Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  My right thumb is very painful tonight.

  November 11. The phonograph is playing because Ted is here after the beach, and we’re waiting until it’s time to go and see a juvenile delinquent movie made in Sweden.

  Today on the beach has been incredibly warm, but not nearly so much as yesterday. The heat wave is tapering off.

  The house is a ruin of plaster, but at least the windows are in. By the time everything is fixed and painted, we’ll have spent at least 5,000 dollars.

  The day before yesterday, I sent in my first twenty pages of the screenplay to Jerry Wald.

  Yesterday, we went flying again with Vance Breese, starting early, shortly after seven, and getting back on the beach by twelve-thirty. We flew over the Yosemite gorge, circling Half Dome Rock, and then landed at Bass Lake. I am getting almost at ease, flying with Vance. Only a little nervous when we dipped steeply sideways into the gorge. But Vance afterwards reassured me by saying that he had been figuring all the time where we could have landed if the engine failed. He is reassuring just because he is anxious.

  A bee stung me in the arm yesterday, while I was dozing on the beach. Today it’s quite swollen.

  Johnnie, according to Dick Foote, is now definitely out of danger. Now the struggle between Carter and Starcke begins: shall Johnnie go to the ranch to convalesce, or shall Starcke take him to a rented house in Key West?

  November 13. Last night, Don and I went to Vance Breese’s house, taking Jo and Ben with us. The idea was for us to see color TV and for Jo and Ben to get acquainted with Vance—swapping their knowledge of the West Indies for possible airplane rides while they were down there. But much of this project went askew. It turned out that Vance is going only for two weeks, because he is anxious to get back home and restart life with Eleanor. Also, Ben and Jo couldn’t very well talk to him because there were so many other people around—an architect named Parsons and his Peruvian wife; a woman named Kirk, who is a flier and an international lawyer; and her daughter who works in TV and is a fan of mine. Also there was Eleanor, wearing a sort of underskirt dress—it almost seemed to be a slip—like the one [Anna] Magnani wore in The Rose Tattoo. Jo and Ben and Don all like Eleanor, but Don says she is no lady. Vance, who proved himself a very great gentleman by walking Don out to his car (the first time any host anywhere has ever done this), was clownishly rude in other respects. He pushed the hi-fi cabinet right into the room and played dirty songs at full blast, because Mrs. Kirk’s laugh irritated him. This treatment was absurdly inept—it deterred Mrs. Kirk about as little as the entry of a full orchestra would deter an opera star: she simply made more noise. In fact, it was a noisy, vulgar, rather tragic evening, with Vance restlessly wandering back and forth, demonstrating the tricks of his various possessions. I felt that, after all, Eleanor would be mistaken if she went back to him, but, of course, I can’t and shan’t say this.

  The color TV of “Jack and the Beanstalk” was beneath all criticism—produced by and for those who are constitutionally unable to believe in any kind of magic. It was the ultimate in the non-magical.

  November 16. The plastering is done now. Next week, they start painting the house. Johnnie is said to be entirely convalescent. Lincoln writes that Igor has had a stroke and is in hospital at Munich.

  I have done very little of the script this week. The novel is within a few pages of the end, however.

  Was worried about burning sensations in my rectum. Went to Sellars this afternoon. He says it’s all right.

  We had supper with Speed this evening. He plans to suggest to David Brown that he write a film of The World in the Evening.

  Saw Swami yesterday. He said of [the morals case]: “If only he hadn’t got caught! Why didn’t he go to some bar!” Also talked to [the monk] himself. There is really no case against him—only the word79 of a deaf-mute boy who claims that [our boy] beckoned to him; that’s all. But unfortunately [our boy] has to explain why he was in the can at the Hollywood High!

  A big lunch given at the Miramar Hotel yesterday by the doctors at UCLA who are experimenting with mescaline to Dr. Humphry Osmond from Canada. Osmond told me I could certainly take mescaline six months after my hepatitis.

  Ivan Moffat, just back from Europe, says Iris had a terrible time after taking the mescaline capsule I gave her. She thought she was going mad.

