The Sixties

by Christopher Isherwood

  I also saw Swami yesterday, at the convalescent hospital on San Vicente they have just moved him to. How utterly without pretension his behavior is! He seems much calmer now, though he still gets excited about Vidya, who is maintaining what seems a very bitchy silence. Apparently there is even a suspicion that Vidya told the Belur Math people that they should close the center altogether after Swami’s death—but this is really more than I can believe. Swami is also sad about Sarada. “As long as she thought I was going to die,” he says, “she was eager to come and see me. Now she doesn’t care to.”

  However, he is seeing Maharaj in his dreams nearly every morning, early. Once they were sharing a bed. He also had an anxiety dream in which he was looking for Maharaj at Myavatifn608 and couldn’t find him, and meanwhile Krishna ran over someone in the car and cut off his leg!fn609

  September 21. As Don was driving me to the airport, he advised me to dedicate A Meeting by the River to Gerald Heard only—not to Gerald and Chris Wood. If I just dedicated it to Gerald, he said, Michael and Jack Jones wouldn’t have any excuse to feel offended. He’s going to ask Gerald about this.

  Danny Mann had come with Gigi (her surname is Michel, and I now discover to my surprise that she’s thirty-one and has never yet been married, so I was probably all wrong about her being a gold digger.fn610 Don and I parted discreetly at the car door. As for Gigi, I politely kissed her goodbye on the cheek. Danny took out ten dollars’ worth of life insurance (which pays off three hundred thousand, I think he said). Danny spread his between his children and Gigi, I guess. So I took out the same amount in favor of Don—just to show Danny that we animals are every bit as valuable as humans.

  In the first class (American Airlines) the television is a tactfully small box between each pair of seats. Danny didn’t want to watch it either. So he read [Edmund Wilson’s] Memoirs of Hecate County and I read Whitman’s Specimen Days.

  When we got near New York there was quite a long holdup, about two hours, circling around with occasional bumps and waiting to be allowed to land through rain and low fog and lots of air traffic. I was calm, thanks to Librium and drinks. Danny was pretty worried. “I’m an orthodox coward,” he said several times—maybe this was a Jewish joke (almost all jokes made by Jews are Jewish, by queers queer). Anyhow I like all his behavior so far and really begin to think we shall get along.

  The Kennedy Airport, when we did finally land, was in that state of yelling confusion and impotent haste which seems to be what I always encounter when I arrive there. A tall handsome German boy told us we’d missed the plane to Munich but could get on one to Frankfurt. Danny was much annoyed. I merely rejoiced that we didn’t have to drive into New York—the only way one could have left the airport within an hour would have been in an ambulance. On the plane we were separated. I sat next to a manufacturer of rubber goods named Hans Christian Pauck, and practised my German on him until we were both thoroughly drunk. “You have not made any mistake for half an hour,” he finally told me. He gave me a jar of gänseleber pastete.fn611 I slept snugly, wearing dear little blue slippers which the Luft Hansa gives its passengers.

  September 22. Danny decided he couldn’t face any more flying, so we came on to Munich by train. It didn’t leave until the early afternoon however, so we had to wander around Frankfurt, which seemed stodgy and dull. On the train, I slept. Danny reported to me that, while I was asleep, some students in the carriage said to each other that only Americans would sleep on such [a] journey and never even open a book. Danny claims that he rebuked them, saying “We’ve been up two nights,” and that this silenced the students. I say “claims” because Danny really speaks very little German, though he does make himself understood to an amazing degree in Yiddish.

  We failed to get rooms with baths in Munich, because the Oktoberfest is on—the great beer-drinking festival. It makes the streets very loud at night. We are opposite the railway station, which is full of questioning eyes. But no opportunity or indeed inclination to explore. I woke suddenly in the night with a hunger that was like the sexual drive of a rapist. Quicker than it takes to tell, I’d plunged my hand in my bag, got out the jar of gänseleber pastete and eaten all, all. Was this the first symptom of loneliness?

