Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Gerald accepted the Buddhist and Hindu hypothesis of many worlds and states of existence, all bound to causality and all within time. The peculiar advantage of this world and life is that the opportunities offered for “leverage” are very great. Earthly events are of such a nature as to give you the possibility of working yourself a long way up, or down, by the way you handle them. Gerald—employing, as usual, the scientific imagery which made his conversation so exciting—compared the body to the lead shield used by Roentgen workers to protect themselves from the invisible rays. In other, disembodied states, such proximity to the vital radiation might be intolerable, unless one were accustomed to it. Our task, therefore, during our life in this body, was to expose ourselves repeatedly to the screened rays—so that, when the screen was removed altogether, at the instant of death, we should not be burned and blinded.

  (This idea, though I didn’t know it at the time, was taken from the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The soul, at death, is supposed to get a glimpse of the reality. If it is prepared for this glimpse, it turns naturally toward the reality and becomes a part of it. If it is unprepared, it feels terror and pain, escapes from the “Clear Light of the Void” into fresh illusions of separateness and individuality, and is consequently reborn.27)

  Gerald’s highly pictorial methods of teaching are, of course, open to criticism. They arrested his hearers’ interest, and thus obtained remarkable short-term results with beginners. In the long run, they were apt to produce mental habits which were slovenly and dangerous. A parable or a simile is only, at best, a mirror image of the truth. It has no substance. Whenever Gerald produced some dramatic illustration, like that of the Roentgen rays, he was fond of adding, “This isn’t just an analogy. I believe it may actually be an homology.” This sounded very exciting, but it meant very little. Also, most unfortunately—as I was to find out later—some of the facts upon which Gerald based his “homologies” were scientifically inaccurate. His followers would find this out, from time to time, and feel unreasonably dismayed—because Gerald had taught them to identify the parable with the truth it illustrated. Just as many Christians would lose their faith in Christ’s teaching if it could be proved that Christ didn’t exist, so many ardent Heardians lost their faith in Heard when they discovered that man is not descended from a small tree-shrew, and that his [Gerald’s] knowledge of evolution was dubious. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; and a lot of knowledge is even more dangerous. Gerald knew something about almost every conceivable subject, but he wasn’t the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He relied far too much on his wonderful memory. Sometimes it let him down badly. However, I’m anticipating—

  Gerald regarded the search for reality as an ordered process, with definite stages. In this, he was following the Christian mystics. You can find the whole system worked out in Poulain’s big book on prayer.28 The first stage is Purgation. The mind has to be polished, as it were, like a lens—through constant practice of meditation and renunciation. The ego, in Gerald’s words, has to be “reduced” from its “strangulated” condition, and systematically freed from—Gerald used to tick them off on his long fingers—addictions, possessions and pretensions. Addictions (which included also aversions—anything from chain-smoking to anti-Semitism) were, according to him, the least harmful of the three. Pretensions were the worst, because, when you are free of all sensual attachments and all your household belongings, when you have forgiven all your enemies and said goodbye to all your lovers, when you have resigned from all your positions of honor and ceased to use your titles of nobility—then, and only then, you may fall victim to the spiritual pride which will destroy you. After Purgation comes Liberation—a condition of near-sainthood, in which the mind is free to continue its search dispassionately, without the obstacles of fear or desire. And Liberation ends with the accomplishment of this search, in Union with absolute reality.

  At that time, Gerald was passing through an anti-Christian phase. He read Meister Eckhart and St. John of the Cross, but preferred Vedanta philosophy. Several times, he told me that he could never become a Christian, as long as the Church claimed for itself a monopoly of divine inspiration—which Hindus and Buddhists don’t—and as long as the crucifixion was presented as the inevitable and crowning triumph of Christ’s life. A few months previous to our arrival in Hollywood, he had found a Vedantist teacher. This was Swami Prabhavananda, the resident monk of the Ramakrishna Mission in Hollywood. Gerald went to see the Swami regularly at that time, and also lectured at his temple—a miniature plaster “Taj” at the top of Ivar Avenue. He was also editing a magazine called The Voice of India, which was published by the mission.

