Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  Talked to Nicholas Thompson this morning. He feels that if we don’t get some action by the end of next week on the play we should consider postponing it. And I really want this. I want to go home. I need Don.

  Had supper last night with Richard [Le Page], the nice (and attractive) geneticist36 I met in Mark Lancaster’s rooms at Cambridge. He told me about the research which is going on to discover how the genetic information is encoded in the cells—in other words, how do the cells know the particular way in which they’re to combine to promote a certain kind of growth. He’s very tall and has a long nose and reminds me just a little bit of Jim Charlton. I took him after supper (at Provans) to meet David and Peter who were having a birthday (Peter’s) supper at Odin’s. It was a success, though perhaps not entirely with Peter; I felt he hadn’t had much of a birthday, under the shadow of David’s show. That’s the blind side of David. He can’t quite realize how Peter feels.

  Richard [Le Page] has one very British mannerism which could become annoying. When you’re telling him something he is apt to keep breaking in with “Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . .” which sounds as though he had heard it all before and must therefore be bored.

  April 4. Supper with Albee last night and Roger Stock and a friend of his named Brian. Not being alone with Edward, I couldn’t ask him about Tiny Alice but I enjoyed the evening. We ate at the Hungry Horse. Roger was very friendly, almost flirty; he suggested we should have a drink together after Edward leaves on Monday. Today he is going to show his whippet at a dog show.

  Heard last night that Ian [McKellan]37 has refused to play Oliver, says he isn’t right for it. Meanwhile he praises the play. Incidentally, Albee was telling me how much trouble he had, getting Tiny Alice put on. His producers were all afraid of it.

  April 5. On his way back from seeing me on the 2nd, Richard [Le Page] skidded on a patch of ice, knocked down a telephone pole and wrecked his car. He writes from Cambridge, “Rarely in one evening has my elation been so rapidly quenched!”

  Yesterday I saw Dodie and Alec. Alec much fatter, quite bulging in both face and figure, but still tanned brick red and very healthy looking. Dodie has aged greatly; she’s now almost a freak with her little white waving arms and her head sunk into her tiny trunk. But our meeting had a marvellous sense of continuity. Nothing had to be rediscovered or reassessed—we simply picked up the threads. The weather was foul, so we couldn’t go out for a walk and get relief between the big meals. They have now adopted a second dalmatian, one of those problem dogs. It was alledgedly thrashed by a wicked U.S. sergeant at the air base, which made it for a long time impossible to put on a leash. Then various trial ownerships ended because people didn’t like the way it broke things. So someone conned the Beesleys into taking it on. It jumped up on me and put its muddy paws on my precious Swami’s scarf, so I was not charmed. (Whenever I see people like the Beesleys, whose “dog love” is really a blind spot of utter insensitiveness toward the feelings of other human beings, I start by feeling very affectionate toward their dogs and then begin to hate them; very soon I was flinging this one away from me with actual brutality. Dodie registered this and said to herself, for the one thousandth time, “Chris doesn’t like dogs.” And when, later, I really drooled over their four adorable little donkeys, I could see that Dodie found this a bit hysterical and an indirect insult to the dogs!)

  She is wonderful, though, in her beelike energy. Now she has written two more plays! And her novel has been getting good notices, which excused me from praising it. Indeed she excused me herself, saying at once that she knew it wasn’t the sort of book I’d like. I have given her our play, which excited her interest greatly in advance, but I can hardly believe she’ll like that.

  She almost never comes up to London, she says—with a certain implication of pathos. Don’t know why. We spent a lot of time trying to remember the name of the author of The Lord of the Flies. (I still can’t!)* Talk about the theater, John van Druten, death. Dodie is obstinately pessimistic; she wants to survive as herself and she is sure she won’t. She memorizes Eliot’s “Four Quartets” every few months. She says they are “the nearest I can get to religion.”

