Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Took the Sunbeam down to be washed and have its wheel straightened. Got into a talk with Ben, who’s expecting a copy of his short stories from Methuen. Met Michael Barrie—getting fatter, like me—on the way home and talked about a young English actor he knows who wants to get into Ben Bard’s school at Fox.137 So I called Pam in David Brown’s office and she gave me some advice, which I phoned back to Michael. Then Johnnie called to say Dick Foote had caught a fish which gave birth to young, so I phoned Ben who told me that all the surf perch of the Pacific Coast do this. So I phoned Dick. Meanwhile, I also kept phoning to tell Kent Chapman how much I like his story, “The End of Everything,” in the Santa Barbara College magazine, Spectrum, which he gave me last night. No answer.

  The boy from the Sammets’ and Ollie, the one-eyed German boy, are at baseball practice. I don’t mind how much noise they make, because they are cute and sweet. But an uncute boy with glasses from across the road is firing a toy carbide cannon at irregular intervals. Of this I do not approve. The Hines are suffering from flu, so are quiet.

  The Sammet boy has just told the boy with the cannon to stop firing it—and I shouted “Hear! Hear!” out the window. But the boy goes on shooting.

  July 16. Worry, depression, fat, anxiety—this trip hanging over us and no money available for it. No job or prospect of one—other than a possible rewrite on Jean-Christophe for Wald. My stomach still acting up. Shall have to see a specialist. And somehow or other, I don’t lose weight, although I seem to be eating almost nothing—because I keep sneaking in tiny snacks.

  And my novel doesn’t get on. Why? I think because the character of Paul is wrong.

  What’s good about anything, then?

  Don. He’s an angel.

  Nice Yukio Mishima, whom I met yesterday and took out to see John van Druten. But oh, the hopelessness of communication! Here’s this guy, with all of his qualities, his ear for words, etc.—and nothing of it came across.

  Nice Don Murray, for calling and saying he enjoyed our dinner party on Friday.

  Nice Paulette Goddard, for ditto reason.

  Yes, and we slept on the beach at John’s.

  It all sounds fun, doesn’t it—and so it should be—but underneath I feel only gnawing anxiety, despair, the deadness of everything. I turn to making japam, but that doesn’t seem to improve my mood.

  Oh, Jesus—a huge carload of kids just arrived, to visit the Hines! There’ll be noise all morning.

  July 17. Ollie, the little German boy, is playing ball with the Sammet boy. Ollie keeps touching his glass eye, as if it were loose and might fall out. Yesterday I went around to see Mrs. Hine, to ask her if she would say something to the lady opposite her about her grandson’s carbide cannon. She said she would, but obviously she doesn’t think it is very important. Mrs. Hine says that [a boy in the neighborhood (whose parents are divorced)] is a juvenile delinquent. He steals cars. His mother beats him and screams, and the Hines call the police. (This shocks me.)

  Last night Don read the first chapter of my novel. We had a valuable talk and now I see the way to certain improvements.

  John van Druten called to say that Dodie has a tame thrush. She wants it to eat well—but must it eat worms?

  Still no news about money for the trip. And my stomach symptoms persist. This morning I asked Don if he’d mind very much if we had to postpone it. He said no—there was always school. This made me very happy.

  Ollie lost his eye in a bicycle accident—riding behind his big brother. They ran into a car. In Germany, an attempt was made to graft on a living eye. But it failed.

  July 18. For once, I’m in an optimistic mood!

  Jessie Marmorston and I went down to see a Dr. Griffith this morning—he’s so grand, so entirely the medical doyen, it seems, of Jessie’s circle—that he isn’t even Jewish! He says I’m in fine shape, all except for my vagus nerve, which is causing this upset in the pyloric region. So I’m to take belladonna to stop the spasms. And if that doesn’t help—well—they’ll cut part of the vagus nerve!

  Jessie also went after me about my financial mismanagement. She says she has made a million for Larry138 since she has known him. She was horrified to hear that I only have ten thousand in the bank. She says she is going to see about this.

  But, senselessly, I feel cheered up. I resolve to write the first two chapters of my novel before we leave. Jack Goodman called me this morning saying he would produce the 11,200 dollars I need for the trip. Now I almost believe in our going.

