Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  December 11. Vance Breese got back yesterday from the Caribbean, having broken his record for hurry in his impatience to get back. Now Eleanor feels she may leave right after my return or may wait until the first draft of the screenplay is finished—all depending on how far she finds it possible to live with Vance and come to work here with me. At present she’s doubtful, because Vance is so demanding, despite all his resolutions to be more considerate.

  The Japanese gardeners have gleefully stripped all the ivy from the terraces of the back garden. Don says it looks like the foundations of the pyramids.

  Am sticking in the rewrite of my novel. Now that I have to take more trouble, I’m suddenly meticulous.

  Hugh Chisholm and Brad Fuller to lunch today. Hugh has aged a lot, but is still boyish, flirtatious, almost elfin when he talks about real estate and the furniture business. For the second time, he has solemnly left Italy—regretfully abandoning it to its fate.

  December 15. Depressed. I don’t want to go to New York. I dread the trip, the cold, the discomfort of Julie’s house, the strain of parties, the uncertainty of Don’s mood. He is very upset today. Everything he says is well founded. I do not find his behavior neurotic. And yet, of course, I resent his unhappiness. It makes me insecure and miserable.

  Also, those horrible attacks of rage I get. Against Eleanor, for being late back from lunch yesterday. Against the trustees of the Conan Doyle estate, for attacking my foreword in the anthology.87

  December 16. Still depressed—though things are all right with Don again. He is amazingly good considering his age and his problems and I have no right to expect more of him. When I compare him with Caskey—! I am amazingly bad, considering my age and my problems. I’m horrified at myself—at my fits of rage, during which I want my enemies throttled black and their faces stamped in. My attitude seems to get more and more negative as I grow older, fatter, feebler. And yet I know that this self-condemnation is even worse than what it condemns.

  We saw Speed yesterday and he took us to meet Ralph Meeker88 at the Garden of Allah.89 Speed was even more shockingly vulgar than usual. He told Meeker, “He wants to look you over,” indicating me. And then he went on about how Fonda wasn’t right for his play because he’s had an operation on his cock and his wife killed herself,90 and he couldn’t play “studsy” roles! Really it is no wonder that many people refuse to see Speed at all—or at any rate are very unwilling to be seen with him in public.

  December 18. Don has been at school this evening, and I’ve worked on a foreword to “The Secret Sharer” in case Dell decides to have that in my anthology in place of the Dylan Thomas (which was too expensive) and the Conan Doyle (which Frank Taylor is ready to join me in rejecting).91

  Tennessee isn’t in New York—but Truman Capote is, and Marguerite, and of course Julie and Lincoln, and Hugh Wheeler will be coming down. So we can look forward to some sociability.

  Great agitation on the part of Eleanor Breese, choosing me a secretary to succeed her. The one she wanted, Christina Pettigrew, can’t come because she’s earning much more in the job she has.

  Am dissatisfied with the few pages I’ve rewritten of my novel. It should be in diary form, as I originally intended—terse, abrupt, sometimes inconsequent. Not a smooth narrative.

  December 22. Just about to leave. The usual misery and jitters.

  Saw Swami yesterday, who told me that he’d been making japam for me. Nevertheless, I was sulky in the evening because we saw a bad film, The Rainmaker, and I got no supper till 10:00 and was rude to Glade [Bachardy] and Ted. Such behavior is inexcusable.

  December 26. Well, here we are in New York. Arrived on the afternoon of the 23rd, very late, after delays due to fog.

  As usual, when on a holiday of this kind, I feel very disinclined to write anything in this book. Just can’t be bothered.

  But so far the trip is being a success. I enjoyed going to the El Morocco on Christmas Eve and hearing the Salvation Army sing carols. Also, Gottfried [Reinhardt] was there—along with Silvia [Reinhardt], Marguerite, that masochistic bore, Emmett Blow, and an Englishman named Keating. Gottfried was drunk and insisted that the musicians in the Champagne Room play something echt Wienerisch,92 not operetta. Silvia was frantically impatient with him because they were leaving the next day for Europe.

  Then yesterday we had Christmas dinner by candlelight in the tall dining room at the Plaza, looking out over the twilit park. It was stuffy and plushy and comfortably sad and we felt like characters in a Henry James novel. I caught a whiff of New York in the 1900s.