  November 18. Rereading what I just wrote, I should amplify about Swami’s attitude to [the monk in trouble]. He feels, of course, that the act itself was supremely unimportant—just a venial slip. “If he had come and confessed it to me, I’d have told him, ‘Forget it.’” Swami’s kind of rueful worldliness—the state of mind that makes him say, “Why didn’t he go to some bar!”—is just exactly what’s so unworldly about him. A really worldly person would have been either shocked or cynically indifferent—saying the whole thing was unimportant (the act and its relation to [this monk]’s vocation and attempted self-discipline) which of course it isn’t; and thereby throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

  Am at page 244 of the novel.

  We slept till 11:30 today, because Don worked so late.

  I doubt if we have ever been so happy together as we are now—and I very much doubt if I have ever approached such happiness with anyone else. And yet—there’s no security here. Old age coming soon, and death, which I sometimes greatly fear, sometimes think I can fairly easily accept. We walked on the beach. It was so calm and beautiful, with the sea shallow at ebb. I thought with regret of my body as it used to be when I first came here in 1939—still so lithe and young by comparison, and still throbbing with sex. Since the hepatitis, I feel myself becoming more and more impotent. But maybe this is a phase. Gerald used to say that, “The train stops—and you can get off if you want to—otherwise, it will start and take you on again.”

  Last night, an eclipse of the moon in a clear sky. The strange transparent blood-brown shadow, lasting a long time.

  Tonight the eclipse of Dick Foote, I fear, after this dreadful concert which we all have to go to.

  Speed woke me up at 8:00 a.m. this morning to say that Joshua Logan is definitely going to do the play very soon.80

  November 22. My Thanksgiving thanks are basically: that I know Swami and Don. That I finished the rough draft of The Forgotten this afternoon. That I have a job and am earning money to pay for this house—which is going to be really nice, when finished.

  Have just returned from seeing Swami. He talked about Grace. How Maharaj had told them that there are some people who just get it. “God can’t be bought.” Even if you do all the japam and spiritual disciplines, you still can’t command enlightenment. It’s always by Grace. Swami’s youngest brother got samadhi while being initiated by Swami Saradananda. Then he became an extremely avaricious lawyer. But, no matter what he does, he is liberated. On his deathbed he will “remember.”

  The scandal [at Hollywood High] has had various developments. [The poor monk] has been let out of the Vedanta Society. But his brother, a doctor in Pasadena, will look out for him. However, [the boy] doesn’t want to live with the brother. He’s going to take a room in Hollywood and get a job.

  Prema, meanwhile, is upset because Swami has taken this occasion to say that he doesn’t want any more boys “of that kind” coming to Trabuco, and that he thinks it difficult if not impossible for such a boy to make good in the spiritual life. Prema feels condemned, and yet he doesn’t have the nerve to talk to Swami and bring the whole problem out into the open.

  I, myself, wish Swami wouldn’t talk this way. I’m quite accustomed, by now, to love and look up to him without expecting him to be a pillar of wisdom and consistency on all occasions. It’s rather that, because I love him so much, I want him at least to impress others in this respect. For myself, I don’t mind. I know that Swami makes exceptions in my case. I’m privileged. He tells Prema—so Prema says—that I’m a model of devotion—(this seems incredible, but I doubt if Prema would lie about such a thing)—that he wishes he had my devotion, etc. et
c. So I’m forgiven, and allowed to get away with murder.

  Swami even said that now he didn’t want to take Tito back—because of [the incident at the high school]. But, I’m glad to say, he feels himself obligated. It would have been too shameful to turn him away now. Tito, it seems, has now made the necessary money arrangements to come.

  Last night, we saw The Ten Commandments, with Speed and Paul. A dismal bore of a film. It makes you loathe the Jews and their god. Only one line I liked. When the old pharaoh dies, his son announces: “The royal falcon has flown into the sun.” That’s the sort of melodrama I enjoy.

  Still this extraordinary dry hot weather.

  November 26. The heat wave continues. Today, the humidity was zero! No smog.

  We have stayed home tonight. I cooked pork chops. Don did homework. The house is now bleak with fresh white paint. We have become so accustomed to living in this mess, with workmen coming in every weekday morning before eight, that we almost take it for granted.

