Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  Have finished a rough draft of chapter 12 today—the second chapter I have finished in rough since I got back here and started working again. Now I’m wondering if maybe I won’t try to get right through to the end of the book in rough and then go back over the whole thing later.

  June 8. Yesterday morning, a woman called me from New York—I think she was representing United Press—and told me Morgan had died that day. Of a stroke or a heart attack or maybe both, I forget. She said he died at Coventry, which means with the Buckinghams. I was talking about it to Don and I said, “He really had a very happy life, he was very lucky.” As I said this I began to cry a little, and Don kissed me and said, “So is Kitty.”

  But I can’t feel sad about this. When I last saw him, on April 28, he told me he wanted to go. And he didn’t die alone in that big chilly bedroom in college; he was snug and warm and tucked up and looked after by May and Bob.

  He is absolutely alive inside my head as I write this. I have been living so long with him in my head that I know he won’t fade out until I do.

  This morning we went down to see Michael [Barrie] and Gerald [Heard]. Michael told us that Gerald became quite lucid yesterday for a short while and told him that, living as he does between the two worlds (or however he put it), he sees quite clearly that this world is held together by “the demiurge.” So Michael asked him, “Do you mean Ishvara?” and he nodded.

  David Hockney went back home yesterday, planning to make a stopover in New York. We both of us feel very fond of him, and admiring, too. Don said that he has an “easy grip” on things.

  On Saturday night, when we were giving him a goodbye supper, Nick Wilder (whom David had asked us to invite) arrived wearing a kind of formfitting dark female gown, and leather boots. He also forced us to have his friend Jason in after supper. Jason talked a lot of shit about art which greatly irritated Billy Al Bengston. Billy Al said, “I’m an autocrat,” and added that nobody was going to talk to him about motorcycles who couldn’t get out there and ride one—“faster than I can” was implied.

  June 12. Today I finished chapter 13 of Kathleen and Frank in rough. That means that I’ve covered more or less all of the family history material, Marple Hall as symbol of the Past, the ghosts, etc. Now my feeling is that I’d like to push on hard and try to get as much roughed out as I can, before some new interruption takes place. Playing projections is really a meaningless game, but—if one projects two weeks per chapter, then I ought to be able to get five more chapters done in rough before my birthday. That would mean I’d have eighteen out of twenty chapters done, assuming that I can do the rest of the book in seven chapters, which I think is really quite possible. I don’t want to dwell nearly so much on Strensall, Frimley and Limerick.7

  Yesterday, Peter Schneider came over with Jim Gates, and Don did three of his very best pen and ink drawings of Peter. I honestly can’t see how anyone wouldn’t have to admit that they put David’s work to shame; but that’s a silly remark, because of course David’s not being able to draw too well is the whole point. Don caught so beautifully the grossness and the cuteness of Peter, his thick gross lips and his big dirty feet. Peter actually looks adorable now, with his beautiful golden skin; while Jim seems to be getting homelier by the week. Peter has decided to go and live in the back country someplace and grow nuts and meditate, and Jim seems to be thinking of coming with him. Peter is very grand and superior about the “typical American adolescent” he has staying with him now (and paying him eleven dollars a week rent). This youth smokes, and he says fuck and shit, and it’s so awful to watch him getting up in the morning that Peter has taken to sleeping out in the yard in a blanket. Nevertheless, Peter feels that the Ramakrishna atmosphere is starting to work; the youth is slowly improving. He is the same age as Peter, nineteen.

  June 15. Gloom today, despite the glorious weather, because a writers’ strike is almost certain to be called for tomorrow8 and somehow or other we have to find a way of wriggling out of picket duty. Don has a much better case than I do, because this really isn’t his profession, only a sideline, and he can maintain with a great show of reasonableness that he has to keep making appointments to draw people and really cannot be expected to wear himself out trudging back and forth in front of a studio. They have already asked us both to picket and I have said I will, tomorrow, just as a token of willingness. I’m only supposed to do two hours. They have asked Don to do three, and to show up at six in the morning, but that’s the day after, so maybe he can get out of it.

