Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  Jess and Glade Bachardy came down early and Jess proceeded to fix the hum on our T.V. within a few minutes; we’ve had it for months.

  February 21. I went to see Swami yesterday afternoon, having been put off from doing this because Swami was feeling tired and his pulse was missing beats and he had slight asthma (which the doctor said was due to his heart condition). I arrived early at Vedanta Place, so I asked Ananda for the key to the shrine gate and went in and sat right up close in front of the shrine. I don’t know when I did this last; it is quite different, and not nearly so satisfactory from my point of view, to sit at the side as I do at the Vivekananda breakfast pujas. And then of course it makes all the difference, being alone in there. When I am alone I get the sense of confrontation, the “setting face to face” which is so wonderful and which I try to recapture when I’m meditating here at home. Well, it began working almost at once and almost without effort; I just reminded myself that it was before this shrine that Swami had his visions and that Sister used to see “the light” and that Krishna has chanted day after day. I felt the Presence and exposed myself to it, making no demand whatever, except to include Don in the exposure; it was like a radiation treatment and I knew that it was getting to me, all I had to do was stay there. And then, just when I was really open to it, in came someone and sat just behind me to the side and began whispering “Chris” and I turned and it was Ananda to say apologetically that Swami was ready to see me.

  So I reminded myself that Swami is a human shrine and therefore really much more worth visiting, and that he contains his relics too, his memories of Maharaj and the others. I found him looking not only beautiful but surprisingly well. He described his treatment as he always does, in great detail, and then told me the doctor had asked him, “Are you depressed?” and that he’d answered, “Oh no, I’m never depressed.” (The smile with which Swami told me this was so marvellous, not in the very least superior but gently amused, as much as to say how ridiculous to ask someone if he is depressed, when that person has seen Maharaj!)

  Last night we had Camilla Clay and Linda Crawford and Gavin and Mark to supper, and barbecued a butterflied leg of lamb. I had feared that the high wind we had earlier would make this dangerous but it dropped to a calm which was so dead that I had to use the bellows to get the charcoal going. Indoors, we had a cheerful fire fed by bits of my old bookcases. Camilla is on the wagon but Linda got fairly drunk. Both Gavin and Mark are dieting. Mark wants to lose twenty pounds, Gavin just a few. I asked Gavin what weight he wanted to get back down to and he surprised me by saying 158. Gavin and Mark had been to Las Vegas to see Elvis and had both liked him, but Gavin had been disgusted by Las Vegas itself. During the evening there were two earthquake jolts which I, who was in the kitchen and standing up, didn’t even feel; but the others felt them and this morning we hear that the bigger of the two was 4.3. Everyone is still quake conscious and inclined to be jittery and there is much talk of the “big one” that is coming.

  February 22. I have now finished another volume of Chekhov, the fourth, and two Richard Brautigan books, Trout Fishing and a volume of poems called The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster. I still love reading Chekhov as much as ever and am starting on the next volume right away. Brautigan amuses me much of the time, when I’m not being repelled by his whimsey. This kind of writing is sweaty, though; I am so aware of the author knocking himself out keeping me amused.

  This morning I also finished the second of the two files I borrowed from Evelyn Hooker. What a plodding old donkey psychology is! Evelyn’s questions are full of phrases like, “His own processes of sexual arousal are on the ascending incline,” “I don’t have a very clear picture of how much mutual stimulation is going on,” “The primary stimulation is on the head of the penis. Would that be true?” “While I have asked you many questions about sexual preferences and gratifications, I have not really asked you questions couched in his terms of the basic mechanics of sex.” I really can’t imagine myself working with Evelyn on this sort of thing; it would be like having to write a book in a foreign language. But I mustn’t prejudge the issue. I must wait until we have had a talk and I have found out just exactly what it is she wants me to contribute.

  Just a shade over 148 pounds at the gym.

  February 23. Yesterday afternoon, Hunt Stromberg’s secretary called, asking if we had any work for her to send on to him in Texas—this is the first jog he has given us. So we have been hurrying to get a faircopy of our opening finished, as far as the attempted suicide of the Creature and Frankenstein’s return to Elizabeth. That ought to be ready tomorrow.

