Liberation

by Christopher Isherwood

  There’s a new group going around town: Jews for Christ. And senior citizens are being referred to as Gray Lib. Incidentally, I save quite a bit of money at movies now; a lot of theaters have special rates for senior citizens.

  I’ve been reading three long extracts from S.N. Behrman’s People in a Diary, in issues of The New Yorker. Here’s an abridged version of a story he tells about Siegfried Sassoon. Behrman and he had been to visit Sassoon’s mother, during a visit by Behrman to England. As they were driving back to London, Behrman noticed that Sassoon was in a “dark mood.” Sassoon finally confessed that he was upset because he had been thinking about Edna St. Vincent Millay. Behrman knew that Sassoon had met Millay and liked her but sensed that now something had gone wrong between them:

  There was an immense interval before Siegfried said anything more. We were approaching London. Siegfried went on,

  “A friend of mine told me . . . someone was praising my war poems—perhaps excessively. Miss Millay said, ‘Yes, yes, I agree. But I wonder whether he would have cared so much if it were a thousand virgins who had been slaughtered.’”

  “I don’t believe she said it.”

  “She did.” There was a pause. His cheek muscles were twitching. He was suffering.

  “What’s the use?” he added, “What can one do?”

  Did he mean against a concentrated malice and venom of the world?—of even a fellow poet—a nice creature like Edna Millay?

  “It couldn’t have meant much to you,” I got out finally, “or you’d have told me.”

  “It meant so much to me that I didn’t tell you. It all came back while you were telling those stories at dinner.”

  We drew up before the Park Lane.

  “I’ll call you in the morning,” he said. “Good night.”

  “Good night, Siegfried,” I said.

  He shook my hand. My heart ached for him.

  I went upstairs to my room. I sat on the bed thinking of him. Everyone sang, I thought, except the poet.

  This story—or rather, the way Behrman tells it, makes me dislike Behrman, Sassoon and Millay equally. Which is quite a feat. And how odd that Robert Graves made much the same remark, later, about both Sassoon and Owen!

  July 21. Another semivictory is announced in The Advocate: a revised code for Delaware, but the lewd conduct and soliciting clauses still stand.186

  Last night we had supper with Jack Larson, Jim Bridges and a young director from New York, Joe Chaikin, who has been giving classes here for directors, on the invitation of the Mark Taper Forum. Gordon Davidson and Ed Parone, as well as Jim and Jack, have been attending the classes. Jim and Jack say Chaikin is amazing. He’s a little stocky plump curly-haired red-blond, a Russian Jew by descent, with light blue eyes. He has a lot of charm and seemed rather impressive, though prone to sententious art talk, which may be explained by the fact that he worked with Peter Brook in England. He reminded me a bit of Richard Dreyfuss, the actor.

  A heavenly morning on the beach with perfect waves. We are very near the end of “The Mummy” outline.

  July 22. Tomorrow is Gavin Lambert’s birthday. We celebrated it by taking him to dinner at Raphael’s yesterday. Before dinner, we went to see The Stranger, with Orson Welles. The sound system in the theater was in such bad shape that you could scarcely hear the dialogue. The drama is corny, anyhow; and I am temperamentally against all movies set in small American towns. Welles was at his best.

  Mark, once again, wasn’t with us, but this time he had a convincing excuse, he has sprained his ankle. Gavin talked casually and without much sympathy about this, saying how tiresome it was to have to cook for him and to have him laid up just now when Gavin needs his help in getting ready to move. We felt he was a bit bored with Mark. I asked him if he had brought up the subject of Mark’s alleged thefts, and he said no, the right moment wouldn’t be until after they had settled in France, because whatever money he decided to give Mark would be in francs or pounds, not dollars.

  We have a scene in “The Mummy” in which Kay dreams that the mummy kisses her; she wakes and finds white dust on her lips. This suggests a title for our film, “Put your Mummy Where Your Mouth Is.”

