Liberation

by Christopher Isherwood

  Mick is a fuzzy-haired skinny freak with an awful complexion; he is shy or rather standoffish, like an animal. He helps Mo make the cutout wooden trees which are now becoming a successful business venture; they are selling them to the States. Mo tells us that Mick never gets home until 4 a.m. We don’t quite like to ask if this is because of a job or because he prowls the clubs. In the mornings, when we peep into the big bedroom, they are both in bed. But it is always Mo who gets out to answer the phone or cope with any emergency.

  Mo has a very beautiful white cat who is also standoffish. He isn’t used to living in David’s flat, so he won’t use his box and shits on the floor every day, on exactly the same spot.

  That first morning, the 23rd, we had a meeting with Hunt Stromberg, who is installed in an office on Piccadilly, quite near Hyde Park Corner. I suppose these houses all used to be family homes. Their vast rooms have now been partitioned off, with a crudity which creates a sort of war-emergency atmosphere; you can’t believe that these cheap plywood walls can be anything but temporary. Two or three doors down the street the ground floor of another house has been converted into a hippie restaurant, The Hard Rock Café. The noise is terrific, which excuses you from talking. They serve you sandwiches so huge that you can hardly bite into them. The customers are mostly long-haired and there seem to be many Americans—yet again you feel the essentially British grin-and-bear-it air of emergency.

  We found Hunt interviewing actors. His manner with them is timid, flattering and yet rude. He seems vulgar, insecure. Dick Shasta is playing the role of co-producer. While we had supper with them and Dick’s mother that evening, at the flat they have rented on Grosvenor Square, Hunt and Dick brought forth their suggestions for rewrites. The chief one was that the Creature shouldn’t be created by means of light[n]ing, with a kite used for a conductor, because that is in the original Frankenstein film. Hunt and Dick suggested solar energy. This seemed an idiotic notion for England, where the weather is so unreliable, but we said, Sure, sure. Then Dick said that the Creature couldn’t carry Polidori right up the mast; no actor could manage such a feat. Therefore, he should be hoisted up on a hook, which happens to be hanging down from the mast at the end of a rope. Okay, okay. Then Hunt said that the Creature shouldn’t throw Elizabeth’s clothes all over the road, otherwise she wouldn’t have anything to wear on the voyage. We agreed to this but privately decided to get around it, because cinematically a monster throwing beautiful female clothes all over a road at night is better than throwing pots and pans or anything else.

  We spent most of January 24 at Pinewood Studios. Hunt and Dick were there and we met and had lunch with Ian Lewis, who is the production head of the studio, and a couple of his assistants. It is much grander than Hollywood; the dining room has quite a baronial air and they have actually used it for a set in a costume picture. But Lewis and the others were much less grand and much much less full of shit than our bogus Hollywood executives; they actually seemed to know the business and had been cameramen, cutters, directors themselves. In the afternoon we talked to Wilfred Shingleton, the art director, and—such is the power of misplaced ingenuity—at the end of two hours we had recklessly and shamelessly invented the whole process of conveying solar energy to storage batteries by means of mirrors, and also the accident which causes the mirrors to burn each other up and crash down upon Frankenstein and the Creature. After which Mr. Shingleton said he would produce sketches of all this—we never saw these—and we parted with the utmost politeness.

  Later we saw Peter Schlesinger and went with him to have supper with Tony Richardson. Tony seemed very much as usual. We talked a lot about his latest film project, [H. G.] Wells’s Tono-Bungay. But all this was just table conversation; nothing intimate was said. Later we found out that the situation in the house has its depths, or heights—that is to say, Will Chandlee(?) the boyfriend I met at Tony’s place in the South of France in 1970, is living upstairs, while Grizelda [Grimond], the girl who has just had a child by Tony, is living in the basement. We saw Will that evening but not Grizelda.

  January the 25th was the first of our stay-at-home working days on the rewriting of the script. Luckily, David has a Smith Corona electric typewriter of the same model as ours, so Don felt at home with it. We had supper at Patrick Woodcock’s house. Hal Buckley’s brother Peter was there with his friend Kevin McKormick.40 Patrick described them as “dishy.” He seemed older and stiffer—he had had an operation on his knee—but looked very healthy. He is planning to retire soon to the South of France and build a house there, to which he will invite his elderly wom[e]n friends to stay—his “White Queens” he calls them. They are Rosamond Lehmann, Hester Chapman and Gladys Calthrop.

