Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  December 20. Sister is sick—not dangerously—but Kolisch has put the girls on a twenty-four-hour nursing shift, chiefly, I think, to punish them for not taking better care of Ed Tremblay (who’s nearly well, now, and going home). Mr. Kellog died this morning. Swami’s going to the funeral on Friday. Roughie, Vernon’s Airedale, has been taken to the vet to be destroyed; she had a bad sore on her back.

  Willie Maugham’s friend, Gerald Haxton, is dead. I heard this from Gerald Heard, when the Beesleys drove me down to Laguna Beach yesterday, to look at a house they may rent. We had lunch with Chris. Gerald went into a number for Dodie’s benefit—but it was the wrong one, and he realized it too late, and started to overact and ham it up until I wanted to sink through the patio floor. “He fills me with a kind of horror,” Dodie said later.

  December 31. Something has happened. Or rather, nothing has happened but I accept that nothing. Suddenly, I feel quite calm. Sure, the situation is impossible. Sure, I ought to stop seeing X., or leave Ivar Avenue, or both. I ought either to get a movie job or start a new story. But the whole problem—just because it seems insoluble at present—has to be accepted for what it is, and simply offered up. I’ll let it develop and try to stop worrying. Sooner or later—probably much sooner—X. will go away. Sooner or later, I shall write another story, or get work, or money, or go East or to England. Nothing that is happening or may happen really prevents me from doing the one thing which ultimately matters. Make japam, watch and wait. Put all your emphasis upon that. Everything else—even your scruples about your conduct—is vanity, in the last analysis. Never mind what other people think of you. Never mind what you think of yourself. Go ahead with the only valid activity, the one which never fails. Stop trying to tidy up your life. Stop making vows—you’ll only break them. Less fussing and more faith. You’ve been an awful nuisance lately, but I forgive you. No, don’t thank me. No more tears, I beg. Blow your nose, and pull up your socks, and shut up. You don’t have to be a grim old stoic, either. Your life could be such fun. Now run along and enjoy yourself. And let’s try to make this a happy new year.

  1 Journey to a War, with Auden.

  2 Mummy; see Glossary under M. and under Isherwood, Kathleen Bradshaw.

  3 Black jazz singer, appearing at the Onyx Club.

  4 American playwright and journalist.

  5 Writer on dance and literary hostess.

  6 Possibly Werner von Alvensleben; see Glossary.

  7 English actress and singer (1864–1942).

  8 Carroll was not killed in the war, but eventually gave up the stage because of a lung problem.

  9 Kaufman and Hart’s play.

  10 Stars of the films of slum life—Dead End (1937, based on Sidney Kingsley’s Broadway play), Crime School (1938), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), and others.

  11 Olsen and Johnson’s stage revue.

  12 American political journalist; the PEN (Poets, Essayists and Novelists) Club is for published authors.

  13 “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”

  14 The convict in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.

  15 Auden and Isherwood’s 1936 play.

  16 American actor and director; “Prince Hal” in Welles’s Five Kings.

  17 Prominent British pacifists; see Glossary.

  18 A large number of immigrants were permitted annually from the U.K.; see Glossary under quota visa.

  19 H. O. Walker’s depiction, in the Great Hall, of Shakespeare’s Adonis, Milton’s Comus, Wordworth’s Boy of Winander, Tennyson’s Ganymede, Keats’s Endymion and Emerson’s Uriel.

  20 John Nance Garner, then Roosevelt’s vice-president.

  21 Arthur Vandenberg, journalist and politician.

  22 The president of the Senate, usually the vice-president of the U.S.

  23 Chief residence in Tibet of the Dalai Lama.

  24 Evidently a motor scooter.

  25 Isherwood’s habitual misnomer for Musso and Frank’s.

  26 Roughly, “You should not be called Brightmood but Darkmood.”

  27 See Glossary under Bardo Thodol.

  28 Augustin Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer: A Treatise on Mystical Theology (1910), translated from French by Leonora L. Yorke Smith.

  29 For kundalini, Krishna and the gopis, and for all Hindu names and terms, see Glossary.

  30 The Americanization of Edward Bok (1921); see Glossary under Bok, W. Curtis.

  31 Alexander of Yugoslavia, assassinated in Marseille by a Croat subject, October 10, 1934.

  32 The Steinbeck piece was published that autumn in The Kenyon Review and the short story appeared in The New Yorker; both were reprinted in Exhumations.

