Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  One disconcerting feature of Taliesin is its non-allergy to millionaires. There were a pair of hogs there the night we arrived, Mr. and Mrs. Price. They have a fortune from pipelines. They were carrying on because the Duke and Duchess of Windsor have been in Phoenix. So I said: “I’m afraid I’m a terrible snob. I only admire talent.” Then there was a Mrs. Sharpe, of whom Don said: “I’m sure she’s had an operation so she can’t fart.”

  During the nights—the cries of coyotes and babies.

  The Tonto Park where we picknicked: the ocotillo, the vicious cholla like a snake, the greasebush, the paloverde, the great columns which are sometimes more than ten feet high. The mottled desert plains, with streaks of dark green which looks from a distance like turf, and of pale gold sand. The cacti look as if they’re trying to catch your attention.

  Wright’s architecture suffers from all the imitations of it one has seen. Very satisfactory is the fruitcake effect of burying blocks of rock in concrete. But a lot of the carving in the woodwork seems disconcertingly trivial. And if you put almost anything on the shelves, you are in great danger of making the whole place look like a gift shop. The Biltmore Hotel in Scottsdale really does give an effect of splendor and luxury, which you seldom get nowadays.

  Mrs. Wright adored Tantine.92 Says she didn’t like Prabhavananda.

  Gene defends the Wright protocol: the dressing for dinner and for Sunday breakfast. He says that without it the whole institution goes to pieces. The boys grow beards, pitch their tents way back in the hills, etc.

  The Wrights say: let there be dancing, or singing or whatever—and somehow or other there is, although nobody had been trained previously to do any of these things.

  The problem of the wives—and of children who have grown up on the place. One boy, of seventeen, doesn’t know what he’s going to do. His mother left his father, married another man, and the two of them are coming back to Taliesin; where the father still is.

  March 28. Well, I’m really getting along with my novel—the first episode that is; “Mr. Lancaster.” Expect I will finish it in rough by the end of the month. I do believe, this time, I’m genuinely on to the track of something. For that, I can’t be thankful enough.

  All the movie projects have temporarily fallen through. I’m considering trying to scare up an advance from Random House, and thereby bury the hatchet with them. Have written Truman Capote for his advice on this.

  Now meanwhile Don got into another mess—his fifth traffic ticket (for shooting a red light, this time) this year. He had a hysterical outburst, exclaimed he couldn’t drive anymore. So we are seriously considering moving into town, to Hollywood. Am getting the people at Vedanta Place to help us find a house near them. This just may be a great idea. I’m excited about it.

  Don’s fortune-teller said my bad period would end the end of March. So let’s see. I’ve turned down the Berlin TV story offer for CBS. Now I seem embarked on trying to earn my living outside the movies. We have $3,000 still left, my job at Los Angeles State College in the fall, and a possible $4,000 refund from the income tax in June. We won’t starve!

  Unless I get sick. My intestine still bothers me, and I don’t feel really good—but I haven’t told Don that. Everything is suspended till I finish “Mr. Lancaster.”

  And, quite aside from this novel, I see another novel—or at least a publishable beginning and end—contained in my material. New Directions might do it, or Botthege Oscure.

  It’s 1:10 and we haven’t yet heard from Emlyn Williams, who is supposed to be coming to lunch. He asked to bring loathsome slimy Tim Brooke. So we had to say yes. And now they’re late—up drinking at Cukor’s, apparently.

  We went to Emlyn’s Dylan Thomas recital last night. Emlyn is too tricky—or tricky in the wrong way; his camp is quite other than Dylan’s. And his attempt at pathos at the end is downright embarrassing.

  March 29. Just to wish myself a happy Easter.

  We’re off to the Bracketts’ for lunch—god my arthritis is bad—if I get through this volume I’ll type the rest of my journal till I die. I have fulfilled my ritual by doing one page of the Ramakrishna book—thirty-eight to thirty-nine—and one page of my novel—thirty-seven. I’m fairly sure I’ll finish the rough draft of “Mr. Lancaster” on Tuesday. I’m wild to get ahead, and only hope my health won’t hold me up.

  Just written to Dodie and Alec.

