The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  October 6. A gap, not so big but important because of what’s been happening.

  First, to add to my last entry, I have another memory of the evening at the Mermaid Theatre with Cecil Beaton.

  The theater has two performances a night, at six and eight-forty, and so the theater restaurant serves supper in two shifts: before-the-later-show and after-the-earlier-show. When they decide that it’s time for the before-the-later-showgoers to eat up and pay and get out, they ring a somewhat irritatingly loud cowbell, one of those church-like Alpine clangers. This annoyed Cecil, and he even told the waitress that he was in absolutely no hurry and didn’t care if he missed the curtain. (As a matter of fact, there is no curtain at the Mermaid.) And even after we had left the restaurant he was still ruffled. “Imagine,” he said, “her not realizing that we couldn’t be herded in with the rest of the bell-followers!”

  Well, now I’ll put the rest of this down in order:

  On the evening of the 29th, we did indeed see Angus Wilson and I was cowardly and didn’t give the least hint of how I felt about The Old Men at the Zoo. Since then I have read the whole of it, and can only give thanks to God that I hadn’t done so when we met that evening. Because it really does stink. . . . Angus made me feel a heel by offering to review my new novel in The Observer!

  On Sunday, October 1, Don drew Francis Bacon. He has been trying to do this for a long time, and had asked Paul Danquah to ask Francis. Paul reported that Francis wasn’t very keen on the idea, but he advised Don to go around to Francis’s flat with his drawing board and act as though he had misunderstood and that they had an appointment. This Don did and it worked—Francis was very sweet and friendly and Don did three drawings, one of them really first-rate, and got it framed next morning, in time for the opening of the show.

  On Sunday evening, we went around to the Tynans’ to watch Ken’s new T.V. show, “Tempo.” It was a dead march; even the boys from Beyond the Fringe weren’t up to their usual standard. We dashed off at the end of it, making a mystery of where we were going; actually it was to see The File on Thelma Jordon at the National Film Theatre. We both adore Barbara Stanwyck. Don and I achieve some of our moments of greatest closeness while watching films of this kind. I glance at him during some huge emotional scene and see his face absolutely lit up with delight and gleeful amusement. It’s then that I feel this delicious subhuman animal snugness.

  Afterwards we had supper with Maria St. Just. She seemed much nicer than in the old days—maybe because then she was on the defensive. Very funny about her two daughters, who, according to her, are pure Slavs and display incredible savagery. They have already gotten through fifty nannies. Maria described how she was with them at a railway station, to see a friend off on a train. They arrived late and had to run. One of the little girls fell down on the platform. Maria took no notice of her but ran right on, and this shocked the passersby. “But I knew,” said Maria, “that in England there’ll always be someone to pick up a child. And anyhow it served her right, after the way she used to turn that miserable pet tortoise of theirs over on its back.”

  On October 2, we had the party at the Redfern Gallery. It was a truly marvellous event. As I said to Don later, it almost if not quite made up for the bitter disappointment of the twenty-first birthday party Marguerite gave him, to which so many stars were invited and almost none showed up. Although there were bars both upstairs and down, the upstairs was practically deserted; Nicholas Georgiadis and Henry Cliffe282 were left with their stupid old abstractions, and our downstair room, which was quite obviously the worst of the three positions, and which we had apprehensively nicknamed Room at the Bottom, This Way to the Tomb and Down There on a Visit, was crammed to halfway up the stairs.

  Don was interviewed and photographed by the press, while I kept away in a corner, nearly splitting with pride. He was photographed with Amiya, who got into the act with both feet and nearly wrecked it. They stood beside her portrait and she leaned over toward him with the smile of a drunken amorous pig. I saw one of the photographers shrug his shoulders, as if to say that this was really more than he could take. Willie Maugham created a major sensation by appearing for a short while with Alan Searle. Forster and Joe Ackerley stayed quite a long time. Jimmy and Tania Stern said they would buy one of the portraits of Wystan, the one of me and maybe one of the ones of Stravinsky. There were a lot of commissions, including one by a well-known doctor who wanted his wife drawn naked to the waist. After it was all over, we took Francis Bacon out to supper at Gale’s. He had stayed all through the show and somehow given it his blessing, although obviously he couldn’t have thought very highly of this kind of work.

