Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Swami himself, as if at Prema’s suggestion, also displayed the weaker side of his character. He forbids the sale of Marie Louise Burke’s book on Vivekananda18 because he says it’s so inaccurate. But Prema is sure that Swami’s real motive is that she is a disciple of Ashokananda and Swami is always jealous of Ashokananda.

  Now what do I feel about this? It is certainly true to some degree. And it seems almost inexplicable, because why in the world should Prabhavananda find anything in Ashokananda’s setup to be jealous of? And yet—just because it’s Swami—this absurdity seems to me largely lovable. I almost like him to be weak in this way.

  The boys came down from Trabuco and we had a picnic after dark on the beach.

  August 2. Selznick, Jennifer, Adrian and Janet [Gaynor Adrian] to dinner last night.

  Selznick seemed very likeable but revealed his megalomania. He sends telegrams of advice to Dulles19 and receives “evasive” answers. Specifically, he advised Dulles to get a Russian Jew to advise him in dealing with the Russians. He feels that Dulles’s midwestern moralistic attitude is hopeless. He believes Nixon has some statesmanship. He thinks Kennedy a “reactionary in the wrong party.” He speaks of himself as a Tory Republican.

  Adrian went in for Vedanta too strenuously, couldn’t breathe for hours after being touched by the relics. So now they (he and Janet) have turned against renunciation and toward the teachings of a Dr. Holmes, whom Janet appealed to by telegram when Adrian was terribly sick in Brazil and about to have a lung removed. Holmes (whom they didn’t know) cabled back “work in progress.” And then their Californian doctor called and told them to bring Adrian home at once. This they judged a miracle due to Holmes’s influence; because their doctor made the decision without even consulting the Brazilian doctors.

  Selznick stands out against all this woolly womanly faith. He says that if anybody had really developed any powers beyond the five senses, the whole world would know of them and profit by them. I can’t help sympathizing with his agnosticism. There is something about it which is curiously decent, and Jewish in a good sense. Religious faith doesn’t really suit Jews, any more than homosexuality.

  Fashion note of the period: Jennifer wore a black chemise dress, with a big bow on the back of it way down below the ass, against her knees.

  August 7. Roger Edens has been unable to get Columbia to back his project, so The Living Lotus is off.

  Which would be perfectly okay if only I can make a big drive to get on with my work. Nothing done today because of a hangover: Jerry Lawrence came over yesterday evening with a young actor named Chuck van Haren, who said—looking at our empty fireplace—that when a fireplace isn’t used it withers and dies. He also dropped ash in it from his cigarette. He also boasted that Vasari’s Lives of the Painters was his constant companion, not to mention Graves’s [The] Greek Myths and Will Durant’s historical volumes.20 Still, he was quite charming and even rather bright.

  A very happy time this, with Don. I feel we’ve reached an understanding—temporarily at any rate. It’s not just an armistice, either, or a deadlock. It is literally an understanding.

  He has just painted another very good picture.

  August 9. Gerald Heard, Michael Barrie and George Huene to supper last night.

  Gerald was delighted because the sighting of a giant saucer over Alamogordo[, New Mexico] has been officially admitted to, after being suppressed. Gerald believes that this loosening up is due to Jung’s statement that he has been interested in saucer sightings for many years.

  Also discussion of the voyage of the Nautilus under the Polar ice cap.21 And a remarkable case, known personally to Gerald and Michael, in which a cancer of the pancreas was reduced by building up the patient’s vitality and will to resist, both by psychological methods and drugs.

  George Huene held forth on the decay of taste in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the bourgeoisie got control. I guess he thinks of himself as an aristocrat, being an ex-baron. His generalizations rattled Don who became altogether much upset, though he didn’t really admit this till this morning.

  Oh, it’s so hot! And I feel tired and lousy and sick to my stomach—the vagus nerve is acting up again. No work today. And more guests tonight—Shelley Winters, James Costigan, Caroline Freud, Collier Young. I couldn’t want to see any of them less.

  August 10. Well, they came. And Shelley got drunk and was very rude to Jim Costigan and I more or less threw her out of the house, but just the same she was in many ways the most sympathetic person at the party—and I really got her out because it was nearly 3:00 a.m. and I was exhausted beyond words. This afternoon I slept heavily. It is still mercilessly hot.

