Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  As I was on my way back to my seat (in a box with Don and a guy from the gym named Jim Shadduck) a lady named Mrs. Olive Behrendt ran after me and told me I had been marvellous, etc., and not to feel bad about the rudeness of the audience. She is one of the most important people on the Hollywood Bowl Committee.102 I met her again today at Roddy McDowall’s and she repeated what she’d said, but she wouldn’t at all accept the idea that Fleischmann was really to blame for the whole thing. After the show was over—and Rohan McCullogh had disgraced herself by giving a hissy unctuous performance of her lines—quite a batch of people came up to say how sorry they were that I’d been cut short. And then there was an article by Martin Bernheimer in the Los Angeles Times, pointing out that the tribute to Reinhardt had been underannounced and that I wasn’t introduced. And then a member of the orchestra wrote a letter apologizing for his colleagues but excusing them by saying that they had none of them known about my appearance in advance or why I was going to speak or for how long; and that the concerts are timed precisely because of union regulations. He also pointed out that, since members of the audience are allowed to eat and drink throughout the performances, many of them are drunk! (The writer of the letter was named Dennis Trembly.103)

  Don, that avenging angel, was furious of course, but we decided to show the flag by going to the party afterwards. However, when we arrived, and asked for wine, we were told that we couldn’t have any because it was needed for supper. So we left!

  September 14. Letters about the Bowl incident keep arriving. And I keep answering, in effect; don’t apologize to me, apologize to Reinhardt—don’t blame the audience, blame the management.

  On the 6th I sent a cable to John Lehmann, and next day a letter, telling him that I cannot agree to the publication of my letters to him. They are dull, mechanical, false. Don was horrified by their insincerity when he read them—he hadn’t believed that even old Dobbin could be capable of such falseness. I haven’t heard a word from John yet, but I surely shall soon.

  Robin French has at last admitted that he is giving up being an agent. He has got a job as Vice President in Charge of Production at Paramount. We are rather pleased and excited, because we have practically decided to switch to Irving Lazar. If this is a mistake, it will at least be an adventurous one. We sounded him out through Peter Viertel and he was enthusiastic to have us. (Peter is in town because Deborah is here in The Day After the Fair. She opened last night, boldly overacting because of the oversize of the Shubert Theater. Her courage is adorable and I think the audience really liked her.)

  During the last few days, I quite suddenly decided to make a stab at my autobiographical book about America—or maybe just the first volume of it. And yesterday I actually started. I am basing the opening on my diary, but already I’m expanding the material and, I dare to hope, beginning to see how I can work away from mere narrative. My inspiration is Jung’s resolve “to tell my personal myth.”104 Therefore, I shall try to dwell only on the numinous, on the magical and the mythical. I shall try to avoid much reference to characters who lack these qualities and arouse negative emotions in me. I don’t want to gossip and bitch. I don’t want to complain and denounce—unless I am denouncing mythological demons. I aim for a tone which is positive, good-humored, tough, appreciative—but not goody-goody or mealymouthed. I want to refrain altogether from blaming myself or indulging in guilt. When I mention famous people, it will never be merely to debunk them. Unless I can see something marvellous in them, I’ll leave them out altogether if possible. I want to write about my sex life very frankly and without the least hint of self-defence.

  The kind of book I do not want to write—the kind which is full of sly debunking put-down gossip—is exemplified by S.N. Behrman’s People in a Diary, which I am just reading. (I was told by someone that he died the other day,105 but that’s no excuse for him.) On page 250 of this diary, July 20, 1972, I’ve already referred to one of his stories about Siegfried Sassoon, which was part of an excerpt from the book published in The New Yorker. Here is another, equally nauseating—

  Behrman has a talk with Sassoon’s ex-landlady and friend in London, “Burton.” She hints darkly to Behrman that Sassoon ought not to stay at his country cottage near Salisbury—it’s no use his staying there, the longer he stays, the unhappier he’ll be. When Behrman goes down to visit Sassoon, he finds that Sassoon is lingering at the cottage because of an obsessive involvement with someone who lives at a nearby country house—a very beautiful but somehow sinister house; Sassoon himself describes it as being like “The Turn of the Screw.” The house has a tower and in this tower lives a young man who is the nephew of a famous British public figure. When Sassoon comes to call, he is told that the young man isn’t well enough to see anyone. Sassoon knows that this is a lie and says so, bitterly. This embarrasses the two nice middle-aged ladies who are looking after the house. They are even more embarrassed when another young man arrives, “flamboyantly dressed and arrogant”:

  The women knew him, evidently. He treated them with condescension.

  “’Ow is ’is Lordship today?” he asked, with a jocular wink at them. . . . He nodded up toward the tower room.

  “’E expects me an’ I ’ave to make the six-thirty to London. Apologies.”

  He turned abruptly and walked into the house. . . . Siegfried had gone white. He turned and walked toward his car. I followed.

  We rode in silence. Siegfried’s face was set; he kept his eyes on the road. I wondered. Had the invalid contrived this visit from the disagreeable young man in order to humiliate Siegfried? . . . The incident was ugly, grotesque. . . . The visit had left an impression of evil, intensified somehow by the surrounding beauty . . . a poisoned beauty. . . .

