Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  An amazing thing happened today. We had decided to get the play typed in a rush for Dodie and Alec to read; so we planned to hire another typewriter and split the work. We were talking of this at Ted’s counter and a grey-haired woman next to us introduced herself as Mrs. Pierce and offered her portable typewriter. And it turned out to be a Royal, with exactly the same type as mine! A sign from heaven?

  January 20. After frantic typing the night before last, and all yesterday up to 4:30, we finished three copies of the play in time to take one of them up to the post office and airmail it to Dodie and Alec. Later I found one glaring typographical—by me. In the midst of the big emotional scene in act two, scene two, Michael suddenly addresses Catherine as Elizabeth! This because we were copying from a script which had the old names.

  Today is glorious, but I feel let down and depressed, wondering how we can get money. Talked to Ivan on the phone. He says business is very bad.

  And I have to admit that my novel, in its present form, has folded. Still and all, I think I see a new line on this, which I’ll sketch out in my big notebook.

  And I must get on with the Ramakrishna book.

  January 23. This beautiful weather continues.

  Am increasingly worried about money. It now looks as if Bob Gottschalk of Panavision isn’t really interested. So we are left to the mercies of Hal Roach.79 All other work in prospect seems highly dubious.

  To Vedanta Place last night. I was amused by Swami’s plotting to go behind the back of the Math council if necessary and get Swami Sankarananda to okay his project of bringing the girls to India for sannyas.

  Gerald, who came to tea yesterday, bitched Aldous a little. He refuses to be associated with Aldous’s claim that mescaline gives you spiritual experiences.

  Great unwillingness to restart the Ramakrishna book—but I must.

  Don is sad. Let down after finishing the play. And sad because we can’t afford to fly over to New York and see Gielgud again. I would like to, too. What I resent about Don’s sadness is that it demands that we somehow shall do this, despite the lack of money. Which is childishly selfish, and leaves me in the position of an unkind parent, refusing.

  January 27. Needless to say, we are going to New York! The excuse is that the money pig was found to contain far more than we had expected—470-odd dollars! It’s still crazy of us to go, and Don believes we can stay there two weeks and only spend $300, which is just an example of his obstinate self-deception. Still, he’s an angel—even if an obstinate one. And maybe I’ll somehow scratch up some money while we’re there. And of course it will be fun. If only it’s not too hatefully cold!

  A wonderful reunion with the Stravinskys yesterday. Igor said how he loves to get drunk. He only drinks whiskey now. Vera said, “I am fat,” and was.

  Not one word from Dodie and Alec! Where are they?

  Today it was said that we’d be approached by an Italian producer, who wants to make Melville’s Benito Cereno. Ken MacKenna recommended me to him. But no word as yet.

  January 28. One of those dog-sad evenings before a journey. Oh, if only I didn’t have to go! How I loathe the whole idea!

  Now Don has come in late and is sulking because I said he was. We shall get no sleep and dash out late for the plane. God, what hell.

  Phil Taber is leaving Vedanta. They ribbed him at supper about it.

  February 7. This utter hell of so-called pleasure. We are in New York, “amusing” ourselves.

  We never get up till 11:00 or 12:00, which I find deadly wicked. I can never write this journal because there is no time. Having gotten up we go out and trot around all day long until late. Usually we eat and drink enormously.

  Don is getting sick. He had a bad stomach all last night.

  Nothing from Geller about The Vacant Room.

  Lincoln never referred to the affair of Mina [Curtiss] and the application for a grant which I made.80 Just avoided the whole subject. I don’t think I shall ever really like him again. After all, the rich are the rich.

  We gave the play to Cecil Beaton and I gave the first three chapters of my novel to Frank Taylor. We now await their verdicts.

  God, I am in a pessimistic, paranoiac mood! And yet Don was never sweeter.

  February 8. Snow has started. Not much yet. That would be the last straw. We are leaving for Philadelphia to see Sweet Bird, this afternoon.

  Cecil Beaton doesn’t like our play at all. He couldn’t find one good word to say about it.

  A truly terrific performance of The Crucible, in the round, at a little hall in the Martinique Hotel. That and Epitaph for George Dillon81 make this trip worthwhile.

