Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Then on Thursday evening, we went in to see Jo and Ben, and they were just in the process of hearing from Irma, the woman who runs the cleaning business downstairs, that the house has been sold behind their backs by Andy, their landlord, whom they’d trusted as a faithful friend. Now the question is—will they be allowed to stay on there? Even if they are, their rent is sure to be raised.

  This weekend, I have the unpleasant prospect of having to write the epilogue to my treatment for Jean-Christophe. I’ve stuck and stuck in it, despite the quite genuine interest I feel in the story, and despite the fact that I know I’m wasting my own money—I’ll have been working on it five weeks—which comes to $1,200 a week—fifty dollars a week less than my usual salary!

  Met Curtis Harrington in a corridor yesterday, face to face. Said hello. So the spell is broken.

  Saw Giant yesterday. There are beautiful things in it. But it doesn’t add up to a great deal. What is memorable is a certain horror—the rawness, the tawdriness, the self-satisfied vulgarity, the folksiness of oil millionaires. Loud children amazed and indignant when they grow tired of their toys. Oh yes, they are touching, too. But ultimately you feel tired of being sorry for them—you leave them to their games, deciding to save what little compassion you have and use it on something worthwhile.

  Two most important observations I’ve read lately (I forget where). (i) This is the age of respectability. The boys who, in the twenties, would have been members of the Lost Generation, are today married men with three or four children, owing money on everything they possess and voting for Ike because “we never had it so good.” (ii) Successful films and novels nowadays are about money, rather than sex.

  October 22. Talking of successful novels, Jerry Wald has bought a book called No Down Payment to make into a movie. It’s by John McPartland, and it’s about people who live on a big new building development, where everything’s standardized. Of course, the book itself may be satirical, for all I know. It isn’t published yet, and all I’ve read is a synopsis prepared for the studio by a (probably) hostile writer. This fascinated me—it seemed positively a parody of the modern best-seller. (I should explain that David is the intellectual in the story—i.e. the not-perfectly-adjusted man. Leola Noon has a husband named Troy Noon—would a satirical writer dare to call him that? no, I think it must be serious—who rapes Jean, and she loves it because she isn’t satisfied. Later, David gets wised up and treats her brutally in bed, and everything’s all right.) Here’s an excerpt from the synopsis: “The act was completed” (i.e. they’d been screwing), “but David knew that tonight it was not complete for Jean, and David felt a hidden inadequacy. Why, he asks himself, in unconscious searching, why had he asked about Leola Noon before he made love to the woman he loved?”

  There you have the very essence of our time—this half-baked pseudopsychiatric groping around for “adjustment,” which means getting a good fucking and becoming pregnant.

  Don came home depressed. He has mountains of homework to do—and his teacher always sets the problems in the most cryptic art jargon, so that poor Don often finds he has completely misunderstood. Today for example: “To create shapes by the fabrication of elements. Start out with patterns that end up in shapes.”

  Some momentous steps today. We made reservations for our trip to New York at Christmas—exactly two months ahead. We put down our names on waiting lists for freighters to go to Tahiti, any time after next June 15. I finished the revised treatment for Jean-Christophe and handed it in to Jerry Wald. Began taking hormone pills.

  Tomorrow, Bill Reid is starting alterations on the house.

  I did no novel over the weekend—was busy with the treatment. But I worked on it at the office today, while Eleanor typed. Her ex-husband, Vance Breese, has offered to take me flying around the northwest in his Beechcraft plane. Don can come too.

  Jo and Ben now have reason to hope that their house was merely bought (by a lady who’s a partner in the Golden Bull73) in order to prevent the hateful Louis74 from buying it. Otherwise he’d have closed half their parking lot and frozen them out of business.

  October 24. Today Eleanor and I had lunch with her husband, Vance Breese, who is one of the greatest of the former test-pilot engineers. I was quite astonished by him. He is a massive, heavy, nearly bald man of my own age, with the most vulnerable eyes one can imagine, and a mouth that reminds me of Bob Buckingham. He is terribly anxious to please. He kept calling me Sir. We ate at the Luau. He brought maps with him—suggesting that we fly on Sunday over the Mono Lake country behind Yosemite. On the whole, he makes a very reassuring impression as a prospective pilot—but Eleanor says that her doctor friend, Spud Taylor, thinks he may have a heart attack at any time! She says also that he’s subject to frightful rages and might have a stroke.