  33 “… is coming at once.”

  34 “Hello.”

  35 Townhall.

  36 Vincent Sheean and Negley Farson, American correspondents working respectively from Paris and London during the war, both novelists.

  37 Works Progress Administration, created by Roosevelt in 1935 to provide useful public employment during the Depression.

  38 Desikacharya Rajagopalacharya, Krishnamurti’s advisor and financial manager, and Rosalind Williams Rajagopal.

  39 The conductor Leopold Stokowski and Garbo’s diet guru, Gayelord Hauser, with whom she had much-discussed relationships.

  40 “No More Peace”; see Glossary under Toller.

  41 Peace with Honour (1933); see Glossary under Milne.

  42 See Glossary under Löwenstein and Mann, Erika.

  43 I do not know, I do not know.

  44 The William Hickey column (written at that time by Tom Driberg) appeared November 27, 1939; Nicolson’s article didn’t appear until April 19, 1940. See Glossary under Nicolson.

  45 Frederick Robert Hoyer Millar (1900–1989), British diplomat, First Secretary in Washington, D. C. from 1939, Minister from 1948; created Lord Inchyra in 1962.

  46 Possibly Lena Frank, ex-wife of novelist Leonard Frank; she joined the Viertels as a refugee with her teenage son.

  47 Henry Wickham Steed (1871–1956), British journalist and broadcaster, former editor of The Times and the Review of Reviews, also published one of the first books about the war, Our War Aims (1939).

  48 A sweet, spiced rum drink using the yolk and white of an egg beaten separately, and topped with nutmeg.

  49 Canadian-born American film star (1900–1983).

  50 German playwright, essayist, and screenwriter.

  51 The man is an ordinary actor!

  52 Then prime minister of France for the third time.

  53 Argentinian poet, novelist and translator, known for her relationships with Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Isadora Duncan.

  54 The School of Dramatic Arts founded by Maria Ouspenskaya (1876–1949), a Russian actress who first arrived in Hollywood with the Stanislavsky troupe in 1923.

  55 Isaac Leslie Hore-Belisha, a Jew, fell out with General Gort and resigned from Chamberlain’s war cabinet January 5, 1940 amid talk that Hitler’s propaganda had made the British reluctant to have a Jewish war minister.

  56 Both screenwriters; Trumbo wrote a novel about WWI, Johnny Got His Gun (1939).

  57 From “Here on the cropped grass of the narrow ridge I stand,” in Look, Stranger! (1936).

  58 British stage and, later, film actress (1878–1955).

  59 She was then about thirty years old, and Robson nearly forty; Cooper, past fifty, had previously made only a few films but made Rebecca that year and then many more.

  60 S. N. Behrman (1893–1973), playwright and screenwriter (often for Garbo).

  61 South African playwright and screenwriter (1911–1980).

  62 Australian-born London music and theater critic, poet, and biographer (1889–1946).

  63 German character dancer admired by Brecht; she had her own cabaret in Berlin, the Kohlkopp, and later, in New York, The Beggar’s Bar.

  64 Albert Basserman, German stage actor, in Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet.

  65 William Dieterle (1893–1972), German director and former actor lon
g in Hollywood.

  66 I.e. to tell the story (Hamlet, V: ii).

  67 Foreign minister and Mussolini’s son-in-law.

  68 American writer and film director formerly in the military.

  69 Albert I of Belgium resisted German aggression throughout WWI, but in May 1940 his son, Leopold III, cut off from the French army, surrendered; some Belgians fought on with the French and English until the Dunkirk evacuation in June. Lord Dunsany (E. J. M. Plunkett) was a soldier and a literary author.

  70 After the British navy sank the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir near Oran, Algeria, on July 3, the Vichy government severed relations and bombed Gibraltar in retaliation.

  71 British film director in Hollywood from 1939.

  72Forever and a Day (1943), about an English house over many years; roughly eighty stars participated.

  73 Hungarian playwright Menyhért Melchior Lengyel (1880–1974), in the U.S. for many years from 1937, wrote several screenplays (including Ninotchka for Garbo).