  If Gerald hadn’t been so interested in yoga and opposed to Christianity, he would never have been able to influence me the way he did. My prejudices were largely semantic. I could only approach the subject of mystical religion with the aid of a brand-new vocabulary. Sanskrit supplied it. Here were a lot of new words, exact, antiseptic, uncontaminated by association with bishops’ sermons, schoolmasters’ lectures, politicians’ speeches. To have gone back along the old tracks, to have picked up the old phrases and scraped them clean of their dirty associations—that job would have been too disgusting for a beginner. But now it wasn’t necessary. Every idea could be made over, restated in the new language. And restatement was what I most needed—as a mental discipline, and even as an alibi, since it was embarrassing to admit to myself that I had been so intolerant.

  I had always regarded Vedanta philosophy, or yoga, as the ultimate in mystery-mongering nonsense. (Like the vast majority of outside critics, I identified yoga with hatha yoga, and imagined that it consisted entirely of trick postures and breathing exercises.) Now it was suddenly revealed as a precise, practical, clearly stated philosophical system—the only one I had ever been able to understand. Here was a sort of metaphysical algebra, in terms of which every type of religious experience, from that of St. Francis to that of Charles Kingsley, could be tersely and adequately expressed.

  In our Cambridge days, and after, Edward and I had had two slogans, “Religion is bad art,” and, “Religion is nothing but sex.” How silly they sounded now! Or rather, how entirely beside the point. By “religion is bad art” we had meant, simply, that it is illegitimate to substitute traditional religious values for aesthetic values—which is obvious, as far as it goes. A bad novel about Christ is easier to get away with than a bad novel about Mr. Jones; because the reader already knows Christ and is awed by the associations which surround him. The mere mention of Christ causes the reader to suspend his aesthetic judgment and make allowances for the writer’s shortcomings. If the reader is an atheist, this process works in reverse, and he condemns the book out of hand. Mr. Jones’s character is unknown to the reader. It is not surrounded by traditional values. Therefore, a novel about him will be judged on its own aesthetic merits.

  But all this presupposes that “religion” means tradition, dogma, sentimentality about dubious historical facts, unquestioning acceptance of traditional values. And it doesn’t. Religion, as Gerald had shown me, is not the opium but the adrenalin of the people. Religion is the struggle for greater awareness of reality, deeper understanding of the nature of life. Art, also, struggles for awareness and understanding. The goal is identical. Art, rightly practiced, is a way of religion. The better the art, the more religious its character. Conventionally minded “good” people can never see this, because they confuse religion with ethics (whereas ethics are only a necessary means to a nonethical end). They are told that a certain novel is “great” (i.e. that it heightens the reader’s awareness and understanding) and then discover that the novel is about a prostitute and are shocked—because prostitution, and therefore the mention of prostitution, are automatically wicked.

  As for “religion is nothing but sex”—that was typical puritan nonsense. Whether you accept Freud or not, the fact remains that the mind-body has only one life force. This force expresses itself in different ways at differ
ent levels of consciousness. In a department store, the same elevator takes you to the women’s hats, the sports department, the furniture and the restaurant on the roof. The same force impels a man to paint a picture, run the quarter mile, have sexual intercourse, say his prayers. Most Europeans and Americans, religious or not, find this fact shocking, because they secretly think sex is dirty, and because they think that the life force is nothing else but sex. Hindus do not make either of these mistakes. Their theory of the kundalini corresponds to my simile of the elevator. Their legend of Krishna and the gopis never fails to shock westerners.29 It even shocked Huxley and Gerald himself.

  In writing all this, I have had to go far ahead of my narrative. The process of accepting Gerald’s ideas was a long one, with many hesitations and revulsions of feeling. It covered many months. I suppose I shall never again in my life have moments of such intense excitement and revelation as I had then.