  Swami had a mild attack of flu, so I had to give a reading at the temple yesterday. I read Vivekananda, Brahmananda and the Gita. Swami much better already. I think this is one of his demonstrations to nudge the Belur Math about his assistant.

  We had supper with Gore, who showed up in town as unexpectedly as usual and is leaving today. He said, of Morgan’s death, “Well, we’ve all moved up one rung higher.” That’s such a typical remark; he sees everything in terms of competition. Now he’s not so anxious to withdraw from the States to Ireland; he wants to start a third party with Dr. Spock.9

  May Buckingham writes: “Dear old Morgan was taken ill in King’s, in Hall actually, a fortnight ago. His legs gave out but his mind was perfectly clear. We brought him here at his urgent request and he gradually got worse. This morning he died. We were able to look after him to the end, which was what he so wanted.”

  June 16. Last night Don and I spent a good deal of time discussing whether or not we ought to go to the Writers Guild meeting—we neither of us wanted to and we were so snug lying on the bed watching T.V. and eating corn on the cob and fried eggplant. I argued that we actually should not vote against the strike because our motives were personal, we’d be simply voting against it as a personal inconvenience, and we were planning to get out of picketing anyhow, if we possibly could. This was maybe disingenuous but it convinced both of us. Later Jim Bridges called to say that he had arrived at the meeting to find that it had been dissolved without a vote, because someone had raised the alarm that there was a bomb planted in the room!

  Today, Jim tells me that there’ll be another meeting on Thursday night and that a strike vote seems nearly certain. As for the bomb[,] it must have been a particularly false false alarm, because the fire department wasn’t sent for and no one was cleared out of the rest of the hotel (the Beverly Wilshire). Jim says he heard that the meeting last night was very bitter on both sides. One can’t help wondering if the bomb scare wasn’t a trick to avoid the possible antistrike vote, relying on the fact that something of this kind can be blamed on the producers (vaguely) and so used to stir up hawkish sentiment. Also, when a vote is deferred, it is probable that a lot of people won’t show and thus leave the field clear for the determined minority which runs the guild most of the time without opposition. This all sounds fantastic, almost paranoid, and it’s characteristic of the present atmosphere in this country that I should be thinking such things even half seriously.

  June 19. Jim Bridges has just called to tell me that the strike is off, at least temporarily; he doesn’t know any details. Of course I am delighted. No excuses to be made, no sulks to be sulked. I can get on with the book, which is all I want at present; and it begins to look as if it may be shorter than I expected. I may even get through Frimley in one and a half chapters and Limerick about the same, which would mean six chapters in all, including the three about Wyberslegh and Marple. Then, surely, there would be only two more to finish the book.

  Dr. Allen rather tiresomely discovered that my cholesterol count is too high and said I must go on a diet. And Dr. Ashworth says my contracture is slightly worse and must be closely watched.

  Yesterday a man from the BBC in London named John Drummond called me about a program they are doing on Morgan (he wants me to do a bit of it) and told me that Gerald Hamilton died, on the 17th. Now I feel sorry I didn’t get in touch with him before I left London. I don’t give a damn whether or not he swindled us—though I would love to know, simply out o
f curiosity. But I do remember all the fun we had together. He had a very cozy personality and an animal innocence, you felt he was only acting according to his nature.

  The day before yesterday, Don had a conversation with Irving Blum. Don has been so miserable lately, feeling that his life is all wrong, not at all what he would have wished for himself, that he isn’t free, that he’s getting old and ugly and, above all, that he is coming to the end of the kind of drawing he has been doing and doesn’t know what to do next. All these statements are unanswerable, because if he believes them they are true, so you cannot argue with him. So I begged him to talk to Irving, since, after all, Irving has believed in him and has arranged these shows. Of course, I don’t know exactly what Don said to him—Don was very much afraid of insulting him by suggesting that the “failure” of the Los Angeles show was somehow Irvings’s fault10 —but, anyhow, Don did ask for advice and Irving rather wonderfully made a definite suggestion; Don should draw a team of women roller skaters. This seems to have turned Don on at least a bit, and he is investigating their doings, where they race, etc. The idea is to get away from portraits as such (that is, pictures of people who demand that they shall be likenesses). Personally, I feel that Don achieves this every time with his new pen and ink technique; these last drawings have been most of them marvellous. It’s largely, I think, because they are full figure and often surrounded by an environment, while his pencil drawings tend to be heads with very little else. When the pencil drawings succeed, it’s because of a psychological penetration; therefore he has to draw people who are worth penetrating. The ink drawings make a more generalized poetic statement, so they can be of almost anybody.

