Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  Don’s earnings are now up to eighteen hundred dollars for this recent period! We went and deposited some of the money in a different savings bank, called American Savings. Somehow the place seemed totally unreliable and unserious, but that was probably because we were taken care of by a very campy black queen and because everybody in the office was in pseudo-Hawaiian drag—it’s part of a publicity drive by Western Airlines. When the deposit had been made we were given an orchid each. We left them in the gym, to which we went right afterwards.

  Harry Rigby, for whom Gielgud is directing Irene in New York,195 is one of the people Don has been drawing. He came around with Scott Schubach to pick up the drawing. (Don wasn’t there because he was drawing Elton John and his collaborator Bernie Taupin; this morning he had to dash out to Malibu to deliver the drawings to them before they took off for England.) Rigby is a mixture of Van Vechten196 and Frankenstein’s monster. He kind of drifts up to you and makes gestures all around you, like an octopus. Scott alarmed me by saying that Hunt was “a prisoner” of Dick Shasta and Dick’s mother, and that Hunt is terrified that Dick will murder him for his money. He doesn’t think Hunt will be allowed by them to return to Los Angeles or go to England for the film—unless, of course, he is heavily guarded. This is just the sort of hysterical half-truth which one can’t dismiss altogether. Hunt certainly did believe his life was in danger from Dick; that was when he had that bodyguard.

  Surveyors have been working a lot on the road below. Fear that means they are going to widen it at last.

  Another beautiful morning on the beach. We went to the ocean twice.

  August 2. Talked to Jim Bridges on the phone this morning. He is now more or less committed to directing The Paper Chase and is off to look Harvard over and then go to Toronto, to decide if the buildings there will do as a double for the Harvard Law School. He has just found out, to his disgust, that the production of Streetcar which he’s to direct at the Ahmanson next spring isn’t the only production opening at that time; there will be another at the Lincoln Center. Jim feels this will take away a lot of his publicity and prestige. Also, he has begun to realize that Tennessee isn’t really interested in the project; he’s busy preparing to write his autobiography. Also, Jim has had a change of heart about the play itself; he now feels that it (hush, hush!) isn’t all that good.

  Robin French called to say that he has put us up as possible writers of the script of Galsworthy’s The Apple Tree, with Bogdanovich directing. Also that Sheinberg is leaving for Europe, where he will talk to Boorman and/or Lindsay Anderson about directing “Dr. Frankenstein.” Also that he still believes he can sell The Vacant Room197 to T.V.

  From first indications, Deliverance is going to be a huge success.

  August 3. We had supper with Swami out at Malibu again last night. He had been discussing spiritual experiences with Pavitrananda. He told us that his vision of Vivekananda in the shrine of the Hollywood temple had come after Ashokananda had attacked him for allowing me to write (in the introduction to Vedanta for the Western World) that “if he (Vivekananda) had never visited Dakshineswar, he might well have become one of India’s foremost national leaders.” Ashokananda found this insulting to Vivekananda’s memory. Swami didn’t agree but nevertheless was very upset. And then the vision came, apparently to reassure him. All this I’ve heard dozens of times already. But yesterday evening Swami remarked, almost casually, that, just before the vision, he had been going through a mood of self-blame in which he considered suicide. “How could I live, if I had insulted Swamiji?” This was what amazed me and Don. I asked him, “Surely, Swami, you couldn’t have considered killing yourself and leaving your work unfinished—that isn’t like you at all, you always have such a sense of responsibility?” Swami didn’t seem to get my point. But we both remain astonished. Was this just a bit of Asian hyperbole? I find it hard to dismiss it like that, when I remember how matter-of-factly Swami went on to speak of his three great experiences, this vision of Swamiji, his vision of Holy Mother in his room at the center and his experience of God without form in the temple of Jagannath.198 It was so convincing that it gave me goose pimples. Then he added that the “I” that witnesses these experiences is not the ordinary egotistical “I”; it simply records and remembers.

  Don asked Swami if he would sit for more drawings, but he screwed up his nose and said, “It takes too long—and this body is so old!’

