Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Dinner with Chris Wood and a boy named Peter Finley, who is studying at Ouspenskaya’s school of acting54—which develops the “five-sense response.” Finley talked eagerly about his work. Chris hummed and yawned, interposing occasional bored provocative remarks. If you contradict Chris, he only grins. He can’t be bothered to argue.

  January 12. The weather is clearing. Blue sky at last, with immense clouds. Spent the day discussing the story with Thoeren; I couldn’t put him off any longer. He is a big tomcat of an ex-leading man, who talks endlessly about his love affairs, with a kind of sadistic vulgarity. His attitude of cynical self-abasement amounts to saying: “I’m dirt myself. Therefore anyone who sleeps with me is less than dirt.” He is a [bit of a] liar, but intelligent. We shall probably get along quite well together.

  January 13. Thoeren and I had another interview with Hyman. We were talking about our hero’s inferiority complex. Suddenly, Hyman started to tell us a story.

  When he was a schoolboy, his best friend had a girl, and this girl had a sister. The first time Hyman saw her, he fell for her. “She was a perfect assembly of womanhood.” Soon he was so much in love that he gave up making dates with her; he felt it was quite hopeless—there were so many rich, goodlooking boys around. Then, to his amazement, she sent for him and asked why he was staying away from the house. He told her the truth. She said: “I’m glad—because I’ve been in love with you for a long time.”

  In the same town there lived a very rich man, twenty years older than Hyman, who, for twelve years, had been unhappily married to an invalid wife. The wife died. The rich man met Hyman’s girl at a party and fell passionately in love with her. He came to Hyman and appealed to him, humiliating himself before the schoolboy: “If you really care for her happiness, give her to me. Think of all the things I can offer her.” The widower’s relatives and friends joined in the campaign; they carried the girl off to spend a weekend with them. The girl telephoned Hyman: “If you still care for me at all, come and take me away.” But Hyman did nothing. The rich man’s arguments had convinced him. He never saw her again.

  A year later, the widower and the girl got married. They have been happy. The girl now has grown-up sons. Her elderly husband has lost most of his money. Hyman is earning two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.

  Once, quite recently, he spoke to her, on the phone. She was very gay and “said all the wrong things.” She also had a long conversation with Hyman’s wife. Bernie told all this so modestly and simply that, for the moment, he seemed quite charming. The question is: how often does he tell this story, and to whom?

  (Much later, after Hyman’s death, I discovered that he used to tell it to nearly every writer who ever worked for him.)

  All day I have been happy. Chiefly because this morning, driving through the cold sunshine in our open car to the studio, I saw, far behind Hollywood, for the first time, the snow-covered mountains. “Look at them!” I kept repeating excitedly, to a hitchhiker I’d picked up. He agreed politely that they were pretty.

  Mrs. MacCabe treated us to a turkey dinner. Happy chattered all through the meal—about aviation, sailing, automobiles, and the good times he’d had with his friends. “Boy, I had more fun—!” He has to have several shots a day for his diabetes, but he is exactly like any ordinary, healthy boy. It never occurs to him to feel sorry for himself. (It never occurs to me not to.)

  January 15. Lunch with Huxley. Now that he is getting over his shyness, he is charming. We talked about the Bardo Thodol, which he has been reading lately. An old lady sold us bunches of artificial violets. I gave mine to Frau Bach, who said: “You’re fortunate that I don’t reward you with a kiss!”

  January 16. A man named Crane burst into my office this morning and sold me a subscription to the trade paper Box Office. He knew everybody, he assured me, and they all subscribed. Sure, he knew Huxley. Very well. Huxley had given him a copy of After Many a Summer. “I got a big kick out of it, because, to be very frank with you, he uses very very highbrow language.” Mr. Crane was born in England, and came to the States as a young man, via South Africa. He has two American-born sons, very patriotic Americans. They asked him: “If there was a war between England and America, which side would you be on?” Crane said: “America.” The sons were shocked. They found this unnatural.

