The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  Also, there has been far too much drinking. This is bloating me and dulling me altogether and I’m up above 150 lbs. I have got to stop it and get on with my novel.

  I miss Don. Without him I feel “restless and uneasy” and I worry about how he’s getting along. Without him, my life is just a big bore. I could live alone, I guess; but then everything would have to be reconstructed.

  October 18. This morning I fixed myself a Prairie Oyster, because I couldn’t be bothered to eat breakfast; I wanted to get started on work. This was nostalgic. Thoughts of John [Layard] and Berlin.112

  Last night was [a] perfect little gem of boredom. I drove all the way to Highland Park to see Del Huserik and his wife.113 Why? Because he intimidates me and makes me feel guilty for not taking part in his aggressive Quaker projects. Del is as nervous as a witch. He wouldn’t sit down and talk, which would have interested me, because his political opinions are his own. No, he had to play me jazz, Weill, Wagner, tiny little snippets of things which he then immediately switched off in favor of something else. And meanwhile his wife served her best supper; a symbolic act, because she didn’t really want to have me there, only the idea that I was in the house as their guest. She’s a sharp-faced discontented girl [and you wonder whether she] will give trouble later, like an unreliable make of car—a Simca, in fact. Mine has been through all kinds of trouble lately; now the lights have gone out on the instrument panel. Mr. Mead counsels patience: “If I may venture to suggest, Sir,” “If you’ll pardon me for remarking . . .” etc.

  How good to be quite quite sober this morning! I drank only a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. Nothing else. Tony Richardson was quite irritated about this; he is an absolutely incurable mischief-maker in tiny ways. He wanted me to stay and get drunk with them—Tom Wright and John Rechy were there—and then, having cancelled the Huseriks at the last moment—have supper alone with Frank Moore114 while he went out to some engagement. What irritated me was that, of course, I would have liked to do this. But much more because of the Huseriks than because of Frank.

  October 23. Don phoned yesterday to say that he must stay east until the end of the coming week, at the least. His designs for the Tennessee Williams and Julie Harris advertisements have been accepted, and that’s what matters. And of course it’s obvious that this may lead on to other jobs, and he really should stay there as long as it seems necessary. Still, I miss him more and more. Each day I feel it just slightly more.

  Have just returned from a lunch at the de Grunwalds’115 for Terry Rattigan, and indirectly for Angus Wilson. Oh dear God how I loathe lunches and the run of Hollywood people you meet at them! Besides which, of course, I didn’t get to talk to Terry (who looked rather bloated) or to Angus, who is roly-poly and quite sweet. From Angus I get a rather depressing whiff of the London critical deadlock—everybody’s fangs locked in someone else’s back. But Angus himself is really understanding and sweet.

  Told everybody about Don’s success. That was really the only satisfaction of having gone there. But David Selznick, as usual, was interesting. He’ll still vote for Nixon, but admits that he’s only fifty-one percent for him. He thinks inflation will come much faster with Kennedy. He also says that Kennedy is anti-Semitic.116

  Well, at least I feel good about one thing; I got some work done on “Waldemar” today. I have been so bad lately, getting hangovers, and I’m fat and pouchy in consequence.

  October 27. It’s just eight in the morning, a beautiful one, and I plan to get off to an earlier start, so I can arrive punctually at 11 a.m. at the college and thereby frustrate Douwe, who always greets me with his faintly bitchy smile because I’m late. (Late for what, one may well ask.) Douwe is amazingly bitchy underneath, and full of old-maidish resentments. I don’t dislike him for this, or I won’t until he turns against me; indeed, I find it rather fascinating. It fascinated me the other night—last week, at that awful party at the Hoffmans’ with the arty-method puffed-shit group of actors—when he suddenly exploded against Christopher Fry117 and said he was “evil” and that he felt sick to his stomach, just being in the room with him.

  I’ve still heard nothing more from Don. I now really do miss him terribly, more and more every day. Perhaps this is the difference between different sorts of relationships; there are people you miss instantly after parting, and then gradually less and less; and there are a few—very few in a lifetime—you become slowly and then increasingly aware of missing, at first it’s discomfort and then misery and then agony, like being deprived of oxygen. Of course, I wouldn’t be in the agony stage unless I thought we were being separated for a long time or forever; but it is getting very unpleasant.