  As so often before, Patrick held forth on the advantages of dying of lung cancer; he has become quite aggressive about this. It was the only way to die. It didn’t hurt a bit and you had a whole six months in which to put your affairs in order.

  On January 26, we went to see Peter Schlesinger. He has a large front upstair room in a house which is only a minute’s walk from David’s. Peter’s bed—or rather, mattress—lies on a wooden platform which you reach by a ladder. His paintings stand stacked against the wall. He cooks on a hot plate and shares a bathroom with another lodger. The room overlooks the street and is much lighter and less shut in than the Hockney flat. And Peter himself seems different in this setting—freer, more individual, more cheerful, more admirable—no longer a spoilt little boy, nested in luxury. He keeps repeating how much he likes living alone.

  After lunch we went to the Universal office and met Nicola Pagett, whom Hunt and Jack Smight fancy to play either Elizabeth or Prima. She is impressive and not, thank God, very nice. Then I realized that she is the actress I so much admired in 1970 as Blanche in Widowers’ Houses.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon working with Jack Smight at his flat in a mews in the Sloane Square neighborhood. This was furnished just as you would expect a shrewd decorator-landlord to furnish a flat which he wanted to rent to Americans. The accent was heavily on British tradition; to intimidate them. “Good” furniture, coats of arms, engravings of eighteenth century fighting ships, etc.

  We had firmly made up our minds to be as agreeable to Jack as we knew how, and I think we succeeded. Actually, he is very easy to get along with. Indeed he accepts our ideas and objections with a readiness which is alarming. It suggests that he has no opinions of his own. His wife kept popping in and disturbing us; she is one of those women who hate to see her man busy with other men. And there is a slobbish but agreeable teenage son who was going through the ordeal of adjusting to a London school for the sons of Americans working in England.

  In the evening, we saw I and Albert, a musical directed by John Schlesinger. It has failed and is soon coming off; and the first act is certainly rather dull. But, in the second act, Lewis Fiander as Disraeli does a number with Victoria which is one of the best things of its kind I have ever seen on the stage. Disraeli plays the scene as a conjurer who is trying to keep Victoria amused and at the same time singing a song to the audience about the best way to handle old ladies. He produces coins out of the air and drops them into her empty treasure box, he fishes the Suez Canal out of a top hat—it is a long blue ribbon, he turns his handkerchief into a Union Jack and then discovers an earl’s coronet in it for himself. It was like a series of political cartoons from Punch brought to life. The effect was both surrealistic and realistic, because it gave you such a vivid impression of what Disraeli must actually have been like.

  After the show we had supper with Bob Regester at Wheeler’s Braganza. A supper at Wheeler’s was one of the treats we had looked forward to when thinking of this trip. But, in actual fact, we only really like the Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street. The Braganza is too grand and the one off Jermyn Street is so uncomfortable. After supper, we went back to the house with Bob to see Neil. He seemed lonely and depressed and sick. Bob says he gets pneumonia every year. But Bob is nevertheless going back to the Stat
es in a short while. The two of them have more or less separated.

  January 27 was another day of indoor work—until Stephen Spender came around to pick us up in his car and drive us back to his house for supper. To my surprise, he wasn’t nearly as bitchy as usual. When I asked him about Wystan, he was positively reticent. Lizzie Spender was there and, on an impulse, I told her I would try to get her a part in “Frankenstein”; she belongs to Equity and she really is very good-looking. Then Francis Bacon arrived—that powerful star—and we were at once drawn into his orbit and scarcely talked to anyone else all evening. He was most affectionate and kissy. He had dim sour Luci[a]n Freud with him and also a nephew from South Africa, a farmer, named Harley Knott. Knott was quite young—not unattractive but seemingly dead square. He kept addressing Francis as “Uncle Francis.” I couldn’t make out what his attitude was to Francis’s flamboyant behavior; sometimes he seemed disapproving, sometimes impressed. He didn’t even seem convinced that Francis was really an important figure in the art world; maybe he thought that the rest of us were merely flattering him and putting him on. I solemnly assured Harley that Francis was every bit as great as Van Gogh. We were all of us pretty drunk.

