May 18. Yesterday, I finished the rewrite of the October Diary for Jack Woody, all except for its ending—there has to be a paragraph which somehow rounds the whole thing off, and I can’t quite decide what it should be. I don’t want anything which suggests that this whole job was done to order, although, of course, that would be obvious to anyone who knows anything about writing. There is nothing spontaneous about it. No flow. Each entry is just “making conversation.” However, I promised Darling that it would be ready for his birthday, and now it is, practically speaking.
On April 27, Marti Stevens gave a lunch for Gavin Lambert— one of those fatal alcoholic lunches which I ought never never to attend under any circumstances. I was bored and got drunk and fell down the steps when we got home and hurt my head, rather worse than I have in other similar falls. The lump on it is still there and I get pains over the top of the skull and my neck is chronically stiff.
Darling finally decided he had to have spectacles. He got them the day before yesterday. I think he looks attractive in them, but then I admit I have a thing about spectacles. Having to wear them depresses him—it’s all part of his feeling of getting older, which the birthday reminds him of sadly. God, all of us need so much courage, even when things aren’t going particularly badly!
May 19. Boswell, Gladstone and T.E. Lawrence died today—and why not? The Canyon is full of fog. I’m really not in the least depressed. The October Diary is practically finished. My Guru is out in the world on its own, and we’ve got to follow it and fuss around, making publicity—but not for another week. And even then, I just have to do one book-signing session, next Sunday.
Darling’s birthday was at least brightened for him by seeing a really good print of 2001, which he and Rick and I all thoroughly enjoyed. What an extraordinary masterpiece this is! This time around (the 4th-5th?) I was most strongly impressed by the sequence of the man-apes—their chattering and the curious tension which Kubrick creates around them; they seem so threatened. (What they are threatened by is an enlargement of their consciousness!) The other sequence which seemed specially remarkable this time was the conversation between Dr. Floyd and the Russian scientists, on board the space station; the banality and polite bitchery of it. . . . But, overall, I felt that it’s preeminently a visual artwork—not merely because of its great scenic passages but often in details of interior decoration. Again and again, glimpses of daily life on the spacecraft compose into static pictures you might exhibit in a gallery. . . . One noticed that yesterday because the print was so good.
Our birthday supper was baked potatoes with caviar and champagne. A small pot of the caviar was Russian, I’d bought it at the Farmer’s Market the day before, for $34. The rest was Icelandic lumpfish $2.29 at Vicente Foods. The Russian was noticeably better, which was reassuring, but the lumpfish wasn’t bad, at all. The champagne was Mumm’s. Mount Saint Helens honored the occasion by exploding, but there’s no lava yet.
May 20. Drizzle in the morning, foggy all day. I’ve spent most of today reading the typescript of Gavin’s still incomplete novel, Running Time—343 pages of it, so far. I found it heavy going, the characters seemed to have little life, and the device of mixing them in with real people, such as L.B. Mayer, didn’t help. I have a hunch that this novel is made out of material which Gavin collected for his nonfiction book about Hollywood.
We had Paul Sorel to dinner last night, at the Café Swiss. His money affairs are getting worse and worse. This time, we had the impression that he is losing faith that anything will happen to “save” him. But he still keeps saying that he won’t give up the house.
Last night, and the night before, we slept out in the studio—the reason for this is that the mattress on the studio bed is newer and much firmer and springier. Don feels it helps his bad back to sleep on it. I feel it helps my neck, which has been bad ever since my fall down the steps. I do have the impression that the bump on my head is now getting smaller and perhaps the neck is better too. Right after my fall, I did have some rather alarming symptoms, which I don’t think I’ve ever had before—a kind of amnesia during which I couldn’t be sure what I had seen or heard or what I had perhaps dreamed the night before. Such images kept melting into each other in a disconcerting way.
