Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  August 18. Strange—I’ve been looking forward to this outing for several weeks, and now that I’m here I find I’m bored. This is chiefly because of the Viertels. I’d blandly assumed that they would be delighted to see me, and that they’d devote all their time to keeping me amused. They are quite pleased to see me, but they’re all working hard, or busy with their own problems. Berthold has his play, Salka her movie stories, Eduard his music, Mausi her sulks, Salka’s mother her housework, Hans his sleep. Only Tommy is nearly always available.

  Last night, because I was bored, I found myself doing what I would least have expected—hunting up Tennessee Williams. I located him, after some search, at a very squalid rooming house called The Palisades, at the other end of town—sitting typing a film story in a yatchting cap, amidst a litter of dirty coffee cups, crumpled bed linen and old newspapers. He seemed not in the least surprised to see me. In fact, his manner was that of the meditative sage to whose humble cabin the world-weary wanderer finally returns. He took it, with discreetly concealed amusement, as the most natural thing in the world that I should be having myself a holiday from the monastery. We had supper together on the pier and I drank quite a lot of beer and talked sex the entire evening. Tennessee is the most relaxed creature imaginable: he works till he’s tired, eats when he feels like it, sleeps when he feels inclined. The autoglide has long since broken down, so Tennessee has stopped paying for it, and the dealer is suing him, and he doesn’t give a damn. He also has a fight on with Metro. He probably won’t stay here long.

  August 20. Yesterday morning, I cycled to Malibu and back before breakfast: it was much further than I expected. In the evening Berthold took me to the Brechts’; [Hans] Eisler was there, too. I liked Brecht immediately. He has close-cropped hair, very deep-set eyes and a pale, scarred face: he dresses in loose grey clothes and felt slippers, like a convict prepared for electrocution. He’s very lively, alert and nervous, with a high-pitched voice, not unlike Forster’s. Frau Brecht,175 who’s a Jewess, looks very strange; beautiful, in a way, and almost Chinese. She probably knows this, because she has smoothed her black hair back and tied it into a knot, and she wears the clothes of a Chinese peasant woman: a short jacket with a high collar and dark blue trousers. Eisler, the Red composer, is a little moon-faced man with peg teeth, short fat legs and a flat-backed head, who talks very rapidly in a loud unharmonious voice, with whirring wittiness. Stefan retired early to bed, with a deep bow: he had a chemistry test in the morning.

  Spent most of today down on the beach with Tommy Viertel. He asks questions all the time—about politics, Buddhism, literature, everything—with his laborious, impeded articulation, listening very carefully and earnestly to my replies. I enjoy this, partly out of vanity, but also because I always like trying to state any problem in the simplest possible terms, and my frustrated schoolmaster instinct hasn’t been indulged for a long time.

  This evening, Berthold has been reading me poetry—Hölderlin, Brentano, and some of his own. It was very enjoyable—this time, I was the student, and I got Berthold to explain to me the difficult lines in “Heidelberg” and the three marvellous versions of “Dichtermut.”176 We almost wept with excitement. It was like the old times—or as near as we can ever come to them now. For Berthold really does seem to be changed. He looks so much older, so furrowed and battered, and he is so desperately nervous. His preoccupation with the purely ephemeral aspect of this war—the opinions of commentators, the speeches of politicians, the exaggerations of journalists—sometimes seems just childish. I think he thinks of himself as a kind of prophet—it’s the last pitiful bit of fancy dress in the depleted wardrobe of his egotism—and in this he is like most of his fellow refugees. They can’t see how futile this role is. Even if they are right, occasionally—who cares? The war moves too fast. Prophecy is for peacetime. And they are seldom right: their judgment is shaken by their hope and their fear. They have nothing to contribute to the postwar world but the idea of mercy—they might be truly great in that, because they, as victims, have the right to forgive—but how many of them are capable of mercy? Berthold far more than most. But he’s so unstable. A breath of emotion can set him raving.

