Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  And then there is the tremendous, rigidly repressed excitement of the mental journey. Edward, in this Victorian drawing room in Sandown, is setting forth into the outer space of his own mind. Edward conveys the excitement of that in a way which makes me think of Zen.

  Two days ago, we took Tom Wudl up to Vedanta Place. He had supper with us at the monastery and then came to the reading, where Chetanananda answered questions. I think Tom was interested, but we both suspect that he was also a bit put off.

  Old Age notes: After a day of answering letters, writing checks to pay bills, etc., I am more than ever conscious of my incompetence. This could be described as senility, but is basically due to an enormous resentment at having to do these chores at all. Maybe old age is expressed in resentment. My left foot is always bad now. And my left eye seems to be clouding over. Yet I run every day. And I see well enough. My eyes don’t smart any more than they always have done at the end of a day.

  October 14. Another name to add to the Cancer List: Larry Holt has had a malignant tumor taken out of his lower intestine. I haven’t talked to him or seen him yet. And Dorothy Miller, she’s also in hospital; because she has at last agreed to have her leg surgically straightened.

  Don has listened to Edward’s tape of Alan Sebrill and thinks that Edward is very near to madness. I think he lives very near to madness and perhaps always has; but I don’t expect him to cross the line now. I believe that danger is over.

  My meditation has never been worse. Sometimes I spend the entire period just rattling away to myself about chores or anxieties or my book. What I must learn to do now is live in the present— with one exception: I must dwell continually on my death until I am absolutely accustomed to the thought and not one bit scared by it. Otherwise I must live in my love for Don and in the work I am doing. And I must fill in every empty moment with japam. Never mind if I can’t think of Holy Mother or Maharaj; I don’t believe that that really matters, as long as I never cease to make the effort.

  The novel—just look at me, I call it a “novel” because most of my mind simply isn’t attending to writing this—the book goes very slow but I am progressing. I keep feeling that I am leaving out “the point,” however. This book, more than any of the others, is like a net. I keep letting it down into the mind water and failing to bring up the real right fish. Don’s suggestion for its title is A World of Difference or maybe Worlds of Difference. I have an uneasy feeling that these titles have been used already.

  After all this time, I have taken to drinking coffee again; it seems to blow the nearly dead embers of my imagination into a faint red glow. Also I occasionally increase the effect with a Dexamyl tablet.

  Old Jo now walks without a crutch or even a stick and her complaining is cut down to a minimum. Now it’s chiefly because there are so many kids everywhere: “It’s like they let loose a swarm of beetles.” She says they come down to the beach while it’s still dark and begin to surf at dawn. I suppose this will be a marvellously romantic childhood memory for those of them who grow up capable of having romantic childhood memories.

  October 16. Suddenly an overpowering heat wave. Even down here, at 9 p.m., it is hot outside. Don has gone to draw Alice Faye at the theater during her performances—a wild undertaking which has really no relation to art but to his private sport of star teasing. The more she tried to put him off, the more determined he became to trap her.

  Yesterday a letter from Leo Madigan arrived, with a postscript to the news of James Pope-Hennessy’s murder which is almost more upsetting to me than the murder itself: namely that the murderer was a sexy blond Irish boy named Sean O’Brien whom we met twice in London last year with Madigan, on February the 3rd and 7th, and who gave me that memorable kiss in the pub. Madigan writes:

  He got a seventeen-year sentence a few months back though what good that does after the event I can’t tell. Miss James sorely but, in his innocence, it was partly his own doing. He had a way of putting people on towering pedestals till they thought they were confirmed in grace, then cutting them dead. Aren’t trying to justify or excuse Sean but that’s the position he suddenly found himself in and for a bloke who used to go out and hustle to bring home a nigh-on bankrupt James the takings to find himself abandoned just when all the papers were screeching about him, JPH, getting a 75,000 pound advance for a book on Noel Coward, it was understandable treachery. I believe Sean wanted to humiliate James. He, Sean, had been drinking for twenty-four hours beforehand and the whole thing ran amok.189

  I wrote back asking Madigan, if he was in communication with Sean, to tell him how sorry we were and to give him our love. Don was amused and a bit thrilled, saying that what I had written was “daring,” but it was simply how I felt and he agreed that he really felt that too.