  A series of tornadoes in Mississippi and Louisiana has killed more people and done more damage than our earthquake. Hope this doesn’t make the San Andreas Fault feel competitive!

  Chris Wood came by this morning, with the first two folders of my book, to collect the third. He has had flu and looks terribly stricken and skinny, though sunburnt. His back is getting so rounded that he almost has a hump. He told us proudly that he hadn’t gone to bed or seen a doctor and that he had thought he was dying. He was on his way to see Gerald but thought perhaps he ought not to go in, in case he was still infectious. It would certainly be ironic, beautiful almost, if Chris were to be the one who gave poor Gerald his release. We joked about this—you say such things to Chris without embarrassment—and yet I suppose if it really happened he’d feel guilty.

  An item in the London Sunday Times says David Hockney is going to Japan later this year, so maybe we’ll get a visit from him here.

  February 24. Weight at gym, 148. Today we finished and sent off a new draft of the first section of “Frankenstein” to Hunt in Texas.

  Last night we saw two rather dreary films with Gavin and Mark, Babes on Broadway (with [Mickey] Rooney at his sweatiest) and The Harvey Girls, which really is a deeply shocking story about the triumph of respectable girls over whores; the only sympathetic character was Angela Lansbury and she didn’t have a proper part. And then the terrible extravagance of eating out, at Frascati’s on the Strip—seventeen dollars for the two of us. It is wrong not to be stingy in these cases. Mark Andrews wore a scarlet sweatsuit; it’s curious to think that, ten years ago or less, he would never have been allowed into any restaurant in the area, dressed like that! Again, he hogged the conversation, which didn’t matter except that it was so late and we were exhausted.

  Gavin was shown the paintings by Don which are now in my room. He liked one of the “white” ones (the one I like less) and the big head. We weren’t sure how much—but he repeated that he liked them as we were saying goodnight; which, as Don said, was tactful at least.

  February 28. I had made one of my compulsionistic resolves to keep this diary every single day throughout February. Well, I haven’t.

  There’s not really much to record. I got a copy of a pamphlet written about me by an associate professor of English at Columbia University named Carolyn G. Heilbrun. It’s only forty-six pages but at least it’s a book, and it’s in a quite distinguished-looking series called Columbia Essays on Modern Writers. I can’t judge how “good” it is. Shall be interested to know what other people think of it. No news of Alan Wilde’s book on me yet.

  On the 25th we had Leslie and Michael Laughlin and Jack Larson to supper. It was blowing a gale and the whole house shook. I had to barbecue outside the front door and even with that much shelter it was quite dangerous. Jack made the evening by announcing, as soon as he arrived, that Jean Dickson (I think it was)84 had prophesied there was to be a ghastly earthquake complete with tidal wave right here between 8:00 and 10:00 p.m. this very evening! Jack said he had been told this by phone by Jim who was in New York and said the whole city was talking about it—and gloating no doubt. Anyhow, both Leslie and Michael got a bit nervous and the gale added to our state of tension. It was a relief when 10 o’clock passed. Both Leslie and Michael, Michael particularly, praised the new paintings which Don has hung in my workroom. Michael liked the same “white” one that
Gavin liked and thought it much the best of all Don’s “movie star” paintings.

  Today’s Los Angeles Times has more reports of the psychological damage done to people by the Sylmar quake. One lady showed extreme calm for four days after the quake (during which she had screamed). On the fifth day her hands “froze” to the steering wheel of her car; it took three men to pry them loose. Then she became sexually cold toward her husband. Eleven days after the quake she told her husband she wanted a divorce. They had been married for eighteen years. The husband reported, “She says when she was lying on that kitchen floor, she realized she’d ‘never really had a chance to live.’”

