Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  February 8. I left Euston at noon, got to Stockport at 2:30. As a matter of fact, I think we arrived a bit earlier. Richard wasn’t there. Outside the station, it was drizzling. The taxis were being taken, one after another. On an impulse, I grabbed the last of them, saying to myself that maybe Richard had got the day of my arrival wrong. As we drove away from the station, we passed a car in which I was nearly sure I saw Richard and Dan Bradley—but I wasn’t quite sure and it seemed less trouble not to stop the taxi driver. (I didn’t mention this when I saw Richard and the Bradleys later.)

  As we reached the end of High Lane and turned off the Buxton Road up the road that leads to Wyberslegh (Carr Brow?),52 I saw that the hillside was already built up with rows of houses—not the old solid brick villas but the flimsy glass and plaster bungalows of nowadays. Knowing from Richard’s letters that his bungalow and the Bradleys’ were both at the top of the hill, I told the driver to go up and around, so that we entered the “development” (it’s called “Wybersley Rise”) from the Ridge road, only a few yards from the drive gate of Wyberslegh Hall. This area was still under construction and deep in mud. The way through it was blocked by a cement mixer and several trucks. The men working there told us we would have to drive back down the hill and enter by the lower road. No one seemed to know exactly where number 61 Thornway (the Bradleys’ bungalow) was. So down we went and around, and up past the already finished—fatally, finally finished—houses, until we reached the same goddamned cement mixer from the other side! And this time I discovered that number 61 was a mere dozen hop-skip steps away, across puddles and along duckboards.

  Evelyn Bradley welcomed me warmly, telling me how well I looked and herself looking like a big plump apple-cheeked girl, about thirty years younger than her age. As she served me tea—a tea which never quite ended but became “high” and merged, several hours later, into supper—she told me that Dan and Richard had probably missed me because they had both been drinking. She clicked her tongue over this—not that it shocked or worried her—she was merely deploring my bad luck in choosing the wrong day to come here; as though their drinking were like the weather, something beyond anyone’s control. On the whole, she said, Mr. Richard was “much better” than he had been in the old days, when he had spent hours shut up inside the Hall, getting depressed and downing bottle after bottle of beer. Now he only went in there a couple of times a day, just be sure that everything was all in order. . . . This led Evelyn on into psalms of praise of their bungalow. “It’s like being in paradise,” she said, and “sometimes, we can’t believe we’re really here!” I could only suppose she meant that the living room was big, far bigger than the one they had had in the Disley house. Certainly, the view from this bungalow is much inferior to the view from Bentside Road. The hill slope is only gradual, up here at the top, and so you look straight at the bungalow opposite, not over its roof. But maybe the real source of Evelyn’s joy is that she feels that “Wybersley Rise” has class—no doubt it would rank socially above the Bentside Road area; office-worker commuters in the one, factory operatives in the other. And then, of course, these bungalows are separate buildings, while the Bentside houses are semidetached. A very important distinction! At the same time, Evelyn was on the lookout to anticipate and counter any criticisms my roving eyes might be implying. She pointed out that the electricians hadn’t fixed up some of the lighting and that the plasterers had left some cracks in the wall—all that would be attended to when they came around again on their monthly circuit.

  Then Evelyn’s daughter Susan came out of the bedroom where she had been lying down. She had spent the day teaching—it was some kind of a test for her student-teacher’s diploma—and now she was suffering from migraine. (I suspected that the migraine might disappear forever if she could escape from the Bradleys’ bungalow and be on her own in Manchester and get herself fucked.) But she is obviously a bright, interesting girl. I tried hard to project sympathy but we had no chance to have a proper talk.

  Finally, Richard and Dan returned. They had missed me by only a moment—it had been them I’d seen in the car as I drove away from the station. Richard was pretty drunk and remained so. He showed this chiefly by his air of preoccupation. He had set his controls on automatic, saying “yerss, yerss” at appropriate intervals but rather too loudly to be convincing. Dan talked obsessively. Since his accident he has been homebound and all his energy goes into talk for talk’s sake. He described, in repetitious detail, exactly how the heating system of the bungalow works and what legal difficulties he has had to contend with in making his claim for accident compensation. He was drunk too but only moderately.

