Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  From Boulder Dam we drove to Barstow, where we spent the last night of our trip. Its inhabitants have made the desert hideous with enormous dumps of cans. Wherever we walked, we came upon them, all around the outskirts of the town.

  Throughout our journey, Maria and Aldous were watching like hawks for rare desert flowers. I noticed that Aldous’s sight was really remarkable for distant objects—far better than mine. Once, as we were travelling at full speed, Maria suddenly pulled up with a jerk which nearly pitched me through the windscreen, and the two of them jumped out of the car and rushed off over the desert. I thought they had gone crazy. Actually, they had spotted a group of mariposa lilies, at least a hundred yards away.

  I came back to Green Valley Road to find that Denny had arrived, driving his car from the East. I’d invited him to share my apartment until he was drafted. He’d already filled in his form 47 and been classified 4-E as a conscientious objector.93 He might expect to be sent to camp almost any time, but we hoped that, in any case, he would be allowed to spend some of his leave at the seminar which was then being planned.

  Friction between Denny and Gerald began almost at once. It must always have existed. I seem to recall that Gerald told me of scenes between them even while they were actually living together, before Denny left for the East. They were bound to clash, sooner or later: Denny, sharp edged, raw, sour, uneducated, rude, chronically suspicious of other people’s motives; Gerald with his old-maidish habits, his precise tricks of speech, his Irish blarney and his Irish evasiveness. Denny was prepared to worship, to throw all his weight on the arm of the Good Shepherd; he was incapable of discrimination, qualified admiration, of separating out the gold from the sand. Either Gerald had to be the new avatar, or an old phony. Gerald was neither.

  Chris made things worse, by getting an attack of sulks. Gerald announced, two days after Denny’s arrival, that we could no longer all have breakfast together in the Arlene Terrace kitchen: Chris had forbidden it—saying that the house was getting too full of people. Denny was very bitter about this. Chris, he said, was childish and spoilt, but he also accused Gerald of running halfway to meet Chris’s whims, instead of telling him not to be a selfish fool.

  Then there was the money problem. Some months before this, Gerald had acquired a very large sum—I believe around a hundred thousand dollars. I don’t know who gave it him, but it was earmarked for the foundation of his center, “Focus,” which I’ve mentioned already. Gerald felt, quite logically, that he could legitimately use some of it to help the future Focus members. He offered Denny ten thousand dollars, and Denny accepted them. This happened before Denny went to Pennsylvania, and I am sure that the money was given and received in perfect good faith on both sides. But, nevertheless, it constituted a kind of option or advance on royalties. As soon as Denny had taken it, he was obligated; as soon as he was obligated, he began to feel guilty. As long as he continued to follow Gerald’s way of life, and honestly intended to join the center, some day, the sense of guilt wasn’t very strong. But, as Gerald and he drifted apart, it grew and grew, and turned into resentment and near hatred. I don’t think the ten thousand dollars were ever mentioned between them again; but Denny often spoke of them to me. As long as a cent of the money remained—and it lasted nearly two years—Denny alternated between self-accusation and guilty extravagance. I think Gerald was largely to blame. After all, this was really a kind of bribe.

  I am quite ready to admit that I also contributed my drop of poison to the brew. I wasn’t altogether sorry to see a chilling of diplomatic relations between Arlene Terrace and Green Valley Road: I wanted to have Denny all to myself. I began to look at Gerald through Denny’s jaundice-yellow spectacles. Gerald, who was extremely sensitive to the faintest hint of criticism, reacted to this: unsure of himself, he began to exaggerate his least agreeable mannerisms. He began to talk, more and more frequently, in his masochistic, life-hating vein. He saw nothing but evil and ugliness around him. He delighted in descriptions of disease and corruption. He found fault with everybody. He said he hoped he’d die soon. One day, while we were walking on the firebreak, he told us that the male sexual organ reminded him of a loose end of gut hanging out of the body. In my already critical mood, this so disgusted me that I got very angry. “Gerald,” I exclaimed, “if you go on talking that kind of filth, I shall walk home alone.” This was childish, and I later apologized; but Gerald was very much hurt. Denny, needless to say, was delighted.

  Actually, those weeks of May and June were some of the happiest of my whole life. Real happiness is simply the absence of pain. After the tension of my life with Vernon and the period of loneliness which followed, I suddenly found myself quite contented, needing nothing. And this, in itself, was pure joy.