  Johnnie, up in a suite at the Dorset, seems much better but you feel how he has been shaken. Shaken to the very depths. He now has to be careful. You feel his care in everything he says. Starcke, I could feel, is pushing him already—talking about his career, etc.

  Julie and Manning are more completely absorbed than ever in the business and game of being parents. They are nice to stay with, because we’re so free. But their Christmas presents were worse than nothing—two ugly identical faggoty belts from Carlos McClendon’s shop.

  Yesterday we walked miles and miles, looking at the Christmas shop windows. It was very enjoyable and I didn’t feel a bit tired. New York really wakes you up.

  December 28. Still rushing, and it’s really cheating to make this entry—just that I don’t want to break my record, and am in such a desperate hurry that I can’t think. Hurry to do what? Go to Frank Taylor’s office and fix up my forewords to the anthology items. To lunch with Glenway [Wescott]. Drinks with Paul Cadmus. But now I must go—

  1957

  January 1. Happy New Year! It’s snowing, and Don is depressed, after the party at Bernie Perlin’s93 last night, because he felt he had no identity. So I’m a bit miserable—how easily I turn to hating “pleasure” as soon as the least thing goes wrong.

  Sybil Thorndike, whom we met yesterday at Johnnie’s, was even more wonderful than I’d expected. She is a sort of saint—if only because, as an actress, she still doesn’t seem to give a damn what sort of an impression she creates.

  Johnnie himself looked grey and shaken and sad. We felt some strain between him and Starcke.

  But no—I can’t write any more. Everything is against it, including the discomfort of this desk. New Yorkers live in the most utter squalor—all of them. The dirt and the old broken-down slum houses.

  I decided yesterday to try writing The Forgotten in the third person with “William Bradshaw” as its chief character.

  At seventy-some, Sybil Thorndike is learning Greek!

  January 5. We got back home the night before yesterday—around one, because a seventy-mile-an-hour headwind held us back while we were flying over the mountains. Don had a stomach upset and felt awful throughout the flight—and he spent yesterday in bed. But now he seems much better. And we agree that, despite some bad moods and moments, this was really the nicest of all our visits to New York. The best things—the meeting with Sybil Thorndike, the performances of Major Barbara94 and Long Day’s Journey Into Night,95 Christmas Day dinner at the Plaza, the hilarious morning and lunch with Truman, the Balthus paintings.96

  Now Natasha Spender is staying with the Hookers. We had supper with them this evening. Natasha is really very sweet and not at all crazy as I feared.

  She says an old Russian she knew prophesied many years ago that before the end of 1957 New York wouldn’t have one stone standing on another. And all his other prophecies have already come true!

  I drove Natasha up to see the Huxleys in their new home in the hills, under the Hollywoodland sign. Laura very elegant. Aldous looked pinched and tired. The house is enchanting. Aldous’s study has the true snugness—something about it partly suggests a nursery.

  Natasha, on the way home, spoke of Evelyn Hooker’s hopeless pessimism about her appearance. Evelyn can’t believe that anything she could wear would be becoming.

  Two college boys just called me to settle an argument—is Konrad Bercovici97 “more important” than Alan Paton
98 or Joyce Cary!99

  January 6. This evening I have at last finished tidying up my desk—more or less—and now we are going out to see the Hookers and Natasha and Raymond Chandler, who describes himself as Natasha’s “nanny.” She isn’t quite sure that she likes the idea of him following her around; it was all right as long as they were driving about Arizona, but now she is settling in Palm Springs for a couple of weeks and wants to be quiet and play Beethoven sonatas.

  Natasha says that Chandler is a Walter Mitty. Certainly one doesn’t see any resemblance between him and the he-detective in his books—quite aside from his being nearly seventy. He told some funny stories—of how Harry Tugend100 said of Betty Hutton,101 “She’d be a nymphomaniac, if they could slow her down.” His favorite Hollywood expressions: “It’s terrific—but we can fix it,” “Do you want it good, or do you want it Friday?”

  I felt, when the three of us had lunch together (Don didn’t come with us because he is still keeping to liquids and also wanted to finish a homework portrait of himself as the boy in El Greco’s El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz102), that Chandler was jealous of my presence. He wants to monopolize Natasha.

