I think her stay was a success, though. On Saturday, we had the Stravinskys, Bob [Craft] and the Huxleys to supper. Igor became wonderfully oracular, said, “Music is the art of time.” Aldous talked mescaline, recommended The Relic by [José Maria de] Eça de Queiroz, and said that he had met Father Bruckberger recently and that he was going to France to make his own Mary Magdalene film and would probably sue Selznick.177 (In all Aldous’s remarks I seemed to detect a certain venom and aggression: he looked much better, though very thin.) Rosamond did her best to keep up with the highbrow talk. She used phrases like “an organic whole.” She wore a most elaborate grey dress and was covered with makeup. Laura seemed less rude and more feminine than usual. Bob, as always, was lovable. Vera told me that, the day before, when I’d phoned her, she had been napping in her studio, and she had actually been dreaming of me and Auden. Auden was present in the dream—very elegant, wearing long white gloves. I had told Vera that I was about to give up writing and sell pictures. I had a Cézanne for sale. Vera dissuaded me. She said that it was a terrible profession, you never knew which pictures were fakes, etc. etc. I told her I thought this a very friendly dream.
Just before our guests arrived, Ted showed up and said he had broken with Bart and wasn’t going to see him again. He was greatly upset, and both Don and I were a bit jittery because we’d just been to see Three Faces of Eve. So Don misunderstood and thought Ted had said, “I just left Bart dead”—meaning he’d killed him. Later, Ted seemed to calm down. He went off quite cheerful.
Last night we went to a glamor party at the Selznicks’, for Rosamond’s benefit. Don was enchanted because he was going to meet Joan Fontaine. He did meet her indeed—she talked his ear off about cooking until he was utterly exhausted! I felt rather disgusted by both Sam and Frances Goldwyn. There is something vile about them. I feel ashamed to have shaken hands with them. Of the guests, Louis Jourdan was the handsomest, Rock Hudson the dumbest, Janet Gaynor the coyest, Lauren Bacall one of the nicest—though maybe a little bit too much of a regular guy. I do like Selznick and Jennifer—particularly Selznick. Today, Jennifer leaves for India, on a solo trip.
Marjorie Ramsey, my secretary, had a dream a few weeks ago. She was going to die at a certain time—I think it was 2:00 a.m.—and she realized with horror that she had no religious belief. She thought: I should try what Mr. Isherwood believes in—the—she couldn’t think of its proper name—but it was the Gita.
Swami thought this dream was very significant.
Lately, I have arrived at this formulation: religion—as I understand it—means a relationship. Either directly with God, or with someone who has a relationship with God: belief in another’s belief—as I have with Swami.
April 30. Yesterday I got this cable from Richard: “Deeply regret to tell you Mum seriously ill following stroke writing fondest love.”
I just feel dully wretched about this. No more news so far. I cabled back that I would come if I could be really useful. I don’t want to go, of course.
Decided not to tell anyone except Don, and I didn’t tell him until after we’d had supper with Jo and Ben at the Brown Derby and taken them to the Oscar Levant show where I was appearing. I had to take part in singing “Huxley wants to dedicate a book to me,”178 and I blew up on one of my solo lines.
Don was very sweet about it. But I made him spend the night in town. I don’t want to make the usual kind of tragedy out of this—the kind which consists in imposing funeral faces on your friends and embarrassing everybody for a month.
May 1. Another cable from Richard this morning: “Mum slightly better and is going to nursing home tomorrow for treatment Amiya is with us.”
A dull bad day. No work accomplished, either on the movie story or on anything else.
May 4. Today we have been on the beach and now are getting ready to spend the evening at Selznick’s. Jennifer is in India.
Don just said he’d like to go to New York for his birthday present. I guess that will be in June when his school semester is over.
The wisteria is quite over now. But there are spilling yellow roses along the patio wall.
I get the feeling, so often lately, of how fragmentary life is. “Es hat wohl einen Anfang, hat ein Ende, / Allein ein Ganzes ist es nicht.”179 This realization comes whenever I think how I might die right now, leaving everything “out on the floor.” And yet—is there any way to tidy it up—and—far more important—is tidying up really desirable? More of this another time.