  We woke early around six o’clock, and got out of our beds without a word—Denny going into the living room, I remaining in the bedroom—for our respective sits. They lasted an hour—after which I would read, lying on my bed, while Denny used the bathroom. Then, while I got washed, he prepared breakfast. Until it was ready, we didn’t speak—even to say good morning. After breakfast, I washed up; and then we would read aloud to each other, usually from William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, a badly written book which we both criticized violently. At twelve, we began our midday hour; and then it was time for lunch.

  In the afternoon, we had various occupations. If we drove anywhere in the car, one of us would take the book along and continue the reading. At six, we always returned home for our evening sit. And, all day long, never a cross word, never a disagreement. We were perpetually busy and gay. Everything we did seemed interesting and amusing. The apartment acquired a kind of nursery atmosphere of innocence.

  We had agreed, of course, to give up sex. And we did, for two months: but this little austerity was purely technical. We didn’t give up thinking about sex, talking about sex, even boasting of our glamorous love lives. Sublimation is of the mind, not the deed, and we never seriously attempted it.

  Through the Huxleys, I had met a lady named Claire Stuart, a teacher of hatha yoga. She was a pupil of the somewhat dubious Theos Bernard, who had just gotten himself mixed up in some kind of sex scandal in New York. There was nothing dubious about Miss Stuart, however. She was eminently respectable, and had many pupils who were being taught, on a merely athletic basis, to improve their health and their figures. Miss Stuart was herself, perhaps, a more complicated human being than these youth-and-beauty-seekers. Denny and I felt sure she was a lot older than she looked and we thought we could detect unhappiness and strain beneath the sleek disguise of her suppleness and charm. She had a really amazing body which she could twist and stretch in every direction with the utmost ease.

  She taught us bastrika, hollow tank, air swallowing and many other exercises and postures. It took us about an hour and a half a day to work through them all. Even when we were all three lying nearly naked on the floor, Miss Stuart remained the perfect lady. She explained that the air which is passed through the body in the swallowing exercise should come out “quite odorless”—and she smiled with playful disapproval when one of us released an evil, noisy whiff of gas.

  I must admit that the exercises, which we practiced daily for about three weeks, made me feel wonderful. My insides felt like a well-packed suitcase. But then Miss Stuart began to advocate the use of an enema—as a preparation for the yogi trick of washing out your intestines with water by muscular effort alone. I objected to this, feeling that I was getting out of my depth. In any case, I had never intended to continue the exercises for long. I did them chiefly because hatha yoga is such a misrepresented occupation, and I wanted to know something about it at first hand.

  The Swami, when he heard of it, was highly disapproving. He told me that the breathing exercises produce hallucinations, and that he had seen people in India who retain a boyish physique up to the age of sixty, but are complete idiots in consequence. “What is the matter with you, Mr. Isherwood,” he asked severely, “surely you
do not want Etarnal Youth?” I was silent and hung my head—because, of course, I did.

  I was working for the American Friends Service Committee on and off during the whole of this time. I used to drive to the Friends Center on Orange Grove, Pasadena, and pick up bundles of clothes to be delivered to the Okie camps in the valley around Bakersfield. These camps were certainly an improvement on the “Hoovervilles” described in The Grapes of Wrath, but they were miserable enough: long narrow corrugated iron huts, which became uninhabitable ovens in the midday heat. On these trips, I cooperated with the Chisholms, who were rapidly developing social consciences and convictions to suit them. (They now had a beautiful old Spanish crucifix, insted of an erotic surrealist “object,” lying on the table beside their bed: the Bible and the works of Heard had replaced Ulysses and Lady Chatterley on their special shelf.) We had much consultation, before our first visit, as to what Bridget and Hugh should wear—lest the Okies’ feelings should be hurt. Something “very plain” was agreed on. They finally showed up in brand-new denim pants and gaudy silk neckerchiefs, like guests at a dude ranch. But we needn’t have been afraid of striking the wrong note. We scarcely saw the Okies at all. Quaker volunteer workers received our bundles, and our stay at the camps often didn’t exceed ten minutes.

