The Sixties

by Christopher Isherwood

  Heard this morning that Rudolf von Strachwitz, Barbara Greene’s husband, is dead. One of Hitler’s deadliest enemies; and he has been living and will be buried in Berchtesgaden!fn826

  Leslie Caron told me on the phone that the murder of Sharon Tate and the others in Benedict Canyon, followed by the two other murders at Silver Lake and Marina del Rey,fn827 created a tremendous panic. She and Michael actually moved to the Beverly Hills Hotel for a few nights, feeling that a murder epidemic was about to break out.

  Psychologically speaking, the flight to Tahiti was incomparably the most significant part of our journey. Ben Masselink said in an article that he had thought of Tahiti every day of his life. I probably had too. I had thought of it as utterly alone (disregarding the thousands of other islands) on a vast blue empty map; the most distant point. And the fact that nowadays you can take a plane to it several times a week from our huge roaring mobbed airport only made it more remote, more romantic. There was, so to speak, amidst the tiresome popular vulgarity of departing for London, Rome, New York or Tokyo, this one unobtrusive alternative. To make a genuine departure, to the one place on earth which wouldn’t be exactly like all the others.

  Then it seemed (though we hadn’t planned that) the perfect night to depart—right after the moon rape. (Oh, how sad it was to look up at the poor violated thing and know that it was now littered with American junk and the footprints of the trespassers!) It was right to be going.

  The flight took place entirely in darkness, which added to the effect of its being a teleportation rather than a gradual progress. All those thousands of miles entirely over water! I woke a few hours later, somewhere near the equator, and how awesome and all encompassing the star dome was, millions more of them out there, great burning misty blobs of light right down to the ring of the ocean. And then I kind of thought or felt that now we had entered the other world, within which Tahiti really exists; we had almost already arrived.

  The darkness eased us through the crowded Tahiti airport and the French and the customs and our arrival at the too-luxurious hotel (the Maeva). We got right into our room and it was still dark and we lay down on our beds and waited for the sun to rise and it did, and here we were in Tahiti, looking out at a grove of tall palms surrounding a parking lot. But that didn’t spoil anything. We moved at once to a more expensive room on the beach side; and there was Moorea, towering up with its jagged pinnacles under clouds beyond the lagoon. It was absolutely there and we were beholding it, and for this fact alone the entire trip was justified in advance.

  August 22. It’s silly to say that Tahiti has been spoilt, just because there are hotels and tourists. The life in Papeete was probably corrupt long before Gauguin’s arrival. Quinn’sfn828 kind of loudness isn’t really that much more romantic than an old-fashioned rough trade bar in San Francisco; it’s just that a lot of foreigners find it kicky to get drunk and pick up Polynesians in their native surroundings. The waterfront appears to be in the process of rebuilding and I personally wouldn’t be bothered if it developed luxury shops like Palm Springs.

  Because there is the rest of the island and the interior of it which is still virgin jungle and there are all the surrounding islands, some of them nearly a thousand miles away and still only to be reached by schooner after a week of sailing. And anyhow I felt that the charm of Tahiti isn’t at all a sense of having entered another culture, an innocent Garden of Eden. To me the most romantic spot was the tomb of the last king, Pomare V, with a brandy bottle on top of it, a monument which has the gravity of a nineteenth-century European graveyard amidst the untidiness and irresponsibility of tropical vegetation. Another thing Ben Masselink said came back to me often: the sense of the ocean all around you, brimming full and seemingly ready to flood you at any moment. How beautiful it was to sit at the restaurant near the Gauguin museum and look out across the pale leaf-green water of the lagoon to the reef on the horizon, where you see the waves bursting huge into the air and the dark blue dangerous ocean beyond.

  I’m glad we didn’t fly over to Moorea but went by boat. The violently rough trip across the channel was the right preparation for the overwhelming experience of entering Cook’s Bay; the waves outside the reef create a dreamlike sense of gliding calm within the lagoon. This is a Garden of Eden but a very sophisticated one. The fantastic garlanded pinnacles seem contrived and campy and you gasp as if the curtain had gone up on a supreme theatrical spectacle; this is literally one of the most enchanting places I have ever seen in my life. We swam about in the warm water, gazing at it all and trying not to mind the other tourists. We did however miss seeing the Bay of Opunohu (which some say is even more beautiful) because we should have had to go there with a party, packed into a minibus.

