Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  1958

  February 2. Well, hi.

  Yes I’m back. We got here three days ago, early in the morning of the 30th. A very thick white fog around the airport. The pilot said the ceiling was 500 feet, but it seemed to me that we had almost touched down on the runway before we saw it. Some cute paratroopers across the aisle of the plane were visibly worried.

  It is pouring down rain. I’ve been working all day, getting my desk tidied and my accounts and papers sorted and straightened out. I still have rather a bad cold on my chest, with a cough. The day after our arrival I spent mostly in bed.

  The idea is to start work tomorrow morning on both the Ramakrishna book and the novel. We have $5,162 in our account here. That won’t last long. I had hoped there would be some money coming to me from Johnnie’s will, but Carter blandly informed me that I’m no longer the literary executor. Johnnie made three different wills last year. I wonder who was responsible for that?

  I went to supper with them the night we arrived. Dick seemed as much of an ass as ever, only now he’s a rich ass. As usual, he was planning to advance his “career,” with a couple of agents.

  Don goes back to school tomorrow. He couldn’t possibly be sweeter than he has been since we arrived home.

  February 3. Don went to school. It rained heavily in the night and our bedroom leaked. This morning it cleared. More rain is expected tonight.

  Today has been a day of doing dozens of evasive chores to escape working on my two books. I suppose this was inevitable. One can’t expect to snap smartly back into work after nearly four months of doing nothing about it.

  Talked to Gerald on the phone. He described, with a certain relish, the truly horrible last phase of poor Bill Kiskadden—he leaks at the sphincter, has a nylon aorta and is going blind.166 On top of that, he has been forced by ill health to return to live here with Peggy, which he’d previously refused to do.

  Talked to Tom Wright, who tells me (a) that Jim Charlton has just gotten married to a rich Swiss woman of his own age, with three children (b) that [a friend] ran off to Portland with Tom’s car and Jim’s camera. Jim never got the camera back, but Tom went up to Portland and recovered the car.

  February 11. Yesterday and the day before were bad. I had bellyache and fever. Then felt absolutely exhausted and lay down resting on the couch. Don was away all day yesterday at school and phoned to say he was spending the night downtown. Maybe at his mother’s. I don’t know.

  Today I got a page of the novel and a page of the Ramakrishna book done. Never mind if it takes an eternity. I must keep at it.

  To see Kent Chapman yesterday evening. He lives down in Venice, which I still think the most glamorous slum in the world. I do like him. He is intelligent and innocent. He has a candid eye. He told me about the Venice West school of poets and painters. They have a special jargon: they talk about “wailing,” meaning riding high in any sense. You can “wail” by writing or painting or simply smoking marijuana. The aim of their art is to make you sick to your stomach. One painting is of a figure with a death’s head. One arm ends in a great spike. The other arm has a bleeding wound in it.

  February 14. This diary keeping goes hard, but I must keep after it. I’ve been rereading the earlier pages of this volume with quite a lot of enjoyment. Meanwhile I’ve got to get some notes written down on our trip.

  Ben and Jo return on Sunday. In lifemanship terms, they are one up. They have “made contact with the environment” (I only write this in quotes because it sounds so pompous). We failed.

  Today is the fifth anniversary of my meeting with Don. I gave him a star ruby last night to replace the one that got lost or stolen last year.

  There isn’t even any statement to be made about this anniversary: we are so much in the midst of getting on with our lives. I do pray that Don is going to find more happiness in his work. I can’t help hoping that this idea of his going to a class with Vernon Old might work out well. Because Vernon can surely understand many of his problems.

  We had Vernon to supper, three nights ago. He really seemed very nice; much less pompous and patronizing. I took him up to see Swami the day before yesterday. Not sure how much of a success that was. Not a smash—but maybe all right. Vernon is still very critical of things up at Vedanta Place.

  Prema whispered to me an amazing story: Phil (Buddha) has seen Tito fairly recently. He thinks Tito is crazy. Tito has a terrible hate on against Ramakrishna and Swami. Phil and/or Prema suspect that it may have been Tito who disfigured the picture in the Santa Barbara shrine. A symbolic murder. What makes this idea even more alarming is of course the possibility that Tito might attempt to hurt Swami. I very much doubt this, though. And the whole theory has big holes in it. I can’t picture the circumstances in which Tito would get clear up to Santa Barabara, hide, presumably in the bushes, and sneak into the temple.

