Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  Last week we were haunted by a sweet little cat, which marched into the house and was so loving and eager to be petted. I really suffered terribly because I had to be the one who said absolutely that we mustn’t adopt it; Don didn’t want to really, but he liked to play with the idea a little. And then John Bleasdale fed it, which made me really furious, because everybody says that is the one thing you must not do if you want a cat to go away. And then the next day, quite inexplicably, it did go away! It had a flea collar on and was quite sleek, so maybe it belonged to someone.

  Gavin and Mark are back from the South Pacific trip. They say it was marvellous, but we suspect otherwise. They left Moorea without even spending a night there and they never went to Bora Bora, and when they got to Honolulu it rained and they didn’t even see the Pali!63

  January 13 [Wednesday]. It’s pouring down rain. The weatherman promised water-spouts but none have appeared so far, and the rain is a terrible nuisance at this point because John Bleasdale was just about finished inside the house (only the service porch remains unpainted) and we were hoping he would be doing the outside windowsills today and that we’d be rid of him by the weekend. Yesterday he didn’t come at all because he broke a tooth and today (11:40) he hasn’t shown up so far.

  The day before yesterday, it was announced that Derek Bok has been chosen to be president of Harvard. He is forty—and I remember him so vividly as a little boy jumping up and down and rushing around the garden at Peggy [Kiskadden]’s Alto Cedro house. It makes me curiously delighted—partly because I feel he has become admirably sly, a rogue in the right cause. The paper (Los Angeles Times, January 12) tells how, during trouble on campus in 1969, “law students held a study-in at that school’s library to protest grading. Bok” (who was then Dean of the Law School) “was summoned [at 12:30 a.m.] to handle the crisis. He calmly ordered coffee and doughnuts, climbed atop a library table and announced, ‘I want to thank you all for coming here to show your concern about the law school.’” Derek also travelled to Washington last year to join Harvard groups protesting the sending of troops into Cambodia. That to me is the typical action of a very shrewd person—seemingly a dangerous, perhaps career-ruining move but in fact one which was sure to please and impress the governing board; in these days of terror of the Young, anybody who can manage them is in, even if he shares their dreadful revolutionary opinions! So I’ve written Derek a note of congratulation. I wonder how Peggy will react to that, if she hears about it.

  Nothing about “Frankenstein” yet, but Hunt did call this morning to ask if Universal had got in touch with Robin French to arrange a deal. They hadn’t. However this is explained by the fact that Frank O’Connor64 has gone to New York, and he was supposed to handle it.

  A fan in Derbyshire has sent me the interview Brendan Lehane did with me for the Telegraph when we were in London last spring. It is well-informed and fairly well written and it gets Don’s name right and mentions that his Auden drawing was bought by the National Portrait Gallery. (The way it does this is amusingly ambiguous, because it calls the drawing “his Auden,” as though the picture were an unrecognizable abstraction which Don might as well have named Solitude or Fish!) The article also says I am homosexual, quite flatly, without further explanation. I think it is the first time anyone has said this right out, in print.65 I’m glad he did. It sort of prepares readers for my remarks in Kathleen and Frank.

  Elsa is lonely during her weekends, down at 147 [Adelaide], because Ray [Henderson] is now mostly with his wife, and Jack66 has paired off (so Elsa thinks) with another of her male attendants and is therefore ashamed (so Elsa thinks) to appear with him in her company. She is left to make do with David Graham67 but she can’t bear the way he smells and he has a trick of chewing bits of food and finding them tough and spitting them out again and arranging them around his plate! In spite of all this, however, Elsa declares that, “I am the happiest person I know”!

  My New Year’s resolution is to read all the stories by Chekhov which we have in the house—that’s to say all the volumes of Constance Garnett’s thirteen-volume translation but one. It’s really the only way to enjoy him properly, because you realize that these stories are all part of a world and indeed you hardly notice when one stops and another begins. He is tremendous. I feel as if I could go on indefinitely—maybe read the entire oeuvre at one sitting. He never bores me for one instant.

