Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  Last night, we had supper with the two men who own the arrestingly angled pink house across the Canyon on Amalfi, designed by Charles Moore. Inside, there are dramatic effects of height; bookcases with inaccessible upper shelves; a staircase which might have been built by Gordon Craig for a production of Macbeth.12 There are also many intimate nooks, charmingly, too charmingly furnished. It is just as much a showplace, in its miniature way, as Chatsworth or Blenheim. One couldn’t live in it with any sense of privacy or snugness. The architect’s real achievement is to have packed so much drama and variety into such a relatively small space. Such houses are far too rare. I would like to have at least a dozen of them in this canyon but I would hate to live in one.

  We went on to a show of paintings by a nearly attractive redhead Mark K[e]iserman13 whose work Don rather admires. Billy Al and Penny were there. Billy told me, “You two are the most distinguished people we know,” slapping my back with drunken laughter. I often feel really fond of him. He sends me up a bit with his compliments, but in exactly the right tone.

  On the 27th, I finished reading the manuscript of Jonathan Fryer’s book about me. I’m afraid it is hopelessly dull. There is no impression of me as a character, although he talked to so many of my friends. Caskey alone could have provided dozens of lifelike glimpses, and Jonathan told me that Caskey was the most interesting of all his informants. You could never guess this from Jonathan’s book; it just goes on and on, doggedly listing events, and missing the point of them almost always.

  December 31. More rain last night and this morning, followed by a rainbow over the Canyon. Don said it was a good omen for 1977.

  Last night we had supper at Trader Vic’s, with Alan Searle, George Cukor and some friends of theirs. I was trapped in a corner with Alan, who was the host. I am fond of him, largely for old times’ sake, but oh dear he is like a wealthy widow. Getting a bit maudlin, he said he hoped he had made Willie happy—also that Willie was so fond of me and of Don. Also that he would send us a copy of Willie’s unexpurgated autobiography, including all the homosexual part. Don doubts that he will really do this.

  Three parties in prospect tonight—at Jack and Jim’s, at the pink house belonging to Lee Burns and John Smith, at Peter Bogdanovich’s. Bogdanovich called this afternoon—I don’t really know why, unless it was because he has just read my book; we have never met properly—only, according to him, at a showing of Bringing Up Baby, at which, he says, I laughed even louder than he did. I don’t remember being so amused by the film as all that. Probably it was somebody else.

  1977

  January 1. This is merely to wish an unworthy hungover old Dubbin a soberer New Year. I woke up so shaky that it took me nearly three-quarters of an hour to figure out which way to attach the new refill to the calendar stand. And even now it looks odd to me, the way I’ve done it.

  I have only dim memories of the Bogdanovich and the Burns–Smith parties. Jim Bridges, with characteristic self-indulgence, failed to cancel their party although he already felt sick in the afternoon. Instead he went to bed and left Jack to cope with us, Zizi Jeanmaire, her daughter Valentine,14 Ustinov’s daughter Pavla,15 Nellie Carroll and Miguel. He failed to make us jell and nobody raised a finger to help him except Don and me. I can’t help it, I do so dislike Frogs.

  My darling, in contrast to me, made an admirable start on 1977, writing his diary, running down to the beach and, this afternoon, painting me—the first painting he has done in the studio since its rebuilding.16

  January 2. Because of yesterday’s failure, today must be my symbolic start of the work year. At least I can get on with reading through my diaries. I have three more volumes ahead of me, beginning with the trip to Austria on the “Silent Night” project, with Danny Mann, in September 1966.

  Other jobs: Revision of the Avadhuta Gita;17 continuing the reconstruction of the diaries from the beginning of 1945—thus far, I’ve reached May 1951 and would like to carry the narrative on until at least the end of 1952.

  Last night we had supper with Tony Richardson, Bob Newman and Larry Gonzales at Au Petit Joint. Tony was in good spirits and full of enthusiasm for Jackie Onassis whom he seems to regard with an almost yin-feminine admiration as a yang power-lady, stressing her utter ruthlessness. One pictured him being raped by her. I like Bob much more now than I used to; he is a sex comedian with a sadistic act, often very funny and also sexy. Larry is a gracious, softly flattering but quite intelligent young man with certainly some Negro in him. Attended by these two, Tony appears a sultan with an ambisexual harem. (I don’t know if he actually goes to bed with Larry, who is described as Neil Hartley’s friend.)