  Actually, during that first month at the Rose Garden, I was too busy to think much about such things. We were in a whirl of minor occupations. First, there was the quota visa to take care of. Hellmut and Fritz had put us in touch with an immigration counsellor named Miss Dicky Bonaparte, who had helped them both to get into the country. Miss Bonaparte had a big clientele among Hollywood’s alien actors and actresses. She would take your papers down to the American Consul at Ensenada, get everything ready in advance, and then run you down herself in her car. Vernon came along too. Miss Bonaparte was attractive, black eyed and obviously full of temperament; we both had an uneasy feeling that something more than the fee was expected of us. We stopped a few hours at Tijuana, a dirty unpicturesque town of chickens and whores, miniature burros and sandals which reeked of urine, and then drove on down the wild empty coast of lower California. We spent the night at an auto-camp just outside Ensenada and saw the consul next morning. It was the merest formality. But at San Ysidro, on the American side of the frontier gate, I was interviewed again, by an immigrant-inspector named Leonard Kinstler. Mr. Kinstler had a strong sense of drama. “When I sign this form,” he told me solemnly, “you will be legally admitted as a permanent resident to the United States.” He took up the pen, formed the first letters of his name, hesitated, examined the nib, coughed. A terrible suspicion seemed to occur to him. He thumbed hurriedly through my dossier, found nothing, paused, sighed, glanced quickly up to see if I was watching the performance, grinned, flourished his pen and signed. As dusk was falling, we drove triumphantly home to Los Angeles, through dense, sour-smelling groves of oil derricks. This was on June 9. About a month later, following Miss Bonaparte’s advice, I applied for my first citizenship papers.

  Now I could take a job, if anybody would give me one. My first step was to visit a Mrs. Baker(?), at the office of the Sam Jaffe Agency on the Sunset Strip. Mrs. Baker was young, attractive and dressed in the height of chic. She told me at once that there was practically no hope of getting a movie assignment; business was very slack, now. Had I written anything? Had it ever been published? Yes? Well, she’d read it sometime if I sent her a copy, but—Plainly, she wasn’t interested. I never heard from her again.

  Still, I wasn’t much discouraged. Work would probably turn up, sooner or later. I had my visa, and there was still money in the bank. Vernon offered to get a job in a drugstore or a fruit market, but we both agreed to wait till things got desperate. Neither of us seriously intended to live on eighteen dollars a week. I would sooner have borrowed more money. Vernon wanted to go to art school, and that, I argued, was a much better long-term investment than a dozen little jobs. So, instead of tightening our belts, we bought a car and moved into a house.

  The car was an old T-model Ford. We got it from a couple of Englishmen who lived opposite Chris Wood, on Green Valley Road, in an apartment which I was to share with Denny Fouts, two years later. The car made a tremendous noise, but it went all right, at first. I got my California licence, after three attempts. The police tester, though pleasant, seemed determined to prove to me that Englishmen can’t drive.

  House hunting brought us into direct contact with the splendors and miseries of Hollywood architecture. Hollywood houses, especially those on the outskirts of the city, have an uncanny kind of artificiality, like movie sets. No matter whether they are Spanish, Mexican, Colonial, Tudor English, French Chateau or Cubist, they all look as if a gang of stage carpenters had put them up during the night and would take them apart again tomorrow. And, in amongst the merely artificial structures, there are some rather nightmarish freaks—a witch’s cottage, with false dormer windows and gables almost touching the ground, a miniature medieval castle, with cannon on the battlements, a monastery with a totem pole in its cloisters, an Egyptian temple or tomb. Up Laurel Canyon, nearly buried in undergrowth, we found a Japanese bungalow, which appeared to have been fortified. The doors and shutters were several inches thick and studded with huge marine bolts. The furniture was made of heavy beams of wood, screwed together with enormous screws. The table could hardly have been lifted by four men. The bed looked like an instrument of torture: lying on it, you were enclosed as if within an open coffin. The house agent had to admit that the gentleman who designed it had been “peculiar.” He had kept his stockade shutters closed all day.

