Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Because of this perhaps, or similar experiences, poor Rapf had become very quiet and vague. He didn’t want any kind of trouble, any decisions. He was stupid and he knew it. He explained to me that the film was to be “cured” by a prologue, explaining that the miners, whose lives are described in The Stars Look Down, are the same men who are suffering the dangers of wartime England. “Humanity,” said Rapf, “that’s the keynote. Humanity’s the important thing, not politics. That’s what we’ve got to put across. I don’t want much, mind you. Just about eight hundred words.”

  So I went back to my office and started composing prologues. It was fun, at first, like writing prose poems; but the joke wore thin. By the end of the week, I had presented Rapf with half a dozen of them—none of which, I am happy to say, were used when the picture was finally released.

  From Rapf, I went to Milton Berle. I took to Milton at once. He was youngish, well built and pleasant. As a high-school boy, he used to spend his summers at Catalina, working at the hotel cigar stand and aquaplaning in his free time with the local girls—among them, the future Carole Lombard. One year, the hotel was visited by Charlie Chaplin. Charlie, already a world-famous star, was at a loose end and bored. He conceived a kind of Proustian, romantic, collective passion for the “little band” of girls, and asked Berle to introduce him to them. Chaplin dazzled them all with his fame, his wealth, his jokes; he hired a motorboat for their aquaplaning, he gave parties for them, he loaded them with presents. By the end of the summer, he and Berle were like old friends. Charlie wanted to send him to college, and then to take him around the world as a sort of secretary-pimp. “Just because I was young,” Berle told me, “he thought I could get acquainted with any girl I wanted to. The funny thing is, he’s really scared of girls. He was awful shy.” However, Berle had to refuse the offer, because of his family. A year later, when Chaplin was making a picture, Berle went around to the studio and gave his name to the doorman. Chaplin said he was “busy.” Berle made several more attempts, but Chaplin wouldn’t see him.

  Berle told me all this without the least hint of resentment. To him it seemed perfectly natural. He was a true child of Hollywood, and accepted the violent ups and downs of movie life as a matter of course. As a young man, he had been very wealthy. Then he lost everything, and had to start again from the bottom. Now he had thirty thousand a year outside of his earnings, a beautiful wife, two or three children, a fine house and a biggish yacht. He was quite a tough little customer, probably capable of getting nasty when drunk, but fundamentally amiable and, like so many of his kind, as soft as putty in the presence of what he would describe as a “cultured” Englishman. It’s our accent that does it. I’ve seen the broad a’s work wonders in Hollywood. You might call the effect “His Butler’s Voice.” Berle said of himself: “I can get mad awful easy. You see, like most Americans, I come from a bad neighborhood.”

  Berle was very apologetic about the picture we were to work on together. It was called Free and Easy—a comedy of the late twenties or early thirties, written by Ivor Novello, and originally played by Robert Montgomery and Mady Christians. Bernie Hyman was determined to remake it—for sentimental reasons, Berle said: Bernie had fallen heavily for Mady while the original version was being shot. (Mady, as she appeared in the movie, was the usual fuzzy-haired, shapeless, continental frump of that period, with a makeup that suggested galloping consumption.) The dialogue, bad enough when it was written, now dated like a newspaper, but Bernie would hardly let us alter a line. He insisted, however, on calling us frequently into his office in order to give us a performance of the love scenes. “And now,” he would drool, his eyes blinking with tears, “now she can’t say any more … He’s won her … She gives him her lips …”

  So Berle and I exchanged glances of mutual pain and mentally loaded Bernie with the entire responsibility of whatever might follow. Actually, the picture was made, with a fairly good cast, including Robert Cummings and Ruth Hussey, and it stank: though not as strongly as I’d feared and hoped. As this was only a polishing job, my name wasn’t on it. Once again, I had wasted hours of studio time. It seems uneconomical to hire a writer at six hundred dollars a week to dictate another man’s script to a stenographer.