  Tony is obviously sincerely worried about Joseph Andrews; the English distributors are said to hate it. He predicts another “disaster” and laughs nervously and apologetically. Don and I are praying that we like it, when we’re shown it the day after tomorrow.

  A flat tire on the way home. We had to call the Auto Club to change the wheel. One really should know how to do such things.

  Today we may see Casanova. I woke up this morning and was disturbed to find I couldn’t remember the name of its director, although I knew the names of some of his other films, La Dolce Vita, The Satyricon etc.18 I worry about these seeming advances of senility, and yet I know that it’s also a sort of game I’m playing with myself.

  January 16. On the 12th, I read at the Vivekananda breakfast puja. Looking through my diaries, not very carefully, it seems that I first read the Katha Upanishad at the breakfast puja in 1960. Or did I first read it in 1944, while I was actually living at the center? I simply can’t remember. The only part of the breakfast ritual which I remember clearly from those days is Sister’s pouring of the coffee and lighting of the cigarettes. . . . Maybe Swami didn’t intro duce the reading until much later. It occurs to me that Swami may have “invented” this role of puja reader for me because he felt that I was spiritually “astray” and knew that the duty of reading would form a link between me and the society for at least one day every year. That would be characteristic of his kind of slyness.

  This year, Chetanananda officiated. I didn’t feel any powerful spiritual emanation from him, but I did feel one from the shrine itself. If I could have just sat beside it, all by myself, for maybe half an hour, I believe I would have been at least somewhat spiritually refreshed and restored—the publication of my book and the resulting ego-jitters have dulled me.

  It was maybe a couple of days after the puja that Jim Gates told me he has heard that Krishna has already had two malignant tumors removed from his face and that there is another which may cause him to go blind, either in one eye or in both. I didn’t actually get to speak to Krishna on the 12th. Jim is going to try to find out more about this.

  Yesterday I heard that Anaïs Nin has just died. Spoke to Rupert [Pole] who was perfectly in control of himself and ready to talk. He said it was a great mercy, she had been in terrible pain, on and off, for two years. Now he was going to devote himself to editing and publishing the rest of her diaries, translating a much earlier diary from the French, etc. He said that Anaïs’s great fear was not of dying but of being separated from Rupert forever. Sister Mary Carita19 had come to talk to her about this and had made her believe that it wouldn’t be so. I got the impression—I don’t know exactly how—that there is some other woman close to Rupert who will help him with the diary editing and generally give him her support.

  Jim Gates just called to say that Krishna had this third tumor removed and it was malignant but the doctor thinks his eye is saved.

  January 28. Oh horror—at the end of next week, Sunday February 6th, we leave to tour the frozen cities of Rochester, Toronto, Chicago, Minneapolis, where blizzards are still raging. Someone said that there may actually be a 100 degree difference in temperature between here and there! Ordinarily, Rochester would be fun; we are going there to view Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl and to meet its star, Louise Brooks, now poor, arthritic, cranky and as old as I am; also, weathe
r permitting, to dash over for a glimpse of Niagara Falls. Then we fly across the lake to Toronto for one night, then to Chicago for one night, then to Minneapolis for one night, then home. And then—after stopping here for one day, we are supposed to fly down to a Pacific coast port near Oaxaca, where Billy Al Bengston and Penny Little are staying! The port is called Puerto Escondido.

  I can hardly believe any of this, and I fear drastic psychosomatic sabotage to prevent me from carrying out the plans. My bad thumb is paining me already. And yet maybe old show-horse Drub will respond to the T.V. camera and the mike, if they can ever get him through the snow and ice to them. It will be a severe trial for both the Animals, that’s for sure.