  Shelley attacked Costigan because he didn’t understand Joan of Arc (she said) and because he said Lillian Hellman wasn’t a great dramatist. He was quite courteous to her and made the mistake of arguing seriously. So she descended to the lowest depths and asked who was he but a corrupt little TV writer, a servant of the sponsors? The truth is that Costigan obviously isn’t corrupt, painfully noncorrupt even—though fairly dull.

  Shelley is a blundering Jewish leftwing ass, who “accepts Christ as a man” and quotes the unspeakable arch-ass Lee Strasberg,22 who will never tell you to enter right but insists that you wait until you feel the approach. Yet Shelley manages to be a good and moving actress by playing everything from bits of her own personal experience.

  Collier Young told amusingly of how he was elected, when seventeen, the Most Representative American Boy, and met Calvin Coolidge. His election was engineered by Miss Virginia. But Miss Florida became Miss America. Collier is a dapper little man, very proud of being married to Joan Fontaine, who couldn’t come because of mononucleosis. He might be partly queer.

  Caroline was round eyed as usual, either dumb or scared.

  Today on the beach, a man and a girl were making love, without the least regard for anyone but each other. Suddenly the man called over to Don: “Where did you buy that hat?”

  August 11. Very hot again this morning. We are in the midst of a big heatwave—earthquake weather, says Dorothy with relish; she loves all disasters and incurable diseases. I feel soggy and toxic and weak—so does Don—but determined nevertheless to do energetically our long and heavy task. Mr. Oshinomi the gardener arrives just as I am fishing out of the garden trash box a recipe for mulligatawny soup, which Don had thrown out with the Sunday newspaper. I want to fix this soup for nostalgic reasons; it’s one of the few items of British food I cherish. To make conversation to Mr. Oshinomi, I ask him if he thinks the potted plant is alive which we moved outdoors and replanted under the magnolia tree. He replies in his Jap-English jargon: “Back for grow for dis dinium, see? All right—they grow!”23

  Mrs. Stickel with her wobbly thighs in shorts is wearily putting out the last of the family garbage—licked by the heat already, but somehow game to go on till she drops.

  I call up to Don, to know if I shall throw out some boxes of old cereal. He calls down, “What?” in his semihostile, we-do-not-wish-to-be-disturbed voice. But later, more friendly, he calls down to ask how to spell Churchill. I know he must be writing to Truman Capote about my row with Levant, over Churchill. This was one more instance of my usual tactics. I didn’t want to go on the Levant show any more—so I worked myself into a rage in order to quarrel with him in order not to go on.

  For some wonderful reason, there are no children playing outside on the street today.

  Don has just been down to get the exact facts about the Levant quarrel. I suppose I may as well record them, myself.

  Levant: What do you think of Churchill?

  Me: I respect him as a man. I don’t like his politics.

  Levant: But don’t you admire him as a writer?

  Me: Not particularly.

  Levant: But they gave him the Nobel Prize.

  Me: Yes, and I think it was disgraceful. They only gave it him because he’s such a celebrity.

  Levant: You hurt me.

  Now, on a
later broadcast, when I wasn’t there, Levant said: “In 1941, when Churchill was making his great speech, Isherwood was in Hollywood writing I Am a Camera.”

  So, when Levant’s manager called, last week, to know if I’d be on the show again, I said: “Never. There is no free speech on Mr. Levant’s show. Because I disagreed with him about Churchill’s writing, Mr. Levant first deliberately misrepresented what I said—claiming that I had attacked Churchill as a man. He followed this up by making a vicious attack on me, for which I expect him to apologize.”

  Incidentally, Levant did apologize.

  The Ramakrishna book is stalled because I decided I wanted to get the first sixty-some pages typed up in a revised form and shown to Swami. This meant getting a good shorthand typist. Marg Ramsey, who worked for me on Mary Magdalene, got me one, but she belonged to the Fellowship of Self-Realization, and Prema thought she might prove to be dangerously interested in our book, and therefore indiscreet.

  Miss Ramsey said she’d find another girl but she hasn’t yet.

  August 12. Up to see Gerald last night. He says he wants to buy one of Don’s paintings, the portrait of Vernon’s girlfriend, for Michael’s birthday. Then he plans to “make” Don by introducing him to Florence Vidor!24

  Gerald says he thinks Aldous will never write anything more of importance. One can see he blames Laura, although he is careful to say she’s a kind woman. She leaves him alone, up at their house on Deronda, with nobody to drive him.

