Though I have learned of love in every phase
With diligence and thrift have gathered love
Heaping my treasure over many days
Toiling to love you more, with deeper love
Like hopeless love that does not count the cost
Guiding my love through many devious ways
Knowing that those becalmed in love are lost—
Patience! My own dear love whom I adore
Each day I learn to love you more and more.
He is very sweet. I feel terribly embarrassed because he is reading through The World in the Evening, very slowly—even rereading it, he says—I feel with a rather horrified fascination. He calls it “clever.”
I have done some work on the novel today and on the Vedanta history, but nothing for Wald, because he’s been too busy to see me about the problem of the rioting. I find it nearly impossible to push on with the script until this is cleared up.
My health is good again. The stomach twinges are gone. What I need now is lots of money for the trip.
Don restarted school today, after a week’s holiday which he described as “some of the unhappiest days of my life.”
April 24. Decided to call my novel simply Forgotten.
Don was greatly depressed yesterday—so this morning I gave him a pep talk, reminding him that nothing learned is ever a dead loss, that he may as well stay in school until some other line of action presents itself—as it surely will, etc. He seemed much reassured by this talk.
A bad day at the studio. Drove and drove at the scene between Jean-Christophe and Olivier just before the riots. Couldn’t get it.
Lunch with Charley Locke at the Swiss restaurant on Westwood. He is sweet and innocent and I like being with him, but he demands so much time. He unwinds so slowly.
Gore Vidal came by. He is suffering from rectal bleeding. I felt very sympathetically toward him. Jerry Wald has asked him to do the Proust film.
April 30. Am feeling worried because of this indigestion. I mean, I’m worried that it may not be indigestion. And yet I have to smile at myself, even as I write this, thinking how differently we appear to ourselves and others! Here am I, a bundle of worries about myself—and yet this very day Charley Locke told me that I ought to have been a minister of the Gospel because I had so much inner strength—his secretary had said the same thing—and that this inner strength was undoubtedly due to my British ancestry! Poor Charley is in a terrible state of mind, because his producer casually told him yesterday that he will be off the picture by next Tuesday—just when he was having his wife come out to visit him! I comforted him as best I could.
As for the indigestion—well, it must wait till next week. I have to give Jessie’s pills a tryout.
Feelings of general dullness and elderly weakness are no doubt due to reading Balzac’s Curé de Tours, and falling asleep this noon, on the office couch.
Finished the Paris part of the script—up to Jean-Christophe’s departure for Switzerland—and sent it in.
Getting on slowly with the novel.
May 1. Indigestion continues. Stomach swollen up big. Wretchedness.
But I want to finish the screenplay before there’s any serious trouble.
Gore Vidal, with whom I had lunch on Monday, thinks that Tennessee is pathologically obsessed by the pursuit of success and the fear of losing it.
I make arrangements for our trip to the Orient, and yet a voice whispers to me that I won’t go—that I may be seriously sick—may die soon. I’m weary, weary, weary. I keep on with my novel, however; and keep working through the Vedanta history. If only I could stop feeling so rushed! In fact, no one is rushing me, except myself.
Don just finished painting the downstair bedroom. He’s nervous-sick too, strained and rushed. But we seldom lose contact with each other now, and if we do it’s soon regained.
May 3. This stomach thing continues. I’m now resigned to the fact that I will have to tell Jessie Marmorston about it on Monday. Ironically enough, my sex feelings have meanwhile returned to quite an extent!
Saw Swami, the night before last. He held forth against mescaline—or rather, against the cult of mescaline. He doesn’t feel that the experiences it provides are valid. I think there is a semantic block here. Swami is not unnaturally annoyed when he hears it talked of as a substitute for meditation.
I’m deeply depressed, right now. Because I’m sick? Or is it just a guna? Who knows? I keep on working and functioning, but without joy.
And how much japam have I made? None!
