On January 27th, 2020, I began the second volume of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries: The Sixties. I had been waiting so impatiently for my interlibrary loan that I had finally purchased a used copy online—and then they both arrived on the same day. I read the library copy to reward Timberland Regional Library for the effort of sending it. I had read Volume One at the beginning of January.
Here are some of the things I loved about his 1960s diaries.
From the forward, so funny:
Jazmin does not much like the Isherwood diaries because they are such enormous tomes that they leave little room for a lap cat.
Christopher was good friends with Dodie Beesley, author (as Dodie Smith) of 101 Dalmatians and of one of my favourite novels, I Capture the Castle. I read the latter in seventh grade when my favourite ever teacher, Ellen Sherlock, recommended it to me and have read it once a decade since then. It is time for a reread. Christopher describes the Beesley home in England thus: “The cottage looks as if it were right out of Disneyland, with clematis and Albertine roses climbing over the thatched roof and black and white fantail pigeons pecking around on the lawn. Lots of people who are driving by stop and frankly stare.”
Somewhere in one of his diaries, Christopher mentions that Dodie herself has written four obscure memoirs. Allan tracked all four of them down online and ordered them for me. One has already arrived, but not the first one. I’m so excited to read them later this spring.
This is how one book leads to another. The path to Christopher’s diaries and May Sarton’s letters and Maxine Kumin’s memoirs all came from when I read Carolyn Heilbrun’s The Last Gift of Time and learned that she had written a biography of Isherwood. I had heard of him, vaguely, and decided to seek out his journals that she mentioned, and thus my winter reading was shaped, not at all according to my original plan (which was supposed to be the sorting of contents of my old file folders).
Back to one of Isherwood’s trips to England. (I can’t remember who he was writing about, perhaps Dodie’s husband, Alec.)
As you can see by the very end of that paragraph, Christopher is not all sweetness and light about his friends. He is also a hypochondriac, something I share and find comforting to read (since few of his health fears turned into anything terrible).
About remodeling their house: “We now have the lath house up outside the front door, complete with gate. It is certainly private—in fact, it seems doubtful that anyone will ever again find his way into the house.”
Christopher and Don enjoyed their garden but had to contend with some annoying neighbors.
……
…..and not long after that…
Chris and Don loved to breakfast on their deck with its view over the Santa Monica canyon.
…..
Christopher has a revelation about solitude, not for the first time…
…and yet continued to have days like this:
In years past, while I never had a glamorous social life, I had an active one, even though I craved solitude. During staycation or long weekends, I recognized even then that I was happiest on the two days a week when the coffee shop was closed. So why don’t we listen to ourselves and give ourselves what we seek? Maybe because it is hard to remember when friends call, or maybe it is because it feels rude to decline, or maybe both ways of life are satisfying and it is hard to narrow down to just one. I lost a whole batch of friends when I revealed my true self and learned a lesson about valuing the truth rather than passing for an extrovert. It was a difficult lesson that I have forgotten and relearned several times. I’ve read to the end of Christopher’s diaries and I don’t think he ever chose to have much alone time.
In a way that is connected to those very problems, I loved when he wrote, while reading his old diaries, “Oh my God, it is so depressing! The sheer squalor of my unhappiness.”
Like Christopher, I need to remember this: “What a wonderful life I have, really! How very seldom do I do any thing I don’t want to do.”
I followed with sympathy the saga of a huge apartment tower being erected at the end of their street:
And later…
His horror of a new glaring streetlight…
…and his dislike of noise are feelings with which I strongly identify.
…..and also the increase in noise brought on by construction.
Here is a google earth view of what I am sure are the tower apartments. (147 Adelaide is the house next door to Chris and Don, then owned by the Laughtons, and most recently the home of Rene Auberjonois, who played Odo in Deep Space Nine!)
“[We] got together for …a picnic in the park at Inspiration Point (as the city still dares to call it, after failing to stop those swine from putting up the Penthouse apartments to block off the hills, the ocean, the inspiration, and the whole point of the point).”
I was especially interested in how Chris felt about turning sixty five, which is about to be my fate next month.
So with all the things I love about Christopher Isherwood, would we have been friends? I doubt it, because we would have had some disagreements about a few of his prejudices, the ones he never outgrew, like some of the things he wrote in his diary about his women friends. Please don’t expect to find him completely adorable if you decide to read the diaries. A book jacket blurb describes him as “assured and neurotic, fearless and fretful, generous and small-minded, forgiving and remorsefully judgmental.”
I think I would have liked to be his gardener or housekeeper, though; he was a wonderful friend and client to his longtime housekeeper, Dorothy, having many conversations with her, visiting her when she was sick, worrying about her and caring about the details of her life. Even when the house did not need her attention, she would visit him socially to catch up when he returned from a trip. I like that about him very much.
Some advice about reading the diaries: Start with Volume one, but then read The Lost Years, which he pieced together for some years in the 1940s and 50s when he had paused the diaries. (That is going to be the last one I read, due to poor planning on my part.) Then read about the sixties, and then read The Animals, the glorious book of love letters between Chris and Don that ends in 1970, when they were together most of the time. And finally, read the last volume about the 1970s.
The forwards in each book will give you fair warning about how…problematic…some of his opinions are, and I do wonder if he would want us to know some of his innermost thoughts. Well, we know them now. And somehow, because of his hypochondria and self-deprecation and steadfast love for Don and frequent utter drollness, I find myself just irresistibly smiling while reading his diaries.
In one of the many articles about him that I have read this month, I found this, by his fried John Lehmann: “When I think of him now, I think first of the pleasure that I always felt when he came to see me or I visited him, his bubbling zany wit and his free-wheeling imaginative gift for turning any situation that one discussed with him . . . into absurdity and fantasy. A friend in a million, a friend of the greatest rarity. I don’t know what a life that has had its ups and downs would have been like without him.”
Rene was in my favorite movie, McCabe & Mrs. Miller. I read some Isherwood along time ago, will have to dip in again.
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Christopher Isherwood shows us his human-ness. Most people hide it. Of course, this was a diary so he could freely write his true feelings. I identify with his abhorrence of the apartment tower and the noise. When I left Austin, TX and the house I loved, I reminded myself to remember the summer noise created by the airplanes that flew over my house every 3 minutes. (Austin moved its airport a few years after we settled into our house and suddenly every summer we were inundated with low flying airplanes. It drove me nuts.)
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I remind myself of the huge deck that was built overlooking my Seattle back yard and how since I sold my house there, monster houses have been built behind and on the other side of my once secret garden.
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