  September 23. We went out to the Bavaria Studios. We had no appointment, no letters of introduction, no particular proofs of identity, no guide except an ambitious young man who runs the Her[t]z Agency here and who had just rented us a car. And yet, within half an hour, we met the second in command and were shown round the studio, and within an hour we were having lunch with the head of the studio, Dr. Rosa(?). Imagine that happening in Hollywood!

  Went to visit Herbert List after supper. Why was it so sad? Because he’s now dry and lonely and looks like an old lady and is collecting drawings by minor Italian masters? Probably he thought of me as a sad little figure too.

  October 8. What with work on the teleplay and idleness and the impossibility of doing anything private while one is with any director, I have left out the whole of our Salzburg visit and now I’m about to leave for London—this afternoon—and goodness knows how I shall ever be able to write anything at all while I’m there. I’m to stay with Neil Hartley and Bob Regester. And Danny will be itching and chafing to get the teleplay revised and retyped because he is mad to get back to his Gigi. Well, anyhow—

  Have been here just about two weeks, and this much I can say, Salzburg is one of my most favorite towns, along with San Francisco and London, I guess. Venice is too spooky and miragelike to come on the list and I don’t know Rio enough. But Salzburg is so snug in the best medieval way, ratlike tunnels and alleys and cellars, and the setting is so beautiful, and the two ridges of mountain block off the old part so that all the new shit has to be built on the other side and can’t be seen. The Austrians seem to be slightly sinister, with their unpleasant dialect and Disneylike unconvincing charm. The country is Disneylike too, so lawned and smooth and carpeted with green, and the improbable landscaped crags—but of course it is beautiful, beautiful like no other place, except maybe Japan, in its toylike way. After spending all these years in that junkyard, America, the sheer tidiness of Austria seems uncanny—everything, billboards, tin cans, neon signs, seems to have been swept under the rug.

  All this refers to tourist Austria only. The extraordinary thing is, how tourist Austria stops near Salzburg and you get into this other land. At Salzburg, or near it, this other Austria begins. For example, Oberndorf, or Eugendorf which we are actually going to make the film Oberndorf, belongs to the atmosphere of East Prussia almost. There are little hills, but what you sense is the dreariness of the appalling Prussian plains, the squalor of the sad winter-stricken villages—a tall onion-dome church, rat-faced peasants, telephone wires, cowshit.

  The weather has been beyond belief heavenly. So warm you could sunbathe, and the leaves all red and gold.

  There is much to write about Danny Mann, and I will write it by degrees, I hope. I can say this at once, we have gotten along surprisingly well, considering what sort of people we individually are—neither very easy.

  October 14. Here I am in London. Arrived on the 8th and this is my first entry. I doubt if it’s going to be possible to write much while I’m here. Anyhow, I’ll begin by copying out various notes I made while in Salzburg.

  Walking with Danny in the town. His vice: buying sweaters. He simply cannot resist. Also, he is passionately fond of cheese. The way the foodshop windows here are displayed makes everything look rare and delicious. He bought me a silk scarf, saying, “Perhaps this will remind you of old Danny.” He let me pick it out and I got a very nice one, but I have to wear it in the tennis-anyone style, which is not mine. Danny says of himself that he was a Don Juan at one period of his life. If this is true (and why not) it makes you reflect on the nature of sexual success: his face is blasted with acne like a Hiroshima. All that is left of the acne now is a lumpy, unpleasantly shiny red surface.

  Danny is sentimental about his own sentimentality
—it seems wonderfully touching to him that he keeps photographs of his mother and father with him wherever he goes. He says that his marriage was a failure all along, and now he has so much alimony to pay that he must make $50,000 a year before he gets a cent. Gigi is the only love of his life, he says. (To Danny’s love I oppose my love—which is like a merciless religion—it offers no salvation to anyone else and yet damns anyone who doesn’t accept it.)

  He suffers from vertigo. When we went up in the bus to see Hitler’s house above Berchtesgaden, he couldn’t look out through the window. This I found sympathetic, because I was hardly bothered by it at all.

  Hitler’s house is such a grim paranoid little dump. And most of the time it must have been shut in by wet clouds. The long torture-chamber passage through the mountain to the elevator, which is lined with brass, like a receptacle for boiling victims in.