  Lunch today with David and Peter; Peter wearing a beautiful white suit. The Sunday papers are raving about David’s show; he is England’s pet, this is truly the springtime of his fame. Showed me the photos they took on our trip. The ones of me are grotesque, and so fat. There’s one of me kissing Peter on top of the tower at Aigues-Mortes which looks like an assault by the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  April 6. Yesterday I went to see Paul Taylor, who I visited in hospital years ago and thought to be dying of T.B. He now evidently isn’t; he is a very gracious furniture-queen and an obsessive talker. But I spent a quite agreeable two hours with him and his friend Ian Grant, who is an architect, plump and merry.38 They were inclined to be shocked by the goings-on of David and thought that queers should keep it to themselves.

  Then I saw Larry Madigan, the New Zealand seaman who has been writing me for a long while. He is a big dark-haired man of thirty, not good-looking but I suppose very attractive to some people. He is Catholic, has tried being a monk, writes stories and poetry, drinks a lot and gets into fights. He is obviously well educated though he mispronounces some words. He has been at sea since he was sixteen and says that is the only life for him. He is queer—at least I presume so from the way he talks—and describes it as being “bent.” While we were in the restaurant, Provans, David and Peter came in with Patrick Procktor and his friend. Peter, bless his heart, is now wearing silver makeup on his eyelids. Their appearance shocked Madigan a bit, but he is dutifully going to the Hockney show today.

  This morning the rain has been pouring down and I suddenly feel I’ve got to make definite plans for leaving—if only as a challenge to Fate to come up with some good news about our play. So I’ve written [my brother] Richard asking if I can come up next Monday 13th and leave Thursday 14th and tomorrow I’m going to get air reservations for April 19, back home.

  An actor named Basil Hoskins has read the script and is eager to play Patrick. Clement says he’s tall, good-looking and quite talented.39

  April 7. Terry Hands40 has just refused the play, Ronald Eyre (Three Months Gone41) has also refused it, sayings there’s no conflict and it’s too literary and he doesn’t understand all the light changes! It has been offered to Robert Chetwyn[,] and Richard Chamberlain is still reading it. Through all this I must praise Clement for his courage; he still declares the play is good and is still determined to do it. But I am all the more decided to book my plane ticket today.* Must rush out now, to see Sam Shepard’s Red Cross.

  Later. Red Cross was performed in a walkdown, a Chinese restaurant-club at the bottom of a steep flight of stairs at 6A New Compton Street, called the Soho Theatre. There are three characters, played by Briony Hathaway, Katherine Tracy and James Gary, the young man who already wrote to Clement and to me, asking us to come and see him because he wants to play “The American Boy” in our play. All three of them are Americans, and the two girls were quite good; Gary wasn’t, he is a hit-or-miss performer, and anyhow out of the question as Tom because he’s a very oriental looking Jewboy with a huge nose and slitty eyes. Red Cross isn’t a play in the ordinary sense of “and then what?” It is “about” behavior simply and solely and its rule is that, if one of the characters starts something, the other goes along with it and joins in the game, as children do. The first girl involves the man in her fantasy of skiing and being broken to bits. The second girl is involved by the man in an imaginary swim in a lake, which ends with her getting drowned. Aside from this, the first girl is living with the man in a hut with two beds in a forest; it may or may not be part of a mental hospital. The second girl comes in to put fresh sheets on the beds. The man has crab lice and the first girl gets them from him.

  The only way to enjoy this kind of thing (and I quite did) is to take it just as it comes and be content to accept it from moment to moment, because there
is no apparent development and no “ending”—except that the man suddenly shows the first girl what seems to be a bloodstain on his forehead. But when I said this later (politely) to James Gary he obviously didn’t agree. Obviously he felt the whole play was interwoven with meaningful symbolism— and it didn’t matter anyhow what symbols you found in it, because today’s symbolism is strictly do-it-yourself. When I said (testing) that I thought the bloodstain looked like a Hindu caste mark, he agreed, graciously, that yes, some others had thought that too.

  He says the play got very good notices in the Financial Times and that, last week, they had had “a crowd.” Today there was no “outside” audience, I suspect, except ourselves. The rest of the maybe dozen people looked very much part of the Sam Shepard world and maybe were members of the company. As I said to Clement, we could only be taken for managers from the West End—or the police.