  Gavin wants to use one of Don’s drawings of Selznick as an illustration in his book about the making of Gone with the Wind. And Bryan Forbes, who had tea with us yesterday, wants Don to draw him so Bryan can use the picture on his next book, I think it’s his autobiography. Bryan didn’t seem to have changed a bit, full of bounce and good nature as ever. How kind he was to Don around the time of Don’s London exhibition in 1961. He took our play with him, saying he wanted to send it [to] some theater in London he’s connected with.

  July 23. This morning we finished “The Mummy” outline in rough; it still seems to need something doing to the ending.

  Last night, supper with Rudi Gernreich187 and Oreste Pucciani;188 Shelley Winters, Bill and Peggy Claxton and an actress named Diane Ladd were there. Rudi wore a thick red burnous which made him look absurd. Oreste looks exactly like Radclyffe Hall. Oh yes, and their precious stud Frog, Jacques Faure,189 the defaulting husband of Pat Faure, was there too; I forgot him, which shows, I guess, what a racist I am at heart. Shelley did all the talking. Peggy still had on her dead white and black geisha makeup. God, what an idiot bore evening. Then we went on for a short dip in Bryan Forbes’s birthday party. I do like him. And at least there were some groovy boys. Also an English rock star, Elton John—who, Bryan had previously assured us, is a real respectable married gay, twenty-four, made over a million last year and shares it with his lover-manager, also young. I find something particularly touching and charming in the abandon with which an English gay boy dresses up to the teeth and throws himself into the role of a Californian. Saw one of them doing it at that party.

  July 24. We still haven’t quite finished “The Mummy,” but almost. Don had a bright idea for the ending, while we were on the beach this morning—a revelation that the nurse is now working for the mummy. But it will take some fixing.

  Yesterday we saw Dan Luckenbill and talked about the two stories he gave us to read. Later, Don told me that he thinks Dan regards me as having a closed mind; that I have my own standards and apply them to every story I read and if they don’t fit, that’s too bad. Dan is right, but I don’t apologize for that at all; it’s the way I have to be. Real broadmindedness is for noncreators. What did disconcert me was hearing from Don that Dan had told him he was once in a class of mine on some campus and had shown me a story and that I’d made much the same criticisms of it as I made this time. I mean, I was disconcerted to find I had forgotten this so completely.

  Later we went to see Butterflies Are Free, ghastly stuff, thick entiment sprinkled with Jewish jokes. But Edward Albert, whom we used to see at the Palisades gym, gave a really moving and noble performance as the blind boy. He is quite beautiful but not slickly so and he makes you believe he is in love with the girl—how seldom can one say that about an actor! His emotion is very Latin in a good sense, and when he plays anger he is warm, not nasty. Considering the dialogue he had to speak, this was a genuine personal triumph. He got absolutely no support from anybody else in the cast.

  July 25. We still haven’t finished “The Mummy,” because we can’t quite decide on an ending. I really wish we could have a cloudy morning, tomorrow. These brilliant warm mornings lure us down to the beach after we’ve worked less than three hours, which isn’t nearly enough.

  Michael and Pat York came yesterday afternoon; he to be drawn, she to photograph me. The drawings didn’t turn out well. Don says Michael sat all right but somehow didn’t project. Indeed, he later fell asleep! Pat took about a hundred pictures of me, talking all the time. And then, at her request, I showed her some of my albums, which she loved seeing. I think it jolted her, though, when I told her that, for me as a queer, the difficulty wasn’t to be able to fuck a woman but to be able to fall in love with one—which, I said, had been out of the question throughout my life. She would have
much preferred it if I had said the opposite, because then my falling in love with a woman would have been touching and romantic and my impotence something to be saddened by—in other words, I should have presented homosexuality as a disability, which is how women like to think of it.

  But I do find her sympathetic, in her desperate way. Don still thinks she is a bit crazy. [. . .] When I showed her the ridiculous snapshot of Mrs. Lanigan190 and told her that Mrs. Lanigan was my first heterosexual fuck, she hastened to say that she thought Mrs. Lanigan really quite attractive—as if to boost my morale by assuring me that I’d been to bed with at least one attractive woman! Heinz’s pictures, before and after the operation on his nose, interested her enormously, for obvious reasons—we both agreed that Heinz looked far better with it broken. Michael broke his nose—perhaps the most beautiful broken nose of his generation—when he was around three.