May 9. Grey. A sad dull day. No more news from England.
Saw Swami the day before yesterday. He said that enlightenment is not loss of individuality but enlargement of individuality, because you realize that you’re everything. When he says things like this they seem like revelations, because it is he who says them. A very sattvic mood all the time I was with him.
This treatment writing for Selznick drags on and on. We are now on the eighth draft. I still can’t really believe that the movie will ever be made. I like getting the money, but I would love to stop and get on with my other work. No novel for a long time. Very little on the Ramakrishna book.
May 11. The evening of the 9th I got really quite sick and spent the night vomiting. My shit is very light colored and I still feel shaky. Hope it’s not the liver acting up again.
A cable from Richard yesterday—which I spent mostly in bed—says that M. is “wonderfully better and has recovered her speech”; but I doubt if this will be more than a temporary relief.
Well—I thought I wanted to write something here but I find I don’t. Except that I just finished a novel I really like: The Relic by Eça de Queiroz. It takes a real artist to write a bitchy novel which is not too bitchy. This is almost perfect tightrope walking.
Had the great satisfaction of writing the following to the Hartford Foundation:180 “Because of the situation which led to my resignation from the board, six years ago, I have made it a rule to have no dealings whatsoever with the foundation. I must therefore regretfully ask you to tell Mr. Themistocles Hoetis that he must find another sponsor.”
May 13. Supper last night with George Koniaris and his wife, Angela, a rather beautiful Greek girl with a big ass, hairy arms and a light moustache. Koniaris, drinking resinated wine and eating the very good dinner Angela had fixed, declared fiercely that everything he saw in the world around him was rotten, he was so alone but an atheist, and unable to accept the consolations of religion, that no real tragedy could be written around a woman, etc. He is quite a ferocious little thing. He finds that tragedy in America is on too small a scale, everything is ordinary. In Greece people feel more passionately and don’t care about money. The best ancient Greek dramatist, in his opinion, is Aeschylus. It surprised me a good deal that he likes Cavafy.
Extract from his credentials—he wanted me to show them to Selznick, “After his graduation from the high school, this Prince of Thought had overrun the highest academic studies…” etc. The funny thing is, despite all this nonsense and because of the egomania, I guess he will “succeed.”
Oh, this goddam success, which nearly everyone has to have, it seems, before he can become even halfway sane! And by then he’s old and awful.
Miss Ramsey smells of dog. She keeps them. I wish she didn’t get on my nerves so.
May 15. Don and I are going through a not-so-good phase. He is under strain; too much rushing back and forth in the car to school and back. Vernon is a most valuable calming influence, but not quite strong enough. I really rather hope he’ll go to San Francisco alone, the weekend after next—and to New York later. Yet I know I shall miss him horribly. And as for the thought of his leaving me—it would be the end of everything. It’s true, I depend on him too much.
And I criticize his selfishness, instead of restraining my own.
May 21. After a day with Selznick, it really looks like we are running into a bog with Mary Magdalene. He is the soul of indecision, and today he took the story all apart. Well—this will be the ninth week, anyhow.
Harry Brown didn’t last nearly that long on Tender Is the Night.
Don had a nice birthday supper last Sunday at La Rue, given by Marguerite [Lamkin] and Paul Millard. Don and Hope Murray came, and Bob Craft, and we got very drunk.
Don has done a good portrait of Marguerite and some truly brilliant and funny sketches for his fashion class. He does seem to be making marvellous progress now.
A long talk on Sunday cleared the air a whole lot, I think. I must learn to be much franker with him, always.
May 23. Time rushing by. Nothing done. It’s all very well to fool with this Magdalene story but I ought at least to be inching ahead with my novel and the Ramakrishna book.
Nature note: a snail ate the words “Dear Chris” from a note Don had left for me on the chest in the living room.
Glorious weather. War talk.181 Uneasiness. The recession doesn’t seem to recede. My thumb is as bad as ever; maybe worse.