  Rob [Matteson] sent prints of his photographs yesterday. They really are surprisingly good, of both of us. Only I must give up smiling at the camera altogether. My assorted mouthful of false and real teeth looks grotesque!

  August 4. I forgot to say that I asked Swami which of the direct disciples—other than Brahmananda—made the greatest impression on him, personally. He answered without hesitation Premananda and Turiyananda.

  Last night we had Chris Wood to supper at the Bellevue. His back is better but still bad; he is stooped and shrunken. He weighs 112 pounds—only a little more than Swami! He still talks of going to England, but maybe the back is a psychosomatic obstacle; Don thinks so. Chris talked about Peggy, who has obviously been bugging him by trying to run his medical care. He says that Derek [Bok] is now “like a famous actor.” Then, obviously quite forgetting who he was talking to, he decided that only people of the same age should have sex together—otherwise “it isn’t pretty”!

  This morning, Evelyn Hooker went up to Vedanta Place and had an interview with Asaktananda. I spoke to her on the phone just before she left and knew at once that she was “disturbed”; her voice was weepy and she told me, “Things are happening which I’m not ready to have happen—samadhi.” I thought it best not to ask her to describe what she thinks samadhi is. Later, having seen Asaktananda, she called me to say that he was “a man of great wisdom.” She was vague about the interview itself, but apparently she got “samadhi” again just as it started and was unable to speak for some time. Asaktananda gave her some instructions; “and now,” she said, “I know where I belong.”

  August 5. Last night we went with Jack Larson and Jim Bridges to hear Tom Hayden talk about the war in Indochina. Jon Voight arranged this series of talks and he wants us all to get others to come, so we’ll know the facts and be able to use them—in the presidential campaign, for example. Hayden spoke lucidly and in great detail. He seemed terribly weary and no wonder; he has been doing this for years now. It is right and necessary that we should be reminded that all this is going on, just over the horizon of our fat-cat lives. But what exactly is one to do about it? Making Nixon responsible seems petty and even cynical, in the face of this ghastly suffering. Are we to use it merely as a weapon in our party politics? Our entire economic system and its philosophy is involved; and what are the alternatives to it? China? Russia? Cuba? God save us! So, practically, what does one do? Retire into an anarchist commune. Or a monastery. Work for birth control. Go to Indochina with the Friends and help in a medical unit. Yes, those are ways of keeping your hands clean. I suppose, for me, the only way I could be even minimally useful would be to teach again. I did manage to tell a lot of people a few home truths, in those days, and one or two may have been influenced by them. It’s far more effective to give a little prod unexpectedly, now and then, in the midst of what’s officially a course in English literature. When you speak at a peace rally everybody knows in advance what you’re going to say. It makes no difference if they’re for or against you; at such times their minds aren’t open.

  Before going to the talk, we went to a restaurant called The Corkscrew which has been opened fairly lately on San Vicente. The sort of place we never ordinarily visit—hostessy, your “wine girl” is introduced to you by name, and you go to the counter and mix your own salad; the object being, I guess, to give the sheep the illusion of making individual contacts and choices. Jim objected to it strongly, calling it “bourgeois,” but Jack obstinately likes the food. (This morning, both Don and I had gained weight; I’m over 151.)

  The talk was at the Compan
y Theater.199 Two of its members told me they want to do Dogskin soon, the original version. I’m wondering if Elsa will raise a stink about this. Don says that, as usual, I’m manufacturing obstacles.

  August 6. Elsa, to my surprise, took the news about Dogskin and the Company Theater quite calmly, saying that it would make no difference, as far as our musical version is concerned. She’s now getting ready to pursue John Houseman, who is coming here soon to direct a replay of Don Juan in Hell.

  Don, waking up this morning: “‘I think I’m going to have to drop my ban on Jesus, eventually’—that’s the first line of a movie we wrote about Stephen Spender.” Don quite often begins the day like this, by describing a dream he has had. He is still half asleep while he talks to me. “Did Stephen say that?” I asked. “No,” said Don. “Was the movie produced?”