  74 Alluding to Turner’s painting of the ship which had supported Nelson at Trafalgar, “The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838.”

  75 Child scamp played by Fanny Brice in the Ziegfeld Follies and in the radio skit of the 1930s and 1940s.

  76 Fred Astaire’s sister and his dancing partner until her 1932 marriage to an English aristocrat.

  77 Lyricist and Broadway impresario, producer of Cole Porter’s early musicals; he proposed to Loos in 1934.

  78 W. P. Lipscomb (1887–1958), British screenwriter in Hollywood from 1935 through the war, who also worked on Forever and a Day.

  79 Los Angeles psychiatrist.

  80 By Dorothy Brett.

  81 2 Kings 5.12.

  82 English poet.

  83 A grand San Francisco hotel.

  84 Breasts; Adohr was a local dairy (named for the owner’s daughter, Rhoda, with the letters of her name reversed).

  85 Wealthy English versifier, painter and botanist.

  86 Civilian Conservation Corps; see Glossary under CPS camp and under Selective Service.

  87 Anne Morrow Lindbergh, writer, wife of the flying hero Charles Lindbergh.

  88 Not his real name.

  89 A restaurant; see Glossary under Todd.

  90 Crawford played Sadie Thompson, the American prostitute, in the 1932 film of Maugham’s story about Western Samoa, “Rain”.

  91 Probably The Reptiles of North America, revised edition (1936).

  92 The Waste Land, 11. 402 ff and note to 1. 402.

  93 See Glossary under Selective Service.

  94 A Baptist sect.

  95 The international Christian pacifist organization.

  96 University of California at Los Angeles.

  97 The Practice of the Presence of God: The Best Rule of a Holy Life by Brother Lawrence (1611–1691), a French Carmelite monk.

  98 Then thought anonymous and attributed since 1955 to Heinrich von Bergen, a fourteenth-century German priest of the Teutonic Order; also see Glossary under Meister Eckhart.

  99 Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, I: ii.

  100 From Tennyson, Idylls of the King, “Gareth and Lynette” (ll. 116–118).

  101 Matthew 11. 29 reads, “learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart.”

  102 English poet (1763–1855).

  103 Thomas Brown, after Martial, Epigrams, XXXII.

  104 The Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

  105 Jan van Ruysbroeck, medieval Flemish monk, theologian and mystic.

  106 Italian religious poet, monk and mystic (c. 1228–1306).

  107 Josiah Royce (1855–1916), American philosopher and author; he taught pyschology at Harvard in William James’s absence.

  108 Producer of The Earl Carroll Vanities, a showgirl revue; he co-wrote a play, Murder at the Vanities, set in his Sunset Boulevard nightclub and later filmed.

  109 By W. F. Harvey.

  110 A human being made of clay and brought to life by the medieval Prague rabbi.

  111 Literally, “bird of passage”; a member of Heinrich Hoffman’s youth group promoting outdoor life, especially hiking and folk culture.

  112 Moscow-born geographer and revolutionary (1842–1921); he renounced his title in 1871.

  113 Not their real names.

  114 French intelligence.

  115 Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), German founder of phenomenology.

  116 Friend.

  117 See diary entry for July 16.

  118 Not her real name.

  119 —I am so afraid …

  120 Leon Henderson, head of the wartime Office of Price Administration.

  121 The first performance, by Paul Wittgenstein with the Philadelphia Orchestra, of Britten’s Diversions for piano (left hand) and orchestra.

  122 As “Juno Boyle” in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock; see Glossary under Allgood.

  123 Wagner’s opera.

  124 By Beethoven.

  125 German actress and film star (1898–1986), settled in England from the 1930s.

  126 Robert Millikan (1868–1953), American Nobel physicist.

  127 From Rimbaud’s “Bateau ivre,” the penultimate stanza: “If I want a water of Europe, it is the puddle black and cold …”

  128 The anarchists executed in 1927 for alleged murder in the course of armed robbery; the evidence was slight.

  129 “Case closed!” and “That’s what’s left of the shooting match!”

