There is nothing to be said about this at present. I am sad, yes, but I don’t really feel M.’s loss. Perhaps I never shall; perhaps I’ve been through it already. My feelings aren’t important, anyway.
Everything seems suspended, until I know if I shall have to go to England. I do hope not, and we can’t afford it.
Don was sweet, and put off a date to spend the night in town, so as not to leave me alone, and we went to two films—a terrible version of Tennessee’s Orpheus Descending, almost a parody of Tennessee, and a rather inept low-budget picture about juvenile delinquents trying to make a married woman (Private Property).
Kent Diegaard, Jerry Siegel and a girl179—I think a girlfriend of Kent’s—came around to see me this afternoon. Kent (I think it was) said of the girl—when I asked if she wrote—“No, but she has insights into people.” This sounded like a joke when the girl told me she was an X-ray technician.
The usual kind of talk, ranging from Hemingway to Trocchi.180 The two boys were showing off (a little) how at ease they felt with me. The girl watched. It is part of my function to be available for this kind of darshan. I guess it sometimes stimulates people to get on with their own work—which makes it important that I shall tell them how well I’m getting on with mine. And anyhow, I don’t pretend it doesn’t flatter me.
Both Don and I are taking Dexamyl nearly every day. Don probably every day. In my case, I fear it is losing its potency. I was very bad tempered this morning—first flaring up because the cablegram company in London had wired Santa Monica there was no such place as High Lane. Then because two boys came over our bridge and climbed down over the gate. I yelled at them like I used to on Sycamore Road.
Charles Laughton seems to have come to an understanding with Elsa about the Hal Greene house—I saw him yesterday—so now I suppose they will probably take it.
Not one word more from Jed Harris about Hedda Gabler.
The first day of glorious weather, after this long period of greyness and fog. Lay in the sun and read two of Leslie Fiedler’s articles in Encounter, because he’s coming here tonight; his wife called this morning and suggested it. Fiedler is going to be at the State College writers’ conference.
Marguerite called this morning to say that all’s well between her and Rory. But they are having trouble with this woman in the Canyon he’s slept with. She threatens that if she gets pregnant she’ll tell the columnists. Rory is said to be penitent and to have sworn off drinking.
Which reminds me—Don and I have stayed on the wagon for almost a month, but must get off it tomorrow, at least temporarily, in honor of Igor’s birthday.
June 17. Leslie and Margaret Fiedler came by to see me last night. He’s a funny vain plump little man, pink cheeked, slightly bearded and somehow girlish. She’s dark haired, still young looking and almost pretty, the typical Russian Jewish student. They have this regular job and home at Missoula, Montana, the State University—and six children. “I thought everyone knew we had six!” said Mrs. Fiedler, rather the way a famous queer expects to be known. Anxious to flatter me, I guess, and therefore tactless, she said “…back in the thirties, when we all read you”! Fiedler didn’t bother to make any compliments. He was too entirely concerned with himself. He had come to see me, I gathered, largely because he hoped to get some advice on how to break into movie writing. He has an idea for doing Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (I must read it). So this morning I called Jerry Wald to tell him about this. (Jerry had just bought Fiedler’s new book, but referred to it as The Life and Death of the American Novel!181)
Beautiful weather again. With Don on the beach. He did a really perceptive and beautiful drawing of Jan Clayton yesterday, showing her sadness and advancing age. (Needless to say, she didn’t like it much!) Also some nudes of Chuck van Haren.
We lay on the beach. Don was in his teasing-provocative mood, and said I loved him “not well but too wisely” and we laughed a lot. But there’s always a faint reproach somewhere, when he’s like this. He says he wants to be really good, great—“because what I’m doing is so tiny.” I must honestly say—though he never believes this when I tell him so—that I do now firmly believe in the psychological possibility of his becoming a really good artist. I mean, he has the right attitude toward the object. He is genuinely, passionately interested. By degrees, he has to learn to care more and more and more. That’s all. But he really and truly cares—and you couldn’t have said that three years ago.