  January 28. After being miserably cold it is heavy and hot and still—ninety degrees today downtown! The work on the house was finished the day before yesterday; Bob Main finished putting new asbestos wrappings on the heating pipes downstairs. John Bleasdale finished painting on the 23rd.

  Swami is in Mount Sinai Hospital, having some tests; he seems to be fairly all right, however. I’m going up to the vespers of the Brahmananda puja and may see him later.

  At last, the “Frankenstein” project has been set in motion. We are to have our first story conference with Hunt Stromberg tomorrow.

  On the bad side: I have to pay over nine thousand dollars state and federal income tax tomorrow morning, plus whatever the Maltins have the gall to ask for “managing” our affairs. Arnold is useless, either sick or out of town; Mrs. Maltin does all the work and I do rather like her. Her twin boys, no longer cute, alas, have become the most fantastic junior athletes. The whole mantelpiece is already covered by their trophies and they are only eleven!

  Also on the bad side: They have at last started, as of last Monday, to get ready to put up the high rise, or two high rises at the end of our street. This really sickens me. I feel deeply invaded. I keep imagining that I can hear them banging away up there. One can, sometimes, but it’s very mild compared to the noise made by helicopters, motorbikes and other nuisances.

  Yesterday I went with Ray Henderson to play his tape of the Dogskin musical to Ed Parone down at the Music Center. I’m sure Ed didn’t like it and will do nothing about it—but I was surprised how good it sounded and indeed the half dozen assistants he had brought in to listen to it kept breaking out into obviously quite spontaneous laughter.

  Hunt Stromberg has called a couple of times since making the date for tomorrow, because he keeps getting ideas for “Frankenstein.” He wants it to be a musical, with [Leonard] Bernstein composing—no, he doesn’t—but he wants Elizabeth Taylor to play the bride of the monster—and Burton is to play Pretorius (the “mad scientist” who appears in the Bride of Frankenstein film). And then there’s Rex Harrison. Or maybe Albert Finney. . . . I just keep my mouth shut. But I do hope he isn’t going to continue bugging us like this.

  January 29. 9:00 p.m. Gore just called. He’s in town with Howard; they just got back from India which he says he loved. He has decided to write a novel about the last incarnation of Sri Krishna, as a white soldier, a G.I.! As always I am pleased at the prospect of seeing him.

  The puja (vespers) last night was spoilt for me by Swami’s not being there, and, as usual, by the gabbling whispers of the women waiting to get their turn at being touched by the relics. Afterwards I went to Mount Sinai Hospital and saw Swami—so tiny and bird-legged and so beautiful with his silver hair. He was attended by two Asian nurses, one from Thailand, the other Japanese, I think. He said, “They are my daughters”; and already they had somehow become devotees, without quite knowing of what. Swami didn’t seem as weak as I’d expected. He took my arm and walked right down the passage and back to his room. But they are not going to let him return till Monday. They have put a catheter in him.

  I forgot to mention that I’ve had a pain in my side since about the 16th. I went to Dr. Allen about it and he seemed to think it is diverticulitis(?)68 and prescribed a diet—which, characteristically, I haven’t been following. Sometimes I feel something hard in there, then it seems to disperse, as though it were a blockage in the intestine.

  We had our talk with Hunt over lunch, and now, inescapably, the moment has arrived for us to have some truly brilliant ideas. Am hoping for them tomorrow morning.

  Readi
ng Chekhov, with joy. Also dipping into Henry James’s letters, just bought.

  February 1. We started working on “Frankenstein” the day before yesterday and, as of now, I really do think we are doing well; that’s to say, we have given the Creature an extra dimension. Frankenstein has a rather older college friend named Rudolf, who is the sinister influence. It is Rudolf who gets Frankenstein involved in monster making. Then Rudolf dies, of blood poisoning caused by cutting himself while dissecting one of the bits of bodies they have stolen from a churchyard. And Frankenstein then takes the brain out of Rudolf ’s corpse and puts it into the Creature. So the Creature is partly Rudolf, but only partly. (He points to the Bible, opening it at the text: My name is legion, for we are many.69) Rudolf is imprisoned within the Creature, struggling to communicate—because of an injury to its vocal cords, it speaks with difficulty. This solves quite a lot of problems, right away.