  Michael kept saying how sad he felt to be leaving California. Pat is going to the Vedanta Center in London, to seek guidance. I would love to see her interviewing Buddha (Yogeshananda)! We probably shan’t see them again before they leave. Michael made a stiff little speech, thanking us for our friendship. Darling as he is, he embarrasses both of us. I feel I could only break the ice by covering him with kisses all over, until he screamed and giggled. The kind of kisses we do exchange are mere culture-bridging gestures—like a white man exchanging the correct ritual greetings with an African tribal chief.

  July 26. A very hot but beautiful day, enough to make anyone regret leaving California. We had supper with Swami at the Malibu house. He asked, “Do you think I’ve gained weight?” It seems he now weighs 105 pounds with his shoes and pants on. When they dehydrated him at the hospital some time ago, he weighed 93! Dub’s weight this morning, just under 150; Kitty’s just over 139.

  Today we really did almost finish “The Mummy.” If we fix a couple of tiny things, we can send it in tomorrow. We’ve also been working on Don’s magazine article. Now he’s picking drawings to illustrate it; and he has to write comments on each one!

  Suddenly Don is getting commissions. His goal is to earn enough to pay for all the paintings he’s bought.

  July 27. Am writing this listening to an Elton John album (Honky Château) which Don brought back this morning inscribed to us from Elton John and Bernie Taupin, who writes the lyrics. At present I like the lyrics much better than the music, especially “Honky Cat”—“They said get back, honky cat, / Better get back to the woods . . .” Also “Rocket Man.” Don got the record because he was over at Malibu at the house where Bryan and his family are staying with Elton John, drawing Bryan’s daughter.191 One of the drawings is marvellous and Bryan is going to buy it, as well as Don’s drawing of himself (of Bryan, I mean).

  After I wrote my entry for yesterday we actually did finish “The Mummy” last night. This morning I had it xeroxed and a messenger from Universal is to pick it up. Talked to Hunt this morning in Texas. He says he has heard, in some backstairs way (the way he seems to hear everything) that Sheinberg has set the beginning of shooting on “Frankenstein” for October 15. And that they are “going in the direction of Boorman.”

  Another glorious day. But the beach is really too crowded and the sand is too hot.

  July 28. Robin French talked to Sheinberg and was told there’s no truth in Hunt’s story that a date has been set for “Frankenstein.” It seems that what has been holding things up all this while is NBC, which can’t decide if it wants “Frankenstein” for T.V. But now Robin thinks it will probably be made as a feature film, because even the head of NBC has advised them to do this.

  This morning, right after breakfast, we went down to the beach—partly because it looked like being a very hot day later, partly because Don had to go to Santa Barbara and see Bill and Paul. Don has left now, but the hot day isn’t so hot down here, after all; there’s a wind. In town, it’s been breaking records, going up into the hundreds.

  On the way back from the beach, we met Gordon Davidson outside his house. He told us he hasn’t read the revised version of our play yet but he’s just about to—no doubt he decided that when he saw us. At the bottom of the steps leading up to the Casa, somebody had dumped a dead opossum, a few days ago. It began to stink horribly, but this morning it has been nearly devoured by maggots; the ground all around it was swarming with them.

  Last night, with Gavin, we saw Touch of Evil and it was as wonderful as ever. It makes a special appeal to me because it’s about a frontier.192 It almost makes me want to have another try at writing about my mystique of The Frontier, as I did in The Forgotten.193 But first I must see if I can’t understand better what it is.

  I had meant to write a great deal today in this journal—particularly about my day-to-day life with Don, and thoughts about his future and my death and attempts at meditation. But the day has flown by, and now I must fix my supper.