  “Not yet.”

  I have kept meaning to record a discovery I made, last time I was up at the Malibu house, seeing Swami. In his bedroom is a shelf of books belonging to the hostess. Most of them are religious or at any rate seriously instructive in tone. But, between the New Testament in Modern Speech and St. Francis de Sales’s Treatise on the Love of God, I saw Myra Breckinridge!

  Last night, we had Mrs. Leavitt in to cook and had Roddy McDowall, his friend Paul Anderson, Dick Gain the dancer, Jack Larson and Jim Bridges to supper. It didn’t quite work. I think Roddy is nervous unless he has some other stars in the room with him and preferably some women. And maybe he was embarrassed by the flower-child behavior of Dick, who kept repeating how much he loves Don and me. But Dick’s a sweet creature, and his figure, in his late thirties, is still terrific. He’s up at Marymount Convent, teaching children dancing, for two weeks. I still find Paul attractive, though he is very much Mr. Showbiz Junior. He’s a real farm boy, with a thick trunk and sturdy legs—“workhorse legs,” Don calls them. Roddy has a weird hobby, he makes candles. He brought us one, or rather a sort of wax embryo containing three wicks and many lumps of colored wax embedded in wax. Without my glasses, I took it for some sort of fruit dessert and was about to put it in the icebox.

  August 7. As we ran down to the beach this morning, we talked about one of Don’s paintings which is hanging in his studio. Don described how he prepares the background first, covering the whole area of the paper; then he paints the head and shoulders over it, allowing the background to show through in places. That’s to say, he has to adapt the figure to the background. I asked him to explain why he does this and he answered that it’s because he has a temperamental horror of making plans. He feels that plan making destroys his artistic impulse. If he tries to plan, he loses all desire to paint the picture. So he confronts himself, as it were, with an emergency, a fait accompli, which demands to be dealt with.

  We live, many people would say, entirely for pleasure—that is, we mostly do only what we want to do, and even when we do something we don’t want to do it is as a result of our own mistakes; for example, we go to somebody’s house against our better judgment and then have to invite that person back. We aren’t wage slaves, we don’t have to conform, we impose our own lifestyle on others rather than vice versa. Yet our lives are curiously rigorous. We go to bed late, get up early after what seems like too little sleep, feel guilty if we haven’t finished breakfast by eight, put in our stints of reading and work, run down to the beach and go into the water but don’t stay long, hurry off to the gym, rush out to movies and sometimes see three of them in a row, often sitting through them grimly and almost hating them, then dash home and drop stunned into bed. . . . And yet this is, without doubt, the most continuously happy time of my life. The nearness of Don, the sharing of experience with him—that’s what makes everything worthwhile.

  August 8. Last night we went with Gavin to see Rebecca and Jamaica Inn. The print of the latter, or rather the way it was projected, was so bad that we left. In many shots, the heads were cut off. But it was obvious that Laughton was awful, anyway. This is Gavin’s last week in his house, then he’ll move to the Marmont, then leave. We still haven’t seen Mark or even discussed the situation with Gavin. I feel we can’t let him go without having it out with him, otherwise the whole thing will fester into a feud. At the Golden Bull, where we had supper later, Evelyn Hooker was sitting with two guys at another table; either she didn’t see us or she decided not to come over. She was drunk and talking with maximum audibility. I heard her telling the others that she was Lebanese. I never heard this before. Was she kidding, and, if she wasn’t, does this explain why her sister looks so Jewish?

  August 9. This is a period of intensive moviegoing, partly because several theaters are running revivals of old films made by some particular director or starring some particular actor. Last night we saw To Have and Have Not, which I thoroughly enjoyed and Ozu’s Tokyo Story, which is perhaps the best of all his films and tremendously moving. Even his boring passages—in this case the death of the old woman—seem artistically intended; he slows the action down until it nearly stops and this in itself is a most daring kind of realism, a way of making you feel the drag of Life.

  The moviegoing keeps us up very late and we wake exhausted. This morning Don had a dream “that we bought a lot of furniture and when we brought it home we didn’t like it as much.”

