Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  Don is being marvellous about it all, taking on the cares of a son and executor, driving into town again and again to have meals with poor old Glade and clear out the junk in the apartment with Ted. Glade’s memory has nearly shrunk to nothing, a lot of the time she seems to live in the Now like a saint and is therefore cheerful and contented to be alone. But then memory returns with a cruel stab and she’s scared and thinks she’s been deserted by her sons and cast adrift. This is heartrending.

  It would be hypocritical to say that I personally am unhappy, because the situation produces an extra closeness between Don and me, and closeness between us is my life.

  Albert Marre, with whom we were both feeling extremely unclose at the time of my last diary entry, is now our hope and our leader. His notes after reading our script were astonishingly intelligent, and we responded by writing in some new scenes—a couple of them lifted from our own filmscript, written in the fall of ’73. Now we are looking for an actor to play opposite Keith Baxter. Maybe John Hurt. Maybe Michael York. If we can get either of them. We are supposed to start rehearsals in the early summer.

  The book of Don’s drawings is seemingly agreed on, but no contract yet signed. After Many a Summer, ditto. And we have met two very nice young producers at Fox, Walter Hill and David Giler, who are friends of Peter Viertel and whom we may be able to work on some project with.

  December 19. On the 16th, I finished revising chapter 1 of the book about Swami. It took me fifty-two days to do this, and the chapter is only sixteen pages! At this rate, revising the whole book would take between two and three years. Gee up, Dobbin!

  December 25. Christmas blues. Damn it I am depressed, as I haven’t been in weeks—and for no good reason. We probably both drank far too much last night, first at Billy Al Bengston’s, with a lot of artists and art fanciers I mostly don’t care for, then in a much seedier corner of Venice with fags, fag molls, a black or two whom I worked very hard getting along with. I only feel senile when I’m frisking about, not acting my age. Also, dancing, or rather, stomping, I made my leg worse, it’s been bad for a week and must see Elsie Giorgi the day after tomorrow.

  Don has gone off to see his mother and help Ted clear Jess’s things out of the apartment. This awful problem of her future remains an awful problem. Don is really wonderful about it, wonder fully brave and competent.

  Have just finished volume seven of Byron’s letters. Wish they’d hurry and publish some more. What do I get from reading him? Reassurance.

  My meditation has been a dead telephone line for months and months. But a thought (message?) came to me. Just don’t bother about that and make japam; that’s the basic minimum response to everything, and it can get you through anything, I believe. Only I don’t do it nearly enough. And I bet I don’t think of Swami more than ten times a day—unless I’m actually writing about him.

  1978

  January 20. Here’s a belated start to the diary year. The beginning of 1978 has been so depressing, rainstorm following rainstorm, that I just haven’t had the gumption to begin. Now the sun is shining. Also, I’ve cultivated a little bit of an appetite for diary keeping through reading Virginia Woolf’s first volume, 1915–1919. She is fascinating. Somehow, the abridged diary that was published in 1953 left me with a quite different and much less stimulating impression. She seemed to be so preoccupied with people’s opinions of her books. This volume makes her seem much more positive, much less self-preoccupied. But as soon as I’ve finished this volume I’ll go back through the abridgement and see if I get the same impression as I got before.

  Bother with my knee. I do hope I don’t have to have an operation. And it’s so frustrating not to be able to jog. Jogging is most necessary if I’m to keep in one piece.

  I’m crawling along with the Swami book—still provisionally called Another Kind of Friend. I don’t know why I am so slow and inhibited. I don’t like my tone of voice in it, the tone in which it’s written. The prose seems so bland. But I must get on.

  At dinner with Vincent and Coral Price last night, Frank McCarthy told me he thinks that Israel’s lack of real enthusiasm for Egypt’s peace efforts42 is disgusting a lot of Jews in this country. Interesting if true. But I have never trusted him or liked him. Coral and Vincent were both charming, particularly Vincent describing his Oscar Wilde play.43 He plied us heavily with some wine called WHITE which has the extraordinary property of not giving you a hangover. Coral’s charm was slightly neutralized by anti-queer overtones as she described the huge amounts of money lavished by Roddy [McDowall] on the training of Paul [Anderson] as a singer, when he has absolutely no talent. He now calls himself Adam.