  This morning I drove Jim Gates and Peter Schneider to Acres of Books at Long Beach. All these years I have been meaning to go there, so in a minor way it was an accomplishment like getting to Tahiti. It was terribly hot and the whole area reeked of oil. I found a novel of Masefield’s which I didn’t even know existed, The Street of Today; it seems to be a sequel to Multitude and Solitude. Peter bought books by Stephen Leacock, Benchley, Thurber and [Heard’s] Is God Evident? Jim also bought a book by Heard, The Five Ages of Man, and Tagore’s Gitangali.

  August 23. Bora Bora stands up like a little monument in the middle of the sea. It is beautiful but it doesn’t seem at all mysterious and for this reason one might well prefer it for a South Sea holiday of quietness to Tahiti or Moorea. We arrived in a heavy rainstorm after a rough flight in a small battered plane. Don lost his cool because of the delays and the crowding and the heat of the closed launch which took us from the airstrip across the lagoon and began one of his fuck fuck fuck outbursts. A woman behind him was sincerely surprised and whispered to her husband, “What’s he so mad about?” However we found a dear little hotel of grass huts called the Maitai and were quite happy, the tropical rain fell warm and soothing on the dark snug huts. Next day, the launch took us over to the airstrip. Having been deposited there we were told the plane would be delayed owing to engine trouble. It was delayed for ten and a half hours, during which time they kept us out at the airstrip rather than bring us back to the island and have the expense of giving us lunch at the hotel. Everybody got angry in different ways and formed groups. We were angry too but we didn’t want to belong to the groups. So we bathed in the lagoon and strolled about the beaches which have sand in very large yellow grains. We also ate coconuts, more as a protest than because we wanted them. We finally got back to Papeete just in time to board a big plane for American Samoa. It was full of the members of some huge tour, mostly Jewish. Pago Pago airport seemed awful and we resolved not to go to the Intercontinental Hotel where we had been booked in by our travel agent. So we found a driver and asked to be taken somewhere cheap and quiet. There was literally nowhere. He drove us to a house full of sleeping people, probably it was his home, and was told they couldn’t take us in. So we went to the hotel after all and got in a fight with the management because the air-conditioning made such a noise and the breakfast was practically uncooked. We had left Bora Bora without ever having seen Maupiti, the island which was the scene of Larry Holt’s long-ago love story. It lies over on the other side of Bora Bora and we had no opportunity to make the trip. But the fact that it was there, all the time, created a brooding tragic background which was just right as a contrast to Bora Bora’s sweetness and shining calm.

  Last night I talked about all this to Jo, who has just got back from Brazil. Paul Wonner was sick in Chile and Buenos Aires and so he and Bill decided they couldn’t wait for her and went straight back home. So Jo decided to go alone, and she met some people who entertained her and all was well—rather grimly and heroically so; she has proved to herself—and to Ben too, of course—that she can make out on her own. Not that she enjoyed the trip but it taught her a lot. Poor old Jo, now her kitties are sick with a fever and have had to go to the vet.

  August 24. I forgot to mention how, when we left Acres
of Books and were on our way home, we noticed one of the two very impressive bridges—much more impressive, I think, than Sydney Bridge, and outrageous looking too, like roller coasters—between Long Beach, Terminal Island and San Pedro. I had never seen them before. Neither had the boys. So of course we had to drive over them. All around was this almost comically ghastly junk-landscape, reeking of oil. Jim delivered himself of a pensée which was so sententious and yet perfectly natural in the mouth of someone very young that I made him write it down on the notepad in the glove compartment of the Volkswagen, to his great embarrassment: “Man has finally created a situation in which it’s necessary for him to bypass his own colossal blunders!”

  Talked to Don in London this morning. He now feels that we should sign a contract with Jim Bridges without delay, binding him to direct our play right after he has finished this film or else step down. Don seems to be disgusted with the London agents and backers. I don’t quite understand the inwardness of this but maybe I’ll find out more from Jim who is returning from England by plane this evening.