  In addition to the Okie work, I took on a certain amount of visiting. There were a lot of refugees living around Hollywood and Beverly Hills who needed help of one kind or another. One man could get a job if he had an artificial leg. The Chisholms invited Barbara Hutton to dinner and told her the story. Next morning, she sent a check. Another needed a camera for professional work. Another canned goods. Another, a job as a gardener and the necessary tools. Actually, we were much more successful than most of the local workers at raising money, because the Chisholms had such influential friends. Our reputation at Pasadena was soon considerable. We even considered the idea of opening a regular office and acquiring a staff.

  But my most interesting “case”—the only one that taught me anything at all—was a total failure. One day, I met Guttchen in the street. He was in the depths of poverty and despair—and aggressive, cunning, theatrical and cynical as ever. We began by arranging that he should live at the house of a Quaker named John Waye. He didn’t stay there long. He savagely tore their sweetly reasonable goodwill to shreds. He refused to have a doctor examine his kidneys: “That man knows nothing—he’s just a shoe salesman.” Bitterly he assailed our bourgeois, wishy-washy philanthropy. It was all a pose. “You call yourself a Friend,” he railed at me, “all right, go ahead—do something. I’m not your friend. You’re mine—or so you say.” If I had any religion, any consolation, any spiritual strength—I was to give it to him. I said I was a believer. Very well, then—what did I believe? Or didn’t I believe, really? “Of course I believe—” I protested weakly, my vanity smarting under his jabs. But when I tried to tell him, the words just wouldn’t come. No—not with my Chevrolet standing outside. Not with Denny waiting at home to cook a tasty evening meal. So I gave him money. And Guttchen sneered, “You’re bribing me to leave your conscience alone.” It was true.

  From Guttchen I learned some of the problems of social service. You can’t only help people, like a Lady Bountiful, from ten to four. If you want to be of any real use, you must share your life with them. Otherwise, it’s probably better to avoid them, and subscribe to charities. My experience with Guttchen had a good deal to do with my decision to go to Haverford, later in the year.

  Denny sometimes came with me on these visits, and on the Okie trips. We also made two semi-pleasure trips—hunting real estate for Gerald’s future center—one to the Sequoia Forest area, the other to the coastal country south of Laguna Beach, the mountains around Julian, and the Palm Springs and Mojave deserts. We found several more or less suitable ranches for sale—including one behind Oceanside, called the Blue Bird, which we particularly liked. Later, we drove Gerald down to see it, and Gerald turned it down. Denny took his refusal personally, and was very indignant. Actually, I doubt if Gerald would ever have bought any property at all—he was as undecided and full of excuses as Queen Elizabeth—if Felix Greene hadn’t finally taken matters into his own hands, and bullied Gerald into the purchase of Trabuco. But that was many months later.

  Another companion on my Okie trips was Vernon. We had gone on seeing each other, at intervals, ever since we parted. Vernon and Denny could never meet, because Vernon hated him—violently, unreasonably, with a mixture of jealousy and self-recognition: the two of them were really very much alike. Denny realized this too, but reacted in just the opposite way. He sympathized with Vernon and would have liked to help him and be his friend. He even blamed me for breaking with Vernon, and said he was sure the fault was mostly mine.

  Vernon was living in wild untidiness and dirt in his little adobe house on Gordon Street—painting a little, drinking a great deal, and having promiscuous sex off the boulevard. One night I arrived to find him apparently dead drunk. Actually, he had swallowed half a bottleful of Seconal tablets. A friend who happened to be there helped me work on him for a long time, with cold water and black coffee. When Vernon came around, he professed to be very angry with me. He’d wanted to kill himself, he said; but I doubt it. After this, I persuaded him to see Allan Hunter. They had long talks which seemed to make Vernon feel better about things—rather to my surprise. Allan was unexpectedly good at dealing with such cases.

  I longed to help Vernon somehow, but I really knew that I couldn’t. We knew each other too well. However, we continued to meet. Sometimes it was so enjoyable that neither of us could believe, or remember why, we had ever quarrelled. Sometimes we only made each other miserable: one wrong word led to another, and we’d part angrily after a few minutes—jarred to the bone on each other’s basic obstinacy.

