She is so terribly unsure of herself. Meeting a new person, she can’t keep still, she can’t wait. She has to try for the right note. First it’s sharp, then it’s flat. Now she’s hit it—or has she? Her laughter falters and sounds tinny. Her conversation bubbles over—it’s nothing but froth. She gets absolutely desperate. She strains and strains. And then, suddenly, it’s all right. She calms down, and is charming, human, sincere.
The Huxleys often compared her to Olenka in Chekhov’s story “The Darling.” Like Olenka, Peggy was always adapting herself. Her friends’ interests were her interests. She read the books they advised, and repeated their remarks as gospel truths. She was far too enthusiastic. Then, when the friends had been revealed as mere fallible mortals, she was badly disappointed and inclined to be resentful.
At the time when I met her, Peggy was entirely under the spell of Gerald. Later, his influence waned, and she turned bitterly against him. And yet she always remained one of his best—or perhaps I should say his truest—friends. Henwar, too, she had to believe in—all the more passionately because he was, actually, a very poor filmmaker, a bit of a dilettante, and extremely lazy. When Henwar’s movies were shown, none of us dared to tell Peggy what we really thought of them.
The house they lived in (9121 Alto Cedro Drive) was another product of Henwar’s dubious artiness, and therefore an article of Peggy’s faith. She never tired of its praises. It was strikingly beautiful, certainly: a dramatically modern building, with glass window-walls overlooking the valley and a distant glimpse of the ocean. But many of its details were badly and stupidly planned. It was too hot in summer, too cold in winter. The built-in beds in the library were awkward to make. The staircase was slippery and dangerous. The shower drenched the floor. The dressing tables which contained the washbasins showed the slightest mark of damp. And there were all sorts of queer niches and useless spaces which collected dust.
I think Peggy was attracted to Henwar because he was so unlike the other men she knew—the thin thinkers and the middle-aged college boys. She once told me, years later, that he reminded her of a character in a D. H. Lawrence novel. He was earthy and solid and Slav. He could do things with his hands. He was a sort of art peasant. Also, I am sure, he attracted her very much, sexually. Once, when we were in the garden together and Henwar was working, stripped to the waist, she exclaimed, with involuntary excitement: “Hasn’t he got the most beautiful back you ever saw!”
The house which Vernon and I finally chose was 7136 Sycamore Trail. It stood high above the Cahuenga Pass. Sycamore Trail is a dirt road running up from Woodrow Wilson Drive. You had to climb several flights of steps to reach the house itself. The nicest thing about it was its terrace, shaded by a big pepper tree and overlooking the San Fernando Valley. There was a large living room, too high for its size, a breakfast alcove, a bathroom, a bedroom and a kitchen. Beneath the living room, on a lower level, there was a smaller bedroom and bath, very badly ventilated. The house had no back view, because the hillside rose sheer up behind it, to a height of about ten feet above the roof. Next [to] it were two vacant lots, crowded with dirty pine trees, which the agent urged us to buy as soon as possible, to guard our privacy.
I never really liked the place, from the beginning. It was curiously sinister. Perhaps there are more haunted houses in Los Angeles than in any other city in the world. They are haunted by the fears of their former owners. They smell of divorce, broken contracts, studio politics, bad debts, false friendship, adultery, extravagance, whisky and lies. Every closet hides the poor little ghost of a stillborn reputation. “Go away,” it whispers, “go back where you came from. There is no home here. I was vain and greedy. They flattered me. I failed. You will fail. Go away.”
With a heavy heart I joined in the planning and spending. Hellmut and Fritz were extraordinarily kind and helpful. One or other of them came every day and took us to secondhand furniture dealers on Santa Monica Boulevard, where we bargained for tables, chairs and beds. The Five & Ten supplied most of the kitchen utensils. And Peggy Rodakiewicz would drop in, with her car full of useful gifts.
I felt like a Christmas tree. Twice in my life I have experienced this peculiar misery—the guilt of possession mixed with the dread of imminent war. The other time was in Copenhagen, in the winter of 1934, just after King Alexander’s assassination,31 when the newspapers screamed “Krig! Krig! Krig!” and Heinz and I were buying things for the Classensgade flat. But that was only for six months, at the most. This time, our stay was to be indefinite. We had an arrangement whereby our monthly rental payments were also installments of the purchase price of the house—I think it was seven or eight thousand dollars. Maybe I was to be tied down at last.
