Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Mina Curtiss (Lincoln Kirstein’s sister) came to dinner, on her way from San Francisco to New Mexico. She talked about her friendship with Hans Otto Storm, the writer. And about Anne Lindbergh,87 who had said that all women are mothers and all men are brothers—hence the difficulty of making a successful marriage. Mina is a bit cursed with Lincoln’s intellectualism, and she hangs on to “Love” with grappling irons. She’s a fine creature, very strong, but she ought to stop evaluating people so intensely. She needs religion, of course. And all she has in its place are Art and Leftism—as mental states. Nothing is any good unless you practice it: so many of us get a bug in our brains and just waste our lives cerebrating. That’s why Mina was so impressed by Storm: he doesn’t just talk about writing, he writes. But all she could do about it was to go to bed with him, and make both of them unhappy.

  January 7. Gottfried tells me that he spent last night arguing with Peter about going to Canada. Gottfried had taken the hard-boiled Jewish line (as opposed to the crusading Zionist line): “What the hell—war isn’t romantic, any more. That’s nineteenth-century stuff. I’ll tell you what war is—it’s a bore. Sure, there’s a lot of heroism. There’s a lot of heroism in an earthquake, too. Everybody’s a hero, when he has to be. Cowards are only the exceptions. Hell, I dread going to the dentist, but I go just the same, don’t I? If the war comes here, I won’t try to dodge. But why should I run after it over there? People talk about the Jews. The Jews! The Jews! The Jews have to fight Hitler! I tell you, the Jews have done enough against Hitler already. Let the others do something. Don’t be such a sucker!”

  Poor Peter! Gottfried’s attack must have gotten him all confused. For he’s so determined to be the hard-boiled guy at any price. I can picture him wondering if there wasn’t, perhaps, something even tougher than war. How awful if one weren’t cynical enough, after all! “Don’t get me wrong,” he is supposed to have replied: “If I’m sent over there, I’ll pick a soft spot. I’m not sticking my neck out.” And later: “Of course, if I’m offered a job at two thousand a week, I’ll stay here.” There you have the tragedy of a generation which is without belief; the generation which my generation taught and betrayed.

  January 8. A long telephone call from Mrs. McCullagh, the landlady of Joe Valentine,88 Denny’s protégé. (Denny picked Joe up on the road one day, in his car. Joe had run away from his home in Pennsylvania—an overcrowded shack in a mining town—and taken to the road. Denny felt sure he would grow up to be a gangster, if he wasn’t taken care of; so he’d found him a room, paid several months’ rent in advance, and asked me to keep an eye on him till he got a job.)

  Mrs. McCullagh is getting more and more alarmed about Joe, whose “job” is very mysterious, if not actually sinister. She says his room is always full of men. “I don’t know what they’re doing,” she told me, “but I’m going to find out.” She has already informed the police, and the men are being watched.

  January 9. To see Gerald in the evening. He plans a seminar of some kind for this summer, at which various problems of the religious life will be discussed. I may be able to come to it, if I can get leave from the San Dimas camp. Many of the most important Quakers are cooperating, and it seems possible that this work will be somehow integrated with the activities of the Friends Service Committee. The Quakers, says Gerald, are beginning to realize that they have laid too much emphasis on social service and too little on mysticism. The balance is upset, and their motive power is weakened in consequence.

  January 10. Out with Tony Bower in the evening. We drove down to Thelma Todd’s89 and drank coffee. Tony, as usual, was very eager to talk about yoga. He sniffs all around the subject with jealous curiosity—surely there must be a hole in it somewhere? He’s hoping it’s all true, and yet he’s hoping like hell that it’s a fake, and that I shall come to my senses finally and have to admit this. He’s hoping also, particularly, that Denny will have a relapse and return to his old ways. Denny causes more resentment than any of us, because he is a traitor to the gang, and because everybody had him so neatly taped as a drunken, doping sex maniac. Denny’s desertion is very disturbing. Poor Tony—he feels the foundations giving way under him. And religion is so dreary, so madly ungay. It makes him shudder. Psychoanalysis, now—that’s something else again. That’s scientific. So he’s going to be analyzed as soon as possible.

