So I agreed, and said it was true: I never wanted to talk to Vandanananda except on quite superficial matters. Whereas Swami Satprakashananda, whom I’d never met before, seemed immediately lovable. And that got us on to the subject of Krishna (George)—how, from being a sort of hunchback of Holy Mother, an abject, comic, pitiful, almost animal figure, he has developed, during the past fifteen years, into this very strange individual; cantankerous, obstinate, certainly—even still malicious—but so radioactive with love that he’s the only person around (excepting maybe Sarada) whom one could dream of calling a saint.
So Swami said that Krishna is going to India toward the start of this spring, to take the vows of sannyas. Then he’ll come back here.
After supper I talked for a long time with Prema, on the temple steps. How strange and dry and yet sympathetic he is! I felt as if I were talking to Judas Iscariot. He loves and hates Swami. He is full of bitter resentment and intrigue. He can feel no warmth and yet suspects and dislikes all who can. In a way, he wants me to come back and live there, and yet he’d soon get to hating me if I did. He longs for freedom, and yet he feels that leaving Vedanta Place would be a confession of failure. He said bitter-humorously: “When Swami told me I would get brahmacharya, I thought I must go to India first and see the source of all this, and then make up my mind if it was really the thing that mattered. I went to India, and found everything horrible and completely disillusioning—so I came right on back here and took the brahmachari vows.”
I like Prema very much when he talks like that. But oh, he is in a mess! And Ramakrishna help the society when Swami dies! Tito says Prema will run it, along with Daya.
Don and Ted have had one of their big quarrels. Ted is in a bossy, infuriating, manic state which is usually the prelude to a breakdown. Don says he [Don] won’t go to Bart [Lord]’s house any more to watch TV.
Don has done a portrait of a Negress which is really good. His best painting, so far.
I’m reading up on the Dead Sea Scrolls for a possible movie job.
August 25. Yesterday Dr. Lewis gave us our typhoid, typhus and cholera shots. We both had very sore arms and felt terrible. Today is a little better. I’ve never had such a violent reaction before. Dr. Lewis says, however, that Don’s sickness is merely due to his failure to eat in the middle of the day.
Johnnie called this morning to ask the derivation of the word “blighty.” It is Hindustani. The word means “foreign” (bilayati).
We had supper last night with Harry Brown and June. Harry has rented a little house perched on the side of the “Appian Way,”144 high up in the hills. A thick black ceiling divides the valley haze, which is yellowish, from the dark blue upper air. And yet you can see lights through it. The cut-out black toy silhouettes of three fir trees on the ridge. The houses and gardens up here seem curiously snug, tucked away out of reach of the city. Harry quite sober, drinking nothing at all, and doing all the cooking: he even makes cakes. A slightly boring but pleasant evening.
The result of Ted and Don’s quarrel is that Ted sneaked into the house while we were asleep and left an unwanted present, a record of The Pajama Game. Instead of gradually seeing less of them, which is what Don would like, we shall now have to make it up!
Don wrote a letter to Ted which was really quite masterly. And he says he did this with very little trouble—the words ran off his pen. All our grievances are so neatly and convincingly arranged in our minds, ready for presentation at any moment. If only a novel could write itself like that—or even a thank-you letter!
An unexpected rain shower this afternoon. This place is becoming more and more like the tropics. Jo and Ben came around. We had tea and the remains of the cake we fed to the Swamis and Paulette Goddard. Jo was enthusing over Erica Steele (who now calls herself Gayle) the madam who was involved in the Jelke scandal.145 Jo admires her clothes, her dancing, her skill at cookery, and her capacity for enjoying herself. Jo and Ben had told her she should buy a rubber raft and fins, so she went and bought them right away. (“You know why you aren’t catching those waves just right, Gayle? It’s because you need fins. You can’t do a thing without them!”)
Jo gets more and more fervent about all things aquatic. Her agonized wail: “Oh, the water was so warm! We had so much fun!”