  Lunch in the commissary, at our usual table. It would be difficult, if you saw the people sitting there, to guess what their profession was. Car salesmen, possibly. Stephani, the producer, was an organizer of the Rhineland separatist movement, after the last war; he was lucky to escape lynching. Parsonnet, the writer, was a circus acrobat; he spends all his money on horses. Waxman, the composer, looks like a repulsive insect; his dark eyes immensely magnified by his rimless glasses. The talk is mostly movies, racing and sex. But today there was a lively discussion about the dismissal of Hore-Belisha.55 They are all very friendly and polite to me, as a newcomer. The Americans are lazy, sentimental, good humored. The Jews satirical and sour. Thoeren, particularly, is always bringing up the Semitic question—which means the anti-Semitic question—to the slight embarrassment of the gentiles. They try to pass it off by laughing at his English. “The trouble with all you foreigners—” one of them began. “Why can’t you say: ‘All you Jews’?” Thoeren interrupted.

  In the evening, I went with Berthold to a showing of the French film J’Accuse, under the auspices of the Hollywood Antiwar League. Dalton Trumbo and Dudley Nichols spoke.56 Trumbo was quite good, but dull. Pacifism of this kind is really an indefensible position. It involves so many dishonest arguments, tu quoques, frank appeals to self-interest. We shouldn’t help Finland because we didn’t help Spain. We shouldn’t fight on the side of England, because look what England did in India. How all these people fear the plain moral stand against killing! Anyone in the audience could have silenced them immediately by shouting “coward!” Nichols, who was obviously conscious of this, hastened to assure us that he was a “militant pacifist” and quite ready to get into a fistfight with anybody who said that America should go to war!

  The film itself was boring and hammy to the last degree. Victor Francen exhibited all his most agonized grimaces. Later, we had coffee with Belfrage and half a dozen others. Belfrage is as conscious of being English as Thoeren is of being a Jew. His Anglophobia is horribly embarrassing. He can’t drop it for an instant. Why do we all feel so painfully responsible for our little social and racial groups? Why do Negroes talk of “niggers” and homosexuals of “faggots”? Always these aggressive apologies, this yearning love-hate.

  Peter [Viertel], who had come with us, got into a long argument with Berthold on the way home. Peter thinks the U.S. should get into the war in order to stop it. Berthold took up a position which would have outraged him, six months ago. But this whole antiwar agitation here will achieve very little, either way, I believe, because it isn’t based on a genuine condemnation of violence. And you can’t only condemn some violence.

  January 17. After lunch, Thoeren and I drove downtown to look at secondhand bookstores. He likes stories about pirates. When we got back to the studio, Thoeren pretended to Frau Bach we’d been to a brothel. There was a little Chinese girl there who earned a lot of money, just as a curiosity, for doing nothing. His details were so convincing that Frau Bach very nearly believed him.

  At present, I’m obsessed by a mania for debt paying. I want to save every penny. For example, I’ve found that, if we’re very careful, we can pay off the whole cost of the car in three weeks. I spend a lot of time doing calculations about this on my scribbling pad in the office.

  The days go by, and I don’t see the Swami, don’t start meditating. This isn’t mere laziness. The opposition is enormously strong. Incredible as it seems, part of me actually wants to wallow in black, lazy misery, like a pig in filth.

  I think perpetually of Wystan’s great lines on the 1914 war:

  While the disciplined love which alone could have employed these engines

  Seemed
far too difficult and dull, and when hatred promised

  An immediate dividend, all of us hated.57

  For myself there is less excuse than for most people, because I know already that “the disciplined love” isn’t dull: it’s the most absorbing thing in life. And Gerald and Swami are there all the time, always available and ready to help me through the difficulties.

  January 18. To [Max] Reinhardt’s production of Maugham’s Home and Beauty, adapted as a musical comedy. It’s all very well to blame this fiasco on the unlucky Californian amateurs who had to struggle through it. Actually the original show in Berlin must have been equally silly. Germans should never try this kind of thing. The pink boudoir curtains are trampled under their ten-ton boots.

  Afterwards to the Vine Street Brown Derby, where Salka, Berthold and the boys ate raw chopped meat. Salka posed as a passionate Polish barbarian, thrilling and shocking a wide-eyed young dramatic student, who had her hair fixed like a Zola whore, and whose mental age was six. Felt lonely, sleepy and bored.

