Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  46 Included in paperback editions of Prabhavananda and Isherwood’s translation of Shankara’s The Crest Jewel of Discrimination.

  47 To extend author’s copyright from twenty-eight years, renewable for the same, to fifty years after the author’s death; the bill was introduced in 1964, bogged down over cable T.V., computer data storage, and other new technologies, and finally passed in 1976.

  48 Hayim was a middle-aged mentor to Fox before Fox met Cohen; the book was Obsession (1970).

  * He calls himself professionally “Chris Connery,” Isherwood being too long for the entertainment business.

  He looks inescapably like a clerk, and so respectable. His hairdo is grotesquely unsuitable, it makes him look like an earnest games mistress in the twenties.

  49 W.W. Jacobs’s short story in which the monkey’s paw grants three wishes, leading to tragedy.

  50 Isherwood visited Vailima, Robert Louis Stevenson’s house in Samoa, in July 1969 with Bachardy (see D.2); he visited Japan in June 1938 with Auden.

  * For me, the magic quality of The Dream is that it seems to express pure happiness—not the bliss of ananda but nevertheless unalloyed (it’s like when, in the Katha Upanishad, they say “Death is not there” [“In the realm of heaven . . . You, Death, are not there . . .” (I.12).]). The world of Fairyland is full of tiffs and feuds but they aren’t serious, they are high camp, and high camp is happiness. Puck’s relations with Oberon are so beautiful and animal, his vanity is beautiful; and what’s so terribly moving, when you watch, is that Wayne isn’t immortal like Puck; his marvellous grace and fun and sexiness will only last for such a short time, then they’ll be lost or rather inherited by another dancer. Also terribly moving, for a reason I can’t quite analyse, are the first modest steps which Alexander Grant [as Bottom] essays on his hoofs; at that point the tears pour down my cheeks. On the other hand, the relationship between Oberon and Titania seems merely ceremonious and frigid and uninteresting.

  51 Out of Focus (1971); see Glossary under Smith, Katharine.

  * We stopped for lunch at a ridiculously depressing bungalow hotel, which I tried to make interesting to David and Peter by telling them it was exactly like a building in Australia. The diners inside were pure Separate Tables characters, and we three had so much fun giggling about them that the meal was quite a success. Also, in that fascinatingly unpredictable English way, the food (roast beef ) was good. [Separate Tables (1954) was two short plays by Terence Rattigan, and later a film set in a shabby genteel English hotel.]

  52 A revival of George Bernard Shaw’s 1892 play, directed by Michael Blakemore, at The Royal Court.

  53 Hodgkin (b. 1932), educated at Eton, Bryanston and Camberwell School of Art, became widely known only in the mid-1970s. Hockney’s Illustrations for Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm was published by the Petersburg Press in 1970; the publisher, Paul Cornwall-Jones, approached Isherwood and Auden unsuccessfully in 1969 to make new translations for it. He does not recall the plan, evidently abandoned, for “Gems of Belgian Architecture.”

  * I mean actually that I was a bore. I tried to hypnotize a rather charming boy who had the grass giggles, named Eddie MacAndrew.

  54 But Isherwood’s double “p” is correct.

  55 Lyme Cage is a sixteenth-century tower built as a hunting lodge in the medieval deer park surrounding Lyme Hall; Lyme Hall, a Tudor house, was lavishly rebuilt in the early eighteenth century as an Italianate palace.

  56 The Quaker Meeting House.

  57 An explosion on April 13 crippled their command module, and the astronauts were in jeopardy for four days; see Glossary under Apollo 13.

  58 Salinger, introduced by Gerald Hamilton, was the English lawyer in Brussels who promised to obtain, through an acquaintance at the Mexican embassy there, a Mexican passport for Heinz. See Glossary under Neddermeyer.

  59 Salinger was a Jew; this may refer to his fate during the war. Possibly he went to prison for other reasons.

  60 Isherwood wrote “Sylvia.”

  * Another of Kasmin’s gestures was to give away some valuable books he’d just bought from a man who works at Bertram Rota’s bookshop. (Maybe this was Rota;** anyhow he was with Kasmin and falling-down drunk.) Kasmin gave me a first edition of Sidney Keyes’ poems, inscribed, “For Christopher I. from Kasmin with wanton fondness.”

  ** I found out later that it wasn’t Ro[t]a but a George Lawson—this from a note which John Byrne delivered to me in person after I got home from supper with Neil and Bob on the 17th. (He said he’d seen my light was on.) I was too tired to ask him in. It was quite a nice note, to say goodbye, because Lawson had told him I was leaving on Sunday, but it irritated me, because Byrne admitted that he’d forgotten all my answers to the bibliographical questions he’d asked me!

  61 Gustav Klimt with a Catalogue Raisonné of His Paintings, Fritz Novotny and Johannes Dobai, translated from German by Karen Olga Philippson (1968); Isherwood took another copy back to Santa Monica.