  October 30. Some young Mexicans, employed by Elsa, are trimming the eucalyptus which tends to overhang this house. Looking at it more closely, we find that another tree, much smaller but already quite big, has grown up near the parent tree but on our side of the fence. So we shall have to pay to have that one pruned. While watching the Mexicans at work on the big tree, I saw something extraordinary happen. A limb of the smaller tree suddenly cracked and hung down, nearly broken off, as if in sympathy. There was no wind blowing, at all.

  I’m sort of stuck in my book or at least dragging my feet[.] I think I am being too picky, trying to make this a final draft, which it can’t possibly be, because I can’t see where to put the emphasis on certain characters and events until I can read through the whole thing.

  Now the big event is Don’s show, on the 5th.190 Several people, including Diebenkorn and William Wilson, have seen the few paintings of his which are already framed at the gallery and have been greatly impressed, saying that the paintings made them revise their whole opinion of Don as an artist. What Deibenkorn has evidently forgotten is that he actually saw four of these same paintings when they were hanging here in my workroom, and that he praised one of them, without knowing who it was by and (after I had told him) without repeating his praise to Don.

  We’ve been having a cold spell, with rain. The nerves and muscles in my hip promptly started giving me pain jerks. But enough of that—complaints are for Old Jo—from whom I’ve heard nothing for quite a while.

  November 15. Henry Seldis, this morning, in the Los Angeles Times:

  Don Bachardy, long famed for his revealingly drawn portraits of celebrities, has also created some absolutely fascinating water color portraits on paper using anonymous friends and acquaintances for sitters. All but one of these remarkable paintings is frontal. It is in the directness and in Bachardy’s sure and expressionistic use of color that we seem to be able to plumb the mood of each of his subjects as it looks back at us. There is a tension here akin to Egon Schiele—though both terror and eroticism identified with that great Viennese master are nowhere to be found in these Bachardy works. Rather he comes closer to Kokoschka’s probing of the psychological aspects of the people he painted rather than stay[ing] content with their outward appearance. To me, Bachardy’s line portraits have always had too self-conscious an artifice. Here he demonstrates a [far] deeper, more subjective aspect of his considerable talent.

  This notice is considered very good by Nick Wilder and of course I’m delighted. But I wish that there had been a picture accompanying it and that it had appeared on Sunday. The show is a success, though—no question about that. Several of the paintings can only be called masterpieces. They are so absolutely Bachardy and no one else. And you could feel how sincerely surprised many of Don’s acquaintances were by them. Diebenkorn, talking to me about them, got so enthusiastic that he seemed to become quite boyish.

  No sales so far, though.

  Last night we had supper with Nick Wilder. He got a bit drunk and displayed a rather alarming side of himself, saying that he hardly knows how he’ll get through each day, and that he simply has to get drunk toward the evening. He also told us that he is making no money and that, if he doesn’t do better in th
e next four(?) years, he may give up the gallery and go into some other profession. But we both think that this kind of talk, coming from him, isn’t to be taken too tragically. He is obviously a very strong, self-reliant person, and a very shrewd businessman.

  On the afternoon of the 13th, when they were getting the temple ready for the Kali puja that night, Swami came in to look at the image and said, “My hair is standing on end.” Then he prostrated in front of the image, lying down full-length. Then, coming out of the temple, he told people, “You are all Shiva.” “But,” said Ab[h]aya, telling us about this an hour later, when we arrived to see him, “he’s quite all right now.”

  Dorothy Miller died the 12th, of a heart attack. She had been discharged from the hospital and was in a convalescent home, learning to walk. Her sister Rose had seen her a short while before and she was cheerful and seemed quite all right. The funeral is tomorrow.