May 6. This morning, I went to see the famous Charles Taylor, who told me that my rectal bleeding was only due to an unimportant pile—not to the other trouble I’m having. Taylor complimented me on being able to relax to such an extent when he put in his sigmoidoscope! So now both Eleanor’s men, pilot and proctologist, have awarded me good marks for sangfroid—me who am literally dying of tension! Taylor is very dapper and charming—compared to Vance, he seems almost courtly! And he certainly handles his instrument with the same quality of reassurance as Vance his airplane!
But, all kidding aside, this choked-up sensation in my stomach persists; and the day after tomorrow it’s to be X-rayed. I’ve been having the most horrible sensations of depression. Yesterday I kept wanting to weep. Yes, underneath, as I discovered under hashish, I’m a sorry creature—terrified of being deserted by all, and particularly by Don. Terrified of getting old and sick and dying of cancer.
Don has said he wants to go to New York alone—because he feels incapable of having any relationship to anyone while I’m around. So he is going as soon as school ends—June 15—and already I’m miserable about it—for no reason—for actually, as the sane half of me knows, it’s good and healthy and desirable. He has to feel free to do such things.
Misery, dread, weariness, weakness. And what’s the answer? Japam.
Supper with Ken Wasson, whom Caskey and I met in Bolivia.122 His talk brought back the black manic-depressive nostalgia for the altiplano. He told me about a tribe which reckons everything by twos. One is a half. When they drink, they use two cups simultaneously.
May 8. To Dr. Danelius for X rays. He gave me 1066 and All That123 to read while waiting, and talked excitedly about the Jungian analytical interpretation of Moby Dick. I don’t have a tumor, it seems. But still this feeling of discomfort persists, and they don’t know what causes it.
Some tension with Don. He says he is bored by my affectation of strength and would like me to lean on him more. But when I do lean on him, he gets rattled. Or am I being a bit unjust? Yesterday he said he hadn’t realized I was worried about the result of the X-ray tests, until I told him I was.
I’m a leaky, creaky but still quite powerful old ship. Some of my passengers are sincerely shocked, however, to discover that the captain carries a private life belt.
May 9. The day my father was killed.
What a long long siege of melancholic tamas I’m undergoing! Miserable slothful sadness and aimless worry. Defeatism without cause. Already I dread Don’s departure for New York. In my present state, I really don’t want to travel anywhere myself. The India trip looms as a dreary menace. I don’t want to go. I want to lie down and moan.
It’s most instructive to go through this kind of thing at a time when there is no question of its being rationally justified. Just shows you!
“Though we know not always whither we are going, we know well what the journey costs us.” Balzac—Le Curé de Tours.124
May 10. Last night, we had supper with Jo and Ben, and Eddie James came too. He seemed more balanced, more relaxed, more genial, less crazy than I’d remembered. But how he remembers, and how he can hate. The extraordinary intensity of his resentment is best expressed in his imitations. He told an annihilating story of how Tchelitchev125 had tried to double the prices of his pictures—“For you, as a friend.” He still remembers every slight he has suffered, as a rich man in the hands of bohemians.
But he was also charmi
ng and interesting about Xilitla, his Mexican home. How he has learned to be observant because if you aren’t the tarantulas may fall on you from the trees, or you may tread on a coral snake or a deadly lizard—so deadly that a man was killed by spreading his blanket on the ground, lying down and inadvertently squashing one. And the parrots that sleep lying on their backs on your pillow, like men. And the rats and the goats. And the casual murders committed by the Indians and never or lightly punished. He made the whole place come alive.
Afterward, when we got home, Don said: “I feel I’m stifling here!” He talked a lot about my qualities as a monster—how I force people to leave me, etc. But the end result of the talk was a letting off of steam, and somehow the atmosphere cleared. I only wish he could go to New York at once and then perhaps we’d be able to see things clearer.
He is right about one thing—and I write this knowing that one day he’ll read this, most probably. There are times when I think bitterly: I support us both—and what’s his contribution—making neurotic fusses!
But that’s only half of the truth. I’m still happier with Don than I’ve ever been with anybody. And I don’t really in the least mind earning the money—at any rate, not when I’m well.
Jessie Marmorston tells me this morning that the rugae (wrinkles) of my stomach are slightly inflamed. I’m to go on a diet. No raw vegetables or fruit. Eat only chicken and hamburgers.
