The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  (September 8.) Jocelyn is plump and pop-eyed and not terribly bright but there is something sweet about her. She doesn’t seem bitchy at all. Her face in repose is curiously young and innocent. During breakfast she went back and forth between the terrace where Don and I were eating and the bedroom she shares with John. She took him coffee, etc., and reported, “He can’t be left alone for long. He has to be distracted from lying with his face to the wall.” But, again, John when he finally appeared seemed in the best of spirits. He is feminine and quite pretty, and he is obviously impossible in his dealings with women. With men he doesn’t exactly flirt but you feel that he is somehow in the feminine relation to you. He kissed both Don and me when we met. Tony is always teasing him about his appearance, complaining of his spots, etc. They are like sister and brother.

  Breakfast: long long rolls of bread brought from the village by one of the boys on the Lambretta,262 coffee, jam and honey with wasps in it.

  We spent the day lying beside the pool. Below us, the red rock-dry fertile landscape with the silver olives. The wind pouring softly through faint-scented pines. Clouds swelling menacingly snow-breasted above the dark thunderland of the mountains. Perfume of pines and softly pouring air. Tony read Passage to India. I talked to him about my Rashomon263 ideas for a Christ film, and he was interested, but not thrilled.

  Our fearful mistake was to come here and stay with him. When you are at his mercy, he can drive you absolutely nuts. You have to do exactly what he says, every moment of the day. If you refuse, he asks “Are you all right?” as much as to suggest that your refusal is the first sign of an oncoming mental breakdown. He has a clacking sexless birdlike energy; he is a demon toucan. And yet, what do I mean when I write this? Merely that he knows exactly what he wants to do at every moment, and we don’t; so we have to wait around for him. Nevertheless, he has reduced Don and me to nerve-raw neurotics. My pyloric spasm makes me feel as if I’d been kicked in the guts. I long long long to leave this place.

  At supper, Tony’s dirty-sadistic chatter, in which the others eagerly joined—John because he’s childish enough to find it funny, Jocelyn because she will adopt absolutely any tone of voice necessary to keep in with the men. Much talk about “Lord Blowright” as they call Olivier now that he’s married to Joan Plowright. Tony astonishingly venomous about him; told how Joan once threw up all over the table during dinner. He also teased John, by talking about castration, of which John has a horror. I asked what they thought about sterilization. Apparently this, too, was sinister and quite disgusting. So I refrained from telling them about my operation.264

  Yesterday, Cuthbert gave me a typescript of a play by Terry Rattigan, who’s about to arrive here. It’s called Man and Boy, all about a financier who goes bust, like Kruger.265 Tony read extracts from it aloud, with savage sneers. Cuthbert wants to get Tony to direct it.

  (September 12.) Yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, we spent on the beach at Cannes. We are now dark brown, and have drunk several gallons of gin and Campari. How I hate the thirsty sun and the salty sea and my hysterical gutache! We both long to get back somewhere where we can work. And yet, now Tony has gone, we feel we should make a serious effort to enjoy ourselves and get some value for our money.

  Tony left in the middle of the night, with Al Kaplan, in order to be in London in time for a press preview of [his film of ] A Taste of Honey today.

  Yesterday evening, he was to meet Terry Rattigan and talk about the play. Because he thought he’d been trapped into this, he insisted on bringing with him Al Kaplan and an American decorator named Peter Gregson. “Fuck Rattigan!” he kept exclaiming. But the meeting was, after all, quite amiable. We had drinks on the terrace of the Hotel Martinez. A moppet sang “Because He Needs Me” and the song about liking being a girl.266 Cuthbert said, “I was sitting on this terrace when the Second World War broke out, and I’ll probably be sitting here when the third one does, in a few weeks’ time.”

  (September 13.) Now at least we are free agents, and we have Tony’s car to drive. But I’m still weary of the beach, and “relaxation.” The Herald Tribune describes the great hurricane in Texas;267 a crowd of rattlesnakes invaded one small town, fleeing before a tidal wave, and tried to swarm up the walls of the buildings.

