Later. A warmish night with a misty moon. The frogs in the channel making a noise that reminds me of the clatter of a funicular railway. Why do they sometimes suddenly stop?
Supper with Jo and Ben, alone—Don is in school. They have just returned from Jo’s home, Yakima, Washington, where there was a family conference on what to do about Jo’s alcoholic brother. He became alcoholic because he was the smaller of two twins, and because all his sisters were so strong. Ben, telling about this, said, “They all married weak guys.”
Jim Charlton had been in to see them. He is still nursing this grudge against me, because I didn’t give him the remodelling job on the house. Ben thinks all this is nothing but jealousy, and that it goes way back—back to the fuss about my going to Bermuda with Sam Costidy in March 1952!
We hear Tennessee has had an operation but is better.
June 9. Two days ago, I finished work at Fox—at least for the time being. That is to say, the script of Jean-Christophe is now to be mimeographed and read by the front office, and offered to stars and directors.
Now I’m at home hoping I can make good use of my time.
Rather against my inclination, we are going to San Francisco on Thursday for three to four days. I’m unwilling to do this, because it makes a rather meaningless break, and because it’ll cost money—of which we do not have much, considering the expense of the trip before us. However, the tickets are paid for already.
Don leaves the following week—the 18th—for New York.
Today was grey but with some sun. We lay on the beach. Don and I went in the water—the first time we had a good long swim this year. Jo gave me some trunks which had been a present to Ben but were too small for him—and horrors!—they fit rather snugly, thirty-fours. I am getting loathsomely fat. I have just taken the tape measure and looked to see how big four inches is. That’s what I’ve gained.
June 10. Last night it rained. Today was sunny and hot and I went in the ocean; it was quite warm.
I have quite lost the art of being alone. My mind is dull. I get no bite out of sensations. I’m merely restless. Then tired out. Got my “upside-down” board from upstairs, and lay on it.
However—my stomach seems better and I feel a certain return of sex vitality.
Today in Campbell’s book store (where I went to buy a Greek dictionary as a birthday present for Igor) I read an article in a book edited by John Lehmann, which said I was through—my good work all finished in the thirties, and thereafter nothing but the inconsiderable Prater Violet and the “unsatisfactory and uncharacteristic” World in the Evening.130 This depressed me. And yet I don’t know why it should, because I don’t really care what they think. But then I ask myself: What am I fit for, nowadays? What am I accomplishing? What does my life mean? And the answer seems to be I have to write that Ramakrishna book. That will sum up what my life has been about since the thirties. As for the novel, I don’t know what to think about it. But I do know I want to write it.
June 12. Today we heard that Thom Gunn isn’t going to be in Palo Alto this weekend, because he leaves for England tomorrow. So Don said he didn’t want to go to San Francisco at all. This relieved me. We have decided that he’ll leave earlier on his trip—as soon as he can get reservations. I welcome this, too, because it may mean that he comes back earlier. I want to get his absence over with. I shall miss him horribly. Today we drove up to the Observatory in Griffith Park—which we haven’t done since February 20, 1953, when we talked about Ted’s breakdown and Don’s decision to leave home. I said that I’d never guessed, then, that here we’d be, four years later. Don said that it wouldn’t have surprised him. “That’s what I mean by being obstinate.”
When I went up to see Swami, and put out my hand to shake his, he first made me bend down and gave me his blessing. He seldom does this. He told me again how very near Maharaj is to him, all the time. “Whenever you think of God, He thinks of you.”
June 15. Don left two days ago, at 11:00 p.m. on Thursday. I’m sort of taking this easy for the present, breathing deeply, swimming slowly along—lest I get rattled and start wondering if anything is happening that I wouldn’t like to happen. So I try to be very calm.
Yesterday night I had supper with Hayden and Rod. It was really very nice—though Don’s right, they are both bitch[y] and would hurt anyone to the quick, just for the sake of a wisecrack.
Today I had lunch at Vedanta Place—a “Father’s Day” celebration, arranged by the congregation for the Swamis and the monks and nuns. We were all garlanded with flowers. Afterwards, some of the congregation performed a very amusing play based on the story of the twenty-four teachers of Avadhuta, from the Bhagavatam.131 When I congratulated the author, Mr. Sharp (?) he said, “Oh, it was all a mad camp!” It was campy, in just the right way.
