The Sixties

by Christopher Isherwood

  I, too, have a tiresome ailment. The fall I had over the barbecue bowl at Geo Dangerfield’s house caused a hemorrhage under the skin of my ankle, and it has remained very sensitive all this time. Today Jack Lewis x-rayed it. He still isn’t sure that the bone may not have been cracked. And, if it is cracked, I shall have to wear a cast. And that will mean I can’t drive myself to Santa Barbara—unless I can borrow a car with an automatic gearshift. Right now, Lewis has put an elastic bandage on me, which feels quite good, but I don’t notice any improvement.

  Charles Laughton and Terry left today for Japan. Terry seems as placid as ever, though I think I detected a very faint uneasiness about Japanese food.

  I have managed to do a little, a very little work on “Waldemar.” I feel oppressed by the various lectures and talks which are ahead of me. The week after this one will be particularly tough: my lecture on “The Nerve of the Novel,” which is probably the most difficult of the whole lot. A possible appearance on local T.V.; God knows what I’ll say. And then, next day, a luncheon speech on “Writing—A Profession or a Way of Life?”fn44 Here I hope to get in some spiteful digs at the Books of the Month and suggest that “the crowd is the real beast.”

  October 12. What rat-racing! As soon as Don recovered from his bad throat, he went into an emotional spin caused by his anxiety about the work to be done for Tennessee. And then he was mad at me for “aggressively” helping him when he didn’t ask to be helped. And then he had a quarrel with Glade about this fucking Herald-Expressfn45 problem and said terrible things to her. Hasn’t told me what they were, yet. As for the Herald, I arranged for it to be delivered to Jim Charlton at his office, and then called him and told him what I’d done. So that’s taken care of.

  Nevertheless, today, I have finished the opening and very difficult section of “Waldemar” which announces all the themes.

  Don has now more or less decided to leave on Friday morning and go straight to Wilmington, Delaware, where Period of Adjustment is opening. This is much later than Tennessee wanted, but no doubt they will fix up something.

  Lewis says that, now the X-ray photos are dry, he still can’t see any signs of a fracture. But he still threatens me with a cast if the swelling doesn’t go down soon.

  Charles Laughton seems to have told Dorothy Miller quite a lot about his problems with Elsa. He is such a baby.

  At last the sun is setting right into the ocean again, beyond Point Dume. Yesterday evening I was watching it and I distinctly saw the green flash,fn46 very bright and localized, like the explosion of a bomb. This is the second time I’ve ever seen it. The first was with Caskey when we were living in South Laguna in 1951, and that time our experience was slightly suspect, because we were both drinking very strong martinis.

  October 17. Don is in the East and won’t be back at the earliest till the end of the week. He seems to have had a very reassuring talk with Tennessee, whom he now feels is really fond of him. (But Don will need to be reassured about this later, as he always does.) Tennessee had also said that he regards his friendship with me as one of the greatest friendships of his life.

  There is a hot wind and the colors are sharp; this is glorious weather. But the wind is giving me shooting nerve pains in my buttocks and thighs. I have been worrying somewhat about my very heavy schedule this week at Santa Barbara, but now I’ve more or less figured out what I shall talk about in my two lectures; and the T.V. show will have to take care of itself.fn47

  Also, there has been far too much drinking. This is bloating me and dulling me altogether and I’m up above 150 lbs. I have got to stop it and get on with my novel.

  I miss Don. Without him I feel “restless and uneasy” and I worry about how he’s getting along. Without him, my life is just a big bore. I could live alone, I guess; but then everything would have to be reconstructed.