  Well, at least, I’m thankful to be working and so full of plans, this Easter morning. And thankful above all for Don, who makes everything worthwhile.

  The Williams-Brooke lunch yesterday wasn’t so bad. Because they arrived drunk and we got drunker, and slept on the beach. Emlyn told me Olivier had said my blue eyes were frightening, and Molly Williams said I had the sweetest, kindest face! Emlyn very pussy-sly, and pleased with himself, in a nice way. He says Olivier told him he wished he had been queer—it would have been so much easier—but that he had been frightened off it by the advances of another boy, when very young. Emlyn believes in asking everybody the most personal questions. He says they nearly always answer.

  March 31. This morning, I finished the rough draft of “Mr. Lancaster.” God knows if it’s about anything.

  The Bracketts’ Easter party was for some reason more enjoyable than most. And we went on to see the Laughtons, who were most friendly. He demonstrated how he’s going to play Lear at Stratford. The high note of the storm—which he heard while crossing on the Champlain. His idea is that Lear starts power-crazy and becomes sane in the storm sequence.

  April 10. Depressed tonight.

  I have rewritten about forty-four pages of “Mr. Lancaster” and roughly fudged the rest, so Don can read it. He’s doing that now. I feel he’s in a bad mood about something—maybe that I didn’t recognize one of his self-portraits. The children this evening have made more noise than ever before. We must get out of here.

  And [Frank Lloyd] Wright is dead.

  And I have broken a tooth, which’ll cost $200 to replace.

  And I have got to go to New York, to see Auden and Frank Taylor about the musical.

  And—and what? I don’t want to.

  Stephen visited us last weekend. He says he doesn’t really like [living as a] bourgeois. He feels trapped […]. Jim Charlton says he likes Hilde but wishes she were more fun.

  April 11. I wish I could describe the ice cold toxic despair I feel. I feel as if I were chewing on ashes.

  Don read the manuscript last night. Didn’t like it. Then he had an outburst. He feels terrible. And there is a problem he can’t tell me about because I would mind too much. Etc.

  Oh the boredom of being unhappy!

  The awful awful kids outside, screaming like demons.

  And yet, if I were incurably sick or sentenced to die, I should be terrified.

  April 12. Things are a little better. I’m convinced that I must keep taking sedatives to quiet the vagus nerve. That kicks up and causes my depression.

  To see Charles Laughton today and we went through a lot of Lear together. Don lay by the pool and was bored.

  I can’t understand why Charles keeps saying he wants to hear my opinion. He has studied the play for thirty years and believes he is the only man who has understood it in the past two hundred. Maybe he is!

  He thinks that Cordelia’s offense from Lear’s point of view was making a fool of herself in public. Lear’s vulgarity is in staging this land-distribution scene in public, as a Hollywood tycoon would. His story of Cecil B. DeMille making the whores scramble for gifts. The same ugly megalomania. Lear begins to recover from it in act three, scene two, when he realizes that the Fool is a suffering human being: “How dost, my boy? Art cold?”

  More work on the end of “Mr. Lancaster.” Don likes it better now.

  April 14. Yesterday I showed “Mr. Lancaster” to Gavin Lambert. This morning early he phoned to say he thinks it one of the best things I’ve written! Triumph! I did a few last things to it this morning and mailed it off to Curtis Brown. Triumph f
or Don, too. He has eleven of his drawings in the Chouinard art show!

  April 18. Usual pre-trip misery. Particularly because this time I’m leaving Don behind.

  To Vedanta Place to get Swami’s blessing; then to see Laughton. I do like him. He is worried about Lear—feels the audience won’t understand his rendering of it. They’ll label it “a comic Lear.” But of course he is right—Lear is partly farce; that’s just what makes it so terrific. Laughton says of Lear that he is “antic.”

  His story of how Frank Lloyd Wright said to him quite seriously: “You are the Frank Lloyd Wright of the theater.”

  I asked Laughton how he would make his first entrance. He said: “You know these old men in England who walk straight at a grand piano as if they were certain someone would move it out of their way at the last moment?”

  April 24. Got back yesterday afternoon.