June 17. 6:45 a.m. Have already said my beads and am now ready to begin the day. It’s going to be beautiful. The chill of early morning. The white half shell of the moon in the sky—looking like a place you could really get to, if you took the trouble. Stomach symptoms persist, faintly, in the background and no wonder: last night with Evelyn Hooker I drank two martinis and some wine. Evelyn looks mortally tired, but she is full of plans for “entering the jungle” on her search for the social customs of the intergrades. We had supper at Sinbad’s and talked to [Lennie] Newman who told me, drunk, that he can’t get any intellectual companionship.
Mr. Hine, Mr. Stickel and his daughters have just come back in the car from swimming. The sunshine is nearly down to the bottom of the hill opposite. The vacant lot strewn with papers. The sycamore tree opposite, with the four mail boxes on it and the sign warning you that children are at play. Pink roses are blooming in front of my study window and the rice-paper plant (a native of Formosa) is getting big. I find the tree in front of the house is not a palm but a green dracaena.
I wonder where Don is.
June 18. Yesterday was scorching hot; today looks like being hotter. Jo, Ben and I took gluttonously to the beach. We went in the water half a dozen times at least.
To the Stravinsky concert in the evening—for Igor’s seventy-fifth birthday. Bob Craft, pale as a lily and quite beautiful in his exhaustion. He looked, as it were, purged through hard work and so curiously innocent and good. He hadn’t had enough rehearsals with his orchestra of the Canticum Sacrum and the Agon. Then Igor came on, limp with sweat but wonderfully svelte, although he had hurt his back against the corner of a couch. He conducts with the most graceful, campy gestures, like a ballerina. Bob is stiff, sudden, birdlike. He jabs at the musicians with his fingers, and you feel an almost vengeful birdlike harshness, a pecking and a dry ruthless demandingness.
Of course I didn’t enjoy the music. I didn’t expect to. It seems chiefly to consist of nervous stabbing sounds, the creakings and squeaks of a door swinging in the wind. Little fizzes of energy from the violins. Short desert twisters of revolving noise, which soon pass.
Yet I believed it when Aldous—looking more beautifully slim and distinguished than I have ever seen him—called Igor “a great genius,” a “saint of music” and the maker of “the Stravinsky revolution.” What struck me so, thinking it over this morning, is the token quality of any kind of a life—viewed as a story of achievement, every life is a little ridiculous: what a to-do about nothing! So Igor has made a revolution—! So you were president of the USA—how absurd! But it seems more absurd to be president. Eisenhower sent an asinine telegram, obviously composed by one of his aides and carefully worded so Igor shouldn’t be praised too highly—after all, he is only a naturalized citizen.
All these lives—they’re absolutely convincing “on paper”—one accepts “the idea” of them without question. But—what a strange masquerade!
Vera’s sweetly lovable dazed innocent fatness. The bohemian mixture of languages they all speak—which somehow creates Paris in the twenties. Igor always scolds her in Russian.
Have just heard from Geller that they like the script at Fox. They want to
put me on something else, soon.
June 20. Don called from New York this morning, early. He is having a great time, seeing everybody, and he doesn’t plan to return until the last moment before school—in ten days. I can’t say I’m altogether pleased. Selfishly, I’m worried. I imagine him forming all sorts of new relationships outside of my sphere, and maybe one in particular which will keep pulling his thoughts eastward after his return. And yet I am glad he went, and glad that the visit has been a success.
The trouble with me is that I give up so easily. I just cannot face the prospect of losing Don, and so I prepare to lose him at the first hint that he isn’t yearning to return. Partly, too, this pessimism is due to my stomach, which keeps acting up.
It isn’t so hot, today.
Oh, I must conquer tamas, sad sloth.
Last night I visited Jack Larson in Salka’s old apartment. He had a young actor friend with him, named Jimmy Bridges, who said to me, “You must have had a marvellous life.” I agreed with him, but it’s surprising how little this thought consoles you for sadness in the present. Jack has a rubber monkey wrench used by Chaplin in Modern Times and an original poster of The Kid. We watched an awful TV film of him trapped with three others in a burning flattop. They played cards until the ship blew up. Jack photographs very badly, all chin.