  Have just finished rereading the manuscript of my novel. It really is nothing yet—except a provocation to make something out of that nothing—which is a sort of achievement, I suppose. My present plan is to write the second draft in the same mood as that in which I wrote the first—good-humored patient fumbling—to “get down to the nerve.”81

  Its feeling should be somewhat like that of An Adventure, the book about the psychic experience in Versailles.82 We have to get quietly deeper and deeper into the weirdness.

  Jim Charlton, Betty Andrews and a young man named Ted Holcomb came to lunch at the studio today. Holcomb seemed unusual and charming, a wartime flier born in San Bernardino, who has spent ten years in Europe (much of it in Venice) and is now a private tutor up at Santa Barbara. Jim says Caskey is living at Pasadena, Texas, with a man from Bohemia. He must have a certain amount of money. He doesn’t work, doesn’t drink much.

  November 30. Yesterday I had a letter from Johnnie, written in pencil from the hospital. He writes fairly cheerfully but I get the underlying impression that he has been terribly shaken. (Carter, with whom I lunched on Tuesday, says Johnnie doesn’t realize how sick he is; but I doubt this. Some part of you knows.) What I found particularly touching was Johnnie’s saying that, when we had supper together at Chasen’s on October 9, and I told him to go into the men’s room and look at the pornographic pictures, he hadn’t felt sure he could walk that far. And I never noticed anything! Because, I suppose, I didn’t want to. It would have been emotionally disturbing and tiresome to admit that Johnnie was sick. So I didn’t. Just like the Duchesse de Guermantes in that famous last scene with Swann!83 Which reminds me, Johnnie says he is reading it. The pathos of this letter is that it reads almost as a farewell. And now I see the significance of Johnnie’s little speech of thanks to me at Chasen’s.

  The news is very bad this morning—Turkey getting steam up for war with Syria and everybody else taking sides. I’m still optimistic, but chiefly because the U.S. News and World Report is.84 They’d better be right.

  Discovery that I have no income tax to pay, this year, encourages more spending on the house. Now that the place is painted and the woodwork “pickled,” we are thinking of a tile floor, new furniture, a reorganized garden.

  Went up to Vedanta Place two nights ago, and had a talk to Prema. He had already gone to bed when I knocked on his door, after seeing Swami, and—lying in bed—he appeared very much in his own predicament: having made the bed of his life, so to speak, he was obstinately but dubiously lying on it. He longs to go and have a frank talk with Swami, but he can’t, he is afraid of him. (Afraid of Swami! That only shows me how many different Swamis there must be, for different people.) Prema keeps wondering how he can possibly stay there, when Swami dies. But where else can he go? How else could he earn his living? He wants to take a holiday and think things over.

  Don is making steady progress, both in drawing and painting. Our life continues to be marvellously harmonious. I hardly dare breathe on it or even glance at it, though. It’s like an organ of the body whose operation must never be interfered with by the conscious will.

  Perfect fall weather all this week.

  December 2. On Friday the painters finished the inside of the house. Today we put the furniture back in place and vacuumed and cleaned the windows, although a new mess is due to begin shortly when our tiled floor is put in. Also, we shot the subtitles for the bit of film about the Gurians’ visit here, which we plan to give Julie and Manning as a Christmas present. This included a scene on the beach, where I wrote “The End” in the sand.

  Ted, Don’s brother, was arrested yesterday for shoplifting. A detective at Sears caught him stealing phonograph records. The lawyer says he’ll be let off with a fine.

  On Friday I had [the boy who was arrested] to lunch at the studio and we talked about his difficulties. He says he only does these things for excitement, not out of lust. Now that his career as a monk is wrecked, he doubts if he will ever want to repeat them. He was pleasant and almost cheerful, yet I felt the completeness of his loss. Now he really doesn’t know where to turn—and yet I can’t help feeling that maybe, in some mysterious way, it’ll be for the best. I suppose the truth is that I really believe in change, both as a stimulant and a cure—even though it always terrifies me when I have to face it myself.