  And Don makes everything worthwhile. Last night we looked back on the last six years and agreed how really wonderful they have been. Only, we have to stop bickering. That’s childish and unworthy.

  February 10. This season in New York is the season of Baroness Blixen. She is dying, weighs sixty pounds, wears a hat with black ostrich plumes, can eat only oysters, grapes and champagne, looks like a withered monkey, enchants everybody. They say she will get the Nobel Prize. Our song: “We’ve been mixin’ with Baroness Blixen.”

  At Zachary and Ruth Scott’s party for her, a copy of her Gothic Tales82 had been carefully placed at the end of the shelf and put in back to front, so you couldn’t help reading the title.

  The horror of the first night of Sweet Bird of Youth at Philadelphia. The heat of the auditorium, the blinding cigarette smoke, the rudeness of the club audience which talked throughout the show. Geraldine Page was excellent. But Paul Newman is just not a Lost Boy.83 Oh, the terrible theatrical rat race! And the maddening difficulty of thinking a play through to a clear-cut conclusion, and then bringing it to pass without banality.

  Tennessee dazed, irritable, jittery. Paul Bowles seemed nicer than ever.

  February 16. Here we are, back home, after a most hateful twenty minutes this morning while the plane bumped down down down through rainy clouds. Torrents of rain today.

  Geller reports that negotiations for The Vacant Room have all broken down. But in a way I don’t despair any more. I won’t be pessimistic. We’ll go on trying everything. The travel article shall be next.

  I do rather wish Stephen and Natasha weren’t coming this weekend. It makes another interruption, and so soon.

  Cheered up by finding Ben Jonson’s poem: “Where dost thou careless lie?”84

  Cecil Beaton and Truman Capote, at a goodbye dinner, told us we were so cagey, too nice.

  An old-fashioned penthouse on Central Park South—the windows toward the park were mere slits, while a huge stained glass window looked out on a blank wall.

  People who came out well on our visit: Tom Hatcher, Arthur Laurents, Truman, Cecil, Mrs. Ira Gershwin, Lesser and Helene Samuels, Howard Austen (E for effort), Paul Bowles, John Goodwin, John Gielgud, Hugh Wheeler, and that angel Pavitrananda. I think I liked my call on him best of anything.

  February 19. A beautiful fresh sunshiny morning, after rain. But I feel so dissatisfied with myself. Is our play any good at all? Can I really split up the novel into pieces, and do I want to write them anyway? Can I write this travel article? The first draft rings false.

  I weigh 154 lbs. I mean to do something about this, at once.

  Stephen and Natasha are coming this weekend, with that rather loathsome pale Matthew who is always being told how marvellous he is. I want to see Stephen—always. But Natasha is just a big wistful nuisance. Why can’t she stay with Evelyn Hooker, who wants her and who is anyhow being saddled with Matthew?

  Don is getting over a cold he caught in New York. I’m rather concerned about him, he looks so tense and desperate, and is constantly attacked by doubt and despair. But I can do nothing, except make japam and maintain my own self-discipline.

  I found Swami (last night) still much concerned by the problem of getting the people at Belur Math to give the girls sannyas. But then he became very gay, remembering how poor mad Medora had told him he was Ramakrishna. Swam
i expected her to go on to say that she was Holy Mother and therefore his consort, and was greatly relieved when she merely announced that she was Vivekananda!

  The evening before yesterday, Don spent the night in town. Jim Charlton called and asked me to have dinner with him. He says Caskey is expected back on a visit. Jim said of his marriage: “I got what I needed, not what I wanted.” We had drinks at the Friendship, now sadly stripped of most of Doc Law’s trophies.85 Then down to the Carousel, where “Exotica,” who looks exactly like Callas, did the dance with two bowls of fire. As we said goodnight, Jim said, “I still love you, you know.” And he urged me to come up and visit Hilde.

  February 26. Missed some important days, because of arthritis in my thumb.

  We had heavy rain at the end of last week. The roof didn’t leak, thank goodness. Stephen, Natasha and Matthew Spender came for the weekend. Matthew (who is really intelligent and nice and seemingly a very talented artist) stayed at Evelyn Hooker’s and provoked in her such feelings of mother love that she is seriously considering adopting someone! Evelyn hastened to assure me that she didn’t believe in the maternal instinct, however. “On the human level, it’s nothing but possessiveness.” She was really quite touching. When Matthew left, she gave him the duplicating machine which had belonged to Edward.