  Next day, we spent four hours at the gallery. Quite a steady trickle of visitors. But Don was depressed by a feeling of anti-climax. Nothing in any of the papers about the show, except for The Evening Standard, which had some inaccurate stuff about Maugham and Amiya. Jimmy Stern showed up to announce sheepishly that they were only going to buy Wystan’s picture, after all, because Tania had said they needed the rest of the money for a new bed! And some of the champagne had dripped down the stairs and made a wavy tide-line along the bottom of one of the already-sold portraits of Bryan Forbes’s wife. We drank what was left of the last bottle of scotch with Harry Miller, who is actually very pleased with the way the show is going.

  Later, because of Don’s depression and our need to somehow make an evening, we called on Walter Baxter,283 who has become a rather tragic self-pitying drunken figure with a philosophy of failure. What use was success, he asked. Oh yes, he could write again if he wanted to, but it would mean giving up drink, smoking and sex—and was it worth it? The only thing that interested him, anyway, was to record some of his very early sex experiences; and those couldn’t possibly be published. . . . I felt we depressed him even more than he depressed us. He was eager to get us to leave him alone after dinner.

  Last night, we saw Robert Moody, who has managed to escape from a couple of unhappy marriages and is now living happily with a not-so-much-younger-than-him woman named Louise Diamond. Robert has that same sly low-voiced confidential way of talking, and he seemed really pleased to see me. But how old he looks! A bald, slow-moving, wrinkled old man. Olive [Mangeot] was there, too. Incredible how young she looks. And her memory! But it was embarrassing when she talked so much about the past, because it left both Louise and Don out in the cold.

  October 8. This time a week from today, I suppose I’ll be in the air, somewhere between here and Los Angeles. I’m filled with dread and sadness, whenever I think of this.

  Disappointment this morning, that there’s no mention of Don in the Sunday papers. So far, Don has been called “accomplished” by The Times, which printed his full-face drawing of Wystan, and The Arts Review prints the one of Albert Finney, and says, “Bachardy is adept at varying the angle of head and pose, including shoulders and hands, and making a large, balanced work; his line is elegant and crisp rather than enquiring, impression rather than facial landscape drawing. On this account, his ladies, where their shape of face is not unusual, reveal more makeup tha[n] personality. The portraits of Auden are the best; they show the most investigation into the lines that life makes. No doubt this is not always what his subjects, whose work involves so many different projected images of themselves, require.” (Michael Shepherd.)284

  On Friday evening, Jimmy Wolfe drove us and a woman named Raemonde Rahvis285 out to supper with Bryan and Nanette Forbes at their home in Virginia Water. I must say, I really don’t like Jimmy very much, although he goes through all the motions of being friendly. It’s all very well to say he’s shy or scared; that’s really what I don’t like about him. And of course he has power and uses it, and is pretty thick-skinned and potentially ugly. He probably hates nearly everyone, underneath. He keeps referring to Tony Richardson’s opinions, but he bitches him too. He said how both Tony and he had hated Victim. And “anyhow, I can’t imagine anything less interesting than a story about homosexuality—”286 Ah,
how ugly! Disowning his nature like that, in the presence of outsiders. That’s what causes persecutions. And then Jimmy went on to talk about Tony’s sadistic mania for truth games. He once asked a man, “How long was it after your marriage before you started sleeping with boys again?” And the man hesitated and then replied, “Four months,” and his wife cried out and got up and left the room, and soon afterwards they were divorced. Both Nanette Forbes and Raemonde Rahvis agreed that, in such circumstances, a woman wouldn’t dream of telling the truth.

  The Forbes[es] play it big, being happily married. Not that one doubts this, but oh, they do advertise! Bryan loves gadgets, and one reason they bought this house is that it is full of them. It used to belong to a millionaire who had orgies. A whole wall of the dining room sinks into the floor when you press a button under the table. I don’t quite know why.