  Don and I had supper with the Stravinskys and Bob Craft last night. Chris Wood was also there. A wonderful evening of joy and love, in which I felt we were all included. I never can remember what is said on these occasions—oh yes, we were looking through a book of very inadequate illustrations by de Staël to poems by René Char.167 But it was all joyful. We had fish soup. Igor seemed much better and looked younger.

  Today I’ve been bad. I ought to have gotten on with my novel and the Ramakrishna book. Instead, I slept; after working outside putting some of the garden debris into cartons. But at least my social security application is all set up. I start it in a couple of weeks.

  February 17. The day before yesterday, Saturday, at 10 a.m., I took the half bottle of mescaline (dissolved, I suppose, in water) which Pat Trevor-Roper gave me when we saw him in London last month.

  (Pat fished the bottle out from behind a row of antique leather books. I think he had had it with him for some time, and this may possibly explain some of the disagreeable symptoms I got from taking it—symptoms quite different from those of my first mescaline experience on February 24, 1956.)

  The solution tasted bitter, but not sufficiently so to make me want to get rid of the taste by eating something sweet. (A puritan reaction here: I had a feeling that maybe it was good that the stuff should be bitter—that this meant it was still potent!) After taking the mescaline, I went ahead and ate breakfast—orange juice and a boiled egg. No coffee, but I’d had some just before taking it.

  Symptoms, as before, of sickness and nervous excitement. I thought of myself as a rocket, tearing upward through the atmosphere layers. In an hour, I should begin to orbit.

  Sure enough, the first visual phenomena began to appear just round 11:00 a.m. By 11:30 they were quite vivid. Above all, I was aware most strongly of the rich texture of the “pickled” woodwork of our ceiling. Also of the many tints of light in our whitewashed walls. The yellows and reds and blues of books on the shelves stood out very sharply. Also I became aware of every particle of dirt and dust on our living room floor. The folds of the window curtains were deeply sculptured.

  The sun was shining outside, though somewhat hazily. I was aware of the prettiness of the plants, which became full of blue shadows. But when I went outside to examine them, I was rather disappointed. I felt no sense of their being alive (as in the previous mescaline experience). Indeed the potted plants on either side of the front door seemed quite definitely dead (which they are not) and very dry. Only some small flowers held out their blossoms toward the sun like begging hands—that is to say, in a gesture which seemed human.

  Don asked me: how do I look with the moustache? I replied that it seemed natural to his face, and that it was perhaps the lack of it which had bothered me when I examined his face under mescaline before. But I was also, not agreeably, aware of his terrible restlessness—of his anxiety about his appearance and of what people might think of it. I saw him positively tormented by his ego—his ego perpetually stepping between him and the possibility of real enjoyment and satisfaction and knowledge. Yet, at the same time, how gallantly and touchingly he struggles! Such a quick nerv
ous beautiful restless creature, sometimes momentarily so ugly with cruelty and misery. One of the smaller cats, an ocelot, maybe. He brought me two or three of his pictures to look at. They didn’t fail the test by any means—there was evident power in them. (But I’m anyhow very sceptical of John Goodwin’s theory that mescaline endows you with an absolute criterion of aesthetic judgment.)

  The unpleasantness of this dose now began to become more evident. I mean, when I took mescaline before, I seem to remember that the nausea quickly passed off. This time it continued throughout. Also I became increasingly aware of acute nervous tension which expressed itself as a feeling of pressure at the back of the skull and at the base of the spine. I was terribly restless.

  I called Ivan Moffat. I wanted to see him because he is to be the chief character in my novel. He said he would come around as quickly as possible.

  At 12:15 I noted “a very intense secret kind of nervous trembling.” By this time I had showered and gotten dressed. I was clumsy (as before) and dropped the soap a couple of times.

  I closed my eyes, expecting to see patterns. But the only patterns I saw were stupid, sharp cut, dull colored, metallic. “My thoughts are all tin,” I wrote.

