Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  December 16. Am now in the midst of revising my October Diary. I still don’t know what I think of it but at least it does represent an accomplished task.

  What has happened since I last wrote? [The gardener’s helper] has had hepatitis, contracted erotically, but is nearly well now. I have had an attack of dizziness—that was quite recently, on the 12th of this month. It was embarrassing, because it took place while I was being visited by a terribly square-dull psychologist named Tony Joseph,112 and I feel sure he believed that I invented the attack in order to get rid of him. Elsie prescribed a seasick medicine, so Don got Merezine, because it suggested the word “mare,” and it was effective, apparently. I’ve had no more symptoms. It was rather unpleasant, as though my head had become so heavy that it kept making me lose my balance. We’ve been to a vast number of parties—about which I can at least say that I never once fell asleep or otherwise misbehaved. We went to Merle Oberon’s memorial service on the 28th, chiefly because George Cukor had asked me to write a few words for him to say and so I was obligated to go and hear him say them, which he didn’t do very well, poor old thing. The Downer remains a presence in the background—his absence is a lasting reproach to Dobbin’s meanness. But time will heal, or make things worse in some quite new way. Meanwhile Kitty is Kitty, the one without a second.

  December 21. Solstice blues. It has rained today and is gloomy and Dobbin is gloomy because of bulging gassy bowels and pains around the hips and groin. Elsie, on the phone, recommended charcoal tablets and now his tongue is black as the tongue of a devil horse. However, I have made various assertions of the will—written a blurb for Warhol’s Pop memoirs,113 which I have just finished and found so wonderfully good-humored and so wise; sent off the publisher’s copy of my British contract, duly signed; told the Black Sparrow Press that I will not sign the copies of the special edition of Stephen Spender’s letters to me during the thirties—I still don’t know if it was Stephen who put them up to asking me to do this. It seems to me an indecent idea, a kind of built-in blurb. If Stephen is publishing all of the letters, that means several quite vicious ones are included, and, knowing Stephen, it probably also means that he has added bitchy footnotes which I am not about to endorse. There’ll probably be a fuss. Let there be.

  I should mention that Susan Burton has never replied to my letter of apology for getting drunk on Richard’s birthday. That proves, says Don, that she isn’t a lady.

  December 24. Last night I had a dream about Kathleen. I was wandering around somewhere and suddenly came face to face with her. I recognized her—that is to say, she had changed a bit, for an instant I wasn’t quite certain, then I knew it was she. The shock of meeting her was really the chief experience of the dream. She seemed sad and rather vague. I felt that she was astray, didn’t quite know where she was going. I asked her, knowing from the first that she was “dead,” if she had come to tell me that I would soon die, myself. But no, she didn’t seem to know that; she didn’t seem sure of anything.

  As soon as I woke, it struck me, self-reproachfully, that I hadn’t asked her about herself, or about Frank, or about Richard. I think I was kind and more or less protective in my manner toward her. But she couldn’t stay with me, it seemed, or didn’t want to. She drifted away.

  When I spoke about my dream to Don, I began to feel that this hadn’t actually been Kathleen but something disguised in her appearance. She wasn’t quite convincing. She was a sort of clone, I said to Don.

  The feel of this dream was pessimistic, disconcerting, something was wrong.

  1980

  January 24. A rolling 5.5 earthquake up north at Livermore. Went to see poor miserable old Jo who has to go into hospital, suffering from diverticulitis. What really upsets her is that they want to put a tube into her with a bag to drain off the shit—at least for several months. She shed tears, exclaiming that she wouldn’t be able to go in the ocean for all that time: “I couldn’t possibly wear it with a bikini.”

  At last, the galley proofs have been corrected, after long sessions with Michael di Capua. Today for the first time in over two weeks, I restarted work on the revision of our October Diary project.

  February 2. A dreary crisis period, with Carter “leading” the U.S. against Russia for all-too-evident election-year reasons. Suddenly, an act of atomic idiocy seems possible.114 Meanwhile I try to plod along with our October Diary project and fail, and blame it on pains in my back. Well, at least I’ll try to keep this diary for a while.

  Largely thanks to Don’s vigorous persuasions, old Jo decided at the very last moment not to have the operation, but to stay home and try the effect of a diet. Whenever you dial her number, the phone starts whining, but she seems better.

  Very happy with Darling. He is working hard for his show at the Corcoran at the end of the month; it’s to be all of women.

  February 6. Morale much better—chiefly, I do believe, because we have stopped drinking since the day before yesterday. Our modest goal is February 14, when the Animals have to celebrate their 27th anniversary with champagne. Don agrees that he feels so much better without it. Yesterday evening we had a curiously boring supper with Tony Richardson and David Hockney. Tony held forth at too much length about an involvement with some Mafia-connected bird dealers, in whose defence he was conned into appearing in court as a witness: the story didn’t hold together. As for David, he just blandly sat there and made corny jokes. I am fond of them both, and of Gregory Evans and of Peter Schlesinger (who has shown up here in town unexpectedly). I am even quite fond of Keith Coleman, who is one of three part-time successors to The Downer. But I would have been much fonder of them with a few drinks inside me. Keith is fat but sexy, silly and greedy but sympathetic.115

  Now I really must pull myself together and restart revision of the October Diary.