  January 11. I’m through with the picture at last. Now I have a few days’ vacation. The Swami is in bed, with a slight heart attack. Gerald had to speak, this Sunday, at Allan Hunter’s church, so I pinch-hit at the temple. Read poems aloud—by Herbert, Vaughan, Emily Brontë, Tennyson, Swinburne; and the duel scene from The Brothers Karamazov. Then down to lunch at the Hunters’. As Allan and I were walking out to the car afterwards, we met a small red-faced man carrying a little parcel which nevertheless seemed too heavy for him. “Are you tired?” Allan asked. “No,” said the man, in a very matter-of-fact voice, “I’m drunk.” We drove him to his house. He was a barber, who’d been working overtime to pay his debts: yesterday, he’d worked sixteen hours. So he took a few drinks to keep him going.

  January 13. Went round to see the McCullaghs. Joe was out. He’d got a new job, working all night at a hot-dog stand. Mrs. McCullagh showed me his closet, which was full of brand-new suits. Where did they come from, she wanted to know? She is fond of Joe—“He’s just a big open-faced boy trying to buck the world”—but she’s very suspicious of the life he’s leading. Mr. McCullagh, who has only one eye, was much more charitable. “We don’t know that, dear,” he kept interrupting, “we haven’t any right to say that.” However, they both promised that they won’t throw him out without warning me, first.

  (A few days later, Mrs. McCullagh called me on the phone. “Mr. Isherwood,” she told me dramatically, “at last I’ve found out what Joe does with all those men. It’s terrible—” She lowered her voice: “He gambles.” She was disappointed and slightly shocked when I burst out laughing.

  As far as I remember, we lost sight of Joe shortly after this. He left the McCullaghs of his own accord, without giving them any notice, and disappeared. Neither Denny nor I saw him again until the summer of 1942.)

  January 14. Lunch with David Kirk, who is probably going to the San Dimas camp. The draft board first passed him as a C.O. and then changed its decision. He has appealed. The law still seems very vague on these points. He is in a specially difficult position, because he is a refugee. So everybody expects him to want to fight Hitler.

  David is very intelligent, and not without charming qualities; but he’s so terribly conscious of being a Jew. He is pedantic, fastidious in his choice of words. He seems to suffer from a kind of nervous exhaustion. He told me how—when he was studying at Owen’s College, Manchester—he made a pact with the Devil, in order to pass his maths exam. And he did pass—although he was perfectly certain he must have failed. Even when he made the pact, he says, he intended to wriggle out of it; and he knew he could do this if he stopped masturbating. Now he’s gotten engaged to a gentile girl in Kansas City, and he’s haunted by the fear that the Devil will revenge himself by making her marry someone else. David was perfectly serious when he told me this. In a kind of way, he believes it.

  Gerald lectured to the class at the temple, on the difference between contemplation and meditation. Meditation is the stage of effort—in which we struggle to fix our mind on the Object by means of images, similes and metaphors. Contemplation is effortless. When we achieve it, we are unaware of the passage of time; our mind has become one-pointed. The need for images stops. We pass beyond the stage of logical analysis. We cease to infer. We know.

  On the way home, we talked about the Devil—or rather, that part of our Ego which represents the Devil. Gerald said that lately he’s been very conscious of his presence; not as someone terrifying, but as an unwearying Watcher—a presence which is always waiting its chance, bold and impudent and brutally cynical. …

  By this time, Willie Maugham and his friend Gerald Haxton ha
d turned up in Hollywood. They had taken a house with a huge swimming pool on Beverly Glen Boulevard, and Willie was rumored to be working with or for Selznick. (I believe he was actually writing his potboiler The Hour Before Dawn.) I was so pleased to see Willie again—that old, old parrot, with his flat black eyes, blinking and attentive, his courtly politeness and his hypnotic stammer. He is my ideal uncle.

  At Gottfried’s suggestion, I invited him to the studio. On that particular day, we were remaking the steel-mill scene, and the gas flames of the fake furnace nearly singed off Willie’s moustache. There were two unforgettable encounters—the first with the Marx Brothers, who rushed out upon him screaming like devils, and climbed all over him, hugging and kissing him, as Willie submitted to their embraces with shy pleased smiles; the second with Joan Crawford, who greeted him with extreme aristocratic languor, on the set of A Woman’s Face—like a reformed and ladylike Sadie Thompson meeting the doctor in Australia, ten years after the “Rain” episode.90 The young studio messenger who showed us around was quite overcome, at the end of it all, by Willie’s chattiness and his five-dollar tip. “He’s a wonderful man,” he kept repeating, “a wonderful man.”