  Pago Pago harbor is impressive but oppressive, with its very high walls of greenery all around. You feel you recognize the tacky-tropical wooden architecture of “Rain” and indeed the house where Maugham set the story is still standing, though transformed into a market.

  We managed to get seats on the plane for Western Samoa that afternoon. It’s less than an hour’s flight. After Pago Pago we wanted to like it but the experience was much more than liking; joy and delight. The long road to Apia from the grass-covered airstrip runs along the coast through a succession of villages, and it was like entering a better land and Beatrice saying, “Don’t you know that here man is happy?”fn829 The cooking ovens were smoking and the open, pillared falesfn830 were full of people, and all the boys and youths, so handsome and gay with their beautiful golden bodies, were laughing and shouting and running about. It was a perfect evening, though, as always in the Pacific, there were great clouds piled on the horizon. I asked our driver if it was going to rain and he answered, with what seemed a good-humored irony, “Your flag is on the moon—how can it rain?”

  August 25. Jim Bridges arrived and we are to talk to Robin French together this afternoon. There’s something about Jim that irritates me, he is so weak and so childishly eager to be a big shot; but let’s hope directing this film will stiffen him up a bit. Meanwhile, they are running into difficulties with Dogskin; the black actor, Booker Bradshaw, has had to go off to do a part in a film so they’re rehearsing a replacement. I keep thinking about Claudius, rather negatively. I do hope I’m not going to start hating it. Much depends on Don’s attitude. He has just written to say he thinks Graves is odious and his book a bore. But of course this can easily turn into an inspiration to do better.

  Apia isn’t particularly picturesque but it’s open and cheerful and not dominated by a luxury hotel like Pago Pago. Aggie Grey’s hotel is comfortable and untidily built, a whole lot of buildings have been gradually added to it. We had a room without air conditioning; a fan was quite sufficient. And, at least at this time of year, this island (and all the other places we visited) appeared to be nearly bugless. We had no insect bites at all. Aggie Grey is a character and as such to be avoided; she belongs to the category of the gracious imperious lady-madam. Her place was a whorehouse during the war, it’s said.fn831 One evening we had a fiafiafn832 at the hotel—mostly very amateur—and she danced, with the airs of a very great retired actress condescending. Don’t know why I’m being so nasty about her. Surely I didn’t want her to make a fuss over me?

  Stepping outside the hotel after dark we got involved with a bunch of girls—they were supposed to show us where the cable station was, as we wanted to let Tony Richardson know we’d be late arriving in Australia. Two of the girls turned out to be boys in drag. It seems that some boys “decide” they don’t want to live as boys in the Samoan culture, so they help with the housework and wear wom[e]n’s clothes. This doesn’t stop them from marrying later. Several girls and some little boys accosted us. It was all lively, half-mocking. Sex seems very cheerful, uncomplicated and ambivalent here—sort of Andy Warhol primitive.

  Of course I had to see the R.L. Stevenson house and tomb—particularly the tomb; it was sort of a funeral rite on Frank’s behalf, he would have so loved to go there and in a sense he sent me; the very last of his South African letters I copied out before leaving is about the Stevensons and how he wishes he and Kathleen could have visited them.

  August 26. So far, I’ve spent most of my birthday recording poems on tape for Don; Fulke Greville, Vaughan, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Coleridge. Also I went in the ocean for the first time in months—except for our bathes during our trip.

  Don called this morning, says he’ll come back early next week he thinks. Last night, we ran through the Dogskin selections at Theater West in front of an audience. Everybody was quite good—except for Burgess, who made a mess of the introduction. Julie Gregg was really touching and beautiful and sweet as Elaine; she has a kind of untiresome sadness which is just right. Peter Jason did the Dog with terrific sexiness. Ricky [Dreyfuss] was extremely good in the last speech of the chorus; he got a big laugh with “I am the nicest person in this room” and he said “act” in exactly the right tone. Elsa was quietly turning up her nose at the whole affair. She bitches Burgess because she says he will cast any cute young girl in anything, regardless of her talent.