  But tomorrow we’re off to Santa Fe for the weekend.

  I was quite amazed to discover that Jessie is so businesslike. She talked about amortization as though it were some process connected with the ductless glands. She says Larry has always been so scared. He didn’t dare ask MGM to pay him his salary in a different way, so as to avoid supertax. He feared he’d be fired.

  This afternoon, full of my new energy, I went swimming in the bright windy sea. A boy and girl on the beach, evidently newly married. He was really handsome and sexy and conscious of it. She, merely pug-face cute, and anxious already. With a teasing grin, he went and lay down several yards away from her. She called, “Come back to your wife. You’re embarrassing me.” Finally he crossed to the other side of her, eyeing some teenage girls. She buried him in the sand and passionately kissed him on the mouth. He let her, grinning at the teenagers. They snickered. I saw their whole marriage—probably not a long one.

  July 24. Yesterday I began another draft of my novel, in the third person. I have no idea how this will turn out.

  We spent the weekend in Santa Fe, staying with the Winfield Scotts, an arrangement made by Mirandi [Masocco], the all-powerful proprietress of the Thunderbird shop. We saw The Rake’s Progress twice and also the worst imaginable performance of I Am a Camera, by a Taos theater group.

  Mrs. Scott is very rich and liberal, apple cheeked and haystack haired, with glasses. She goes around in shorts and travels barefoot to New York on the Super Chief. To kid her, a bunch of her friends once saw her off at Lamy junction, all wearing hillbilly clothes and accompanied by a mob of borrowed children.

  Winfield Townley Scott is a poet and critic. He has a pipe and a seventeen-year-old son by a former marriage—very handsome and quite a junior thug—who unfortunately is only about the height of a twelve-year-old boy. He is allowed to drink and smoke and stay up late. He lolls around sexily, demands to be shown nudes of girls, keeps rolling up one of his sleeves to the armpit, calls his father Daddy-O and his step-mother El.

  The hot dry air. The plain with the bright, bright, vivid cottonwoods, ringed around by far blue mountains, and the piled thunderheads, so firmly rounded and white.

  Taos is unspeakable now. The drugstore people have utterly ruined it. But the landscape around [Dorothy] Brett’s cottage hasn’t changed. It is open and beautiful. She wasn’t home. We peeked in and saw her brass bed, and books and paintings. Such an innocent interior—like the home of a saint.

  The Rake grew on me. There is something heartlessly brisk in the music which suggests the eighteenth-century equivalent of the Bandwagon.139 All aboard for London, sex, success. Oops—you fell off? Too bad! Goodbye—we won’t be seeing you!

  One afternoon we swam in a natural pool fed by a spring—the property of the Finnish consul. He has built a Finnish-style rock-steam bathhouse, with grass planted on the roof.

  The Spanish-American boys in Santa Fe hate the “Anglos.” The other day they severely beat up the clerk at one of the biggest hotels because he told them not to make a noise in the street outside.

  Vronsky and Babin, the pianists—a pair of squirrels who have hoarded Picassos and Chagalls.

  Don and I agree that Vera Stravinsky is one of the un-nastiest people we know. There seems absolutely nothing bad about her. She is sweet tempered, funny, silly, kind, intelligent and very industrious. She had a show on in Santa Fe of her paintings. We bought one called Reflections.

  Witter Bynner has already gone to Greece with B
ob Hunt. We were shown over his house, however. It is really rather dreadful—so dark with old teaky chinoiserie. Such a great burden of stuff to carry to your grave. And there is something sinister about having youthful portraits of yourself hanging in your study.

  Bynner’s witchlike housekeeper Rita—a white witch—said, about Bob Hunt, “It’s good to have a friend.”

  Last night we had dinner with Alex Quiroga and his Texan friend at Sinbad’s, and went up to Lennie [Newman]’s apartment later. He seemed in a very bad state—maybe a sort of softening of the brain. He declared that he’d given up after four piano lessons because he was a perfectionist and knew he could never be great—as great, he implied, as he is at cooking. It was sad and embarrassing. I had never seen this megalomaniac side of him before.