  August 23. Very late at night. This has been a long day. I spent most of it at Ivar Avenue, where we had a puja. Swami Vividishananda from Seattle was there—a little grey man with a quiet smile, who impresses me more than Vishwananda: he really has something. This evening, a big party at the Viertels’. Eisler attacked what he calls “religion” (he means clerical politics) and I had to defend “pacifism.” They were all very apologetic about this—as though they’d been guilty of bad taste in even mentioning the subject—rather as though a Negro had been dragged into a discussion of race prejudice. It was silly and futile. I felt like a fake. …

  On August 24, quite unexpectedly, irrelevantly and insanely, I had a sexual adventure. There is no point in describing it: it would only be interesting if I went into details, and these memoirs are not pornographic. Enough to say that it was funny and silly and not in the least enjoyable. Its only importance is in its effect on my subsequent life at Ivar Avenue, and there will be plenty about that in due course.

  My immediate reaction was to return to Ivar Avenue at once—two days earlier than I’d intended.

  August 31. My chief reason for opening this book today is my intense disinclination to write a single word. I feel just awful. High sea and no land in sight anywhere. Can I possibly stay on here? Can I possibly leave? I find myself longing for the navy, for the battlefront, as a positive haven of peace. Even cowardice loses its bearings in such a storm.

  When I told Swami, vaguely, that I’d had trouble with sex, he smiled and patted my head. “It’s a hard life,” he said: “Just pray for strength. Pray to become pure.”

  So there we are. I’ve got to become pure.

  I’m not the only one who’s upset. Madhabi told me, this afternoon in the kitchen, that she doesn’t know how long she can stick it out. Her bags are packed right at this moment. She’s revolted by Vishwananda’s gluttony and bad table manners; says she can’t understand why Brahmananda ever initiated him. And there’s someone in the family she hates desperately; because of this she has already left Ivar Avenue four times. This must be Amiya.

  Meanwhile, Sudhira is groggily scrambling on to her legs after a breakdown following insomnia and overdoses of Benzedrine. Last night we went for a walk and she told me what a hard time Sarada went through before she settled down—fainting fits and crying.

  One’s first reaction to all this is the world’s reaction: mustn’t there be something radically wrong with this place, if everybody is so hysterical? But that objection arises from the fallacy that the aim of religion is to make you happy in a worldly sense. It isn’t. The death of the Ego was never supposed to be pleasant; and this misery may really mean that we are getting ahead with it. So let the squeezing process go on, as long as we can take it.

  September 1. Roger Spencer, with the wen on the side of his face bulging unappetizingly under a patch of plaster, arrived here in the middle of the night—another source of aversion. Vishwananda, after making an appointment with me for ten o’clock to discuss translating a sonnet on Ramakrishna, has forgotten and gone out to get his hair cut. Master, thy will be done.

  I have a gnawing desire to go and see Denny and cry on his shoulder. He’s the only person I can discuss the situation with, quite frankly. But discussing it will only make it worse. What’s done is done. Oh wretched little ego, are you mad? What do you hope for yourself from this self-torture?

  How many times must I repeat it: at the moment of action, no one is free? What happened the other day could never have happened if I hadn’t been lounging and slacking for days before. The whole time I was in Santa Monica, I scarcely meditated once, or told my beads, or kept up any discipline at all. The act itself was nothing. I only mind about it because it breaks a record and hurts my vanity. It was even a very good thing it happened—or rather, it will hav
e been a good thing, if it jolts my complacency. It’s amazing, how one blinds oneself. How, with closed eyes like a sleepwalker—or like one who is pretending to sleepwalk—one edges nearer and nearer to the table on which the candy stands.

  And, as always, within this defeat lies the possibility of an enormous victory. If I can resume my life here and carry on as if nothing has happened, then that’ll be much more reassuring than if I’d never slipped. Morale is the only thing that matters.

  I wonder what is happening to Webster. We are like two men drowning in neighboring wells, completely isolated from each other. But I know that he’s going through a tough time, because he is slacking so much in every way. He meditates very little, dodges housework, eats hugely and lets himself be mothered and practically hand-fed by Amiya, who is getting far too emotionally involved with him.

