Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  Never mind, it was a good year, with much beautiful quiet joy in it and loving snug closeness of Kitty and Dobbin.10

  January 11. It’s dripping rain and I have a cold lurking which I’m trying to keep at the back of my throat with Coricidin D. How I hate my huge belly! A lot of it is gas and I can dislodge it if I do stationary trotting; haven’t been out today except up to the trash cans.

  It now seems almost definite that we’ll go to London on February 2, after a stopover in New York, and that we’ll seriously consider Clifford Williams as director11 and, if okay, start casting and then rehearsals and then open, all being well, sometime in March or April. But Don’s show is still set for the beginning of March, so he’ll probably have to go back for it and then return for our opening. All this sounds as unreal to me at the moment as the plans to go with David Hockney and Peter [Schlesinger] on the trans-Siberian railway—except that Don and I have pretty well decided to back out of that.

  We had supper with Jo [Lathwood] last night and yesterday afternoon I saw Elsa [Lanchester]. Much as Elsa would hate to admit it, she and Jo are now sisters in bereavement, because of Ray Henderson being about to get married.12 Yesterday Elsa was giving a party too and her attitude was just like Jo’s: all alone I’m doing it, poor little me, it seems so strange without him, etc. etc. Jo described to us how she had been given a surprise birthday celebration by “her” girls at the factory. Her slogan is, “They all love me.” And Elsa described how she had gone to some celebrity dinner the other night and been applauded for five minutes; she said that this “made me feel worthy of my friends.” Oh, the false pathos of these unhappy old girls! It doesn’t move you in the way they intend, but it is genuinely, heartbreakingly squalid.

  January 30. It’s five fifteen a.m. and I’m up before dawn because today is the Vivekananda breakfast puja.13 Shall be off there in a short while. Peter Schneider and Jim Gates will meet me there and afterwards we’ll all drive to Claremont, where Jim will have the stitches taken out of his neck. He was operated on, messily, by a Dr. Joseph Griggs who is the brother of Phil who is now Buddha and a monk at the London center. The swelling is huge and looks nasty and Jim thinks it is maybe infected, but he seems serenely unworried. He told me that right after the operation, when it started to hemorrhage, and he really thought he was dying, he felt suddenly blissfully happy. Maybe he is Alyosha Karamazov—but oh wow man the pitfalls! Anyhow he is sort of dear to me and so is Peter. Peter is now coming up from behind, in racing parlance, I mean he had an interview with Swami, too, his second, yesterday and Swami told him to sit up straight and look after his body and Peter told Swami that his father had only told him to look after his mind and Swami had said but they are the same. (This from Swami himself, when I went to see him yesterday afternoon.) Anyhow, in a word, Peter isn’t going to be left out of the Atman race. He is keenly competitive and quite jealous lest Jim should somehow get a bigger slice of me than he does; not that he wants me, or even maybe the Atman, but that’s his character. And at his age it’s lovable. He is therefore coming along with us to Claremont.

  This evening I take off for New York, leaving Jim to house-sit here. He is rather thrilled at the idea of being alone in this (to him) vast palace. It is funny and interesting that there is very little involvement between the boys, seemingly; conscious involvement, that is. They are involved of course. And their life in that little shack beside the canal with the ducks and the kitty and the meditation hut at the back in the grassy yard is so idyllic, hippie in the best way and far more genuine and unpretentious than most hippies’ lives are. I told them, they will look back and say they never had it so good, later on. People come to see them in droves and food is prepared and they eat, or else there is no one and they don’t. They wander off to college or their jobs at these restaurants and it all seems so simple.

  From New York, Don and I are to go to London on the 4th and then find out if the play is really going to happen. About all this I feel at present only the dislike of leaving the nest and the hate of flying and of the impending icy weather, etc. I called Don this morning, just to say hello, but I guess he is spending the night out; no answer.

  Gavin [Lambert] just got back from Europe, last night. He says he’s still ill and he looks it; he really seems quite fragile and his hands shake like an old lady’s. He seriously considers buying a house in Tangier, in the kasbah, and spending several months there every year, chiefly amongst the Arabs. When he talks of this he is Lesley Blanch. He’s also quite a wonderful person, so much style and courage. Style is a kind of courage, always, I suppose.