  The day Gottfried Reinhardt and I lunched at Mitteregg(?).fn612 The two of us, such utterly urban creatures, sitting out of doors under the trees at a plain wooden kitchen table with a check cloth, stuffing ourselves with cheese and white wine as we looked out over a fairytale valley and talked international politics.

  I love Gottfried as much as ever. He is really quite grotesquely ugly, with his great warts and spreading jowls; yet as soon as he begins talking you see only the beautiful intelligence and fun and sadness in his face. He dislikes everything about the Germans—they are utterly subservient, he says, and without any shame. They would support anybody who paid them. Their literature nowadays is worthless because it is written with complete cynicism. “I may be an idealist,” Gottfried said, “but I like books to have a point of view.” (And looking at him I saw that he really is an idealist.) He told me about an Australian manual for infantrymen which he was given while he was making training films for the army during the war. It told you that, if your best friend was badly wounded, you were to leave him lying there—and first you were to take away his water, because it would be more useful to you than to him!

  We talked and ate and laughed until we were both drunk. I was so drunk that I returned to the hotel and slept all the rest of that day, woke up at one in the morning, went back to sleep again and slept till breakfast!

  Salzburg notes: The surprisingly loud bangs of chestnuts dropping from the huge dark trees. There is nothing shorter than Austrian shorts. Every so often, on the right person, they are wildly erotic—but on most people so indecent that you quickly look away. The castle of Hohensalzburg need only be seen from below; inside, it is disappointing. But one must absolutely climb up to the Café Winkler; the view from it is the best in the city because it isn’t spoiled, like every other view, by the café itself.

  Salzburg is dobbintown. The mad marble dobbins on the Residenzplatz, vomiting water or squirting it through their noses, while the dear little live beige dobbins wait to pull tourist carriages through the city. The campy vain painted dobbins on the walls of the Pferdeschwemme.fn613 And Pegasus being so silly, showing off his wings, obviously drunk. There is nothing on earth sillier than a silly horse when it is drunk.

  The night before I left, I went into a cellar bar almost next to our hotel, where the wirtinfn614 sang opera airs. A very drunk young man from Innsbruck talked his ugly unintelligible dialect, aggressively, to show me that it was no good my knowing High German. I felt strongly that I wasn’t wanted and, being drunk myself, said sarcastically to a girl, “Bin nur ein Amerikaner.” “Nur!”fn615 she cried, with an indignant laugh, furious with me.

  The morning I left I went up to the festungfn616 and walked all along the cliffs to the Café Winkler. A beautiful walk on a beautiful morning. But I am incapable of taking walks. All physical acts become compulsive with me, as soon as they are consciously prolonged; and the walk is only around my head. (Oddly enough, I feared that a man who was apparently following me was a homicidal maniac. Even if he had been, it wouldn’t have mattered; there were too many people about. What was odd was that I very seldom have fears of this particular kind.)

  Gerhard Huber, my handsome young secretary, came to the hotel to say goodbye, with his fiancée, Irmi. They had nearly split up during my stay in Salzburg because Gerhard refuses to be bossed by her mother. Gerhard used to explain to me about the student corporation (the Catholic one) to which he belonged, and all its complex relationships. You have “fathers,” “sons,” “brothers,” etc. Some student nicknames: Tristan, Orpheus, Taurus, Virus, Yogi, Rumba, Fouché, Dampf, Orplid.

  October 24. Up at Disley, with Richard. No time yet to write about London, or Disley either. Am reading M.’s diaries, my father’s war letters, etc. Will copy now some passages in M.’s diary relating to his death—because I don’t want to take the book away with me.

  1915. May 12. A telegram redirected on from Ventnor of last night “Lt.-Col. F.E.B. Isherwood reported wounded 9th of May, nature and degree not known.” And this is Wednesday and nothing from him or any hospital. Wired to War Office but no news forthcoming.