  * There was also La Boutique Fantasque. This performance of it was perfectly all right, but it didn’t charm me, either.

  62 New ballets, the first choreographed by David Drew, the second by Geoffrey Cauley.

  63 Et Gulliver mouret de sommeil (1962) under his pen name, Pierre-Jean Rémy (1937–2010), followed by other prize-winning novels, as well as T.V. and film scripts, magazine pieces and works on opera. He was then first secretary at the embassy; later, he was ambassador to UNESCO, director of the French Academy in Rome, president of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and elected to the Académie Française.

  64 Award-winning playwright, screen writer, and T.V. writer (b. 1935); educated at Winchester and Oxford, later known for his 1981 play Another Country, filmed in 1984.

  65 Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s (1972).

  66 The cleaner, whom Isherwood was obliged to hire as a condition of renting the flat.

  67 Isherwood and Prabhavananda agreed to translate as: “What are the evils most difficult to rid oneself of? / Jealousy and envy.”

  68 James Joll (1918–1994), British historian, educated at Winchester, the University of Bordeaux and Oxford, then a professor at the London School of Economics; he published major works on modern European and British history and politics. Golding (b. 1929) is a British art historian, curator, and painter, educated in Canada and at the Courtauld, where he taught. He also taught at the Royal College of Art and at Cambridge.

  69 Nureyev was to play Nijinsky and Paul Scofield, Diaghilev.

  70 Possibly “Las Cruces Springs.” Cuthbertson was a California friend of Schlesinger’s; see Glossary.

  71 Schuman; see Glossary.

  72 2.47; in the Prabhavananda-Isherwood translation, see “Yoga of Knowledge,” p. 46.

  73 Holger Mischwitzky (b. 1942), gay, Latvian-born film director and activist, took this “artistic” name in 1964. Rosa refers to the “rosa Winkel” (pink triangle) which Hitler made homosexuals wear; Praunheim is a town near Frankfurt. His fifty-some films eventually included two about Magnus Hirschfeld, Gay Courage (1998) and The Einstein of Sex (1999).

  * The Kitaj painting I liked best is called “Outlying London Districts (in Camberwell).” Its power is of a kind one simply can’t describe in words; the large figure is, in every sense, larger than life; it is powerfully numinous, its mere presence is like a statement about the world it inhabits. No, I shouldn’t say “is like,” it is a statement. (When I told Ron how much I admired this picture he was greatly pleased, and largely, I felt, because it is a recent one, painted in 1969. I suspect he is going through a period of unproductivity and doubt about his later work.) Ron certainly gives me a sense of being menaced by our present world, his art is profoundly disturbing. But often the pictures seem cluttered up with merely intellectual symbols, and the titles are so literary, “Apotheosis of Groundlessness,” “Trout for Factitious Bait,” “His Cult of the Fragment,” “Primer of Motives [(Intuitions of Irregularity)]”—a truly American portentousnes
s. One title I like, though: “Where the Railroad Leaves the Sea”; I like the painting too.

  † I was particularly pleased that Jean had liked A Single Man; she even quoted from it the remark made by the Californian professor about the Oxford don’s book on Quarles, that you need so much background to write a book like that. I suppose what pleased her was my taking the side of the underdog against the upperclass don!

  74 I.e., Jean Ross; see Glossary.

  75 Albee eventually wrote the final script, but finances for the project fell apart.

  76 Sonia Leon Quennell (b. 192[8]), Soho beauty; from 1956 until about 1967, she was the fourth of five wives of Peter Quennell (1905–1994), Oxford-educated poet, literary biographer, magazine editor.

  77 He was later adopted by Douglas Cooper; see Glossary.

  78 Cockburn and his wife, Patricia, had three sons, later leftist journalists: Alexander had already left Oxford, Andrew and Patrick were still there.

  79 “The Canonization,” 1.1.

  80 As Isherwood tells in Kathleen and Frank, his mother lived with her parents in Cranley Mansion on Gloucester Road, South Kensington, from the early 1890s and throughout her difficult courtship with Isherwood’s father, who suffered from vertigo all his life.

  81 “The Other Boat.”

  * And I remembered Bill Caskey’s intense indignation when the Wilis finished off Hilarion [by dancing him to death]. Right in the midst of a soft passage in the music he exclaimed furiously, “The cunts!” and several people around him laughed.

  82 The 1969 film about a dance marathon.

  83 British dance writer and broadcaster (b. 1944); he was Buckle’s research assistant, 1969–1975, and then succeeded him as ballet critic at The Sunday Times. Isherwood wrote “Dugal.”

  84 Teacher (d. 1991), of Religious Studies at a North London school; in the 1970s, he also became known as a ballet writer for Classical Music. Their flat was in Hampstead High Street.

  * I told Bob about this conversation, later. He replied that Neil loves being miserable and will find excuses for it on all occasions.