  January 19. The lady dentist at MGM hacked my gums into mincemeat while cleaning my teeth. Toothache throughout the day. Guttchen came to lunch with me, in the commissary. His Chinese smile, politely masking the pain from his damaged kidneys. He was so happy, just to be among people. I kept thinking how marvellously interesting he would be, if I could only ask the right questions. But I couldn’t ask them. This was all the worse because I knew he was thinking, “Isherwood only invited me here out of charity, because Viertel told him to.”

  Nevertheless, he chatted away brightly—describing the great Chinese scholar, his uncle, who forced him to start studying oriental art and literature at the age of eleven. He told me about his wife and child in Switzerland. About communism in China. About Chinese poetical conventions. It was maddening to get so much fascinating information at a moment when I couldn’t even listen to it. I sat in a stupor of pain, longing to get rid of him.

  January 20. A letter from William Hickey. Would I mind if he quoted the following verse—which is now, he says, going around London:

  The literary erstwhile Left-wellwisher would

  Seek vainly now for Auden or for Isherwood:

  The dog beneath the skin has had the brains

  To save it, Norris-like, by changing trains.

  Why does this sting me so? Simply because it is really clever. It succeeds in making me look ridiculous—in a way that mere abuse can’t. My vanity is hurt. Yes, I had better admit it. I am not in the least ashamed of myself, but I feel foolish.

  I’ll try to be absolutely honest about this. Am I a coward, a deserter? Not according to my standards. If I were told that somebody else had “run away from England,” I should ask, “What did ‘England’ mean to him?” “England” to me meant a place that I stayed away from as much as possible during the past ten years. From a strictly patriotic standpoint, you can be “disloyal” in peace as well as in war. Yet no one blamed me then. And I certainly didn’t blame myself.

  Am I afraid of being bombed? Of course. Everybody is. But within reason. I know I certainly wouldn’t leave Los Angeles if the Japanese were to attack it tomorrow. No, it isn’t that. … If I fear anything, I fear the atmosphere of the war, the power which it gives to all the things I hate—the newspapers, the politicians, the puritans, the scoutmasters, the middle-aged merciless spinsters. I fear the way I might behave, if I were exposed to this atmosphere. I shrink from the duty of opposition. I am afraid I should be reduced to a chattering, enraged monkey, screaming back hate at their hate.

  Am I being disloyal to my friends? My friends don’t seem to think so. But perhaps I am. Maybe my place is with them, over there. Maybe my attitude would only pain them. Maybe I should become their enemy.

  Oh, it’s not the smallest use trying to work this out, logically. And it’s certainly no use running home to protect my vanity. If I really have to go, I shall know when the time comes. Life will give me some signal. I must just wait for it.

  January 23. A tremendous downpour of rain. Lunch at the Victor Hugo, with Knopf. The place is decorated like a theatrical Italian garden—concealed music, a rose-lit statue in a niche. The waiters served us with the flattering attention reserved for big movie men: Knopf is a regular customer. I like his bald, worried, man-to-man air, and the abrupt, fantastic gestures he makes with his stump. Sometimes he flaps it desperately, like the flipper of a suffocating fish; sometimes he nurses it like a newly born child.

  Knopf doesn’t believe America will go to war. He still suspects the British government of working for an anti-Russian line-up. He thinks great harm is being done to British prestige here by the seizure of U.S. shipping at Gibraltar.

  He still refers to Goldwyn as “Mr G.”—with a certain deference.

  Yesterday, Vernon went to the barber’s and had his hair crew cut, so that it all stands on end. All the careful culture of months is destroyed; in future, he has decided to be ugly, like van Gogh. I laughed, but it is really rather touching. Vernon wants to be taken seriously, as a grown-up painter. He is disgusted with his own boyish prettiness and the effect it produces on people. I remember how I once switched from horn to steel-rimmed spectacles, because I thought steel was less becoming.

  January 24. At lunch in the studio today I got into conversation with Waldo Salt, one of the youngest of the writers. He is a nice little leftist, with a broad grinning face and flap ears. He told me how he had set off to Europe with his wife, a few years ago, to make a picture of “fascist tendencies in the democratic countries.” Needless to say, this quixotic project had to be abandoned at the first customshouse. All they got were some shots of refugee camps.