  130 Count Carl Stürgkh, assassinated October 21, 1916.

  131 Chapter 3.

  132 Henry L. Stimson (1867–1950), then U.S. Secretary of War.

  133 Published in The New Yorker in October 1942 and later reprinted in Exhumations.

  134 American producer, brother of playwright Moss Hart.

  135 Thales of Miletus, sixth-century B.C. Greek philosopher.

  136 Jean-Jacques Olier (1608–1657), French mystic and founder of the seminary of Saint-Sulpice.

  137 United Services Organization, a mostly volunteer charity chartered February 1941 to provide welfare, recreation and live entertainment for U.S. armed forces at home and abroad.

  138 The French admiral and Vice-Premier collaborated with the Germans, then negotiated with Eisenhower once the Allies landed at Casablanca and Algiers in November 1942. He was assassinated soon after; see December 30 below.

  139 I.e., grinning like a Cheshire cat.

  140 English author (1864–1943) of steamy romances.

  141 Prater Violet.

  142 Paul V. McNutt (1891–1955), then Chairman of the War Manpower Commission, which ran Selective Service from December 1942 until December 1943.

  143 Robert Moses, New York City Park Commissioner from 1934 to 1960, built new highways, bridges, parks, and beaches; a power broker, he also ran for Governor of New York.

  144 Of speech and worship, from fear and want; first named by Roosevelt in his January 6, 1941 Congressional address proposing Lend-Lease.

  145 As in “Bad Blood” in A Season in Hell.

  146 Noël Coward’s 1942 film about a British warship in WWII.

  147 In “From Oedipus at Colonus,” first published as an individual poem in The Tower (1928); the play is by Sophocles.

  148 Motive: The Magazine of the Methodist Student Movement, published in Nashville, Tennessee.

  149 An academic (b. 1915); studied at Northwestern and Columbia and later became Professor of Speech and Drama at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.

  150 “Acts passed beyond.”

  151 “The Huxley-Heard Paradise,” Partisan Review, 10.2 (March–April 1943), pp. 143–58. Chase (1904–1988) was a freelance writer and part-time academic.

  152 See diary entry for June 17, 1942.

  153 By Cheng-en Wu.

  154 Edwin Arnold’s long poem about Buddha.

  155 The Wisdom of China and India (1942).

  156 In the Isle of Wight.

  157 Patanjali’s yoga aphorisms, which Prabhavananda and Isherwood later transla
ted as How to Know God (1953); the passage on clairvoyants, with Swami’s commentary, begins in Part III, aphorism 16.

  158 Frank Kidder and Henry Parker, Kidder-Parker Architects’ and Builders’ Handbook.

  159 Evidently this is the motor scooter Williams bought while in Santa Monica; he had at least one accident and returned it to the dealer.

  160 Probably The Life of Swami Vivekananda (1949) by his eastern and western disciples, although others had been published by Nivedita, Rama-Prasada K. Desai, and Romain Rolland.

  161 Alluding to Churchill’s “blood and toil” leadership speech in the House of Commons, May 13, 1940.

  162 A furniture store.

  163 Fried unleavened bread.

  164 University of Southern California.

  165 German mystic and religious poet Johann Scheffler (1624–1677), from Silesia; he took the name Johann Angelus when he converted to Roman Catholicism at eighteen.

  166 “Apologia pro Poemate Meo.”

  167 An island in the U.S. Aleutian chain, seized by the Japanese in June 1942 and recaptured in May 1943.

  168 Auden’s 1936 volume published in the U.K. as Look, Stranger!

  169 Cf. Christina Rossetti, “Up-Hill.”

  170 Probably Dick LaPan.

  171 The Ascent of F6, act 2, scene 1.

  172 Probably “Om.”

  173 “In the morning I had the fatal, depressing, frightening sensation of the onset of my cold.” (April 26, 1797.)

  174 “Early I wept much. After luncheon again.” (May 1, 1797.)

  175 Helene Weigel, the German actress.

  176 Hölderlin’s poems.

  177 “The intoxicating thing,” from the duet and finale in act 2 of Bizet’s Carmen, when Carmen and the gypsies urge Don José to come with them to the mountains.

  178 A murder thriller.

  179 Chapter 34.

  180 Military Police.

  181 Disciple.

  182 Based on Franz Werfel’s novel about the dying French girl, Bernadette Soubirous, who during the nineteenth century had visions of a Lady—presumed to be the Virgin Mary—in a grotto at Lourdes; afterwards the grotto waters wrought miraculous healings.