  It was rather embarrassing, having both Natasha and Stephen in the house. Because Stephen obviously longed to talk about forbidden subjects. He says he is horrified by respectability, and that, when he is alone with […] his square colleagues at Berkeley, he is bored.

  I am amazed by Stephen’s energy. He is always getting on with the job of supporting his family, and with no hint of complaint or anxiety; and he makes it look so easy. By contrast, I horrify myself. That’s no exaggeration. I am weak and lazy and obsessed by fears. I just fear life altogether. It seems quite beyond me. Too strenuous. Too demanding. Even the sight of two planes drawing their contrails across the evening sky depresses me: all that thrust!

  Our insurance policies have been cancelled. And today I got a flat tire. I begin to think I’m accident-prone, hexed, neurotically unlucky. In fact, I get so depressed I think it must be hepatitis recurring. And then I fear I infect Don.

  February 28. Good news this morning. Wystan and Chester are ready to do the lyrics for our Berlin musical, if it can be arranged.

  Last night we went with Caroline Blackwood (Freud) to a couple of beatnik bars, because Caroline is writing an article about them for Encounter, which Don may illustrate. The Venice West is tacky, the Renaissance (on the Strip) is quite grand. Both are enormously depressing. “Cool” seems to be an extra dull degree of being “square.” And the only external resemblance to Zen is that you can’t see what is going on inside these people.

  Caroline was dull, too; because she is only capable of thinking negatively. Confronted by a phenomenon, she asks herself: what is wrong with it?

  She tells us that “beat” is short for “beatific,” which I didn’t know. Specimen conversation: “Pad me.” “I’m frigid.” “I’ll make you wail.” If you agree with a statement, you say, “Dig”—not, “I dig you”; that’d be crude.

  Don has started taking great interest in G[erard] M[anley] Hopkins.

  March 4. Frantic long distance calls from Mrs. Degener of Curtis Brown and from Frank Taylor, who are both phone-happy. Net result: Wystan and I are to do lots of work, and then we’ll see. No money yet. Fine words butter no parsnips.

  Sinister soreness on left side of belly. But I had this before, in London last visit.

  Reading John van Druten’s diaries. Piqued because there is very little about me. The salutary truth: he was far less interested in me than I was in him!

  Am pulling through a phase of inky black depression. Must work. Have at last got the Ramakrishna book restarted.

  Hot. No rain in sight.

  The Berlin crisis looming up black.86

  March 5. Last night, up at Vedanta Place—a typical example of Prema’s malicious joking. He took a stick of Basu’s Kashidarbar incense, which is the usual kind burned in the shrine, lit it and stuck it into the living room wall up near the ceiling, a little while before I was due to start reading from the gospel. Whereupon—just as he’d hoped—several of the girls started complaining: “Who’s been burning that horrible Christian incense here?” It took them quite some while to locate the incense stick.

  On April Fool’s Day—which is Prema’s tenth anniversary of becoming a monk—Prema plans to buy a children’s elephant rug—a toy replica of a big game hunter’s trophy skin—and put it in the shrine in place of Swami’s deerskin. He’s a little scared about doing this, however.

  March 11. Ramakrishna’s Birthday. I’m to go up to Vedanta Place and read the second chapter of the biography after vespers—this is Swami’s idea, and it’ll probably seem like the last straw to puja-burdened camels.

  Jack Lewis couldn’t find anything wrong with me yesterday; so next week he goes to work with sigmoidoscope and X rays. I do feel there’s something.

  Very low finances. And now we have to pay huge assigned-risk insurance as a punishment for our accidents.

  The Maurice Evans87 deal and the Hecht-Lancaster deal and all the other deals are simmering, but only just.

  Don is going through a negative mood.

  BUT—let’s count the good things:

  He sold a drawing (of me) to the Stravinskys for twenty-five dollars.

  We are invited to a party by Olivier for Emlyn Williams.

  I may get $4,500 back from the government in overpaid taxes.

  Stephen likes the fragment of my novel I showed him.

  It’s marvellous weather.

  Courage!