  I was to sleep in Richard’s bungalow, number 63. Mrs. Bradley had fixed a bedroom for me but the rest of it is still only partially furnished. I realized that Richard himself had never slept there before that night and that he had been pressured into doing so now as part of the ritual of hospitality toward me. All this time he has been sleeping in the Bradleys’ spare room, because he doesn’t like sleeping alone in his bungalow, even though it’s only a few yards away from theirs. Next morning (February 9) Evelyn Bradley told me that Richard had in fact not slept at all or even got into bed; he had stayed up the whole night, drinking.

  The morning was showery, windy, with gleams of miserable sunshine and brief flurries of snow. Richard refused to eat any breakfast and sat gulping brandy as though it were beer; I’ve never seen him do this before. Throughout my visit, we had almost no contact, and yet I didn’t feel that his drinking was a hostile demonstration—it was simply, as Evelyn had said, that I’d picked the wrong day.

  He did tell me that he has switched from the Rosicrucians to Unity. And he made a great point of giving me—pressing me to take—a watercolor of Wyberslegh Hall painted by the Mr. Standen who had given painting lessons to Frank. Was this a guilt offering? I only suspect so because I found out, quite accidentally, from Mrs. Bradley that Richard sold Frank’s entire portfolio of watercolors to a dealer, some while ago! This explains why Paul Dehn’s sister found the one he gave me, for sale in a Disley shop.

  Mrs. Bradley’s only other indiscretion was to point out to me, among the workers on the building project, a young man whom Richard fancies. Her smile, as she did this, was full of loving amusement; absolutely unbitchy. She really is an adorable woman.

  The Hall is shockingly close to this bungalow townlet; from the Bradleys’ back window you look right into its wilderness of a garden. There isn’t even a fence. Yet this is a frontier, between two worlds, two utterly alien time rhythms. I find their confrontation inexpressibly spooky. The Hall seems ghastly, abandoned, betrayed, dead—yet overpoweringly there. The bungalows are evidently alive yet scarcely present—mere shoddy momentary things.

  I went over to the Hall about midday, with Richard and Dan. The roof is leaking badly, now, and won’t be repaired till the spring. The water has run down into the Stone Parlour, which reeks of damp and rot and dirt. The shutters were closed. From this dim death chamber, I put a call through to Santa Monica and soon heard Charles Hill’s chirpy young voice speaking from the land of sunshine. He explained quite casually that we hadn’t been able to reach him because he had been spending his nights at Ed Moses’s house, looking after the Moses children. Paula, Charles’s girlfriend, had had to go to Chicago, and Charles had decided that he didn’t like sleeping in our house alone.

  The Bradleys told me that Thomas Isherwood now owns the field which is directly below the house. This is due to a deal whereby Richard gets a larger sum of money guaranteed during his life and Thomas gets some part of his inheritance in advance, before Richard’s death. The Bradleys seem to think that Thomas will sell this field to the developers, who will then fill that section of the hillside with bungalows and block the view from the Hall almost entirely. Thomas has already made an enemy of the Bradleys, by some condescending remark to the effect that they are only occupying their bungalow by gracious permission of the Isherwood family—a permission which may be wit
hdrawn. The Bradleys are terribly afraid that they will be left unable to pay their rent and will be evicted, after Richard dies. Dan spent the last hour before I left in alluding to this problem with much circumlocution and repetition. No doubt he hoped I’d promise to help them out if necessary. I didn’t, but I suppose I probably would.

  The fields below the Hall are part of Wyberslegh; if they are built over, its view taken away, it will no longer be able to breathe or see. And yet the farm, which is its Siamese twin, will remain almost unaffected. The farm’s view, out toward Cobden Edge and the High Peak, hasn’t changed—though, of course, it could easily be cut off by building two or three houses on the opposite side of the road.

