Whine, whine, whine

There came a moment, very early in my reading of the latest volume of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries, when a spell was broken. The relevant entry, written at his beach home in Santa Monica, California, was dated 12 November 1960. And the single, throwaway notation which caused me to re-evaluate, I fear definitively, my admiration for Isherwood ran as follows: ‘Tonight I have to take the Mishimas out to supper.’

There came a moment, very early in my reading of the latest volume of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries, when a spell was broken. The relevant entry, written at his beach home in Santa Monica, California, was dated 12 November 1960. And the single, throwaway notation which caused me to re-evaluate, I fear definitively, my admiration for Isherwood ran as follows: ‘Tonight I have to take the Mishimas out to supper.’

Why do I find that sentence hilarious? Partly, I suppose, because of those two inoffensive words ‘the Mishimas’. Though I knew, of course, that the gay and future self-disemboweller Yukio Mishima had also sought to pass himself off as a respectably married man, there is, to the idea of a ‘Mr and Mrs Mishima’, something so mind-boggling as to feel faintly Pooterish. What proved even more giggle-inducing, how- ever, was my sense (one I would have time and time again as I ploughed through the book’s unendurably whiny pages) of the hassle, the Oh-God-why-do-I-always-agree-to-do-these-things? irksomeness, which hobnobbing with the most distinguished writers on the planet seemed to represent for its author.

Since no one else will say it, I must: Isherwood is a bore. If the test of a published diary is that those passages which describe encounters with friends or acquaintances whose names mean nothing to the reader be as stimulating as those dealing with celebrities, then he consistently fails it.