Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  May 2. Two days ago, I did indeed make a beginning on a new draft of the “Paul” film, which is not only psychologically reassuring but seems to make some sense—it follows suggestions just made by Don; and I see, once again, how valuable his suggestions nearly always are. What he says, in effect, is that we must instantly begin getting to know the Chris character—what his predicament is, as a newcomer from England to California. Thus we find what kind of a companion he needs, and thus we are prepared for the entrance of Paul—even though Chris won’t be ready to recognize Paul as his companion until quite a good while later.

  Don is absolutely right about this. The only problem is a technical one—that all these explanations have to be made by means of soliloquy, and a little soliloquy goes an awful long way.

  Meanwhile, Elsie Giorgi has decided not to have the hernia operation right now, maybe to postpone it indefinitely.

  What with this damp weather and Dobbin’s generally infirm condition, last night was one of the most wearisomely uncomfortable I have spent in a long while. It was like a nightmare journey of painful slowness—I couldn’t sleep, and every move triggered some muscle twinge. But Darling was there.

  I keep trying and trying to get some contact with what is within the mantram—my only resource and safety. Consciously, I very seldom do get it, but I guess the effort is a form of contact anyway. And then, occasionally, these sudden tears of joy.

  May 7. Today we came to a decision—not to go on working on the “Paul” treatment for Alan Stern, because Don wants to get ready a batch of new paintings to show at the West Beach Café. Don has been looking at the paintings based on photographs of movie stars which he did around 1970–1975. At the time, I thought them extraordinary. Now they seem even more so. Darling feels inspired to begin working again along those lines—only this time he may base the paintings on existing portraits.

  Meanwhile, I’m seriously considering starting my next autobiographical book right away—California would do for a working title. I think I’d begin with movie studio experiences—my first few jobs, anyhow.

  May 10. Dreary gut-pains from the hernia. Disinclination to do anything, and yet a desperate nagging of conscience toward work—any work.

  May 9—the family death-day—brought us some good news, however: Robert Miller phoned from New York that the Swedish dealer has reappeared and that Don is to mail off a selection of thirty paintings at once.42

  May 11. Depressed. Pains in back and hernia discomfort as bad as ever. I begin to feel that they won’t stop. Am also jittery because of threats from the Writers Guild Strike Committee—we’re to be fined if we don’t cooperate, etc. etc.43 (What makes me jittery isn’t the threat but the prospect of having to get into a towering rage about it.) And then I’m still in a dither about starting my California book. Where to start? How? I suppose I’ll snap out of this somehow.

  May 16. A new scare. My weight has been dropping steadily and now it’s lower than it has been in years, to 146 and ¼. As usual, when I get scared, I’m embarrassed to tell Elsie.

  On the other side of the ledger, a real important success—on May 12, I made a start on my new autobiographical book California; it’s opening is nothing very inspired but quite okay, I think. And I can feel how powerfully it’s a pro-life force, countering my body aches. Kitty is the real life force and he knows instinctively how much the effort to write this book will help me.

  May 21. Another very painful night. I felt so discouraged by the pain that I began to feel I’d have the hernia operation, to get some relief. Must talk to Elsie.

  However, I am at least crawling on with my California book— have got to page 8.

  May 23. Two nights ago, Don, Jim White and I drove over to the art museum at Newport Beach,44 where there was a group show, with Don the featured artist—the reproduction on the poster was of his painting of me against the cushions. Also he appeared on a video tape, painting me in the studio. Typically, he objected to one shot and refused to be impressed by the next—he really looked magically beautiful, both in the box and in person, that evening—and his work was worthy of him. It looked magnificent.

  Last night, he had to go back there and mingle at a meaningless party—all the artists were supposed to show up but most didn’t, because they aren’t professionals and have no style.

  Poor Angel, he gets back to a dreadful old tiresome pain-ridden Dub. My back is better but I had cramps in the early hours, leg cramps that made me cry out. What must Kitty be thinking to himself? “How much longer do I have to endure this? And what will be left for me by the time that I don’t have to?” Oh, he is such an angel of love.