May 25. A marvellous day, but we couldn’t go to the beach because Don has to do a design project for school. He loathes this design class; it’s the only thing he does in school now which he’s bad at and has no pleasure in. But he has to do it to get a credit toward his degree. Only a few more weeks, however. Then he gets off, and goes to New York. He wants to stay with Marguerite in Monroe first.
Today I made a feeble first move toward writing a travel article (which I must do to substantiate my income tax claim for travel expenses). So I read through Don’s diary of the trip. It was quite a big surprise, both disagreeable and agreeable. The disagreeable things he writes about me are no more than he has often said. And of course the claustrophobia of a relationship is much more strongly felt while travelling. He is obsessively selfish in his reactions; but then I probably am too. On the other side, his talent for describing people—although too negatively—is astonishing. His description of Dodie Smith, written on January 1st of this year, while we were staying at the Beesleys’ cottage:
There were a few moments last night after the New Year, when Chris had gone to the bathroom upstairs to brush his teeth, when I was left alone with Dodie. Almost unaware of me and visibly hardly able to bear any longer the strain of the long day, she began pacing the floor, fidgeting, passing from the living room to Alec’s study and back again, eking out a note or two of half-hearted conversation to keep me occupied while her mind was all but absorbed in something else. I watched her face: it was ugly with tension and pain and anxiety. The corners of her mouth drew down in grotesque expressions of tragedy, her thin nervous eyebrows met and parted in spasms, her whole face changed quickly and horribly in a succession of almost ridiculous stage masks, happy, sad, fearful, resigned, hopeful, determined, grim, like waves of emotion splashing flooding disappearing and forming again over her face. At one point, after a short silence in which she was incapable of disguising her distraction, and even, I think, completely forgetting I was in the room, so difficult was her struggle with herself, she sighed rather than spoke, “Johnny.” Not John, but Johnny, only just audible, as though she were speaking to him personally, intimately, alone. I’m sure she didn’t realize she’d said anything.
There is a touch of Proust in this.
I’ll finish up this volume on an “up-beat,” by describing a dream I had just at that time—to be exact, on the early morning of December 31, just before going from the Cavendish Hotel, where we were staying in London, down into Essex for the above-mentioned visit to the Beesleys:
I dreamed that I had a talk with Brahmananda. He remarked that he didn’t know why Ramakrishna moved around at all, since he could see God everywhere. I went away, thought this over, and decided to ask Brahmananda why he moved around so much—actually far more than Ramakrishna. So I went back to see him. He was seated on a high platform in a wood (the scenery was vaguely Japanese and may have been “borrowed” from Nara182); this platform was about six feet high. As Brahmananda saw me approaching, he prostrated. I understood immediately why he did this. (It was a bit like Zossima prostrating before Dmitri Karamazov.183) I prostrated also, with tears, thinking of my many impurities but feeling at the same time great joy. Although the platform was so high, I felt Brahmananda’s hands touching the back of my head in blessing—which would have been physically impossible. No questions were asked or answered: there was no need. As I walked away, there were other people around. One of them said: “Did Maharaj tell you anything you may tell us?” This was asked most respectfully. I shook my head, still crying, but now beginning to feel vain and take credit to myself for the great honor of this experience—and I woke.
I knew at once that this wasn’t merely a dream but a vision—far more memorable than anything I saw or felt while in India—or for many years. Swami—when I told him on my return here—agreed. “It was a great grace,” he said, solemnly. “Perhaps you’ll come to—” (I can’t remember the word he used: it wasn’t as strong as “illumination”) “—in this life.”
I think perhaps what was so particularly convincing about this vision was that it was my first intimation of contact with Brahmananda—to whose personality I’ve never been particularly drawn. I really felt that tremendous love radiating from him, of which Swami so often speaks.
[The entry for May 25, 1958, brought Isherwood to the last page of his notebook and he began a new notebook here.]
1 1954 film of Bridget Boland’s play.
2 Juan Bautista de Toledo, first architect of the Escorial, the royal monastery northwest of Madrid; the Hieronymus Bosch painting there is Christ Mocked.
3 Bridey Murphy, while under hypnosis, claimed to recollect a former life; she became the subject of a book by Morey Bernstein, The Search for Bridey Murphy, released as a film in 1956.