  February 14. Now it’s Animals’ Anniversary, their twenty-seventh. Rain on and off, and no particular plans for celebration, unless we go to a Bette Midler concert this evening.

  I’ve been correcting proofs over the phone with Michael di Capua and still have a final chore, underlining the words which would normally be italicized, to make them stand out from the italics in which the diary extracts are printed. This underlining has to be done by hand on the plates!

  I haven’t gotten on with the October Diary—this is the kind of chore which I can only accomplish by brute willpower; something in me is resisting it. And yet I know that some of this stuff isn’t bad. I suppose what I resist is the lack of design, the irrelevance of these entries. They suggest an air of dainty caprice—the tone of a writer whose motto is “I write as I please,” meaning aren’t I cute, aren’t I delightfully irresponsible, don’t you wonder what I’ll be up to next? In fact, I am evading the iron question which I try to live by as a writer: Why are you telling me this?

  February 17. We’ve had a clear day since the big rainstorm, and now, at five in the evening, the second storm is coming over and things don’t look good. We’re always worried when rain comes, being mindful of our last big slide and the fact that there isn’t anything more to slide without bringing down a chunk of our retaining wall just beyond Don’s studio. Meanwhile I’ve finished marking all the places where there are italics in the diary extracts; now I have to decide how many of these are really necessary.

  The rain’s getting heavier. Ah, how I hate it. Don’s studio has been flooding—not only over the floor but down the walls of the storage room, threatening his portfolios.

  I don’t know what I think of My Guru. I can imagine really savage attacks on it and yet in a way I think it is the most worthwhile book I have written and probably one of the best modern books of its kind.

  February 21. This miserable fugue of rainstorms continues—there’s said to be a whole procession of them stretching back nearly to the international date line, advancing steadily on southern California.

  After the slide on the night of the 17th–18th which swept a tree and a lot of mud down onto the road below, fro
m the hillside just across the steps beyond Don’s studio, we found that one of the hoses used by Tom Shadduck to water the upper lot had been turned on; presumably it had been running all night or maybe even for several days and nights—in which case it could well have actually caused the slide. This was spooky and a bit scary. We wonder if it was a deliberate act of sabotage by some enemy. It is very very unlikely to have been due to carelessness on Tom’s part.

  February 23. A pause in the rainstorms during yesterday and the day before, but more rain is promised for tomorrow—gleefully, one feels, by the T.V. weather people.

  Tom Shadduck, who showed up yesterday for the first time since the rains began, assured me that the hose we’d found pouring water onto the slide area didn’t belong to him and wasn’t ever used by him. (It now seems to me that this hose looks like one which we had a long while ago and which got stolen. All of which supports the sabotage theory.)

  Yesterday we saw a rough cut of Urban Cowboy at Paramount—Jim and Jack were there and also John Travolta. John was certainly first-rate—indeed he seemed the perfect actor for this particular part. And yet we had our misgivings. The picture seemed to lose momentum several times. The mechanical bull became a bit tedious, it just wasn’t quite dangerous enough to be the number-one thrill and threat. There was the fire at the plant, of course, which was certainly dangerous but wasn’t sufficiently led up to—or down from—to assume great importance in the story. . . . Well, maybe we were just oversevere critics because we were rooting for Jim and Travolta so hard. And it was long—two hours and forty-five minutes.

  Travolta was very sympathetic this time, as before when we saw him, on the 6th. He campily performed the final scene in Cruising, when the undercover detective entraps the stabber by proposing a sex act.116 He knew the dialogue more or less verbatim, as far as I could judge, and he actually dropped his pants to make it extra realistic. (He kept his jockeys on, however.)

  After this we went to the county museum and saw two olden moldies: Duel in the Sun and The Wild Heart.117 So that, when it was all over, we’d clocked nearly seven hours’ viewing time!

  Yesterday, I dictated to Michael di Capua’s assistant Carol Kino all of the words to be underlined in the italicized sections of the book. So that, roughly speaking, my part in the work seems to be finished, with the exception of the blurb.

  The day before yesterday, I walked down through the Canyon to see the flood damage. Both the Friendship and Casa Mia got a lot of mud inside them, carried down the road, not down the channel, which seems to have functioned very well. A lot of the beach has been washed away and all of it has been littered with driftwood and other debris. Some of the canyons are said to be still blocked. During my walk I was hailed by Lyle Fox, from a big car. He has white hair now but seemed as vigorous as ever. He is probably going to become the manager of the Georgian Hotel for old folks.

  Something I saw the other day and haven’t recorded: two youths are jogging on San Vicente, both of them well-made and sexy, in shorts and T-shirts. As they run, one of them, without breaking his stride, strips off his shirt and tosses it into the branches of a coral tree. The abandon with which he did this was extra ordinarily erotic. (When I told Peter Schlesinger about the incident, he claimed that the shirt was still there in the tree; he had noticed it as he drove by.)

