Isherwood & Party Climb Under a Wire

From Christopher Isherwood, Diaries, Volume One 1939–1960, 48-49.

"November 5. [1939, Picnic at Tujunga Canyon, outside Los Angeles, CA]

"After lunch, most of our party wandered a little further up the canyon, to a place the forest rangers had built a high wire fence, right across the riverbed, with notices warning against trespass.
...Somebody said it looked like a barricade around a concentration camp. Anita Loos suggested we should burrow under it, like escaping refugees. It was rather a sinister joke, and the laughter was a bit forced, as several people began to dig, with their hands or pieces of rock.

"I remember Bertrand Russell holding forth to Aldous [Huxley] on some philosophical topic and digging as he talked, with the air of a father joining in a game to amuse the children. Only, in this case, he was both parent and child.

"Inside a few minutes, there was quite a large, shallow pit. Most of us got into it and wriggled under the wire. It was funny to watch how, having done this, people became grown-ups again and strolled off in twos and threes, talking about the war. I don't know why they had taken all this trouble, for they paid no attention to the scenery. Berthold [Viertel] especially––that born city dweller––might just as well have been walking down Fifth Avenue."

And that's why I read Isherwood, even though I don't love the man himself. NOT for the famous people––though it is funnier to imagine Bertrand Russell* wriggling under a wire fence than some unknown person)––but for that glimpse Life As It Happens, including the mention of concentration camps in the first months of World War II.

_______________

*Isherwood's not name-dropping, though this is a star-studded picnic, he's not the host: as an expat British writer in Los Angeles, those are just the people he knows (or the people the people he knows know).