  John Osborne and Jocelyn left for England this afternoon. He has decided to take part in the antibomb demonstration next Sunday, and takes it for granted that he’ll go to prison. Since Wesker and the others got a month—Russell’s sentence was reduced to a week for medical reasons—John assumes the new batch will be treated even more severely.268 He may get six months, he thinks. Their departure was solemn, with tears. Jocelyn embraced all the members of the French family, and wept. John looked smugly pleased with himself. He carried a large Bible in his hand. No doubt this was merely because they had forgotten to pack it, but, under the circumstances, the effect was that of the execution of a sixteenth-century martyr who goes to death with a proud smile certain of glory. “Madame a pleuré,”269 said one of the Frenchwomen approvingly, after they’d gone.

  (September 15.) We drove over to have lunch with Willie and Alan [Searle] at the Villa Mauresque. How I love that drive! The ancientness of that narrow subtropical highway under the towering mountain wall, along which thousands of generations have squeezed around the corner, between France and Italy. Willie seemed deafer and perhaps a bit more shaky on his legs, but still very much himself, every inch a Maugham. He embraced Don and me with enthusiasm and remembered about Don’s forthcoming show, and then we heard him asking Alan what our names were! The martinis before lunch were staggering; but they didn’t seem to faze Willie, or Alan either, plump-thighed in tight white shorts and a cricket-anyone? knotted scarf. Willie took a rather strange bullying-affectionate attitude toward me during the beginning of our visit. Someone mentioned Berlin and he said, “L-lets face it, Christopher, if it hadn’t been for Berlin, where would you be now?” “Certainly not sitting here,” I said. And then Willie started saying that he had believed I’d be one of the most successful novelists of my generation—“and then you threw it all away.” The others were a bit embarrassed, and I pointed out that the game wasn’t over yet, and he should wait till he read my new novel; but really we were on the very best of terms and I have never felt fonder of him. Apparently, according to Willie’s view, I had “thrown it all away” for personal happiness and for Vedanta. “And,” said Willie, “I envy you.” He went on to tell an oddly self-pitying tale of how he had been humiliated in college by his stammer; the class had laughed at him. The whole thing sounded like a literary oversimplification. He was really composing a short story. The Great Old Novelist who has sacrificed happiness and love for his art confesses that he envies the younger brilliantly promising writer who sacrificed his art for happiness and love. The only thing that embarrassed me was that Willie implied that he was without love, and this reflected on Alan. . . . But, really, we were all too drunk to be taken seriously.

  Willie also went on a good deal about Gerald Heard, whom he seemed to think of as still a young man. Gradually Gerald emerged as the villain who had seduced me from Art into Vedanta. Willie assured us that he didn’t believe in reincarnation. “Oh Willie dear,” I told him, “how I wish I had your wonderful optimism!” No, said Willie, he knew that after this life there is nothing; and he broke off a bit of his bread to express the falling away of himself from life. The idea of having to live his life again, he said, filled him with horror. But Churchill, on the other hand, said that he would live his life again gladly. (“Churchill’s a vegetable,” Alan said; and told how gaga he has become, although he is actually some months younger than Willie.) “Churchill always makes me go into a room ahead of him,” Willie said, “he always insists that I’m his senior.” And then back we went to the tragedy of Willie’s life—which seemed increasingly farcical, as one looked around the marvellous garden of the villa and digested the excellent lunch.

  Tony and Al returned from England in th
e afternoon. Taste of Honey a huge success, and Don’s pictures are framed and exhibited at the theater.

  We leave tomorrow, early.

  September 20. John Osborne never did get sent to prison; only fined one pound. But he has stayed in the news by announcing to Jocelyn that he’s going to marry this girl, the movie critic Penelope Gilliatt. There’s a little snag; as of now, they are both married. We saw Jocelyn yesterday. Today, having heard the news, she is incommunicado again.

  Don has twelve drawings on exhibition at the Leicester Square Theatre,270 including all of the cast and Tony and Shelagh Delaney. The only thing is, they’ve left a small reproduction of Annigoni’s picture of the Queen still hanging on the wall between two drawings of Paul Danquah!

  He has spent most of today addressing cards announcing his show.