  This morning Don sent me a copy of the first issue of a magazine called In Unity which represents the homosexual Community Church, with Don’s portrait of the Reverend Troy D. Perry on the cover. It is a revealing drawing, which shows perhaps a little bit more about Perry than he’d like, but he does look very determined and quite attractive. Those silly faggots have credited it as “Sketch by . . . Don Bachardy!”

  There was also a letter from Jim Gates, in which he says that he’s already working for the Goodwill and that he likes Jim Bridges so much. “I’ve gotten to know Don a little more over the past weeks but it’s still not often that I really feel as if I see him. We’re sort of ‘polite,’ do you know what I mean? He’s really kind of shy seeming to me.”

  Yesterday, Peter, Wayne Sleep and I saw The Damned again. A lot of it is very slow and somewhat simpleminded but I still find two sequences—the orgy-massacre and the wedding-suicide— really tremendous. The boys singing the “Horst Wessel Lied”42 in drag, so mournfully, Germanically drunk, while the launch with their S.S. killers comes stealing in across the lake. And Ingrid Thulin’s grotesque finery and blank white death-face, surrounded by the wedding party of whores and hustlers fucking all over the room.

  After the movies (we also saw Entertaining Mr. Sloane, about which nothing need be said) we had supper at Odin’s with David. He was feeling sick in his stomach and made such a tragedy about it that we were all under its shadow. The kind of fuss which is only made by someone who has basically an iron constitution—the kind of fuss I used to make.

  April 8. Today it actually snowed, hard! Last night I had supper with Patrick Woodcock and David Mann at Odin’s. The evening was a tremendous success, despite the tiresome attentions of the owner-chef, Peter Langan, because I somehow quite unintentionally became the go-between who brought Patrick and David more closely together than ever before—this was what Patrick told me in a note, this morning: “The old magician hasn’t lost his power to cast spells.” Actually, I doubt if this particular spell will be very binding, but who knows. David is a rather sadistic tease, but maybe he’s far more involved with Patrick than he cares to admit.

  Patrick says that Edward [Albee] took Roger Stock away from Binkie (?) Beaumont!43

  This morning Dodie phoned to say how much she likes the play. Alas, I don’t like hers (have forgotten the title and now it’s in its envelope ready sealed up to go back to her, but anyhow it’s about Measure for Measure and the headmistress of a girls’ school) one little bit.44 It has a severe case of the cutes. Dodie and Ale[c] both think Oliver should explain more clearly what he values about monastic life, what the point of it is. I think this is a valuable suggestion.

  April 9. Still this wretched cold, though no snow. Yesterday afternoon, Catherine Cook came round again, masochistically drenched (she hadn’t brought a coat) and maddeningly apologetic. I rattled off a lot of glib answers to her thesis questions and caught sight of myself in the mirror, doing it. It’s high time I got out of this place and stopped prancing and settled down to work while I still have my health.

  Lunched yesterday with Nick Furbank. He brought me xerox copies of two more of Morgan’s stories. When he arrived he seemed drunk, maybe he wasn’t. I get along well with him and feel at ease. I find it very hard to believe that his book on Morgan will be good, but he is one of these quiet, perhaps deadly, mice and you can never tell what they will or won’t produce.

  With Cecil Beaton to see Conduct Unbecoming, a melodrama about the British Army in India in the 1890s. It’s silly and farfetched and Paul Jones kept slipping right out of period during the trial scenes and bullying the witnesses exactly like a modern district attorney in an American film.45 But, just the same, some kind of magic was made. Later Cecil took me back to his house and we had supper there with Patrick Procktor, who seemed a bit crazy and was so full of blatantly insincere compliments to us both that I didn’t know where to look. Was he always like this? Maybe so.