  It is not only the houses of Hollywood that have this theatrical, temporary air; the entire landscape is provisional. This was one of Gerald’s favorite themes. Walking with us along the firebreak road, he loved to point out how recently this country had been desert, and how quickly it would lapse back into desert again, if the Japanese gardeners were to stop drenching it every evening with water. The houses are built, the pipes are connected up, the hoses start to spray—and, within six months, the devil grass is growing, the porch is heavy under vines, the big garish flowers burst from their buds, the eucalyptus sapling begins to shoot up into a great shade-giving tree. “These hills won’t last long, either,” said Gerald gleefully, picking up a handful of what looked like rock and crumbling it in his fingers, “decomposed granite. In five hundred years, most of it’ll have washed down into Culver City.” At different points along the ridge, there were building sites, flattened out by the bulldozer. We watched a steam shovel cut slices from the soft hillside, like cake, unearthing several rattlesnakes, which the men killed and threw into a bucket. Every winter, the rains would wash a few dollars’ worth of your property down into the valley. But the course of nature wasn’t quick enough for Gerald. He enjoyed kicking big chunks out of the shoulder of the road, giggling wildly. It disconcerted me, to see him in this mood. He seemed quite fiendish. But it was funny, too, and I laughed and forgot it.

  It is time for me to mention Peggy and Henwar Rodakiewicz. The firebreak reminds me of them, because, if you walked along it for twenty minutes or so, you came down into the valley where they lived. Peggy and Gerald were old friends; they had known each other in England. Gerald and Chris used to visit her every Sunday, or oftener. Indeed, it was part of Chris’s Sunday routine to have lunch there, and afterwards to accompany Peggy on the piano while she sang. She had a beautiful voice and might have become a professional, if she hadn’t married and had a family instead.

  Peggy was an extraordinarily pretty woman, although her hair was turning grey and her features were sharpening a little. She had the figure of a college girl. She belonged to a Philadelphia family named Plummer, and she had married twice. Her first husband was Curtis Bok, son of Edward Bok who wrote The Americanization.30 They had three children, Welmoet (usually called “Tis”), Ben, and Derek. (Welmoet, the eldest, was around fourteen, at this time.) When Peggy and Curtis got divorced, Curtis remarried and became a judge. Peggy married Henwar, who was small, square, jolly and very Polish, although he’d lived most of his life in America. He made documentary films.

  It is very hard for me to write about Peggy, because I know her intimately—so intimately that I think of her with the kind of love-hate I’d feel for a sister. In some ways, we are deeply alike. I think the most dominant of her character
istics is her bad conscience. When she married Curtis Bok, she found herself very wealthy. She also began to realize that she was very attractive. She had to take an important place in Philadelphia society. She met all kinds of distinguished people. And she thought—“How terrible! How can I ever pay this back?”

  That was how she began to manage things, to arrange people’s lives for them, to load them with gifts. She wanted to be Florence Nightingale on a nationwide scale. One can’t blame her. She was very young and she made some fearful mistakes. A lot of her interference was love of power; that goes without saying. She was terrifically tense and eager—always on her toes. She was ruthless with herself and everybody else. They all had to conform to what she hoped and expected of them. Sometimes she acted like a shrew and a schoolmarm; sometimes like an utter little bitch. She had a quick temper and a tongue like an adder. She cooed poison. Afterward, she had terrible revulsions, accused herself bitterly, punished herself without mercy. She was big enough to go straight to people and ask their pardon. Then you loved her.

  If you were really sick, really in debt, really in bad trouble with the police, Peggy rose to her greatest heights. She was absolutely generous and fearless. She’d take charge of any problem and solve it efficiently. In return, she expected results. You must recover, promptly and completely, without laziness or malingering. When your debts were paid, you must turn over a new leaf. When you got out of prison, you must make a fresh start. If you didn’t, woe betide you. How well I know that look in Peggy’s grey eyes—a sharp glance of suspicion, then disappointment, cold disapproval. So you failed to make the grade. She sighs, she turns away. But not for long. No sooner do you get into another mess than she’s back again. Perhaps, this time, it’s going to be all right. She rushes to the attack with the same energy, the same optimism. Bless her heart.