  Am rambling to pass the time. Now I must call the boys and tell them the car will start ( just tried it) so they needn’t come around and pick me up.

  8:07 p.m. A very quick goodbye. Charlie Locke called to say his wife is dying of terminal cancer and can I do something to arrange for them to spend her last weeks in Cornwall. But Jim Gates does not have anything serious the matter with him. So hurrah for that. Goodbye.

  England, March 2–April 30, 1970

  We arrived in England on February 5, 1970, from New York, where we had stayed since leaving Los Angeles on January 31.

  All through the rest of February, Don was with me in London and we did a good deal of rewriting on our play, A Meeting by the River. On March 2, after Don had gone back to Los Angeles because of his show at the Irving Blum gallery, I decided to start this diary and try to keep it every day until he returned or I left England to rejoin him in California.1

  March 2. I’ll try and write this entirely at odd moments. Am now waiting for Bob Holness of the BBC radio program “Late Night Extra.” (Long before that sentence was finished, he arrived, interviewed me—How is your play getting along? How do you feel about Cabaret?—and left within twenty minutes.)

  Don left this morning for New York and Los Angeles. There was a nasty little snowstorm, then it cleared, then it snowed again. It’s horribly cold. I rushed out and bought books—as people rush into pubs to get drunk for the sake of getting drunk: the script of Lindsay Anderson’s If,2 Frederick Brown’s Cocteau biography,3 Aldous Huxley’s letters, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew,4 Richard Neville’s Play Power.

  The heat is on and it’s still cold. Clement Scott Gilbert and his secretary have taken away the new pages we did since the reading of the play on Wednesday last; they’ll xerox them. Clement said that John Roberts and Clifford Williams have been “meaning” to ask me if I minded having all reference to the cubes removed from the version of the play which will be sent round to the actors when they start casting. I don’t like their attitude, it seems sneaky. Are they so scared of me and, if so, why? What is Clifford up to? We have heard nothing from him since the reading and apparently he has gone to New York to see Oh! Calcutta! which he is to work on before he directs our play. I said, it’s not that we’re wild about having the cubes in, but how can you explain to an art director that he must devise a substitute when you haven’t shown him what the substitute is a substitute for?

  A BOAC plane with that terribly insecure-looking tail has just flown over. Like the one we flew here in. Thoughts of Don, flying in it today. Is he in New York already? He should be nearly, if not quite. Wish he would ring me from there.

  An underground train rumbles below, shaking the house, as trains have been shaking it for exactly a hundred years.* This part of the inner circle is older than this street.

  The girls on the street with their very long maxi coats which open to show madly indecent glimpses of miniskirts and endless leg beneath.

  How relaxed the English are! As we were driving back from the Rodin exhibition yesterday, an anti-Vietnam-War procession came up Whitehall. So all traffic was halted by the police until it had gone by. The cars must have been backed up halfway down the Strand. Never mind. They just had to wait.

  March 3. Sylvain [Mangeot] last night seemed quite middle-aged, slowed down, slow spoken, his deliberately told stories have almost no point because he goes into no details, �
��They had some incredible adventures,” “There was an absolutely ludicrous scene.” This little household, the moustached Portuguese twenty-two-year-old student of theatrical design named Juan Melo and the Finnish girl, rather beautiful in her pale Arctic way, whose name I can’t write (something like Kick-kicke-kee) help Sylvain look after André [Mangeot], who now can’t use his legs or do anything for himself. He is downstairs and I didn’t see him. Up to the age of eighty he was still playing tennis! Hilda [Hauser] died soon after Olive [Mangeot]. Sylvain thinks she just decided to, there was nothing for her to live for, so she stopped taking the pills the doctor had given her to keep down her blood pressure and died in the kitchen after getting home from a movie. Sylvain and Juan cooked. We had two kinds of wine, also sherry and brandy. (Sylvain told at great length how cognac is called cognac after the place called Cognac, because the original Hennessey had the idea, so all brandy became “cognac,” although lots of other villages were making it.) A happy evening.