  The light side: I have done my page a day on the California book so far. Also, I am at last getting on with Chetanananda’s huge typescript of edited Vivekananda lectures, to which I have to write a preface.45 Work gives courage for more work.

  I keep praying to Swami to be with us both and help us.

  June 7. The day before yesterday, after we’d been out for the evening with Wayne46 and Juan47 and Jack Woody and Tom Long and a friend of Tom’s from Pittsburgh whom we didn’t like, Darling, who was a bit drunk, flew into a rage because he’d heard me talking to Jim Charlton (in Ho[n]olulu) on the phone and I sounded (Darling says) so thrilled—“Oh Jim!” I exclaimed. Darling mimicked my gushy-delighted tone. My tone with Jim— as Darling knows well enough by now—always tends to be gushy because I’m always a bit on the defensive with Jim, who is such a dog person, itching to be rejected so he can whimper and growl reproachfully. Well, anyhow, Darling worked himself up into a cat snit and threw things at my desk, with the result that he slightly damaged The Totem Horse, knocking off his sacred saddle.48 He did not damage, but did knock over, The Totem Kitty.49

  So yesterday there was great sweetness and purring. But I was rather pissed off—I’d hurt my hernia tidying up the mess. So I said I wasn’t going to Honolulu on the 29th, because Darling had created an impossible situation with regard to Jim.

  Of course the truth is that now I’ve got to go—and I couldn’t dread it more. This has nothing whatever to do with Jim. I simply dread spending all that time cooped up in a house with Billy Al and Penny.50 They’re all right—I’m quite fond of them—but they’re aliens. All the more so now I’m old and shaky and pain-shot. And how can I face their gang of heterosexual swimmers? What could be more utterly ungay? Oh, if only something would force us to cancel! But don’t get me wrong—I’m not praying for an accident or illness or any other unpleasant crisis.

  Oh God—and this evening I have to face dinner with Mrs. Misery and Mr. Know-All—Joan and John Dunne. And dreadful old Weidenfeld will be there.

  Good news: I’m keeping up my stint of pages on the new book—to the first third of page 28.

  And the doses of Butazolidin really have helped my back.

  June 26. Well, ha ha, the prayer was answered—that’s to say, I’ve got to go into hospital (St. John’s) on the day after tomorrow and stay there at least six years days (note sinister slip!) and have my hernia operated on and also be thoroughly tested, because Elsie Giorgi is concerned about my liver and my steady loss of weight—I’m down now to 139 and ½. So now I’m being, as it were, self-punished for my tiresomeness. Darling has been angelic about this. We are so utterly each other’s. It is poignant and makes me cry, sometimes. I have no way of knowing if he is seriously alarmed or not. I guess not—except that he’s worried about my weight loss; he sees how scraggy I look.

  Ah, hospitals—how I shudder at the breath of them! I don’t believe I have ever spent one whole week in a hospital in my life—which just gives you an idea how healthy and lucky my life has been. I must try to make something out of this experience—a dress rehearsal of what must so soon come.

  (Incidentally, we have already switched dates and arranged to go to Hawaii and visit Billy Al and Penny sometime around the end of July. And now that’s okay. I’ll even enjoy it, I think. Oh crazy bad Dobbin!)

  June 27. It’s tantali
zing, how clearly I seem to see my way ahead on the California book just when I have to stop work because of going into hospital. Yesterday, I had a really deep insight—it occurred to me that the letter I wrote to Gerald Hamilton in 1939, attacking the war propaganda made by Erika and Klaus Mann and others, was really a device, to get myself regarded as an enemy in England and therefore make it impossible for me to “repent” and return. That was why I chose Gerald Hamilton to send my letter to—I knew he would broadcast it.51

  Another “thread” in this weave is my continuing effort to turn myself officially into a pacifist—by associating with Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Allan Hunter, and then joining the Quakers. It comes back to me now that, soon after Pearl Harbor, when I was already working at the Haverford Quaker hostel, I got some sort of offer from Washington—promoted, I’m nearly certain, by Lincoln Kirstein. I think it was an intelligence job—was in an office— not amidst cloaks and daggers, but dignified by a military rank (major?). This I refused, on pacifist grounds. When I remember Wystan’s ill-advised appearance in London wearing a U.S. major’s uniform, I get a glimpse, not altogether pleasing, of my own foxiness. I would never have made such a miscalculation. And Wystan seems to me, at such moments, fundamentally more innocent than I could ever be.