  July 29. Very hot again today, and humid. After going to the gym, I was too tired to do anything but lie on the couch in my workroom and read the rest of Bryan Forbes’s novel, The Distant Laughter, and Gavin’s book (in manuscript) about the making of Gone with the Wind. He’s called it GWTW, but isn’t sure if the publisher will like the title; they may object that the book will be mistaken for yet another exposure of one of the big corporations! Gavin’s book is journalism of the very best kind; it could hardly be improved on. Bryan’s novel could have been a quite entertaining story about moviemakers, if only he hadn’t dragged in this embarrassing would-be macho love affair. But I shall have to say something nice about it, maybe even write a blurb, because he has done so much for Don. Don has earned a thousand dollars, just in the last few days!

  July 30. Hunt called this morning from Texas, having read “The Mummy.” His first reaction is that it is better than “Frankenstein” and “on a very high literary level”! His only request—before having it typed—that we should state that the coffin of the Princess Naketah is made of silver, not wood. Hunt also wanted us to delete our note that the roles of Laura and Naketah are to be played by the same actress. But I persuaded him to let it stand.

  Another very hot day, but not so muggy. Thunderheads are piling up inland; we’ll probably have a storm tonight. Don and I had a very nice swim but the beach was already terribly crowded by noon. They say as many as 325,000 may come on a Sunday like this one. I suppose that would be more people than I’ve met during my entire life! Don and I talked about his early days of drawing and going to art school. He said, “You were the only one who encouraged me, I’d never have gone on without you.” We were very close to each other.

  Evelyn Hooker called me a couple of days ago. She said she had had all kinds of ailments and had finally gone to the UCLA hospital, and they had feared a tumor at first but had found nothing wrong except a microscopic ageing of the ventricles of the brain. So now Evelyn is somewhat hysterically determined to be well. I saw her this afternoon. She wants to go to Vedanta Place and get instruction in meditation. That means she’ll have to see Asaktananda, I expect. But then her sister came in. She said she’d met me before; I didn’t remember and was surprised how Jewish she looked, rather like Shirley Booth!194 Anyhow, Evelyn then said that she wanted to do exercises as well as meditation, and I told her that Swami is against breathing exercises. Whereupon the sister said that she had done breathing exercises for years and they hadn’t harmed her. So I sensed hostility developing and shut up.

  July 31. Don got an infuriating traffic ticket last night, because he drove the wrong way down a deserted one-way alley in Santa Monica, late in the evening. We’d been seeing The Lady from Shanghai and The Third Man. I think Welles’s scene with Cotten on the big wheel in Vienna is one of the classic demonstrations of hamming with the eyes; Welles doesn’t seem to need his other features at all. Also, the square in which the final sequence begins, part baroque architecture and part bomb ruins, lit by flashlights, is a magnificent Piranesi theater set. Just now, for some reason, I’m finding the end-of-war period in Europe tre
mendously nostalgic. This morning I read Speer’s description of Hitler just before his suicide—the best thing in the whole book.

  We went to see the films with Gavin. When we’re with him (always without Mark) we say very little about his move. It seems tactless to mention it—as though he were about to undergo surgery.

  Some specimens of art jargon, from a brochure put out by The Underground, a gallery at Los Gatos: “Geoff McCormick . . . constructs small, container-like kinetic sculptures. . . . Some change shape or make sudden thrusts. . . . One is left of a silent impression of sped-up geologic forces. . . . Larry Rief . . . forces art happenings from the ordinary and sometimes dismal environment. . . . Ernest Mathews colors medium-sized canvasses employing an original method using capillary action.”

  August 1. This morning, at breakfast, just as I was telling Don he really should do some more drawings of Swami while he’s at the Malibu house, a white cockatoo appeared and started flying around the Canyon. It reminded us of those mornings at Tony Richardson’s house in Australia.

  Don’s earnings are now up to eighteen hundred dollars for this recent period! We went and deposited some of the money in a different savings bank, called American Savings. Somehow the place seemed totally unreliable and unserious, but that was probably because we were taken care of by a very campy black queen and because everybody in the office was in pseudo-Hawaiian drag—it’s part of a publicity drive by Western Airlines. When the deposit had been made we were given an orchid each. We left them in the gym, to which we went right afterwards.