  Willie also came up to see Gerald, and spoke simply and touchingly about himself. “I’m getting an old man,” he said. All he wanted now was to go back to India and write a last serious book about Shankara, spending his last days in a monastery. I was much moved on hearing this—until the news reached us, through van Druten and others, that Willie had made fun of Gerald, albeit quite affectionately, at a cocktail party next day, and had deplored my wasting my time with mysticism when I ought to be writing novels. But then he’s like that: a mass of guilt and contradictions. I doubt if anybody really understands him.

  I don’t know if it was in January, or a bit earlier or later, that Gerald suddenly decided to break with the Swami. He arrived at this decision after a good deal of consultation with Allan Hunter and others, including myself. (Gerald’s arguments convinced me at the time—partly because I really knew very little about the Swami’s household, partly because they appealed to my innate puritanism. Did a love of mischief making also have something to do with it? I don’t know. Perhaps. At any rate, I hadn’t the least intention of following Gerald’s example. I continued to see the Swami regularly, and even made repeated efforts to bring the two of them together again.)

  Gerald felt that he couldn’t any longer be publicly associated with the temple and the Swami’s household: “the holy women” were too much for him, and the little tea parties, the automobile and the other minor luxuries which the Swami permitted himself—especially his cigarette smoking. So he wrote the Swami a letter in which he said he must stop lecturing at the temple and writing for the magazine.

  Gerald said that this protest didn’t make any difference to his feelings for the Swami; but, after this, they seldom saw each other. He used to declare, later, that he had been moved to take this action because some of his “ex-left-wing friends” (not named) had objected to the Swami’s comfortable way of life and to the ministrations of the “holy women,” which might easily be misconstrued. Gerald’s critics retorted, needless to say, that Gerald’s friendship with Chris might also be misconstrued, and with far more reason—and that it was all very well for Gerald to live in rags on four hundred dollars a year, when his transportation, much of his food and most of his books were provided by friends. To which Gerald would reply that the two cases were quite different, because Swami deliberately set himself up as a monk, a holy man, an official teacher. To which Gerald’s critics would answer that Gerald had set himself up as a teacher, too, in a much bigger way than the Swami, by writing his books. And so on, and so forth.

  The Swami was, as a matter of fact, greatly hurt by Gerald’s criticism, and even answered it indirectly by an article in the magazine, in which he pointed out that true renunciation is of the heart, not the purse: a beggar may be attached to his few possessions while a king may be nonattached to his riches. In private, he gave way to indignant outbursts: “Mr. Hard had the cheek to talk to me like that!” In the end, I just felt embarrassed, whichever one of them spoke about it. Aldous best summed up the whole business by saying that it was a disastrous pity—considering the scarcity of sincere followers of the spiritual life—that two of them should have fallen out. “Judge not,” he quoted, “that you be not judged.”

  During this period, Gerald and Denny were exchanging daily letters. Denny was trying to live entirely without sex, and his lurid accounts of his temptations and struggles made Gerald exclaim repeatedly, “My word, what a tough!” Denny was certainly the white-haired boy of our little circle. We all went around discussing him, raving about him, and dwelling with frissons of excitement on the awful life of sin he had lived before his “change.” We were pretty ridiculous, no doubt—like church spinsters cooing over a converted burglar. And it wasn’t very fair to Denny, who had later to try, and fail, to live up to this impossible ideal.

  Was it at this time that Hollywood rang with the Paulette Goddard scandal? She was said to have misbehaved in public with a drunken movie director in a nightclub on the Strip. There were many versions of the story. There was even a joke: “Dial Crestview 7000 and you’ll hear what Paulette said.” The combination CR7 happens to be nonexistent in the Hollywood telephone system, and if you dial it, or any other such number, the instrument sets up a modulated yowling noise, suggesting the scream of a raped cat.

