The Sixties

by Christopher Isherwood

  Glenn has a lot of aggression in him. His description of the rude Texan who had dared to grab him by the arm while he was eating his breakfast and had tried to drag him out of the hotel “to shake hands with my little girl.” Glenn had told him to go to hell. The Texan had said, “We pay to see you, don’t we?”

  This morning I polished my “last lecture” (really, it might well be, if this crisis gets any worse) and worked on “Paul.” I now see that a very important passage still remains to be written: the change in Augustus after his visit to India.

  January 15. This afternoon, I’m to take part in the taping of the Oscar Levant program, then drive up to the Warshaws’ because it’s Douwe Stuurman’s birthday, and really the only tribute I can pay him is just to take the trouble to do this.

  Yesterday, Don got a frigid reply from the Slade School, signed by Coldstream’s secretary, saying that his work would be considered next month for admission next October and that meanwhile he would have to fill out the enclosed forms, etc. etc. So this morning we again called Stephen Spender long-distance, and he thinks the whole thing is a mistake and that Coldstream will certainly let Don into the Slade, and that if he won’t, then Don can most probably get into the Royal College of Art which is nearly if not quite as good. So Don’s hopes, which were at zero, have shot up again. And now he’s off to lunch with Russell McKinnon who seems about ready to produce the money for the trip.

  Despite Santa Barbara and Laughton, who’s been after me to work on two Plato bits for his reading tour, I have managed to write in the bit about Augustus Parr in India. It isn’t quite right yet, but it certainly was necessary; in fact, it is one of the pivotal episodes in the story. So now I really do hope to get faster ahead. Especially as Charles will have to go to New York very soon to be with Elsa at her opening there.

  January 17. The past four days it has been amazingly warm for the time of year; the temperature up in the eighties. Lots of smog in town; you could even feel it in your eyes down here. Tonight the surf is up, and you hear long menacing artillery-rolls from the beach. When I drove back from the Warshaws’ yesterday the high tide had flooded the highway, along by Solimar Beach.

  I got back to find that Don had been just as drunk as I’d been. He had been out to dinner with Paul Millard and Gavin Lambert and had been so pissed that Paul hadn’t wanted to let him drive home. And when he did get home he left the lights of the Sunbeam on all night and the battery went way down to nothing; and today it stalled again and had to be fixed by Mr. Mead.

  As for me, I still don’t know what I did up at the Warshaws’; I only know that when I woke in the morning it was nearly twelve; something that almost never happens to me. I felt like death all the way home.

  Don was unimaginably sweet. It has suddenly hit him, what it will mean for us to be separated for six months. And now Russell McKinnon has definitely said that he will give Don the money just as soon as he can make arrangements about a school in London to go to. (We haven’t heard anything more from Stephen yet.) I’m utterly sick whenever I think about his going; but yet I know it’s the right, and even maybe the only[,] thing to do.

  Abbot Kaplan and a colleague named Haas(?)fn83 came around and talked about UCLA. They asked me to give three lectures there and they tried to get me down to two hundred dollars for each. I said definitely no, and they at once showed that they hadn’t really expected me to agree, and I’m sure they’ll go up to three hundred dollars. In fact, they’d probably have gone to four or five. Whatever anyone says, this kind of thing nauseates me; it is Jewy and vile and utterly shameful, coming from the representative of a serious institution of learning instead of an old clothes dealer.

  Laughton is leaving for New York on the 23rd, so I won’t have to go on with the Plato for a while. Yesterday and today both wasted and this is inexcusable. (Maybe I’ll at least recopy the two last revised pages right now—yes by God I will!)

  The only funny memory I have of the Warshaws’ party (which was dull on the whole and, worst of all, dull for Douwe himself because he wasn’t drinking) is of [a woman guest] whom I don’t much like asking Fran Warshaw about her behavior at an earlier party at which she had passed out. She asked, “I hope I didn’t do anything that wasn’t dainty?”; meaning, like getting her skirts up above her knees, while she was lying unconscious on the floor.