  Have spent today working on an outline of what Wystan and I discussed. Until he has it, Frank Taylor won’t say if he wants an option or not. Why—since I’ve already told him all of it? Because the sonofabitch has no opinion of his own. He’ll take it to Arthur Miller probably, and God knows who else. Just as he went all around town asking people if Wystan can really write poetry.

  Between you and Don and me, I am worried a little about Wystan. If maybe he won’t be too cerebral about these lyrics. The latest poems he showed me disconcerted me, rather. They seemed juiceless. But Frank Taylor isn’t to know that. As Don says, Chester will most likely save the situation.

  Being with Wystan alone was marvellous, as it always is.

  And coming back to Don was ditto, ditto. He really is, at times like these, a most improbable kind of angel.

  April 25. Rain. The New Yorker has refused “Mr. Lancaster.” Gloom, which I allayed by working on, and finishing the outline of the musical, and by writing to Chester Kallman.

  Reading through one of my diaries of the thirties, I’m struck by the note of utter despair. Maybe I will do a fourth section of my novel—it would come third in order—about the Munich crisis.93

  Great harmony with Don.

  Jo and Ben came and he drew them, brilliantly.

  May 1. Have finished (yesterday) chapter three of the Ramakrishna book. It’s such a bore, but I have to keep after it.

  No news about “Mr. Lancaster” or Random House and the option.

  The day before yesterday, Don took his drawings to the May Company94 and was immediately offered a job, three days a week, to learn the ropes. This is really a triumph.

  So now I must get busy and start “Ambrose.”95

  Time has a not-hostile review of All the Conspirators. Is their attitude to me changing?

  Swami, last Wednesday, told how he believes that he, in his last incarnation, as an old man, met Brahmananda who was then a young man, on the banks of the river Narmada, where they were both practicing austerities.

  May 2. Talked to Elsa Lanchester last night. She says that she hardly speaks while Charles is in the house—he’s so domineering. Sometimes she is useful to him, but they have very little conversation. She thinks it sad that he has no equals as friends, only inferiors, pupils and assistants. She wishes that he and I could be friends.

  She thinks that the study of Lear has opened Charles’s eyes to his own character.

  May 7. Not one word from New York—about the musical, or “Mr. Lancaster” or the Random House advance.

  I’m driving doggedly ahead with “Ambrose,” which, so far, means absolutely nothing.

  May 8. I must not weaken, however meaningless “Ambrose” seems. I must go ahead, at all costs.

  Bad arthritis, as usual, in right thumb, tongue burns—from the few cigarettes I sometimes now smoke when I drink in the evening. But no bother with intestines. Left knee bad.

  Good news today and bad. Random House may be going to give me my advance. Frank Taylor doesn’t want me to start the script with Auden. I’m to collaborate with a professional musical comedy writer then Auden can come in later and write the lyrics. I think I shall tell him to go fuck himself, but perhaps had better wait and see what Frank writes me. How can Wystan do lyrics for a script he doesn’t approve of?

  Played records today—Gerald Heard on prayer,96 Beethoven’s Les Adieux, Franck’s String Quartet—a thing I very seldom do.

  An idea: to use Waldemar as Iris Wright’s97 lover in the Munich sequence.

  May 11. This is sort of a Black Monday.

  Stephen has been staying the weekend. And while it is wonderful, as always, seeing him, this definitely wasn’t the right moment for a visitor, because Don is terribly nervous, feeling insecure in his job and even afraid that they may either throw him out for not being able to draw their way, or else they may succeed in teaching him to draw their way—and ruin his style.

  Then, like an idiot, I took Stephen up to see Hayden and Rod and Bill Caskey—and I asked Bill for the $400 he owes me, and he flew into a tantrum and said he never expected I’d dun him for the money. And he called up in the middle of the night, drunk and called Don a praying mantis—“snap, snap”—and said that was what Speed had called Don. So then neither Don nor I could sleep, for rage, and Don has gone off to work utterly exhausted.

  All this is absurd but nevertheless unpleasant.

  Don was so upset about the falsity of Mother’s Day, Ted’s tiresomeness in calling just as he was starting to work, etc., that he hurled a paperful of coffee into the sink, scattering coffee in all directions. This upset him even more, after he’d done it.