  One day when I was up visiting Gerald, a lady named Mrs. Allen, who owned the house on the corner of Arlene Terrace and Green Valley Road, came out to tell me that her annex apartment—living room, bathroom and bedroom—had just fallen vacant. I’d once asked her to let me know if it ever should. The chance seemed heaven sent. I could be next-door neighbor to Gerald at the very time I needed him most. So, in the middle of March, I moved to 2407 Green Valley Road.

  Mrs. Allen wasn’t altogether an agreeable character. She was fond of whacking up the rent with extras, and no doubt she would have been merciless if her snoopy nature had revealed any irregularity in my sex life. But I had plenty of money, and, for the first time since the age often, nothing to hide: so we never actually fought. Mrs. Allen had a nephew named Jerry, with a big bucktoothed grin, who was in the air force. He was our chief topic of conversation. He was always passing, or failing to pass, some exam.

  Gerald and I had supper together practically every day. On weekends, we took sandwiches up to the firebreak road for picnics and discussions. The Hunters usually came too. And there were three charming boys from Allan’s congregation—Phil Basher and Bob and Bill Forthman. Phil and Bob were in their early teens and Bill was even younger; but they seemed, in an almost intuitive way, to realize what Gerald was driving at. He never talked down to them. One day, when Gerald had finished one of his brilliant discourses, Bob suddenly blurted out: “But—if that’s all true—why do we ever do anything else?” An unanswerable question, followed by silence.

  At the Swami’s suggestion, I did my first all-day sit at the temple. This sounds like an impressive austerity; but in practice it wasn’t. You were supposed to keep silent and fast from dawn till dusk—but you were allowed to talk to the Swami himself, and you were allowed to drink as much water and fruit juice as you wanted. Also, you didn’t have to stay entirely in the shrine room. You could read, in the Swami’s study; or walk in the garden, or up and down the street. I read several of the essays in Sri Aurobindo’s book on the Gita. While I walked in the street, the Swami told me to repeat my mantram and to try to give everybody who passed me a mental blessing—which wasn’t hard, because this part of Ivar Avenue is very quiet. Sitting in the shrine was rather like a long railway journey. I felt curiously exhausted. The stale incense gave me a headache, and from time to time I dropped off to sleep.

  By this time, I was getting to know some of the other occupants of 1946 Ivar Avenue, and had stopped vaguely lumping them together as “the holy women”—that phrase invented by Gerald, and so typical of his thinly veiled misogyny. First, there was Mrs. Wykoff, always addressed as “Sister”; a gentle-voiced, deaf, tough and extremely active old lady in her eighties, to whom the house belonged. Sister had met Vivekananda in 1899, during his second visit to America, and had been interested in Vedanta ever since. Her husband died, her son grew up, became an engineer and was killed in an accident near Palm Springs in the 1920s. Shortly afterward, she heard Prabhavananda lecture in San Francisco: he was then a young man, lately arrived in the United States and in charge of the Portland Vedanta Center. Sister invited him to come down and live at her house and form a center in Hollywood. He accepted. For a long time, they lived quietly, with a couple of other ladies. The Swami gave lectures in the living room on Sundays. Only a few people came. But the congregation slowly grew, and in 1938 they had sufficient funds to build the temple, in Mrs. Wykoff’s garden. Sister loved gardening. The Swami laughingly complained that she would never let anything grow; she was always furtively transplanting her flowers from one corner of the yard to another. She also loved her ill-tempered old collie, Dhruva (named for a minor Indian saint who, according to Hindu mythology, was taken up to heaven by Vishnu and became the polar star). In her old age, she had bec
ome violently political. She read radical magazines and was a great champion of Indian nationalism.