May 21. When Tom Shadduck came today, he discovered that another hose had been attached to the same water faucet on our upper lot and the water turned on; this after some rain had fallen yesterday. In fact, this was a repetition of the apparent act of sabotage on the night of February 17–18; the end of the hose had been left hanging over the wall and it had washed down a little mud from our slide area. This really is scary and we are seriously considering calling the police in. If only we could believe that they’d be the smallest use!
We had Robin French to lunch because we wanted to ask him if he thought we could handle our money affairs better than at present. On the whole he was reassuring—that is to say, he didn’t tell us to sell everything and buy gold, or send our money to Switzerland, or invest in more real estate.
Today Don finished reading my October Diary and was quite pleased with it. He had made a lot of notes, so now I can get to work revising the whole thing.
Weather still damp and threatening rain. Pains in the top of my skull, they worry me a bit.
June 8. The pains went on worrying me, throughout our visit to San Francisco, from the 2nd through the 4th, to promote My Guru. After we got back here, I went to see Elsie. She doesn’t think I need have X rays at present, but she had me buy a cervical collar. The collar is quite a conversation piece—when I saw other people wearing them, I always thought, in my ignorance, that their necks were broken—but I feel embarrassed to wear it during public confrontations, like for example this evening when I have to sign books at the National Gay Archives. It’s really comforting when you wear it in a movie theater though; it rests your neck and you could easily sleep in it if you wanted to.
No more reviews of My Guru, and I’m beginning to feel that it has flopped. Oddly enough, I have already heard the opinions of two lapsed Catholics—one an interviewer in San Francisco, the other a gay activist in Philadelphia. Both admitted that they could scarcely read the book, because of their prejudice against “religion.” What depresses me is that neither of them saw that My Guru is actually an attack on the whole Catholic mentality, and the religion of the God of Law.
The interviewing in San Francisco was drastic. On the 3rd it ran for nearly nine hours without any breaks except for transportation between points. On the 4th, about the same—plus all the fuss of getting onto the plane and flying home. Don was amazing. He shared several of the interviews like a professional, saying all the right things but never merely echoing.
June 9. Last night I appeared at Jim Kepner’s homosexual library in Hollywood, grandly called the National Gay Archives. I answered questions, read aloud from October Diary and signed copies of Guru. It all went off quite well. I was surprised by the quickness and smoothness of my answers. It was as if part of my mind is still much smarter than the rest of it, like some area of a computer which goes on functioning when a lot has been unplugged. I noticed this occasionally when we were up in San Francisco.
But I still feel that this is a losing battle. Today I hear from Bob Gordon that the San Francisco Chronicle has given the book a lukewarm notice; and a notice from New York today was half-assed. Don is going to be proved right—and what else was to be expected? Perhaps the book is only going to be intelligible to faggots.
One thing I was spared—Don Kilhefner didn’t show up, as Gary Hundertmark feared he would, to attack me. The last thing I wanted was a battle over my carcass—which Gary was fully prepared to fight.
[Isherwood’s typed diary ends here. After a gap during which he travel led to London and Amsterdam with Bachardy to launch My Guru and His Disciple, he wrote the remaining entries, from July 16, 1980 to July 4, 1983, by hand on the lined folios of a black, bound ledger.]
July 16, 1980–July 4, 1983
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nbsp; July 16. Shortly before 8 a.m. this morning, while Don was out at the gym, Humphrey Carpenter (Auden’s biographer) called from England. He’d been asked to tell me that Bill Caskey is dead. He was found dead in his apartment, in Athens. That was all Carpenter knew.
I said I wasn’t greatly surprised. He must have been in terrible shape, with all that drinking. No doubt he’d had a heart attack.
Since I’d been meaning to write Carpenter anyway about his book—which I read most of while in London—I took this opportunity to tell him that some of his statements were inaccurate.1 I had not disliked Chester when I first met him, had not left New York in May 1939 because of Chester—had, in fact, done my best to help bring Wystan and Chester together. Having said this, I became aware that Carpenter was a bit shocked by my changing the subject. He thought I didn’t really give a damn about Bill’s death.
July 17. Well, what do I feel about it?
Relief, sadness, relief, sadness.