  September 15. It’s just 3:45 in the afternoon, perhaps three or four minutes earlier, because my watch—that same watch which has been with me round the world and known all my friends—is gaining a little. I have a slight cold, and have just taken an aspirin and gotten undressed and into bed. I’ve had lunch with Aldous, Maria, Peggy and Bill Kiskadden, at the Beverly Derby. Aldous has had to leave Llano and come to live in town because of one of his allergies. It seems that, last rainy season, the floods washed a lot of topsoil down from the hills, and Maria found a pretty little plant lying stranded outside the house. She felt sorry for it and planted it right under Aldous’s study window, and it grew up into a huge ragweed, and gave Aldous a terrible rash. Bill, who is home on short leave, has already taken on the duties of head of the family and is mobilizing the boys to put in a pipe system for watering the garden. He and Peggy are obviously still in the honeymoon stage: she looks years younger.

  Swami Vishwananda left this morning and Yogi arrived. After a few days’ holiday with Yogini, he’s to start living here as a monk. When Vishwananda left from Glendale Station, most of the family went with him and sang the Ram chant on the platform, to the awe and wonder of the other passengers.

  This morning, I had a letter from René Blanc-Roos, confirming what Gretl Eberhart told me in a letter a few days ago (she’d seen it in a Philadelphia newspaper): his wife Kate—whom he married soon after I left Haverford—has committed suicide. Shot herself. René found her dead in the bedroom when he came home from town. She was very young. She was going to have a baby, and René thinks she thought he didn’t want her to have it. He is in a terrible state, on the verge of complete collapse. He says it’ll help if I write to him a lot. So I’ll try to, every day.

  A couple of days ago, I heard from Vernon. He’s still in New York, working at a power press, and has been painting.

  And now, lying in my little blue-walled room with the white flowered paper, the picture of Vivekananda, the sensible brown furniture, my books and practically all my worldly possessions around me—what statement can I make about the future? Only this: I really have no idea what will happen. I haven’t a notion what degree of pressure I can stand, or what I’ll do if I can’t stand it. My only visible means of escape from this place would be into the Army Medical Corps (I’ve already written to the draft board about this) but it seems most unlikely that the older group will be drafted now, despite the news of heavy fighting and casualties in Italy. Do I really want to escape? No. But I do need some kind of shot in the arm. At present, I’m just coasting.

  To be quite frank with myself, Denny’s company is very disturbing to me, a lot of the time. Because his life is free, bohemian, agreeable and full of affairs. He has a very soft daytime caretaking job at a film manufacturing company on Santa Monica Boulevard, and he’s able to study for his high-school diploma during work hours. He’s practically through now. Being with Denny unsettles me, and yet I need him more than ever before, because he’s the only person who can view my life as a whole, and therefore the only one who can give me any valuable advice. He isn’t shocked by the squalid bits of it, and he isn’t repelled or mystified by Vedanta. He’s always getting in digs at Swami, whom he’s never forgiven, but he doesn’t suggest I shall leave. His attitude was summed up the other day when he said, “Either make up your mind to be a monk or a dirty old man.” Sometimes, I find this kind of brutality bracing; sometimes it just annoys me, because I know, and Denny knows, that he has no right to talk to me like this, when he isn’t faced with the same problem himself. If I were to leave Ivar Avenue, he’d be pleased in a way, because it would shock a lot of people he dislikes, and because he knows I could only turn to him and depend on him more than ever—most likely we’d live together again. But he’d also be a bit dismayed, I’m sure, because, in a strange way, he relies on me to do his praying for him; and he would love to be able to believe in my belief. Whatever happens, he can’t lose. And I, it seems, can’t win.

  Sometimes, I feel that everything would be solved if I could get the right kind of person here. Somebody who had the same problems as myself. Somebody who spoke my language. Somebody I could talk to. But I know that this is only another attempt to wriggle away from the relationship I have to cultivate: the relationship to the shrine and what it stands for. Everything else is a substitute, and would end as all substitutes end.