  Denny had trouble with his back, and Miss Stuart’s exercises were continually putting him out of joint. So we went to see a Swedish osteopath named Dr. Inglemann, whose office was on Hollywood Boulevard. He, also, had been recommended to us by Maria Huxley, that connoisseur of doctors, clairvoyants and cranks. Inglemann twisted Denny this way and that: his most agonizing trick was the jerk with which he adjusted the first vertebra of the neck (he called it “th’Aatluss”). I went to him a few times, myself, but gave up after a horrible operation for draining the sinus: he stuck his little finger right up my nostril and seemingly far into the brain.

  Dr. Inglemann was also a diet enthusiast, with a phobia against commercial chocolate—which he said was a deadly poison, containing arsenic. He regarded the chocolate makers as the real merchants of death, exploiters and enemies of mankind; far worse than any dictator or munition merchant. He was a vegetarian and an ardent disciple of Krishnamurti.

  It now became apparent that I shouldn’t be going to the San Dimas camp. Volunteers were not wanted: the draftees were already arriving in sufficient numbers. Edna Schley tried to get me an interim job at Metro, to last until the opening of the seminar in July. So, one day, I was sent for by a producer named Jack Chertok. He had a movie story about a Nazi gas factory in Czechoslovakia and a Scarlet Pimpernel Englishman who destroys it. I read the script through and told him I was sorry—I couldn’t conscientiously write a picture on such a subject. Chertok was very nice about this, and much interested in my description of the C.O. philosophy, which he had never heard before. I also told him about the work of the Friends Service Committee. “Come to me after the war’s over,” he said, “and I’ll be glad to help you in any way I can.”

  At this time, I met Kagawa, who was touring America on a peace mission. He was an old friend of Allan Hunter’s. Gerald, Denny and I drove down to an early morning service at Allan’s church, at which he was present. He preached very badly, on a text from the Apocalypse, arguing with the most dreary kind of Christian fundamentalism. And afterwards there was a stupid breakfast party, at which Kagawa’s secretary, Mr. Ogawa, talked fulsomely of their prison experiences—revealing, as an anticlimax, that they had on
ly been in jail three weeks. But Kagawa himself was strangely impressive—very pale, in his heavy black frock coat, with thick glasses covering his weak, trachoma-inflamed eyes. Because of the trachoma, he wasn’t allowed to shake hands: he offered each of us his forearm to grasp in greeting. There was about him an air of great gentleness, and of an infinite sadness and pain. He seemed to move in pain, as if within an element, softly, selflessly. A Japanese man of sorrows, burdened with all the soft, heavy, overpowering melancholy of his manic-depressive islands.

  Allan Hunter brought other interesting visitors to see Gerald—[Frank Charles] Laubach, who wrote Letters by a Modern Mystic, and [John Allen] Boon, the author of Letters to Strongheart. I can remember nothing about Laubach except a general impression of benevolence. He had spent most of his life as a missionary in the Philippines. He seemed quite dazed with pleasure at finding other people who shared his concern with mystical religion. I felt embarrassed because he treated me as an equal, and assumed that I was as experienced as himself.

  Boon, by contrast, seemed a bit phony. He was highly individualistic and Californian. He talked about Strongheart—the German Shepherd dog which Larry Trimble changed from a savage police-trained killer into a creature so intelligent that it literally died of its own attempt to become a human being. He also claimed that insects can be communicated with, just like animals. He had argued with a train of ants and persuaded them to stay out of his icebox. He had trained a fly to come and sit on his hand while he was writing, and even to run down inside his fist, such was its trust in his good intentions. One evening, he was having supper with Sid Grauman, owner of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Boon told Grauman about the fly, and Grauman became greatly excited and said he just had to see it at once. Boon warned him that, at that hour of the night, the fly would probably be asleep, but Grauman couldn’t wait. So they drove down to Boon’s place. For a long time they waited, and at last the fly appeared and settled on Boon’s hand. “Get him to come to me,” Grauman begged. “I’m afraid he won’t do that, Sid,” said Boon, “you see, you despise him. You think you’re better than he is.” “I don’t despise him,” Sid was nearly in tears, “honest, I don’t. I don’t think I’m one bit better. I swear to God I don’t.” “It’s no use just saying that, Sid. He knows how you feel.” “But I swear to God—” “It’s no use, Sid. I’m sorry.” Poor Grauman! His eyes were turned into his very soul. All his life, he’d despised flies and thought himself better than they were—and now, suddenly, he wanted to repent and be forgiven. But the laws of karma work otherwise. The fly wouldn’t come.