Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  “It’s all Maharaj,” he said, “everything he told me is coming true. I didn’t understand him at the time. Now I begin to know what he was talking about.” Swami keeps repeating that Maharaj matters most to him—more than Thakur—because Swami actually knew Maharaj. “And that’s how I feel about you,” I said. “Ah but Chris,” Swami said, “I am like a little pebble against the Himalayas.” “I have absolute confidence in you, Swami,” I said, with tears of love in my eyes, but still aware of how funny it sounded.

  As a contrast, Don and I had supper with Cecil Beaton at La Rue. But that was a very happy evening in its different way. We both like Cecil a great deal. He is lonely and his talent gets him into feuds. He is having one now with Sidney Guilaroff,154 because he (Cecil) fixed Leslie Caron’s hair, without thinking that he shouldn’t. Cecil’s charm is in his frankness. He makes no bones about his resentments and dislikes—for example, of Stephen Spender and of Speed. (“I don’t feel guilty about not liking Speed, whereas I do feel guilty about not liking Stephen.”) His feeling against Stephen is, I think, quite largely due to jealousy in relation to Peter Watson, whom Cecil unhappily adored. He says Stephen is vulgar and ambitious—and one agrees, remembering however that many people must have said the same thing about Cecil. Nevertheless, he is nice. Don used a very good phrase about him: “I like the warmth of Cecil’s indiscretion.”

  Hopes for Gingold fade fast. But now it seems that we may be commissioned to write the teleplay anyhow, maybe for Elsa Lanchester or Lillie or who knows.

  September 23. Aching depression. An awful sick sadness which is partly sulks. I am furious because Don has bullied me into letting Marguerite [Lamkin] stay here while we’re away. She’s a sl[ob] and she’ll mess up everything and have her messy friends around, poking and prying. And we shall end being let in for all kinds of expenses—I know it.

  But also I’m utterly off this trip. I long for it not to take place—with such intensity that I may quite easily make myself sick. And now I’m tired of this house, too. Tired of the noise of the kids outside. Why can’t we live on the beach?

  In the midst of this, Don remains Don. I mean, although I blame him for some of the fuss, I never for one moment lose sight of the fact that he matters most. (I only blame him for appealing to the Supreme Court, as it were, of our feeling for each other in order to put over this inviting of Marguerite, which is an unworthy cause and really only done for the sake of asserting his own will.)

  Yesterday evening we took Norman Routledge155 to dinner. He’s a very young wriggly gay young-maidish don from King’s, whose specialties are electronic brains and earthquakes. This is an absolutely alien type of creature—a real institution dweller, as happy in King’s as a monk in his monastery—and just palpitating with gossip and academic politics. His idea of a real big thrill is to find some double entendre in a serious document or inscription—or, on another level, to get rather drunk on the train to Cambridge from the same bottle with a couple of G.I.s. He is really quite touching and likeable. But, as Don says, he gives you a genuine horror-glimpse into that life. “I kept thinking,” said Don to me later, “what a ghastly narrow escape you had, and how amazingly daring of you to have left Cambridge when you did.”

  Yesterday noon we had a very successful picnic with Don [Murray] and Hope Murray and Cecil Beaton. By the grace of the sun, which emerged, at the very last moment, from the fog. We went in the water, which was fairly cold, and then ate sandwiches and drank wine and slept. Don Murray and Hope looked like the Babes in the Wood.

  September 24. Such a glorious morning. Don said: “You’re much sadder than you used to be, aren’t you?” Later we got into a quarrel, because he says I groan under responsibilities and blame him for them, which is true. I find myself sinking more and more into the nihilistic mood I was in during my first year and a half in this country—1939–40. But then I had the war as an excuse; and, there’s no doubt of it, I was trying to shake Vernon, as a horse tries to shake a rider. I do not want to shake Don. That’s sincerely true. Yes, he may sometimes be a nuisance; but I never say to myself that I wish he wasn’t here.

  He has just gone off—the quarrel made up—to take Marguerite’s red Dior dress to the cleaner’s because Monty Clift vomited over it or made her vomit, and to get us some typing paper because Gavin and I are going to start the teleplay this morning because Gingold has unexpectedly said yes.

