The Sixties

by Christopher Isherwood

  August 2. Today at one we were supposed to visit Gerald, but this morning Michael called and said he was too weak for us to come. He told me that Gerald had recently remarked that, as you get to the end of your life, you realize how very seldom you have been kind to people. I’m not sure I would say that about myself; I think I have done quite a lot of “favors.” With me, the trouble has been that I have usually done the favors without benevolence, because I felt myself pressured into doing them, emotionally blackmailed.

  We both begin to wonder if we shall ever see Gerald again. Jack Jones has become much more outspokenly critical of Michael and now gives us the impression that Michael has become really quite pathological about visitors, except for the ones he can’t prevent from coming. Jack says that Gerald told him that he would like to see Don and me but that he didn’t feel strong enough to go against Michael’s wishes.

  Don said at breakfast this morning that he is so happy with me and with our life together now. I feel the same way, but it is so important to remember that what is alive and flexible is also subject to change—change is a sign of emotional health. Therefore all statements and facts of this kind are merely to be recorded as one records the weather. Which doesn’t make it any the less marvellous when the weather is fine!

  A talk about the respective lives of the businessman and the artist, arising out of a slick but well-made film called Hotel we both saw last night. Is the artist really freer than the businessman? Is he really more creative? I said yes of course, and gave the illustration of two men being sent to work for the day; one returns with a painting and the other with a hundred dollar bill. But Don, who really thinks much more clearheadedly than I do, took this illustration to pieces and made me doubtful.

  The night before last, we had supper with the Masselinks and [a friend], who has left [her husband] at least temporarily, moved out of the house and started looking for a job. So they all talked frankly and I must say Jo revealed truly shocking depths of self-righteousness and self-pity. Ben seems cowed but aggressive, and I think he’s still seeing Dee. [The friend] has a lot more style. Of course, she has been living with the knowledge of [her husband’s] sex excursions for many years. […]

  I have now been working on Kathleen’s diaries and Frank’s and Emily’s letters, making excerpts from them and copying, for almost seven weeks and I’ve only worked through eight diaries, with twenty-three more to go. Not to mention all the mass of letters, which I have hardly begun to cope with yet because they belong to the later years of the period. I still have really no idea if this work will produce a book which can be published; maybe the material, when I have all of it, won’t seem to be of sufficient general interest. I don’t care. I’m really quite enjoying this work.

  The point is made that the Detroit riots were not just Negroes “out to get whitey”; whites as well as Negroes were sniping at the police, the soldiers and the firemen. As J.D.R. Bruckner says in the Los Angeles Times Sunday opinion section: “It was full scale urban warfare conducted by the alienated and dispossessed against the society in which they live. And that society’s government responded to this threat with unbelievable violence.… A myth being propagated now about this war is that it was a kind of madness.… but it was not madness from the viewpoint of the dispossessed; to them it was a great happiness. Huge crowds of people gathered to watch and cheer the fires during the first two days … and when a fireman tried to put out the blaze they threw rocks at him because he was interfering.… At least the snipers were selective.… The guardsmen were entirely indiscriminate; they shot up everything in sight.”fn664

  “As of mid-July, fifty-two percent of the American people said they disapproved of the way President Johnson is handling the situation in Vietnam. Only a third expressed approval.” Gallup Poll.

  August 4. John Rechy and Gavin to supper last night. It wasn’t a satisfactory evening. We couldn’t talk to John about his court case,fn665 because Gavin wasn’t to know about it, and we couldn’t talk to Gavin about Clint’s moving out, lest Gavin shouldn’t want to do so in front of John. Gavin simply told us that Clint is looking for another place to live, and that was that. And, to make matters worse, my steaks on the barbecue turned out tough and Don’s vegetables were undercooked and his dessert was frozen! If Don and I weren’t in such a harmonious phase the evening would certainly have ended in gloom and recriminations; as it was, we laughed about it and went to bed and slept eight hours.

  John talked at great length about his relations with his mother. He is apparently very frank […].

