Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  On January 12, we saw an almost complete rainbow in the morning; one end in the hills, the other in the ocean. And at about 7 p.m. (energy-saving time, as they call it) we saw the comet Kohoutek at last. It was low down over the sea, below Venus. When you looked at it with the naked eye, it seemed to be just a very bright star, as bright as Venus or maybe brighter. Through binoculars, you could see a reddish-orange short tail to one side of it, like exhaust from a plane. I saw it again on the 14th and again yesterday, but the tail wasn’t visible; it looked like a tiny crescent moon, lying on its back.

  On the 14th, I read the Katha Upanishad and the Hymn to Brahman from the Mahanirvana Tantra. Asaktananda did the worship but Swami came into the shrine and sat on a chair. When the breakfast tray was brought in to be offered to Swamiji, Asaktananda made mudras140 in the correct ritualistic style over the food, before pouring the coffee and lighting the cigarettes. Swami objected to this. He got down on his knees behind Asaktananda and reproved him, telling him that this isn’t the ritual offering like the others—one shouldn’t make the mudras, because “he is alive.” When we saw Swami after breakfast, he said that Sister Lalita never made mudras, she simply offered the breakfast as she would have offered it to Swamiji when he was alive. But Don felt that Swami shouldn’t have corrected Asaktananda in public like that—it embarrassed him in front of all of us. I didn’t agree, remembering how Swami himself always regarded Maharaj’s scoldings as blessings. But I think Asaktananda himself may have been a bit hurt. He was silent and rather aloof during breakfast. He became very Asian, wearing his scarf over his head like a snood under his cap. This made him resemble women in the fashions of the mid-forties.

  I didn’t get as much emotion out of Swamiji’s breakfast puja, this time, as I usually do. And I have never read worse. My sits have been so dull lately, too. I keep thinking of my death, and saying to myself, “Suppose It isn’t there for me, at the end?” But that’s not for me to worry about.

  February 4. Bad news tonight. Don called me from New York— he went there yesterday—to say that at least twenty-one of the twenty-four frames that have so far arrived are damaged. And the firm that sent them was recommended by Billy Al Bengston and Nick Wilder! And then it looks as if there’ll be delays in getting the catalogues delivered from the New York airport—they may not arrive in time for the show!

  There is much else to tell, about the appearance of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant as possible partners in the deal with Warner’s to get A Meeting by the River filmed and about our fears that Jim Bridges may not go along with this because he has other irons in the fire—but I’m [in] no mood to go into all that, at eleven thirty-five, after a long day.

  Swami has been sick again. I was told this by Anandaprana on the 30th. The previous night—it was actually on the morning of that day—I had a dream. I was in a place like the bookshop at the Vedanta Center, standing under a high shelf and protected by it. Swami was there too, but he was standing away from the shelf, near the middle of the room. Suddenly, about half a dozen very heavy packages (of books probably) crashed down from the shelf. They fell in slow motion, but I was so taken aback that I did nothing to kick them aside as they fell. They landed all around Swami. He was a bit shaken but quite unhurt. I blamed myself for my lack of presence of mind, but this wasn’t a dream about guilt. The point was that he had been in danger of actual death and had escaped.

  First pangs of Kitty-loss were felt this morning, when I found I’d put out two cushions on chairs on the deck, when I sat down to eat my breakfast there. It was such a beautiful day, which made things sadder.

  February 11. Tomorrow I am to leave for New York, with Nick Wilder and maybe also the Moseses. Well, good luck—I dread it, the snow and the parties and the dirty grim old Chelsea Hotel. But my angel is there. I only do hope I shan’t get sick and be a nuisance like the last two times.