  October 18. This morning I fixed myself a Prairie Oyster, because I couldn’t be bothered to eat breakfast; I wanted to get started on work. This was nostalgic. Thoughts of John [Layard] and Berlin.fn48

  Last night was [a] perfect little gem of boredom. I drove all the way to Highland Park to see Del Huserik and his wife.fn49 Why? Because he intimidates me and makes me feel guilty for not taking part in his aggressive Quaker projects. Del is as nervous as a witch. He wouldn’t sit down and talk, which would have interested me, because his political opinions are his own. No, he had to play me jazz, Weill, Wagner, tiny little snippets of things which he then immediately switched off in favor of something else. And meanwhile his wife served her best supper; a symbolic act, because she didn’t really want to have me there, only the idea that I was in the house as their guest. She’s a sharp-faced discontented girl [and you wonder whether she] will give trouble later, like an unreliable make of car—a Simca, in fact. Mine has been through all kinds of trouble lately; now the lights have gone out on the instrument panel. Mr. Mead counsels patience: “If I may venture to suggest, Sir,” “If you’ll pardon me for remarking …” etc.

  How good to be quite quite sober this morning! I drank only a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. Nothing else. Tony Richardson was quite irritated about this; he is an absolutely incurable mischief-maker in tiny ways. He wanted me to stay and get drunk with them—Tom Wright and John Rechy were there—and then, having cancelled the Huseriks at the last moment—have supper alone with Frank Moorefn50 while he went out to some engagement. What irritated me was that, of course, I would have liked to do this. But much more because of the Huseriks than because of Frank.

  October 23. Don phoned yesterday to say that he must stay east until the end of the coming week, at the least. His designs for the Tennessee Williams and Julie Harris advertisements have been accepted, and that’s what matters. And of course it’s obvious that this may lead on to other jobs, and he really should stay there as long as it seems necessary. Still, I miss him more and more. Each day I feel it just slightly more.

  Have just returned from a lunch at the de Grunwalds’fn51 for Terry Rattigan, and indirectly for Angus Wilson. Oh dear God how I loathe lunches and the run of Hollywood people you meet at them! Besides which, of course, I didn’t get to talk to Terry (who looked rather bloated) or to Angus, who is roly-poly and quite sweet. From Angus I get a rather depressing whiff of the London critical deadlock—everybody’s fangs locked in someone else’s back. But Angus himself is really understanding and sweet.

  Told everybody about Don’s success. That was really the only satisfaction of having gone there. But David Selznick, as usual, was interesting. He’ll still vote for Nixon, but admits that he’s only fifty-one percent for him. He thinks inflation will come much faster with Kennedy. He also says that Kennedy is anti-Semitic.fn52

  Well, at least I feel good about one thing; I got some work done on “Waldemar” today. I have been so bad lately, getting hangovers, and I’m fat and pouchy in consequence.

  October 27. It’s just eight in the morning, a beautiful one, and I plan to get off to an earlier start, so I can arrive punctually at 11 a.m. at the college and thereby frustrate Douwe, who always greets me with his faintly bitchy smile because I’m late. (Late for what, one may well ask.) Douwe is amazingly bitchy underneath, and full of old-maidish resentments. I don’t dislike him for this, or I won’t until he turns against me; indeed, I find it rather fascinating. It fascinated me the other night—last week, at that awful party at the Hoffmans’ with the arty-method puffed-shit group of actors—when he suddenly exploded against Christopher Fryfn53 and said he was “evil” and that he felt sick to his stomach, just being in the room with him.

  I’ve still heard nothing more from Don. I now really do miss him terribly, more and more every day. Perhaps this is the difference between different sorts of relationships; there are people you miss instantly after parting, and then gradually less and less; and there are a few—very few in a lifetime—you become slowly and then increasingly aware of missing, at first it’s discomfort and then misery and then agony, like being deprived of oxygen. Of c
ourse, I wouldn’t be in the agony stage unless I thought we were being separated for a long time or forever; but it is getting very unpleasant.

  Tony Richardson’s Sanctuary was shown in the projection room yesterday. Parts of it were very impressive; but I do think they have missed the point at the end. The end ought to be about the execution; not the getting-together of these two boring little underlings, Temple and her husband. That’s the story of the two novelsfn54—two underlings, little butterflies out on a binge, happen on a lair of the great monsters; and, in course of time, they destroy the great monsters.