  We saw Gavin and Mark the night before last. It seems that their film project is snagged. He can’t get the money from Jim Davison,70 whose status as a dear friend is thereby endangered. Gavin takes this setback very casually, as he always does. Mark is far less noisy and demonstrative, nowadays, and nicer. But he does smell so bad; like some creature in a cage.

  Supper last night with Joe Goode and Mary Agnes Donoghue. Billy Al and Penny were there. Gradually we are relaxing towards them all; indeed, I feel almost at ease with them. But for some reason their heterosexuality keeps showing, like a slip, and one looks tactfully in the other direction. In Billy’s case, this is because he is deliberately showing it. What a masked, playacting character he is!

  Still feeling the lumpiness within the left side of my guts. It worries me, of course.

  Have finished the first third of Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream with far more pleasure than I’d expected. Writing about the father–son relationship he seems far honester and more frankly sentimental than he does when he writes about women. But his killing off of two of the boys at the end of this episode is an awful tear-jerking trick, surely. However, I’ll wait and see if he makes anything out of it, later.

  Got a slightly gracious, slightly distant brief reply to my note of congratulation from Derek Bok. In spirit, it was like the gracious note Peggy sent me when I tried to reestablish relations with her—the note which made me feel we had better not meet again.

  February 2. Gore and Howard had supper with us last night. Gore had the shits, after getting all the way through India without them. Howard didn’t look nearly as much older as I expected. Gore says that Anaïs is furious with him for his description of her in his last novel.71 Don says it was cruel of me not to tell him anything nice about it; but, really, there are limits. It was nice seeing them—all the more so because they now seem more than ever a devoted couple, despite Gore’s outward coolness. You might say that the fact we are both old couples is almost the one important thing we have in common. But I felt embarrassed, because I couldn’t ask Howard, “What are you doing now?” for fear he would have to say, “Nothing.” They have just lost their beloved old dog. That was what made them take this trip around the world, they told us.

  We are plugging along with the “Frankenstein” treatment; this is our fourth day on it.

  February 3. A beautiful morning but cold. Am writing this during the reading period which Don and I have been observing, from immediately after breakfast until about ten, when the mail comes and we begin work. Don is just starting The Brothers Karamazov, after finishing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. He says he has read more, these last months, than at any other time in his life. I have just finished Chekhov’s marvellous “[The] Black Monk.”

  A call from poor tiresome Charlie Locke. He talked to me in a state of mysterious agitation yesterday, saying that his daughter has been behaving “like a daughter” and was about to move him to another nursing home. Now I discover that this home is in Burbank, so there’s nothing for it but to go there today, before going to Vedanta Place, which is a nuisance. He says he must talk to me.

  I still have my little lump. Today I’m worried about it. Sometimes I’m not. Have been doing my yoga stomach twists energetically, trying to dislodge it. Otherwise my health seems excellent and my weight is down nearly to 146.

  There’s Isabel, our Mexican maid, so must stop.

  February 4. I found Charlie Locke in a much less grand place, made of spit and chandeliers, right by the Golden [State] Freeway, which reeked of urine but had unusually friendly nurses and at least one groovy young orderly. Charlie, poor old dear, was terribly anxious to be reassured that he hasn’t become senile—he has, a bit, but not too seriously. Then we got onto Beatrix Potter and talked about her works for a solid hour. And then his daughter Mary Schmidt arrived and was really much nicer than I remembered. Obviously Charlie is a terrible handful, and she is a teacher and has three children to look after. She greeted me warmly, probably with the mad hope that I’d somehow make myself responsible for some of Charlie’s problems. But I can’t.

  Then on to Vedanta Place, where Swami seemed wonderfully better. (Yet he too—which is unlike him—wanted to be reassured, after the reading and his answers to questions, that he had been up to the mark!) He told me the depressing fact that this year at the Belur Math there will be only eleven monks taking sannyas—and this includes the four from the West, our three and Buddha from London! And only twelve are taking brahmacharya. Unless these numbers are going to double or treble, the order will gradually shrink away to nothing.

