For decades writer Christopher Isherwood made Los Angeles his home. From his sunlit spot in the Santa Monica Canyon, Isherwood observed and recorded the 1960s in hundreds of typed pages. His The Sixties: Diaries 1960-1969 captures everything from the political tumult of the time to its spiritual questing to Isherwood’s rich social circle of fellow artists, all up for discussion in Zócalo’s forthcoming panel, Christopher Isherwood’s Los Angeles. In the two diary entries excerpted below, the first from 1962 and the next from 1965, Isherwood visits the circus, checks out skateboarders, drives the just-opened Santa Monica Freeway, and has lunch at Clifton’s.

October 3. Last night we went to the Ringling Brothers circus, with Barbette. It was in the huge new sports arena, way downtown, and the place was not one quarter filled. It had never struck me before how the Circus is a symbolic play about Life. That sounds heavy and Germanic; what I mean is that the Circus is exactly like Life. The Circus audience is much less attentive, generally speaking, than other audiences. It crunches and munches and slurps soft drinks and talks to itself, and its attention – like the attention of The Others in Life – is only momentarily captured. Indeed, it is made almost impossible for the audience to attend properly, because different things are happening most of the time in the three rings; you cannot concentrate. A sexy girl with long blonde hair is balancing outstretched on something, in a not very difficult pose; but she is watched. In the meanwhile, a dear little Japanese has a billiard cue on his chin, and a chair on top of that, and his wife sitting on the chair (no longer young), and he is twirling colored rings around one arm and juggling flaming torches with the other hand, and keeping a rubber ball  balanced on the toe of one foot. It has taken him his whole life to learn to do this, no doubt; and maybe he can do it better than anybody else in the world; and who gives a damn? There was one act in which a young man rushed around setting plates spinning on pointed rods; and when they were all spinning he rushed around catching them before they slowed down and fell off. (One of them did fall, and shattered.) And this was a perfect symbol of the Rat Race, the Age of Anxiety. And then the disorganization and irrelevance, the sheer chaos of Life, expressed by the sudden invasion of the clowns, the frantic hurry in which many of the acts are performed, the meaninglessness of most of the animal acts – why should bears ride bicycles? – and the abrupt exit of even the star performers, walking quietly away, unfollowed by the spotlights, but perfectly visible to the onlookers, who nevertheless don’t applaud, and indeed pretend not to see them. The clowns are a curious mixture; half of them wholesome nursery types, like Popeye the Sailor Man, the other half abominations from the world of nightmare – things with snake-necks and tennis-ball heads, heads which are cut right off, creatures which split into halves and walk off separately. (They would be even more abominable if their designers had had the genius as well as the intention of a Francis Bacon.) And then there are great engines, absurdly imposing when you consider the idiotic tasks for which they are made; the cannon, for example, which shoots two people into a net – why? The animals which seemed best adapted to the mood of the Circus were the elephants – and yet their monumental poses are a kind of parody of all classical sculpture.

As for the trapeze artists, their art is something else again: high camp about Death.

The wire walker who makes fake slips (and some real ones); that’s one approach. His wife was watching, and wincing each time he seemed about to fall. Attendants held a miserably small net underneath him.

The other approach is the classic style and grace of Gerard, the aerialist. He swings by his heels. He wears a magnificent cape, more feminine than masculine in style, which he takes off before going aloft, in tights with a diamond belt, naked to the waist. Barbette introduced us to him. An utter lack of vanity. No noticeable nervousness, although we met him first before the act. A blond, fairly good-looking, unremarkable, muscular boy in his middle twenties, I guess, who had put on a certain amount of fat. His friend Cesar, a Filipino. Cesar was in college when he met Gerard and joined the circus. Gerard taught him to do a low-wire act and to juggle. He is so good that he was featured in Madison Square Garden; there is no room for him on the program here. Cesar is Gerard’s assistant in his act. He has declared that, if Gerard falls, he will throw himself underneath to break the fall as much as possible. They have been together two or three years. (Once, Gerard slipped and only caught the trapeze with one heel and had to swing right back in that position. He thought he would fall, but he recovered himself. He earns $550 dollars a week. Barbette says he is going to teach Gerard some new tricks when they are in Sarasota, Florida, for the winter. He says that the circus is so big that it requires very big showy movements.)

We took Barbette out to super afterwards at a Mexican restaurant he recommended, the Taxco, on Sunset.

When we were talking the evening over this morning, while having breakfast on the deck, Don said that, if the Circus symbolizes the meaninglessness of Life, then it follows that to have a job in the circus is the most meaningless work of all.

We watched the unattractive wife of one of the neighbors on Mabery Road go out and look in the mailbox. Don said, “What can she be expecting, except bills?”

April 19. I had intended to make an entry yesterday, because it was Easter, but there was no time. I did at least get on with my novel – I still have absolutely no notion if it adds up to anything or not – and with some revisions of the notes to Exhumations. These should be finished in a few days.

Beautiful weather at last. We were on the beach. The water full of surfboarders, about fifty of them. Which reminds me to mention that allied sport, skateboarding. It is almost incredible, but I believe I have never mentioned it here. The Christian Science Monitor, while recording that a son of John Houseman is among the American youths who have just introduced the skateboard into Paris, says that skateboards started in the United States as early as 1960. Ben Masselink thinks even earlier…. Anyhow, their long trainlike sound has become one of the basic Canyon noises. The little kids are sometimes incredibly graceful and adept; they’ll take off at all hours of the day, even in their Sunday suits before leaving for church. Michael Sean rides a skateboard right down our hill. His technique is pretty good, but he looks ridiculous because he is so big and a grown-up.

On the 15th, Don and I drove downtown on the newly opened Santa Monica Freeway. Downtown at night now seems mostly very clean and empty. Big shining new glass office buildings with no one in them; almost like models on show. We ate at the nostalgic old Clifton cafeteria – the one with the redwood décor: the other has been torn down. I must say, the food reminded me of that breakfast in jail when I was waiting to be bailed out on my drunk driving rap. And then we went to see Youngblood Hawke (perhaps the most ridiculous film ever made about writers and publishers) in a rather wonderful old theater called The Globe. It looks as if it had been legit. These downtown visits are especially moving with Don, because they recall the days when he used to come here with his mother and Ted to see films on Saturday mornings, from their home with the palm tree near the railroad station in Glendale. He and I went to look at it, once, when I was leaving by train for San Francisco. The palm tree had been removed.

From the book THE SIXTIES: DIARIES: 1960-1969 by Christopher Isherwood, Edited by Katherine Bucknell. Reprinted by permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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*Photo of Clifton’s Cafeteria courtesy waltarrrrr.