  Don’s problems with his mother and the settling of his father’s estate continue, but more about that another time. Sometimes I think he is the toughest person I ever met in my life; then suddenly he shows the strain by blowing up about some trifle. There is really nothing I can do to help him. Except love him and make japam.

  January 22. Don is gradually building up to telling Ted he has to take over responsibility for visiting their mother, or else she will have to go into a home. This would be workable with an ordinary person, but the danger with Ted is that he’ll checkmate Don by going mad. Oh, Jesus.

  Last night we had supper with Billy Bengston. He was preparing to run a footrace early this morning with assorted males of all ages. But he feared his knee might go back on him. Well, it didn’t. Today he told me on the phone that he did the course, six miles, in forty-six minutes, which was even better than he’d hoped. I do like his chirpy macho manner. The two women, Penny and her sister Barbara,44 also present, seemed tiny and sexless beside him.

  Worry about my knee. Last night they gave me a plaster containing a magnet, made in Japan. If you put the magnet exactly over a place in your body which hurts, it is supposed to draw out the pain. It didn’t, with me, but I didn’t put it on quite the right place. Must try again tomorrow. Just out of scientific curiosity.

  Because of my knee, I have to meditate sitting upright in a chair. This morning, after many many days of dryness, I at least felt some emotion. What I do not feel is any sense of visitation. I have never once really felt Swami’s presence since he died.

  From the blurb on the Avon paperback edition of A Meeting by the River: “With stunning delicacy, Christopher Isherwood portrays the dramatic clash of two complex men. . . .” etc. Could that idiotic phrase ever be used appropriately? Yes. “With stunning delicacy, I reminded him that he owed me twenty thousand dollars.”

  A visit to gloomy old Harry Brown, anxious June his wife and rather sweet Jared, their son, aged thirteen. Harry has been threatening to have a breakdown and retire to St. John’s Hospital. But when I was asked what I’d been doing and mentioned how we’d turned down the Huxley After Many a Summer project, June at once suggested that I should get the job for Harry. So I guess I’ll try to.

  This is neither here nor there, but I got a letter of April 10 of last year and have kept it all this time, meaning to copy it down because I think it’s so funny. So—

  Dear Mr. Isherwood, I am sorry to trouble you again. I had written you in February and you were kind enough to sign a copy of one page of your “Hypothesis and Belief.” When I went to get my mail in my front yard I saw a dog chewing on my mail, and when I tried to take it away the dog attacked me. I had to have thirty-nine stitches in my leg and right arm. It was one of the most frightening days of my life. I have retyped the page and hope you will be so kind as to sign it for me again. Wishing you the best of health and happiness.

  Sincerely, Marilyn Fisher.

  January 25 [Wednesday]. Yesterday I went to see Dr. John McGonigle. Having read the X-ray pictures of my knee he says that I have a badly torn ligament and that it should be repaired. Elsie Giorgi supports this view, so I’ve agreed to have the operation, at St. John’s Hospital. I’m to go in there on Tuesday next, January 31, be operated on next day and probably stay till the following Saturday or Sunday. January 31 is auspicious as
it is the day of Swamiji’s puja this year. I hope to read the Katha Upanishad as usual, if I can manage to sit in the shrine without too much discomfort.

  Am sort of unquiet about this but not really scared or even unhappy. It seems to be part of my pattern, to get myself shaken up from time to time by something of this kind. I think it’s partly an atonement, not only for my bad behavior but also for my success and my extraordinary good luck. I am purified by passing through the ritual death of the general anesthetic.