  Tony Richardson’s Sanctuary was shown in the projection room yesterday. Parts of it were very impressive; but I do think they have missed the point at the end. The end ought to be about the execution; not the getting-together of these two boring little underlings, Temple and her husband. That’s the story of the two novels118—two underlings, little butterflies out on a binge, happen on a lair of the great monsters; and, in course of time, they destroy the great monsters.

  Some queen who is a high-school teacher at a very tough downtown school told the following stories about his pupils, whose ages are around twelve, or maybe younger. A boy says to him: “You’re not queer, are you, Mr. A.? It’s your husband who is.” Another time, the teacher rebukes a girl who is chewing gum. “I don’t mind your chewing,” he tells her, “but stop blowing bubbles.” At once a boy in the class yells out, “I’m Bubbles!” A ten-year-old boy says to the teacher, “Is that a big knife you have in your pocket or are you in love with me?”

  October 28. Just got back from Santa Barbara to find a letter from Don—he has some more work and must stay at least until the beginning of next week. Well, I am glad of course; but now I enter a new phase of missing him. It becomes more wretched. I do not want to go to the [Albert] Hacketts’ tonight, to the party for Angus Wilson but of course I must.

  Last night I had supper with Douwe Stuurman at the little wooden house he built for himself at Isla Vista.119 It is really one of the most glamorous places I’ve been in for a long while; standing on top of the short steep cliffs with the sea right below, and the island dimly in the background. The sun going down golden in a blue Monet haze; the waves breaking against the clay banks at the foot of the cliff; the boy (one of the students who live around) running and splashing through the foam. Douwe keeps a rope in his house to throw to people who get into difficulties with the rising tide. Many do. Two cars have been abandoned and lost.

  Douwe’s souvenirs: a Russian banner captured by the Nazis and then taken by the American troops, a shrunken head from Peru and a bust of [Albert] Schweitzer, a pair of wooden clogs from the days when they were still worn in the Dutch community in America where Douwe grew up. Douwe sleeps on a hard bunk bed right by the ocean window. He made everything, cuts down his own trees for firewood.

  He feels that, after his second wife left him, he learnt to live alone, and I can see that he thinks of himself as a sort of father confessor and spiritual focus for the whole campus. He tells how, one night, he was sitting in a rocking chair before the fire and became aware that someone else was sitting in the chair beside him and he knew it was Death, his Death. So now he is quite easy with the idea of death and it doesn’t bother him. A millionaire gave him a lot of very expensive hi-fi equipment and a T.V. set he didn’t want. He knows several millionaires, and they come to him, he infers, seeking the peace they cannot find, because they live in big pretentious houses and he lives in his simple cabin.

  Of course, I am exaggerating the shit element in all this. Douwe does have something; there’s no question about that. One just sees a great danger in him of giving way to spiritual humility-pride. Perhaps he should admit his resentments more frankly to himself. His hate of his second wife. [. . .]

  Later Howard Warshaw and a group of students came in, and we had a self-conscious sort of seminar. Howard was excellent, howe
ver. His attack on nonobjective expressionism (I may not have the name right, but it means abstract art) seems to me very sound. He points out that these people want to break with the past completely and start something new; and they don’t care what associations you get from looking at their pictures. Howard says this is nothing new, because any painter who merely assembles objects and hopes that they will mean something—this Howard calls “naturalism”—is doing the same thing. And of course this is true of literature, too. They are trying to abolish the necessary triangle: the artist, the objective datum on which the art is based, the viewer. They want, as artists, to communicate directly with the viewers. But this—on the level of maya—is impossible. (Only on the level of the Atman is communication possible—i.e. yoga.) On the level of maya, you have got to have the object. The viewer has got to recognize the object in order to be able to appreciate the artist’s rendering of it. (When I instanced a painting by Picasso, “A Man Leaning on a Table,” 1915, and asked, “If I can’t find the slightest trace of the man or the table, does that mean that Picasso has failed to communicate with me?” Howard had to say yes; but he qualified this by talking about artistic allusions in a way I couldn’t follow.)