  However funny this may have seemed to most of the population, it didn’t amuse Chaplin. The Huxleys told us he was suffering a great deal; and one evening Maria suggested that we should all go out together, to cheer Charlie up. So Charlie, the Huxleys, Vernon and I went down to the fish restaurant on Santa Monica Pier. Charlie was quite gay during dinner. He and Aldous sang old London music-hall songs. Later we went over to the booth of a “reader” of handwriting—a stout, strangely charming, well-dressed lady, who told us that she suffered from asthma and worked here for the sake of the sea air. We were careful not to let her see Chaplin’s face. It was dark by this time, and he stood back in the shadows behind us while we showed her a piece of paper on which he had written “Charles Spencer.” The lady became very much disturbed. She kept repeating that this was a most extraordinary hand. What was the gentleman’s profession? “The theater business,” she was told. Oh, no—that wasn’t right, at all. The gentleman was a musician. He ought to concentrate on that. And he was deeply interested in oriental religion and mysticism. Also there was a woman, a long way off: she was very unhappy about him. (This, said Maria, was undoubtedly Chaplin’s mother.) The “reader” urged Chaplin several times to come back and have a session with her in private—but I don’t think he did. He seemed rather impressed and upset by what she had told him.

  Like people who try to cure an unhappy marriage by having children, Vernon and I bought two Persian kittens—the most charming I have ever seen. It was at this time, also, that Vernon brought home a little scarlet snake. He always loved snakes; I am afraid of them, but I petted this one gingerly. He put it in a wire-covered cigar box in the garage. Vernon explained to me that it was a Coral King Snake (Cemophora coccinea), quite harmless but hardly to be distinguished from the poisonous Coral Snake. What exactly, I asked, was the difference between them? Vernon couldn’t say, so we looked it up in Ditmars’s big book on reptiles.91 The harmless Coral King Snake, we read, has pairs of black half-rings inclosing a wider half-ring of yellow, while the poisonous Coral Snake has yellow rings bordering the black. … Vernon and I looked quickly at each other—struck by the same doubt. We rushed down to the garage and bent over the box. The snake had escaped. We never found it again. As there were a lot of children playing all around, we thought it best not to mention the loss of the snake to our neighbors.

  The kittens frisked all over the house, scratching the furniture and making their little messes. But the mess of our own lives was bigger, and couldn’t be mopped up. Nothing helped any more, even fights. We ne
ver laughed. The worst thing about resentment is that it is entirely humorless. We hated the very fact that we had become so dependent upon each other. On February 17, we parted. I must be grateful to Vernon that, at the last moment, when I would have patched things up for the hundredth time, he insisted on carrying through our decision. He moved to a little house on Gordon Street. I went to the Hotel Stanley, on North Wilcox, just above Hollywood Boulevard.

  The Stanley was a small place, only recently opened. There was a plainness about its furniture and decoration which appealed to me. After the great burden of possessions at Harratt Street, I wanted to feel that I was travelling very light. I had brought nothing with me but my clothes and about a hundred of my books, which I had had trucked to the hotel in a bookcase, to give me some slight illusion of being at home.

  Loneliness is as terrible and irrational as passion. You can’t argue with it. You can only oppose it by a careful ordering of your life. It is always crouched ready to spring, waiting for the unguarded minute. I saw as much of Gerald as I could, kept much more strictly to my times of meditation, and tried, as far as possible, to fill my whole waking life with activity. The studio wasn’t helpful in this respect, however: the work they were giving me could hardly be described as exacting.

  For instance, there was an excellent British picture called The Stars Look Down. Somebody from Metro had bought it, in a lapse from bad taste, and now the front office was scared to release it—it was too left-wing. But, since the money had been paid, the left-wingishness would have to be “cured” somehow. So they’d told off Harry Rapf to get himself a writer and fix it.

  Harry Rapf was quite an important figure at Metro. Maybe he, too, knew where the body was buried—although I doubt if he was capable of remembering. Or maybe he was simply a relative of Louis B. Mayer. They resembled each other a good deal. Both were rodent types, but Harry was distinguished by his enormous nose. There was an unkind story of a young man whom Rapf had discovered and groomed as a writer, believing ardently in his talent. One day, after many expectant months, the young man came to Rapf in triumph. He had an idea for a comedy, a really great idea. Rapf was delighted. At last his protégé was going to make good. He urged the young man to shoot without delay. “Well, see—” the boy began, “it’s like this: there’s a guy, and he has a big nose—no, not just a big nose—a super-colossal, amazing, sensational nose—” Here, his eye fixed on Rapf’s nose, and glazed in horror. Apparently, he had never been aware of it before; or he had carefully censored it out of his consciousness. He faltered. His voice died away in his throat. He rushed from the room. Neither Rapf nor Metro ever saw him again.