  Lately, I’ve been getting more and more depressed. It’s as if I’d walked into a trap at last. After all my antics, all my different impersonations, I have picked up yet another funny mask and stuck my nose into it—and now, all of a sudden, it won’t come off. Have I really got to spend the rest of my life with these people—or any people? How I long for the mere sensation of freedom again—“la chose enivrante”177—I don’t even mean sex—it’s far more trivial than that. Just to sit at the wheel of a car at a drive-in, eating pie and coffee, and to know that there’s enough money in my pocket to go any place I want to—Seattle, San Diego, New Orleans, New York. … No! What utter nonsense I am writing! To say that I really want any of those things is as untrue as to say I want the vision of God. I don’t know what I want. The very use of the word “I” immediately turns any statement into a silly noise. Do I want to die? My goodness no—for what? Do I want to live? My goodness no—for what? Maybe I would like to lose consciousness. To go into a coma for ever and ever. But, from all accounts, that’s the one thing which isn’t possible. To believe in total extinction sounds terribly like sentimental optimism. It would be an altogether unnatural mercy.

  Meanwhile, my prayer is: “Oh Lord, make something turn up! Either bounce me out of this way of life, or bounce me deeper into it, but don’t leave me stranded on the edge.” He won’t either. I know that. The mere movement of life will carry me somewhere. Meanwhile, I just have to keep my head above water.

  How delightful religion used to be—in the days when I wasn’t doing anything particular about it! What delicious emotions, what pleasantly sentimental yearnings! Now it’s just a stupid, boring misery. I seem to get worse and worse. I know that I’m ten times more disagreeable than I have ever been before in my life. Oh, of course, I know the answer to that one, too. Swami says it’s like cleaning out an inkwell which is screwed to the table: you keep pouring in water, and nothing comes out but dirty old ink.

  Later. … Sudhira just came in, to give me a nightcap glass of lemon and rum for my cold. Her face, with its slap-happy, masochistic smile, looked moist, as if from crying. “Aren’t you terribly lonely here?” I asked. “Yes, terribly.” “So am I.”

  September 20. Down to Santa Monica. Lunch with the Viertels. Supper with the Brechts. We talked about the adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi which Brecht has made for Elizabeth Bergner. Aside from some very ingenious rearrangements and cuts, Brecht’s object has been to give Ferdinand a stronger motive for his persecution of the Duchess. Brecht says he must have been in love with her. In order to point this up, he has written in about a dozen lines of verse, in German; and these he wants translated into Elizabethan English. So he switches on all his charm, to woo me as a possible collaborator.

  Until Berthold arrived. Then, fatal
ly, we got on to the subject of Vedanta, and Brecht fairly blew his top. To him, it’s all fascism and superstitious nonsense. Frau Brecht joined in—like a Salvation Army lass—calling on me to repent and remember my duty as a revolutionary writer. Berthold took my side—or rather, he apologized for my deviation, and tried to suggest that it was only temporary; that, in fact, I might be regarded as a sort of spy in the enemy’s camp. If only—after two or three years—I’d write a book “showing up” mysticism once and for all, then my retirement would have been well worth while. All this was fairly funny, until they left me and got on to Huxley. Brecht said he was “verkauft”—had sold out. I was so angry that I nearly got up and left the house at once. I did leave very shortly afterwards.

  Brecht is obviously sincere, in his way. But, humanly, he’s no more worthy to criticize Aldous than I am to criticize Swami. He’s just as arrant an individualist as I am, and pretty much of an opportunist, too. I asked him what he’d do if a local soviet committee of peasants didn’t like his writing, and he answered that he’d talk them into liking it. In other words, he accepts the will of the majority as long as it’s his will. I think it was extremely smart and realistic of him to align himself with the communists: they’ll probably win out in Germany, anyway, and then he’ll be on top. What I object to is his claim to be more honest than a man like Aldous, and his conviction that everyone who disagrees with him is getting a paycheck from the capitalist bosses.

  Stefan, the ever-polite, sensed my rage and discreetly accompanied me to the bus stop. He would order my execution without flicking an eyelash, but, in contrast to his father, he has beautiful manners. …