  June 21. Thick white fog. Don has gone off to see the women roller skaters this afternoon, then have supper with his parents. But meanwhile something has happened which I feel, hope, is most awfully important; Don talked to Billy Al Bengston on the phone this morning (we were there last night for supper) and told him all about Irving’s suggestion and asked his advice. And Billy Al (who doesn’t like Irving anyhow) said, “Only do what you want to do,” and went on to tell Don that all the artists he knows who have seen Don’s work think very highly of it and that the opinion of artists is all that matters in the long run, Don just has to wait until their opinion is accepted which will probably take at least two years or more. Furthermore, Billy said that he’d like to show Don’s work in his own studio, which consists of several very large rooms and which he now uses instead of a commercial gallery.

  So of course Don is immensely encouraged, as well he may be, for indeed what Billy says about his work is far more impressive than any of the wretched little press notices he has so far had. Don says he now feels he can go ahead. Also, after the talk with Billy, he admitted that he does feel he has made a great breakthrough by starting these ink drawings and particularly by doing them on smaller paper, the paper he was working on, he says, was too big for him. Don wouldn’t be Don if he didn’t add a note of doubt, so he points out that he is now using exactly the same paper and the same pen as David Hockney uses—implying that he is therefore just a copycat! But he is pleased. Billy Al has given him courage. So now I love Billy Al, though he embarrasses me terribly to be with.

  Yesterday was Father’s Day (as far as the Vedanta Society was concerned) and I went there for the lunch. Swami pretty much recovered, but Pavitrananda, who is staying with them, looks ghastly and Swami says he is in serious trouble with his prostate gland, because he insists on being treated by a homeopathic doctor in New York. Swami will take him to his doctor tomorrow.

  There was singing, of course, and Jimmy Barnett surpassed himself. In the midst of it, I got a sudden comic vision of a sort of last-act-of Faust scene. Jimmy is being condemned for his sins, when God’s voice exclaims, “No—he is saved! Because he is shameless. He who is utterly shameless is pure.” This amused me so much that my eyes filled with tears, I was really moved, and the boys, who were singing to us, at us, right into our eyes and hearts like crooners, were very pleased, they felt they were truly hitting the button.

  June 24. Have just finished chapter 14 of Kathleen and Frank in the rough draft. Tomorrow we are probably going up to San Francisco for a couple of days, chiefly because there is a postmidnight showing of The Shanghai Gesture at a theater there! But we’ll also see Ben Underhill11 and maybe I can show Don the [Frank Lloyd] Wright Marin County Building. Would like to see it again.

  On Monday I did a short speech for a BBC T.V. film about Morgan. A man named Eric Timmerman shot it and he had the really absurd idea of doing so in the midst of the Japanese garden at the top of Orange Drive above Hollywood Boulevard. So I squatted on a Japanese toy bridge over a miniature stream with a waterfall, which had been turned off so as not to interfere with the sound reception, and spoke about Morgan to Timmerman and his cameraman and a girl with nearly no skirt—none of whom had even read him. (Timmerman confessed that he mixed Morgan up with [C.S.] Forester and—Conrad!) It was very hot and I had to shout because a Mexican was working with a vacuum cleaner in the background and in the middle of it all a plane flew over.

  Yesterday, Phil Carlson came and interviewed Don for Esquire—at least that was what Don had been told in advance. But it was just on speculation and had been suggested by Elsa. Don was on his guard and how rightly, because Carlson tried to get him on the subject of our friendship, how did we meet, etc. Also, the day before, he’d brought a cameraman to get Don’s picture with a drawing of me; he took no interest in any other work by Don! Don refused to sign a release on the photos until he’d seen them, which rather shook Carlson. He is probably just an innocent. He is certainly an amateur. I’m still waiting to decide just how furious to be with that bitch Elsa.