  Terribly cold today. Last night I had to wear an undershirt and my bathrobe in bed. And to think a tiny kitty could keep Dub so much warmer!

  It was cold at the Ramakrishna-Vedanta center too, where I’ve just lunched. Buddha looks starey-eyed, a little crazy, but doesn’t seem so. Swami Bhavyananda is fat and laughing, a bit like Vishwananda. He is a jnani, so Buddha does all the pujas.5 Four other men were there; they made an unusually good first impression—a Chinese, an Australian, an Englishman, a German; they all seemed genuinely friendly.*

  March 4. Thick fluffy snow fell this morning. May it clear before I go north! A man from the BBC came to interview me, arriving more than half an hour early, just as I was in my bath. (The bath is one of the few appliances that really functions; you can have as much warm water as you like.)

  Had supper with Robert Medley last night. He is planning to write a book about the Group Theatre and wanted my memories. We talked a lot and then found that his new tape recorder wasn’t recording.* Later, Gregory Brown came in and made it work. Robert was chiefly interested in the friction that developed between himself and Rupert on the one side and Wystan and me on the other. I said I really didn’t feel hostility to Rupert (aside from the fact that he was one of the most infuriating prima donnas who ever lived) and even liked him. Wystan—as Robert agreed— really disliked Rupert because he was jealous of him.

  Gregory is a silly billy, I think; a white goose with a strange look of a homely Hope Lange. Why am I being so nasty? Because he’s married and yet comes around and smugly accepts the devotion of Robert—who told me he looked “ravishing.” Is that my affair? No.

  Robert is now painting hard-edge squares and other shapes. They looked a most awful lot better after some scotch—though it didn’t take much, I admit, and I didn’t get the least drunk. But liquor does help me to look at art, it always has. When sober, my eyes dart about so restlessly. That’s why nowadays I find it a terrific effort to read anything.

  Later. Still blasting this wretched snow. Have just come back from lunch with Gore [Vidal] at the Connaught. He looks thinner, hollow-cheeked but in a boyish way; terrifically attractive. He says he feels attractive, and he charmingly recalled that I was his present age when we first met and how attractive I was then. Indeed we were very pleased with each other. I love his consciously aggressive careerism. (Careerism is only loathsome when people are hypocritical about it, as they nearly always are.) Gore is now casting off the U.S.—as, he says, he threatened to if the Vietnam War continued six months longer after Nixon took office. But he also says the Nixon administration is out to get him, through income-tax audit. So he’s planning to become a citizen of the Irish Free State, and leaving for Dublin tomorrow to buy a house. I urged him to go into politics there. “Yes,” he said, “de Valera’s about had it.”6

  The usual pronouncement that Truman Capote is a “birdbrain.” Gore has finished a novel called Two Sisters in which he admits that he and Jack Kerouac went to bed together—or was that in an article? (Gore told me about so many articles he’s written and talks he has given that my memory spins.) Anyhow, Gore now regrets that he didn’t describe the act itself; how they got very drunk and Kerouac said, “Why don’t we take a shower?” and then tried to go down on him but did it very badly, and then they belly rubbed. Next day, Kerouac claimed he remembered nothing; but later, in a bar,* yelled out, “I’ve blown Gore Vidal!”

  Talking about books, Gore recommended The French Lieutenant’s Woman [by John Fowles] and said he likes everything by William Golding. He is to make a film called Jim Now which is to bring The City and the Pillar up to date and is set in Rome. Howard [Austen] will be the producer, and Gore says he’s really doing it because he feels Howard needs something to occupy himself with.

  Quite a flap over the play. Clement [Scott Gilbert] wants to get rid of Clifford Williams because he feels Clifford is trying to do two jobs simultaneously—this and Oh! Calcutta! John Roberts supports Clifford, but Clement believes he’ll get a shock when he hears what a lot of money Clifford is demanding—the contract with him hasn’t been signed yet.