  July 17. Maybe this is a propitious date—what with my look-alike “Wrong Way” Corrigan’s landing in Ireland (July 17, 1938)52—and the eclipse of the moon last night—anyhow, I woke up this morning with a curiously strong feeling of assurance that I am at last about to get better—that’s to say, stop feeling so miserable. My back doesn’t hurt as much as usual and I’m not so limp and lazy, even though this heat hasn’t let up and the air’s still smoggy.

  Anyhow, this nonsense has been going on quite long enough. (Reading back over this account, I see that I have been ailing since March.) Now I must really push ahead with my California book.

  July 26. Ah, this weary summer of hot weather! My old body aches and I feel sick to my stomach so much of the time, and nauseated by the sight and smell of food. Darling is being truly wonderful. He cooks for me, waits on me and grumbles just sufficiently to remain human, not intimidatingly angelic.

  There is no way through this wretched period except by working at the California book and other projects. One welcome helper is Lyle Fox. I was somehow inspired to call him—he’s managing the old folks’ hotel in Santa Monica, The Georgian. He came at once—instantly announcing that he didn’t want to be paid—and gave my back a deep massage. He married a French wife while living for two years at Cap Ferrat. He seemed quite unchanged, cheerful, silly, a truly kind and good man.

  August 2. Being sick, in the way I’ve been for the past few weeks, means that you experience the life journey as conscious effort. Instead of spinning along the road almost without effort, as if on a bicycle, you feel like a character from The Grapes of Wrath, coaxing your broken-down, rattling, over-heated Ford to keep going, mile after mile—hardly even expecting to reach “California” ever.

  This is old age. And I must say I’m well aware that—despite all my complaints—I know I’m travelling deluxe. There is more love in this house now than there ever has been before. And, in a strange way, I feel Don’s love and Swami’s love as two combined forces, not always distinct from each other. I’m not expressing this properly, but my sense of it is powerful. Thinking about this love while I was walking in the park before breakfast today, my eyes streamed tears of joy. And, oh, the beauty of the breakers on the shore! My lifelong urge has been to plunge into them, but I don’t really care if I never do again, because the weakness of the body is a merciful self-adjustment.

  August 27. Despite good resolves, I have been dragging on with my tiresome back, etc. However, ten days ago, after trying a nice but somehow unconvincing Japanese therapist with needles and other techniques, I came upon a Dr. Fichman, right here in Santa Monica, who got me walking without a stick after a week of therapy with ultrasound (I think it’s called). I still have severe twinges if I make a wrong move, but I’m in better shape. But oh, if only this exhaustingly hot weather would let up!

  I have to admit that I felt curiously scared on my birthday yesterday, to realize I was seventy-seven. Why, I don’t know. The number must have some occult significance for me.

  I also got into an utterly ridiculous flap over the prospect of renewing my driver’s license. I nearly always flunk the written test, because I have convinced myself that I just cannot understand any kind of bureaucratic language (the secretly underlying assumption is that I’m “above” all that kind of thing). Well, I flunked this time. But the young black clerk at the desk helped me out, asking me additional questions verbally, in such a tone that he indicated the proper answers. He may have done this out of kindness of heart, or compassion for old folk, or contempt for the system as such. That doesn’t matter. To me it was a victory, just because I had resisted defeatist impulses to surrender before I was defeated and simply resign myself to living the rest of my life without driving a car—no big deal for me but an extra load on Don, who is already carrying most everything else.