  Anyhow, what I personally care about is that Howard is bitterly opposed to the cult of abstract art in art schools and the sneer with which representational talent is so often greeted nowadays—that the possessor of such talent will do well in advertising. I value this attitude of Howard’s because it puts him on Don’s side.

  November 2 [Wednesday]. Had a telegram from Don this morning; he’s arriving back here on Friday afternoon. That means he will have been away three whole weeks, which must be the longest stretch of time we’ve ever been separated. Oh, I’m so deeply glad that he’s coming back. But I’m certainly not deeply pleased by the way I’ve been handling my life while he’s been gone. Drinking, idling, wasting time with people I didn’t really want to see; and getting nearly nothing done on the novel.

  Today I’ve been feeling sick in my stomach; I do hope I’m not going to get ill. That would be too tiresome. Probably I am simply run down from drinking and eating too much. I am not charmed with myself at all. Swami, with Krishna and Mrs. DePry, was in to have tea here this afternoon—the first time he has ever been in this house—and I had a guilty feeling that somehow he saw the state I am in. Well, never mind, I just have to snap out of it.

  Of the people I’ve seen lately, the most interesting was John Rechy. We had supper and a long talk the other evening, and then he came again to discuss the latest episode in his novel, which I’d read. (It needs an awful lot doing to it.) One of the characteristic things about John is his fear of inventing; he wants to record every thing exactly as it happened. So I spent a lot of time trying to convince him that this would be undesirable and anyhow impossible. But I do respect and like him; he quite fascinates me. He says quite frankly that he’s an exhibitionist, and this makes it possible for him to hustle, etc. He is fascinated by mirrors; spends hours looking at himself in them. At the same time, his relationships are compartmentalized. He never told his engineer friend that he was a writer until quite lately. And, with his “mental” friends, he is exaggeratedly nonphysical; he hates to be touched, even in the most casual way. (I remember how Edward [Upward] used to laugh at me for this, at Cambridge.) I think he thinks of himself as being always in disguise.

  I introduced him to Evelyn Hooker. They both took to each other immediately. Evelyn’s motives were of course more interested than John’s, because she at once saw him as an ideal expert informant to help her in her researches.

  Two days ago, I definitely decided not to go to [L.A.] State College next semester. The two thousand they offer just is not good enough, and besides, I ought to get on with my novel; Laughton will probably be in my hair anyhow. And Byron Guyer120 says that he can arrange a much better offer for me for next fall.

  Huge excitement is stewing up over the elections. My Kennedy stickers have been scratched off the car twice, but I keep putting on new ones. There are Nixon stickers everywhere, it seems, and I am worried. So is Jim Charlton, despite the reassuring forecasts. Jim, says Tom Wright, believes that his own personal problems and anxieties will somehow all be miraculously solved if Kennedy wins.

  November 9. Don’s New York visit was just as much of a success as the first one. It now seems that his drawings will be on display at three different theaters—Taste of Honey, Period of Adjustment and Little Moon of Alban. He got back on the 4th. But he isn’t at all well. He seems to be having constant attacks of my age-old complaint, spasm of the vagus nerve—at least, I hope that’s all it is. He refuses to see a doctor. He is touchy and nervous and hostile, and then utterly sweet. And I just have to practise caring-not caring.

  Worried because my ankle, which seemed all right, has suddenly swelled up again and hurts, after a walk on the beach yesterday.

  Well, the toad Nixon is driven back into his hole, and rejected by his own home state, which is a special satisfaction.121 I feel I want to triumph over that bitch at Santa Barbara, at Wright Ludington’s party, who called Howard Warshaw “stupid.” Those arrogant rich-bitches!

  Have had a most gruelling weekend reading all kinds of manuscripts—including the huge novel by poor Alfred Weisenburger, to whom I wrote an unkind letter yesterday. I am ashamed of it. If I don’t want to read these things, I shouldn’t consent to do so. No justice in getting mad at their authors.

  Ah, I’m so full of resentments, these days. Sick with them. I must get my calm back somehow. Tonight I have to take the Mishimas out to supper. They are going to Disneyland today. Mishima told me, “We also see the home of Mr. Nixon, and a ghost town—” he paused, “same thing!”

