Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  The ceiling is greenish blue, with a suggestion, here and there, of small clouds.

  I think Chris likes my being here and fears the day of my departure, because it will mark another milestone on his own progress toward a CPS camp: he also has registered as a C.O. It’s really touching, how he clings to the least scrap of security. Today, seeing my writing materials and spectacles on the table, he exclaimed, “How nice that looks! It makes me feel as if there wasn’t any war on, at all.”

  This afternoon, we walked from Emerald Bay to the Seal Rock, peering into the rock pools full of purple anemones and great bunches of seaweed, like heavy heads of gorgon hair, dragged back and forth by the pull of the tide. We talked about the Bloomsbury group, and intellectuals in general. Some brilliantly cultured people are like great cities; you promenade through their minds, awestruck, admiring the superb buildings of the central boulevards; but if you wander further you find yourself lost in suburbs which grow more and more squalid and repulsive until they cease in the darkness of a landscape of total and empty despair. However, there are other towns of the mind which are far less imposing but charming and healthy throughout—because even the narrowest alleys are full of light and air from the neighboring ocean, the universal consciousness.

  It must have been on September 23 or 24 that I received the following letter, datelined the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, New York Hospital, September 21:

  My dear sir,

  This is going to be an exceedingly badly written letter, as it is being cooked up against time and George Edington is taking it to the post in the next fifteen minutes. I am writing to you at Mr. Exman’s suggestion, because he feels that I am somewhat closer to recent events in the histories of Vernon and Hugh Latham. We came into the picture some months ago, when Vernon expressed a desire to become part of the Order of the Holy Cross, an Anglo-Catholic monastery. I had seen something of Vernon—precious little, but was interested—and Father Tiedemann, the Assistant Superior, consulted us somewhat. Since then, we have almost literally found it necessary to form a Society for the Friends of Vernon and Hugh. I have asked Auden to send you a note stating that I am not quite insane.

  Very, very briefly, this is what has happened. Vernon left Holy Cross with Hugh to go into a retreat in the Catskills where they opened a little monastery with Hugh as Father Superior and Vernon as novice and repentant sinner. (The phrase is Edington’s.) Over the weekend of Labor Day, both boys descended on me, asking me to help them put themselves in jail as conscientious objectors. I called Edington in to help me persuade them that jail was an uncomfortable place. Finally, both agreed to accept certification to the public authorities that their previous psychological handicaps were such as to render them unfit for military service, and they returned to the Catskills to their monastic establishment. George went up to visit them (I may say that Edington is a twenty-five-year-old boy, a Master of Arts from Columbia, who served here for a year as a student assistant—an extremely fine person for whom Auden has much praise), and found them obdurate in their idea that they would somehow find God in the mountains. The going, however, might be a bit rough. It is questionable whether Vernon could stand the severe winter, and Hugh has some idea that Vernon would do best in California.

  It is to this that I address myself. Are you quite determined to go to a C.O. camp? If you decide to do otherwise, it is possible that you might be able to make some arrangement to carry Vernon through the winter if you were so minded. Mr. Exman thought it might be well for you to consider the possibilities of giving him houseroom and possibly taking on helping him come to a more realistic position with regard to his future. It seems extremely doubtful that he would adjust to the monastic life. It is equally doubtful that he would be successful in the venture in the Catskills, although time alone will tell here. …

  Yours very truly, Alfred A. Gross.

  By the same mail, or shortly afterward, came letters from Wystan and from Eugene Exman—explaining that Hugh Latham was a young man who’d applied for admission to Holy Cross (Vernon had met him there) and been refused: he seemed, from all accounts, to be an irresponsible, romantic character. Gross’s letter irritated me, with its grannyish fussiness. I replied courteously but briefly (which offended him, I later heard) pointing out that there was no question of my being “determined” to go to the C.O. camp; the Government was determined to send me there: and that I was surprised—if he knew anything about Vernon’s past life—that he should suggest Vernon’s returning to live with me, of all people. I felt annoyed with Gross for shielding Vernon just at the very moment when he’d at last taken an independent step. Vernon needed, above everything else, confidence in himself. If he’d decided to go to prison for his opinions, he should have been allowed to do so. Whatever the merits of the gesture, he would have felt good about it, later. He never lacked physical courage, and I couldn’t see him as a tender flower. Yet Gross and Edington seemed determined to get him away from the Catskills—apparently because the roof of their shack leaked and Vernon might catch cold: Edington later wrote me a long and positively mawkish letter about this. I answered, protesting energetically. Vernon remained silent throughout. After a few weeks, and some difficulty with the FBI, they did finally leave, and Vernon drifted unhappily about New York for the next eighteen months. Thanks, largely, to Gross’s interference. My opinion of psychologists sank lower than ever.