  May 27. Jack Isherwood came. His idea of comfort seems to be to catalogue and label the different degrees of dreadfulness of things that might have happened, then argue from the different hearsay reports that these things haven’t happened, and therefore why be anxious? Just as if the mere fact of not knowing where or how he is, is quite enough in itself for anxiety, without speculating about anything else that can have happened, but I don’t think the Isherwoods have much real feeling.

  June 6. Aggravating note from Eric … saying what a fearful and glorious fight they must have had on the 9th for so few to be left to account for the remainder.

  June 8. A letter from Mr. Isherwoodfn617 in which Frank’s being a prisoner (which alas we do not even know) he seems to think is quite a blessing in disguise. It all makes me feel so lonely.

  June 10. A long letter with my fortune told by cards from Miss Cooke of Cappagh. My fortune all that could be wished with the return of my fair soldier.

  June 21. To King George’s Hospital just over Waterloo Bridge where Lady Wyman is working. Her son has been a prisoner in Westphalia since Mons, he was reported killed and she and her husband went to hospitals all over England to get news of his end. Three different soldiers and one a man of his own company told them in detail how he died.… Six weeks later he wrote to them from Germany and said he had never even been wounded. Could not help feeling cheered. It seemed another ray of hope.…

  June 24. In the evening came a terrible letter from Arlington St., the British Red Cross Order of St. John. “We much regret to say that according to the Geneva list of June 12 received here on the 23rd it is intimated that a disc was found on a dead soldier close to Frezenbergfn618 early in May with the following inscription: Isherwood, F.E.B. Y & L Regiment C. of E. We greatly fear this disc may have belonged to Col. Isherwood. I am faithfully, Louis Mallet.” And so passes hope and life.

  June 25. Wrote to Marple to Jack Isherwood as he and Esther [Isherwood], or at any rate the latter, continue to think it strange Henry [Isherwood] can see anything to be so worried about, they may still see hope.… I don’t know how the rest of the day passed except that time seemed to have stood still and there appeared a vista of endless hopeless days of loneliness ahead.… Everything reminds me of him, the places we used to go together, our outings and the way he had of making everything nice and all his thousand kind and thoughtful ways.

  July 11. Nine weeks today.… Now and then I have such hope and peace.… I think it must be well … and if he has gone beyond, think he must have found the things he loved, and peace, and it may be, the beyond is near if one could only know and see.

  July 16. I had a letter from Major Bayley yesterday … it said it made them all the more determined to wage this war to the end—bitter to the Germans as we mean it to be. It is due to the memory of your husband and others like him that we out here should do all we can to avenge them. Rest assured we all shall do our best. Which makes one feel the lives that have been given have not been given in vain, but serve to stimula
te by their example … and that does so gladden one’s heart.

  July 27. A woman from Barker the mourning warehouse arrived between 10 and 11 laden with boxes of hats, bonnets, blouses and costumes and coats—all the latter designed for the very ample matron, and I was quite swamped. However we chose designs to have dresses made. M[ama] and I each a dull black silk and she a serge too. Hats, etc. Took till lunch.

  July 29. Letter from Col. Clemson quite sure it is all a mistake about Capt. Purden having identified Frank, as he had promised all he heard to let him know at once.

  July 30. Was fitted at William Barkers for my black silk coat and skirt … feeling all the time so hopeful … and yet there are alas no grounds for it.

  September 8. In the paper today under previously officially reported missing now unofficially reported killed is Frank’s name. A year and a day after he first went out. I think I miss him more every day and life seems harder and darker.

  September 11. Heard from Graham he had replied for me to the Keeper of the Privy Purse: Please convey to Their Majesties with humble duty our grateful appreciation of their gracious sympathy.… I should never have dreamt of putting “humble duty!”fn619

  September 27. In the evening I received from the War Office the disc bearing my husband’s name—very polished up and torn from its string. It didn’t seem real, somehow.

  September 29. Met Mr. Robertson at the entrance to Somerset House at 11:45 and he took me into various bewildering departments in connection with presenting the will and valuing the property, which but for him would have been very tedious and distressing … as it was it was after 1, and I had to return at 2:15 to take my oath and be asked more questions—felt so proud to say there were no debts … few can say that.