  Some queen who is a high-school teacher at a very tough downtown school told the following stories about his pupils, whose ages are around twelve, or maybe younger. A boy says to him: “You’re not queer, are you, Mr. A.? It’s your husband who is.” Another time, the teacher rebukes a girl who is chewing gum. “I don’t mind your chewing,” he tells her, “but stop blowing bubbles.” At once a boy in the class yells out, “I’m Bubbles!” A ten-year-old boy says to the teacher, “Is that a big knife you have in your pocket or are you in love with me?”

  October 28. Just got back from Santa Barbara to find a letter from Don—he has some more work and must stay at least until the beginning of next week. Well, I am glad of course; but now I enter a new phase of missing him. It becomes more wretched. I do not want to go to the [Albert] Hacketts’ tonight, to the party for Angus Wilson but of course I must.

  Last night I had supper with Douwe Stuurman at the little wooden house he built for himself at Isla Vista.fn55 It is really one of the most glamorous places I’ve been in for a long while; standing on top of the short steep cliffs with the sea right below, and the island dimly in the background. The sun going down golden in a blue Monet haze; the waves breaking against the clay banks at the foot of the cliff; the boy (one of the students who live around) running and splashing through the foam. Douwe keeps a rope in his house to throw to people who get into difficulties with the rising tide. Many do. Two cars have been abandoned and lost.

  Douwe’s souvenirs: a Russian banner captured by the Nazis and then taken by the American troops, a shrunken head from Peru and a bust of [Albert] Schweitzer, a pair of wooden clogs from the days when they were still worn in the Dutch community in America where Douwe grew up. Douwe sleeps on a hard bunk bed right by the ocean window. He made everything, cuts down his own trees for firewood.

  He feels that, after his second wife left him, he learnt to live alone, and I can see that he thinks of himself as a sort of father confessor and spiritual focus for the whole campus. He tells how, one night, he was sitting in a rocking chair before the fire and became aware that someone else was sitting in the chair beside him and he knew it was Death, his Death. So now he is quite easy with the idea of death and it doesn’t bother him. A millionaire gave him a lot of very expensive hi-fi equipment and a T.V. set he didn’t want. He knows several millionaires, and they come to him, he infers, seeking the peace they cannot find, because they live in big pretentious houses and he lives in his simple cabin.

  Of course, I am exaggerating the shit element in all this. Douwe does have something; there’s no question about that. One just sees a great danger in him of giving way to spiritual humility-pride. Perhaps he should admit his resentments more frankly to himself. His hate of his second wife. […]

  Later Howard Warshaw and a group of students came in, and we had a self-conscious sort of seminar. Howard was excellent, however. His attack on nonobjective expressionism (I may not have the name right, but it means abstract art) seems to me very sound. He points out that these people want to break with the past completely and start something new; and they don’t care what associations you get from looking at their pictures. Howard says this is nothing new, because any painter who merely assembles objects and hopes that they will mean something—this Howard calls “naturalism”—is doing the same thing. And of course this is true of literature, too. They are trying to abolish the necessary triangle: the artist, the objective datum on which the art is based, the viewer. They want, as artists, to communicate directly with the viewers. But this—on the level of maya—is impossible. (Only on the level of the Atman is communication possible—i.e. yoga.) On the level of maya, you have got to have the object. The viewer has got to recognize the object in order to be able to appreciate the artist’s rendering of it. (When I instanced a painting by Picasso, “A Man Leaning on a Table,” 1915, and asked, “If I can’t find the slightest trace of the man or the table, does that mean that Picasso has failed to communicate with me?” Howard had to say yes; but he qualified this by talking about artistic allusions in a way I couldn’t follow.)

  Anyhow, what I personally care about is that Howard is bitterly opposed to the cult of abstract art in art schools and the sneer with which representational talent is so often greeted nowadays—that the possessor of such talent will do well in advertising. I value this attitude of Howard’s because it puts him on Don’s side.