  He rather reminds me of Faulkner.

  I have a feeling that this year is going to rush by like a jet. I must be quick. So much to do. Make a definite new start on my novel. Get started revising the history of the Vedanta Society.103 And finish the foreword to Conrad for the anthology.

  Talked to Ray Ohge on the phone. The Trancas restaurant escaped but the garbage cans were burned. His house escaped too, but the lot next to it burned. Beegle also had a narrow escape out at Anne’s104 ranch.

  January 7. It has been raining on and off all day and will rain more. My first day at the studio, and without a secretary. The new one I’m promised, Joan Waugh, claims she worked for me in another studio—MGM, I guess, but I can’t place her and I don’t like to offend her by asking.

  So today I’ve done next to no work, and it’s really impossible for me to do any until this girl has familiarized herself with the script.

  In the morning I talked to a writer named Pat Frank who is doing an air force picture, and tells me that at present we are ahead in the race with Russia, but within ten years both sides will be even. Then what? Buddhism or bust?

  Eleanor Breese came to lunch, already [wondering whether] she [should have gone] back to Vance. He is so possessive. She wants to go on working with me, on the side—but I’m not encouraging this. Eleanor is now thinking tenderly of her doctor.

  Talked to Rod Owens. He and Hayden nearly lost their house in the fire. Rod feels awful, thinks he’s going to have a breakdown. Called Evelyn Hooker to try to find him a psychiatrist.

  January 13. Heard from Evelyn Hooker this morning that Edward died two days ago, of a heart attack. The funeral is on Tuesday. Natasha is coming up for it, from the desert. At present, I feel nothing particular about this; the news is too surprising. My only clear resolution is that I ought to remake my will. I can’t expose Don to the danger of being left homeless just because of a personal scruple about my promise to Billy [Caskey] never to alter my will—an unsolicited promise, at that.

  Heavy rain yesterday, and depression, which I conquered in the only possible way, by doing lots of work—letter writing and other hated chores. My physical problem105 loomed large yesterday because we discussed it, and assumed the air of a tragedy. Today, because nothing was said about it, it solved itself absolutely—for the time being. But whether it is going to disappear slowly or reassert itself in the worst way, I can’t possibly tell.

  As I suspected, this year is tearing by. Have failed to restart my novel, done very little about revising the Vedanta history. I barely keep up with my work at Fox—in fact, this week has been disgracefully slack.

  January 14. Bogart died, which was somehow quite shockingly sad. I minded far more than I did about Edward Hooker, although I never knew him and scarcely knew Bacall. Such is the power of glamor?

  Frank Taylor and one of his publishing colleagues, Walter Mitchell, took me out to lunch at Romanoff’s. The atmosphere of businessmen on a spree. Frank told me how cultured Mike Romanoff is. He had read a government white paper on China.

  Don’s homework is to analyze the composition of Velasquez’s Las Meninas.106

  Have reached an all time high of over 150 pounds. Started to diet.

  Don couldn’t possibly be nicer to live with or more sweet natured than he is at present. It seems to me—touch wood!—that his lows of depression and negative emotion are getting much shallower than they used to be. His future and his development is the great absorbing interest of my life, now. I couldn’t possibly feel this more strongly if he were my own son.

  January 15. This morning I had a Salk vaccine shot, saw Harry Brown (who may be coming to work at Fox) and ate with Fred Zinnemann on the set of A Hatful of Rain—one sandwich apiece in paper bags. Fred appealed to me to invite Renée [Zinnemann] while he was away. He says she feels people only want to see her because he’s around. I told this to Don and left him to see the reflection of himself—which he instantly did.

  Edward Hooker’s funeral in the afternoon. A dreary but quick business. Allan Hunter delivered a rambling, almost senile address, but seemed quite his old self when I met him outside. Evelyn had the appearance of being half-doped—she had been given a Miltown before the ceremony.

  There was a full moon, and the sea was breaking to show an underlining of silver flashing from beneath the fold of its black cape. We ate at the Holiday House, with Natasha Spender, who talked about Lolly Spender’s death—how slow it was, and how hideously emaciated Lolly became, and how hard she fought.107 The blind man who used to visit her and make her temporarily better. Natasha’s very understandable resentment against Bill Goyen. She calls him a man-eating orchid.