  We are worried by the arrival of Mr. Burton, the man who adopted Richard.271 For the moment he is staying with the Jenkins[es], opposite—but Ivor Jenkins has an uneasy embarrassed look on his face when he talks to us, and we fear we are going to be told that we have to leave because Mr. Burton needs our house.

  Another memory of Cannes: Jocelyn saying, “I’ve got to go into the sea, so I can pee.”

  She tells us that Mary Ure’s baby is definitely Robert Shaw’s. What Tony Richardson told me, before we left England for Valbonne, that John was having an affair with a model, was false. Probably I just misunderstood it. The model had been invited down to keep Jocelyn company. But she sulked and fussed and had to be sent home again.

  September 24. Only three weeks until my scheduled departure, and much to do. Don’s show with all that that entails, and a new cap to be put on my front tooth where the yellow one is, and a visit if possible to Richard, and to the Sterns, and the proofs of the British edition of my novel to be corrected, and Stratford to be visited to see Gielgud in Othello.

  Today, Don has gone to draw Bryan Forbes again—the director who made the awful film about children finding a tramp and mistaking him for Christ.272 I have fussed about, reading The Sunday Times—Gielgud on the theater—Dag’s death and its aftermath273—gradually appearing signs that the U.S. is going to sell West Germany down the river, thank God.

  My latest health worry: increasing stiffness in the joints of my jaws. (Marion Davies died of cancer of the jaw yesterday.)

  I feel that Don is quite eager for me to leave, but I don’t take this as anything bad; we both need a holiday from each other. He is under great strain now, naturally, with the show coming on.

  September 27. A grey chilly wet day today—the kind of weather which is like an admission of failure: it’s no good, we can’t be bothered to go on trying to fool you, after all this is England and what else can you expect. One gets a horrid feeling that the six-month-long winter has started.

  But here we are in high spirits. Don is so happy, because The Queen has just come out with two pages of his drawings; Stravinsky, Alan Sillitoe, Gerald Heard, Robert Stephens,274 Angela Lansbury— not perfectly reproduced, it’s true, and not very well arranged on the page, but still—Also, yesterday, we saw Peter Schwed from Simon and Schuster, a grey little Jew who looks very like Nehru, if Nehru were nobody in particular, and Mr. Schwed showed us a proof of the jacket for my novel with Don’s drawings, and it really looks very good indeed.

  On Monday, we had supper with Jocelyn Rickards. (Mary Ure had put us off, because she said she had a nervous peeling of the skin of her fingers. John Osborne, it seems, has a psychosomatic skin rash all over his face and crotch, which only goes away when he sees Jocelyn!) John is now down in Sussex, living in open whoredom with Penelope Gilliatt, and being moated around by the gutter press. A picture of Gilliatt, big-assed and plump but sassy, was being displayed on their front pages. John as usual roared to be left alone and allowed to get on with his work; he is just a great big huge girl. Meanwhile, Jocelyn acts shattered but brave. These people’s capacity for taking themselves seriously would stagger even a Goethe. One wonders how they would behave if something really serious happened to them; maybe heroically.

  The Rickards party—which included some dullish others, Alec Murray,275 Richard Wollheim,276 Diana Moynihan277—left us both with terrible hangovers yesterday. Nevertheless, Don had to draw and I had to go to the dentist. This was very unpleasant, as Dr. Peschelt278 had fastened in that old yellow fang he made for me so tight that Mackenzie-Young had to give me Novocaine and hack it out with the drill.

  On Sunday night we had supper with Jeremy Kingston and Rashid Karapiet. Jeremy’s strange exhibitionistic indiscretions about his love life, in the presence of two other boys who came in after dinner and who, it seemed, had been involved. They and Rashid seemed embarrassed but they didn’t protest. Yes, the more I think of that scene, the stranger it seems. I don’t think Jeremy was being bitchy or taking a revenge on anyone. What makes him so shameless?

  I told Jeremy my ideas for a Ganymede story. In telling them, I suddenly saw something—a technique of narration—which one could use on many kinds of material, but which would be particularly suitable for retelling classic myths. It is, in a way, a technique of describing one’s effects, telling how one would tell a story rather than directly telling it. Hard to describe, and yet I know more or less what I mean. For instance, here’s the way one might begin—

  Very important not to overburden this with classical props. Let’s start with two gigantic pillars and a pediment, simple, brutal, despotic, against a furiously blue oriental sky with black in its depths. That’s all. And then the appearance of a figure. Naked, molten-gold, as if coming forth from a furnace. The young prince. The young arrogant animal, unconscious of the future, incapable of cruelty or love.