Don feels his problem is to become able to take more trouble over each individual drawing. It’s as if he were compelled to hurry; and this hurry imposes a superficial technique on him. Of course, on the surface of things, it would seem that he is compelled to hurry—either his sitters don’t want to stick around indefinitely, or else he’s drawing with a group and has to suit his speed to theirs. But the fact is, Don is always in a rush, and this rush is part of the pattern of his life, and he will just have to slow down all along the line and relax, if he’s to draw differently. I really think this is the truth. However, meanwhile, I’ve told him I’ll sit and sit and sit for him, by the hour if necessary, while he tries to work this out for himself.
Laughton called this afternoon. It seems we really are going to start on the Socrates project. And that he is seriously considering buying Hal Greene’s house. But probably he’ll stand out for a lower price, which may cause Hal to call the deal off.
The Fiedlers say Wystan is dieting, and that he’s had his moles removed surgically! (The latter may, of course, be on the advice of a doctor for fear of cancer—not because of vanity!)
Nothing from Wyberslegh yet. I hope and pray Amiya is up there by this time and has taken charge.
Just got a partial transcript of my talk at USC. The person who sent it to me claims, with a slight air of reproach, that it took a student seven hours to type it out—less than eleven pages. It is full of grotesque misprints: “sub-specia ternitartous” (for sub specie aeternitatis), “Battow Bresh” (Bertolt Brecht) and “plutonic” for Platonic!
Don got back from marketing for the Stravinskys’ dinner and I told him what I’ve written above. He says he draws quickly because he feels the impermanence of things, and because he fears that if he doesn’t drive himself he’ll get nowhere.
But we agree to try another approach.
Just phoned Hugh Gray182 to check on my spelling of sub specie aeternitatis—correct!
June 18. Last night we had the Stravinskys and Bob Craft to dinner, because of Igor’s birthday, which, according to the mysterious arrangements of the Russian church, is either on the 17th (in the nineteenth century) or the 18th (in this century) or the 20th (in the next century). Vera bought our presents to him for us—a British handbook on South America, and a book of synonyms. She also brought two silk scarves for us. Also a bottle of Haig and Haig. Also a bottle of champagne.
I had one Scotch and a little champagne, and don’t feel the tiniest bit affected by it this morning. Don had an extra Scotch and says he feels it a little.
While we were barbecuing, a plane came in from the ocean—from Hawaii, maybe. It was a blue-dark night, very calm, not long after sunset. The plane was a big one, but it made very little noise. As it flew overhead, it switched on its ground lights and turned, beginning its approach pattern to the airport. Igor watched it and said softly, “Welcome!”
After supper he seemed drowsy and spoke very little. Vera assured Don once more that it isn’t she or Bob who are set on this South American trip, it’s Igor himself. He is so accustomed to being a great celebrity that he feels he has to keep making public appearances, she says.
Later: To a Father’s Day lunch for Swami—one day early. The garden had been fixed up with lanterns by a member of the congregation who decorates for Disneyland. The swamis and I sat under a tent, which protected us from the hot sun, and ate turkey and cake. We were all decorated with flower wreaths. Afterwards, there was a performance in the temple. Barada sang songs which were favorites of Ramakrishna; they were
of the wailing variety which merely make me nervous. The young girl—Vigli(?)—played on two drums, with fingers and heel of hand, most skillfully. And another girl plucked the tanpura belonging to Swami Ritajananda—she did this in a self-consciously profiled pose, turned toward Barada and away from the instrument, as if disclaiming all responsibility for the sounds it made. Then two of the men performed a scene from M.’s183 gospel—M. talking to Vivekananda about his first meeting with Ramakrishna. The actor who played Vivekananda couldn’t have been hammier, but his abrasiveness was effective. Which shows that the old tricks work, provided you play them with conviction and without a hint of apology.
Calling in for messages, I learned that Eddie James had said he was coming by on his way back from the beach, around 6:00. So I hurried home, closed the shutters and locked the back door, having left my car parked up on the street, so he should think I was out. Unfortunately I neglected to unlock the door again, and Don, coming back early, found it shut and flew into a tantrum—he was in a bad mood because he’d had a Father’s Day dinner with his father.
