I hope I’ll get through the experience somehow, by losing consciousness—whatever that means! When Don is very desperate and dependent, I see us as a tragi-comic couple—Lear and his Fool in the storm.

  This is miserable cold grey weather—the kind I hate most. The faces in the streets look furrowed with worry and defeat.

  And how I hate “grand” restaurants! We went to one yesterday, Savini’s, in the Gallery (which utterly lacks the glamor of Naples). The hushed, poker-faced air of the far too many majordomos—the mixed atmosphere of a church and a hospital.

  December 10. I sincerely hope that December 8 may have been the most—and one of the very few—boring days of this trip. Today was not boring. We are in Alessandria—got here yesterday and will leave tomorrow. This morning early we drove out with Soldati over the flat ice-foggy country to the banks of the Po, which was being used for the Berezina in the film. The Italian army is supplying the extras. Today there were 3,000 of them—about a third in Napoleonic uniforms, others in blue aprons over their uniforms to give a background effect, others in their ordinary modern equipment. But the scene was very moving. Napoleon (Herbert Lom) orders the burning of the standards, and, in the background you see the huddled line crossing the pontoon bridge (which the army built), Russian guns firing from the heights along the river, bright orange flames bursting out in the fog, the sad grove of naked poplars, the stream flowing very swiftly and darkly.

  Soldati and King Vidor make an almost absurd contrast—Soldati flapping like a Groucho Marx scarecrow, Vidor very relaxed, careful of his health, no doubt, for he often looks quite old. He never seems rattled or unkind.

  We had lunch in a small-town restaurant on the way home, with a lot of news cameramen—including Max Scheler (a friend of Herbert List) and a man who was the (half-Italian?) son of Gordon Craig.

  The soldiers looked quite natural in their Napoleonic uniforms—for, after all, they were soldiers. They didn’t smell good, and they laughed a lot. In fact, it was nearly impossible to stop them laughing. One of them rolled over in ecstasies of amusement when he was supposed to be blown up by a shell.

  (Incidental information—I forget who we got it from: the Hotel Europa we stayed in, in Venice, was the one where Henry James always stayed.)

  This visit has made me feel very dubious that I want to work with Soldati, at any future time. (He wants me to read a short story of his with a view to making a picture out of it.) I see too much of Berthold Viertel in him, and I’m too old for the embrace of such a father, with his total demand, his terrible poignant reproachfulness, his subconscious determination to make me somehow betray him.

  Don says he has decided to cut down sharply on drinking—not that he drinks much anyway—but he hates the scenes he makes when drunk. He couldn’t be sweeter-natured than he is at present—most like his best self.

  Went out into the town to try to buy an English book. The only one they had was Fielding’s Joseph Andrews.

  December 12. Yesterday we came back from Alessandria on the train and returned to the Hotel Manin. This time they gave us a room on the front—a really nice one with a balcony, and it’s a shame we can’t enjoy the view because of miserable thick fog. My cold is letting up. Don is starting one.

  Last night we saw Callas in Norma at the Scala. And she really is terrific—one of the most immediately effective theatrical personalities I’ve ever seen. She manages the tiger slink without being ridiculous. Or rather, she includes the element of camp in her performance. The sets were far better than I’d expected.

  Today we’re expecting to leave, and I think it’ll be France.

  December 14. We didn’t leave till yesterday, because the train times didn’t fit. As it was, we had a nice trip, leaving foggy old gloomy Milan at 9:10, getting down to Genoa, where the sun almost shone, by lunchtime, arriving in Nice at half past five. Our hotel, the Scribe, has its own charms—a rather 1900ish honeymoon air—with brass bedsteads. We have seen nothing of Nice yet, except the Avenue de la Victoire after dark. I have an idea that we should use the days until we go up to visit Maugham by making a side trip to Avignon or someplace. But I also want to take mescaline soon.