  About a year later, in New York, I had lunch with a famous English stage star. He said that there was no more pernicious young man in England than the occupant of that tower room.

  Here, Behrman seems out to prove that homosexuality is a kind of madness. Sassoon’s obsession is so pathological that he lays himself open to a snub from his lover and to humiliation by a hustler who drops his h’s! This, Behrman describes as “grotesque.” The only grotesque feature of the story is the British upper-class snobbery affected by Behrman—an American Jew born in a ghetto (his word, not mine). And to think that the most pernicious young man in England was poor silly crazy touching Stephen Tennant! What an abject masochist Sassoon must have been, to expose his feelings to a bitch like Behrman.

  One more Behrman anecdote—this time about Maugham—

  Behrman is staying with Maugham at the Villa Mauresque. After supper, Maugham and Behrman go into the drawing room. Behrman catches Maugham off guard:

  He was standing, his back to me, before a sunburst mirror hanging on a wall. . . . I saw him make an extraordinary gesture. He stretched his arms out wide, flexed them, and stretched them out again. . . . It was a gesture of despair, a gesture of trying to burst unbreakable fetters, to escape from the unescapable. His arms fell to his sides. He stood there a moment, limp. It came over me that Willie was the most miserable man in the world. I felt for him. . . .

  Boy, what compassion! Behrman feels for Maugham!

  Now, Maugham tells how he wanted to go to India with Gerald Haxton to do some research before writing The Razor’s Edge. At first, Haxton wasn’t permitted to go (no doubt because the British objected to his homosexuality) but Maugham got the ban lifted.

  “We were received everywhere, unofficially—by the maharajahs and so forth—but there was no official recognition of our presence in India.” There was a freighted pause and then in a voice that stabbed like a knife thrust, he explained the official neglect. “The Viceroy was Lord Linlithgow.”

  There was, in the last words, an ultimate concentration of hatred. Lord Linlithgow was Liza’s father-in-law. . . .106 Did Willie think that Liza was an accomplice?...

  The vituperation continued. He was embalmed in hatred. . . .

  Finally, sensitive Behrman can endur
e no more. He excuses himself and goes up to his room. The Villa Mauresque turns into another Turn-of-the-Screw house. “You felt it was malign, that you had to get out of it to escape what it might at any moment reveal.” But innocent Behrman is still puzzled, hatred is something he just cannot understand.

  Sitting in a chair, trying to ravel out the heart of the mystery, I remembered suddenly a novel by Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man. It tells the story of a teacher in a California university whose male lover has been killed in an accident before the story opens. He is driving along the freeway to his class when he passes a block of newly built apartment houses. As he thinks of all those un-gay squares who will occupy those buildings, he gives vent, in his mind, to a sustained aria of applied sadism. . . . Is this how they really feel about us? I couldn’t help asking myself—is this what they’d really like to do to us? And then I thought of Mr. Isherwood himself, with whom at one time I had a very pleasant acquaintanceship. This personal knowledge did not, at any point, cohere with the aria.

  The joke of it is, I wrote that hate passage as a parable for the members of all the other minorities as well as mine. Because we are all so unwilling to admit that our own dear little injured minority can ever feel hate—except, of course, when it’s one hundred percent justified. I hope that Behrman the Jew at least got my point subconsciously, that the vast majority of all minority members sometimes give way to a paranoia which makes them temporarily insane. I believe Behrman did get the point, though he didn’t dare to admit it to himself. That is why he’s so disturbed, and writes all this gooey shit.

  September 20. No word from John Lehmann. Is he so shattered that he simply can’t bring himself to reply? I doubt that.

  Jim Bridges keeps having reasons why he can’t see us and talk about our Meeting by the River film. Quite acceptable reasons. He had to go to Atlanta twice, to be honored at the film festival. (Not only did The Paper Chase get the grand prize, but Jim got awards as best director and writer and the cameraman got an award and so did John Houseman!) This weekend, Jim has gone off to another festival, at Stratford, Ontario. And of course he has every right to be too busy or too exhausted in between these trips, or to tell us, “I just haven’t gotten around to working on it.” All the same, we are worried. Jim is a terribly sloppy, trial-and-error type of worker, we realize that now. He throws out suggestions without thinking them through, “spitballing” as he calls it, and then, if we make some slight technical objection, instantly abandons the whole idea, instead of trying to find a solution. I fear that it’s only too likely that he’ll accept some ready-made commercial film which the studio wants him to do. His success has made him all the more vulnerable in this respect.

  Good news. R[o]y Strong, of the National Portrait Gallery in London, is at least interested in buying some more of Don’s drawings.107 Irving Lazar, as I noted before, is definitely interested in being our agent. Deborah has had wonderful notices for her play. For the past eight days, I have been working with enthusiasm on my autobiographical book; I really do think it is going to hatch out!

  Terrible weather, the worst summer anyone can remember, fog day after day. When you go in the water it’s cold but bearable. I’ve been running quite a lot—but also overeating. Gluttony is truly the vice of old age. The latest temptation, Doritos taco chips.