Later: Melancholy. Stomachache. Loneliness—terrible sad unromantic loneliness. Lay on beach with Speed who is wild with excitement because he has finished two acts of Comes A Day. He started on his favorite theme—that there was soon going to be an explosion between me and Don, and between him and Paul. “I don’t know why,” he said, “I just know it.” He “knows” it because he wants it to happen, partly because of his love of explosions, partly because he thinks it would be good if we two lived together. Our living together he imagines in terms of continuous excitement, sparks jumping back and forth. But my battery is dead. I couldn’t work after I left him. I lay down on my upside-down board and slept like an old dog.
June 21. Every day I feel worse. Miserable loneliness. And stomach blues, which no kind of dieting seems to dispel. Time has begun to crawl. I can hardly imagine how I’ll get through it till Don comes back.
Had lunch with Charlie Brackett at Romanoff’s, to meet a French journalist, Michel Clerc, who is doing a lightning book about the USA. He was obviously impressed by my energy and youthful appearance!
“On my tongue the taste is sour/Of all I ever did”132—how well that describes my mood!
Tonight the Lockes and the Anhalts are coming to dinner. Why?
June 22. God, I was so bored last night! The only relief, in a way, was that I didn’t have to talk. Charley Locke and Eddie Anhalt yakked away at each other—chiefly about Eddie’s dealings with the army in relation to his work on The Young Lions. Eddie speaks of the army with terrific love-hate, admiration-contempt. Obviously, being in it was the only thing in his life that actually mattered a damn. I quite like bossy Mrs. Locke, who has a hugely fat, piggy daughter—a nice hard-boiled jolly girl who drinks a lot. Eddie’s Jackie George [was] a bit of a bitch.
Woke up feeling so blue. I can’t figure out where the pain in my stomach ends and my mood begins. Grovelling loneliness and longing for Don to come back—and yet the feeling: what have I to offer him but gloom and misery? He should stay away and make his own life.
June 23. I have to record ten days almost utterly wasted in sloth and self-pity. True, I have felt sick and lonely, but that’s nothing new.
Now, let’s have a couple of resolutions:
Before Don returns, I’ll—
finish revising the Vedanta history
write their foreword for them
and solve the problem which prevents me from finishing chapter one.
June 25. Another incredibly sluggish day—slept one and a half hours on the couch this afternoon! I say to myself: Well, why not be sluggish? Cultivate a noble idleness, like Augustus John, whose memoirs I’m reading.133 But—with me, sluggishness is sluggishness.
However, I have done some work.
Roll on the weekend and Don’s return!
I torment myself, imagining that he has become deeply involved with someone else, or simply discovered that he prefers to be on his own.
Stomach better, after Jessie Marmorston told me yesterday that she is taking me to a specialist! She declares she’ll fix it up, no matter what, and that she’ll restore my virility by bigger and better shots.
Today I went swimming. The water was warm though the weather was grey with drops of rain. The atmosphere of “bathing” in England but about twenty degrees warmer! A portable radio carried by a teenage girl was hoarsely raving.
Later. Rereading this diary at 11:50 p.m., after supper with Harry and June de Bon (?)—I never will get her name straight134—I’m disturbed to detect an underlying note of resentment against Don. It keeps appearing throughout the past few months. Do we basically hate what makes us suffer? If so, we must hate everything we love—including God. If God doesn’t make us suffer, it means that we don’t love him. But—since the aim of journal writing is to be frank—I must be very careful not to gloss over any feelings of resentment I have against Don. Don is in this respect much more honest than I am, I’m bound to admit. He says he has to focus all his aggression on me because I’m the only person he cares about. Well—maybe after this trip he’ll feel differently. Would I prefer that? No.