  It was worth staying on in Milan to have visited the Poldi Pezzoli Museum. And it was worth visiting the Poldi Pezzoli for the painting by Ghislandi of the Young Gentleman—the most terrifying evocation of an eighteenth-century beau, with his great black three-cornered hat, his powder grey wig (suggesting premature age) his heavy-lidded, pouched, rather glassy eyes, his huge mulberry-colored lips, the weak sloping shoulders. With almost imbecile sensuality dressed up in lace. And the cruel plump white hand. A character right out of Browning’s “A Toccata of Galuppi’s.” I notice from the postcard of it I bought that Ghislandi is also known as Fra Galzario. Did he become a monk? Was this perhaps a self-portrait—or his view of the world after leaving it? I must read up and find out.265

  Great problems last night because of my snoring—the last remnant of my cold. Don got very provoked.

  December 18. The day before yesterday, we rented a car and drove to Avignon. Yesterday we returned by way of Marseille and all along the corniche, through the little seaside towns that are shrines to the great names of the twenties—Picasso painting, Kathy266 writing her journal and looking out of the window at the cruel mistral vexing the sea, [D.H.] Lawrence dying. St. Tropez seemed almost unchanged since I was there in 1928, but different perhaps from the town I described in my novels. What I forgot was the redness of the earth—all red.

  We have both had bad colds, are better. Don is reading Maugham with passion—and today we’re going up to the Villa Mauresque267 to stay. Am nervous about this. More later.

  Later. We are at the Villa Mauresque!

  I want to say ssh!—as if we were in Mecca in disguise, and might give ourselves away and be instantly strangled.

  This place is truly a palace. Ice water, Vichy and cookies in glass caskets by the beds. Your clothes unpacked by the faultless menservants—I think there are only two, but there seem to be about twenty. And they unpacked everything—including Don’s movie magazines, our powder to kill crab lice and our K.Y.268

  Willie seems extraordinarily intact and scarcely older at all. And Alan Searle hasn’t changed much. But I’ll write about them at length tomorrow.

  December 19. Feeling somewhat stifled by much food and drink and little exercise—though I did walk down with the others to the rocks below Jean Cocteau’s villa. Don thought he’d swim but was dissuaded by Willie and Alan.

  I’ll just put down at random some things Willie, or Willie and Alan, told us.

  Willie remarked that after his d
eath he wants Alan to go and live in London. “If he stays here, he’ll go to pieces.”

  Willie said that a dramatist doesn’t need brains—only a knack of writing. He doesn’t believe Aldous has that knack—but admittedly he hadn’t seen The Giaconda Smile. He said: “Graham Greene said that The Sacred Flame269 was the worst play ever written. I replied that he made that remark before writing The Living Room.” He said that he hadn’t known many really evil men. The only two he could think of offhand were Aleister Crowley and Norman Douglas—but that it was extraordinary how Douglas commanded devotion even from the little boys to whom he often behaved so meanly. He remembered an occasion when Douglas had been so sick and weak that he couldn’t walk up to his villa unaided. Two little boys had appeared, kissed his hands and then supported him home.270 Willie remarked about the Villa Mauresque: “During the war, it was occupied first by the Italians and then by the Germans, who did it no damage. But then the British came and shelled it—trying to hit the semaphore on the hilltop. And finally the French looted it from top to bottom.” Both Willie and Alan declare they were shocked, during their recent visit, by the envy and spitefulness of the English. They feel that the English have changed very greatly since the war.

  Willie has a painting of a naked man which is the most untypical Toulouse-Lautrec one could imagine. Only two people have ever recognized its authorship—Sir Kenneth Clark, and a young American tourist—who got lunch and two signed copies of Maugham books as a reward.

  December 20. Today the weather was much better. We drove with Alan Searle up to the village of Eze—a natural fortress which was never captured throughout the Middle Ages. Yesterday night we went over to Monte Carlo and gambled. Alan won five thousand francs, we won two thousand. The place was rather empty and disappointingly unglamorous.