  Later. Terrible depression. Stephen was around all day, so I couldn’t work. He played Carmen on the phonograph. I feel absolutely sick with nerves.

  May 14. Ups and downs. Don did much better at the May Company, and so felt better. But was mad at me for trying to get him a gold wristwatch through Rod Owens. Well, I might have known he would be—

  Yesterday evening, I met Swami Nikhilananda98 for the first time. (A Freudian, or a prophetic error?) He seemed intelligent and was charming. But I felt a certain destructive cynicism in him. And I felt Swami feeling it.

  To Evelyn Hooker’s later. She had Stephen staying with her. And she’d been up to her usual trick, involving him with some of her colleagues—in this instance, a professor of literature from Cal Tech. A terrible square, with a dazed, sleepy wife, who was maybe more fun when drunk. However, he and Stephen and Evelyn had a quite interesting conversation about the young and the state of America. For example—

  Politics nowadays are a matter of accommodation rather than debate. If they weren’t, the country would fall apart, like France did. It’s more important to find ways of agreeing than to disagree.

  We are all “fat cats.”

  Socialized medicine is being achieved through insurance.

  The young read Mad magazine, because it attacks the values of the advertising business.

  The country is ceasing to be agrarian.

  The great issues are: overpopulation, natural resources, the growth of China, the H-bomb.

  Evelyn said she wished the young would get excited about issues—the way they did in the thirties.

  May 18. Saturday was such a happy day. Don and I lunched at Frascati’s and then shopped. Got him a gold Rolex watch and a suit and a book of Miro engravings and an American College Dictionary.

  Yesterday we went in swimming—the first time for him this year. And Olivier, the Burtons,99 Emlyn Williams, Ivan Moffat and Caroline came to dinner. Caroline was a frost, as usual. Olivier, Richard Burton and Emlyn very lively and drunk. They took Emlyn to the airport later to go back to England.

  Don to work today, although it’s his birthday. He’s still unsure if he can hold down the job.

  Frank Taylor is coming out here—a bore.

  Nothing from Esquire.

  Am breaking with Random House.

  Swishing heartbeat in my ears as I woke.

  May 21. Heartbeat merely due to water in ears.

  Talked to Frank Taylor last night. He was very u
nderstanding about my relations with and obligation to Wystan—that I couldn’t go back on this—but he won’t put up any money till Wystan and I can work and be together. And this means—well, not till next February. I think Frank wants to back out.

  Have restarted “Ambrose,” after realizing that the other draft was just a tangle.

  This morning, after leaving the Simca to have its brakes fixed, I walked home through the park. And suddenly I felt exhausted, and lay down on the grass and slept with the sun on my face. It was so good. I felt a stirring of those feelings of compassion which I seem to have had quite often with me in the old days. That is to say, I didn’t see everything and everybody, as I usually do, through a dull red murk of resentment.

  Business gifts. Frank Taylor had had sent him, as a welcome gift, a bottle of twenty-one-year-old whiskey from a man at Warner Brothers he’d never heard of. As he said, it tasted of “sick piss.”

  May 24. The other evening, Don told me that I don’t like Americans, though I love some of them. This may be true.

  I do not love the Hine boys. They and their friends have been playing ball more often and more screechingly than ever. Again, we feel resolved to leave.

  On Thursday, I restarted “Ambrose.” I believe I’m on a better track now.

  “Mr. Lancaster” turned down by Esquire. On Don’s advice I’m not sending it to any more U.S. magazines. I’ll have Edward read it first.

  Don’s job seems to be going well. Thank God for that, and for him. Having this job has done wonders for his morale.

  Met the whole TV Nelson family100 at a party at Jerry Lawrence’s. David is much more attractive than Ricky.

  June 2. Missed a day last week and broke my record.

  With Virginia Viertel and Berel Firestone to see the lawyer yesterday, to be coached as a witness in her divorce case. Virginia is shockingly changed. All through lunch she was coaxing Berel for more drinks. Her confession to the lawyer that Peter got disgusted when she became pregnant and couldn’t bear the sight of her.