  Clement, Clifford and Roberts agree that, when our revised version of the play is typed up, all mention of the cubes shall be taken out of it. They say the idea of the cubes will scare off prospective actors! I say, if the cubes aren’t mentioned, how can we explain what we want the art director to do about replacing them? (I’ve just realized that I have written all this already, which shows what a preoccupation it is with me at present!)

  March 5. Last night, Norman Prouting and I saw The Way of the World at the Old Vic. It is depressing, how little Congreve’s lines mean when they aren’t spoken with style. Behind this shoddy clowning the old performance by Edith Evans and the others, the one I saw in 1927, kept appearing, their voices “came through”; I hadn’t realized how well I remember their readings of many speeches.7

  Norman Prouting is touching, kind, vulnerable—maybe he appears to be more vulnerable than he actually is. He says he has put his whole life into this house; that’s conscious pathos, of course; but I don’t see him as a tiresomely pathetic person. He fixed us a little supper up in his flat after the theater. We talked about [ J.M.] Barrie’s plays.

  March 6. A lady named Rosemary Ellerbeck8 came to interview me. She was nice, and had written an article on lesbians. “We talked about why they were lesbians and why I am a heterosexual[.]” “And why are you?” “I found I had absolutely no idea.” She says that the lesbians told her they hate male homosexuals and indeed all men. As she was leaving she was speared by one of the very sharp little horns on the back of the armchair in the living room. It made a hole in her dress, but she didn’t complain.

  I had lunch with Bob Regester. Neil [Hartley] is quite sick, he has a bloodclot in his leg. He returns from New York today. Tony [Richardson] has quarreled with Henry Geldzahler about Larry9— not for the obvious reason but because Tony invited Henry and Larry to come down to the Caribbean and then told Henry he wasn’t wanted. Bob was dieting, so we ate beefsteak tartare, at a swanky club called dell’Aretusa.

  With Peter Schlesinger to see Hadrian VII; almost incredibly poorly constructed.10 Peter kept getting the shits. Patrick Woodcock thinks it’s psychosomatic, and Peter certainly has homelife problems. The flat is always full of people, which he hates, and yet he can’t go off alone much because David wants the two of them to go around town as a couple. Also different sex patterns—shall they do it evening or morning? So they end up hardly doing it at all. [. . .]

  Peter says [Don’s friend] asked him to find out if I’d see him. I said no—I wasn’t a bit angry with him (this isn’t absolutely true), I would be polite if we met socially, but I did not see any point in our getting together.

  This morning Clement Scott Gilbert called to tell me that Clifford Williams wants the play rewritten; Penelope to come with Patrick to India, the Swami to be alive, Tom to be dropped and the mother too. John Roberts supports him in this; thinks the play as is isn’t box office. Clement and R
ichard Schulman11 declare their loyalty, however. I called Don, who is already in Los Angeles. He was rather depressed, said that Clement and Richard are amateurs and that Clifford and John are the pros; but of course he agrees we can’t consider reconstructing. (I see [Don’s friend]’s shadow lying darkly over this. He didn’t like the play either.) There is to be another meeting on Monday, and then the situation should be clearer at least. Nicholas Thompson maintains that Clement is experienced and professional and says he isn’t at all disturbed.

  Am just off to see Richard [Isherwood] at Disley. This gruesome cold! But no more snow, thank God.

  March 7. Just before I got the taxi to Euston I rushed into a shop in the King’s Road to buy some pajamas. Grabbed some rather sickening pink ones with stripes, paid for them and rushed out. Only later, in the taxi, I realized they had cost me ten guineas! Felt so disgusted I considered stuffing them into some trash can, lest Don should see them when he returns. But of course I shall tell him. I always do.

  The electric train ride to Stockport was much smoother than the old steam ride used to be. Richard met me, looking a bit heavier but somehow much more distinguished and indeed, if one can use such an expression, more like other people—though he still twists his head about and blinks. Dan and Mrs. Dan [Bradley] looked the same, both blooming with health. Dan talks more than ever, plays the stereo for “background music” and has a little curly damp-looking Yorkshire terrier named George which barks and drives one slightly crazy. But the Bradleys are really lovable animal-people, cozy to be with.