  Fran took me into the kitchen and showed me in horror that the cake had Douwe’s name spelled wrong; Fran herself actually wasn’t sure how it should be spelled! So I scribbled out the other letters of “Dowe,” leaving only the D, and then we stuck candles over the spot to hide it.

  January 20. Well now, suddenly, everything is fixed and Don is to leave for New York next Monday the 23rd. He’ll stay there long enough to arrange with McKinnon’s agent about the way his money shall be paid to him in London; then he’ll go on there. Stephen cabled two days ago to say that the Slade will take Don any time he cares to start work.

  Oh, I’m sick—sick with foreboding and anticipated loneliness. And Don is wretched about it too. We have never been closer to each other than during these past few days. There are moments when I think, can I bear it? But I must—not only that, but make something out of the experience; discipline and train myself. Not run around to parties getting drunk and looking for “consolation.”

  Japam, work—of which, God knows, there’s plenty—and also physical training. I must try to get back into better shape. Today I’m well under 150 lbs., but so flabby. And I must be prepared for an attempted psychosomatic coup; getting sick in order to be able to call Don home.

  Laughton leaves for New York on Monday, also; so I’ll have a real opportunity to get down to hard work on the novel. So far, I’ve written fifty-four pages of the revised version of “Paul”; this is only forty-five pages of the first draft, but I’ll be making very big cuts farther on, I expect.

  After all the glorious weather, yesterday and today were smoggy and sorrowful. This morning, Dr. Haas and two of his colleagues from UCLA came back to see me. They have capitulated; I get my money. And we planned three readings for March, under the heading, “The Voices of the Novel.”fn84 My general line will be that a writer can be judged to quite a large extent by his tone of voice—just as you already form a judgement of someone, rightly or wrongly, by merely listening to his voice on the phone. The old stichprobefn85—reading the first, last and middle pages of a novel—isn’t so unfair as it sounds.

  January 23. Don went off this morning. We both agreed we didn’t want to go through the tension of an airport parting, so I just drove him up to the Miramar Hotel, where he caught a bus to the airport at 6:55 a.m. He should be in New York by now, staying with Julie [Harris] and Manning [Gurian].

  I don’t know how I feel. I’ve kept going all today on nervous energy and doing one thing right after another. Ideally, you could carry on that way for six months or until you dropped. I went to interview two gyms—Vic Tanny’s in Santa Monica and Lyle Fox’s in Pacific Palisades. I think I shall go to the latter, starting tomorrow. At Tanny’s, I was high pressured. And the atmosphere, though sexy, is squalid.

  Then I plan to get one of the bicycles fixed and ride it a lot. And of course there is my work, etc. I have even started preparing the material for another chapter of the Ramakrishna book. And I want to do a little meditating every day as well as the japam. And make an extra round of japam for Don.

  Yesterday was so hectic. Don went into one of his last-minute whirls. At about 3:50 we tore off downtown to the County Museum to see a show of art nouveau which closed at 5:00! We made it, too, and saw nearly all we wanted to, because the show was pretty small anyway. Then up to Hollywood where we were just in time to see Buñuel’s The Young One. Then for drinks with Paul Millard. Then, terribly late, to UCLA to see [Pirandello’s] Six Characters in Search of an Author. And Don damaged the Sunbeam while parking and we had to be towed away afterwards. I was a bit cross or rather madly rattled about all of this, but then he was so sweet. We stayed up all night
. He tried to draw me for the brochure of my UCLA lectures, but he couldn’t do anything good. Then he packed and wrote letters. Our whole parting—all these last days—couldn’t possibly have been more loving. For once, I haven’t one moment of unpleasantness to reproach myself with. Don said, “One thing I’m sure of now—we didn’t meet each other by accident.” We both cried as the bus went off.

  January 24. I can hardly believe it’s still not yet forty-eight hours since he left.

  Of course I’m still very schedule conscious; that’s the first stage. Lots of japam—for Don too. And I got to the gym and had a good workout; and I worked on the Ramakrishna material and also (not enough) on “Paul.” And tomorrow I’m going to talk to Don in New York; I sent him a telegram today asking him to call me.

  Yesterday evening, I had supper with Jerry Lawrence. I told him that he is the only person I could think of to spend the first evening after Don’s departure with; and the funny thing is, it’s perfectly true. Nobody else would have been right—except Jo and Ben.