  In a short private talk, Alan told me how the Maugham family hates him, and how he feels he has acquired so many enemies by being with Willie that he dreads going to live in London after Willie’s death. Paunchy, jowly and spotty, Alan is a rather sad figure but not really a pitiful one, because he obviously cares for Willie and considers those years spent with him well worth while.

  Willie himself shows immense energy—today he walked up to the abandoned chapel at the top of the hill and all along the ridge, over a trail of broken stones. He talked about Glenway Wescott, saying that his journals could be of no real interest because he was a mass of insincerity and had no real talent as a writer. Passing a mimosa tree in blossom, he turned to Don and said: “You must remember, Don—anything that’s very beautiful only lasts a very short time.” Don didn’t quite know whether to take this as a compliment or merely an admonition.

  Willie remarked that he takes far more trouble over his work than he did. Nowadays he rewrites several times.

  Alan assures us that Willie is greatly enjoying our visit.

  December 22. Willie once knocked Alan down, for throwing a stone at a frog. Yesterday, a copy of an address on Colette arrived from Cocteau, with an inscription to “his dear neighbor.” (Cocteau has a house very near this one.) Willie dislikes Cocteau rather (says Alan) and he commented on Cocteau’s long-winded insincerity. He thought this applied to nearly all French writers.

  Willie couldn’t have been sweeter, yesterday. We went for a walk and he posed for movie shots whenever asked to, and signed a copy of The Casuarina Tree for Don, who is now his devoted fan.

  I’m shocked to learn from Alan that Willie is no longer on good terms with any of his family, including his nephew Robin. Both Robin and also Maugham’s daughter sent for Alan while he was in London and asked him why this is. They blame Alan, which distresses him very much.

  Tonight we have a most disagreeable journey ahead of us—about twenty-two hours—train to Geneva, sitting upright, then by air to Munich via Zurich.

  December 25. The journey was indeed disagreeable—the only pleasant part of it being our parting from Alan and Willie, who said, “You’ve been model guests.” It was delightful to feel so sad at leaving and to know that our visit had been such a success. Otherwise, we had recourse to the box supper Willie’s staff had packed, including a bottle of wine, and to a bottle of whiskey we bought in the station. The compartment got steadily hotter—in fact, the actual seats got hotter—until midnight; then quickly colder and colder. We wandered around Geneva in a drizzle. Was chiefly struck by the immense number of swans on the lake.

  Then by plane to Zurich, where we spent an hour in the beautiful white watch-and-toy shop of an airport and saw a plane from India disgorge men in crumpled suits and pink turbans.

  Then we flew on to Munich, arriving in a drizzle which hasn’t let up since, and this evening is turning to heavy rain. Munich is a stark, empty-looking city of huge plain buildings and very wide streets. The bomb damage is still enormous but severely tidy. The city is like a mouth with many gaps but all the remaining teeth strong. There’s a certain German smugness, despite this grim exterior. The local accent is almost farcically gemütlich.271 And there’s the eternal smell of Turkish cigarettes.

  It was a hideous and costly mistake coming here. How can we possibly have imagined we wanted to see Herbert List? He is such a bore—a sadist too, perhaps. (His face, when he let his giant poodle loose on us as we climbed the stairs to his apartment, had that wooden look of sub-cruelty which must have been common on the faces of medieval torturers.) And his friend Max Scheler is a bore too, and [also a bit of] a sulker. I feel, in these young Germans, the rude weary superiority of the European. They know better what it’s like to suffer. Okay, agreed. But must suffering make people merely more unpleasant?

  All this is, of course, unfair to Herbert—who fixed us a Christmas Eve dinner, complete with goose—which Don was then too sick to eat. He vomited and shat all night long. Today I went to a doctor and got him some pills and he seems slowly recovering. But he still hasn’t eaten anything. He thinks his sickness is partly due to the train journey, and partly to some vile sausage with sauerkraut we ate for lunch yesterday.