  Gerald was much disappointed in the latest mushroom drug.25 It just takes away your power to think—and there you sit.

  He described satirically a visit from Father d’Arcy26—whose face in youth used to be tortured, but is now a “small dainty man” who looks like a woman dressed as a priest. Gerald found no serenity in him.

  He made me read aloud (to him and Margaret Gage) the article Forster wrote on the imagined later lives of his characters in A Room with a View. His pacifist George becomes a combatant in World War II, distinguishing between the Germanys of 1914 and 1939.27

  August 13. Depressed after reading a [Georges] Simenon sex-murder book, Belle. Dreary stuff by a dreary little mind.

  Also I feel bad because Rita Cowan28 came in to borrow $200 to pay her mother’s hospital bills, and I refused. Why? Because I wouldn’t have given the money willingly; I’d have regretted it if I had given it; Rita has never done anything for me and indeed has made use of me in a mild way a couple of times. Yet I feel guilty—wish I’d loaned her the money. I can’t help thinking that after all one should be ready to answer any call on one’s charity that’s within one’s power—considering that there really aren’t very many calls.

  Last night, Don and I spent what we agreed was one of our most desperate evenings of boredom. Gavin Lambert invited us to supper with Nicholas Ray,29 a dancer named Betty Uti—said by Ray to be the greatest in the world; she works at MGM as assistant to Hermes Pan30—and Mike Steen, who has just done a bit in a picture Ray is directing—as a stuntman, falling downstairs. The boredom was because Ray arrived eloquent drunk, and held forth and forth and forth. His attitude toward me was based on that type of aggression which consists in accusing you of having betrayed your own talents and sold out. Why didn’t I write poetry any more, he wanted to know—I who had belonged to that group of poets he, Ray, had regarded as the gods of his youth—Auden, Spender, MacNeice, Day Lewis? Nobly refraining from saying what I think of Day Lewis’s work, I pointed out that I had never been a poet anyway. But he continued to reproach me—pretending not to believe me—and also to reproach Day Lewis for having stopped writing poetry—and then me again for not having written a first-class movie with a first-class director. I finally replied with some heat. But we parted friends—as they say.

  A strange heavy rainshower this morning, but not again later, and I went in swimming. Today—as also yesterday and Monday—I did a decent swatch of my novel rewrite; four pages. Am eager to get back up to Los Olvidados31 before my birthday.

  August 22. I have come to a disturbing conclusion—at least I think I have. I believe that the whole section of Approach to Ramakrishna that I have nearly completed—seventy pages—is irrelevant. Not badly done, most of it, but really not part of this book. It belongs to some future autobiography.32

  Well then, I must start fresh when I get back from San Francisco, where we’re going the day after tomorrow.

  As for Down There on a Visit, I have done quite well and am practically up to Los Olvidados, as I hoped. But the contents of the Olvidados section is still vague. What I now see as the basic theme is the deliberate masochistic servitude of Mary, Wes33 and their Quaker helpers to the whims and antics of the horrible aggressive lazy inmates.

  August 23. Slight depression—because Don is staying away tonight, because I don’t really want to go to San Francisco tomorrow, because we shall be seeing Thom Gunn there, and I’m jealous of him. All this is foolishness, of course. And it only represents one aspect of how I’m feeling. But as I can’t tell anyone about it, I may as well write it down.

  I can tell Don how I feel about him, so I needn’t write that.

  Also worry about our money, which is dwindling again. And no clear prospects of a job in sight.

  And a new crisis starting on Quemoy.34

  August 24. Just off to San Francisco on the train. Shall not take this book—so as to make it a real holiday.

  Don just did three paintings of me from sketches. We had a picnic on the beach, drank Pouilly Fuissé.

  Mr. Hine “taught” Diane Varsi’s35 dog not to snap at cyclists, by kicking it and chasing it. Then he put a new brake on Don’s bike—just to amuse himself.

  August 30. Just arrived back, to find the house still in one piece and everything apparently all right.

  On the train coming down here, I dreamed of a tremendous earthquake. We met Dore Schary in the dining car, returning from doing some final takes for Lonelyhearts. A deposed monarch with his little court of faithful followers.36 He was very affable. Liked him, as always. He says he’ll invite us to the preview.