When he storms like this, I don’t know what to say. I just wish he’d grow up. But then, lots of people never do.
Depressed this evening, because the latest Gallup poll says that fifty percent of the population now thinks there’ll be war with Russia sooner or later.
Also depressed because I’ve done no work for the past two days.
June 20. A beautiful day—without any morning fog. We had breakfast at the coffee shack at the entrance to Entrada and went on the beach early.
Nothing in the mail from Wyberslegh.
Edward James called to say Aldous has had a growth removed from his tongue and looks terribly sick. Just now Laura called to ask me urgently to speak at their symposium at Tecate, because Aldous is in hospital “with acute laryngitis, and has to be fed intravenously to build him up.” (Am not sure if this is true or not.) Anyhow, I resist Laura’s bulldozing methods, her taking it for granted that, because she has gone to all this trouble to arrange the symposium, I have to help them out. This kind of thick-skinned pushfulness is so [insensitive]. I got obstinate and said no—impossible—I am too busy. She’s mad at me, now. Can’t help it. I never really liked her.
Yesterday I did quite a bit of work on “Paul.” I feel it’s slowly opening up.
We had Mary Ure, Tony Richardson and his friend Wyatt Cooper to supper. The house and the evening were at their best, and they were all entranced by a vision of domestic snugness which is, after all, quite largely genuine. Barbecued steaks, and peaches with Cointreau.
Don raved about Mary Ure’s beauty, finding her much superior to Marilyn Monroe. I agree. You feel she’s really a sweet nice girl and not at all dumb, either. Tony is interesting—quite sly and subterranean, and with a wild manic side to him (after brandy) which promises great talent. Don thinks him very attractive. Wyatt is a well-meaning but unthrilling young actor.
Tony likes all kinds of pets. He wants to buy lizards and birds. For a time he had a slender loris (described by the dictionary as “a small nocturnal slow-moving lemur”). It would bite you unless you picked it up by the back feet.
Yes, there is something really stimulating in Tony—a wildness. He is all for visiting dangerous night spots and doesn’t care if they’re raided. They had taken Mary (whose attitude to all this seems just right—neither shocked nor too insistently “one of the boys”) to the Carousel the other night and been refused entrance on the ground that she was a minor—but they suspect she was actually mistaken for a boy in drag! Don says there’s a resemblance between Tony and Gavin. There is; but it’s just this wildness which Gavin seems to lack. They are both terribly shy. Tony has the explosive quality of a very shy person who occasionally uncorks himself. Gavin is cagier.
I forgot to mention that I recommended both Leslie Fiedler and Ray Bradbury to Laura Huxley as speakers for her symposium. She was very contemptuous, because she hadn’t heard of them. The ass.
Talking to Don on the beach about Doris Dowling, for whom he painted a floor yesterday. He said that she has resigned herself to Len and her marriage and not being a success. I asked, “You mean, she’s stopped putting on her act?” “Oh no,” said Don, “she still puts on her act, only the curtain’s gone down.”
June 21. Wolfgang Reinhardt has just left. He wants me to do a screenplay based on a German historical novel called Ein Kampf um Rom,184 by Felix Dahn; it’s about seventy years old and is set in Rome in the sixth century A.D. And I have to do it with Guy Endore185 and share the money with him—which is $24,000 altogether. It doesn’t sound very promising, especially as I’m supposed to do three-quarters of the work—Endore being busy on a book.
Wolfgang hasn’t changed much, to look at. He has the same yellow teeth, vague charm, and slyness underneath.
Yesterday we went to Vera Stravinsky’s picture show. This new batch of them is far more decorative than the earlier ones—if anything, too pretty, and they have somewhat the air of having been improvised out of blots. Then we went on to see some paintings by a Mary Vecht—all of them were of owls—cuteness without competence. They maneuvered me into being photographed with her, shaking hands as if to congratulate her on this mess. So I rather bitchily changed the significance of the photo by roaring with laughter, as if the whole thing were too silly for serious comment.