  This hotel, the Carlton, is small and family and very respectable. Our bedroom, with its federbetten,272 is still somehow more like a sitting room. (Just as many European restaurants are like drawing rooms.) There are brass lamp hangings and there’s a big oil painting of an Alpine scene. A shower but no toilet, unfortunately—so poor Don has to shit in the shower, as the toilet is down at the far end of the passage.

  December 28. A depressing morning for departure, with rain coming down hard—but at least thank goodness we are departing. Yesterday was quite enough of Munich. We went to the Haus der Kunst and saw the two marvellous Altdorfers—Susannah at the Bath and the Alexanderschlacht.273 Also discovered that one of the statues on the Luitpoldbrücke274 is exactly like Burt Lancaster. Also went to see a film called Der Himmel ist nie ausverkauft,275 in which Frank Diernhammer (calling himself Frank Holms) appeared. That’s as much as you can say—he appeared. We left in the middle.

  We had supper with Herbert, Max Scheler and Robert Furst. It was as depressing as usual. Max and Robert have the sulky mouths of spoiled children. Max wants to go to the U.S. His editor doesn’t want him to go—says he’s not interested in the U.S.—would only accept articles showing the U.S. to be militaristic. At the same time, he is interested in Russia!

  Herbert, Robert and Max had taken majoon yesterday evening—[Herbert had] smuggled some out of Tangier. That was probably why they were so listless.

  One very big good mark I must give to Munich—the service. The people in the hotel have been admirable, and when I went into a restaurant with the loop of my topcoat broken the woman at the hat-check desk mended it for me without saying anything. I didn’t notice what she’d done till much later.

  December 30. Paris—we got here by train near midnight the day before yesterday. A tiresome journey, with a quick change at Strasbourg into a very crowded train. A charmingly polite man gave up his seat so Don and I could sit in the same compartment. He only found another with great difficulty.
Big mark for the oft-accused French.

  So far, our visit hasn’t gone well. We successfully got a room at the Hotel Voltaire (this must be at least my fifth visit—I was here four times in the thirties that I can definitely remember—with Heinz, Johnny Andrews, Ian Scott-Kilvert, and Wystan, on his way to the Spanish war) but it seems horribly noisy and no longer so glamorous. Then it has rained, on and off, since our arrival. And Don is disappointed because Audrey Hepburn obviously doesn’t want to see us, and because he could only ascend to the second platform of the Eiffel Tower. And I’m depressed because two lousy notices of Diane have just arrived from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, both blaming the script—calling it wordy and slow.

  Well, shit. All this isn’t very important and indeed mostly subjective—and anyhow one nice thing has happened: we met John Gielgud yesterday on the street quite by accident, and we’re seeing him tomorrow.

  Also, I must say that Paris—even in the rain—appears wonderfully lively, bright and interesting at every turn. This afternoon we walked along the Boulevard Raspail as far as the Balzac statue, had a coffee in the Dôme and returned through the streets alongside the Luxembourg Gardens.

  [1956]

  January 5. Second day of black depression, assisted by a thin sad fog that hangs over the city and makes the morning delay its start until around 10:00. The truth is, I dread going to England. I dread seeing M. and Richard and reopening the whole dismal tragedy. And even the lesser effort of brightly smiling every time I’m asked how I like living in the States—well, I have to go and that’s that.

  Actually, we’ve had some quite amusing times while here in Paris. With John Gielgud and his friend Paul Anstee, mostly. I think I really like John—at any rate, I find his weaknesses extremely sympathetic. He is terribly superstitious. At the little restaurant in the market, there were gypsies, and one of them took him aside and asked him in a threatening tone: “Do you want to be happy?” and he was so scared he gave her 5,000 francs. Meanwhile, a strange little American named Gladys Solomon made us draw horses on the backs of the menus. She uses them for character analysis, and, as a matter of fact, she’s very good at it. Nearly all her subjects draw their horses facing left—unless, of course, they’re left-handed. I drew only a head, and was told that I concentrate on essential details. Don drew a careful neat little horse, and was told that he’s a perfectionist.