  On the drive home, Jimmy and Raemonde talked gambling; they were going off together to play chemmy287 at a club. Don and I went to a small loud smoky party Norman Mailer was giving at the Ritz. By this time, I was drunk.

  Yesterday, we took Maugham and Alan Searle to lunch at the White Tower, and it was quite a success. Willie remembered the restaurant before the first war, when it was the Eiffel Tower and [George Bernard] Shaw and [Arnold] Bennett and [Augustus] John went there. The manager came up with a guestbook and said, “Mr. Maugham, we’ve waited years for your signature!”

  They have decided to leave the Villa Mauresque and maybe settle in England; the only problem is taxes. As for his servants, they are all wealthy. Willie was alone one time at the villa and sick; he sent for one of them and said, “You know, I may not recover from this illness. I hope you’re properly provided for?” The manservant merely smiled, as if this were an absurd question.

  Willie was very lively and looked around at the other people in the restaurant with eager interest. “Do you think those two enjoy going to bed together?” He was also most interested in Don and his career and wanted to know exactly what proportion of his earnings Don had to pay the Redfern. Alan told a story of how, at Angkor Wat, he had leaned up against something massive in the dark and found it was a baby elephant. He is terrified of flying. On the plane from Nice to London, he had sworn to have no sex in London if the plane landed safely. Now he was sorry.

  Joe Ackerley, whom we took to supper yesterday evening, tells us Stephen is hurt because Don didn’t ask him to sit for him. Which was what Don intended.

  Yesterday, the first batch of my proofs arrived. Today I’ve been correcting them. So far, they don’t seem so bad.

  (I didn’t actually leave England until October 15, and, in the meanwhile, several things happened which I want to record. But I’ll do that when I switch back to the volume of my diary I was using before this one, because I don’t have any more paper this size.)

  October 19. (This resumes after the interval of my stay in England, from April 7 to October 15. The diary of that is in a separate folder.)

  Got back here on the night of Sunday the 18th. There was a heat wave on. At 8:30, at the airport, it was still over eighty degrees and I sweated in my thick suit which I’d put on because it was so cold in London, the first thick fog of the year, right down to the roots of the grass. We took off about two and a half hours late. Jo and Ben met me at the airport. They were as thoughtful as usual and had put flowers in the house and seen to it that everything was in apple-pie order. But I was dazed and sad. The misery of leaving Don in London was acute. We said very little about it, though, and there were no tears. I just felt utterly utterly wretched. And I still don’t really know how Don is to live here; all his future as an artist would seem to be in Europe or New York. Well, we shall see.

  When I unpacked my suitcase, I found amongst the clothes this note: “Kitty loves his dear more than anything in the world.”

  The last entry in my London diary is of October 8. So before I go on I’ll put down a few things about the end of the London visit.

  On October 9, I had lunch with Henry and Dig Yorke, and Don and I saw them again, for drinks, the evening before I left. I can’t imagine what kept me from seeing them, all those months in England, because, as soon as I did see them, I realized that I like them both enormously—much better than most of the people we did see a lot of. Henry is terribly deaf and keeps lamenting that he has stopped writing. He is willing himself into being an old old man before he’s sixty, and I suppose he’ll succeed. Dig is very bright but she must mind, terribly. Also, we are told that the family business, which is now being run by the son, is failing. The son, Sebastian, has just broken up with his wife. What makes me like them? I suppose it’s the thing which makes me like Chris Wood—an absence of shit. You feel truth in them.

  On October 11, I went up to Wyberslegh to see Richard again, for one night. This visit was a success too, though a strain for me, because Richard was determined to expose the Bradleys (or the Alans, as he calls them) and me to each other. I also had to meet Alan’s father and mother. We even spent the night at Alan and Edna’s house, a council house on a side street off the Old Buxton Road hill above Disley; and that evening we drank with them at the nearest pub, the Ploughboy. I do see the snugness and consolation which Richard gets from them. They are on the level, I feel sure; but I got rather tired of the solemnity with which they kept telling me I needn’t worry about Richard, because they had solemnly promised my mother on her deathbed, etc. etc.