  November 21. Dorothy’s funeral was more white than black, because the members of her church—the Monroe Street Christian Church—attended. The minister [. . .] was obviously “a good little man” and even a closet queen, but oh dear how terribly he sang “Nearer My God to Thee” and how desperately he affirmed his belief that Dorothy is now with Christ. He had to thump and wave his hands to make it true. What a contrast to someone who knows it’s true, like Swami!

  Now Vera Fike is in hospital, having just had an operation for gallstones.

  Nature note: a few nights ago, near midnight, we heard a very loud chattering, scolding noise from the road below the house. Don said he thought it must be the squirrel, being attacked by one of the dogs—a dog was barking—but, when we looked down, there were two raccoons, right out in the middle of the road, fucking! We were afraid a car would hit them but there was no traffic.

  Don, describing someone: “One of those Jews that live under rocks and grow noses in the moisture.”

  At the gym: The big noisy male impersonator, named Dick, I think, says to the bleach-blond plump queen: “Shit, I though[t] you was starving—and today, godammit, you drive up in a fucking Cadillac!” The queen, very grandly, as he walks out of the locker-room, displeased: “I never starve.”

  Today, for some reason, I got the impulse to use Gerald Heard’s writing board, writing on my lap on the couch. I seldom do this. Instantly, I wrote quite a good passage on Forster. It was a bit spooky.

  November 30. Now that Don is (as far as I know) keeping a diary fairly regularly, I can’t help feeling “excused” from doing the same. But what that really means is merely that I should stick to the strictly personal, or to things which he didn’t experience.

  He did experience the evening with Gore Vidal and Howard Austen, at which I told off Sue Mengers during dinner, on the 27th. She said the Jews were better than anybody and, because I was drunk, the words flew out of my mouth and I said their art was fundamentally vulgar and second rate and that, having made themselves the boss minority, they did absolutely nothing for homosexuals, etc. etc. I felt terrible next day, but I must admit largely because I’d expressed myself badly and hadn’t been calm and superior and bitchy. Gore swears they didn’t mind—she and her husband and Howard and a producer named Howard Rosenman—three and a half Jews in all—but I feel that Howard Austen did mind very much, which I’m truly sorry for.191

  Next day I went down to Trabuco for Thanksgiving lunch. Despite all the horrors of “development” around El Toro, the view from the monastery is still nearly unspoiled—and the silence, it’s so odd; I’d forgotten what it is like. I mean, the silence there is the permanent state of affairs with occasional interruptions. Here, the silence itself is very very occasional. Jim Gates drove me home; the two of us alone in the car. He’d fixed this because he wanted to talk, and he did—I think he thought he was pouring out terrible secrets, but all he told me was about very natural resentments and feelings of loneliness. Also, that he doesn’t feel Asaktananda and Chetanananda have real reverence for Swami. Particularly Asaktananda. Jim thinks his feelings have been terribly wounded by some of Swami’s rebukes, and that he can never get over this. Jim also told me that he has swellings in his lymph glands and that he doesn’t want to go to the doctor lest he should turn out to have cancer and be a financial burden on the monastery, as Larry Miller was until he went back to his family. (He is apparently getting along quite well now, but he never mentions the cancer in his letters.) Jim wants to wait until it has become very serious and then die quickly. He wasn’t melodramatic about this. I felt much more warmly toward him than I have felt, recently.

  On the 14th of December, we’re leaving for Chicago by train. Now I’m hurrying to get chapter 7 finished and with it the whole section on Berlin. Aside from accidents, I can do this easily before we leave. Meanwhile, tension. Also irritation with Dick Dobyns who has gone off and left us stuck with this boy Corderman who has failed to send us the rent checks.192 Trivia, trivia. But how it all rattles me! I am in a very strange state. My relations with Don are as close and loving as possible; we hardly seem separate people. We both have our work and are engaged in it constantly. Thus we have the two greatest kinds of worldly happiness. But my prayers are empty; the line is dead. I try every day to keep my mind in God and I have less control than when I first started meditating. The only difference is, in some irrational way I feel that all is well.