  It isn’t surprising that the Bradleys are pleased with their bungalow townlet, but it amazes me that Richard is. With his intense under lying obstinacy, he can hardly have let himself be brainwashed; this must be a case of subconsciously willed acceptance. Since he has agreed to build a nest for himself and the Bradleys here, he must have made up his mind to like it. He keeps suggesting, quite seriously, that Don and I should come over and settle here. As for Evelyn Bradley, she says with conviction that Kathleen would have been so comfortable and happy in one of these bungalows. This statement staggered me so that I couldn’t help showing my astonishment. I think Kathleen would have had a stroke at the mere suggestion.

  After lunch (another meal he refused to eat) was over, Richard began to fall apart. He couldn’t even stand up. Evelyn used all her powers of coaxing to get him to go to bed and at last she succeeded, just as it was time for me to leave. He was helped into his little bedroom in the Bradleys’ bungalow, still protesting that he wanted to come with me to the station. I caught the 3:38 train and was back in London at 6:12. An hour and a half later, washed and changed, I showed up with Don at a party given by Alain Bernheim53 for John Houseman. My sense of psychological transportation couldn’t have been stronger if we’d just flown in from California. Here was Ingrid Bergman, still beautiful and still radiantly smiling as she was when I first set eyes on her, more than thirty years ago. (The last two times we met, she seemed hardly to remember me, but now she did, vigorously—she is the adorable queen of all the moo cows.)54 From the party, we went on to a happy gossipy supper with John Schlesinger and his friend Michael Childers at their newly acquired and reconstructed house. Each room was like a fresh advertisement, executed in breath-taking, boldly contrasted colors, for their successful, with-it way of life. Nowhere to relax, be untidy or display unfashionable objects of sentimental value.

  On the morning of the 10th, we phoned Wystan, who had just returned to Oxford from Brussels, where they’d been performing [Nicolas] Nabokov’s opera, Love’s Labour[’s] Lost, for which Wystan and Chester wrote the libretto. This was the only possible day for us to have seen him. Chester answered the phone and there was a feeling of awkwardness between us. Then Wystan got on the line and said quite firmly that he couldn’t see us that day. Perhaps he didn’t want to, with Chester around. I don’t blame him.

  We filled in our more or less wasted last day in England by going to see the Futurismo and Dante Gabriel Rossetti shows at the Royal Academy, eating a cramped lunch at the Jermyn Street Wheeler’s and having a drink with Kate Moffat. She was unexpectedly unfriendly and obviously only received us as a duty. Ivan arrived while we were there, but couldn’t warm up the atmosphere. He still seems very much at home in her house. Didn’t see Kate’s lover.

  Our last evening was spent at the Powis Street flat. Peter Schlesinger and Eric Boman cooked supper. Patrick Woodcock was there and Mo—but not Mick Sida; he was off, I suppose, on his mysterious nocturnal wanderings. My relations with Patrick weren’t as pleasant as usual, I’m sorry to say. Maybe all his talk about settling down in France irritated me, after a few drinks, for I launched into one of my tiresome cantankerous Francophobe tirades. Also I declared that, as a writer, I needed all my life to master the English language—implying that Patrick and the rest never had and never would—and that I therefore had no time to waste in dabbling in foreign tongues. Patrick rightly found this statement pretentious. It was also rude to Eric, who speaks at least three languages fluently.

  We packed before going to bed.

  Next morning, February 11, Tom Pugsley (the driver who had brought us here on arrival) came round early with a limousine— Universal’s last service to us—and took us out to the airport where he refused a tip. We left most of our baggage in storage, so as to travel light to Switzerland and Italy. All went according to Peter Viertel’s schedule, except that the plane to Zürich was delayed nearly an hour. I think there had been a last-minute bomb scare, because the baggage had been put on the plane and taken off again, and each of us had to identify his own pieces. But, when we did get to Zürich, the Swissair representative who was a friend of Peter’s saved us from missing our train by unlocking doors with a private key, thus bypassing passport and customs officials, then personally changing money for us and getting us a cab to the station. This was dirty and gloomy, not Swissbright as I had expected, and crowded with skiers, many of them just riding up to the snow for the after noon. We must have been almost the only nonskiers on the train. When we got off the train at Landquart, we found ourselves marching inside a compact formation of them; all around us, the dark skis, held upright, looked and clattered like antique weapons.