  When Sister and the Swami had been living together for a few years, they decided they must have a housekeeper. They engaged an Englishwoman named Mrs. Corbin, who had just arrived from England. The Swami renamed her Amiya: he was in the habit of giving Sanskrit names to all of his devotees, as part of their initiation. Amiya was a big blonde woman who must have been very pretty, but was now running to fat. A marvellous cook and a born manager, she was jealous and bossy. Like Peggy Rodakiewicz, she said bitter things which she immediately regretted. She adored the Swami and was terribly possessive: she hated anybody else to wait on him: she wanted to be undisputed mistress of the household. The Swami knew this and scolded her unmercifully, often humiliating her to tears in public. At first, this shocked me. Then I began to see how much Amiya needed it, how necessary it was for her to be forced to submit—even to occasional injustice. As a girl, she had been vain, silly, spoilt. She had separated from her husband (as she now admitted) for quite insufficient reasons, out of pique. Now she was achieving, painfully, a kind of greatness. She was warmhearted, passionately loyal, absolutely sincere, tactless, emotional, rude: the prototype of Martha in the Gospels. She overworked herself, unnecessarily, almost hysterically, and kept getting sick. Dr. Kolisch attended her. The two dictatorial natures clashed, and produced a permanent feud.

  If Amiya was Martha, Sarada Folling was Mary. Sarada was a girl in her early twenties, of Norwegian descent. She had studied music and dancing. Often, when she thought nobody was looking, she would strike ballet postures, humming to herself. She was very beautiful, with the pale, serene face of a saint. She took naturally to the life of meditation, spending long hours in the shrine, doing the ritual. She had learnt quite a lot of Sanskrit. The Swami was specially fond of her, regarding her as his prize pupil. This of course made Amiya jealous. She loved Sarada dearly; but Sarada’s vagueness about housekeeping drove her frantic. It was all very well for Sarada to pray, to grow more and more spiritual: somebody had to fix the dinner. Sarada understood how Amiya felt, and didn’t resent it. She had an extraordinary, quite unsentimental sweetness about her. And she was gay, lively, full of jokes, quite a tomboy. Like all genuinely religious people, she wasn’t a puritan, she didn’t cut her life into compartments; she joked about Ramakrishna, the ritual and Vedanta in general in a way which would have shocked any member of the Swami’s congregation to death. Blasphemy is only possible for those who don’t really believe in God.

  The atmosphere of Ivar Avenue and of Gerald’s room on Arlene Terrace were, in fact, entirely opposed to each other. It was very instructive for me to be able to inhabit both. On the one side, apparent disorder, religious bohemianism, jokes, childish quarrels, dressing up in saris, curry, cigarettes, oriental laissez-faire; on the other, primness, plainness, neatness, austerity, discreet malice, carrots, patched blue jeans, wit and western severity. My puritan middle-class upbringing pulled me in one direction; my past life pulled me in the other. Forster, I felt, would feel much more at home with the Swami than with Gerald. The Swami, I felt, would better understand my nights in the Berlin underworld—a period which Gerald could ignore but never forgive, because it awakened some reminiscent insecurity in himself. Gerald offered me discipline, method, intellectual conviction. But the Swami offered me love.

  However, I wasn’t in the mood for love, just then. I didn’t trust it. I didn’t dare venture again outside my shell. I wanted discipline and austerity—the gloomier the better. I wanted to take some definite step toward “purgation,” however small. It was the only way I could strengthen my shattered morale.

  So I decided to give up smoking. This was to be the final test. If I couldn’t succeed, then I was no good. I’d better retire to the Sunset Strip and relax—at any rate, that was what I told myself. My addiction to nicotine had grown, during the past year. I had to start smoking before I got out of bed in the morning; my fingers were permanently stained (I had always objected to this, in Wystan) and there were little burns all over my clothes.

  The first two weeks of disintoxication were very unpleasant. I was quite unable to do any work, or concentrate at all. I trembled. My nerves were on edge throughout the day. I longed to strangle my secretary, who happened, by ill luck, to be a rather silly murderee girl with eyeglasses. However, by a minor miracle, I succeeded. I didn’t smoke again for nearly two years.

  My final job with Metro was a picture called Crossroads, a remake of a French movie about amnesia. The producer was Eddie Knopf. I’m afraid I disappointed him badly. What with my disintoxication, and my general preoccupation with my life outside the studio, I was much stupider than usual. My contract’s first year expired early in May. I gave Metro notice (against great opposition, including my agents’, I’d insisted on the right to do this when I signed) and told [Ken] MacKenna, head of the story department, that I intended to join the San Dimas camp. He was very nice and understanding, and even had the grace to pretend that Metro would have taken up my option, which I doubt.