  Have just reread Gerald’s The Gospel According to Gamaliel. The idiom in which the dialogue is written is entirely unconvincing, the characters talk like no human beings on land or sea or in any historical period, except Gerald himself. And yet, partly because the whole performance is so utterly Gerald, it has its own power, and it does make its points very clearly, much more clearly than Gerald usually does. How amazing he is! (I make myself write “is,” though I am thinking “was.”) I read it very quickly, with ease and enjoyment.

  Went to the vespers of Ramakrishna puja yesterday. The wait to get touched by the relics was again spoilt by whisperings of women. Asaktananda called me up into the shrine right after the monastics; he did the same thing at the Brahmananda puja. Rightly or wrongly I feel that this is part of a protocol of politeness which we are evolving in our relations with each other, in preparation for the day when he will become head of the center. (He may well not be aware that he is doing this, but I am that I am; I realize that, as a senior member, I must build his position in advance by showing him extreme respect. I always rise—although it’s an effort because I am sitting on the floor—when he comes into Swami’s room.)

  But I did once again get a strong sense of contact by just sitting outside the shrine gate for a few minutes, the day before yesterday.

  Not one word from Hunt about the “Frankenstein” material we sent him, to Texas. And meanwhile we seem stuck. I am rather worried about this, can’t see any ending to the story yet. And I know we ought to have something ready for Hunt when he returns, otherwise he will bug us with more mad suggestions.

  March 2. Hunt hasn’t called but he has sent us a message through Ann, his secretary at Universal. He likes what we have written very much but makes two suggestions: the butterfly Elizabeth sees should turn into a horrible bug of some kind and terrify her—the severed arm, when Henry finds that it is becoming monstrous, should attack him and beat him, damaging his brain, so that it is no longer a normal brain when it is put into the skull of the Creature. The first of these suggestions seems merely inartistic, the second misses the whole point of the story as we wish to develop it. Still, Hunt can’t be expected to know how the story will develop because we don’t yet really know that ourselves.

  I see a little more light on this than I did two days ago, but we are still fumbling about with a lot of characters at cross-purposes. What is Pretorius (now provisionally called Dr. Thorndyke) up to? Does the Creature want a bride, or does Pretorius create one to please himself ? What part does Elizabeth play? Does the Creature rape and or murder her? Does the character of Henry emerge more and more within the Creature as the story comes to an end? And how is this demonstrated?

  Yesterday morning I saw Evelyn Hooker and told her that I can’t write her book with her. I think I explained why I can’t quite lucidly and I think I convinced her. The analogy of Kathleen and Frank was very useful, in doing this, because Kathleen’s diary can be likened to Evelyn’s files of case histories. The diaries, like the case histories, can be commented on, they can be elucidated and conclusions can be drawn from them; but they can’t be rewritten because nothing can be as good as the source material itself. What is embarrassing—and what I think sticks as a reproach against me in Evelyn’s mind—is that I told her, in the Saltair Avenue days,85 I was prepared to write a “popular” book about homosexuality with her. Of course I was always saying things like this, quite irresponsibly, subconsciously relying on the probability that I wouldn’t ever be taken up on them. To Evelyn yesterday I said, “Well, you know, in those days I was nearly always drunk”; which, the more I think of it, was a silly tactless altogether second-rate remark. (But why should Drub expect that his remarks should always be first-rate? Vain old Ninny-Nag.)

  March 4. John Lehman arrives this morning; more on that later.

  Last night, at the end of the question period after the reading, Swami said, “Let me speak out, you have no one but the Lord, no other refuge, your own nearest and dearest, they will desert you, only the Lord will never desert you.” The “Venice Gang”—Jim Gates, Peter Schneider, Gib [Peters], Beth [High], Doug [Rauch] and all their friends—now form a majority almost of the group and indeed the older people seem only half there by comparison; these young people, with all their faults and phoniness, are nevertheless the involved ones, the ones to whom Swami literally means contact with the living truth, or so it seems to me. I am not being sentimental about them, indeed I probably view them with more realism than most older members of the group do. It makes me glad that Swami has them now at the end of his life; it is a little reward for his long years with those frumpish self-indulgent women; like Ramakrishna at last getting his young disciples.

