Alan Cummings!

Sunday 10:26 p.m.
                              Just  finished watching a programme on the wonderful BBC Four teevee channel about Cabaret, and Christopher Isherwood,  and being in Germany in the 1930s. It was presented by Alan Cummings, who I do like although not like that, although he got me into a Traverse party once after I met him in the toilet, and made demands. But it's great to see Scottishy people getting ahead. I also saw a programme about his ancestors once and that was brilliant as well. So I hope to see some more of that kind of thing from him on the telly.
                            I have a great affection for Christopher Isherwood. I'm not sure why. Here's some of the things I can remember that I liked anyway.
1) I read in an autobiographical thing from him once that when he'd left uni, (a chap without a degree! Oh no!) he went to Eastbourne and spent the summer writing his first novel. He wrote it in longhand SEVENTEEN  times. This has ever since been my benchmark. It's like being a music producer. You have to be able to listen to the bugger again and again and again. Anyway, his prose is full of semi-colons, colons, etcetera like you might expect from someone well educated in Latin, Greek, grammar, etc. These are the days before copy and paste and all that word processing stuff, when you had to think. I can almost remember trying to write like that. Make a mistake and you have to re-type the whole page.
2) None of his books were that good. The boy didn't have a plot in him. Prater Violet is, however, a fantastic description of a person and far better than anything I could ever aspire to.
3) I saw him interviewed by Kenneth Alsop who was a titan of Newsnight in the early seventies. This would have been after his autobiographical book came out, Christopher and his Friends, I think it might have been called. Kenneth Allsop asked him about going to Germany and corrupting these German boys. I think Christopher Isherwood said they were far more corrupt already than he was.
4) His pal said you shouldn't sell what was dear cheap, as regards him writing screenplays in California. Auden. He said he sold what was dear dear.
5) He funged off to California when the second world war was getting awkward. Why want to fight for a country which puts you in jail because of your sexual preferences.
6) He said when he got back to London much later that he liked it better because it was full of people who were cosmopolitan, like black and brown and polka dot.
                         I don't know why I like Christopher Isherwood so much, but I do. The concentration on the malleability of the prose which means that the seventeenth time it will be better .... Why stop at seventeen times? I think you should maybe write the one book seventeen times in your life, and just keep writing the bugger. So the prose had to keep up with you.
                         You're never going to make any money thinking like that, Hotboy. No, Jack. But I would have just spent all the money on drink and drugs. Some painters must have painted the same scene over and over as they grew older, and it would have changed as they changed.
                         They all ended up in the gutter, Hotboy. The evil bourgeois all end up in hell, Jack. Hell's too good for them!