  At least, the Burns brothers believe she has. Her agent has agreed and says she’ll sign. Me, I’ll believe it when I see it, and when the pilot film has been shot, and when the whole series has run its course. I believe her (and him) capable of infinite bitcheries.

  I like the Burns brothers. But there’s something just a little sinister about the domesticity of TV. George and Willy and Gracie and Ronnie and the rest of them are becoming (one imagines) more and more what they appear to be on the screen. The medium is ruthlessly sincere.

  September 28. Gavin and I finished the rough draft of the teleplay yesterday. Gingold still hasn’t signed and Cecil Beaton, who sees a lot of her on the Gigi set, thinks she won’t. Meanwhile Gavin and I are getting seriously concerned—should we really commit ourselves to the responsibility of producing thirty-nine teleplays the first year, not to mention more the second year and more the third?

  Leonard Gershe,156 whom we met at Roger Edens’s house the night before last, put this idea into my head. He described the horrors of trying to supervise the work of other writers—how you always end up doing all the work yourself.

  The almost spooky tropical beauty of Roger’s garden, on its narrow shelf, with a safe-seeming overgrown wall hiding the sheer drop of the cliff, and beyond, the magic of the moonpath on a misty overcast sea. The house is well proportioned, but like a very grand gift-shop.

  Roger’s imitation of Tallulah Bankhead, clutching Judy Garland’s knees in insincere, drunken adoration.

  Cecil sat through all this quizzically. He is very patient and cheerful and polite.

  Yesterday night we bored him again, I fear—though at his own suggestion—by inviting Romain Gary and Lesley Blanch. Gary could be sympathetic in the very bogusness of his virility and old-tomcat girl chasing, and he makes shrewd intuitive remarks about China and the Andes. Her I find a little depressing. She is in a permanent sulk because of Gary and his amours. And it was bitchy of her to have corrected one of the few bad mistakes he made in English—“box fight.”

  Blanch is pale, with blue rings under her eyes. She has slightly puffy cheeks. She could be a sister of John van Druten.

  September 29. On the telephone this morning, Cecil Beaton said he thought that he would give Lesley Blanch “a pi-jaw,”157 telling her that her sulks would cause her to lose her husband. “She’s a born spinster,” he said. It interests me very much that Cecil is prepared to do this—it shows that he has a kind of disinterested goodwill which is quite rare. And yet many people regard him as a rather heartless bitchy man-about-town. No bitch would stick his neck out in this way.

  As I have said already, Don and I are getting to like Cecil more and more.

  Jo and Ben returned from their San Francisco trip. They had seen J. B. Blunk and his wife who are living up in the woods north of the city. J. B. is building his own house, grinding his own corn, making his own pots;158 and his son is allowed to crawl around the woods, where he recently ate poison ivy and got bitten in the lip by a lizard. Jo was a little strident in her screams of praise for J. B.’s way of life—she and Ben both have the tendency to play up any back-to-nature stuff with religious fervor.

  After they’d gone, Don and I had another quarrel about Marguerite’s coming. Don says I let Jo and Ben see that I don’t want Marguerite in the house; which is probably true. Anyhow, after a lot more shouting and arguing, I think things have definitely calmed down; and today I feel quite resigned to the whole affair. It will probably seem microscopically unimportant in retrospect.

  I should be, and am, distressed and disgusted by the deterioration o
f my character, this last year or two. And yet, somehow, I know that this isn’t ultimately important. Even if my “faith” wavers—and it does from time to time, of course—even this isn’t important. Even if I cease to “believe in” Swami—I mean, believe in the reality of his religious experience—the fact remains that he is there and his experience is a reality. I know this, somehow. As one just knows that a certain artist is great, even during periods when one feels no contact with his work.

  Let me write this down clearly and definitely: I believe that there is something called (for convenience) God, and that this something can be experienced (don’t ask me how), and that a man I know (Swami) has had this experience, partially, at any rate. All this I believe because my instinct, as a novelist and connoisseur of people, assures me, after long, long observation, that it is true in Swami’s case.

  All right then—believing this is also my guarantee that somehow in the end everything will come out all right for me and everyone. Because if God is there, then we needn’t be afraid.