  February 1. I have just finished reading right through my diaries, from the beginning of 1939. There is still one gap I want to fill—never mind how inadequately; from January 1, 1976, until the next entry, on August 1. A lot of this period was just slogging away on the final version of Wanderings (I must find out from Don when it was that he suggested and I adopted Christopher and His Kind as its title). Then there were the not very interesting legal proceedings and hearing before the Coastal Commission, in order to get our permits to put the upper floor on Don’s studio and thereby cut about a foot out of a worm’s-eye, street-level view across the Canyon. Then there were the arrangements for starting the construction work and our ill-fated agreement that Walter Winslow should be the contractor. Then there was the making of Alan Wallis’s film about us (which is now just about to be shown on T.V. in England, we hear).20 Then there was our takeoff for New York, England and later Morocco, to stay with Gavin Lambert. And then our return to Los Angeles on July 13, via Madrid and New York.

  What is fatally missing from the diary as the result of this gap are any entries about our last few meetings with Swami. I shall also have to describe the two memorial services for him which I did attend and particularly my meeting with Krishna when he gave me back my rosary with Swami’s bead added and I took the dust of his feet. I hope that Don will have some details in his diary about all this.

  Having read through the diaries, I still don’t have any clear idea how I am going to do this book about Swami. No doubt, as usual, I’ll have to start writing before I begin to see the way ahead.

  Meanwhile, the frozen North awaits us at the end of the week— followed, presumably, by the septic South. I long to have all this behind me and start work—work which I ought to have started months ago. Don, meanwhile, sets me an example by working away in his studio. I feel that he now rather loves it and has gotten used to all its structural defects. A very significant psychological barrier was broken when he first dropped paint on the floor and let it stay there. (He only paints downstairs; upstairs he draws.)

  Just one thing I’d like to record now, because it gave me so much satisfaction. At Gore and Howard’s big party on the 28th, I ran into Sue Mengers and she told me how marvellous she thinks my new book is. “And you said such nice things about the Jews,” she added. For the first time since our famous clash, I felt that every thing was really and truly all right between us—and not because she was kidding herself that I had had a change of heart or that I hadn’t really meant what I said to her then. I felt that, after reading the book, she had put my earlier remarks in perspective and had somehow understood exactly how much I meant by them.

  February 18. The frozen North wasn’t so frozen after all. Rochester was really the coldest—the only place where my face ached—and that was only after dark. Toronto was merely cool, Chicago was windless for the first time since I began visiting it, Minneapolis was so springlike that the Minneapolitans were positively apologetic, insisting that they were just between blizzards.

  Our best experience: the meeting with weird old Louise Brooks and seeing her marvellous young self in The Diary of a Lost Girl and Miss Europe (Prix de Beauté); the view from the window of our room at the Drake Hotel up the Chicago lakeshore at dusk, with the traffic describing a great golden curve and the lake misty blue beyond. And then there was Don’s heroic feat; his skiddy drive out from Buffalo to see Niagara under ice. (We parted and rejoined in Chicago because he had forgotten to pack his passport and we didn’t want to risk his getting stuck in Canada.) My biggest emotional thrill was my reception at the Gay Academic Union meeting at the University of Toronto. This kind of thing could easily go to one’s head; it’s what happens to successful old actors. . . . Oh, and one other thing: the schoolchildren who were watching a television program in Minneapolis being sent out while I was being interviewed and brought back after I had finished.

  Now I’m back home and so glad to be; we unanimously decided not to go down to Puerto Escondido and join Billy Bengston and Penny.

  On February 12, the day after our return, I formally made a start on my Swami memoir. (I tried doing the opening draft in pencil on Gerald Heard’s old writing board, and again it seemed to give forth some power—at least, I scribbled several pages.) The great problem at the beginning is to keep to the point—which also means that I want to reserve all the rest of the material for the published version of my 1939–1944 diaries and not leave too large holes in that book. But, all the way through, the problem will be to keep to my relation with Swami and only let other people appear in the background. I have a feeling that (a) this memoir is going to be very short, maybe not even as long as Prater Violet, and that (b) it will speed up terrifically through the later years. Perhaps the best thing about it will be its final passage, a description of me in old age and of what Swami means to me now that he is dead and of how I view my approaching death and of the phenomenon of happiness near the end of life.