  So we stayed drinking and drinking. Richard drank pints of bitter—it’s simply amazing how much he can hold—Alan drank Guinness, Edna and I drank gins and tonics—I sensed that “spirits” are considered somewhat ladylike, as they are in Australia. The pub stayed open nearly an hour after closing time. Toward the end, a “character” named Reg appeared. He is evidently a hero of Alan’s and suspected by Edna as a bad influence. He said, “The Americans are living in a world of fantasy,” and quoted W.H. Davies and Newbolt’s “Play up! And play the game!”288 Richard got depressed temporarily and exclaimed, “I’m so lonely!” But Alan efficiently shut him up. I gather he has to do this quite often; and he certainly seemed genuinely kind as well as firm. Earlier in the day, Richard had told me about the death of Jack Smith, who drove us around the Peak District last July. He died of a heart attack on September 1. Richard was with him until they took him away to the hospital. He was quite cheerful and not at all scared.

  Waking up in the morning at the Alans’, to the anxious voice of the radio. It would drive me absolutely nuts, and they don’t even listen to it.

  From Wyberslegh, I went down to Stratford and joined Don, and we saw Gielgud in Othello and stayed the night with him and drove back to London with him on the 13th. John was really no good at all as Othello; not even as “noble” as I’d have expected. The sets by Zeffirelli289 weighed literally and visually tons; they crushed the play.

  I do respect John, though. I even respect his vanity, because it is the humble vanity of a real honest to goodness professional.

  Well, and now here I am, with lots and lots to do—restart the Ramakrishna book, get the Virginia Woolf article ready for Encounter, see if I can make a short story out of the hashish episode from my novel. I am stoking myself full of Tiger’s Milk and vitamins. Am going to the gym again, and very stiff from the first visit. Worried about the muscular ache and stickiness in my jaws. If anything, it’s getting worse.

  October 24. Today a colored man named Mr. Bayless, recommended by the Mr. Gardner who painted the house, recommended by Dorothy, came with a truck and three others and started clearing the hillside. I had to drive him to a place whe[re] he could rent a saw for the cypresses. The saw was gasoline driven, instead of electric to which Mr. Bayless is accustomed. This bothered him greatly. Just as we got home, he exclaimed that we had forgotten to rent an extension cord for the saw. I reminded him that the saw wasn’t electric. He cried, “Ah’m slippin’.” But he didn’t seem to be. He is nearly seventy-one but he rushed about all over the hillside and reproved one of his assistants, a young
Hercules, who was a lazy nigger and kept drinking water from the hose. Within three quarters of an hour, all the trees were down. It is sad to see the old Casa so bare; but it really made no sense, keeping the couple which were alive. Especially as Don still wants us to have a balcony. I heard from him yesterday, a very sweet letter of loneliness and not much news. But he seems to have lots of commissions.

  Finished correcting the American proofs of Down There on a Visit and sent them off this afternoon. I keep worrying that maybe Tony Bower will object to the character of Ronny; but really he is quite sympathetic and merely a necessary advocatus diaboli.290

  October 25. This morning, the saw Mr. Bayless had rented broke down. We had to take it back. The people were quite nice about this and indeed admitted that the saws were subject to defects. But still, I said to him, that didn’t alter the fact that they were going to charge him for the time he had lost, bringing the saw back to be exchanged. Said Mr. Bayless, “That’s what I’m harmonizing about.” He will make some perfectly simple statement, like that it’s a fine day, and then ask me, as if I had been puzzling for hours, “Now d’you get it?” He has a sort of wolf whistle which he repeats constantly. Poor old thing, today he couldn’t even stand up straight, he had tired his back so much by working.

  The removal of the scrub on the hillside reveals a number of empty pint bottles which have been tossed up there from the roadway over the years.

  Worried about the Berlin situation, which looks nasty. I shan’t have any rest until Don is back here from there. And then I shall worry about something else.

  Saw Ted Bachardy and Vince [Davis] last night. They live in the midst of a sort of junk shop, largely composed of things Vince has made or painted. It is snug. But there was still a lot of strain and politeness between us. We aren’t nearly at ease with each other. The conversation could only subsist on movie talk.