  This evening, I restarted the novel, beginning the second draft. I’m still working blind and I still am not quite sure that this is a possible theme for a novel, at all. All I do know is, how to rewrite most of the first chapter. So I’ll begin with that and trust to receive further guidance.

  December 4. We have been reading Dodie’s Hundred and One Dalmatians in bed. Not that I greatly enjoy it so far, but it seems very snug to be reading Dodie’s book together; it brings us into relation with her.

  Lots of bother with my teeth, and no prospect of Peschelt’s fixing them for three more days. Also vague threat hanging over me of something Jessie Marmorston found in my urine tests. But she’s too busy to see me and tell me about it because her old mother-in-law has had a stroke.

  The radio says it’s going to rain, tonight or tomorrow.

  Ted has been let out on bail till his trial.

  Prema, who came to lunch yesterday, was much shocked because Swami Vandanananda had asked Buddha (Phil) for exact details of his sex life. If he is really pure, says Prema, why the curiosity?

  Jo and Ben left by car yesterday for Florida en route to the West Indies.

  Today I bought a big lolly-eared stuffed dog for Peter Gurian. One of those loveless symbolic presents—but what else can one do? At least Julie and Manning will probably like the film we’re giving them.

  Prema brought me part of a vast manuscript by Swami Gambhirananda of Calcutta—a history of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission—to have its English corrected.85 This is my newest piece of homework, interrupting Ramakrishna’s life. It will probably take years. But first I want to finish the Rolland book on Ramakrishna.86

  December 8. We’ve had some rain, this week. Now it’s windy, brilliant but a lot cooler. The house is all painted and looks good. We are waiting for a man to appear from the auctioneer’s and tell us if they’ll sell the furniture. Last night, Bill Reid came in while Tony and Beegle Duquette were there, to talk about the floor. Tony decided for us that the kind of tiling we’d admired in Jimmy Pendleton’s shop window—four big white squares with a little black diamond in the middle—is too elegant for the kind of living room we want to have. Bill Reid was opposed to it anyway, because it would mean a lot of work, cutting up the tile. So he tried to intimidate us by estimates of the extra expense and then psychosomatically cut his own finger, right through the nail, while cutting a specimen piece of tile to show us. Tony seemed very exhausted and kept blinking with his mouth open in his fishlike way. He has just read Lions and Shadows and is very enthusiastic about Mortmere.

  Don and I had a talk, after they’d left. We agreed that neither of us want a house we have to live up to—that,
in fact, we only want to be snug. We are, to some extent, being intimidated into making this place “grand.” We have to find a happy medium. Tony said: “You might have the chest painted black, to hide what it is.” Don told me, “I didn’t dare ask him what it was.”

  Supper with Evelyn Hooker the night before last, to discuss her Chicago paper, which is now to be published, and her future investigations into the social life of homosexuals, which will oblige her to go to parties, dance and get drunk. Could she use a tape recorder, she wondered. I suggested that the only way to reassure her hosts about this would be to say awful things into it herself—so compromising that it could never be used except for scientific purposes. Evelyn had asked Edward if he would mind her going to these parties and getting into possible scandals. He replied: “No, if it doesn’t take up all of your time.” There is really something very noble and admirable about Evelyn. I love to think of her getting drunk and living it up in the interests of science—the good thing about her is that she’ll really enjoy doing this.

  Evelyn told me how [Bruno] Klopfer, the great Rorschach expert, can actually tell from Rorschachs which patients have slow-growing cancers and which fast-growing ones—because patients who have made a good adjustment to life are able to put up a much greater resistance to them. And yet, Klopfer wasn’t able from Rorschachs to tell a homosexual from a heterosexual.

  Had lunch with Speed, who told me that he compensates for his hates by positive feelings for something or someone else. So he doesn’t waste energy.

  Eleanor Breese just called me to say that she has talked long distance to Vance in Miami and he’s hurrying home—so all her suspicions that he was planning to meet the other Eleanor in New York were ill founded.

  Walked with Don on the beach. A feeling of great mutual happiness in being together. I think we’re both lucky. How many people can say that?