  A thought—referring back to what I wrote above about my reception at Toronto: the kind of love which young people feel for old figurehead people like me is perfectly healthy, beautiful indeed, not in the least silly and woe unto young people who are incapable of feeling it; they are emotionally lame. But it is so important for the old figureheads not to take this love personally; to understand that it is simply an effect of the interaction between age groups—to understand this makes it more beautiful, not less.

  March 16. Yesterday, I got a card from the UCLA Department of Anatomy which I am to carry in my billfold. It announces that I have willed my body to the department and wish to have it sent there if I drop dead in the street. So now that’s taken care of; I’d never have got accepted if Elsie Giorgi hadn’t used her influence at UCLA. I think I really began to decide to take this step because of my horror of the mortuary atmosphere which was inspired by a visit to Forest Lawn when Tony Richardson was about to film The Loved One. I am very glad that I’ve done it—although there are occasional absurd qualms at the thought of Dobbin’s old pickled carcass hanging up on a hook ready to be carved. But far far stronger is the satisfaction of knowing that there won’t be any kind of “resting place” to which my darling might feel obligated to come, on anniversaries, with wreaths. Then, too, I like to think that I’m following Gerald Heard’s example; that maybe, even, my ashes will be dumped with his in some communal hole after the cadaver has served its purpose.

  And while we’re on such themes, today came an announcement of a performance of Edward Albee’s “most profound play yet, All Over, which deals with the awareness that we are forever alone as we enter our twilight years”!!

  March 20. Yesterday, we went to see Tom Stoppard’s Travesties. Don said, its humor is verbal, not dramatic at all—which meant that the director (Ed Parone) evidently felt he had to eke it out by making his actors skip around and mug and strike attitudes—with the result that the show ran nearly three hours. . . . Howard and Fran Warshaw and Judith Anderson were there. At intermission, Don suggested that I should ask them to have supper with us later. I hurried over to their seats and did so—the second act was just about to start. Sitting in a row just below them was a pretty elderly woman with carefully fixed white hair in a halo around her head. I thought to myself that she was a typical rich Beverly Hills matron, rather like Dee Katcher
(who is again putting the Hilldale property on the market for us).21 The woman gave me a look which might have meant that we knew each other from somewhere, so I started a tentative smile, then shut it off again, largely because I was in such a hurry. On my way back to my seat, it hit me: “That was Peggy Kiskadden.” I hadn’t recognized her— perhaps because she had hardly changed, wasn’t looking nearly old enough. Don said yes, he was sure it was her. I felt shocked and shaken. It was like suddenly realizing that the thing which had looked like a bead necklace, and which you’d nearly bent down and picked up, had really been a coral snake.

  Howard has changed a lot; skinny and sunken-faced and old-Jewish, after his cancer operation. And Judith has become quite tiny and humped over with an ailing back. Only Fran looked just the same, like a powdered silly smiling goose. But they were all very affectionate and full of chatter, and we had a charming supper.

  At the end of the week we fly to England. Am dreading this.

  But at least I’ve now made a good start on the Prabhavananda book—more than thirty pages.

  April 17. We did fly to England on March 26 and got back here on April 11th. More about that by degrees, maybe. For the moment, what’s chiefly important to me is that I was able to get restarted right away on the Prabhavananda book. Now I must simply drive ahead with it until I’ve gone so far that I have to finish.

  A couple of days ago, Prabha called from the Santa Barbara convent, with two objectives—to get me to promise to fill in some reading dates during the summer, because Chetanananda is off to India for a three-month pilgrimage (as they call it—may this mean that he is escaping and doesn’t intend to return?) and because Swahananda is also leaving for a holiday on the East Coast—and also to get me to convey a warning to the boys at Trabuco that they have got to shape up and face the facts of monastic life and open a bookshop and entertain the public and have lectures and stop being so reclusive and mystical and self-indulgent, or else the property may be sold over their heads and they may be ordered back to Hollywood to work. Prabha’s silvery southern coo was hateful with malice as she told me this, putting it all onto the will of the Lord and of the Belur Math trustees—as if she gave a blue shit for either when her will was involved! So I said I’d think about the reading but could promise nothing, and that I’d speak to the boys if I went down there, as I probably may.