Pains today. Coffee brings them on.
Got the car washed, badly.
Don wants to have the beams taken out of the living room ceiling. I don’t. But I feel that this must be his decision.
Still worried about income tax, and the safety of the copy of “Afterwards” I sent to John Lehmann.
No idea what I’ll talk about tomorrow in class.
October 24. Foggy, but it cleared a little and I went on the beach. Marguerite and Rory were there. He still makes love to her a lot. He expects his screen test at Columbia the end of next week. They had seen me on TV last night. I was good, I guess; but I have to stop this ingenue-oldboyish act which is inseparable from appearances with Levant.
Pains very bad yesterday. Middling bad today.
Reading Goodbye to All That124 for class.
Bad sloth. I must force myself to do a little of “Ambrose.” I just took a hot bath to settle the pain. But I can feel it.
Must pay at least $250 income tax penalty, Freedman says.
October 30. A terrific wind. Big sandstorm on the beach. We feel the wind strongly, up here; but it’s enjoyable and exciting.
The pains have let up a lot, the past two days. It’s only provoked by coffee drinking.
But now there are money worries. We’re rushing into big expense on the house. Taking out the beams in the roof. Tom Calhoun and Red Tully are doing that right now. It’s so exciting that I can’t settle to work on “Ambrose.”
I just called Fred Shroyer and told him I’ll teach for another semester. So at least we’ll have some money.
This afternoon I’ll devote to letters, accounts, etc.
4:20. Red and the others have gone. Two beams are out, without too much mess.
October 31. The rest of the beams are out. Tonight, Tom, Red and Joe borrowed twenty dollars from me. They are hard up and scared, because Tom Calhoun’s wife is divorcing him and he’s afraid she may seize all the money in his account.
Meanwhile, the beams are out—all of them.
Prema came by and looked at everything with an air of faint disapproval. It is all worldly. But he accepted a gin and tonic.
Walked in the park with Gavin, planning a foreword to The Vacant Room, for the benefit of producers who don’t know what possession is. Gavin thinks there are prospects for it. And Peter Kortner at CBS is interested in Elsa Lanchester as Emily Ermingarde.
Don has a small job, drawing hats for Charles LeMaire.125
Am working on Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise for my class. I feel a sincere dissatisfaction with my teaching. So much of it is treading water. I don’t communicate anything solid. But I hope to be better next time.
November 4. Cold, grey weather; but beautiful. The tiles are reset in the living room floor. Soon we can start to paint.
The poignant happiness of being with Don—all the greater because he’s out so much. He talks of making a studio downstairs. He is getting bored with Paul Millard’s frequent interruptions.
David Hatmaker, one of my students, is quite a talented poet. He [tells of going to some wild parties].
My pains have almost entirely stopped for nearly a week, now. Am very happy about this.
November 7. Burning hot weather. So dry that the leaves of the calendar curl and the corner of my blotter turns up on my desk. This morning, the sea like a Dufy painting was blue and flat and dotted with toy boats.
Don having a crisis because he hates the hackwork of faking heads to wear LeMaire’s cap designs. And yet he longs to make money, to help out with our expenses. He says he’s getting old, etc. I tell him to rejoice that he has talent and a vocation—how many young men have either? Now he feels better and resolves—after a talk with Marguerite and Rory on the beach—to get together a portfolio of drawings of famous people. Something which could be sold to Vogue.
The sorrows of Prema. Should he have spoken crossly to one of the girls because she hadn’t done the household accounts? She wept, and he knew this was just a bitch trick, and yet he felt guilty. And mad John [Schenkel] left the monastery and then begged to be taken back. Mark126 is afraid of him—because Mark once sat down in John’s chair, and John trembled all over and hissed: “Don’t you ever do that again!”
November 9. Still very hot. I lay on the beach reading Lionel Trilling’s book on Forster,127 for my next class. Amazing what these critics see! I realize, once again, how superficial, lazy and altogether fifth-rate that part of my intelligence is.
Just finished Lehmann’s I Am My Brother, which is worthy and well documented and liberal and almost noble and a big fat bore. John is a bore because he’s so fucking grand. Rather like van Druten, he watches himself with the greatest respect, to see what he’ll do next—but alas no humor.