  What I really do feel anxious about is whether I’ll get a room to myself. And this isn’t even self-indulgence, because Albert Marre is coming the week after and we shall never get the rewriting of Rafferty’s character done—turning him into a woman—unless we can have these days while I’m at the hospital to work together in privacy.

  About ten days ago, after correcting a whole lot of errors in Brian Finney’s wretched book on me, I got a letter from him saying he’d just had a long letter from Bill Caskey, and as the result of it he wanted to make three insertions:

  To mention Jo Lathwood’s name as “a G.I. bride,” to say that Lincoln Kirstein was my model for Charles in The World in the Evening, and to describe “Vernon” as “a typical hustler from a male brothel.”

  This last really amazes me, it’s so viciously untrue. Any mention of Lincoln will offend him. And the statement about Jo is false. All this Caskey knows perfectly well. It makes me feel that he is in his worst “situation queen” mood, and I dread the thought of his coming here, as he proposes. I must make up my mind in advance, how to handle this.

  January 28. Blues—largely due to getting drunk last night at Neil Hartley’s. It’s very unwise for me to drink when there really are things to be blue about—so often, there aren’t, in my so much above average happy life. It is unworthy of Dobbin to get depressed at the prospect of an operation; this is the sort of thing I’m supposed to be good at accepting.

  Speaking of happiness reminds me of a passage I liked in Virginia Woolf ’s first volume of diaries. This was written on April 20, 1919:

  . . . . I can pardon these self-seeking impulses on the part of Desmond [MacCarthy] very easily. My tolerance in this respect is far greater than poor Mary Sheepshanks’. . . . But then I am happy; and Mary S. is not; every virtue should be natural to the happy, since they are the millionaires of the race.

  Uneasiness about the construction of Another Kind of Friend, I seem to be meandering through my narrative; it’s so ill-constructed, compared with well-made Christopher and His Kind.

  February 2. On Monday 30, the day before I was scheduled to go into St. John’s Hospital, Don suddenly declared that he didn’t want me to have the operation, he’d been worrying about it terribly, we must cancel it somehow. So he called Elsie Giorgi, who encouraged him, saying that there was no hurry and if I didn’t mind having the pain for a few more weeks I could start some therapy and see if my knee didn’t get better without surgery. I was glad of course. I now realize that I simply agreed to the surgery in the first place because I believed it could be done at once. Then they postponed it and I couldn’t back out.

  This reprieve means that I must work much harder. Yesterday and today, we’ve been rewriting the character of Rafferty for our play, turning him into Consuela Rafferty, a jet-set lady newsperson. As for Another Kind of Friend, I keep digging at it; still very tough but I feel it will gradually ease up. Albie Marre is still expected at the weekend to discuss the play.

  Have just restarted Stevenson’s In the South Seas with surprised pleasure.

  Don’s name for Jim Gates, in the days when he was up at Vedanta Place—Our Man in Nirvana. (Incidentally, Jim tells me he has just fallen in love with someone; but so has Warren [Neal]. They are quite frank about it with each other.)

  I now begin to suspect June Brown. She called me the other day on the phone to please call Harry at once. So I did and Harry acted mad at her for doing this, says she’s disturbed and that his marriage is falling apart. So which one of them is really disturbed? Or is it both?

  February 7 [Tuesday]. To see Dr. Blair Filler yesterday about my knee. He is a fellow runner of Billy Al and Penny’s, and was therefore especially well able to pass a verdict on the ligaments I have torn jogging. But the verdict was dismaying: he saw no alternative to an operation, saying that the knee will otherwise merely keep getting better and worse, whenever I rest it and use it too much. Came home very depressed. It’s hard to screw myself up again to submit to the surgery; the first time it was relatively easy.

  Now, however, on Don’s urging, I’m going to see a man Jack Larson knows. He isn’t a surgeon and only uses therapy, and he’s said to have cured all manner of fallen stuntmen. I’m to see him next Monday, the 13th. Meanwhile, Marre is coming—if the snowstorm in New York lets him take off—to see us tomorrow and pass judgment on our substitute for Rafferty, Consuela. I do think she’s a vast improvement.