  By this time, the wall boards seemed semitransparent. Whenever I fixed my eyes on them, the white in them began to run down like milk. I said to myself, “Isn’t all this just an artistic kind of nausea?” I was very far from any sense of genuine insight or vision. Most unspiritual. I also felt the reticence of one who is nauseated. I could say literally, pointing to anything: “All that makes me sick.”

  When Ivan arrived—I think around 1:00 p.m.—I was sitting on the step of the front door. “Like an old Provençal peasant,” he said. My first impression of him was almost that of a George Grosz drawing: the high white bulging forehead of an unhealthy child, and below it the wrinkled eyes and the sagging purplish fruit-heavy cheeks of senility. His legs seemed disproportionately short.

  Later, I saw that he too is a cat—one of the big ones: a heavy old panther sitting patiently in a tree, waiting for his prey. He has a heavy-jowled face, grave with patience. He is cruel in a sense, but not fierce. He even waits with humor. “I’ve had everything I wanted,” he said, “even the most unlikely things.” I asked him if he was afraid of impotence. He said yes—he was afraid of any loss of potentiality.

  He drove me up to the house he wants to buy. He only has about $4,000 saved, because of all the people he has had to support, and because he eats at Chasen’s three or four times a week. The house will keep him slaving at movies for years. It is high up the hillside above the mouth of Sunset Boulevard—not far from the Cottens. Quite a big place, about twenty to thirty years old, Spanish style. Ivan wants to take it to make a home for his daughter, Lorna. If Caroline Freud can get her divorce, he’ll marry her. “If not,” I told him, “you’ll find yourself with a sixteen-year-old bride, one of your daughter’s friends.” He admitted to lecherous daydreams along these lines.

  I had to ask him to drive home, because I was feeling sick.

  After we got back, he borrowed an issue of the U.S. News and World Report which contained an alarmist article on Russia’s military intentions. Ivan is haunted by war fears.

  Shortly after he’d left, I phoned him to ask if he is ever bothered by resentment against his dependents. He says almost never. I believe him. But this is flatly opposed to the character in my novel.

  The visual effects continued till between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. Toward the end, I noticed a lot of caricature faces in the woodwork. I said to myself that, if this picture-making faculty were to persist after dark, it might become annoying and ultimately frightening. Otherwise, I felt absolutely no fear.

  But I was getting very tired of the visual effects. Also of feeling so sick and tense. All this while I’d felt absolutely no hunger. But now I forced myself to take several spoonfuls of honey—hoping to stop the action of the drug.

  Don—who’d been doing homework upstairs all this while—hadn’t eaten; so we went out to Ted’s [Grill]. Either because of the honey or because the drug was anyhow losing its power, I now ceased to see things abnormally. But the feeling of tension increased and increased, until it became quite agonizing. I felt almost unable to sit still. I wanted out. It was like suffocating, although you could breathe. “I’m not sure I can bear this,” I thought; and then: “What will happen if I can’t bear it? Nothing.” And I felt ready to scream. Gradually the worst of the distress passed off, as we walked home. But I never felt hungry, and never really relaxed—even in sleep—until next day.

  To sum up: a disappointing, acutely unpleasant, uninstructive experience. My immediate reaction would be never to take the stuff again. But I have these five capsules I got from the drugstore in New York. So I think I have to try. I’ll wait awhile.

  Yesterday night, Jo and Ben returned from their Tahitian tour, flying back from Honolulu. They arrived in a thick fog, and had to land at Burbank. Most of the rest of the country is being swept by blizzards.

  February 20. Ramakrishna’s birthday—but I’m not going up to Vedanta Place because Swami is sick with a cold and won’t be taking out the relics at vespers.

  A lovely cool sunshiny day, after yesterday’s rain—which dripped into the downstair bedroom closet and over the record player and over my books, ruining, among others, Marjorie Bowen’s Black Magic which I’ve loved for more than thirty years.

  A very nice evening, the day before yesterday, with Jo and Ben. They say that Tahiti has almost no native life left. But they loved visiting the smaller islands. Jo is much worried because her White Stag168 job has come to an end.