  Jo has just heard another rumor—from the Filipino who works at the Golden Bull—that their house is going to be torn down to make room for a new Golden Bull: the old one having been condemned.

  Don is wondering if he should go to the Chouinard ball on Saturday. He may get a costume from Beegle.

  October 27. The morning of the day before yesterday, I went up to see Swami. He was in his most loving mood. He seemed entirely relaxed in love, or by it, as people are relaxed by a few drinks. He wasn’t authoritative. He didn’t shine or project: he just beamed. I noticed that the whites of his eyes are very yellow, but this added, in a way, to their beauty, making an effect as if the gold was spreading from the iris over the whole eyeball.

  We were talking about the possible number of inhabited worlds. Swami said: “And, only think, the God who made those thousands of worlds comes to earth as a man!” Something about the way he said this—his wonder and his absolute belief, I suppose—made my skin go into goose pimples. I said, “How terrifying!” and that was how I felt. (It is quite impossible to convey in words the effect made on you by things like this said by someone like Swami—because, of course, it is the man himself, present and speaking to you, and conveying in some otherwise banal sentence, a glimpse of what he is, that makes all the difference.)

  He told me that one of his ambitions is to found a boarding school, one half for boys, the other for girls, where “they would be given the ideal”—first on the high-school level, later as a university. He repeated what he has so often told me, that he feels in all his work responsible to Brahmananda. When he initiates new disciples, he hands them over to Brahmananda or Holy Mother. He would like to stop giving lectures, but if he tries to shirk any duty he finds that he loses touch with Brahmananda—“I can’t find him. Then I know he is displeased.”

  Talking about Santa Barbara and Trabuco, he remarked that boys always seem more restless than girls. The boys always feel that they ought to do something or get something. Swami tells them they have to be something.

  Phil (Buddha) is at Vedanta Place, recovering from his delusion that Trabuco would collapse without him. Ken grumbled, “I’ve spent ten years of my life here.” “That oak,” said Swami, “has spent five hundred years. Go and bow down to it.” David is “having trouble with lust” and wants to leave.

  Prema (John Yale) tells me that when he was very sick the other day with kidney trouble and thought he was dying, he saw all his rage and other sins so objectively that he called Swami in and told all about them. Then he felt much better, and, he says, “I saw how a sudden conversion would be possible.”

  Going to see Swami is like opening a window into my life. I have to keep doing this or my life gets stuffy. It doesn’t matter what we talk about. He said: “Come again soon. I like seeing you, Chris,” and I told him I think about him all the time and have conversations with him in my mind. I was moved, as we parted, and felt shy.

  This evening I’m depressed. Gerald Heard and George Huene looked in unexpectedly for tea, which was nice in itself but threw Don’s plans completely askew. He exclaimed that he couldn’t come flying tomorrow because of homework, and rushed off to look for Nicky Nadeau, who suggested going with
him to the Chouinard ball. He has a pair of antlers and a goatskin from Beegle.

  No sign of Bill Reid to start work on the house. The Christophe treatment still isn’t okayed by Buddy Adler,75 so I can’t start work on Monday. And of course, I’m scared at the prospect of flying over Yosemite and Mono Lake tomorrow. Especially if Don doesn’t come. Because I’d far rather stay home and work on my novel—I’m two pages behind schedule, as it is.

  Harry [Brown] just called. He’s back from New York—possibly about to marry a girl named June [de Baum]. He sounded rather less drunk, but worried about money.

  October 29. Well, wonders will never cease. I really enjoyed our flying trip yesterday—and although I was slightly scared several times I really felt a great increase of confidence—in Vance Breese as a pilot, but also in light-airplane flying in general.