  I write this in a time of dryness, degradation, dullness and general alienation—sincerely believing it to be no shit. This is what Swami has done for me. And it’s certainly enough.

  Goodness, though, some of his stories about Maharaj are disconcerting. When I saw him last Wednesday, he told me that Swami Sankarananda, the present head of the Math, used to be Maharaj’s secretary and that Maharaj got mad at him and wouldn’t see him for years—wouldn’t have him in the same monastery, even. Swami Sankarananda’s offense was that he had been setting himself up as a judge of Maharaj’s visitors, saying who might see him and who might not. So Maharaj turned him away and only forgave him on his deathbed!

  Swami Prabhavananda seems to find this all quite as it should be. He even remarked admiringly that it gave Swami Shankarananda the opportunity to show his greatness; because he never left the order or bore Maharaj any ill will. He stuck around and was there at Maharaj’s death bed, to be forgiven. Swami Prabhavananda added that Maharaj gave people the power and strength to endure his displeasure. At the same time, however, he, Prabhavananda, had the nerve to protest to Maharaj against this treatment of Sankarananda. So maybe this is just one of the things which Swami has only come to understand lately—as he, himself, said.

  A marvellous day on the beach. The sea cold with quite big surf. The sun bitingly hot. Visibility so good that you could even see the peak of Catalina which makes it look a little like Tahiti.

  Read a weak worthless novel by a nice old lady, about the Dutch East Indies, The Ten Thousand Things.159 Simon and Schuster sent it me—they are publishing it. I feel tempted to say something really crushing about it, because Peter Schwed160 just wrote me that Ben’s book is “slick.”

  Apropos of nothing in particular, I’m happy to record that my “virility” (the word is so silly it ought always to be in quotes) seems to be definitely reestablished. In spite of the fact that I haven’t had any hormone shots for at least a month.

  Later. We’re just back from supper with Evelyn Hooker. She fixed us a deliciously stuffed roast duck. The house is very clean, very neat, very dead. Evelyn has absolutely no taste. She has all sorts of pieces of furniture and pictures, objects, etc., which just don’t go with each other. Worst of all, the rosebud wallpaper in her bedroom—a suggestion made by Natasha Spender!

  Evelyn has now started her “field work” on her new project—the investigation of social patterns of homosexuality. As she says herself, the only way she can do this is to follow up every clue and see and talk to anybody who is willing. For instance, she was told of the existence of a queer science-fiction club, which turned out to be merely a science-fiction club containing some queers. She visited an after-hours bar, run by a white boy and a colored boy, both Korean veterans. The colored boy had started it because he wanted his friend to meet “a better class of people”; however, shortly after Evelyn’s visit, the club was raided and the colored boy lost his job—which was some kind of white collar work for the city police! Then in New York, Evelyn met the men who have opened a new branch of the Mattachine Society161—and found that they were being so cagey with each other that they didn’t even know each other’s professions. A commander in the navy was much bolder, however. He took his boyfriend to visit the family. The boyfriend rather dismayed the family by sewing, but reassured them by watching football games on TV as he did so!

  Such scraps Evelyn is collecting. It all seems slightly futile, and yet I don’t see any other way she could go about the job, and maybe a pattern will emerge.

  We got almost no glimpse of Evelyn’s own life. There she is, sleeping in the marriage bed. And there’s her dog Star, who barks at everything but makes her feel protected. And there’s her work. I suppose she seems lonelier than she actually is, because the house is too large.

  October 1. Yesterday Don and I went to MGM to have lunch with Cecil Beaton and go on the sets of Gigi. I seem to see more and more how much of Cecil’s art is nostalgia for this period—the nineties and the nineteen hundreds. Perhaps a nostalgic whiff of the glamor of royalty as it exuded from the figure of Edward VII. Happy is the artist who digests his nostalgia in this way. I felt Cecil’s joy in thus swimming in the element of his favorite world. And it seems that Minnelli162 feels the same.

  Gingold, looking younger but not better in a curly black wig, was table hopping during lunch in the commissary—quite beside herself with archness and glee. She is a sort of sublimated nymphomaniac, you feel. Maybe not so sublimated, either. I agree with Cecil—it seems doubtful that she will ever sign this TV contract.