  July 26. Frank Taylor called this morning from New York to tell me that Jack Goodman of Simon and Schuster died suddenly a couple of days ago. However, he thinks Simon and Schuster is ready to go through with the advance.

  Gavin Lambert with incredible industry has written the whole of the script for the first TV play of our series for Gingold. We’re to start peddling this next week.

  In a month, my birthday. In two months we’ll be nearly ready to leave. My novel crawls. I’m slothful and fat, as never before. I seem to have lost the knack of work. I waste time on anything and everything that comes handy.

  July 30. Two days ago we spent the evening with Paulette Goddard, Remarque, and Florence Homolka. We ate at the Traders140 and got very, very drunk on rum—including those fatal communal bowls you drink out of from straws. And I was sick. So was Don, later. And we had to spend most of yesterday in bed. Awful guilt today, as a result.

  I do like Paulette; she is tough and good humored. She calls Remarque “Death.” She says he looks like Death when he’s asleep in the morning. What she means is that he wears a smiling mask. He smiles everything away. He’s like a Conrad Veidt141 character. You can imagine him shooting himself, with a smile. Paulette also said that the only three possible roles for a woman were to be a wife, a secretary or a movie star.

  As for Florence, she kept announcing that she is going to lose twenty pounds. But she won’t. And she won’t lose her twenty millions, either. She’s a great big cry-baby millionairess.

  Don’s mother didn’t want to go to Mexico as her husband suggested so now she insinuates that she somehow sensed that there would be this big earthquake in Mexico City. She called to announce the news of the earthquake to us, weeping. With delight, I suppose. Because God killed all these people so she could have her own way!

  Supper alone with Johnnie last night. He says he has no idea how his life will develop, now. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to direct again, or even travel. He is quite calm about this.

  August 2. Another heat wave, though a bit cooler today. We are now sliding into the smoothly accelerating slipstream of time before we leave. About nine complete weeks, starting Monday next, the 5th.

  I have now decided not to promise any books to Simon and Schuster—if possible—and hope to get by on our savings and what I can earn on our return.

  Yesterday it looked as if I could get a TV job with CBS—Robert Graves’s They Hanged My Saintly Billy; but now I see that this is impossible because of our deadline.

  I am doing a strange new experiment with the novel—writing it as a simple dialogue between Paul and William.

  August 5. Beginning of the nine weeks—the solemn period of our journey preparation.

  A glorious day on the beach, with wind and sun. Mishima’s modern No plays142 arrived, and I read them. The bathers, advancing into the water in one long straggling line, remind you of naked African hunters heading off a lion. They advance upon the immense uncatchable water beast.

  Don said the other day: “I’m afraid we came in during act three, scene three of Mr. Hine. Now there’s only a short epilogue in which he turns into a toad.” The tone of this remark would be right for a novel in a modern Jane Austen manner.

  There is something quite fascinating in the lack of consideration shown by Mr. Hine, who, after all, must be fairly regarded as a well-educated, good-natured man, far above the average in intelligence and even sensibility. Yesterday—Sunday morning of all mornings—he began work on his television aerial shortly before 7:00 with some kind of small electric circular saw which could be heard all over the Canyon! And yet this same Mr. Hine called the police when the German woman next door fought with her husband one night and disturbed him!

  I’m going ahead with this dialogue idea for my novel. It may be bad, but it’s really an original technique, I feel. To write the fundamental, underlying, unspoken dialogue between two people. The dialogue of their relationship, as it were. As I was saying to Don yesterday, it is really much more satisfying to feel that your work is genuinely experimental than to feel that it is merely good—safely good within the easy compass of your powers.

  Ollie and the Sammet boy are playing ball as I write this and making a hell of a noise. But I don’t mind, because they’re so lovable together. All right—now why not try some love on the Stickel girls? Any offers? No? No saints around here.

  August 11. To my dismay I find that I’ve broken the record—only one entry last week. It’s silly to mind about such things—and yet I find that the alternative to keeping schedules is doing nothing whatever.

  Never have I known time to go as fast as it’s going now.