May 12. Stomach a bit better. Or anyhow my mood is better. Don seems happier. The sun has been shining. But more rain seems to threaten. The huge inscription which the high-school boys painted on the wall down at State Beach—“This wall is for queers, homosexuals and perverts only”—has been removed, somehow, by the authorities.
Don went to Mother’s Day dinner with his mother. I’ve been pondering over my novel and reading Fires on the Plain by Shohei Ooka. I’m about to start a course of Jap novel reading, so I’ll be hep for our trip.
Yesterday night, we had supper with the Stravinskys. A journalist once asked him; “When you wrote Orpheus, did you think about classical Greece?” And he replied, “I thought about strings.” Bob Craft took this as a text for a diatribe against critics. I felt very warmly toward him, and Vera and Igor—they are all lovable. Igor complained of headaches. He works even after supper. Eddie James was there, with a silver non-rep statuette made by Oliver Andrews—obviously an ideal object to “lose” in friends’ houses. Eddie, I noticed, has a technique of carrying two tissue-paper parcels—one a real one, one just paper. At the end of the evening, he leaves the real one behind him while he ostentatiously pockets the paper one.
Igor showed us the back garden, remarking that it was always overrun by the neighbors’ children and that he didn’t at all mind this, but that they were not always “prudent” with the water hose—left it flowing and thus caused landslides. Imagine the fits we’d have thrown if anything like that had happened!
Jim Charlton actually left the Masselinks’ in a hurry yesterday, because he thought I was coming up there! I don’t know why he is putting on this act—but I must confess I’m beginning to get really mad at him. This is very silly—and, on top of that, it’s just exactly what he wants!
May 16. It has turned a lot warmer. A piercing headache last night and this morning. But the gastritis—that’s what Jessie says it is—has yielded amazingly to the treatment she prescribed—no raw fruit, milk drinking, and giving up coffee altogether.
All is cheerful at home. “We have such fun together, don’t we?” said Don this morning at breakfast.
Vera Stravinsky and he came to lunch with me. We took her on the set of Kiss Them for Me. She told us how she once played Elena in a Russian film of War and Peace.
May 17. Amazing, the headaches and bodyaches I suffered last night! And yet I’m sort of optimistic. I know I’m quite sick, but I don’t care. You get used to it so easily. Sickness only becomes depressing if things are going badly—then it’s the last straw.
Ivan told me yesterday on the phone how Caroline had said gaily—after he’d sat up all night writing her long introspective fault-finding letters—“Let’s draw a veil over those, shall we?” She’s coming out this weekend.
Charley Locke has received notice that he’s through, here. He is leaving with no regrets—sincerely shocked by the life that is led in movie circles: he finds it hectic and decadent. He met Harry Brown the other day, and thought him: “self-confident.” He told me that I’m one of the few people he isn’t afraid of!
May 20. We drove to the AJC Ranch and spent the weekend. John [van Druten] seems definitely better, although he has lost a great deal of weight—thirty pounds—and continues to do so. Saturday, Don’s birthday, was beautiful. We swam in the pool and I started to feel a good bit better inside. Don loves the peacefulness of the ranch. Later we drove to the rather grim stony valley end where the Crippens (the murderer’s son and his wife) live. John has a great curiosity to meet them.126 The houses stand in little carpets of garden, always with bushes of oleanders and sometimes some palms, with the grey volcanic rubble all around. Later in the evening, a roaring wind got up, thrashing the cottonwoods, and blew all night.
Yesterday, after a tedious drive in fast but thick traffic, we got home and went to supper with the Masselinks, celebrating Don’s birthday by having our first drinks.127 The drinks went down well and warmly and the evening was pleasant, without aftereffects.
Today I learn that I’m to finish here at the end of the week. MGM offers a polish job on Ben Hur. Geller irritates me by staying on in New York because his wife is sick.