  Tonight it started drizzling. Had supper with dull but rather sweet Bill Inge, and John Connolly, whom Don and I met years ago at our first New York Christmas; it was at George Platt Lynes’s apartment and we all helped paint John’s body for some masquerade party he was off to. Tonight we went to a fearfully dull and bad Mexican restaurant called the Caracol, which is however the same building as the fish restaurant, Marino’s, where Jim Charlton and Ted Bachardy and Don and I had supper, that historic evening.…fn86 And, up at the Holiday House, where Inge and John Connolly are staying, there were three little kitties.… Well, I must get used to this sort of nostalgia.… What makes me feel bad and almost superstitious is that it’s all somehow so reminiscent of “Afterwards”fn87—but then why not, since I wrote it?

  The last two days, I’ve been wearing Don’s sneakers. I like to have on something of his. Am now sleeping in the back room. I plan to take the sheets off the big bed and not use it any more till he comes back.

  January 31. I haven’t wanted to write in this book as much as I’d thought I should. This morning, I got a cable from London to say that Don has already enrolled at the Slade and is looking for a flat. There is a very faint chance that I might be able to get the assignment to write the screenplay of Graham Greene’s England Made Me; in which case I could go there at the end of March or the beginning of April. Ivan Moffat is helping me try for this, because he knows [John] Sutro, the producer of it.

  Sunday was bad—the day Don left for England. I let it get too late before phoning New York and then made desperate efforts to reach him through Pan-American at the Idlewild Airportfn88. There would have been lots of time to do this, but the people at the Pan-Am office were casual and careless beyond all belief. God help anyone who really needs to get in touch with a passenger! I never did get Don—only someone named Machardy, who wasn’t even on the same flight!

  After being stiff all over from exercising last week, I was better today and went back to the gym. I felt wonderful right after it; now I begin to ache again.

  There’s still an awful lot of “Paul” to do. I have revised fifty-eight pages of the original manuscript and this has turned into sixty-nine pages of the new version. If I could cover four pages of the old version every day throughout February, I could finish by the end, but this isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds; because I write in so much new stuff. I do think it’s pretty good, though.

  February 6. At present it’s a real effort and a bore, writing in this book. If I want to write anything about my life, it’s letters to Don. I had a letter from him from London; full of homesickness. But now comes the difficult part—I must manage not to mind when he gets over this, as he will. I must want him to be happy in England. And I must get over the most basic part of my possessiveness—wanting him to experience everything through myself as an intermediary. What he is about to experience now isn’t going to have anything to do with me—and this, I’d better not kid myself, will be painful.

  Amiya and Prema down here to supper. Amiya yakked and yakked, retelling all her oldest stories. Prema sat rather sour, until near the end, when he’d had enough to drink and we told him he must become a swami and run a center on his own—not rush off to India when Swami dies.

  Can’t be bothered to tell about Monroe Wheeler’s visit, or Bill Inge or Marguerite’s party—though I must say I laughed a lot when Gavin told me that, after we’d left, Larry Harvey announced that he was secretly married to a British actor who’d come out to play Mutiny on the Bounty, and that John Irelandfn89 was his mistress. He really is sympathetic.

  Considerable excitement because John Zeigel is to come and stay with me. Well—

  One thing I won’t forget—driving up to the top of the hills with Monroe and Bill Inge and John Connolly yesterday, after Marguerite’s party, and looking down over the city. All the platforms cut out of the hillsides, ready for pretentious French chateau-style houses “worth” eighty thousand maybe, but no more than slum dwellings because so crowded and viewless and altogether wretched. And I had such a sense of something spawning itself to destruction, spreading and spreading out until its strength is exhausted and then shrivelling up and dying, and then the rockets, or the new ice age, or the whole slab of coast cracking off along the earthquake fault and sliding into the sea; lost in any case. And the quickie promoters and real estate agents hustling to make their dollars before it happens. Such a sick sad knowledge that this is “Babylon the great city”fn90 and it can’t end well—and was never and could never be great, anyway.