  My own prospects, none of them very dazzling are:

  The possibility Jerry Wald will succeed in casting Jean-Christophe (as he says he’s trying to)—that Elsa Lanchester will like the Gingold teleplay (which goes to her today)—that I’ll be hired to write Tender Is the Night for Selznick and [Jennifer] Jones (which is being considered)—that I’ll be taken on to do a movie about the Dead Sea Scrolls (in which a producer at Fox is interested). Of these choices, I guess I’d most rather do rewriting on Jean-Christophe.

  If I had money, I’d just keep going on the novel and the Ramakrishna biography. Both grow very slowly—a page a day—but I know I shall become increasingly absorbed in them.

  February 25. We’re as busy as bees right now. Don has supplemented his classes at the Chouinard by taking lessons with Vernon Old. That is, he took the first today and it seems to be a great success. Oddly enough, the still life he painted for Vernon was in quite a different manner—much more relaxed. I am so delighted, but hardly dare breathe lest it shouldn’t last.

  Heavy rain last night, and the leak reopened over my bookcase, which is most tiresome. The roof will have to be fixed—and where is all the money to come from? Still waiting to hear if maybe Selznick wants me for Tender Is the Night—but of course I don’t really want to work with Selznick or with anybody. I want to get the hell on with my books.

  Met Betty Andrews in the Canyon, with her little boy Christopher. He had a plastic toy doctor’s outfit. He said: “Show me your braces.” I said: “I’ll only show you, because you’re a doctor, not your mother,” and I took my lower bridge out and showed it to him.

  Prema drove me up to Santa Barbara on Sunday. I had to pinch-hit for Swami, who still has a cold. On the way, Prema told me Maughamlike stories about the congregation.

  For example: J., a building contractor, seemed the archetype of husky virile American male. But he began saying that his wife, K., really ought to be a nun. So finally K. joined the convent. Prema found this so odd that he decided J. must be impotent—especially as J. sometimes spoke of a serious accident he’d had. Finally, K. fell in love with or was at any rate fallen in love with by D., one of the nuns. The two of them finally had to leave the convent. But now, J., the supposedly impotent mate, springs a surprise. He comes to Swami and says there’s a beautiful young millionairess wants to marry him; and he’s
going to marry her. And one supposes that millionairesses do not marry impotent men. Or do they?

  February 28. I seem to have no particular desire to keep this diary going, but I shall try to do so—at least to the two entry a week minimum. It has been thundering this afternoon. Now it’s raining. Don has worked steadily at art school. I’ve kept the Ramakrishna book and my novel going—without much enthusiasm. The novel seems such a bore, and the Ramakrishna book is weary work. But I know from experience that some good always comes of steady progress. Pages always pile up into something.

  The latest scandal is that one of Marguerite’s beaux now thinks he may be in love with Speed. Actually, […] the whole pentagon—Marguerite, Marguerite’s number one beau, Marguerite’s number two beau, Speed, Paul—[is a bore. T]he whole thing’s an utter bore. Marguerite’s chief preoccupation is lest she should be publicly humiliated, because Muff Brackett has already announced a big Sunday Lunch “to meet Marguerite’s beau.”

  There’s a kind of gleeful masochistic indiscretion in all this which I find repulsive, and which makes me rather hate both Marguerite and Speed. Rather, not altogether. Well, it’s not important—except that Don minds. Says I don’t like his friends.

  March 5. We had quite a big party last Sunday night. Dorothy Miller fixed a turkey and Ivan Moffat, Joan Elan, Paul Millard, Harry Brown, June de Baum, Ellis St. Joseph and Gavin Lambert came and ate it. Ivan was bored by Paul, who has been told by Marguerite all about Speed’s behavior and couldn’t stop talking about it and protesting he didn’t care. Joan Elan has been warned by a fortune teller not to travel at the end of this month—it would be disastrous; but she has been offered an excellent job in New York television. Shall she disregard the warning? Harry has a job at Fox, and seemingly he still has June. Ellis has bought a house down our street, which doesn’t charm me at all. Hope he won’t be a nuisance. Gavin had been in a fire that afternoon. A gas explosion in the house he’s renting. All his books and a lot of clothes burned. And he burned his hand, not badly. He was very good-humored and stoical about this.