  About a week ago, poor old Jo woke up in the middle of the night and felt thirsty, so she drank some orange juice, thought maybe it was a bit tainted but finished it anyway. A short while later, her tongue began to burn and swell. It got bigger and bigger until she couldn’t speak, so wasn’t able to phone for help. Terrified, she rushed out in her nightgown, got into the car—it was now around 3 a.m.—and drove to the emergency ward at the Santa Monica Hospital. As she told me, “I was snow white, wet and shaking like an old car!” They told her it was some kind of an allergy, resembling in its effects the bite of a snake or a spider, and that she would probably have died before much longer, if she hadn’t been treated. They gave her adrenalin and cortisone. In a few hours she was nearly all right again, and then the adrenalin made her terrifically energetic for several days!

  September 25. John Lehmann has finally written, in a tone of restrained pathos, accepting my decision not to publish our letters. “Very well,” he begins. End of paragraph. Massive pause of reproach. Then: “As you remind me, I liked and continue to like your letters very much, indeed I treasure them, and I hate to be told that the writer of them thinks they are false. That is painful and I mind it a lot.” Next paragraph repeats that John does think they tell a story—of our relationship. Next paragraph moans a little because of all the work his agent and Methuen put “into their side of the scheme” (whatever that means). Then: “We shall just have to wait until someone makes a fuck-up of it after our deaths. ‘We!’—our ghosts.” And then another bit of pathos: “Of course I shan’t be coming to Texas/California this autumn. No point now.” Then, in case he’s gone too far, he announces that he’ll be coming to Berkeley in mid-March and looks forward very much to seeing us both. Signs himself, “love, John.”

  This irritated me so much that I wrote quite a stinker to him, which Don wisely restrained me from mailing. The reply I did mail is as follows: “It pains me, and I mind it a lot that you have decided to take this personally and make up your mind that my friendship is false because I tell you that my letters are. We’ll talk it over before long. I won’t write any more on the subject—it’s too silly. Treasure the letters, by all means—but one day try to read them through objectively. If you can, you’ll see what I’ve saved us from.”

  This is weak and evasive, but I absolutely could not be bothered to go into the whole thing and point out to John how he tried to bulldoze this project through and commit me to it before I’d reread the material, and how he always resorts to pathos and being pained when he doesn’t get his way. Once started, I might have found myself cutting much deeper and telling John why my letters to him during the war were so false—namely because I knew he wasn’t on my side, I knew he didn’t believe I was serious about Vedanta or pacifism and I knew he would disapprove, on principle, of any book I wrote while I was living in America. I was false because I didn’t want to admit how deeply I resented his fatherly tone of forgiveness for my betrayal of him and England—“England” being, in fact, his magazine. . . . Well, I probably shall tell him one day if he provokes me enough, but I’ll do it face to face, not in writing. The stupid thing is that I’m fond of him in a way, and that I’ve often defended him, even. I think, as everybody in London thinks, that he’s an ass and that he has almost no talent. But I am fond of him, which is more than most people are.

  September 30. Wystan died yesterday—or anyhow sometime during the night of September 28–29. A man from Reuters was the first to phone and tell me, then a man from the BBC. He died at a hotel in Vienna, after giving a talk to a literary society there. According to the BBC man, he was quite himself during the talk; no one suspected he was sick. The BBC man said it was a heart attack, but didn’t know if it happened while Wystan was asleep or not. His body is being flown to England to be buried.108

  I have written all this down so I can read it. This is still so uncanny. I believe it, I guess, but it seems utterly against nature. Not because I thought Wystan was so tough as all that. He seemed to have been ruining his health for years. And then, whatever he may have said, he was awfully lonely—isolated is what I mean—he made a wall around himself, for most people, by his behavior and prejudices and demands. Perhaps he deeply wanted to go. His death seems uncanny to me because he was one of the guarantees that I won’t die—at least not yet. I think most of us, if we live long enough, have such guarantee figures. On the other hand, the fact that he has gone first makes the prospect of death easier to face. He has shown me the way.

  The thing which seemed particularly poignant about his death— which made me start to cry—was that he didn’t get the Nobel Prize, after all. He did so want it—and, God knows, it isn’t muc
h to ask of life.

  An odd thing: That night he died—or rather, in the afternoon here, which might well have been the exact time of his death in Vienna—I started a sore throat, the first I’ve had in a long long while, and it got so bad during our nighttime that I couldn’t swallow. And today, despite doses of penicillin, I still have a fever and headache and feel lousy. This makes me glad. I like to believe that he sent me a message which got through to me.109

  October 7. Now the awful Arabs have attacked the intolerable Israelis and all is tension and fighting speeches.110 The only way to keep from giving way to depression is to work hard. I finished a rough draft of the first chapter of my autobiography a few days ago, and now we are trying to get our screenplay revised for Jim Bridges while he’s still interested in the Meeting project. We haven’t even told him that Clement Scott Gilbert just wrote with another of his false good tidings—Simon Ward, who played the young Winston Churchill,111 wants to play Oliver and Basil Hoskins wants to play Patrick. (On the stage.)