  March 2. Sunday, muddy Sunday. It’s raining again, hopefully not for another week-long period, or we’ll lose more hillside. This is a bad dark day of depression. Yesterday was the reception for the opening of Don’s show, which was, officially, the day before, February 29. Crowds of people came, including Marguerite Lamkin, just arrived in town, but only one picture was sold. Darling deeply depressed—why do I go through this, what’s the use if I can’t make a hit at my age, and many other unanswerable questions. I feel we’re let down by Jim Corcoran, who couldn’t even be bothered to express either concern or optimism. Then, driving home in a mood of extreme nihilism, Don bumped the back of another car—not hard at all. The other driver, with the worst kind of Jewishness, began by accusing Don of being “inebriated,” and threatening to call the cops, then gradually, contemptibly, backed down and started to address Don as “my friend.” “Don’t you call me that,” Don told him. “I’ll call you anything I damn well like,” the man blustered. So Don called him “a jerk” and he took it meekly, having lost steam. Now, this morning, the man calls to tell Don that he has taken a look at his rear bumper and can’t find any mark on it at all. Don reports that he behaved with the utmost politeness, thanking the man for calling.

  Jim Gates has entered a home for gay alcoholics—it seems that he has been a constant solitary drinker, which I’d never known. Talked to him on the phone. He has done thirty days of his ninety-day stint and is in a good state of mind. He is even considering rejoining the monastery. If he doesn’t do this, he is anyhow determined to give up the real estate business and get some other kind of job, in which you don’t have to tell so many lies.

  Now, I’m slowly signing copies of a specially printed edition of A Single Man, and preparing to restart October Diary, maybe even this afternoon, God willing.

  March 6. Another heavy rainstorm last night and another tree down. God, how this weather depresses me. And how burdened I feel by letters (which I hardly ever answer anyhow) and by the dreary empty chore of writing this October Diary. The only thing I feel inspired to write in it is why I don’t want to write it at all. It should be a deliberate study in triviality, the miseries of attempting to write a potboiler.

  March 30. Well, at least Don sold two drawings and a painting and got two commissions. And the Los Angeles Times critic, Suzanne Muchnic, wrote: “Don Bachardy’s portraits look marvellous in any season. Now that human likenesses are enjoying a revival of interest, his work looks better than ever. In an exhibition of new portraits of women, Bachardy is up to his usual impressive level as he chisels features, freezes character and eliminates odd details. He makes beautiful drawings that are endlessly interesting because they offer insight into the substance behind appearance.”

  However, after a brief summer of good spirits, Don is down down down again, and so am I. We both have our reasons, and God knows, reasons hang from every tree in this gloomy epoch of inflation and crisis,118 ready to be plucked.

  The day after tomorrow, I have to haul ass up to San Francisco to give a lecture at Marin College,119 because they will give me $2,000.

  Am stuck in October Diary again, and my gut hurts and the usual pile of letters has accumulated and I still haven’t finished the long complicated census form. Well, enough of all that.

  Old Jo is in hospital because they have at last persuaded her to have the operation—in fact she’s had it and now is lying there groaning with tubes in her.

  My Guru has arrived in page proofs but Farrar Straus still don’t seem to have decided if it is worth their while to pay for us to come to New York and make propaganda for it. Methuen is far more enthusiastic.

  Oh Swami, be with us and help us and cheer us up.

  April 6. Happy Easter and, Swami, I do think my morale is better and Don’s also, although Darling has a painful stiff neck, and Elsie Giorgi diagnosed my gut pain as a hernia but didn’t insist on surgery, only advising me to lose weight and not wear my belt tight.

  The talk at the College of Marin was quite a success. Armistead Maupin was there with Ken Maley and they thought it better than the Gay Rights Advocates talk.120 I got a very intense fan letter about it yesterday [. . .], the kind of letter Don would say warns of trouble: “Often times the words seemed secondary, it was your presence, your smile, your laugh, your love that spoke to me. In fact perhaps the most inspiring moment was when you first walked on stage, before you had spoken a word. I felt such powerful energy radiating from within me and from you. . . .” etc. etc.

  Much more important, my few hours of separation from Darling won me such a meltingly sweet welcome home from him—he had taken the trouble to park his car and come right up to the ga
te at the airport to meet me as I came off the plane, after midnight.

  Yesterday night, the Oliviers—Larry, Joan [Plowright], Richard, Julie Kate—came to supper, and it was really cozy and nice. Joan went into the kitchen afterwards and kissed Natalie, which was stylish and much appreciated. And, when they went into Don’s studio, pretty plumpish Richard went into raptures and Larry commissioned Don to paint Joan.

  April 17. Deeply depressed again—partly too much wine drinking, partly because of Gavin, who was at the party last night, has now read My Guru and doesn’t like it. Don continues to say that he is sure people in general aren’t going to—are going to hate it, in fact. The other day he declared that all the stuff I have written for the October book is of inferior quality and obviously made-to-order. He said we should drop the whole project and tell Jack Woody at once. But now he says well, after all, it’ll do, it’s better than he thought. So I must struggle on. Meanwhile, I feel the hernia nearly all the time. Courage, old horse. My Darling is very sweet to me—that keeps me going.