  The only way I can repay him for all he’s done is to get well quick and get on with my book. The first is easily said but not done. The second shouldn’t be too difficult. Because what I basically have to begin with is to copy out all the material I need from the diary, just editing and annotating. I restarted work yesterday, continued today.

  October 16. Well, the moment has come when I must recognize and discuss the situation with myself, which means, as usual, writing it down and looking at it in black and white. I have got some sort of malignancy, a tumor, and that’s what’s behind all this pain. They will treat it, of course, and so we shall enter the cancer-recognition phase and its gradual retreat to the terminal. I shall get used to the idea, subject to fits of blind panic. The pain may actually be lessened but there will be the constant awareness of it. Before all, there will be the need to accept what is going to happen. My goodness—at my age, should that be so difficult? No, it shouldn’t be. Yes, but it will be.

  Don is heroic, heartbreaking in his devotion. He keeps me off the pain pills as much as possible, to prove to me that I can do without them—which I can, so far. But this isn’t a problem of how to bear pain; you can at least relieve that with drugs. What I have to face is dying.

  This ought to be easiest of all. I pray and pray to Swami—to show himself to me, no matter how—as we’ve been promised that he will, before death.

  I feel that I wish I could talk to Krishna, or someone from the center who was really close to Swami. But to arrange to do this is a huge psychological effort, and it might not be a success. I get fits of being very very scared.

  Don says I should work, and he is absolutely right. I remember how wonderful Aldous Huxley was, working right to the end. I have promised Don that I’ll get on with my book.

  The love between me and Don has never been stronger, and it is heartbreakingly intimate. Every night he goes to sleep holding the old dying creature in his arms.

  1982

  January 1. A big gap here, because I gave way to the dreariest, most cowardly depression and thus stopped writing in this book. I couldn’t settle down sensibly and matter-of-factly to having cancer—although Elsie Giorgi kept reassuring me that, practically speaking, I didn’t have it, since it could be kept at bay indefinitely by the medication that she and Dr. Brosman have prescribed.

  Then, on December 23, Dr. Brosman did a biopsy—sticking some kind of an appliance up my rectum and cutting a sample of tissue from the prostate—unpleasant but not as unpleasant as it sounds. Since then, I have heard nothing from him directly but Elsie called me on the 28th to tell me he’d called her and told her that the biopsy was negative. He has never called me, however, and Elsie thinks this is odd and insensitive of him. He is odd—kind of take-it-or-leave-it in his medical manner—yet, at the same time, I get the impression that he regards me with respect, even awe, as a writer. Maybe he’s simply shy.<
br />
  As a layman, I feel temporarily relieved but still quite unclear about my condition. Did I ever have cancer at all? Can cancer come and go so casually? Or did Brosman merely mean that he thought I had cancer, originally? (I had got the impression that his original diagnosis was based on an earlier biopsy performed while I was having tests at St. John’s.)

  Enough, Dobbin. If you can’t be brave about all this and rise above it, then you must deliberately distract your mind from it by concentrating on your book—which is still only about one-third written—and that only in rough draft.

  January 4. This morning comes a charming pair of letters from Dodie and Alec Beesley, saying how pleased they were because Don and I called them long-distance on December 27. So glad we did. Dodie writes: “Again and again throughout the book” (this is the volume of her autobiography she’s at present working on) “I have had a sense of happiness shared with you, followed by a sense of loss because those days were so long ago. And your unexpected call somehow restored the happiness, made me feel you are part of our lives for ever.” She and Alec are eighty-five and seventy-eight respectively. (Alec tells us this—I think it is the first time he has ever spoken of their ages.)

  On New Year’s Eve, Don painted Rick Sandford because it was his birthday. Rick asked me, “How long was it after you met Don that you and he had sex?” I said: “We had sex and then we met.”

  February 19. Today warm and windless—the first day I’ve walked down to the beach this year. I look so grotesque, with my huge belly and skinny arms, that I’m a bit embarrassed to show myself there—that’s just senile vanity. Darling doesn’t care how I look, as long as I look healthy—and I certainly am much better; my legs quite strong again, no excessive back pain, only a little nausea when about to eat.