  We have now reached a low of denudation—the table, the chest and the couch have all been taken away to be fixed up. Don is drawing on the small kitchen table.

  When I met Allan Hunter at the funeral, I said, “How nice to see you!” and immediately felt I’d been tactless. Allan, on his side, asked me, “What are you working on at Fox?” and then obviously felt he’d been tactless and added hastily, “It doesn’t matter!”

  January 22. Vivekananda’s birthday puja. Read the Katha Upanishad in the shrine before breakfast. Swami gave me a new raw silk wrapper—my old one seems to have been lost at the Trancas beach house.

  Pains right up my arm from the injury I did my thumb by playing with the modelling wax.108

  Many thoughts about death. How will I face it? And/or old age? Will Don be around? What will I do if he isn’t? I’m really disconcerted by my weakness.

  Weekend at Palm Springs with Natasha Spender, Evelyn Hooker, Raymond Chandler. Ray undoubtedly in love with Natasha. How does she feel? […] Natasha told Evelyn that Stephen is asexual109—I suppose she means, fundamentally.

  Evelyn assured us that she isn’t having to brace herself. This amazes her. But I fear she may have a terrible relapse later.

  January 23. Just talked to Evelyn on the phone this morning. She’s back at Saltair Avenue. She says she feels able to start to work again. She is worried about Natasha and Chandler, because apparently Chandler has restarted drinking heavily.

  Yesterday evening I signed my will, up at Mrs. Herbold’s. So now Don is protected.

  Then Swami took me (and Tito) to the little house in Pasadena where Vivekananda stayed for a few weeks in 1900.110 His bedroom is now made into a shrine. We went up there with Swami and sat for a while, while the other guests downstairs chattered loudly. I tried to concentrate on Swami’s meditation. What an amazing privilege—to be with him, in Vivekananda’s presence. Felt a keen elation—I was so safe with him. I tried to hold this. I want some of it for when I die. Can I be afraid while he’s with me? We shall see. I do hope not.

  Another note from poor crazy Bill Stroud: “As an Adult Friend of Mr. Gerald Heard, would you plead with him to use his mobile cons
ciousness a little more intelligently. He [may] disregard Vedanta because of repression, but his own provisional immorality stinks stinks raised to the n’th power of infinity …”

  January 29. Torrents of cold dreary rain. How I hate it! They say there’s snow in Topanga Canyon and down to the foothills around Malibu. Natasha went off yesterday night on the plane to Washington, after two dreary strained days spent entertaining her. If I’d been alone with her, I wouldn’t have minded, but Ivan and Caroline Freud made me embarrassed and Evelyn (with a virus infection, poor thing) was dull, and Don was being neglected. I must say that—though he is sometimes hypersensitive—I’m often quite infuriated at the way people take him for granted as the dear little kitten. This morning, tiresome old Chandler called from La Jolla, drunk, to tell me he liked me—am I supposed to fall on my ass with joy?—and that we were invited to stay with him. He graciously included Don but added that he was “overdefensive and that makes him a bit chichi, but I don’t mind.” I told Don the first bit of this sentence—not fortunately the rest of it—but he was depressed, just the same, saying how hard he had tried and how it never worked, and how he didn’t want to see any more of my friends, and how he didn’t know what he really did want, etc. However, the mood of all this talk was much better than it used to be.

  I decided not to go to work in all this rain. And I won’t go tomorrow, either, if it doesn’t clear.

  January 31. It did clear, but I didn’t go. Today, however, I’ve spent at the studio, racing to finish off the Paris sequence of Jean-Christophe. Am still not sure if I can do it.

  Magnificent after-rain weather with the snow-covered mountains in their splendor. I feel happy, yet I so miss the keenness of appetite and response to this kind of beauty I used to have—even up to a few years ago. Has the hepatitis permanently dulled me?

  A weird thing happened. The lady who has lived at 333 East Rustic Road since Bill and I left, fell into the channel last weekend in broad daylight (and sober), cracked her skull and died. I would love to know if they had had any unpleasant experiences previous to this, in that horrible spooky little place. It ought to be torn down. It’s full of bad luck.