Still, Vernon was delighted, and I couldn’t help sharing his happiness—at any rate, at moments. There were so many ways of playing with the new toy. Vernon decided to build a wall, to keep back the next winter’s landslide. He left it half-finished and began to plant flowers. Then he bought a parrot, which followed us from room to room, perched on our shoulders, pecked our ears and scattered its seeds everywhere. He decided that one should eat only steamed vegetables. He got a steam cooker and steamed them, several evenings, until I protested and we began going out for our meals again.
We moved into the house at the end of June or the beginning of July. Soon after this, Vernon started going to art school, and I was left at home, stranded without a car, several days a week. There was nothing to do. I wandered from room to room, or sat out over the valley, or listened to the radio, whose news bulletins chronicled the steady reduction of the chances of peace. The mornings were always the same, brilliant blue. The far mountains paled to silhouettes in the midday glare. Then the shadows moved sideways, shifting the sunshine inch by inch from the terrace, and the lizards disappeared, and the valley deepened and darkened back into color, and the hills cooled and hardened into scarred contours of ocher and crimson, and it was evening—another day which Chamberlain and I had wasted.
How awful that period really was! I was in a constant state of apprehensive tension and guilty paralysis of the will. What Gerald was telling me (just then I was reading the proofs of his Pain, Sex and Time) only increased my sense of insecurity. I knew I must do something, but I didn’t know what, or how. My only instinct was destructive. I wanted to throw all the ballast overboard—this house, this furniture, even Vernon himself. Perhaps it would have been better if I had let him go back to New York. I had nothing to offer him but my fears. And yet, more than ever, I dreaded being alone.
I forced myself to write—a review of The Grapes of Wrath and a story called “I Am Waiting”32—but there was no satisfaction in it. I was only imitating myself. All that interested me was the present moment, which I couldn’t analyze, because I couldn’t regard it objectively.
It must have been at this time that I made my first attempts at meditation. I had very little idea what one was supposed to do when one meditated, but Gerald had given me some valuable advice. I wasn’t to set myself any program. I wasn’t to try to pray or think, at all. I was merely to sit quiet, for ten to fifteen minutes twice a day, morning and evening. I was to remind myself of “this thing,” what it was, and why I wanted it. This I said I would do.
I remember that the mere idea of actually meditating filled me with an extraordinary excitement. I don’t know exactly what I expected from the experience. I was like the boy who says to himself, “Tomorrow I’ll climb the highest tree in the garden.” Or the young man who decides that, next week, he’ll start learning Russian.
Gerald had also warned me that the decision would set up a violent resistance inside myself—and he was right. No sooner had I made up my mind that I would meditate some time, than the question arose, well, why not now, this minute? Immediately, a dozen voices were raised in postponement and excuse. Tomorrow would be better. Or next Monday. Or even next month. Then would come the doubts: “Isn’t all this rather abnormal? What would Edward say? What kind of a joke would Stephen
make?” To which the advocates of meditation (prompted by Gerald) would boldly answer: “Since when have you been afraid of abnormality? I always thought you were rather too proud of it, if anything. … Yes, of course it’s dangerous. All exploration is dangerous. You might even, quite conceivably, go crazy. So what? You’ll more than probably go crazy if you stay the way you are. … Edward would say, this isn’t my cup of tea, but go ahead if you believe in it. … Stephen’s joke? It’s sure to be very funny.” So the argument went, backward and forward. Never before had I been so aware that our will is divided; we are not one but many.
The first obstacle is self-consciousness. Gerald himself usually meditated sitting in a chair. My own preference was for something more exotic: I wanted to be as oriental as possible. So I squatted cross-legged in a corner of the room. The advantage of this position was that it was an entirely new one: you saw everything—the furniture, the ceiling, the view through the window—from a different angle, and this in itself was a reminder of what you were doing. But it was also very embarrassing, even when you were alone. Suppose someone should walk in! I told Vernon, of course, what I was doing. I wanted him to get used to the idea and not find it mysterious or funny.