  Lots of rain has been falling. Don out tonight, so I’ll eat and watch T.V. I am really and truly not depressed, most of the time. It’s odd—something to do with Swami, or with my mantram (if there’s really a difference) and yet not seemingly much connected with either. No, that isn’t true, I do feel a lift almost always when I make japam.

  Criminal neglect of Another Kind of Friend. Must force myself tomorrow morning, early. I know it’ll be easier later along in the rewrite.

  A weird discovery we have both made: since using the tape recorder to record our discussions of the play, we have both realized that we cannot be certain which of our voices is which!

  February 11. On February 9, I got a call on the message speaker of my telephone answerer. It began in a very sinister sex-maniac kind of tone: “You cocksucking goddam sonofabitch, fuckass prick. . . .” I hastily switched off the on button so I could talk to the caller (male), but I lost him. Pretty soon the phone rang again. This time, the caller said, in a much more natural voice: “Hey, Chris, how’s it going? I still think you’re a dick, okay. And I’m not going to forgive you.” Don thought this message was genuine, not some kind of joke. I don’t know. It was spooky, it worries me a bit.

  Albert Marre has been here, twice, plane hopping between San Francisco, where he had an opening, and New York. He doesn’t like our Consuela—that’s to say, he wants her to give Oliver a hard time before she tells him he’s “the real thing.” I’m not sure what I feel about this. Isn’t it just dramatically tricky? Marre’s other idea, that Tom shall be much younger, eighteen, rather appeals to both of us. Marre wants him to be a more powerful figure—the son perhaps of a state senator (our idea not his) and therefore able to use his father’s position to help him commit irresponsible acts, hence creating a greater threat of scandal to Patrick.

  February 20. Depressed. I don’t feel nice Dr. Richard Tyler’s treatments are doing anything particular for me. I get the impression that he just tries what he has in his box of tricks and hopes for a wonder cure. Today we tried a Japanese kind of acupuncture, the needle gives you a shock but doesn’t pierce the skin.

  Today, after more snailing along, I did get to the end of chapter 4, which is page 41. This is a bad period. Patience.

  The weather is glorious, and I can’t run down to the beach. Maybe I never will again.

  February 26. Today I am seventy-three and a half. Grey chilly weather. Don out somewhere with someone. My knee no better. I had a sort of love scene about it with sweet faded-cute Dr. Richard Tyler who pouted and said he couldn’t bear it when his patients weren’t instantly cured. So we had some electricity of a different kind which made the muscles of the leg jerk, not unpleasantly. I would love to produce a miracle for him. Later he showed me photos of himself as a cute boy with Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary’s45 and as a wrestler in the Highland Games, a year or two ago. He has a terrific body, but his face is drawn and pale because he starves himself—daren’t eat supper because he puts on weight so easily.

  Morale good today because I am on a slightly easier part of
the book and can see my way ahead. Good also because relations with Don are very good. Also I’ve taken a Dexamyl. Big resolutions to make lots of japam, during every spare moment, and to work. There is a curious strength to be found in the terminal condition of being old—it cuts out such a lot of shit. But I am subject to senile resentments, mostly against strangers, who bother me to sign books, etc. It is very seldom that I really enjoy being a celebrity, but I guess I’d miss it if I weren’t one. The young need so much support and one should give more and more. That’s the only creative way of taking one’s mind off oneself and one’s ailments.

  All right, Dobbin, you’re dismissed. Let me see you do better. Let me be proud of you.

  March 13. Slightly more optimistic today. Because the sun has shone, after all these days of rain, and the alarming earthslides close on the other side of the studio and even just below the house (smaller ones). Because, though I know my knee isn’t really better, it is in a better phase and allowed me to walk down to the beach—down and then up all those stairs—and get it wet in the ocean and dry it in the sun—without particularly acting up afterwards. Also because I do see now, at least for the immediate future, an easier part of my book. I have passed page 50.