Jimmy Daugherty came to breakfast yesterday and told us that we look so much alike, now. Jimmy is really quite sweet and lovable—the nicest kind of colored girl. I can see him absolutely enveloping some[one] in domestic bliss. So many people one sees—going around absolutely loaded with potential love.
I am very lucky. So I must remember to be very happy. So often it’s a question of remembering.
Funny old thing, glimpsed today in the barber’s mirror—with a neck turning scraggy unless pulled tight, and eye bags. But still potentially useful and capable of being used, if only the old silly doesn’t waste its few precious years in resentments, tantrums, cantankerousness. I really must try to keep it in better order. And not let it drink too much.
Have restarted japam as of yesterday—the anniversary of my initiation—the nineteenth.
November 11. A bad day—depressed and upset. I have stuck in “Ambrose.” And we have spent far more than we can afford. And I have toothache.
I feel that “Ambrose” just isn’t right. The anecdote isn’t quite interesting enough, perhaps. Or is it too slight? Or what is the matter? And I am worried about money. When we get through, we shall be down to about a thousand dollars, which makes me really nervous. We haven’t sunk that low in a long while. I can’t help worrying and feeling insecure.
Reading After Many a Summer128 for class. It is so dry and prissy. I know how my students’ stomachs will be turned by it.
November 16. Lunch with Aldous up at his house, alone. He is very thin with a kind of benevolent falcon face; but he seems well.
Says he’s far along with his utopia book; about an island between Ceylon and Sumatra, where life is sane.129 He will get it finished after he stops teaching at Santa Barbara.
He does definitely believe that mescaline produces spiritual experiences.
His dream about Denny Fouts. He saw Denny naked, on a horse. Riding along a precipice road, bounded by a cliff. There was a door in the cliff, into a cave. The horse threw Denny and he banged through the door and fell into the cave. He was very badly hurt. One of his legs twitched uncontrollably. He crawled back out of the cave on to the road and collapsed. Aldous was bending over him with extreme concern and compassion; then Aldous woke.
Aldous still uses the Bates method.130
Says the Kiskaddens are both miserable. Bill has insisted on sending little Bull away to school in the East. Spite against Peggy?
November 21. Two heroes—Edward Chappel, the polio-crippled vaudeville star I went to see two days ago. His bland determination to become a writer—a commercial one, however; mainly for TV. He is quite stupid but nevertheless admirable. And Francesca Macklem (Jill) who is Fred Shroyer’s secretary, a dynamo of energy and enthusiasm, married and a would be novelist, who carries nitroglycerine tablets around with her because she has already had several bad heart attacks and expects a fatal one.
Today I sketched an outline of a Sleeping Beauty film for Lincoln Kirstein. He won’t take it, though. He’s committed to Balanchine and the New York City Ballet.
I really have been quite creative, lately. There’s “Afterwards.” And in these past two weeks, the Sleeping Beauty idea. And an idea I gave Edward Chappel for a serial—he didn’t understand it,
though. An idea I gave a man named Stoloff for a TV serial for Rory Harrity. And a completely new idea for Emily Ermingarde I had yesterday—to turn her into a detective.
Why can’t I make money?
Also, today, Don read the draft of “Ambrose” and was most encouraging about it. So my enthusiasm’s renewed. I must get ahead with that, now.
November 25. How bad it is to putter! All day and evening long I have been home alone—and what have I done?
Restarted “Ambrose.” Good—but only five pages.
Clipped the pages of the magazine, in preparation for making a “book” out of the printed Ramakrishna chapters.
Read some of The Sun Also Rises for our TV program.131
Puttered around the market.
Made a list of the fuses and the lights they control.
Gossiped on the phone.
And now my thumb hurts—to stop me writing more.
November 26. A dream last night:
Don and I were leaving on a journey. Our hosts (presumably) were seeing us off. I said to them, “One of my mottoes in life is: Always visit the outlying islands. It’s amazing, the people you find living there. And the others always try to discourage you from going. They say: There’s nothing on it but sheep.”