  November 2 [Wednesday]. Had a telegram from Don this morning; he’s arriving back here on Friday afternoon. That means he will have been away three whole weeks, which must be the longest stretch of time we’ve ever been separated. Oh, I’m so deeply glad that he’s coming back. But I’m certainly not deeply pleased by the way I’ve been handling my life while he’s been gone. Drinking, idling, wasting time with people I didn’t really want to see; and getting nearly nothing done on the novel.

  Today I’ve been feeling sick in my stomach; I do hope I’m not going to get ill. That would be too tiresome. Probably I am simply run down from drinking and eating too much. I am not charmed with myself at all. Swami, with Krishna and Mrs. DePry, was in to have tea here this afternoon—the first time he has ever been in this house—and I had a guilty feeling that somehow he saw the state I am in. Well, never mind, I just have to snap out of it.

  Of the people I’ve seen lately, the most interesting was John Rechy. We had supper and a long talk the other evening, and then he came again to discuss the latest episode in his novel, which I’d read. (It needs an awful lot doing to it.) One of the characteristic things about John is his fear of inventing; he wants to record everything exactly as it happened. So I spent a lot of time trying to convince him that this would be undesirable and anyhow impossible. But I do respect and like him; he quite fascinates me. He says quite frankly that he’s an exhibitionist, and this makes it possible for him to hustle, etc. He is fascinated by mirrors; spends hours looking at himself in them. At the same time, his relationships are compartmentalized. He never told his engineer friend that he was a writer until quite lately. And, with his “mental” friends, he is exaggeratedly nonphysical; he hates to be touched, even in the most casual way. (I remember how Edward [Upward] used to laugh at me for this, at Cambridge.) I think he thinks of himself as being always in disguise.

  I introduced him to Evelyn Hooker. They both took to each other immediately. Evelyn’s motives were of course more interested than John’s, because she at once saw him as an ideal expert informant to help her in her researches.

  Two days ago, I definitely decided not to go to [L.A.] State College next semester. The two thousand they offer just is not good enough, and besides, I ought to get on with my novel; Laughton will probably be in my hair anyhow. And Byron Guyerfn56 says that he can arrange a much better offer for me for next fall.

  Huge excitement is stewing up over the elections. My Kennedy stickers have been scratched off the car twice, but I keep putting on new ones. There are Nixon stickers everywhere, it seems, and I am worried. So is Jim Charlton, despite the reassuring forecasts. Jim, says Tom Wright, believes that his own personal problems and anxieties will somehow all be miraculously solved if Kennedy wins.

  November 9. Don’s New York visit was just as much of a success as the first one. It now seems that his drawings will be on display at three different theaters—Taste of Honey, Period of Adjustment and Little Moon of Alban. He got back on the 4th. But he isn’t at all well. He seems to be
having constant attacks of my age-old complaint, spasm of the vagus nerve—at least, I hope that’s all it is. He refuses to see a doctor. He is touchy and nervous and hostile, and then utterly sweet. And I just have to practise caring-not caring.

  Worried because my ankle, which seemed all right, has suddenly swelled up again and hurts, after a walk on the beach yesterday.

  Well, the toad Nixon is driven back into his hole, and rejected by his own home state, which is a special satisfaction.fn57 I feel I want to triumph over that bitch at Santa Barbara, at Wright Ludington’s party, who called Howard Warshaw “stupid.” Those arrogant rich-bitches!

  Have had a most gruelling weekend reading all kinds of manuscripts—including the huge novel by poor Alfred Weisenburger, to whom I wrote an unkind letter yesterday. I am ashamed of it. If I don’t want to read these things, I shouldn’t consent to do so. No justice in getting mad at their authors.

  Ah, I’m so full of resentments, these days. Sick with them. I must get my calm back somehow. Tonight I have to take the Mishimas out to supper. They are going to Disneyland today. Mishima told me, “We also see the home of Mr. Nixon, and a ghost town—” he paused, “same thing!”

  November 12. A day of heavy showers and strong winds. I have prepared my talk for the Santa Barbara templefn58 tomorrow. I only hope the rain lets up before I have to drive there. As usual, I feel a resentment against Prema, whom I always suspect of being in the background, whenever I’m burdened with one of these weary Vedanta chores.