  Rob Matteson came to be drawn yesterday afternoon. He absolutely refuses to be paid for the photo graphs, which means (a) that I shall have to get one of them into a magazine when next I’m interviewed and (b) that Don will have to give him one of his drawings. He really is a sweet boy though.

  Richard Haydn200 came by and had tea with me. After reading Kathleen and Frank with great enthusiasm, he wanted to see Frank’s and Kathleen’s watercolors. He is an odd lonely creature, proud of being able to live alone. He says that when he gets sick he recovers much more quickly than most people because there is no one to encourage him to stay in bed. I can’t quite picture how he uses his time.

  August 10. Two or three days ago we discovered, with some anxiety, that Hammer Films of England have made a movie based on Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, which is one of the books I read while we were concocting our mummy story. Last night we went to see it. It is called Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb. (Don and I were talking about the nuances of meaning in “A Lady from the Land of the Dead” and “The Lady” etc. “Blood from a Mummy’s Tomb” would be like “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”—campy romantic, not a horror title.)

  There are resemblances between our story and theirs, but I don’t think they’re serious enough to matter. The emphasis is quite different. The biggest resemblance is that both stories have a girl in them who’s a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian. But theirs is an evil witch, ours is a perfectly harmless princess. Their incarnation takes place more or less arbitrarily; ours is motivated. Their story is cluttered with minor characters, ours uses very few.

  I shall call Hunt about this, but largely to tease him as a punishment for not having been in touch with us the whole of the past week.

  August 11. Don says not to tell Hunt about Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb because if I do I shall start something. What we ought to do, he says, is say nothing unless somebody raises the question, and then say casually, Oh, that thing—we went to see it, of course, but it was so obviously quite different and inferior that we didn’t think it worth mentioning. . . . So that’s what I’ll do.

  We saw Robin French and one of his colleagues yesterday, to discuss T.V. projects. But, as always when you do this with an agent, the attitude is, You write something marvellous and then we’ll see if we can sell it. Their idea of something marvellous was a story of Germany in the thirties. Robin quoted a great story someone had dreamed up, about a very ambitious dissatisfied young World War I vet who can’t get work and everybody laughs at him and he’s full of rage, and then he turns out to be—Hitler! Actually, I believe Jean-Christophe would make an excellent four-part T.V. film, if only someone would buy my screenplay from Fox.

  We had supper with Sw
ami at Malibu yesterday evening. In addition to the regulars, Swami Prabuddhananda, the head of the San Francisco Center, is staying with them now. He hardly spoke at all and seemed stodgy and almost Germanic; no doubt he has had to assume an authoritarian persona in order to control the rebel “white swami” elements in his congregation which so nearly succeeded in taking over before he arrived! Swami was full of love. He seemed really pleased to see us both.

  August 12. Hunt has never returned my call. I wonder if Dick Shasta (who answered the phone) ever told him about it? Ever since Scott Schubach made those remarks, I’ve been half expecting some terrible drama. A little paranoia goes an awfully long way, especially since we have been seeing so many Hitchcock movies lately. How easy to imagine Hunt gagged and strapped in the cellar, because he refuses to sign a deed of gift, making over his fortune to Dick and Dick’s mother!

  Last night, we took Jo to supper and then to hear Tom Hayden speak again on Vietnam at the Company Theater. The talk itself was less interesting than last time, because it was the past history of Vietnam. It was all based on the proposition that the Vietnamese are sure to throw the invaders out because they always have done so in the past. I kept falling asleep. But I am being much instructed by one of Tom Hayden’s books, The Love of Possession Is a Disease with Them.

  Jo seems a little “better,” I mean wiser. I felt this quite definitely yesterday. Glade Bachardy, alas, isn’t “better.” Today, Don tells me that she has refused to go to Europe with Jess, saying that she doesn’t want to “come back in a box.” Don says it is all spite; she has to do something to spoil his enthusiasm for new experiences. Don is wondering if he ought to speak to her. But he is afraid that, if he does, she will simply fly off the handle and refuse to see him again.