  In the middle of Saturday night, after the party at Jerry Lawrence’s, Jim Charlton came blundering into the back bedroom drunk, just as he used to in the Rustic Road daysfn91, mumbling about how he’d realized he was a fascist and had got scared. In the morning, he seemed to take all this behavior for granted; and I begin to wonder if he isn’t becoming a bit crazy like his mother. He certainly is full of the most dreary self-pity. Now he’s all for leaving Hilde and ducking out from under the mess he’s made—not that I have one particle of sympathy for Hilde herself […]. I only know that I don’t want Jim around as he is nowadays. He is the most ghastly bore and nuisance. While Inge, Monroe and John Connolly were at the La Mer restaurant last night, Jim showed up there—I’d idiotically mentioned we were going—and sat around and created gloom and boredom and some sort of dull-dog reproach for his sadness, aimed at all of us.

  February 13. Bad. I feel sad, bored, impotent. I guess it is the dead of the year. The sun is shining here, but it’s somehow chilly and dull. I’m not exactly stuck in my novel, but am making very poor time. Got to page 78 of the rough draft manuscript, which is page 89 of the revised version. Let’s face it, I still have a good half of the thing to write. And now I have to devise this different setting for the seminar, in place of La Verne, the cabins on the Salton Sea. And it all takes so much time!

  Johnny Zeigel is a very sweet boy—intelligent, though on the prissy, academic side, and capable of serious love. He stayed the weekend here—chiefly talking about Ed Halsey (whose intentions I suspect) and what their life is to be together from now on: are they to live in the Caribbean, and if so doing what? Yesterday we saw Charles, just back from New York and Elsa’s show. He wanted me to tell him his scruples about calling Terry back were silly, so I did, so he called Terry, who was away for the weekend, and only succeeded in infuriating Terry’s London landlady, because it was one o’clock in the morning, their time. Then we went to Laughton’s house and drank and swam in the pool, and Charles sulked like a great baby and Johnny left feeling frustrated, and I went to see Paul Kennedy, which was a huge mistake, he is hopelessly sloppy and tacky and passive.

  I have kept up the japam so far, and the exercising, BUT I MUST GET ON WITH MY WORK. Nothing else matters. Until I have done that, how can I go to England?

  Don is supposed to be calling me tonight or sometime tomorrow, for our eighth anniversary.

  Courage.

  February 17. It�
��s quite late already, but I want to get this book written in before I go to bed.

  Today was the Ramakrishna puja and I went to vespers, which was an absurd mess, because Swami had decided that it would take too long, each one of us coming up to the shrine and being touched by the relic tray and given a flower and offering it. So he came around with the tray among the audience and touched us where he found us. Only the usual women wouldn’t budge after they’d been touched (Prema claims one of them was dead drunk) and so a traffic block was created, and some got touched twice and others not at all.

  Ritajananda is not going to Paris, and this rejoices Prema’s heart. Now he hopes Vandanananda will be sent off to run another center. Ritajananda came out after supper and asked me, in the garden, if there was a feud between the center and Gerald Heard!fn92 I think he is being wised up, fast; and he is very anxious to be loyal to Swami.

  I must say, I do love this house. I am really sad that I must go away and leave it all summer. If only Don could come back and we could simply stay here! I think it is the only place—except the garden house at Saltairfn93—which I have really liked for itself and rejoiced to live in.

  Jitters about the novel. Can I finish it? Of course I can, but I must get busy. Criminal laziness today—I lay around finishing off the Oppenheimfn94 thriller Chris Wood lent me. And now Dana Woodbury has lent me that de Sade book—The 120 Days of Sodom. But that looks like a bore—an ugly humorless French bore.

  Laughton was here again today and we worked on the “wings”fn95 passage from the Phaedrus, which Charles wanted to read aloud tonight to Taft Schreiber. We got it finished and he was enthusiastic. Now he talks about paying me extra for my work on the material for his reading tour. We shall see.

  February 23. Stayed home and ate alone tonight. The first time in such a long while. If you stay home at night, you get all sorts of offbeat calls of which there’s otherwise no record—like an offer of two free lessons with Arthur Murray’s dancing school.