  A sudden idea—to try meditating while typing. I wonder if it’d work. I’m not sure exactly what I mean. But I’ll try it soon. Not enough time, now, before supper.

  December 14. I never did try it, and now two weeks have slid by and it’s the day of our departure for Chicago—where Tony Richardson no longer is, because he has resigned from the film.193 But Leslie Caron is there in a play and Neil Hartley has paid for us to be able to stay in his former apartment, the two nights we are in town, which was truly generous and thoughtful.

  I’m happy to be able to record that chapter 7 is finished, and with it my whole account of the Berlin period. I have even written a few pages of chapter 8, getting Christopher, “Luis”194 and Erwin Hansen to Greece. Oh God, this book is going to be long!

  When we went to say goodbye to Swami on the 11th, he was in good spirits. He told us scornfully that there were some new regulations about brahmacharya made by the Belur Math (I think). One was that each candidate must be recommended by his guru as being devoted to God. “What nonsense!” said Swami. “As if one can say that anyone is devoted to God! It’s only when you feel that you are not devoted that you are devoted.” However inconsistent and illogical this remark might seem to an outsider, it was beautiful and true because Swami made it. I asked him to bless us on our journey and he told us to say Durga, Durga,195 as we started.

  Well Durga, Durga. I am signing off, and this is the end of this volume.

  P.S. After watching the dreadful T.V. production of After the Fall, Don said, “Arthur Miller shone a searchlight into an empty tin can.”

  January 1, 1975–December 31, 1975

  January 1. This is just to make the symbolic act of beginning a new volume. I have already symbolically contributed a couple of pages to Wanderings (chapter 8) in celebration of New Year’s Day. Also, if I have the time, I’ll rough out an opening for the preface I’m supposed to write for the new British omnibus volume of my Berlin novels—to be called The Berlin of Sally Bowles. The whole point of the preface will be to make it clear to the reader that it wasn’t her Berlin.

  We got back from New York safe and sound on December 29; I may feel like writing about this later, but not now. I’ll only record that Dale Laster,1 who’d been house-sitting for us, dismayed us by having put up a lot of the corniest Christmas decorations. He actually has a supply of Christmas tree decorations, pine cones, etc. which he uses year after year; and he’d brought in a lot of Christmas-tree branches which he had made into a sort of bush, sticking out of one of our iron balcony chairs. Other branches he stuck into the railing of the balcony, outdoors. I had to get him to take them down by telling him that we had a supers
tition in our family: Christmas decorations must be removed before New Year, or there’d be a death!

  Dale confessed that, before inviting his mother down to see the house, he had moved some of the pictures around, hiding the Hockney nudes of Peter! But he’s a good reliable soul and we are certainly lucky to have him when we need him.

  January 24. This morning, I hear from Bill Gray, a professor at the Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, that Chester died in Greece on the 17th. He got ill during dinner and died that night. (The curious thing is that he was having dinner with James Merrill the poet, about whom I’ve just been corresponding with a tiresome woman who was at the Modern Language Association in New York and heard me speak there; she is writing about Merrill’s work and wants to discuss his closet homosexuality and he doesn’t want her to and she expects me to advise her how to get around him, which I can’t and wouldn’t even if I could.)2

  I am glad that Chester is dead, both unselfishly and selfishly. He was obviously terribly unhappy—partly no doubt because of typical Jewish guilt feelings about his behavior to Wystan—and a misery to himself and a nuisance to others and an incurable unjoyful drunk. So it was best for him to go and go quickly. I am also glad because he might just possibly have made difficulties for me, out of mere meanness, when the time came for me to ask permission to include some of Wystan’s lines in my book. And anyhow it is unpleasant to have someone around who is actively hostile to you and talks maliciously about you to people who don’t know you. Indeed, I had come to regard him with powerful dislike—so much so that I found myself, for the first time, praying for him the other day, as I do for Peggy Kiskadden on the too-rare occasions when I say my prayer For Those I Love and For Those I Hate.