  November 12. A day of heavy showers and strong winds. I have prepared my talk for the Santa Barbara temple122 tomorrow. I only hope the rain lets up before I have to drive there. As usual, I feel a resentment against Prema, whom I always suspect of being in the background, whenever I’m burdened with one of these weary Vedanta chores.

  At Santa Barbara, I see a lot of a student named Frank Wiley, because he is writing a novel—a queer novel about the UCSB campus in which he, the “I” of the story, falls in love with another boy. Quite aside from the natural sympathy I feel for him, he is certainly one of the brightest students in my seminar. A few weeks ago, I noticed that I’d been referring to him, in conversation and in my pocket diary, as “Grimm.” I thought carefully about this Jungian error and decided that it was simply because of Grimms’ Fairy Tales! I told this to Wiley. I don’t know if I should have, or not. He didn’t seem very surprised. But not very amused either.

  I have to face it—my seminar is actually the least successful— perhaps the only unsuccessful—of my Santa Barbara activities. It’s no good blaming the students for sitting around like muffins. It is up to me to toast them. I mean to do something about this, next time. I am going to ask each one of them a number of direct questions and see if we can’t find out between us what is wrong. This is urgent, because we have already had eight seminars and only six or at the most seven more remain.

  November 15. Yesterday, I again saw the green flash. Only this time it wasn’t so much a flash; the sun disappeared and then a tiny nodule, like the very last bit of another sun, appeared, and it was quite sharply green.

  This weekend has been difficult. Don has been suffering almost continuously from his stomach trouble. At last, yesterday, he made up his mind to go to Jack Lewis, who told him it may be an ulcer, but was so reassuring about ulcers in general and their relation to longevity that Don wasn’t worried. Anyhow, he gave Don some medicine and, thank God, [Don] immediately felt better and his spirits greatly revived. I think the stomach had a lot to do with his behavior on Sunday—also the weather. Saturday, it rained heavily. Tom Wright provided a farce interlude by insisting on bringing us some firewood he didn’t need. The firewood was quite water-logged, and Tom, like a cheerful wet badger, arrived during a particularly heavy downpou
r, so we had to change our clothes and unload it into the garage. We had our best clothes on because we were about to go out to dinner with the King Vidors. This wasn’t a success—although a very interesting man named Hendricks was there, the chief representative of The Christian Science Monitor,123 who reassured us about the danger of a Kennedy upset due to absentee balloting and uncommitted electoral votes124—because, as so often, they practically ignored Don. Don stayed in town for the night, but it didn’t improve his mood; and when he got back next day and we were having supper together at the Red Snapper, he blazed up. Told me he wanted to be independent. Wanted to go to New York for several months. That all I ever did was to find ways of making him dependent on me. That he didn’t see why he should be grateful to me, because after all he had given me so much of his life, and it was time that counted. I daresay I could have taken all of this and realized how much and how little it meant, if I hadn’t been tired from a rat-race drive to Santa Barbara and back. I had to talk at the Vedanta Temple about “The Writer and Vedanta”—but, as it was, I got mad too, and asked, what about my time? And so it went on. Don said he never feels the house belongs to him. It isn’t his home. Etc., etc. With much hatred of me in his voice. And then, to top it all, we had tickets for The Threepenny Opera, and it was ugly and crude and dirty beyond belief—a parody of Brecht, even at his worst. We left at the intermission, so as not to have to witness the spectacle of poor old [Lotte] Lenya involved in this dreary horror.

  Then Don began to say he was sorry and terribly humiliated. And that he felt there was nothing inside of him fundamentally but a “selfish little faggot.” And of course I did my best to reassure him.

  He says he is desperate to get rich—earn money—and this is, of course, partly because he wants to pay off the debt to me and be free of this tiresome guilt-obligation. Whether he would decide, when that was done, that he could and would leave me, I don’t know, but I think not. I believe that he still loves me, just as much as I do him; and I still believe that this love will last. I know that I am possessive and fussy. But I also firmly believe that I am overcoming this fault, and that it would be absolutely possible for us to ease into another sort of life together.