  […] Jo says that she feels she and Ben are going to break up; he is still seeing Dee and Dee has “changed” him—for example, he now drives like a demon and curses other drivers!

  The night before last, I had supper with Jim Charlton. His fate seems really to have taken a turn for the better. He’s off to Honolulu to settle down in partnership with this friend he likes who’s an architect, and there seems no reason why he shouldn’t make lots of money and lead a happy life surfing and cruising and lapsing gradually into tropical inertia and middle age.

  Reading M.’s diary gives a very strange sense of the inner nature of a life—just because it is written from day to day. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that it gives you a sense of the utter mystery of a life when it is viewed from very close to the surface. The mystery is in the lack of meaning. Everything Kathleen does seems compulsive. Does she really give a damn about all those art galleries and churches she visits? Does she give a damn about horse racing? And how about the dancing and the flirtations? She obviously finds some meaning in nursing Emily, partly because she loves her and perhaps even more because this represents self-control, self-sacrifice etc., which is her compulsive religion. But how much of the Christian ethic did she really believe in? And how squeamish she is about sex! Everything has to be just so in the relations between the sexes, otherwise Kathleen starts to get outraged or shocked. And yet at the same time she was an extremely perceptive person in many ways. Sometimes in later life she used to talk as if she viewed the whole of human activity as a sort of masquerade. Then, dismissing it all, she protested with genuine indignation that it would be “unfair” if there wasn’t an afterlife in which she could be with Frank! At such moments she seemed to regard God as a hotel manager.

  Talking of God, my morning japam gets more and more and more empty—or rather, fuller and fuller and fuller of myself and my daily preoccupations. My only grace is that I remain quite clearly aware of this emptiness. I still believe that it is only a phase; and therefore I wait apprehensively for the shock of fear or misfortune or loss which will bring me to my senses. It’ll have to be a terribly big one!

  August 8. Now at last the weather is quite beautiful, though windy. We lay on the beach on the 5th and saw Ted in the distance. He was lying reading (in itself unusual) and his legs were displayed in a way which would be perfectly normal for many people but seemed quite uncharacteristic of him—they were stuck up in the air, one crossed exhibitionistically over the other. I commented, “He’d never lie like that unless he was really absorbed in his book,” and Don agreed, “Either he’s absorbed or he’s gone mad.” The strangeness of this statement coupled with the fact that, in Ted’s case, it was literally true or at least could be, made me laugh madly. But Ted didn’t see us.

  Yesterday morning we went to visit Gerald. He is very weak now and speaks very low, though his articulation seems better. You had the feeling that he was “high” for one reason or another. He seemed hugely amused by us, we were maya, absurd and trivial and yet absorbingly interesting to him, “and it doesn’t alter one’s affection,” he added, “indeed it increases it.” (I’m paraphrasing this because you couldn’t properly understand everything he said.) He kept laughing, wildly but with a weirdly genuine amusement; it made me think of Ramakrishna. I have a feeling we shan’t see him much more. He is very thin and tiny, but seems relaxed and perfectly happy. And yet—what an awful toil dying must be! Michael is a wizened
little old man.

  As I’d expected, Gerald was very eager to hear about Joe [Ackerley]’s death and he launched at once into some sort of scientific explanation of Joe’s cheerfulness that last weekend, coming after his long years of depression. (Actually I don’t think Joe was really cheerful, only extra stimulated by our company; but there was no point in saying that to Gerald.)

  Charlie Locke showed up out of the past from New Jersey and made the afternoon very long, with the assistance of his wife and daughter. Not that I don’t like them, but the meeting was symbolic, merely.

  Yesterday evening we had a really very pleasant dinner with Horst Buchholz and his wife. Mrs. Buchholz (Myriam) seems a rather usual refined Frog but Horst has a proletarian jolliness, he is still a little Berlin hustler at heart which makes him quite charming. He showed us a couple of card tricks, showing us how to do them. One—“Posko Piati kennt alles”fn666—was his special secret and he said he would never have told it if he hadn’t felt a “special affection” for us; Lee Thompson, the ex-alcoholic movie directorfn667 was there with his wife, and Thompson had been best man at the Buchholz wedding. Myriam encouraged her skinny Frenchified children to get Don to draw animals for them and to insist that he sign them! Just in case!