  August 28. Am feeling more than somewhat harassed; so much to be done either at once or in the near future. I had a charming evening on my birthday with Igor and Vera and Bob and Ed Allen—Igor very distant and deaf and nervous but at least he knew me and was friendly. However I got a bit drunk, not really but more than I like to be, and that depressed me all yesterday and stopped me from working. The only good thing was supper with Jeanne Moreau. She has style; in fact, she is very like herself on the screen. Probably she’s fat, but that was all covered by a flowing Hawaiian-type garment, and what you saw was quite beautiful in its own way—the tired restless face and the graceful arms and hands. An agent named Mike Medavoyfn833 was there too, a young not bad-looking Jewish wheeler-dealer, he seemed to me, rude and insecure and really quite anxious to please. I wondered if maybe he hadn’t been to bed with her; she might well have found him sexy. During dinner, cooked by her French maid, we heard noises in the trees and bushes beyond the patio—this was quite a lonely house, away up in the heights of Bel Air. All three of us were extremely conscious of the noises—indeed, Moreau asked me a couple of times, “Do you hear them too?” as though she thought they might be an hallucination brought on by murder fears. We kept repeating that they were obviously deer; and I’m sure they were. But it brought home to me how the ghost of Sharon Tate haunts people nowadays, especially in this part of town. (Incidentally, Moreau told me that she can’t smoke pot, it makes her paranoid.)

  To get back to Robert Louis Stevenson. It was a very hot morning when we went to see his house—they only showed us the outside—and the policeman on duty advised us not to go up Mount Vaea. When our driver saw that we meant to, he produced a guide, a young girl. She was soon joined by at least nine others, an oldish woman, youths, male and female children. The beginning of the path was easy, then quite abruptly they told us, “This way,” pointing up a slope so steep that one could hardly have climbed it if there hadn’t been lots of bushes and vine roots to hang on to; the hill is entirely covered with trees and undergrowth. I struggled up somehow, panting like an animal and streaming sweat; even Don was soon exhausted and we kept stopping. Our “guides” pushed us from behind and dragged us from in front, laughing and encouraging us; when we rested they examined my face like doctors who are considering whether or not the patient will be able to stand the operation. So of course I reacted by showing as much energy as I possibly could. Don filmed my struggles with our movie camera. Actually, the absurd effort of this trip didn’t surprise me unduly because I remembered reading that, when they took Stevenson’s coffin up
to the summit, one fat mourner collapsed and died soon afterwards! The campy fun of the climb was increased by our feeling of instant intimacy with the Samoans; they seemed to know everything about us at a glance and probably they did. “Is he your son?” “No.” “Oh, I am sorry!” “No need to be sorry.” “You are half boy, laugh like woman.” They had tremendous jokes about us. When we got to the top, there it was. It doesn’t look like much. But the view is tremendous—Vailimafn834 right below, and the mountains rising behind and, on the other side, the corrugated iron roofs of Apia, rusty red or painted blue, and the ocean. In a show-off mood because pleased with myself for not having collapsed, I recited Stevenson’s “Requiem” aloud; but this was also a ritual act offered to Frankfn835—not so much to Kathleen, who would have hated it all, I’m sure. On the way down we discovered what we might have guessed at once—this brutal climb is a trick to squeeze money from tourists; actually you can get to the top by a quite easily graded path winding slowly through the woods. The “guides” wanted a dollar each. We ended by giving them about six dollars eighty, which was absurd, but after all the climb was psychologically worth it. After this, we drove on around the island and picnicked on a beautiful beach where we could swim in the lagoon. (The only serious hazard on such beaches are the coconuts, which fall quite frequently and could lay you out or even kill you.) A beautiful Samoan youth appeared while we ate and rode into the water on a horse, which seemed symbolically appropriate.

  Our first day on Tahiti, I said to Don that it had been one of the happiest days of my life. This was another. You get such a feeling of joy, in these islands anyhow. Don was feeling it too and our being here together made it perfect. One of those rare and perfect passages in the life symphony when one’s interior monologue, one’s psychological duet with the companion and one’s subjective sense-poem about the surroundings all relate and make harmony, and yet continue individually. One of them doesn’t drown out the other two, as usually happens. That’s what makes the passages so rare.