  September 25. A letter from Roger Spencer, a boy at the Los Prietos camp whom I met at Trabuco some weeks ago, to say that I was expected at camp last Tuesday. This worries me: am I technically AWOL without knowing it? But I’ve had no induction notice from the draft board yet. There must be some mix-up. I’ve telegraphed to the director of the camp asking him what to do.

  Aldous came down here yesterday. He, Gerald and I came up to Trabuco for a weekend seminar. There are about twenty-seven of us here—including some old La Vernites: Felix Greene, of course, and Lucille Nixon, the Hunters, Marian and Rodney Gale, Etta Mae Wallace and Harry Farash. Also Bob Forthman; a Quaker named Esther Rhodes who has worked in Japan and with the Japanese in the U.S. internment camps; Evan Thomas and his wife, both members of Allan’s congregation; Herbert Douglas, a music teacher and veteran seminar attender, who also visits Krishnamurti and the Swami; and David Signer, a Jewish boy from New York, half-crippled by arthritis, who is a friend of Harry Farash—Harry met him in a park one day, it is said, and persuaded him not to commit suicide.

  September 26. Morning discussion: What is prayer?

  “Prayer is a way out of prison.” Felix Greene.

  “The only thing that does any good. Prayer dissolves away my self-will.” Rodney Gale.

  “Sometimes it’s just a stubborn desire to hang on to a commitment—but it’s all on different levels. To get everything permeated with a sense of meaning—everything related to an effort that the Kindom of God can come in. An effort to be honest about Evil, and the Good behind the Evil.” Allan Hunter.

  “I must put my hand in and pull out my will. I keep repeating the two questions, ‘What is God?’ and, ‘What am I?’ … I hope to merge the two questions.” David Signer.

  “What a little we see of the total realities—and yet what a mess we have made of that little!” (I forget who said this.)

  “Prayer is the line of least resistance.” Herbert Douglas.

  “My spiritual exercises are designed to help me to withdraw from self-will and regard myself more detachedly: sometimes I have felt that detached feeling which I realize is love.” Harry Farash.

  “I pray to get out of the car which is bound to crash over the cliff sooner or later … to detach your soul from your body before it dies.” Bob Forthman.

  “I came to this thing in a rather curious way, as a reductio ad absurdum. I have mainly lived in the world of intellectual life and art. But the world of knowing-about-things is unsatisfactory. It’s no good knowing about the taste of strawberries out of a book. The more I think of art, I realize that though artists do esta
blish some contact with spiritual reality, they establish it unconsciously. Beauty is imprisoned, as it were, within the white spaces between the lines of a poem, between the notes of music, in the apertures between groups of sculpture. This function or talent is unconscious. They throw a net and catch something, though the net is trivial. But one wants to go further. One wants to have a conscious taste of these holes between the strings of the net. … Now, obviously, one could never possibly give it up.” Aldous Huxley.

  “Prayer is a mode of life which is a kind of training which will help us generate this charity.” Marian Gale.

  I quoted to the group a passage from Bishop Hedley which I found in Bede Frost’s The Art of Mental Prayer: “It (mental prayer) is the hour in which the soul lives: that is, lives its true life and rehearses for that life of eternity, in which prayer, in its highest sense, will be its rapture.”

  That prayer is actually a rehearsal, I find extraordinarily suggestive. It seems to mean that our prayer is a kind of sample of what life after death, without a physical body, would be like. And this, in its turn, gives a hint of the nature of purgatory. To be set fast in one place, incapable of movement, confronted with the Godhead yet held apart from it by all our everyday distractions, greeds and fears—that, as Gerald says, would be “hell with a time limit.” Boredom stepped up to the point of agony. (If fear is crystallized greed, boredom is crystallized selfishness.)