  Ken McDonnell, Larry Paxton’s half brother, whom I met just that once at Larry’s funeral in 1963, writes again this morning out of the blue:

  Dear Chris, I hope you do not think it too presumptuous of me to write you this letter after so long a time. The beauty and compassion of our one brief meeting has often filled my thoughts with fond memories of you.… It’s funny how time would have me write this letter to you, but I suppose I could never forget the strength you gave me on that morning of sorrow. If, Chris, I may ever do anything at all for you, whatever it may be, please feel free to ask. With fond regards.…

  This makes me want to go to San Francisco. Maybe I will next month.

  A brief quarrel with Don last night because he accused me, as so often, of “buttering him up,” a phrase which never fails to annoy me. But we were soon friends again.

  August 13. A beautiful day but we haven’t been down to the beach, because it’s Sunday and so crowded. As I bang away, copying out extracts from Kathleen’s diary and Frank’s letters, I realize more and more clearly what a gigantic job this is going to be. But it is quite fascinating, provided one doesn’t press it—especially now that Frank and Kathleen are lovers, more or less; Kathleen is still so cagey one can’t be sure of what she feels.

  Yesterday we took Andee Cohen out to supper; she has just arrived home from Europe. She seemed foolish and pathetic and was maybe a bit high, at least at first. She has probably lost Willie,fn668 […] Andee was full of apprehension of world-doom and told us that one of her astrologers is so scared that he has “gone into hiding.”

  Andee also told us how her friends in Europe regard America as being already in a state of civil war. California is certainly no kindergarten, but both Don and I were surprised by something he saw the day before yesterday—he went to draw Mrs. Reagan (for this Harper’s Bazaar assignment) and found their home absolutely unguarded;fn669 this was the house just off Sunset, near Pacific Palisades. From the outside, Reagan himself could be seen lying by the pool. “I could have shot him,” Don said, “without even ringing the doorbell.” He found the family atmosphere completely false and dead; the Reagans and their children seemed to be giving a performance of “American family life.” Then some visitors came and Reagan took them into the den. Don heard him tell a story using the word nigger.

  August 25. From a brochure put out by the Egg and I Gallery: “The formal arguments of this young Californian are direct, disarmingly simple. The clay forms of Carol Fumai are vaguely totemic and ambiguous, the surfaces warm and penetrating.”

  From an article in the Los Angeles Times of August 13 by Ian Nairn, a British architectural critic, called “The Sordid American Landscape”:

  This is an environment of total confusion and mediocrity. And after a few miles the driver no longer cares whether he is in Maine or Texas. Yet stop the car and walk a few yards into the trees and you are in primeval America.… Yet this land is mostly inaccessible—and hence pointless. Urban wilderness and rural wilderness meet head-on without benefit to either; the environment has no structure at all.… The first thing that ought to be said about this disintegrated landscape is that it is not due to the pressure of population. In Western European terms the United States has no suburban problem at all; compared to the density of England and Wales—which still has some of the world’s greatest rural landscape—the whole population of the United States could comfortably be fitted into Texas.

  Today we went on the beach and in the water; the weather is glorious. I plod on with Kathleen’s diaries and Frank’s letters, which are very good indeed from South Africa; but don’t get much other work done. Don is to leave on Monday for a few weeks in New York.

  Gerald still very weak but no worse, it seems. Igor has been in hospital with a bleeding ulcer. Both Jo and Ben Masselink are going to psychiatrists. I keep on going to the gym but am still too heavy—153 lbs.—and my stomach bulges.

  A correspondent writes this morning to ask what the pylorus is. He found it mentioned in A Single Man and insinuates that he doesn’t believe there is really any such word.