As soon as I was settled into position, the Ego began, as it were, to dance around the room, screaming: “Look at me! Look at me! Isn’t it funny? Don’t you think it’s funny? Aren’t I extraordinary? What do you think I’ll do next? I bet you can’t guess! Matter of fact, I don’t know, myself. I say—look, look—aren’t I a scream?”
Gradually, the prancing and the antics subsided. They were followed by the fidgets. “What’s that bird outside? Why does it make that noise? Who can that be in the next garden? I can hear the neighbor’s radio. Damn him—what selfishness, making such a racket! How loud the traffic is! That bird. And now there’s a fly buzzing. It’s too much—” Very often, at this point, I’d break off the attempt and get up. But, if the fidgets passed away, the next trouble would be sex. I sat and throbbed dully with lust. Bed. Darkness. Flesh. Arms. Legs. Lips. Sweat. Grunts and groans. Heaving, straining, jerking. Me. You. Yes. Now—If I waited long enough, however, the throbbing would subside, also. It was just a matter of time.
And then, on another level, the wheel would begin to spin—the roulette wheel of worries, fantasies, plans and plots, vanities and resentments, mixed in with scraps of nonsense, lines from poems, all the odds and ends of the mind’s ragbag. Usually, the wheel whizzed on and on, long past the quarter hour I had set myself, and I would rise from it feeling merely dizzy. Very occasionally, while I still watched it, it slowed and almost stopped. Then I knew something approaching concentration.
I talk as if meditation (if you can call what I have just described by so grand a name) had become my regular practice. It hadn’t. As a matter of fact, these first attempts were very irregular, and I soon gave them up altogether. The strangest thing about them was that they actually produced some kind of beneficial effect on my behavior. Vernon noticed it at once. One day, when I had said something unpleasant, he remarked priggishly: “I think Christopher, it’s time you went and meditated again.” This effectively stopped me from doing my “sits” for some time.
Vernon’s attitude towards meditation was complicated by his relation to Gerald and myself. Gerald had taken Vernon up in a big way. They went for long walks together—from which Vernon returned soundly flattered and inclined to be superior. Probably, they discussed me, and decided that I hadn’t much chance of “mutating” (a favorite Heard term). I was too old. Too corrupt. Too set in my ways. Whereas Vernon was young: he had the whole future before him. Perhaps I’m being unfair. At any rate, I was jealous—of both of them. I probably even set to work, subconsciously, to maneuver Vernon out of Gerald’s favor. But it is absolutely no use my discussing all this. I can’t write objectively about it, even yet—and self-accusation would be as pointless as fault finding.
Soon after our move to Sycamore Trail, we committed one final extravagance. We traded in our T-model for a new Ford de luxe convertible, to be paid for on the never-never plan. But it wasn’t only the looks of the new car and the salesman’s smooth line of talk that persuaded us; the Model T had become too expensive to be kept. Nearly every day, something would go wrong—the steering, the ignition, the transmission or the lights. At that time, the Cahuenga Pass road hadn’t been reconstructed. To enter Woodrow Wilson, coming up from Hollywood, you had to make a left turn without a traffic light, right across the downstream of the traffic. This, during the rush hours, in a car which might stall at any moment, was really dangerous.
Sometime during July, Berthold Viertel returned from New York to his home in Santa Monica Canyon, full of schemes. He had a movie story which he wanted us to write together. The story was called The Mad Dog of Europe, and it was the usual anti-Nazi stuff. But Berthold planned to reconstruct it entirely; to make it a fair and objective account of how a young German army officer is slowly won over to the Nazi party after the last war, of what happens to him as a party member, and of his final reaction and change of heart. The subject, as Berthold described it, sounded wonderfully interesting (what subject didn’t?) and it would be marvellous to work with him again. I agreed, of course.