Relief that we’re rid of the tiresome menace of Billy’s jealousy of Don. I could never be quite sure that he wouldn’t suddenly show up and subject Don to some ugly idiotic scene. Not to mention his claims to various possessions, allegedly stolen from him—nearly all of them, in fact, lost years ago. And the ugly scene would have been followed by a drunken reconciliation, equally tiresome—and false.
Sadness because Billy’s life in Athens looked so sad—at least from the little I knew about it. But maybe it wasn’t, really. Maybe he kept busy with photographic projects, and still enjoyed eating and drinking, and had friends he was fond of.
Do I feel guilty about him? No, hardly at all. But I do feel grateful to him—I always have—for making the break between us when it had to be made and I perhaps wouldn’t have made it myself.
What’s the best thing I remember about Billy? That he created such a powerful liveliness around him. His liveliness drew people into his orbit to eat and drink and chatter and enjoy themselves. All kinds of people were fascinated by his liveliness—including Forster and Stravinsky. Stravinsky used to say, “He’s my type.” Also, he was very much of a Nanny. Under favorable circumstances, he might have become a legendary male nurse.
July 18. A specimen bit of contemporary art talk, announcing a show of Jane Reynolds’s work at the Jancar-Kuhlenschmidt gallery.2 “The peaceful coexistence of opposites and similarities is a continuing imperative; (in so far as their mixture is an unavoidable reality).”
Meanwhile, I try to heal Dobbin by dipping him every day in the ocean—four days in a row, so far. Beautiful weather.
Yesterday evening, the possibility of a tidal wave was announced, because of an earthquake in some islands east of Australia. But nothing happened to us. I saw Old Jo and got drunk. Don saw his mother. Her apartment is filthy and there are cockroaches in it. It looks like the dreaded moment is nearing when she will have to be provided with a visiting nurse—whom she’ll almost certainly hate.
July 19. We didn’t go down to the beach today—partly because Ted was down there and relations between him and Don are bad; he made a silly jealousy scene because Don didn’t see him at once after returning here, but did see Rick. And then David Dambacher came to sit for Don but yakked so mercilessly—maybe he was zonked on something—that Don couldn’t work.
Result, I haven’t been out of doors and feel fat and drowsy and guilty. I meant to take a beach and ocean cure, not a sleep cure.
This morning I called Bill Scobie who told me that Tony Sarver’s cancer has reappeared and that he must soon have another operation.
July 20. I really do become pathologically lazy, the minute I cease to have a work project. The only constructive thing I’ve done today has been to run down to the ocean and dip in. The rest of the time I’ve also been dipping—in Maupin’s Tales of the City. That book is a modern Dickens novel—tearjerking love affairs (I have a terrific crush on Michael Mouse and weep when he and John think he’s going to die of paralysis)—corny comedy and an ingeniously disgusting horror climax which would have shocked Dickens, I suppose, but is in his best manner—oh yes and also violent political indignation, though Dickens wouldn’t have approved of that either, because it’s indignant support of gay lib.
Tonight, Jack and Jim are bringing John Travolta to supper. Natalie is cooking, which is a shame, because this is the evening of her daughter Thaïs’s return from Europe, on holiday from her ballet career.
July 21. I guess our supper party went off all right, last night. Peter and his wife Brooke Schjeldahl brought their five-year-old daughter but she turned out to be one of the most agreeable children imaginable, neither sulky nor sly nor pushy nor ugly, with a charming trustful smile for all of us, she went off without the slightest protest and slept in our bed until it was time for everybody to leave. But I did feel that both Brooke and Peter cramped Travolta’s style. Their intellectual talk gave him no openings to shine, and Brooke was downright tactless in mentioning a bad review of Urban Cowboy by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker. (Actually, this review was chiefly directed against Jim Bridges.)3 Don and I were both aware of Travolta’s extreme vulnerability; he seemed pathetically insecure. I wish now that we could have had him alone with Jack and Jim, so that he could have been encouraged to show off to his heart’s content.