  Peter was there to meet us, as he’d promised, all briskness and wisecracks. He drove us up a winding road into the Klosters valley. (The train goes there too, but you have to change from the Zürich train into another one, so it’s quicker to drive.) Light snow fell, the peaks were hidden by clouds; you felt the claustrophobia of a forlorn grey day in the Alps. The chalet belonging to Peter and Deborah seemed forlorn and shut-in too when we first saw it; dark woods of conifer all around, the branches extending their heavy paws of snow. Near it is an immense old barn which used to be part of the original farm, Wyhergut.

  The inside of the chalet is richly comfortable, furnished in a mixture of styles, plutocratic peasant and Kensington dainty. Local craftsmen carved its ceilings and put stained glass windows in its doors.

  Peter put us to work at once, shovelling snow off the steps, lest we shouldn’t be able to get back up them when we returned from Klosters later in the evening. He didn’t ask me to help, knowing that I would anyway. With Don he was apologetically bossy. “Don’t make a lifework out of it, as my sergeant used to say.” Peter’s conversation keeps reverting to his army memories. As long as the light remained, skiers would keep shooting out of the woods and whizzing by, in twos and threes, uncannily silent. The massive snow-hush was broken only when Peter started up his miniature snowplow. Once, we heard a faint rumbling as the train passed, improbably high above us, on its way to Davos.

  Wyhergut is about a mile beyond Klosters. We drove down there to have supper with Salka, who has a pleasant little flat in the middle of the village. She is still strikingly handsome but now she is old, really old. You feel how bitterly aware she is of her increasing isolation from the outside world. No doubt Klosters, with its gothic, incurably Swiss villagers and vulgar international millionaire ski-bums, seems a place of exile to her; the local dialect must jar on her theatrically trained ear; and the place itself, though actually so accessible, has an air of hopeless remoteness, tucked away in the very back of Switzerland near unfindable Liech[t]enstein. Also, Peter told us that Salka had been terribly depressed by a recent visit from her sister Rose, who is younger than she is but already gaga, with a failing memory. Nevertheless, Salka is probably better off here than she would be anywhere else. Everyone says how kind Deborah is to her—when Deborah is there. And we all have to make our last stand somewhere.

  After supper, we went round to see Irwin Shaw and his girl friend Bodil Nielson.55 He was very drunk; Peter says he always is. Shaw has turned into the usual type of heavy-duty huffing and puffing Jewish writer, oracular but unsure of himself, and expecting a pogrom to start any minute. (The most ghastly punishment
imaginable for him would be to condemn him to live in Israel.) I liked him. I always have.

  February 12. The sun shone and everything was instantly transformed. The whole valley seemed to have opened up. Peter cooked breakfast, refusing to let us help, and announced the orders for the day. We were to go up with him into the mountains by cable car. He would ski down and we would ride down. After breakfast, he made and received long-distance phone calls—talking to London, Paris and Rome as if they were neighboring villages, and switching without effort from English to fluent French, German or Spanish. Driving down to Klosters, he told me about a girl he had known who was killed by an avalanche. This was one of his beloved Hemingway-style guilt stories; Peter claimed that he felt responsible because the girl had started out with him and several others and had gone off on her own, accompanied by Irwin Shaw’s son; Peter, as the most experienced local resident in the party, felt he ought to have stopped her from doing this because they were in an area of possible avalanches.56 If there are a lot of you together and an avalanche does fall, it’s more likely that a few of you will escape and be able to dig the others out of it.

  It was only after I had questioned him that he had to admit that the girl herself was no beginner but a ski instructor. And the avalanche only killed her indirectly, by knocking her head against a tree. Shaw’s son, who was also buried by it, was able to struggle out of the snow and could have rescued the girl, if she hadn’t been dead already. The fact is, Peter is carefully cultivating his guilt because he is planning to turn the story into a novel.