  On opening the shade of the sleeping berth this morning, I saw first an empty misty beach with small grey sandy waves breaking. Then a tanker, lying off shore, out in the fog. Then a family, apparently just aroused from uncomfortable outdoor sleep, standing helplessly beside their station wagon and looking at the train. Then oil-storage tanks and a palm tree. Then a fishing pier, a few people. Then oil wells, oil tanks, tank cars, wooden homes of oilmen, and all the debris caused by the extraction of oil. If Hercules lived today, they’d tell him to tidy up America.

  Oh God, those fucking children are yelling. I hate it more than all the police sirens, tram clanging and road drilling of San Francisco.

  Our trip was pleasant. We ate and drank too much. On Thursday, when we went to see Thom Gunn and Mike Kitay at Palo Alto, we drank continuously for twelve hours. It was warm in San Francisco and we sweated hugely—hill climbing in ties and suits. Our feet ached. My left thumb started yesterday to hurt as much as my right does.

  Much thought about the Ramakrishna book. I think I shall do an introductory chapter in dialogue. There has to be some kind of an introduction, if I’m really going to scrap what I’ve so far written.

  Beginning of a new interest in Goethe because of the Goethe paperback which Stephen has edited.37 He is far livelier than I’d expected.

  As the result of this visit we have vowed not to go to San Francisco again without getting introductions to a new set of people. The ones we know there are all egotistical drab bores—that goes for Jan Gay, Vincent Porcaro, Jack Dempsey, Grady Norris, Jerry Ogle, Andrew Biggi—

  Just as I wrote this, the telephone rang. It was Don, calling me from the barber’s shop in Beverly Hills, where he had just overheard people talking about a major earthquake which is supposed to have taken place in San Francisco today!

  August 31. The earthquake turned out to be nothing very much—but still there was one, and one in Japan as well!
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br />   Swami told me on the phone that Jennifer [Jones] came to him and asked if she should go to India again. Swami said: “Why? You won’t get anything out of India unless you have reached something inside yourself.” He then asked her if she had meditated according to his instructions. When she told him, “No,” he got “all excited” and told her not to come back until she had done so for a month. So then Jennifer got out of her chair and sat on the floor at Swami’s feet and said: “Teach me once again.” So he did, and she went away—on probation!

  Don spent the night in town. So I ate at Ted’s [Grill], and ran into [an acquaintance], one of those once good-looking vague eye-rolling easygoing faintly bitchy but not-nearly-so-stupid-as-you-might-think boys one has known for years on the beach. His gland trouble. His little apartment, for which he collects things with the patience of a Darwin, buying himself two cocktail glasses a year each Christmas until he has a set. He has studied art, and juggles quite easily with terms like expressionism and abstraction, but misuses quite ordinary words and admits without the least shame that he is semi-illiterate. He talked about himself and the lieutenant in the Army of Occupation in Tokyo, and himself and the professor from Texas, and himself and his ideas about gracious living, and himself and himself and himself until eleven o’clock. I was bored, and regretted I had wasted an evening.

  Which brings me to the subject of WORK!

  How can I ever do enough before I die?

  Right now, the novel, Ramakrishna and my diary of the Asian trip are the priorities. The Ramakrishna book has to be restructured, and a whole lot of preliminary research done.

  Well, what’s stopping you, you lazy old Dobbin?

  September 1. Today, which was to have seen the opening of my attack on sloth and the beginning of speeded-up production is spoiled because I got drunk last night. We’d had a pleasant and relatively sober supper at Jo and Ben’s—their cooking is now marvellous; quite equal to the best restaurants. But on the way home along Rustic Road we were accosted by Zena (don’t know her other name)38 the Czech lady with orange hair who knows Michael Barrie. She was livelier even than usual—truly a Czech that bounced—and invited us in for a drink. What followed was quite horrible. She had a number of very drunk guests, whom she tried to impress with my importance—“This is such an honor,” she kept saying, as she fixed us drinks that were nearly straight whiskey. One of the men was glowering and mean. His wife was afraid to drive home with him. “My husband knows judo,” she said, ruefully. One of the women was repeatedly told by her husband to keep her skirt down. She protested that she had sexy legs. She also kept asking aggressively: “Are you really Christopher Isherwood?” And another woman decided that she disapproved of Don. She called him […]39