This morning, Michael di Capua called, with goodish-baddish news of my book’s fortunes. They have sold nearly ten thousand copies. But business is bad—many, many books don’t get republished as paperbacks at all, nowadays. I had a contract with Avon, but the offer they came up with was so low that Candida Donadio and Michael agreed to try another firm. However, the best they could get was from Penguin—$8,500—which is only about a thousand better than Avon’s. As for the reviews, they haven’t been bad, on the whole. But it seems that there won’t be any from Time, or Newsweek.
July 23. Last night we had supper with Mark Lipscomb and John Ladner at the Black Forest. Mark has shoulder-length hair and he was dressed in a sort of Three Musketeers black costume. He looked exactly like a woman playing the part of Principal Boy in a pantomime. He and John were down at Palm Springs recently and, when they went to a motel, they were told, “We’re gay here, we don’t have mixed couples.” Mark says he doesn’t at all mind being taken for a woman, indeed rather likes it. He looks older, but still coarsely sexy in a way which turns me on, rather. He and John seem to have made their home into a regular dormitory of boys; Mark woke up the other night and found someone in bed with him and wasn’t sure at first who it was. Both he and John seem to have plenty of money—John says he’s earning a lot, Mark presumably inherited some from his mother.
On the 21st Don drew a really brilliant portrait of William Wyler.4 Yesterday he drew Kris Johnson, Edmund White’s very attractive artist friend, a nice but too serious boy, or so he seems to us.5
I still haven’t begun work on my next autobiographical book. There are all these diaries to read through. Admittedly I’m lazy, and glad to let the days slip by. What if I die? Oh well, the diaries are there—let someone else fuss around with them. Fie, Dobbin! Perhaps I’ll start tomorrow—or even today.
July 25. A couple of days ago, I noticed that the metal cable which has been wound around the half-fallen section of supporting wall below the house—to prevent the wall from collapsing altogether—had been slipped off. The wall hadn’t collapsed, but now there was nothing to stop it from doing so. . . . Was this another mysterious act of aggression by the same person who twice put the hose over the wall above the cliff and turned on the water to provoke a cliff slide? Tom Shadduck got the cable back around the wall without much difficulty, however.
July 27. Now, after two whole weeks at home, I must absolutely get to work. I hope to make a token beginning on the read-through of my old diaries, later today.
Needless to say, this morning, which I was planning to spend indoors working, is sunny, for the first time in more than a week. The thick white sea-fog, which has been blocking the Canyon, rolled away early. So Dobbin’s away to the
waves.
Juan Szczesny came by here, yesterday afternoon. He is really quite a sweet boy who bores but also rather charms me by talking obsessively about all the money he plans to make—prospecting for precious minerals in Brazil or breeding horses in Argentina. He reminds me very much of Berthold, his father, but I don’t think he is nearly so wild or so imprudent and apt to get into trouble.
There is one sad photograph of Berthold himself, with his wife and a son (maybe Juan, maybe his brother; I forgot to ask). The picture is sad because of the sadness in Berthold’s middle-aged face; he has lost his belief in himself as the young stud, maybe he is even already aware of his cancer.
Tracy Tynan just called this afternoon to say that Ken is dead. Kathleen wants me to speak at a memorial service and I said I would, “Quaker style,” not making the customary funeral “tribute.” So I asked Don, what did he think Ken’s chief characteristic was. He answered without hesitation: “Appetite.” A very good answer.
July 28. I had another conversation about Ken’s memorial service—this time with [K]athleen Tynan. She was rather apologetic because Penelope Gilliatt is coming from London and will have to be asked to speak, too. I’m rather glad, because that means I will have to say less. Kathleen was worried because she is afraid that Penelope will get drunk and make an exhibition of herself—at least that’s how I interpreted her tone of voice.
Thaïs Leavitt came round today, for the first time since her visit to Natalie began. She is noticeably changed—more self-assured, better looking, much more evidently a young woman with a career she is happy in. And this made her more likeable. Her frank ambition wasn’t in the very least repulsive. She is a ballerina.
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