  The 28th was another indoor workday. In the evening, we went with Mo and Peter to see Lady Caroline Lamb and then on to supper at Odin’s. This was to have been primarily a bit of return hospitality to Mo and Mick Sida. Then Mo told us that Mick wouldn’t be coming to the film but would join us later at Odin’s. But Mick never showed up. Around midnight, Mo finally contacted him, back at the flat. Mick said vaguely that he’d gone to see some people and had lost track of time. No doubt they’d all got high on something.

  Lady Caroline was charmingly dressed and staged, but the chief character (played by Sarah Miles) is a capricious bore sentimentally presented as a martyr, and Richard Chamberlain as Lord Byron looked like the Queen of the Gypsies. Odin’s has moved into the house next door and is now a very elegant establishment, more like a drawing room than a restaurant, its walls hung with paintings. But it is no longer snug. And I’m sure no Wayne Sleep will ever dance naked on its tabletops. [Peter] Langan came over to talk to us, drunk as usual and full of semihostile blarney. He insisted on giving me a painting, which he said I had raved about when I used to come to Odin’s in 1970. It is late eighteenth century; of a rooster (or maybe hen) surrounded by chickens. The rooster-hen is a very odd-looking fierce bird with a crest of feathers like plumes on a helmet. Indeed, the creature has an arrogantly human air; it might be the portrait of some cruel old general. Its look gives the whole picture a sinister quality, a little in the manner of a Goya—which, I suppose, had moved me to overpraise it when drunk. Langan tried to bully me into saying I didn’t want it and hadn’t meant what I had said about it, three years ago; so I ended up accepting it. I think he just wanted to get it off the premises. He was full of suppressed resentment against David Hockney and Kasmin—Kasmin chiefly—and told some involved story I didn’t listen to properly, of how he had wanted to reproduce some of the Hockney lithographs he owns on the covers of the restaurant menus, and of how Kasmin had demanded an outrageous fee to allow him to do this. I have probably got the facts quite wrong.

  Eric Boman, Peter’s Swedish lover, arrived to join us for dinner. (Peter had wished him on us, uninvited, but of course we were very curious to meet him.) He is a big, strikingly pretty blond boy, extremely self-sufficient, with cold good manners, who speaks perfect English almost without an accent. We got the impression that he is in love with Peter, but not that Peter is in love with him. Peter plays it very cool and passive. He tells us that he and Eric still go to bed together. (My first, slightly unfavorable impressions of Eric improved a good deal after two more meetings.)

  Another indoor workday on the 29th. Fierce pale-faced little Mo! I could hug him for being so ferocious and harassed and dauntless. He must have given Mick a terrific bawling out for his behavior yesterday evening. Because Mick apologized to me, embarrassing me greatly. Mo is also enraged because of the many boys—David’s hangers-on—who keep appearing and saying they want to take a bath; David no doubt casually told them that they could. So now Mo keeps the door of the flat locked at all times. If we go out in the mornings, he asks us to lock him in. The first morning we were here, he went out and locked us in. We didn’t know the trick of the lock and couldn’t get out of the flat for nearly half an hour!

  In the evening we went to the Royal Court and saw two Beckett plays, Krapp’s Last Tape and Not I, followed by John Osborne’s A Sense of Detachment. I’m getting to be a chronic evening napper at the theater, especially if I’ve eaten supper beforehand. I napped through a lot of Krapp’s Last Tape, although I admire it very much. Don says it was spoilt by Albert Finney’s affectations. At the end of it, Finney didn’t acknowledge the applause or even rise to his feet; he sat motionless in his chair. This pretentious stunt may not have been his idea, however; perhaps the director wanted it. For Billie Whitelaw—the voice behind the illuminated lips in Not I—didn’t make an appearance at all. I shan’t know what I think about Not I till I’ve read it; in performance it seemed mere clever patter in the manner of Joyce. Beckett (and/or his directors) always puts so many theater tricks between you and your understanding of his work.