  We took off from Cloverfield76 about 10:30 and flew around until 4:30, only landing at Bakersfield for lunch. It wasn’t very good weather—piles of clouds over the Sierras, so we couldn’t get into Yosemite or Mono, or even Bass Lake. And when we left Bakersfield to come home, we couldn’t even cross the coastal range. So we flew back to Palmdale through a heavy rainstorm and then it was fine and bright out to Santa Monica. What I got for the first time and what was so thrilling was the sense of the airplane in the element of air, like a boat on the sea. The feeling of the tiny but entirely adequate contraption meeting the forces of nature and riding them—sometimes by outclimbing and outspeeding them, sometimes by skillfully giving way. Vance is obviously a supremely competent pilot, quite relaxed and yet instantly ready to meet every situation.

  Impressions of flying: The spooky blurred white cloud-wing erect over the ridge and seeming to extend, pointing higher and higher, menacing you like the dramatically outspread wing of a theatrical angel from which you are supposed to shrink back, covering your eyes. The shabby velvet hills, green or beige, worn threadbare in their folds. The bicycle lightness of the taut bright yellow aircraft with its rosy profile, bouncing and jarring on the elastic surge of the air. Angled headlong views of Three Rivers Airport, down, down in a seemingly narrow cleft, the runways newly tarred and therefore unsuitable to land on, lest they should mess up the immaculate plane. Tearing head-on through a horizontal rainstorm, only a few hundred feet above a highway where the cars had switched on their headlights; and far ahead of us but growing broader, the pale bright strip of sunshine on the desert around Palmdale. An altercation with the man in the control tower at Bakersfield because he let so many planes “touch and go” ahead of us, as we stood waiting to start. Thus we got a glimpse of Vance’s famous temper.

  Don came back from the Chouinard ball saying he “felt like Dante”—because the drunken drag show had seemed so revolting to him, sober. Later, he admitted he’d been rude to his hosts.

  We just heard that Johnnie has had a heart attack in New York. Talked to Dick Foote, who obviously blames Starcke for running Johnnie’s life and creating tension, so that [something] was bound to [happen].

  Bad news from the east. Israel has attacked Egypt. No hint yet of repercussions.

  It’s now decided that we start on the screenplay tomorrow. But I can’t get a raise on $1,250 a week.

  Later. Got home to find that Ben had been taken to hospital and operated on. Don and I went around to the Santa Monica Hospital and saw Jo, who was waiting with the Gowlands for Ben to come out of the operating theater. Then the surgeon came and said it wasn’t appendicitis but an infection of the cecum. However, they’d taken out the appendix while they were at it.

  Bill Reid finally made a start on the house today. He has opened a big slot in the roof for the coming skylight, and the furniture is covered with plaster dust.

  Harry Brown called this morning to put off our lunch, on the grounds that he still felt drowsy after the change of atmosphere from New York!

  Vance Breese, according to Eleanor, is most enthusiastic about our flight yesterday—saying that we were such good sports not to mind going up to 15,000 feet (which usually isn’t necessary) and not to be upset by the turbulence, which was quite considerable while we were over the hills. As a matter of fact, Don got sick—probably because of his late night—although we both of us took Bonamine!

  October 31. Am slipping steadily behind on my novel. Thirty-seven pages remain to be written in twenty-two days—if I do the full fifty pages on part five. Tired this evening, but today I made a good start on the script.

  Harry Brown to lunch, looking pouchy eyed but seeming sober and alert. He plans to marry June shortly.

  Dick Foote on the phone again, says Starcke says Johnnie is worse. Carter may go to New York. Dick continued to rage against Starcke and against Joel Goldsmith. “That’s carrying religion too far!” he exclaimed.

  Eleanor Breese tells me that children at the schools around here actually have professionals to make them up for Halloween!

  She is still teetering back and forth. She figures she must be married, for the sake of the children. Shall she go back to Vance? Or to the doctor—if he asks her? In any case, she says, she’ll stay in this job until we’ve finished, because she’s learning such a lot.

  Don has just finished a still life which really shows talent.

  This evening, for some strange reason, things seem quieter, although the British have been bombing Egyptian airports—an act which seems, from here, quite unintelligibly vile, and unprovoked. Yet Eisenhower’s assurance that we won’t be involved isn’t any more reassuring, really, than Wilson’s was, or Roosevelt’s.

  Terrific gusts of wind tonight, threatening to tear off the temporary cover Bill Reid has made on the hole in our roof for the skylight. A dry dusty demon of a wind. How I hate it!

