The Sixties: Diaries, Volume Two, 1960-1969 by Christopher Isherwood review
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/20/christopher-isherwood-diaries-review
Christopher Isherwood's 60s diaries are a great literary account of
the era, says Ian Sansom
Ian Sansom
20 November 2010
Here Christopher Isherwood continues to perform open-heart surgery on
himself, without anesthetic, and with one beady eye on the audience.
Readers of the magnificent first volume of the Diaries (1996) will
know what to expect. Those who missed out are in for a rare treat:
Isherwood is only as vain, as venomous and as near-sighted as any
other honest-to-goodness diarist, but with one crucial difference. He
can write.
By the 1960s Isherwood is living in Santa Monica, is famous, rich
though not yet rich enough to give up teaching and remains devoted
to his California-Indian guru Swami Prabhavananda. He is also
weathering the endless storms of his relationship with the artist Don
Bachardy, 30 years his junior, with whom he is engaged in continual
"psychological wrestling matches". Among other things, the Diaries
serve as a prime ringside seat for grapple fans.
During the 60s, Isherwood appeared to be and in many ways was the
quintessential expat Brit about town. There are plenty of parties,
dinners and soirees. He is out one night with the King Vidors, and
then out another with Nehru, or Marlon Brando, or Danny Kaye. When he
throws a party for a few close friends, it's Aldous Huxley, Alec
Guinness and his wife, and the Stravinskys. He goes on a trip to see
Cecil Beaton; goes on TV with Arnold Wesker; has dinner with a young
Alan Bennett ("quite shy, with a non-U accent"). He meets Joan
Littlewood ("a pretty bogus down-to-earther") and Timothy Leary ("He
really is a fake"). Then pops round to Kenneth Tynan's to watch
Tynan's new TV show, does a quick bit of pall-bearing at David
Selznick's funeral, has drinks with Freddy Ashton, and enjoys an
afternoon on a "famed fag beach" with Wayne Sleep.
Given his hectic social schedule it's difficult to see how Isherwood
could ever have done any work at all. And a lot of the time he
couldn't too pissed, too tired, and then too much time in the gym.
The social life not only took its toll but was in itself
unsatisfactory. "Drinking, idling, wasting time with people I didn't
really want to see; and getting nearly nothing done on the novel," he
complains in November 1960. When he does knuckle down he wastes his
time giving lectures and spouting nonsense. On 10 October 1960 he
writes: "The week after this one will be particularly tough: my
lecture on 'The Nerve of the Novel', which is probably the most
difficult of the whole lot. A possible appearance on local TV; God
knows what I'll say. And then, next day, a luncheon speech on
'Writing A Profession or a Way of Life?'" No wonder that by
February 1961 he is yelling to himself, "BUT I MUST GET ON WITH MY WORK."
The diaries are his work. What is emerging in these vast volumes,
scrupulously edited by Katherine Bucknell, with presumably at least
one more to come Isherwood didn't die until 1986 is one of the
great literary accounts of the 20th century. Of course, one doesn't
necessarily turn to Isherwood for profound discussion of the great
matters of public life and politics, but one does go to him to find
the strange effects of politics upon the private life. During the
Cuban missile crisis he writes: "I feel such a curiously strong
loathing of Castro something to do with his beard, his sincere,
liquid-eyed beard. I should like to see him forcibly shaved in the
UN." Like the rest of us, Isherwood lives half the time in the world,
the other half in fantasy.
In many ways, he was at the vanguard of social change throughout the
period. After a dinner party with colleagues in May 1962 he writes:
"Sure, I am prejudiced, but I feel always more strongly how ignoble
marriage usually is. How it drags down and shackles and degrades."
His own idea of a good night in is quite different. "Everybody got
high, and Ginsberg recorded our conversation and chanted Hindu
chants, and Orlovsky . . . kept asking me if I ever raped anyone, and
the boy Stephen unrolled a picture scroll he had made, under the
influence of something or other, to illustrate the Bardo Thodol [the
Tibetan Book of the Dead]."
There is more telling domestic detail in one entry in the diaries
than in an entire episode of Mad Men. He trips over a barbecue pit.
He tries the Calories Don't Count diet. He has the typewriter
serviced. He watches Japanese porn films. And he is casually
anti-semitic. Actually alas maybe he's not so casual about it.
Reading Paul Goodman's Making Do in July 1965, he remarks that
Goodman "redeems single-handed the drivel of the other Jews". In
November 1966 he doesn't go to see the play of Cabaret in New York
because "It sounds Jewish beyond all belief". In 1961, when some
representatives from UCLA ask him to give some lectures, he is
appalled that they try to negotiate with him over the fee. "Whatever
anyone says, this kind of thing nauseates me; it is Jewy and vile and
utterly shameful, coming from the representative of a serious
institution of learning instead of an old clothes dealer." And this,
coming from a serious writer instead of an old hate-monger. It's an
ugly blind spot, in a book of otherwise quite beautiful blind spots.
.
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