Down the street, the children are screaming—for the sake of screaming. That acutely high note, to which no grown-up can listen for long without discomfort, actually gives them some sort of nervous release, I’m sure. And here am I, nearly fifty-three, and hating them worse than ever—wasting the few remaining years of my life in homicidal fantasies too silly to be written down. I must stop. Not for ethical reasons. Not because little children are of the Kingdom of Heaven, not because tet twam asi146 is eternal truth. No—simply for my own sake. I’m making myself miserable.
August 30. This frantic rat race continues. Another week gone by. Nothing settled. Far too little work done. I had all sorts of comments to make about my birthday, but now they’re forgotten. I’m behind with the section of novel I wanted to write. The Dead Sea Scroll project has flopped, at least until next week.
Patrick Woodcock is here. He’s nice, but he has to be entertained.
My arm aches like hell. The inflammation flared up again, after going down following last week’s shot.
Frankly, as of now, I’d be enchanted if I could find a way of putting off this trip altogether. It is just too fucking much of an exertion.
September 1. Last week, by and large, was one of the worst in a long while.
My birthday was a bore. Jo and Ben gave me a “joke present,” an ink ball to tell fortunes with, like theirs. I asked it, “Will next year be happy?” It answered, “No.” So I threw it out with the trash.
Then we had a ghastly boring party at Gavin Lambert’s, and a much dreadfuller party at the Hacketts’ to welcome Patrick Woodcock from England, and a mismatched emergency dinner at home for Dick Hopper and his friend John, to which we were compelled to ask Gavin Lambert so he and I could discuss the new script idea for Gingold, and a disaster dinner for the Cottens, Gore Vidal and Howard Austen, at which Gore insulted the Cottens’ darling friend Bouverie, the widower of his friend Alice Bouverie—calling him a crook, a fortune hunter147 and a cocksucker. And this led to a row later between me and Don, who accused me of letting him use me by inviting to the house people who bored me. I could easily have shown him the ridiculousness of this accusation if I hadn’t been drunk, exhausted and in great pain from my arm which was swollen up after a cholera shot. As it was, we are only just getting over the unpleasantness, and relations have been set back quite a long way.
I’m still in a great fuss about money. And sure that both the Dead Sea and the Gingold projects are going to fold.
I think we may fly to Japan. That boat trip threatens to be a bore.
As for the novel, it is interesting; and I must absolutely get on with it—do a big chunk before I leave.
September 3. Somehow a better day today—though both cars failed us: the Ford wouldn’t start for about ten minutes, and the battery is dead on the Sunbeam. But the weather is brilliant, cooler, breezier and more invigorating. I seem to have lost a little weight, and my arm, after a second flare up yesterday, is much better, nearly okay. And Don and I had a good talk which revealed, as so often, his terrible, almost pathological feelings of insecurity about our life together—which you’d think would be passing off by this time! As I see it, Don feels compelled to test the relationship in all sorts of ways. Is there anything that’ll make me break it up?
We spent yesterday with Patrick Woodcock. He says he finds great security in the knowledge that, twenty years hence, he’ll be leading just the same life as he’s leading now—attending the children’s clinic, looking after a convent full of nuns, soothing loonies, getting up in the middle of the night to see patients. There is no uncertainty in his future, no hope of exciting change, no scope for the ordinary kind of ambition. A vocation.
At Gore Vidal�
�s yesterday, the gross blond baby-bully actor, Albert Salmi. (I told Johnnie on the phone this morning that he was rude, and Johnnie said, “Yes, and he’s rude when he acts.”) Gore much outraged because Time and The New Yorker have acclaimed [James Gould] Cozzens’s By Love Possessed as a masterpiece. Personally, I only read a couple of dozen pages and stuck. It is quite well and solidly put together, but so prim and prissy and patty paws. So utterly, utterly not what I care about in art.
Got on with the novel today. It isn’t right, but now it begins to excite me.
September 4. Waiting for Don to get back from the gym so I can eat lunch with him and then hurry off to try to sell our story to the Burns brothers.148 It still seems to me like a forlorn hope. In fact, I hardly know just what the story is. And then hierarchies of sponsor-fools will have to approve it. Surely it will terrify and bewilder them?