  We keep on with “Frankenstein.” Today they at last brought the shades for the bedroom and Don’s studio. The ones in the bedroom look terrible, they don’t fit together properly. Don is disgusted.

  Have just been talking to Mary Schmidt on the phone. She says that Charlie sometimes gets violent and that therefore they can’t get him a room in a private house. She told me that, on Charlie’s first night at this new place (The Burbank Palms) he was terribly indignant because one of the two male patients who were in the room with him “molested himself, while the other watched and enjoyed it!”

  February 5. A day of worry and depression. The lump in my side is still there and seems bigger, though I have the illusion that I can somehow disperse it by manipulation after I have been in the steam room at the gym. (Weighed 148 today.) And then Don came back after seeing Dr. Kafka, the foot specialist, who told him that the growths in his foot are papillomas and sometimes “don’t yield to treatment,” whatever that means!

  We may go up to San Francisco tomorrow, chiefly in order to see Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, which is on a midnight show. Am in a flap about “Frankenstein.” We haven’t finished it, and we ought to have, by now.

  Have finished Islands in the Stream and although the main character is fakey in parts I still think it is one of his best books. Largely that’s because it’s about the Cuban area; I like his Cuban writing far better than his Spanish descriptions—he is so awfully dutifully holy about Spain and its bulls.

  Eddie Anhalt says he’ll go to visit Charlie Locke. By great good luck he happens to be working at Warner’s, so it’s only a short drive.

  February 6. We decided not to go to San Francisco, because Jack and Jim didn’t want to go. This morning we finished the first section of our rough treatment of the Frankenstein story and this afternoon Don took it up to Hunt’s house. So we’ll hear from him tomorrow what he thinks.

  They’ve been fooling around on the moon again.72 And there have been two quite big earthquakes, in Italy and in the Aleutians.

  We had a delicious supper of hamburgers at home and watched The Night of the Iguana on T.V. Gore and Howard were to have called us before leaving tomorrow, but they haven’t. A dull but quite happy day, with weather to match.

  February 7. Don, who is worried about his foot and keeps expressing his worry in jokes about having his leg amputated, saw a very bad omen today. A little grey cat with three legs ran across the road in front of his car!

  Gore called from the airport to
say goodbye. Says he’s still undecided whether to become Irish, Swiss or Italian.

  Hunt Stromberg seems genuinely pleased with what we have done on “Frankenstein.” As usual he made a couple of mad suggestions: that the kid brother William’s arm should somehow be used—it keeps grasping at things, fighting for life. And that, when Victor and Henry (as he is now called instead of Rudolf ) swear blood brotherhood and cut their arms, the blood runs down and somehow brings the butterfly to life!

  February 8. We had supper with Jo last night. She has had a reprieve; Louis isn’t going to build outside her windows for another year, maybe two. And now she and Alice Gowland have decided to give cooking classes in her apartment! We had cracked crab, which was quite good, but unfortunately Anne Baxter and her lover Dick Linkroum73 were there and Anne was in a super-manic state, she couldn’t stop talking about herself for a moment—which meant chiefly talking about Light Up the Sky, this dreary play she was in, and reciting great chunks of it. Dick, when he got a word in, kept quoting lyrics from Gilbert and Sullivan!

  This morning we drew up our lists of nominations for the Academy Awards—best pictures, Satyricon, Women in Love, Zabriskie Point, [The] Baby Maker, I Never Sang for My Father; best screenplay from another medium, Satyricon, Women in Love, Something for Everyone, Colossus, I Never Sang; best original story and screenplay, Baby Maker, In Search of Gregory, Zabriskie Point, Adam at Six A.M., The Swimming Pool.

  February 9. Don says he woke up just a minute or so before the quake began at 5:59. He said, “It’s an earthquake!” and then I was awake. It seemed to go on endlessly, in fact it was just sixty seconds. There were several quite loud crashes, and I took it for granted that the mirrors had broken; actually the glass shade of the light on the service porch had fallen and a coffee jar and some pictures, nothing serious. A very bad omen for Dobbin was that my two photos in Don’s room both fell down and also the horse on my desk!74