4 T. H. White.
5 Alluding to The Actors Studio, fount of naturalistic, psychologically revealing Method acting.
6 “Coming to London,” published in Lehmann’s book of the same title in 1957 and reprinted in Exhumations.
7 Isherwood evidently meant piñata.
8 The actor, Montgomery Clift, crashed his car after a drunken party and damaged his face and jaw.
9 The director; Moffat co-wrote the screenplay.
10 Elizabeth Taylor.
11 Ice Palace (1958); the film Giant was based on Ferber’s 1952 novel.
12 Captain Horace Brown.
13 The house Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, her second husband, had shared.
14 The Prologue to Mr. Norris and I ….
15 Isherwood later added in the margin: “(Used this in A Single Man).”
16 Isherwood and Bachardy saw a performance of Marcelle Maurette’s play, later filmed with Ingrid Bergman and Helen Hayes.
17 The actor.
18 Beside this paragraph Isherwood later wrote: “(Used in A Single Man).”
19 The memoir was published as The Widening Circle (1957); the play was never produced.
20 What Religion Is: In the Words of Swami Vivekananda, with an introduction by Isherwood and edited by John Yale (1962).
21 Van Druten directed the Broadway musical version of The King and I which was based on the 1946 film Anna and the King of Siam (based in turn on the book about Anna Leonowens by Margaret Landon).
22 His writing partner on stage and film projects.
23 Here Isherwood added two notes in the margin: “Or maybe Hind—we have a lot of trouble with this man’s name.” And later, “No—it’s apparently Hine!”
24 The house he had shared with his brother, Sam, recently dead, and others; see Glossary under From.
25 On June 30, a TWA flight bound for Kansas City collided with a United Airlines DC-7 headed for Chicago and Newark; 128 were killed.
26 Mullican, a painter, lived next door to Isherwood and Bachardy’s Mesa Road house; Litebaum, Gallagher, and Dominguez were friends of Caskey, and Isherwood knew them during the 1940s.
27 Poets of the English Language (1952), edited by Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson.
28 Beside this paragraph Isherwood added
: “(Used in A Single Man.)”
29 Described in Lions and Shadows, chapter 2.
30 Turgenev’s novella.
31 The production company; see Glossary.
32 “The Saint”; see Glossary under Maugham.
33 Maugham’s 1932 novel.
34 Lamkin was writing a TV show about Mesta; see Glossary under Lamkin, Speed and under Mesta.
35 Actress and columnist.
36 All four quotations are from the first chapter of Masefield’s Basilissa: A Tale of the Empress Theodora (1940).
37 John Inglesant: A Romance (1881), by J. H. Shorthouse.
38 Probably Wyndham Lewis’s The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in Shakespeare’s Plays (1927), republished in 1955.
39 By Goethe.
40 A 1956 translation by Frances Frenaye of Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse, ou Un Ménage de garçon.
41 By Tolstoy.
42 A. J. A. Symons’s biography of Frederick William Rolfe (“Baron Corvo”).
43 By Conrad.
44 By I. A. Richards.
45 The Barbarian and the Geisha.
46 Accidentally struck sideways on by the Stockholm, July 25, off Nantucket; all but forty-six of 1,706 aboard were saved. Isherwood and Bachardy travelled on the Andrea Doria from Gibraltar to Naples in November 1955.
47 Isherwood added “Rorschach” in the margin. The expert was Bruno Klopfer; see Glossary under Hooker, Evelyn.
48 By D. H. Lawrence.
49 Egypt had nationalized the Suez Canal July 26; see Glossary under Suez crisis.
50 In the introduction to Poets of the English Language, volume 3.
51 Third Baron Kinross (1904–1976), journalist and travel writer.
52 1955 Broadway play (later a film).
53 A tranquilizer; see Glossary.
54 Eugene Frenke produced The Barbarian and the Geisha, about Townsend Harris, an 18th-century American ambassador to Japan.
55 Partly Submerged.
56 Hungarian actor.
57 For Great English Short Stories.
58 Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher.
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 109