My novel is very interesting to me and I feel really sad that I must leave it, and think such other thoughts and break the good routine of work. Something is alive. I’m down near the nerve—as I never was in World in the Evening.
September 9. I’m convalescent again, after a real setback—first a drunken evening last Friday at Gore’s rented Malibu house, with Howard, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Claire Bloom; then more shots from Dr. Lewis, which made me feel lousy again.
The Gore-Newman-Woodward household is curious. These people who perhaps don’t like each other too well but are closely involved. Paul isn’t a bad boy, but he’s so hard at work every instant proving that he is an anti-intellectual nature boy. Joanne has decided, as she puts it, that she is not “the mother of us all.” In other words, she finds it a bore to sort the linen and keep the place clean. Claire is demure, but probably quite a bit of a bitch. Her imitations of Queen Elizabeth II are extraordinarily funny. She is hopelessly in love with Richard Burton. Gore is such a resentful unhappy creature. He makes embarrassing references to his books—sort of challenging me to say I don’t like them; and keeps bracketing himself with me as a pair of “literary men.” Howard, I think, is unhappy because he can’t have a complete domestic life with Gore, whom he adores.
Have just finished a day’s work with Gavin Lambert on the TV story. Since we are pretty sure that that old bitch Gingold will wriggle her way out of the deal, it’s a thankless labor, and also an irritating shame, because she could have been so marvellous in it.
The young-old daughter next door just stopped me to tell me she is getting married to an Austrian, “about your age,” who is in “international commerce,” has written several books on mathematics, and who speaks Japanese. He sounds really sinister.
Jo has her stomach pains again. She is taking Equanil and belladonna, which reminds me that I must take mine. I’ve been letting it slide—not because I have had no pain but because the alarm has been lifted. Also, my cholera-sore arm has helped. As Jo says: “There’s nothing like a pain for getting rid of another pain.”
Today we had our passport photos taken for visas. We’ve ordered twenty each to allow for unexpected demands. The photographer told us that another customer who was going to the Orient had taken one hundred. But that was for two years.
One of the little girls opposite has tied a tin can to her pedal car—just so it will drag along the sidewalk and make more noise, apparently!
September 10. Geller called this morning to tell me that Gingold’s agent has announced her decision not to have anything to do with TV work for the present. So we’re just shown the door. All our work is rejected, unseen. And that’s that.
Of course she’s an old bitch. And it would be wonderful to get revenge on her by selling the idea of the story to Beatrice Lillie,149 as Geller suggests. Nevertheless, I feel a certain relief, which isn’t altogether laziness. Now I can get a good big swatch of the new draft of my novel—I like the title Down There on a Visit better and better—finished before we leave.
Talked to Swami on the phone this morning. He says his vacation in the High Sierras was wonderful. But when he got back to Hollywood he felt such a letdown that, “I wanted to cry.” “And then,” he concluded, “this morning I went to the dentist and I thought of calling you.”
One of the nice features of a setback of this sort is that it draws people who love each other closer together. This was Don’s immediate reaction. I have been worried about him—particularly worried about the upsetting effect this trip may have on his development. But, after all, why worry? And what’s the ultimate harm in being upset, anyway? Isn’t it something one should pray for?
6:40 p.m. The latest news is that Geller talked to Gingold and she denied what her agent had said. She claims she merely said she couldn’t make a pilot film during work on Gigi at MGM—which nobody has ever asked her to do, anyway. I’m so disgusted and bored that I’d just as soon drop the whole deal now; because it’s a cinch that if we write out this treatment and show it to her she’ll merely turn it down anyway. But Gavin is inclined to give her one more chance, so I suppose we shall.
A fine windy day on the beach with a crumpled tinfoil sea, not too cold, however. Read Tom Jones. I don’t like it nearly as much as Smollett.
Last night I looked through Whymper’s Scrambles,150 after seeing a terrible film called The Mountain, with Spencer Tracy and Robert Wagner: like so many bad dramas it would have made an excellent farce.
