DIARIES: The Sixties Diaries, Volume Two: 1960-1969By Christopher Isherwood, edited by Katherine Bucknell, Chatto & Windus, 756pp. £30

IN THE 1930s Christopher Isherwood had a double existence, through his own writing and as WH Auden's friend and lover. In his wonderful pre-war buddy poem, To a Writer on His Birthday, Auden conjures up Isherwood's "squat spruce body and enormous head" and praises his "strict and adult pen", wondering if it "Can warn us from the colours and the consolations, / The showy arid works, reveal / The squalid shadow of academy and garden, / Make action urgent and its nature clear?"

That strict and adult pen was busy throughout the 1930s, in novels such as All the Conspirators, Memorialand the sly Mr Norris Changes Trains. And of course The Berlin Stories, which first appeared in Penguin New Writing, with their arresting cinematic aesthetic introduced in the opening sentence: "I am a camera." Moreover, Goodbye to Berlin, which led to the play and film Cabaret, would become his greatest source of income and fame.

Having warned of what was impending, both Auden and Isherwood moved to the US in 1939, to cries of "Coward! Shit!", especially from old-school novelists such as Evelyn Waugh, and above all from Anthony Powell (who went so far as to rejoice at Auden's death). Auden's life in and around New York is well documented, his "long marvellous" poems, such as New Year Letter, his Conversations on Cornelia Street, his operatic scores with Britten and Stravinsky, sometimes composed with his new partner, Chester Kallman.

Isherwood's career as a Hollywood scriptwriter is not as well known, probably another reason for the publication of his Diaries, of which this is the second volume. But as well as screenplays he was working on his novels, in which the influence of Bloomsbury seems to intensify with distance; EM Forster, of course, but also Virginia Woolf, whose Mrs Dallowaywas a beacon. He praises it in terms that may ruffle Irish feathers: "Woolf's use of the reverie is quite different from Joyce's stream of consciousness. Beside her Joyce seems tricky and vulgar and cheap, as she herself thought." And just in case we miss the point: "Joyce's emotional range is very small."

But, surprisingly, he makes amends to us in praising George Moore, perhaps because he was a “professional” writer and novelist: “How I love George Moore! It’s the calm he projects,” Isherwood cries, all the way from sunny southern California.

Isherwood’s life is partly the beach, unless it is smothered in fog: “The sea is like cabbage.” According to a friend, he would visit the Getty museum dressed in a terry-cloth robe and flip-flops. And parties, of course, partly with the more intelligent and urbane movie stars, such as Leslie Caron and Jeanne Moreau, as well as Cary Grant. But also intellectual expats such as Aldous Huxley and, above all, Stravinsky, feeble yet determined. (Isherwood was obsessed by death, and so we learn that Aldous did not know he was dying, and exited high on LSD.)

And of course there are “the boys”, from ageing queens such as Charles Laughton to Isherwood’s own boyfriend, Don Bachardy, 30 years his junior, who struggled as a painter while making his name by drawing famous heads: socialites and film people, as well as the craggy visage of Auden that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. This aspect of the book reads like the study of any complicated marriage, with the older, wiser partner making allowances for the absences of his younger beloved. Isherwood seems to have been luckier than Auden, whose Chester was flagrantly unfaithful.

Confronted by contemporary evil, Auden reverted to Anglo-Catholicism, and produced fine devotional poems, while Isherwood was drawn to Vedanta Place, in Los Angeles, where he studied as a monk during the war. I have been there for the Feast of Kali, "She who Creates and Destroys". Kali-Durga was Ramakrishna's Chosen Ideal, and Isherwood wrote a biography of him. And then there was his own swami (lord or master), who initiated him, giving him his mantra and a rosary: "I say my beads every morning in front of the Lifemagazine photograph of Swami at the shrine." But, one asks, is this is a genuine religion, or a cult? Especially reading Christopher's ardent accolade: "He [Swami] sits there and shines. He is the beacon which shows the way out through the reef."

Isherwood defines his life as being between the beach and the balcony, but he achieves “samadhi” in Tahiti, where “one’s interior monologue, one’s psychological duet with the companion and one’s subjective sense-poem . . . make harmony”.

At the end of this review I still find Isherwood's diaries insufficiently narcissistic. They lack the open bitchery of Gore Vidal's memoir Palimpsest, although we have glimpses of Vidal's wit in this volume: "Gore says that William F Buckley called him a queer [on TV]. Gore says that newspapers from all over . . . have been calling to ask for his reactions . . . and that he has replied, 'I always treated Mr Buckley like the great lady he is.' " And Isherwood can be witty himself, praising a "nice expression I just learnt: as queer as a treeful of ducks".

Also there are no photographs. If you are going to tell us about working out in the gym (he hovers around 150lb, or 68kg), why not show us the body beautiful? We do get pen pictures of the male appendage, either negative – “improperly colour-photographed, the cock can look really revolting, so raw-red, even a bit reptilian” – or else delicately wrought by the Japanese, with “a ritual of seriousness and thoroughness”.

I think the problem is that these diaries lack an aesthetic. There is a scene in which Auden once again dominates a dinner table with his distrust of French language and literature, and yet where The Sixtiesfails is in its absence of the intellectual rigour that we find in the great French diarists, from St-Simon to Gide. Indeed, Isherwood acknowledges this himself, praising Gide's So Be Itas "one of the best things I have ever read about old age".

Incidentally, in 1962, The Irish Timespublished an article called "A Glimpse of Isherwood", which he quotes from warmly: "Medium short and still boyishly well proportioned, he cuts a workmanlike figure. With his trim haircut, California suntan and much laundered 'fatigue' shirt and trousers Isherwood in his fifties looks more like a retired Rommel than a widely read author." And there was a photograph.

John Montague is a poet. This month he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French state and awarded an honorary doctorate by the Sorbonne