  I saw Swami yesterday. He is going to take a holiday, up in a house in the hills near the Montecito convent. Bhadrananda, who is going with him, described him as “testy.” He only seemed rather remote. He is beautiful when he is like this, like some animal, just experiencing his body and waiting—until it either gets better or stops living. Then, with nervous precision, he instructs huge-assed Bhaktiprana141 how to pack his bag. She is to put in the winter socks and the black and white scarf—it was black and gold, but she didn’t dare say so. Krishna was there too, unflappable, getting scolded and taking it all as a grace. Why should he ever worry about anything any more? He has it made. He is one of los Felices, the Blessed. Sitting for a few minutes in this atmosphere, I couldn’t for one moment stop worrying about getting Don’s catalogues which I must get from the printer today, and about the problems of depositing the Cabaret check and then taking money out of it to deposit in Don’s account—his yearly three thousand, all I am allowed by the income-tax law to give him. Swami then asked me to see Swami Adiswarananda, who is running Nikhilananda’s former center. I remarked that I have never yet been to that center. And Swami smiled, seeming pleased, and said, “Nikhilananda was always jealous of me, because of my disciples.” This touched me, too—the memory seemed to come from such a long long way off—like an old woman remembering some satisfaction of her girlish vanity. And then he said, “Now I have to go to the bathroom,” indicating that I should leave him. And I bowed down. It’s odd, I feel that our relations are so much less personal than they used to be. I am just another householder devotee. But I don’t really mind. There is no shit here, no sentimentality, absolutely none. And I do feel “in the presence” when I am with him—the truth is, “he” has very nearly disappeared.

  I did not get a rough draft of all the pre-1939 chapters of Wanderings finished before leaving. But I have done 104 pages, which only brings me to the end of 1935 and our departure for Portugal. It seems to me that I could easily make two volumes out of this work—one of them entirely pre-American. But I don’t like the idea of that; it is incomplete when the first one is published, by itself. This project is all of a piece.

  February 23. I got back here the day before yesterday. Don is still in New York, partly because he is still hoping to get another chance to draw Alice Faye. I haven’t heard from him yet.

  When I left, to catch the 7:00 p.m. plane to Los Angeles, Don came with me in the cab to the bus terminal. When I got on the bus, he waited until it drove off. Then he ran quickly ahead of it and surprised me by appearing at the corner, just outside the building, as we drove out. This somehow moved me deeply. I thought, “. . . they do but part as friends cross the seas, they live in one another still”—a misquotation of Penn142 which doesn’t even quite make sense, but that was how the words came into my head; and they made the tears run down my cheeks.

  Don’s opening was crowded and, as one says, a success. And he appeared as an item of T.V. news, commenting on some of his sitters, next evening but one (February 16), and looked so beautiful and distinguished and I was so proud. But no notices yet, and probably there won’t be any—Mario [Amaya] the gallery director is so slobbish and incompetent.

  I want to write more about my visit but am not in the mood. Don’s car-insurance agent, or a spokesman for him, called me and asked a lot of bureaucratic questions which were none of the company’s business, like how old I am—just because I had admitted that I lived in the same house! So I flew into a towering old man’s shrill rage and, when he kept mispronouncing Don’s name and I corrected him and he said he wasn’t interested in how it should be pronounced, I told him I wasn’t interested in his questions. And he said, I’ll tell them you were uncooperative—as though this were a threat. So now I’m still shaking with fury and rehearsing, too late, all the things I should have said to wither him.

  Well, I’ve just seen the new moon through glass. And now I must stop and fix Dobbin his nice meal—fillet of sole with carrots and a tiny Boston lettuce, and then the low-fat yoghurt pineapple dessert, and meanwhile, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or Alexander Nevsky to watch on tele
vision.

  February 25. Heavenweather, brilliant, hot, nearly smogless. Am in a dither, not knowing what work to undertake first—restart the book, the 1950 diary, or get on with letters, etc.

  The day of Don’s New York opening, my right upper front tooth-cap came off, breaking the stump. I rushed to a dentist recommended by Virgil, Dr. Seymour Feinberg, got it put on again, then raced to get photographed with Liza Min[n]elli, who was already late for her plane to Rio. I rather liked her. She has a complete manner for such encounters and occasions; she genuinely enjoys them, so it doesn’t seem false. We were photographed with her sitting on my shoulders, or peeking around me from behind.143

  The tooth cap held throughout the New York visit and appeared in many more photographs and interviews; Don and I are now beginning to appear publicly as a pair, before long we’ll be giving advice to newlyweds on How To Stay Together For Twenty Years. But as soon as I got home, it fell off again, and now they are adding a new fang to my bridgework. Today I have nearly nothing in my upper jaw and must have a soup dinner tonight with Jo.