  Jo is practically living up at the hospital with Ben. Her possessiveness is almost horrible, and yet he seems genuinely to want and encourage it. One gets a new angle on Ben, now he’s sick. He seems a bit babyish. He has a babyish amazement that he is running a fever or has pain. It’s extraordinarily naive. And yet I guess it is simply that he has hardly ever been sick before.

  Harry says Stephen Spender is, or has been, in New York. But no word from him.

  November 4. This house is utterly cheerless at the moment, because the heater doesn’t work—it nearly started a fire by steadily charring the woodwork around it—and there are the half-made apertures in the walls of my workroom and the dining alcove, awaiting their windows.

  I’m depressed because of this psychological difficulty77 with Don—due perhaps, on my side, to aftereffects of the hepatitis. It makes me feel so insecure, although at present he’s taking it very well.

  Right thumb mysteriously painful for many weeks now, and getting worse. Also worried about soreness in anus—but largely because Eleanor’s telling me her doctor friend specializes in rectal cancer has given me a new cancer scare.

  Good progress on the novel. If I write two pages Monday through Friday, I shall have twenty-eight pages finished by Thanksgiving, and that’s my target—to end the book on page 250.

  Talked to Dick Foote again today. Johnnie is still very bad with dropsy and hardening of the arteries as added complications. Carter is now with him in New York.

  Chris Wood took LSD yesterday. He got the same color perceptions as I did with mescaline. The doctor (from Sawtelle) told him that I could certainly take it. A bad liver would simply mean that the drug takes longer to wear off.

  Swami, whom I saw yesterday, told me he believes these drugs have had a bad effect on Aldous—taking away his faith in God.

  November 8. Dick Foote called this afternoon, to tell me Johnnie has taken a turn for the worse. He has had a heart attack and a stroke. The doctors say he has lost the will to live. Dick and Carter blame Starcke, particularly for involving Johnnie with Joel Goldsmith—but of course, Johnnie knew Joel before he knew Starcke. Dick says Starcke was always reminding Johnnie how old he was. Dick has practically thought himself into accusing Starcke of murdering John by worrying him into a heart at
tack—in order to get the money John has willed him.

  How strange—utterly unbelievable it is that Johnnie maybe is dying as I write this! Do I care? Not at the moment, because I can’t grasp it. I shall care if he dies, though—and more and more as time goes on. Dick Foote doesn’t care much, of course; he is thinking of his concert and how Johnnie has ruined it by taking Carter away. As for Charlie Brackett, he made a lot of noise but he didn’t care much. He resigned himself to it almost instantly.

  Bill Caskey is here—in bed with a cold at Hayden and Rod’s. He has come to raise a mortgage on his land.

  Just heard from Heinz, who left East Berlin in a hurry, for fear of arrest after a political argument in his factory. He’s now in Hamburg. Sent him a little money.

  Lunched with Vernon Old yesterday. He sent messages to Don—urging him to study and get a degree. He feels he missed a lot by not doing this.

  Went to see Swami, today being the sixteenth anniversary of my initiation and the tenth of my becoming a U.S. citizen. Swami said that drugs could never change your life or give you the feeling of love and peace that you get from spiritual visions. Drugs only made you marvel—and then later you lost your faith.

  This evening Swami called in great distress, because [one of the boys] has been arrested on a morals charge outside Hollywood High School. His trial is tomorrow.

  We are in the midst of a fierce heat wave. My novel is lagging again. Nine working days in which to write twenty-two pages. But I suspect it won’t run nearly that long—so I have time.

  Charlie Brackett phoned Dodie in England today to ask if she’d let him have the screen rights to I Capture the Castle. But he doubts if the front office will let him do it.

  Have just had a call from Prema about the [Hollywood High] situation. He obviously resents my mixing in. “Thank you for your interest,” he said. I merely offered to help get Prema a psychiatrist,78 if that were necessary. Swami says that Prema suffers terribly from frustrated ambition. He also showed me a most shaming letter from Starcke, in which Starcke claimed that he longed only for God. Swami was about to write back telling him not to be so romantic. Now, of course, he’ll wait.