So now, every morning, Vernon drove me down to 165 Mabery Road—that address which had become so familiar to me, years before, in London, when we were working together on Little Friend. Every morning was like every other morning. The barking of the two frisky Irish setters and the old Alsatian at the gate. The German cook opening the front door, admitting me to the big, pleasant living room, with the piano and the books and the blue Picasso boy over the fireplace. “Herr Doktor Viertel kommt gleich.”33 And here he was, in his dressing gown and slippers, snorting through his nose, drawing grim-lipped on his first cigarette, shaking my hand: “Servus.”34 At this hour of the morning, he was always preoccupied, moody, stern, like a general before a battle. We would sit down on the porch to our coffee, and Berthold would scowl his way across the newspaper headlines. Our first talk was always about Europe. I forget what his particular predictions were, at that time. They were always startling and occasionally accurate. Anyhow, the future was double dyed in gloom. We shook our heads over it, almost suicidally. But, beyond the porch, the sunshine poured down through the leaves of the fig tree, the little garden was full of roses, the new morning, brilliant with possibility, opened over a sky-blue, milk-edged ocean, without hope and without despair. Our mood brightened, a little. We rose. We started to pace the lawn. Berthold plucked figs and gave me some. He lit another cigarette. He snorted. Slowly, subtly, inimitably, he began to develop an idea.
At twelve o’clock, we put on our swimming suits and went down to the beach. As we walked past the gardens of the little houses, Berthold was fond of saying: “One does not wander without punishment under palms.” This was how he expressed his feeling of guilt at being here, in this improbably remote paradise, while in England the people he loved were threatened by the oncoming war. Together, we strolled along the beach. Berthold, his hands folded behind his back, wore his bathrobe as though it were a toga, with a sort of Roman majesty. Two aliens from doomed Europe, we carried our twisted, pain-ridden psyches amongst the statuesque, unselfconscious bodies of California, basking in the frank sunshine. Where would these bronzed and muscular boys be, five years from now? For what had they been born? For what would they die? Yes, Gerald’s way of thinking was the only one that didn’t point to utter nihilism and despair. I tried to explain it to Berthold, and he was interested, even excited—but only up to a certain point. His wit, his subtlety, his fearless frankness, his warmth and wealth of emotional reaction—all the qualities which made me love him so dearly—were, in fact, the virtues of his limitations. He had fossilized, long ago, into a “character.” He was still capable, like a volcano, of superb fireworks, earth-shaking noises, devastating explosions—but he always remained stationary, a gigantic landmark, occupying a fixed position on the map. Gerald’s asceticism r
epelled him. Pacifism he found cowardly: there were days when he became very violent about this—violent but never personal, because all his arguments were, so plainly, between the two halves of himself. Poor old Berthold—how prophetically I saw my future self, ten years from now, in him—worrying about money and my waistline, resenting imagined insults, a prey to sexual fantasies, pitifully quick tempered, fiercely ready to justify my most casual and ill-considered remarks on any occasion yet thrown into torments of doubt by the slightest word of criticism—that was the way I should be, unless I could do something to change myself before it was too late. And yet—was Berthold really pitiable? In spite of everything, he was a great man, a great human being who had struggled and suffered, failed and succeeded. His talent had never been stronger. All this time, he was producing poems, stories, articles. He fairly bubbled with creativeness. If Berthold was to be pitied, what about Bodo Uhse?
Bodo Uhse had been called in by Berthold to help us with our story, because he had once actually belonged to the Nazi party. Later, Uhse became a communist, and fought in Spain. His whole life had been involved in violence. As an officer’s son in a garrison town during the 1914 war, he had joined an organization formed by other officers’ sons in their teens—a kind of Junior Junkers’ League. One of their members, a boy of fifteen, stole a bicycle. The group court-martialled him. They told the boy that he had disgraced them, disgraced his own father (who was at the front) and the entire German army. There was only one honorable way of atonement. The culprit agreed. They got him a revolver. That night, he shot himself.
Bodo was about thirty-eight years old, small and white and skinny. When he went in swimming, he looked like a shrivelled schoolboy, with his short untidy hair and big, sensitive grey eyes. His mouth was lined and compressed. He seemed always half dead with cold. Berthold said of him: “He’s one of nature’s orphans. He’s so poor—so terribly poor—one can’t imagine that he ever had anything—any warmth, any joy—” One day, I asked him: “Bodo, what was the happiest time of your life?” Bodo considered; then his eyes lighted up: “It was in Schleswig-Holstein, just after the war. I was living among the peasants. There was a rising. We made our own bombs. We went into town in a truck, and threw them at the Rathaus.”35
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 14