  Joan Crawford’s secretary called to ask me why Joan’s picture wasn’t in the show. So now I have to ask Don to call her and explain. The real reason is that Joan signed it all over with loving words and a huge signature, absurdly and fatally upstaging the drawing. But Don probably wouldn’t have exhibited it anyhow, he wasn’t pleased with it. I can’t imagine what he will think of to tell her.

  Yesterday I went to the vespers of the Ramakrishna puja. Swami came to have the relics touched to his forehead, before it began. He is very frail. Seeing him shuffle back to his room and totter up the steps—that fragile vessel containing the boy who met God sitting disguised as Brahmananda at Belur Math—I was quite overwhelmed and began to cry.

  Rereading the revised first draft of our Meeting by the River screenplay, I really like it. (The first draft, in which he goes to California, wanders too far from the point.) We are to send it, or maybe both drafts, and also the text of the stage play, to James Ivory. If he likes it, he may even be the one to direct it—because Jim Bridges told me flatly, when we talked on the phone between New York and Klosters, that he is planning to direct Peter’s White Hunter before he does Meeting—that’s to say, this summer, fall, winter, who knows how long it will take. When I protested, saying that after all I am getting along and I want to see our film done while I’m still alive (this was said in a joke tone but with underlying indignation) Jim at once suggested that we should get Ivory to direct it. So I feel he has already resolved to ditch us. Don is furious with him—well, yes, and I am too. He is so fucking self-indulgent.

  February 27. Got up at six this morning. It is amazingly quiet here, early. Which reminds me of the incredible volume of noise produced in the early morning on 23rd Street, outside our room at the Chelsea Hotel. As if they were dragging trains without wheels over the surface of the road.

  But even at this hour, still dark, I couldn’t meditate. Even though I knew that the boys up at the Hollywood monastery must be doing their individual worship right at that very moment. All I can say to myself is, I am exposing myself to this thing, exposing myself with all my worries and absurd senile trivial preoccupations. It’s like a treatment which you have to believe is good for you, since there are no perceptible results whatsoever. Oh yes, there was one thing. I started by chanting Om, and the noise came out of me very loud and resonant and strange, as though it were a sound being made through me, not by me. Well, that’s not the point. That’s just theater. I do believe. I do really quite nearly totally believe; something is present and hears. Only, isn’t it that something which makes me make these efforts? Is it praying to itself ? Well, why not? As always, one comes back to the paradox. You must make the effort and yet you cannot make the effort unless it wills. The fact that I can accept this idea is perhaps the only sign that I have achieved a certain tiny degree of—no, I won’t say wisdom—sophistication.

  Reading Byron’s letters. How he keeps debunking the very myth of himself which he has created! Right in the midst of the Childe Harold craze, he writes, “I am grown within these few months much fatter . . . and I can’t think of starving myself down to an amatory size.”144 Which reminds me that I became truly enormous in New York—all because of those mandatory three meals—the story of Sodom ought to have been about a city of gluttons which was destroyed for the unnatural sin of eating “business lunches.” Even now, I am 153 and ½.

  But, in contrast, how beautiful those breakfasts with Kitty, fixed with his own paws and eaten in our snug little double bed! The manager (Mr. Bard) told Don that he regarded it as an honor to have Mr. Isherwood staying here, and he wouldn’t charge Don anything extra for the room. But surely, he said, Mr. Isherwood would want a larger double room? Don couldn’t very well explain that the larger rooms have two beds. . . . As for the cockroaches, they are everywhere in the hotel—except maybe in Virgil Thomson’s apartment, and they are nothing to fuss about. They don’t run over you.

  March 1 [Friday]. I had supper with Bill Brown and Paul Wonner last night. I suddenly felt like seeing them and they gave me the meal they were anyhow going to eat themselves, which was so heavy that I wonder they’re not both as fat as hogs—great lumps of pork and then a rich apple pie. It was quite nice, being with them. I noticed how Bill keeps upstaging Paul, however. When I asked to see Paul’s paintings, Bill at once produced his. When I talked to Paul, Bill started playing the piano. Bill’s paintings seemed inferior to and imitative of Paul’s. Paul calls his paintings illustrations—there is a series supposed to illustrate poems about the moon, and another which is a comic strip, or so he says. They are romantic, often grotesque, enigmatic. Figures are strangely interlocked with each other or with mythological creatures. The landscapes which surround them are in pale fresh colors. I saw that they had been inspired by the Indian paintings on the walls of the apartment. Bill and Paul say that their Indian collection is now worth more than $50,000!