  That’s deliberately trashy, but it will remind me of what I want. The narrative has, of course, to be all in the present tense. It’s a little like a film treatment, but cornier, artier, more visual.

  Yesterday, after Don and I had seen Peter Schwed, we were walking around Piccadilly Circus and there was Bill Harris! Although his figure is good and he is perfectly healthy, he seems curiously old for his age, and shrivelled. Nervous tics and smiles, and self-conscious eye-rollings keep his face constantly without repose. He told us that he had been right through a treatment for T.B. and then discovered that he had never had it at all. It was nothing but an old scar which had healed itself. He is coming out to California soon so I shall probably see him there.

  Eric Falk has offered very sweetly to put Don up at his place in the Temple, if Don can’t live here any more after I leave. So that worry is removed. So far we haven’t met Mr. Burton Sr., and Ivor and Gwen have had no direct news of [Richard]279 and Sybil in Rome.

  I have been rereading some of the letters I brought back from Wyberslegh; the ones I wrote to M. during our stay in the Canary Islands and Copenhagen,280 and the ones to her from Saltair Avenue. They are terribly dull, because I almost never tell her anything but mere happenings, never what I am feeling. Out of them comes such an odor of depressing minor anxieties and even more depressing minor hopes. Une vie.

  September 29. This morning, a pre-exhibition flap. The Italian who is framing Don’s drawings called to say that nineteen of them are the wrong size, because Don trimmed them, and that they will therefore have to have non-standard-size frames made for them. And Harry Miller of the Redfern has said that the gallery cannot pay for such frames, because they can’t be used later for other pictures. So Don will be forty-five pounds out of pocket, unless he can absorb the framing cost by selling all of the nineteen drawings, which seems wildly unlikely.

  I had to disturb Don in the midst of a fashion-drawing job to tell him this. I also had to give Harry Miller the number and tell him to call Don. Don will probably be mad at me for the disturbance; it’s the kind of thing he’s utterly unreasonable about. But I can’t help that.

  Trying hard to read at least some of Angus Wilson’s The Old Men at the Zoo, because he will be at a supper party this evening which we’re going to. Christ—it is dry! In a sense
, there is too much observation, that’s what’s the matter with it. Angus stands beside you with a pointing-stick, like a lecturer showing lantern slides, and he proudly calls your attention to every single god-damned nuance. He stage-directs the drama out of existence. I simply cannot imagine what got him interested in all these boring characters in the first place. No vitality, no fun, no joy.

  We had a nice evening with Cecil Beaton last night. He took us to supper at the Mermaid Theatre and then to see ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Don had been drawing Morgan at Cambridge all day and returned late and exhausted and frustrated, because he didn’t think any of the drawings were good; and because Morgan, although himself exhausted, had insisted on entertaining Don and in fact preventing him from returning on the train he had planned to take! One of the drawings is good, however. (And that reminds me, the drawings Don did of Jocelyn Rickards the day before yesterday are not merely good but fiendishly inspired; you want to roar out laughing at this dangerously demure puss-person, with her huge eyes flashing masochistic warnings and her wrist burdened with bangles. Like the V.D. army poster in Denny Fouts’s apartment in Santa Monica, it could be captioned, “She may be a bag of trouble.”)

  Don and I agreed that Cecil seemed more than usually friendly; for almost the first time, I felt affection. We tried to reward him for this by telling him all about the South of France and the Osborne-Gilliatt-Rickards-Ure-Richardson pentagon. He chuckled with his curiously unbitchy kind of malice.

  The play was a bore.281 Partly because it is a bore; the incest seems merely arbitrary. It isn’t made to mean anything more than a sex partnership which just so happens to be socially taboo. Also, it was very badly acted. Whenever anyone wanted to be more than usually Italian, he or she yelled. I strongly suspect that this technique is copied from the films of Visconti. And it’s usually silly enough when he uses it.