  Salt is naive and intelligent in disconcerting spots. I quite see why Huxley deplores the lack of intelligence in all these people. So much of their talk is in slogans. Take them one yard off their beaten party-track and they are bewildered. On the subject of violence, they are like kids playing at gangsters. Their morals are hopelessly muddled; they cover their dishonesty with a shamefaced impudent schoolboy grin. But at least Salt doesn’t make the English left-wing mistake of disregarding domestic problems in favor of foreign politics. He knows all about the Okies and has promised to take me to see them.

  Drove up to supper with Gerald. Chris, when I arrived, was banging out [Stravinsky’s] Petrushka. He always plays specially loud when Gerald is meditating. He left almost at once, warning us that he would be back early with a guest, and we must be ready to leave the sitting room.

  I asked Gerald about the survival of personality. He replied with a lot of metaphysics I couldn’t follow. To him, the question doesn’t seem to be very important. All he knows is that he must get on with his ego smashing. And of course he’s right.

  January 25. In the afternoon, I went to Chaplin’s studio. Chaplin was in a talkative mood. He repeats himself, amplifies, contradicts. (Meltzer later imitated him saying: “The only thing I can say for myself is—I’ve never been melancholy. Never. Of course, everybody is melancholy around the age of twenty. When I was twenty-one, I was terribly melancholy. I was melancholy until I was thirty. Well, no—not exactly what you could call melancholy. I’m never melancholy, really … etc. etc.”)

  Today, he talked about the portrait painted of him by George Bergen, and its mysterious disappearance from the artist’s studio, a few years ago. “Oh, it was a wonderful portrait. He painted me against a white wall, in a white silk jacket—a sort of a pyjama jacket. It was just a good straight portrait—none of that Van Dyck stuff—light and shadow.” A day or two after it was finished, someone ripped it right out of its frame. The police searched everywhere, but they never found it.

  Chaplin then got on to the subject of the Duke of Windsor, whom he met several times during a trip to Europe. Windsor was then the Prince of Wales. His first question was, “How old are you?” He wanted to know what Chaplin had done in the 1914 war—and when Chaplin told him, “Nothing,” there was a frosty silence. Then Chaplin asked him how many uniforms he o
wned and how he knew which one to wear on any given occasion: did someone tell him? “No one,” Windsor replied coldly, “ever tells me to do anything.”

  Nevertheless, he seems to have taken a great fancy to Chaplin and often asked him down to Fort Belvedere. Chaplin nearly committed a serious breach of etiquette by going into the lavatory when Windsor was already there. This is strictly against the rules.

  Although Windsor had at once begun calling Chaplin “Charlie,” Chaplin had stuck rigidly to the formal “Sir.” He imitated himself saying demurely: “Oh, no, Sir! Oh, yes, Sir!” Behind all these anecdotes, there was the sparkle of guttersnipe impudence. One sees him in his classic role of debunker of official pomposity, always, everywhere. “How can they possibly go on with all that nonsense,” he kept repeating.

  Today, they were doing a scene outside on the lot. Hitler and Mussolini (Jack Oakie) are leaving the railway station. The crowd breaks through the police cordon. Madame Mussolini is pushed into it, and the dictators’ car drives off without her. Meltzer says that the Hollywood extras are the most miserable, stupid, gutless crowd of people you could find anywhere in the world. The girls were all copies of famous filmstars—literal copies, made without the least imagination or individuality. The men were sullen, round shouldered, down-at-heel gum chewers. They showed not the slightest interest in Chaplin’s instructions—but, when the shooting began, they put up a surprisingly convincing performance.

  January 26. Dapper little George O’Neil—who is also working for Gottfried, on the script of Girl with a Cello—told me some more about the theft of the Bergen picture. When the picture disappeared, the police suspected everybody—including Constance Collier,58 Bergen, an old lady who collected Chapliniana, a laundryman, Chaplin’s Japanese valet, the half-witted son of the studio caretaker, and even Chaplin himself. As the picture had been commissioned by the Tate Gallery, none of these people could possibly hope to get possession of it by lawful means—so the motive of the theft applied to all of them.