  August 29. Don left last night for New York, dashing for the plane laden with a portfolio of drawings, a covered hanger full of jackets and pants, and a couple of camera bags containing whatever else was needed. There was no time to park the car, much less to eat anything. I didn’t even leave the driver’s seat to say goodbye, because I was parked in a three-minute zone. This morning he called to say that he has got Maurice Grosser’s apartment again, which is a huge advantage. Before he left, he had the usual acute doubts about the necessity for the trip. But this is a transition period for him and the only way to get through it is to keep knocking on doors, trying paths to see where they lead, etc. etc.

  It is very hot. In town they have had a smog alert. Here i[t] is bearable and indeed wonderfully beautiful. I am typing this sitting out on the deck, a quarter past four and the sun is very hot on my back. At about six I shall go down to the beach and have a sunset swim. This house is so delightful now that all the trees and shrubs have grown tall and spread themselves. It is like a house in a wood. And the view from the windows of the ocean and the hills has not changed since the old days. I only wish I wasn’t so obsessed by a sense of change—I suppose it is characteristic of growing old. But it is true that the noise has increased greatly. Daily sonic booms, and heavy backfiring trucks thundering down our hill from half past seven o’clock on.

  We spent my sixty-third birthday going to a play (Pantagleizefn670) and two movies (The Family Way and Hell’s Angels on Wheels). We also went to a very indifferent Mexican restaurant near Watts, recommended by Billy Al Bengston. But it was a happy day for me. And being sixty-three is certainly no burden as of this minute. My life with Don seems, as of this minute and indeed of the past couple of months in general, to be in a marvellous phase of love, intimacy, mutual trust, tenderness, affection, fun, everything. We have plenty of money and more to come, presumably, very soon from Cabaret, which has nearly paid off Gertrude Macy, according to Robin French. My health is good—am only concerned about the thickness of my waist; I seem to eat very little but it won’t shrink any more. And I am very lucky to have work to occupy me for many many months ahead. What is bad, as of now, is my apparent spiritual condition—I say apparent because who knows what his spiritual condition really is. But I do “keep the line open” and try, throughout the day, to make acts of recollection. I am of course terribly uneasy about my “worldly” happiness; fearing to lose it and yet knowing that of course it will be necessary to lose it before I can find ananda. (Having said this, I suddenly ask myself if I’m not suffering from the delusions of puritanism; “sacred and profane love” and all that very unjazzy jazz. How can love be profane if it really is l
ove? In my own case, hasn’t my relation with Don now become my true means of enlightenment?)

  Talk with Gavin on phone. He is off to Ingrid Bergman’s birthday party. Shall he give her the new life of Sarah Bernhardt or a bottle of champagne? Does she read? Does it matter? She certainly drinks. But is that an argument? We decided on the Bernhardt.

  Clint has found an apartment. Jo is going up to see her family in Oregon, without Ben. Ben suddenly has a lot of T.V. jobs.

  August 30. The heat this morning was almost overpowering. (A breeze is getting up now, thank goodness.) After going out to get my cap put back on by Dr. Kurtzman I felt as lazy as a hog and lay drowsing on the couch in my workroom or in the sun on the deck.

  Last night I had a dream in which Don reproved me for being so fat—and no wonder, after the delicious Mexican dinner I ate with Jim Bridges[,] plus four margaritas! Jim talked about our project, the Meeting by the River play, and again I had the impression that he really wants to do it.

  Before going out with Jim I had the impulse to walk down to the beach shortly before sunset and swim. It’s only at the height of the summer that this is really beautiful, the water creamy and bluish and the naked bodies shining-golden in the setting light. With Don it would have been a perfect moment, and even alone I was feeling nearly ecstatic, when who should appear but poor shriveled tearful old Jo. So we two old creatures greeted each other and hugged, eyed with bored faint distaste by the teenagers, and then Jo sat down and poured out her tales of Ben’s cruelty; the horrible things he keeps saying to her all the time now. So the golden moment was lost. I do feel genuinely sorry for her, though, and I suppose I shall have to speak to Ben while she’s away in Oregon.