  We talked about poetry and quoted bits. But altogether I felt a remoteness. They are already elsewhere; I am out of touch with them. I probably bore them. They don’t bore me, but the things which interest me about them—chiefly questions about their relationship—how can two such characters endure to live with each other—can never be even hinted at while they are both present. It’s odd to think that I’ve been to bed with both of them. But then, of course, “I” haven’t and “they” haven’t. That was three other guys, long long ago.

  Don isn’t coming back till Tuesday at the earliest. Meanwhile a brush-off letter has arrived from Jim Bridges in Switzerland:

  I don’t want to stand in the way of a production of A Meeting by the River this year and since you’ve gotten together with Ivory and Merchant . . . I think I should step aside and let him direct it. I don’t want to be responsible if something should happen and by the time I can get around to making the film the money would not be in India any more. As we all know, the economics of film money is precarious and constantly changing and also studio heads roll with a strange and frequent rhythm. . .

  I have a feeling that part of this was dictated to Jim by someone else. Irving Lazar? He has been in Europe lately, hasn’t returned here yet. Did he double-cross us? It’s quite possible. I’m all set to break with him. But all of Don’s fury is directed against Jim.

  Who could we get to play the brothers—if James Ivory likes the script, which I mailed to him yesterday? While we were in New York we saw Michael Moriarty in a terribly dull play about a youth in love with a middle-aged married man, Find Your Way Home. I think he is a truly great actor. I mean by that that he can transform himself, without giving an impersonation or using makeup. He could play a hard charming blue-eyed ruthless Watergate conspirator and he could play The Idiot. In this play he seemed so innocent and vulnerable that we could see him as Oliver. But he could easily do Patrick too, if he weren’t so young. Because of the dullness of the play, I was in a strangely ambivalent state, sometimes thrilled, som
etimes falling asleep. (The same thing happened, for a different reason, while I was visiting Swami Pavitrananda on February 18. When I first came in, he was so full of calm joy, really shining with it, that I knew he was a saint and felt quite overwhelmed. But then his very calmness relaxed me so much, after all my frantic running around, that I found myself dozing!)

  I should add that we saw Moriarty after the performance (on February 20) and talked to him about Meeting, without actually saying that we wanted him. Since then, I have sent him a copy of the novel. And Don has drawn him. Don says he has a French wife, older than he is. This suggests a similarity to Michael York. But actually Moriarty looks much more like Jon Voight; they could be brothers. Oh, if only Jon had more fun in him!

  Stephen Spender was in New York while we were there. Also David Hockney with a French boyfriend whom he refers to as Yves-Marie from Paris, or rather, Yves-Maree from Paree.145 Yves-Marie is quite attractive and intelligent and nice altogether, but I don’t think David is really hooked. For one thing, he really cannot be bothered to learn French properly, so he and Yves-Marie can’t communicate beyond a certain point. On February 16, Stephen, David, Yves-Marie and I went across on the ferry to Staten Island. It was David’s idea of course, one of his whiz tours. But I was eager to see the new monsters, the World Trade Center’s twin towers. They are only one hundred feet higher than the Empire State, but, planted down there near the Battery, they have effectively fucked up the marvellous effect of Manhattan as first seen from the water. The rest of its skyline is now dwarfed and looks out of scale and insignificant. As though this were an island of quite small buildings with just these two giants. I said to Yves-Marie, “American architecture is the architecture of selfishness,” which was playing to the Frog gallery, but he loved it. David was his wonderful breezy self—how uplifting he is! Stephen seemed sly and worried, but he too has amazing vigor. We are very friendly at present, chiefly because of this book I’m writing and the fact that he is helping me with it. I think he is enormously relieved that Wystan is dead and can now be both bitched and honored without one’s feeling either indiscreet or envious. Maybe Stephen would like to get me out of the way, too. Meanwhile, I feel that I am promoted to Senior Old Man, an official figure who has to be flattered. Stephen said, “Christopher’s the only one of us who hasn’t changed at all.”