  85 Cf. William Cowper, “The Castaway,” “We perish’d, each alone,” the line which Mr. Ramsey repeats to himself in Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927).

  * Peter turned eyes and heads and maybe some hearts in his beautiful white suit. I said to him, “It’s sad, the time in your life when you can really wear clothes is also the time when you oughtn’t to be wearing any.” This dazzling epigram didn’t have the success it deserved, when I repeated it later at Odin’s.

  86 Melissa North (b. 1944) was a rock and roll booker’s assistant; later, she ran a furniture shop, designed clothes and, eventually, interiors. Tchaik Chassay, an architect and a founder of the Groucho Club, was remodelling Hockney’s flat in Powis Terrace. They married in 1975.

  87 British art historian and art and ballet critic (1909–1982).

  88 French actor, mime, director, writer (1910–1994), best known for his film role in Les Enfants du Paradis (1945).

  1 Child actor and, later, leading man (b. 1936); his films include The Secret Garden (1949), Kim (1950), Sons and Lovers (1960), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962), and Married to the Mob (1988).

  2 In Vietnam and, since April 29, Cambodia.

  3 The 1969–1970 recession was a mild one; see Glossary under recession.

  4 Antiwar protesters; see Glossary under Nixon and the students.

  5 The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 6, pp. 259–262.

  6 See Glossary.

  7 Towns in Yorkshire, Surrey, and Ireland, where Isherwood lived in childhood while following his father’s regiment before W.W.I.

  8 Writers Guild of America contracts with producers expired June 15; writers and animators wanted a bigger share in arcane but valuable areas like possessing credit, runaway production and residuals.

  9 Benjamin Spock (1903–1998), pediatrician, psychoanalyst, and author of the bestseller Baby and Child Care (1946), campaigned against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War and ran for president in 1972.

  10 Only one picture sold—of Salvador Dali—to a friend of Bachardy’s rather than to a client of Blum’s. And Blum failed to press Brooke Hopper, his own friend, to buy the portrait of herself which she asked Bachardy to do and to hang in the show. This portrait was praised in the Los Angeles Times.

  11 Not his real name.

  12 William Ball (1931–1991), American stage director, founded the American Conservatory Theater in 1965 in Pittsburgh, moved it to San Francisco in 1967, and continued as artistic director for two decades.

  13 Isherwood was named in Forster’s will; see Glossary

  14 More laziness than passion; see Glossary under guna.

  15 Not his real name.

  16 Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (1927–1989) whose radical approach to psychosis emphasized social interaction and the patient’s existential choice to be mad or to be cured.

  17 Gilbert Peters.

  18 Swami was vacationing at a devotee’s house in Malibu; Anandaprana forbade visitors so he could rest.

  19 An aspiring critic who was writing an essay about him.

  20 A puli (Hungarian sheepdog) with a shaggy corded coat.

  21 August 11–12, 1969, on the return from Australia; see D.2.

  22 Oxford-educated British screenwriter and university professor (1900–1981); he taught film, theater, aesthetics, and humanities at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University. He appears in D.1.

  23 Isherwood copied Kathleen’s 1915 diary entry into his own diary, October 24, 1966 (see D.2), and it is unlikely this was engraved on the disk. The is phrase appears to be a mistranscription from Frank’s German-language death certificate held in the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. The certificate gives Frank’s details on a pre-printed list. Item 6 on the list, “Inhalt der Erkennungsmarke” (contents of identity disk), is filled in as “siehe 5 C of E” (see 5 Church of England). The instruction to see item 5 was simply miscopied, siehe becoming siche. Item 5 on the list “Truppenteil” (unit) is filled in as “Y. & L. Rgt.” (York and Lancaster Regiment).

  24 Antibiotic in the Tetracycline family.

  25 A play he and Bachardy wrote, beginning in October 1958; see D.1.

  26 A “queer” story he wrote in the summer of 1959; see D.1.

  27 Her apartment, on Channel Road, was between the street and the eponymous channel of water, concreted since 1938 to contain flooding.

  28 I.e., out of the house.

  29 Canadian-born stage and screen actor (1914–1992), nominated for an Academy Award for his supporting role in All the King’s Men (1949).

  30 Dr. Phillip Oderberg, a Santa Monica psychotherapist Bachardy began seeing in 1963; see D.2.

  31 The other lovers and assistants of famous men included Chester Kallman (Auden), Robert Craft (Stravinsky), Howard Austen (Vidal), and Frank Merlo (Tennessee Williams).

  32 Not his real name.

  33 A longtime friend of Jack Larson.

  34 A psychiatrist who had been treating her.

  35 The piece never ran because of Bachardy’s objections.

  36 In La Verne, California, at the July 1941 seminar on the active and contemplative life; attended by Gerald Heard, some of his followers, and members of the Quaker American Friends Service Committee. Stone Hull was a Christian minister and a pacifist. See D.1.

  37 Not his real name.