  In the afternoon, Gavin and I went to see the Burns brothers about our teleplay. They suggested quite a few alterations, but nothing very radical. We are to get a secretary tomorrow and do them right in the studio.

  George Burns was most interesting about comedy. Speaking of a character who is to wear a false beard, he describes it as “sweaty.” In other words, it is promising something—going out on a limb. It had better be good. The false beard is a promise of comedy, which the audience reacts to with a “you show me.” Whereas, if the character doesn’t wear a false beard, there is no promise. If he’s funny it’s not expected, and so it seems funnier. George and Gracie Allen were the first team to abandon “funny” costumes because they realized this.

  George carries a cane, like Chaplin’s but longer and solider. He also wears a kind of beret. Their assistant is a monkeylike, rather girly young man named Tommy, who reads the teleplays aloud to them—well. He is a friend of Tom Wright.

  Despite the niceness of the Burns brothers, I felt a horror coming over me. I cannot go on with this project. Certainly not tie myself down for a year. I talked to Gavin, who I think may be willing to take over the responsibility. We’ll see. I have decided to offer the Burnses to do six shows for their first year; but this is far less than they will agree to, I know.

  Supper this evening with John van Druten at the Imperial Gardens. A nasty shock when we found that Carter and Dick were waiting for us there. Dick is such a fat old hypocrite. Having spent all the money on redecorating his house Faggot Chinese, he announces that he cannot possibly spend Christmas away from dear Johnnie, so they’ll all go to Death Valley, instead of Carter and Dick going to Samoa.

  Johnnie seemed tired—but no wonder. He had done one third of the adaptation of Anatomy of a Murder163 in two days! He was also upset because he has had a quarrel with Pamela Frankau.164 She asked him to pay her fare out here and put her up. When he refused, at short notice, because he is busy working, she got furious and reminded him he owed her thirteen pounds.

  Am racing ahead with my novel. Only eight more pages to reach forty before I leave. But there’s the teleplay.

  October 7. I have just been roaring like a cross old bear at Mrs. Hine’s and Mrs. Stickel’s youngest children, and then at Geller, because he hinted I was to blame for not letting the Burnses know sooner that I wouldn’t agree to their terms. Now all is confusion. And the Burnses are
starting to say they won’t make the series at all.

  I’m too depressed to write any more just now.

  Well, yes, I must write, because it’s disgraceful to give way to tamasic blues and travel jitters. At least I have finished the first chapter of the new draft of my novel—thirty-nine pages. Not nearly right, but amounting to something. As for this journal, I can’t finish it before we leave, but never mind.

  Don and I are both on edge at the prospect of starting—or rather, at the delay before starting. Yesterday, we went to a movie theater to see An Affair to Remember—God knows why; we left almost at once. But aside from that, the place was almost uninhabitable because of the mob of children. One little girl kept running up and down the aisle. Finally Don tripped her, and she fell screaming. After this he said he felt much better.

  October 8. Yesterday, we took Hope Murray out to dinner. She really is an enchantingly attractive girl. One of the few people you could describe as “fun.” Got quite drunk; then went on to see No Down Payment at Fox. The part they got wrong was the ending. In suburbia every misbehavior is absorbed. Within two to three weeks they’d have been inviting the rapist to their barbecues again.165

  Saw Jessie Marmorston, who wrote me a prescription for Miltown to relieve the tension of the journey. I took some last night and have taken two today. Can’t say I feel that much less tense, but I suppose it’s something that I’m not climbing up the walls.

  Although quite well aware—as always when starting on a journey of this kind—that I may never return, that the next hand which opens this book may not be mine—I still feel unable to write any memorable last words. Perhaps the Miltown really is dulling my wits? I wish it gave more euphoria, at the same time.

  [On October 8, Isherwood and Bachardy flew to Japan; they went on to Hong Kong, Singapore, Bali, Bangkok, Angkor, and then Calcutta where, as background for Isherwood’s biography of Ramakrishna, they visited places associated with Ramakrishna and stayed at the Belur Math. On the way home they stopped for nearly a month in London, where they received the news of John van Druten’s death, on December 19, 1957. Afterwards they spent roughly another month in New York, returning to Los Angeles at the end of January.]