  Don went to take a look at the Roller Derby, downtown, on Sunday afternoon. He decided that he really didn’t want to have anything to do with it because it is so faked, the skaters playact fights and feuds and the audience pretends to believe that they’re real. However, that was just his first reaction. It’s entirely possible—as so often when an idea is suggested to him—that, after turning it down, he’ll keep on thinking it over and finally come up with another idea which is an adaptation of it.

  June 29. Two girls named Mercedes are cleaning house this morning! One was supposed to show the other the ropes, but neither of them knew how to work the washing machine.

  Clement Scott Gilbert and Bob Chetwyn now want to open the play at the Phoenix Theatre at Leicester on August 19, without stars, just to see how it works. Rehearsals would begin about July 27. So back we shall go, I suppose, at our own expense. It is a nuisance but a good thing in the long run, in fact what we’ve always wanted.

  We went up to San Francisco on the 25th and came back here early on the 27th. It was chiefly to see The Shanghai Gesture, which turned out to be terrible. We also saw Ben Underhill who, as always, produced some awful friends. But San Francisco is still beautiful, despite all the new towers, and I feel stimulated by the visit.

  Rushing on with the book. Don has offered to help but now he has such a bad cold. Even if I can get as far as the outbreak of war before we go to England it will be a great advance.

  Last night we had supper with Julie Harris and Jim Murdoc[k]. Jim is almost babylike in his vanity and general behavior but I can imagine getting fond of him and even not being embarrassed by Julie’s embarrassment. We talked a lot about his nose, which has just been fixed (though Don says, with his expert eye, that this obviously wasn’t for the first time) and about diets. Am still hanging on to mine but with no loss of weight to speak to.

  July 6. The dreadful holiday is over and now I must work harder than ever to get this book finished. There are still some very big humps of raw material to be worked over. I feel the ending will be the most inspiring part to write.

  Woke up with more than usually acute worries about Don and his future. From a “sensible” point of view, I really ought to die now, while the going’s good. It would be a bad jolt for him but bet
ter in the long run. But it’s no good talking like that, even to myself. We love each other in spite of all our conflict of wills. All I probably can do for him is to turn more and more toward God. (“More and more” sounds outrageously complacent; in actual fact I don’t seem to be turned one millionth of an inch toward him right now.)

  We heard from Clement a few days ago that the whole Leicester project is off; not a big enough audience in the summer. So that will no doubt mean that we won’t get Bob Chetwyn after all, because soon he’ll be going to New York. And that will probably lead to other jobs.

  We saw Harry Brown last night, with a moustache. He is getting sick of Mexico. The only thing he cares about is his young son Jared, he says. He drinks again but not much. Why is he such a deeply depressing character? Because of a built-in and almost subconscious self-pity. For the first time, last night, I realized the power of his mother over him. She is dying now. The other day she told him she could never forgive him because of the terrible language in his new novel, part of which was published in Playboy.

  July 12. Finished chapter 15 today. Maybe only two more, or, if there is a third, it’ll be quite short. So it still seems possible to get through before my birthday.

  Am happy working, as always. And happier than ever with Don. He is seeing a lot of Mike Van Horn, drawing with him and going dancing and to the club, all of which is good; Mike is a sort of ideal friend to have. So ideal in fact that we both find him a tiny bit mysterious.

  A disturbing letter from Bob Chetwyn, telling us that it wasn’t the fault of the Leicester theater at all, that the deal fell through. They were ready to come up with an adequate sum of money, Bob was quite satisfied with his share, but they did ask for two hundred pounds from the producers, and this Clement and Richard [Schulman] absolutely refused to pay! My God, we’d probably have agreed to raise the money ourselves if we’d been given the chance. But we weren’t. Now we start to wonder, should we refuse to renew Clement’s option when it comes up in a month. But how are we to find anybody else, from six thousand miles away? Meanwhile, Camilla Clay is very sweetly agitating to get the play read by Bill Ball of San Francisco.12