  Tito has just left Vedanta Place, with no warning but a note which said that he is going to look for work.

  Mike Kitay has a growth in his rectum but it isn’t malignant. My nice Dr. Lichtenstein is going to operate on him.

  I’m still trying to write the dialogue version of my novel.

  August 15. I’ve just heard from Geller that Jean-Christophe has been shelved. So that’s that. It looks like I shall earn no more money before we leave. There is a vague idea of collaborating with Gavin Lambert—but who knows when? I smell a period of unsuccess.

  Marisa Pavan has just had a baby boy.

  Johnnie has just had a letter from Starcke, who is in Honolulu with Joel Goldsmith, asking for Johnnie’s forgiveness and prayers. Johnnie says that this has “shaken” him. Carter finds the letter false and nauseating.

  Talking of nausea, poor Don gets sick to his stomach nearly every day. He wants to see Jessie Marmorston about this, but she has been up north all this week, apparently consulting with someone about L. B. Mayer’s health.

  August 17. Yesterday was a day of good deeds and bad movies. Don and I got our yellow fever shots downtown, bought a painting by a Mary Vitz at the County Art Institute, saw Mike Kitay at the Good Samaritan where he is recovering from his operation and Marisa Pavan at St. John’s, where she has just had a son. The bad movies were Jeanne Eagles and Silk Stockings.

  The baby room at the hospital. Here all the babies are alone together, except for the attending nurse. All waiting, behind glass, for the take-off into life. Their footprints and the mother’s fingerprints are stamped on the same card for identification. You can only look at them through the glass pane. Jean Pierre Aumont was very proud. Marisa smiles and smiles, and is “sweet,” but somehow I feel no warmth.

  August 19. Listening to the radio this morning, I heard a man named Ed Hart(?) lecturing on the Indian religious beliefs and rituals involving the use of peyote. The lecture was quite daring, in that it didn’t condemn the Indians and even drew a parallel between their ritual and that of the Catholic Mass: when the supply of peyote runs out, the congregation, instead of taking the drug, will pay homage, ritualistically, to a single peyote bud. As in the elevation of the Host.

  The insurance agent, Walter Burke, who called about insuring this house, told me that business is definitely counting on at least another ten years of slowly increasing inflation, during which costs will rise as much as 4½%. Women will drop out of the labor market as automation increases. But the men will be better and better paid for less and less machine minding. They w
ill be able to support the family alone.

  Yesterday I had earache and felt lazy, possibly because of the yellow fever shots. Stayed home and read all of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.143 Today, I have the strange gradual realization of having been in the presence of a masterpiece. In this case, the sensation is spooky, because of the sense of cold evil in the Marquise de Merteuil. That woman—Jesus—she wasn’t kidding! It makes me shiver to think of her.

  August 23. Yesterday, I saw Tito, who is staying with a friend, Stanley Musgrove. He is so handsome, neat and well preserved, yet with the premature elderly anxious dried-upness of the neurotic. There is a permanent furrow between his eyebrows. He says he left Vedanta Place because he was being overworked, and because Prema and Paul [Hamilton] watched him all the time. They were particularly suspicious whenever he talked to Phil (Buddha). And once, when Tito went for a walk along the boulevard, he found that Paul was tailing him.

  Tito said: “I have to realize that I’m quite an ordinary guy with quite ordinary problems—nothing special.”

  I went on to Vedanta Place. Swami told me that [the boy who was arrested at Hollywood High] is very unhappy. He asked to be taken back into Trabuco. Swami said this was impossible, suggested that he should go to India and live at the Belur Math. [The boy] agreed, so the arrangements are to be made.

  We talked about Vandanananda. Swami feels that Vandanananda is still resentful because Swami rebuked him for going out so much in the evenings. Vandanananda is so cold, underneath his surface amiability. Swami says that none of the girls at Santa Barbara feel at ease with him. Those that got the habit in India of “taking the dust of the feet” always do this when Swami, and any visiting Swami, comes. But they never do it to Vandanananda. The other day, however, Daya did it—just to see what would happen. And Vandanananda said, “Thank you!” This, in India, would be unheard of behavior—a Swami taking such homage personally.