While there, we heard that Patterson had knocked out Johansson, which shocked and quite saddened me. Don’t know why. For some obscure reason, I wanted a European champion this time. And Patterson takes boxing much too seriously. He’s an earnest bore.
Today it has become very hot. Tonight, though cool enough out here at the beach, is quite windless. For the first time since we’ve been in the house, we have front and back doors and the front bedroom window all open, without any draft or door slamming. The surf is loud.
Nothing from Wyberslegh.
No news of Aldous. And nothing all this time from Jill Macklem. I begin to fear she’s had a serious heart attack.
Finished a kind of straggly rough draft of the Vivekananda introduction today. Also got on with “Paul.”
June 23. Yesterday evening Don, who’d been drawing Mary Ure, and I had supper with her and Tony Richardson. And, like idiots, we proceeded to get utterly plastered. And I fell down some steps into their garage and hurt my back—quite badly, I fear. Today I can hardly walk and have stabs of pain which make me yell. Otherwise, the evening seems to have been pleasant, though I remember very little about it. Tony is taking driving lessons. They asked us a lot about our hashish experience.
Today, I’ve read right through [Plato’s] Gorgias, as the Laughton job seems quite definitely on. We are to start our meetings on Sunday, and I’ll get $5,000 this year.
Yesterday I went through the form of picking up the German treatment of Ein Kampf um Rom from Guy Endore. This morning I told Wolfgang I don’t want to do it—though I haven’t even read it. Didn’t like the smell of the job; it seemed I would be left to do all the donkeywork. And I didn’t at all like Endore, who kept closing his eyes wearily and grandly and talking about how he had to get back to his book. He never even asked me what I was writing.
In a great surge of Dexamyl energy yesterday, I got seven pages of the final draft of the Vivekananda introduction finished. Very soon, the decks will be cleared for me to get ahead with “Paul.”
After all the hot sunshine, today has been cloudy all day.
June 24. My back is perhaps a trifle better this morning, after a good night’s sleep. But I’ll see Dr. Lewis this afternoon.
Heard from Amiya yesterday. She describes how Richard drank most of a bottle of whiskey while she was out getting roses for the coffin, and passed out cold. She was writing the letter as she sat waiting for him to come round.
Dorothy tells us that the remains of the birthday cake we gave her—the one we got for Rory—provided a feast. She was waiting for her bus and felt hungry and opened the box, and the cake looked so beautifu
l that two other cleaning ladies, who were sitting beside her on the bench, exclaimed in wonder. So then the three of them ate up every bit of it.
June 26. It really isn’t amusing, being a semicripple. Not that I so much mind the twinges of pain—which were getting less severe anyway, or are dulled by some pills called Soma which Dr. Lewis gave me. But I am confined. I can’t drive the car. I can’t walk more than a few paces. Lewis told me, the day before yesterday, that I have a slipped disk in my spine and that it’ll take weeks, and be expensive. Don hates my being sick. It irritates him. But he tries to be good about it. It’s one of the functional disadvantages of our relationship: he just isn’t the nurse type: I am. This hasn’t anything to do with age. M., all her life, really hated sickness in others and always contrived to insinuate that I was shamming if I took to my bed.
Evelyn Hooker came to supper last night. She talked so much that we hardly had to say anything. But she was quite interesting and she was sincerely impressed by Don’s drawings. She says that someone (C. S. Lewis?) says that the fault of this age is that it stresses genitality rather than communion, and mistakes contact for communion. In other words, all the emphasis is on getting into bed and screwing, rather than on establishing a truly intimate relationship. This is no doubt very true. But what a jargon these psychologists use!
Evelyn told how a perfectly serious psychologist asked her: “Is there anything in homosexuality which corresponds to falling in love?”!!
She is triumphant because one of the annual conventions of churches has decided, next year, to learn about sex. She is to address them on homosexuality, and one of her colleagues is to speak on masturbation.
The crazy artist who, during her visit to the sex offenders’ institution at Atascadero drew a picture of her in crayons brandishing a huge penis! Evelyn complains that the patients there are too much encouraged to think of themselves under the label of their offense. One of them will introduce himself saying, “I’m an exhibitionist.”
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 124