  March 12. Desperate worry about money—the Hecht-Hill-Lancaster job seems stalled. I feel as if I’m really hexed. Also bothered about my health. The pain continues in my intestine.

  Mrs. Degener of Curtis Brown drove me nuts this morning on the phone. And then Frank Taylor called. Why wouldn’t I come to New York and confer about the musical? Said I must have lots of money first—which pained them.

  March 16. Don spent the night in town. I woke early, around 6:00, after big jitters last night because I have to have a sigmoidoscopic examination by Dr. Lewis this morning.

  But I woke knowing that, if I am to go on living, I must make a much better job of it or I really shall get sicker and sicker. I must work sanely and not idle through my days. I must constantly pray for strength against this shameful useless melancholy. I must not infect Don with it.

  The way I have been carrying on, I’m unworthy of health or any happiness. I mean that.

  Don was pressing me yesterday to do something about my novel. So I’ll try. How shall I describe my difficulty? It’s as if I can no longer see things wholly. I can only see slices of them. I can’t see all around this book in one glance, and that I must be able to do.

  March 20. A change in climate—at last!

  My examination by Dr. Lewis was negative. I signed on for teaching at L.A. State College. I believe, since the 17th, that I really see a way of doing this book! Have written nine pages.

  Tomorrow, we leave with Jo and Ben for Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin.88

  At Olivier’s party for Emlyn Williams last night, Richard Burton got drunk and told Don he was as beautiful as Vivien Leigh! He also made a clowning pass at Judith Anderson,89 who got furious and delighted. Emlyn called her, to her face, “the Madonna of the Sleeping Cars.” Burton recited Dylan Thomas, said Emlyn couldn’t. (Emlyn’s been giving a Dylan Thomas recital.) A man with a fat face said that Huxley was getting gaga and that his lectures at Santa Barbara were awful, and when Don protested, the man said, “Quiet, child!” Later he got quite a wigging for this, both from Burton and from Don, and ended up making a pass at Don. Emlyn said to Clifford Odets, “You’re a B-O-R-E.” Odets left soon after.

  A talk with Evelyn Hooker on the phone. She believes that Natasha is very seriously worried about Stephen—that’s th
e real reason she insists on coming down here with him, despite the inconvenience. She told Evelyn that Stephen has now [been], for the first time, […] unpleasant to her. Also [she feels anxious about] the Osamu90 business in Japan [which she thought was] more serious than anything in Stephen’s life previously.

  My intestinal symptoms have almost entirely cleared up, thanks to these pills Jack Lewis gave me: Combid Spansules. It says on the container: “They reduce gastric secretion and motility, relieve anxiety and tension—without troublesome drowsiness—and control nausea and vomiting.” Quite a trick!

  A hangover after last night’s party. So I went in swimming. It was so warm and beautiful on the beach, even at 9:30 a.m.

  March 24. Despite the fact that I’m trying to push on with my novel, and the Ramakrishna book, I must try to write down a few notes about our trip to Taliesin—by car with Jo and Ben. We went there on the 21st, got back yesterday night—and it was truly memorable.

  One of the great events for me, privately, was that I had a really vivid glimpse of how my novel should be; but no more of that here.

  Eugene Masselink says that Wright (who’ll be ninety next June) hasn’t made any arrangements for the future of the foundation because he refuses to think about any event after his own death.

  (Which reminds me that, this morning, I discovered Hugo’s marvellous sonnet which ends: “Nous sommes tous les deux voisins du ciel, madame, / Puisque vous êtes belle et puisque je suis vieux.”91)

  Wright is terribly jealous if anybody spends even a few moments alone with Mrs. Wright (Olgivanna). When she wanted to have a talk with me yesterday morning, we had to hide out in her daughter’s cottage. Wright is always saying that the boys should show more initiative. Actually, he is so jealous that Eugene has to hide the fact that he has done a lot of murals for different clients. When Wright saw one of his designs accidentally, Gene pretended it was five years old—something he’d done and then forgotten all about.

  Is Mrs. Wright a phoney? She talks with Russian mystic intensity about the difference between destiny and providence. Nevertheless, says Eugene (who worships her), she keeps Wright alive—largely by getting him into arguments which rouse his aggressive instincts.