  If I really desire God more than anything else, then I must desire my periods of prayer more than anything else. (I most certainly don’t.) And if I believe that God is Reality, then I must regard my prayer periods as real, or approximately real, and the gaps between them as less real. The pattern of my day must be, not EVERYDAY LIFE with little patches of prayer in it, but PRAYER with huge patches of everyday life in it. Instead of thinking of my life as a journey and myself as a traveller, I should think of the real Self, the Atman, as essentially static, perpetually contemplative within the shrine, always in the presence of God. Never mind how much the body and the Ego run around in the intervals between prayer. In the course of a week you may travel thousands of miles, but your prayer will always be offered up in the same place. That’s why it’s so tremendously important to keep the prayer hours, even if only in token—never mind where you are.

  The meditation hall has a dome like a planetarium: in the darkness, it seems to have no top. Its circular form makes it into a whispering gallery; seated against the wall, you hear the faintest sound. After twenty minutes or so, when your eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, a very faint light is apparent, through the ventilators, revealing the circles of seated forms muffled in blankets (the early mornings are chilly): they look mysterious and cosmic: they seem like the Fates or the Norns. The place smells very peculiar—a blend of glue, carpet and mice. One false step, and you tumble headlong into the central pit, where Gerald sits, in a strange deprecatory attitude, half Buddha, half beggar.

  September 27. Gerald on prayer. (This is verbatim, as near as I could get it):

  But there is no doubt, as an empirical fact, that man has these two sides to his mind. The one has risen to an acute state of illumination, (Gerald meant mankind’s advance in technology) the other has sunk like Atlantis, carrying almost all human values with it. … The animals are much wiser than we: none of them trusts the five senses. It has “a law written in its heart.” In many ways, man is the most unhappy of all animals. We may be superhuman, we may be mad, but we are certainly not animal. We have no healthy animalism left. Either you must go on or go back.

  No form of rapid transition, no form of birth is pleasant. It is again, of course, what Plato said, that our feet point forward and our face points back. … The life of prayer is always your individual adventure. Everybody in that life is a creator. Something unique is coming into the time sequence that has not been there before. And then, of course, another very difficult thing with religion—each generation is unique. (Gerald meant that each generation has its own peculiar type of devotion, of religious consciousness. One generation can’t simply take over from another.)

  So those, I think, are the three assumptions we have to make … This thing is never comfortable. I remember it was, I think, Bernard Hart134 once saying the only adaptation which is perfectly sane is the perfectly stabilized person. And that person is no use whatsoever.

  I think that, before we have anything to give, we have to get quite clearly in our minds that this life is a birth. … Thales,135 because he cornered the olive crop and got rich, was supposed to know what this life ought to be. Heraclitus was dismissed as a mystic. … Greed and fear are caused by some sort of strangulated hernia, jammed off from the main life. … The next thing people have to realize is that this hatching process will go through certain stages. I believe the analogy may almost be an homology.

  I don’t think there’s any doubt that this development follows the familiar cocked-hat curve. … (Gerald meant that the chances of success in the spiritual life diminish very rapidly as one grows older. First-magnitude saints are child geniuses: they show signs of spirituality already in the first ten years—“the first call for lunch,” as Gerald puts it. Most other saints begin in their teens. Very few afterward.) The saints don’t waste much crocodile tears on those people who don’t intend to try but who only want sympathy—not the infinite, but a second helping of the finite. The difference between hell and heaven is seeing Him prepared and seeing Him unprepared. The religious person is the only one who is awake. (Here Gerald quoted the Jack London story “To Light a Fire”—to illustrate how we have to take the greatest possible precautions, in order not to become spiritually frozen.) We’re all out in a subzero temperature. … Hardly any religious person believes this to be true … I believe we’ve got to put every single element into a suspense account which doesn’t make sense for us.

  Low Prayer—I put the screws on the Infinite and He turned up trumps. But there is this other thing, Magic. I believe that most of the answers to prayer have nothing more to do with God than a fourteen-inch gun that blows a town to pieces. The most deadly thing these powers do is to make the Ego contented with itself. It may be no harm people starting with Low Prayer as long as they go on with it—because, by the mercy of God, it will always let them down.