September 13. Friday 13th—hope this is lucky because we finished the treatment of the TV story for Gingold today; Gavin and I dictating, Don typing. Don has typed the whole thing, as well as taking down the rough draft in pencil. Gavin and I gave it to Gingold this evening. She says she likes it, but you can’t tell. She is so foxy, and tonight she had as her excuse her exhaustion after five twelve-hour days of work at MGM on Gigi.
Not to be sly—this was the essence of a revelation Prema feels he’s had, after cooking for the Swamis up in the Sierras. He says he used to be ashamed of Swami Prabhavananda for sounding off and yelling at people and banging the table—but now he sees that it is wonderful not to be afraid to show one’s feelings. This really impresses me, coming from Prema.
He says Prabhavananda spent most of his time shut up in his cabin, and that his mood seemed continuously indrawn.
Only three weeks from Sunday! But I still promise myself a big swatch of work on the novel.
September 14. A resolve: to struggle hard, between now and our departure, to overcome this terrible cultivation of resentment inside myself. It is deadly dangerous.
Much reassured by my talk with Prema last night. If he becomes changed, all will be well. It will make an immense difference to me personally and I think to the Vedanta Society. It was so strange to hear Prema say: “We must be bold. We mustn’t be conservative.”
Oh, I have slipped back so far. And for no reason. There is nothing that I can find morally wrong with my way of life at present. Oh, yes—there is: the giving way to tamas. Perhaps even the glorification of tamas as snug catlike laziness. That’s very bad. I must struggle and struggle against it.
Resolves: to write the draft of my novel at least to page thirty—forty, if possible.
To finish Dante’s Inferno, the Caitlin Thomas book151 and odds and ends. To finish this diary—if possible, without cheating too much.
My arm still aches, and I feel heavy and log headed and dazed. The atmosphere is like flat soda water. Never mind, old horse—scramble to your feet and let’s get going.
September 16. Sad, sad, sad. The sun shines, and yet I’m sad. I feel defeated, self-defeated, inviting defeat and desertion. What a stupid scene on Saturday, a squalid mess. The only consolation: I didn’t behave badly to Thom Gunn, or in front of Cecil Beaton.152
Is melancholy catching? Yes, very.
Nevertheless, I have gotten ahead with my novel.
Gingold, after being all smiles to the Burns brothers yesterday, says today through her agent that she doesn’t want the deal. Gavin thinks the agent’s to blame. But she is certainly a pathological hesitant.
Sep
tember 18. Apparent disappearance of all hopes of Gingold. She wants to go back to the theater and stage her own dreary dull dead-serious (so we are told) play, and act in it.
We had supper last night with the Don Murrays. They are almost becoming serious friends—perhaps they will. Don [Murray] was full of the fact that he has discovered how to fire a rifle with one hand (for his part in The Hell-Bent Kid153). He is getting an extra thrill out of handling firearms, he says, because he’s a pacifist. We also laughed a lot over the Cadillac they have just bought—it doesn’t sound too good for the director of a refugee relief project to be riding around in one!
They are quite a sweet pair, who seem a little sweeter than life because of their physical beauty. But Don is capable of being unkind to Hope—or at any rate of embarrassing her. We were all rather drunk and he told stories about the wedding. A friend of Don’s was staying with him—a somewhat enigmatic German? Italian? who has helped Don with the relief project and with a TV play about refugees in which Don is soon to appear.
Don also signed a photograph of them both with a drunken-embarrassing inscription which I’m sure he regrets this morning.
Their house is still as bare as a prison. We ate on straight-backed chairs in the Californian-Spanish dining room which is still their only furnished room.
September 19. I went to see Swami yesterday, for the first time since he got back from the Sierras. I remarked that Prema had told me how Swami had spent most of his time in his cabin, and Swami said: “Yes—I was having such a wonderful time with the Lord.” It is a measure of the doubleness of my life that I can both accept this statement as literally true and also marvel that such a statement, made by anybody, could ever be literally true. I realize more and more that Swami is my only real link with spiritual life. But this is rather like saying that the Golden Gate Bridge is one’s only link with Marin County. What more could I ask for? I was very much moved, last night, as we sat together and he told me how he wants to have this joy not only occasionally but always. “Then I can pass it on to you all.”
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 105