The feel of this dream wasn’t good. I was too pleased with myself. I was showing off. Because the truth was, I knew that I hadn’t visited the outlying islands. Or only very seldom.
Again and again I find this about dreams: one can analyze them psychologically right along, as they unroll. In the action of real life you can seldom do that.
You watch yourself, in dreams, much more consciously.
December 4. Must scold myself again.
Not nearly enough progress with “Ambrose”—though I feel much more confident I’ll finish it now.
Yesterday I started to get drunk at the Duquettes’ studio—converted into a super fairy palace for Christmas. There was a party for Pat Delpesh, Leonard Stanley’s sister, over from the [Hawaiian] Islands. Pat looked frumpish and ill humored. I talked to a man named Charles de Finis132, who was about to settle on a ranch near Taos with a boyfriend and a girl. He asked me if I believed in luck. No, I said, because I’m a Hindu. We must have a long talk, he said; come and stay with us. Then Rory began talking about Jo and Ben, and how he would slap a woman’s face if she ordered him around the way Jo does Ben. This annoyed Don, who told Rory he was quite wrong—Ben really runs things.
Don had to go to school, so I went to supper with Marguerite and Rory. Ivan Moffat was there, and homely Nicola Lubitsch.133 Ivan seemed dull—dulled by his dull trade. He did the usual imitations—including one of me, which I pretended to find brilliantly amusing but didn’t. Got very very drunk. Came home. Passed out. Snored. How I drove is a mystery. Yet I even remembered to bring down the groceries and put them in the icebox.
This kind of behavior is boring and unfunny.
A peach-colored fog-sunset, with a silver contrail above it. Don is waxing the tiled floor for the second time. It looks marvellous.
Dissatisfied with myself on the TV show, but that was partly Fred Shroyer’s fault. He is such a bore, so soft-spoken and prudent. He strikes no sparks from you.
December 5. Strong dry wind. Swept up the leaves on the terrace, watered, vacuumed. But all this really to avoid getting on with “Ambrose”—of which today I did only a page. WHY? I reread it today, and really it isn’t bad and only the end needs serious fixing. So why shouldn’t I hurry ahead?
As the result of putting my name on the letter to the court in favor of Caryl Chessman, I received today one letter praising me from an importer of Italian wood carvings named Max Hart, and one anonymous postcard sent from Val Yermo, California, as follows: “I bet you would hum a different tune if your friend Chessman were to attach (sic) your sister, daughter, wife or mother. Why should he get this consideration, the beast.”134
December 11. Well, the holiday season is sort of starting. Today we got invited to the preview of On the Beach,135 with supper at the Escoffier Room of the Beverly Hilton first. And Charles and Elsa Laughton came by to see the house, which is still inside out, because Don is painting the dining room floor. Elsa is like a detective; she putters around, tapping walls and discovering apparently useless ventilators and wanting to know why.
December 12. Christmas crowds in Santa Monica. The big bright-colored bogus tinny decorations slung across the streets in the hot sunshine. The ocean marvellous. But I am dull. There is a real danger that I shall sink into a drab ugly interior life of sex fantasies and absurd grotesque resentments—and this in spite of all I have and know and am. My underside is increasingly sordid. That’s why this journal gets duller and duller. I force myself to write it, because it somehow keeps a door open between myself and me. The moment this wretched book is full up, I shall switch to typewriting and stop torturing my poor old thumb.
How I waste time!
I suppose, if I could see myself objectively, I should marvel that anyone could maintain a relationship like the one between myself and Don and yet be, much of the time, a drab self-regarding character like a miser in Dickens.
My life, even now, could be so marvellous. My health isn’t bad. I have my work, my interests, my books. I am capable of being quite useful to a lot of other people. I have the immeasurable blessings of Swami and Don—not to mention all the others. I live in one of the most beautiful houses in Los Angeles.
Well—it’s the old story. I have made less use of my life than any one I know—considering what opportunities I’ve had. No—that’s going too far. But I have been shockingly lazy, dull, depressive.
Come on—a new effort.
