The following quotations from Christopher Isherwood Diaries: Volume
One, 1939-1960 (edited by Katherine Bucknell, Harper Collins, $40 hard) refuse easy categorization: Are they aphorisms, sly observations, or just
gossipy barbs made in private and never intended for publication? Whatever term
seems best to describe them, they originate from an unrelenting self-honesty
and piercing insight into his friends and his environment.
—
C.K.H.S.
January 19, 1939. I was running an agreeable love affair in which the
other partner was more deeply involved than myself, and I kept a second, third
and fourth choice waiting on the sidelines in case I got bored. In public I was
carefully modest about all this.
June 1939. Perhaps there are more haunted houses in Los Angeles than in any
other city in the world. They are haunted by the fears of their former
owners.
November 5, 1939. I suppose everybody who meets Garbo dreams of saving
her — either from herself, or from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or from some friend or
lover. And she always eludes them by going into an act. This is what has made
her a universal figure. She is the woman whose life everyone wants to interfere
with.
September 26, 1942. The pattern of my day must be, not EVERYDAY LIFE
with little patches of prayer in it, but PRAYER with huge patches of everyday
life in it.
April 24, 1950. John Huston’s story of Hemingway out in a boat off the
coast of Cuba. They saw an iguana on the rocks by the shore. Hemingway fired
and hit it. It was wounded. When they got on shore, they found a trail of
blood, but no iguana. Hemingway, although tired and sick, spent four hours
hunting for it, among the rocks, in the blazing sun, because he said it was
unsportsmanlike to leave wounded game to die. Finally, he found it.
May 14, 1952. It occurs to me that, of all the sensual pleasures, sex is
the only one which depends partly on reciprocation. That’s its power. Imagine
if an orange said: “Darling, I was just longing for you to eat me. I was so
afraid that horrible old man would. He’s not at all my type.”
April 20, 1953. Perhaps I’ll never write another novel, or anything
invented — except, of course, for money. Write, live what happens: Life is too
sacred for invention — though we may lie about it sometimes, to heighten it.
February 2, 1956. [About “M.,” Isherwood’s mother]: M. is still
amazingly obstinate and, like so many Englishwomen, full of a kind of
puritanical glee when things are bad. She is really glad that the weather is so
lousy, and she very nearly made me really angry this morning by suggesting that
it would do Don good to experience the cold here. She hates getting anything
new for the house, and affects, for example, to believe that paper towels are
some weird newfangled and somehow degenerate U.S. invention. (I had the
satisfaction of proving to her that the High Lane chemist knew all about them.)
She nurses an obstinate grudge against the present and cultivates a nostalgia
for the “peaceful” Victorian times. February 4, 1956. Journals thrive on loneliness.
February 7, 1956. Yesterday evening we saw Henry V at the Old Vic. Most
of it was dull and hateful, as always — Miss Shakespeare being the National
Bard until one wants to hide one’s head.
August 7, 1960. Don and I got up very late this morning because we were
very late going to bed, after supper at the Selznicks’, where they showed three
one-hour film of interviews with Jung. The interviews couldn’t have been worse
presented — just one show held on Jung throughout. And the interviewer, a
sweaty-faced humorless Jewish-American doctor, who kept cutting in, ” — But,
to be specific — ” Nevertheless, Jung was adorable; you saw how very cute he
must have been as a young man. Like all great men, he spent most of the time
disentangling himself from the net of formalization which the questioner kept
trying to throw over him.
His most interesting (to me) statement: as early as 1919, he began to realize,
in studying the unconscious of his German patients, that something catastrophic
was shortly going to happen to the psyche of the German people as a whole.
August 25, 1960. And I’m still depressed. And of course resentful
against Don for spoiling my birthday mood. Which is babyish, I know, at
fifty-six. But alas, I’m like that — I must either mind –or I must throw all
the switches, shut off the juice, and tell him to go fuck himself. If I did
that there would be a scene lasting maybe a week. And maybe it would startle
the bitch-faggot part of him, “Black Tomasina,” and make it behave. But why
should I upset myself for Black Tomasina? Isn’t it better to have peace at any
price?
August 26, 1960 [Isherwood’s birthday]: Well, of course, everything is
all right today — it really is, I believe.
This article appears in April 4 • 1997 and April 4 • 1997 (Cover).