  A letter from Don arrived yesterday, with many enclosures—six pages of a translation Swami has made of Shankara’s “A Garland of Questions and Answers”46 (which I’m to fix up; Don calls it a “Dubtask”); a letter from the Society of Authors’ Representatives, urging me to write to a senator about the Copyright Revision Bill;47 a drooling letter from David Smith to Don about his show; a letter from George Hayim (whom we met with James Fox and Andee Cohen) saying he has written a book;48 an application for amateur rights to perform Black Girl at Harvard and a brochure from One, announcing a preview of a film called That’s the Way It Goes with an actor named Dale Stephens; the brochure has two shots from the film; in one of them, an Hawaiian-looking youth in a flowered shirt is starting to make sex with Stephens, who is naked to the waist, with his pants open and his shorts pushed down by the youth’s hand, baring his belly right down to the bush and groping to pull out his cock. Stephens stands languidly passive, with his arm around the youth’s shoulder. The story of the film is described as being, “The search for love by a young boy being used—as only grown men can use the young—getting tossed aside like a used and tired condom after each encounter, but the search continues—only to momentarily stop—then it continues, continues.”

  Don writes that Jim Gates deeply offended Jack Larson the other night during an argument about astrology—Jim Bridges and Nellie [Carroll] were also there. “I, too, though I thought Jim surprisingly articulate and sensible, thought him the tiniest bit glib and impertinent. I am still (or again) undecided about him. Every once in a while I hear the sound of Goody Two-shoes being punctuated by a cheeky kind of arrogance, a faint smug intellectual pride. . . .”

  Later. Clement called to say that a director named Robert Chetwyn is “enthusiastic” about the play but “doesn’t understand” the lighting. We are to have a talk the day after tomorrow.

  When I spoke to Dodie Smith on the phone she said that she wanted me to stay in England and Don to come here. “I have a strange feeling that you will. I’ll try and do something about it.” I begged her not to attempt any of her Christian Science magic. “Remember ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’”49 I said, “suppose they fulfil your wish literally. All they have to do is wreck the 2:00 p.m. train on Monday for Manchester. Then Don’d come over for my funeral.” Does Robert Chetwyn’s interest mean that Dodie’s spell has begun to work already?

  Have just seen Christopher Isherwood off. He’s a disc jockey from Bristol who wrote me several times. He has a Beatle haircut and spectacles, is very thin, energetic, has very bad teeth, is thirty-five years old, married, with a daughter. He has just got a job on a Mediterranean cruise boat for the whole summer. He says of himself that he loves being in front of an audience. He has also managed a building company, been a professional photographer and in the air force. He has a sort of egocentricity which seems quite attractive and wholesome, not at all repulsive. Only, it’s hard to imagine that he could be a good entertainer; one doesn’t feel he has enough temperament.*

  The car he was driving in broke down, so he arrived nearly three hours late, and fucked up my day. A cute youth, a would-be disc jockey, had been driving him. Christophe
r Isherwood said of him, “I’m his idol.”

  April 10. I’m ashamed to say I got drunk last night, having dinner with Richard Simon. That was stupid and unnecessary, because I really do like him. He seems genuinely good-natured. The fact that I found him nicer than I remembered may be partly due to the fact that he is very happy with a boyfriend.

  Before we left for the restaurant (Provans, where the beautiful tall girl-boys with their flowing locks now know me well and greet me with discreetly understanding smiles) I was talking about Kathleen and Frank and said something that seemed so good to me that I wrote it down, namely that we sail out into life with, as it were, sealed genetic orders. When we finally break the seals (as I did, so to speak, by reading through Frank’s letters), we find that the orders have often already been obeyed. For example, Frank “wanted” me to go and visit Vailima for him, and Japan too.50

  April 11. Still horribly cold but at least a little pale sunshine today without rain. Walked up to the bag shop to pick up my bag; it mysteriously got a slit in it during our French trip.

  Yesterday I had lunch with Amiya; she came up to London specially. (She remarked that she’d sold a piece of furniture in order to do so but I think she is talking a poor mouth partly in order to convince herself that she must not give money to [her sister] Sally and her other greedy relatives and hangers-on. Anyhow, I paid for our lunch, which we ate in a gaming club called The Nightingale in Berkeley Square; a peculiarly dreary place, as I suppose they all are, reeking of polite gangsterism: they addressed Amiya as “My Lady.”)