December 18. I can’t forget last night’s preview of On the Beach—chiefly because the picture was so unsatisfactory it set me wanting to rewrite it entirely.
Marlon Brando in the limousine on the way to the preview telling Tennessee and me we were whores because we’d appeared on TV. He refused his autograph to Ted Bachardy, saying he only gave it to children.
At the Fishers’ bungalow with Ten today. The moppets just arrived by plane from New York. Eddie furious because the little Todd girl136 called him “Mr. Fisher.” (So Jewish, she looks like a tiny Assyrian bull.) The dealer coming in with a coat of Russian sable. $11,000. He would do anything for Elizabeth Taylor, he said; it was just a matter of her pleasure. But when she suggested paying in two years, he at once refused. She may rent it to the studio for her new picture, Butterfield 8, and get it that way.
Tennessee in the pool, swimming back and forth very slowly, like a channel swimmer. His firm powerful little potbelly.
December 21. The winter solstice—or is it tomorrow? Anyhow, the season for serious resolves. As always not to worry so much. We are very low on money, according to our standards. But in fact we have about $3,000 left. And there will be the L.A. State College check coming in until the end of August—that’s about $5,500 right there, after tax deductions. Meanwhile, I’ll just have to hustle and earn more. There is still the Simon and Schuster money intact, to be dipped into.
Rain last night. Jo and Ben came in with lobsters Tom Calhoun had caught and given them. We ate them barbecued. The fire worked all right, despite the rain. The lobsters kept twitching on the grill—a nasty sight.
Today the Sunbeam’s brakes gave out on the garage ramp and the car rushed down, smashed into the Simca, broke one of its back lights and banged it into one of the bicycles, breaking the front wheel. Don jumped out of the car screaming with rage—completely out of control. He does his best, but his nerves are very bad. He’s so upset because he can’t get a job or sell his work or get any recognition. He is afraid of getting a job, of course. He just wants the money to fall into his mouth. So do I.
An omen for the solstice? The log, which we tried unsuccessfully to kindle all yesterday evening, has begun to smoke and is now slowly burning itself away.
[A] neighbor […] came and introduced himself as I was collecting beer
cans from our upper lot. He is married, has kids, is queer I think.
The humane (why) police department came and collected the dead possum in a carton which somebody left on us, wrapped in papers.
December 23. Yesterday I went with Steve Black137 to visit [one of my students], who is in Brentwood Hospital after a breakdown. [He] was no longer wearing his hairpiece—he’d always worn it at college and I’d never noticed. We walked about the grounds, watched a man with several lines of writing tattooed on his arm, playing golf with a nurse. “He’s our only murderer,” [my student] told us. He likes being in the hospital. He has a friend who thinks he is a devil and can put out stars, seven at a time. The police have a Mo-machine (opposite of Om), which catches devils and liquidates them. “So the police are angels?” I asked. A man went by muttering: “Fakes, fakes—all of them!”
Steve Black is pretty humorless, but I like him. He is sternly critical of Fred Shroyer—says Fred takes no trouble preparing his lectures, makes jokes about the weather, evades awkward questions. But I liked his description of how he argued all evening about Joyce with his friend Gene; then challenged him to a chinning contest. Gene won, thirteen to eleven.
Saw Gerald in the evening, full of a lecture by Maxwell Jones.138 Jones is in favor of out-patient treatment for many mental cases. “The one weapon you have is talk. So long as they talk they don’t act.”
Don seems very nervous and low. Christmas rattles him terribly.
December 27. Am upset tonight because Bill Caskey called a few hours ago and wanted the two of us to have supper alone together. And I said no—it was no good our meeting any more, because we only fight when we do. Caskey acted very hurt, and I felt like a heel; and yet I know I am right and it is just silly for us to kid ourselves we’ll behave. We won’t. Or not for another ten years at least. Caskey simply does not realize how jealous he is of Don.
Relations with Don are quite good and he feels better now, I think.
But I don’t feel like writing about that, just now. Too depressed.
December 31. A cold staring-bright day with high wind. A rush day, as they all are nowadays—for which I ought to be thankful. Today I’ve:
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 120