  The Osborne play seemed almost intolerable to both of us; it’s a kind of intimate revue, or performed interview with him, presenting his opinions, prejudices and fantasies. But that sort of thing has to be done with immense art and care; this was sloppy. The satire was wide of the mark. The indignation was sentimental. It all projected the Osborne pose—that he’s the one truly just man, incorruptible and fearlessly outspoken, who has outlived his period of fashionable success and now scorns it and curses the corruption around him, like Timon of Athens. It reminded me of Hemingway’s drunken peevishness during his last period. And when Osborne dragged in the Vietnam War—as if he had fought in it on the side of the North—and dared to quote from one of Yeats’s most tremendous passages on the revolutionary heroes of Ireland—his bad taste, in this trivial context, was obscene.41 The actors worked bravely, trying to win over a bored hostile audience, but they failed. And, when two of them had to come out at the end with the earthshaking news that Osborne nevertheless believes in Love, my stomach turned in sympathy for them. Only Rachel Kempson (Lady Redgrave) managed to remain uncontaminated and almost noble as she read from a porno catalogue with which Osborne was trying to shock us.

  (I don’t mean what I have written to be against John personally. I’m actually trying to describe his failure as a warning to myself. Because all of us writers (nearly) are capable of lapsing into this tone of oracular complacency and making silly pricks out of ourselves.)

  On the 30th we worked most of the day with Jack Smight at his flat. Then saw Deborah Kerr in The Day After the Fair, during which I did not doze. The play is absurd—based on one of Hardy’s “ironic” jokes—but curiously absorbing.42 And Deborah, that queen of good sports, entertained us, heart and soul. She has only one bad habit; she stops every so often to mug at the audience, as actresses used to do in bedroom farces when one lover is under the bed, another in the wardrobe, and the husband is banging on the door. The mugging means: “How would you get out of this fix, if you were me?”

  On the 31st, we had lunch with Stephen Spender and Cyril Connolly. Stephen had warned us that Cyril liked to have lunch at a certain very expensive restaurant (I forget its name); he told us to insist on going to Bianchi’s, which was cheaper. (Actually, all the restaurants we went to in London seemed hugely expensive; the cost in pounds was sometimes nearly equal to what the cost in dollars would be in Los Angeles.) Cyril had agreed to Bianchi’s, over the phone, but with a somewhat bad grace.

  Stephen arrived first and explained to us that Natasha refuses to see Cyril because he stole one of Stephen’s rarest books, an Auden first edition, and later refused to surrender it, saying that books were more important to him than friends. (I suspect Stephen made up this line.) St
ephen also told us that he had had an accident and had very nearly been arrested for drunk driving on his way home from driving us back to Powis Terrace on the night of the 27th.

  When Cyril joined us, he made quite a production out of greeting Don and then sat down beside me without greeting me at all or even looking at me—maybe this was a gesture of intimacy, for his manner toward me was otherwise most friendly throughout lunch. He started bitching Wystan without delay, saying that everybody in Oxford is already bored by Wystan’s stories about Yeats and by his demand to be given his supper punctually at 7:00 p.m. He has also given offence by criticizing Oxford in an interview, saying that it is noisier than New York!43 Cyril had brought some of my books for me to sign. He said that Wystan’s blow job poem44 and my story “Afterwards” were the two best pieces of homosexual literature. But the compliment was dropped so carelessly and un-convincingly that it was nearly an insult. You felt that Cyril just doesn’t give a damn about anybody or anything outside of his close domestic interests. His flat blue eyes have no mercy in them and hardly any life, though his talk is still lively. He said that, if we go to Africa this summer, he will tell us the best places to visit. I greatly enjoyed seeing him again and even felt an affection for him; I like him to be exactly as he is.

  In the evening we went to a hateful catchall party at Ron Kitaj’s. Romana Bouverie McKuen (the daughter of Gore’s friend, Alice Bouverie)45 wanted to know why I had been a conscientious objector during World War II. I tried to explain my feelings, instead of snubbing her; I wish I had snubbed her. She has an infuriating “some of my best friends are” attitude to queers.