  What you do in spirituality is you loosen this passionate grip of greed and fear which says this moment is all. … God isn’t “The Ancient of Days”—that unfortunate Jewish remark. We are the miserable seedy Ancients of Days. He alone is young, with that appalling instantaneity. … God gives Man everything, save Time. Of the Tree of Life you shall not eat—for the Tree of Life is Eternity. One fate I put upon you, you can only go in one direction. … Till we have forgiven, we are bound and tied. The whole process of Life is the process of getting rid of Time. Olier136 said—that last great saint of the Oratorians—that no saint would be concerned with prophecy. They know God’s intention—but they can’t put it down in a way which would allow a stock-exchange man to make a fortune. The saints do take events as though they weren’t surprised. There is no accident in the Inorganic: there is no accident in pure Consciousness. We’re the sport of circumstances because we want to be. Every crisis is the code word for opportunity.

  Middle Prayer—asking things for other people. You’re doing, if you like, long-distance hypnosis. You’re racked with the lower compassion. The last infirmity of noble minds isn’t ambition—it’s the wish to be of use. Middle Prayer is nearly always the struggle with God to ask for his kingdom to come on earth now.

  As the saint passes to High Prayer, he wills nothing. That’s what made Eckhart cry out, “Why, even if He willed my sins, then I will them too!”

  Drove Aldous back to Laguna Beach. He wanted to catch the bus into Los Angeles. Hadn’t been at Chris’s house long before, over the light blue hills there came a noise of revellers, and it was Bacchus and his crew—Tony Bower, Johnny Dickinson, Martin Whiteman and Dick Kitchen, that nice English painter. Drinks were drunk, and Trabuco
seemed pleasantly far away. Right now, I like both my worlds in small doses. If only one could keep commuting! But that way lies destruction.

  September 28. A reassuring letter from the director of the Los Prietos camp. If I haven’t received the induction notice, I needn’t worry. I can’t come to camp till I get it.

  The advance copies of Gerald’s Murder by Reflection arrived. I asked Gerald why he has to dash his books off so quickly, and urged him to take more trouble with the details—here is a really excellent idea, and he hasn’t bothered to develop it. But Gerald insists that it has to be this way. Says he’s “mediumistic” and must “pour this stuff out” while the spirit moves him. If he lets it get cold, he begins to strain and worry and his prayers are distracted in consequence.

  Had a conversation with the Swami on the telephone. He wants to write a letter, backing up my appeal to the draft board for 4-D reclassification. But first, he wanted me to assure him that I really intend to become a monk. I said yes, of course—but later I was bothered by all kinds of doubts. Just what does the Swami mean by “monk”? One who takes vows of chastity and poverty? Or one who belongs, specifically, to the Ramakrishna Order, conducts lecture courses, officiates at the Tantric ritual and goes to lunch with Lady Bateman and other “devotees”? I’ve decided to drive to Hollywood tomorrow and ask him.

  September 29. As I expected, the Swami waved my doubts aside. Of course—he said—I wouldn’t be asked to do things I wasn’t fitted for or wasn’t inclined to do. “Why,” he added, “I would accept even an atheist if he would take the vow of chastity.” If!

  Went to the barber’s. Whenever I’ve been out of town for some time, Hollywood Boulevard affects me with the most violent kind of depression. The bottles of Wildroot Tonic and Oil seemed scarcely to have the heart to keep up their pathetic pretence a moment longer. “We know we’re not the best tonic,” they sadly admitted. “We know we can’t really stop your hair from falling out. We know it doesn’t really matter about being well-groomed, or attracting girls, or making the grade, or selling your personality. We know you’ll grow old and die, and others will be born, and new tonics will supersede us, with new slogans and old lies on the label.” They despaired, already. And the tiled barber’s shop, with MOVIE-LAND picked out in gold lettering on the arch above the basins, was like a tragic museum of stale, twenty-year-old glamor. And the gallantly lecherous customer in his fifties with a neat military moustache, who told dirty jokes to the barber and flirted with the manicurist—he despaired, behind his alert, smirking smile. And the manicurist glanced at herself in the mirror without enthusiasm: she was no longer quite fresh. Her voice was weary as she told the customer about her dog. What age was he? “Oh, he’s ten years. He’s old.” These people, and the crowds in the street, and the trash in the shop windows, and the movie placards, and the advertisements warning you to get wise, get smart, get relaxed, get well, get sunburnt, get thrilled, get rich—and the newspapers with Japs fleeing and Stalingrad still unfallen—all these, silently or aloud, were yelling their despair because the “life” of Life magazine is deader than death, and there is nothing—no hope, no comfort, no refuge anywhere—but in the unthinkable, bottomless, horrible immensity of God.