June is a nice girl, but she suffers from a fatal lack of what, for want of a better word, must be called sophistication. She says things which must make Harry squirm, I should think. For example, I was saying how much I’d like to do the screenplay of The Day Christ Died, and I outlined a notion—obviously out of the question as a practical possibility—of having a centurion running through the picture who is terribly worried about an inspection by the general which is to take place the day after the crucifixion. So at the end of the picture, he remarks: “Got to hit the sack. Big day tomorrow!” When I’d told this, June exclaimed: “Oh, what a grim ironic tag!”
June 27. A wonderful letter, full of love, arrived from Don yesterday. So now I’m happily awaiting his return and should doubtless have forgotten already about my fears if they weren’t recorded in this book.
Even my stomach is better, despite the fact that I drank too much last night with Vance and Eleanor Breese. I drank because I was hating the evening; it was full of unease. Vance is so nervous and so possessive. If you don’t like the oysters, if the singer in the nightclub is not amusing, it is his fault, he takes the responsibility—like a martyr. And you feel like his executioner.
Eleanor says she is happy, but [maybe] she […] only means that she feels she has made the best of a bad bargain.
I spent most of today reading Gavin Lambert’s Slide Area manuscript. It’s not bad, and I envied him for having seized the opportunity to write about Los Angeles—but it’s mostly just journalism.
June 30. Don has telegraphed that he’s coming in on a TWA flight at 6:10 p.m. today. If he arrives safe and sound, and the trip turns out to have been not only a success but a valuable experience for him and a step forward in our own relationship, I still can’t flatter myself that I’ve had anything to do with it. For me, this separation has simply been a failure. I failed to make any constructive use of it. I’m shocked to find how much worse I am at being alone than I used to be. I had looked forward to pleasures of meditation, survey, reevaluation of the past—and what have I done? Mugged and idled around. The only positive achievement was writing a foreword to the Ramakrishna movement history—and that’s not so hot.
July 2. Don arrived safely, and all was happiness and joy. That’s all I can report, as of now. I haven’t any idea how school is going to work out for him, or how long the glamor of the holiday will carry him, or what changes, if any, have taken place in him.
I still don’t see how things are going to work out with this trip. Can we afford it?
Went to a party at Jessie Marmorston’s last nigh
t, at which I got drunk on wine and today have a hangover. Also, I smoked a cigarette.
My body is putting on fat like a woman’s, 155 pounds!
Today Gavin Lambert agreed to do the TV story with me for Hermione Gingold.
July 5. Yesterday we went to Trabuco. Gruelling heat and a lot of traffic on the way down—better coming back. We were late for lunch and had to sit right in the middle of the table, as it were. Swami Akhilananda and Dr. Chakravaty gave dull talks in dead voices. The play was fun, however. Don liked that.
Later we saw the fireworks. Don had another of his attacks of depression. What was he to do? Should he stay in school? He hates it because he gets no encouragement.
After we talk, he feels better. All the usual things have to be said, but the fact remains that it seems best for Don to stay in school right now. What else would be better?
John van Druten is installed at the rented house on the Pacific Coast Highway. He seems shaky, but is eagerly planning a new play.
Today I have talked three times to John Kulberg, about his “Mad Poet.” Got on with the novel. I’m utterly bored by it but want to finish part one and show it to Don.
July 10. This disease or neurosis of aggressive resentment is getting more and more serious. I find myself chewing on it, like a lemon. I hate everybody—lady drivers, children, cops, Jews, journalists, etc. etc. Never mind about the moral side of this. The point is, if I don’t stop I shall make myself seriously ill.
Needless to say, it affects Don, whose nerves are bad anyway after a long hot day downtown at school. He snapped at me yesterday because I hadn’t called Lena Horne,135 and because I’d sent off letters to Lincoln and Johnnie Goodwin without showing them to him.
We saw The Matchmaker again,136 and Aldous was there. It seemed so strange to see his bowed, distinguished head in such an audience. I suppose Laura had dragged him. I do not like her. There is something shameful in Aldous’s subjection to this mannish well-tailored bitch.
July 11. “All things can tempt me from this craft of verse”—how distinguished Yeats makes his laziness sound! This morning I’m trying to start chapter two of my novel—dashing it off in a rough draft again, because it is so completely wrong in its present form—and I have been tempted already—it’s only 10:35—as follows:
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 103