  My first weeks of freedom from Metro were spent with the Huxleys—on a motor trip through the desert. We drove out over the Tejon Pass, past Lebec (named for a young French trapper of the Hudson Bay Company who was killed there by a bear) and down the Grapevine Grade. The valley toward Bakersfield was still covered with lupines. As far as the eye could see, they stretched away into the dusty golden distance, like the blue, shadowed levels of a vast lake. Maria cried out and clapped her hands like a little girl. She would have liked to leave the car and wander off over the ranch. I warned her not to. Only a week before this, Gerald, Allan and I had come here and nearly trodden on a sleepy old rattler, coiled among the flowers. Gerald and Allan had had one of their serious philosophical discussions: should one kill it, or leave it as a danger to other picnickers? Nonviolence won the day, and we ended by driving it away—for no particular reason—by pelting it with handfuls of dirt.

  We turned east along a side road which wound up into the mountains and over the Tehachapi Pass. The temperature on the valley floor was at least eighty: in the mountains it was snowing. Tehachapi, where the state prison for women is, looked like Wuthering Heights.

  Down from Tehachapi and into the desert at Mojave, where we turned north along the truck-route road to Reno. We stopped the night in motel cabins at Olancha. It was very cold. Maria fussed around, seeing that Aldous was comfortable; and I suddenly felt excluded from their quietly affectionate domesticity. I lay awake a long time, listening to the roar of the great ruthless trucks, as they tore past along the black highway, swinging fans of light across my ceiling and rattling their chains. Now, at last, I said to myself, I am utterly alone.

  Next morning, we drove down, through the jagged brown ranges, into Death Valley. It was surprisingly cool, although the hotel was already closed for the summer. From Dante’s View, we looked out over the gigantic wilderness, from the long winding sparkle of dried salt on the valley bottom to the scarred canyon walls, streaked harshly with vermilion, green, gold, crimson, blue and orange—the Funeral Mountains and the Panamints—and, towering against the far sky, Mount Whitney, all in snow. I’d read of the pioneer clergyman shaking his impotent little fist at nature’s appalling indifference and crying, “Goodbye for ever, Death Valley!” A desert is a great empty picture frame, and we can’t resist using it for a portrait of our private disaster. To me, the scene was beautiful but horrible—like a vast geographical demonstration of Vernon’s total absence.

  After we had passed the ranger station, Maria triumphantly produced a little bush of silver desert holly: you are forbidden to remove plants from a national park. We drove on, through the empty plateaux of Nevada to Las Vegas, that little paradise of expensive dude ranches and cheap gambling, self-centered in its own circle of garish lights and noise, manufacturing the quick, rash marriages that Reno unmakes, and gaily unaware of the surrounding darkness and silence. After supper, we wandered through the little
red light district. The girls laughed and joked with us from the open doorways of the cribs, and Maria chatted with them like a sister. I had never seen her so charming, so genuinely enjoying herself. All night, I kept waking to hear the deep-throated baying of locomotives in the yards in front of our hotel. I wrote Vernon a letter: “Whatever happens, we shall always be friends.”

  Next morning, we drove to Boulder City and visited the dam. Pylons like marching robots stride down into the black volcanic gorge: Maria called them “the Boulder men.” Aldous said it looked like the entrance to hell. Down in the powerhouse, we saw the turbines, through which the water passes at a hundred miles an hour, with the faintest singing noise, like an insect’s hum. Huge calm saints, receiving and transmitting power, impersonally, to do good to crops and men. The saints are like that, I thought: the power which would shatter an ordinary human being like an eggshell cannot harm them, because they do not want it for themselves, they are truly vehicles, without greed or pride. And I remembered the line from the Upanishads which Eliot quotes: “Give, Sympathize, Control.”92