May 21. I forgot to mention a conversation I had with Johnnie. He said again that he doesn’t feel the least bit upset about Starcke. “If he hadn’t left,” Johnnie said, “I should have killed him, just as I killed Auriol.” I said, “Are you planning to kill Dick Foote?” “Oh, no!” he replied.
This idea of Johnnie’s, that he can “kill” people—force them to die—is quite crazy, of course. But not the least bit crazier than the ideas I get.
Don is promoting this trip to San Francisco. He longs for the rush and excitement of it. I hate the idea. I just want to stay home and relax and sleep. But I’ll probably enjoy it when I get there.
To lunch with Gore at MGM and see Zimbalist128 about Ben Hur. He keeps opening his eyes at you, like a revolving lighthouse.
Stomach better but back aches.
Another thing Johnnie told me: that if Carter should die, he’d go back to England and settle in Folkestone or Eastbourne.
May 31. Pete Martinez and his friend, David MacFadden, brought Jen Yow,129 who’s staying with them, over from Long Beach to see us. Jen is here because he is in charge of a traveling exhibit from the Pierpont Morgan [Library]. I haven’t seen Pete since the winter of 1951–52, when I was in New York for the opening of Camera. He was fat then; now he looks good. His thick furry black hair just touched with grey. The visit was a great success. Don got along well with both Pete and Jen. Only David turned tiresome when he had drunk a bit—we felt a submerged spite against Pete. Also he was academically sententious about Thoreau, on whom he’s writing a thesis for a master’s degree.
My stomach is slowly getting better, I think. I stick to wine on Stravinsky’s advice. But my fat disgusts me, 152 pounds.
Mr. Jalal Ahmed, deputy director of films and publications for the Pakistan government, came to lunch with me today. He says that Pakistan has no culture yet—it’s a melting pot. He has the tiniest moustache I have ever seen. We are to meet in India—of course.
June 1. A date to be recorded with dismay. Only four months till we start and so much to accomplish.
Today has flown by. We got up at nearly 11:00, decided to have only juice for breakfast, Don worked on his design, hating it—an oriental dancer. At 2:00 he came out with me to lunch at Ted’s Grill. Now it’s after 5:00 and we’re supposed to have supper at 7:00 with Michael and Gerald Heard, and Don says he has to go to the gym first. He is very cross, as so often, because an hour c
onsists of sixty minutes—not five or six hundred, as he’d like.
Jerry [Wald] now says that we will be through by the end of the week. And then I shall be free to get on. But I’d like to make token beginnings today.
June 2. The supper at Michael Barrie’s with Gerald last night was definitely not a success. The two of them got on to their eternal subject, LSD, and served up the usual line of talk. Michael was very holy. He spoke with holy, smug satisfaction about people who get the horrors when they take it. “People who haven’t meditated just can’t stand it,” he announced. Then turned to Don with what seemed the most bogus solicitude: “Do you meditate, Don?” “No.” “Ah—”
We had had champagne for supper, which made Don a bit high, and he was in a towering fury all the way to Dick Hopper’s, where we calmed down, watching Humoresque on TV. Don says he never wants to see either Michael or Gerald again.
Yesterday I restarted my novel and tried to begin the Ramakrishna book. But it isn’t easy to do so. Some kind of personal approach seems desirable, but what?
This morning, Vernon Old showed up, and stayed talking for nearly an hour and a half, although we obviously wanted to get rid of him and start work. He was very self-contained, gracious, good humored, thick skinned. He told us to go and see a mural he has painted in the cocktail lounge of the Normandie Hotel, also a painting he has had accepted by the county museum. He has been interesting himself in falconry as a hobby. Now that he is nearly bald, his big smooth face seems even bigger and the scars on it more noticeable.
A foggy day here on the beach; sunny inland.
June 5. This is to record that today I broke all records for criminal laziness. Stayed home from the studio and did nothing. If I had decided to do nothing, this would have been okay and even quite sensible—I need a rest. But to wander about, too lazy to read—mugging, puttering, fiddling with things—shameful. I must relearn the art of being alone, or I shall be miserable when Don goes.
Grey lifeless fog all morning. Then it cleared and I went on the beach and swam.
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 102