  Yesterday I went to the place recommended by Penny Little, Billy Al’s girlfriend, to buy organic nonpollutant soap for the Laundromat and for dishwashing, Shaklee’s Basic-H and Basic-L. The sales are made in a garden house behind a quite grand home on Devon, just off Wilshire in Westwood, and the ladies who run the place have the air of amateurs, they might equally well be engaged in local politics. Well, this is politics.

  After leaving Vedanta Place I picked up Don at his parents’. Both Jess and Glade had made a point of having me invited in, to sit with them and watch T.V. for a few minutes; this was a symbol of reconciliation and no doubt one of these days we shall actually have a meal together. The funny thing is, I really like them and even feel quite at ease with them. Don had been down to San Pedro where they exhibited three of his drawings at the art museum, along with work by Billy Al, Joe Goode, Peter Alexander.

  March 6. Tonight the sun set just behind the headland for the first time this year. Shortly before it did so there was what seemed to me a quite sharp earthquake jolt. But Don, who was out in the studio, said he didn’t feel it: “I must have been dancing.”

  We have now put up a fence across the steps; it was finished yesterday. This morning Don had to yell at the first boys who were opening its gate. Since then, the gate has been padlocked. This is all part of our futile but passionate defence against the invading Others.

  John Lehmann’s visit wasn’t so bad. He was away all evening on the 4th, after reading a lecture on the Woolfs and the Hogarth Press at which I had to introduce him, and he left yesterday afternoon. Our conversation, on his side, was mostly a leering inquisition. Grotesque questions like, when did you and Wystan last have sex? No, such questions aren’t at all grotesque in themselves, only the way he asks them, with the air of a dirty old bishop. Still—“Friendship never ends.”

  Still wrestling with the plot of “Frankenstein.” It’s funny how the fact that one’s dealing with monsters and murders (and early nineteenth-century ones at that) seems to make no difference to the laws of probability. One keeps dismissing ideas because they are “impossible,” “too farfetched,” “unconvincing.” But perhaps that’s our mistake. Perhaps we ought to be wilder and sillier.

  March 8. Am worried about the hard, seemingly swollen area in my intestine. I shall go and see Allen again tomorrow and then probably have X-rays, unless I can talk him into telling me it’s nothing.

  David Sachs called yesterday to tell me that Richard Montague, the mathematical philosopher at UCLA, has been strangled, seemingly by a hustler. Have heard no further news about this.

  Evelyn also called yesterday to say that she had been to the ope
ning of the Reverend Troy Perry’s new church. Perry introduced her to the congregation and she had a terrific reception. But when she stood up to speak she was so moved that all she could think of to say was, “I want to correct one misstatement which the Reverend Perry made—my research was not sponsored, as he said, by President Johnson but by the National Institute of Mental Health”! So she has to write a letter to Perry thanking him and them all, to be read out in church next Sunday. I told her this was the kind of thing you find yourself saying in a speech you make in a dream.

  Last night Paul Wonner had a show at the Landau Gallery, the last show before it closes. Some of his paintings I didn’t like at all, they seemed cluttered with gimmicks. But a few seemed better than anything he has ever done; they had a sort of prophetic authority, I felt they were genuine visions. I have a feeling that he will soon find himself able to paint simple landscapes without any gimmicks at all which have this same quality. (What I mean by gimmicks are, for example, a self-portrait face in a cloud, butterflies, flowers, a helicopter—all these superimposed upon landscapes. What he does convey is the awe of the wilderness; he makes you aware of his strong religious feeling when he is out in lonely places.)

  Later we all went to a party at the home of a Mr. and Mrs. Lusk in the rich ghetto off Wilshire called Fremont Place. The Lusks, who have just split up, were both there as hosts and seemed on the best of terms.

  Finished Romer Wilson’s The Death of Society. Why on earth did I ever like it? It’s one of the most bogus books I ever opened. The love scenes are so idiotic that I wouldn’t like them even if they were about two boys. Maybe the book appealed to me because I thought the Norwegian background glamorous. Only it isn’t. And it got the Hawthornden Prize! Here are a few lines, taken at random: