Lost Years

by Christopher Isherwood

  The project which he compared to “knitting”—recreating the sequence and sense of his life during the late 1940s in little, unimportant stitches—did more than just keep Isherwood amused as he had at first imagined. It proved both challenging and absorbing, and for several years he attempted no other work of his own—although during the first half of the 1970s he collaborated with Don Bachardy on a television script of Frankenstein (1971), and on three other scripts which were never made: The Lady from the Land of the Dead, The Beautiful and Damned (both for television), and a film script of Isherwood’s novel A Meeting by the River (1967), which they had already successfully adapted for the stage. Moreover, Isherwood’s “knitting,” somewhat like the flow of unselfconscious, free-associative talk in psychoanalysis, evidently set his mind free to delve more directly than ever before into his private life. The very insignificance and confidentiality of the task opened new avenues to self-reflection. And so perhaps without at first realizing it, Isherwood embarked on an entirely new episode of his life’s work.

  In his Thanksgiving diary entry he had gone on to ask himself whether he would ever again write fiction:

  Have I given up all idea of writing another novel, then? No, not necessarily. The problem really is as follows: The main thing I have to offer as a writer are my reactions to experience (these are my fiction or my poetry, or whatever you want to call it). Now, these reactions are more positive when I am reacting to actual experiences, than when I am reacting to imagined experiences. Yet, the actuality of the experiences does bother me, the brute facts keep tripping me up, I keep wanting to rearrange and alter the facts so as to relate them more dramatically to my reactions. Facts are never simple, they come in awkward bunches. You find yourself reacting to several different facts at one and the same time, and this is messy and unclear and undramatic. I have had this difficulty many times while writing Kathleen and Frank. For instance, Christopher’s reactions to Kathleen are deplorably complex and therefore self-contradictory, and therefore bad drama.

  On the one hand, Isherwood was restating, and perhaps rediscovering, something he had long known: that his reactions to real experience were more vivid, more intense than anything he could invent. On the other hand, he conceded that writing accurate history was a more severe discipline than writing fiction, because he could not alter the facts to conform to his artistic intention. As early as 1953 he had described in his diary his “lack of inclination to cope with a constructed, invented plot—the feeling, why not write what one experiences from day to day?” Then, in 1953, he had attributed the feeling to the fact that he had fallen in love with Don Bachardy: “Why invent—when Life is so prodigious?” And he had added, “Perhaps I’ll never write another novel. . . .”4 Yet he had gone on to write several of his best novels over the twelve or thirteen years following 1953. But eventually the fiction did stop. Isherwood wrote his last novel, A Meeting by the River, in 1965 and 1966; by the time it was published in 1967, he was already hard at work on Kathleen and Frank, which is based so closely on his parents’ letters and diaries that it incorporates long passages from them, “brute facts,” which he could not rearrange and which forced him to struggle with the complexity and contradiction of real life. As soon as he finished correcting the proofs of Kathleen and Frank, he began reconstructing the lost years of his own life, 1945 to 1951, according to a similar version of the newly established method.

  In September 1973, Isherwood at last began to get on, as he had envisioned in the Thanksgiving diary entry, with “something else as well.” This was to be an autobiographical book, about his life in America, in which he planned to tell, according to an inspiration derived from Jung, his “personal myth.”5 It would share publicly some of his wartime diaries as well as the fruits of the “knitting” he had done in the meantime, and it would be for him a new kind of book. By late October the American autobiography began to undergo a metamorphosis, because Isherwood realized that he could not explain why he had emigrated to America without first telling about the personal crisis which had occurred when his German lover Heinz Neddermeyer had been turned away from England by an immigration official in January 1934. So he shifted the book’s focus backward to the decade of the 1930s, in order to tell the story of the events which drove him away from England in search of what he called “my sexual homeland.”6 Isherwood and Heinz had been forced to wander through Europe in search of a country where they could settle together, safe from Hitler’s persecution of homosexuals and from his conscription; finally, Heinz was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1937, just inside the German border. When Isherwood at last published this autobiography as Christopher and His Kind in 1976, he overnight became a hero of the burgeoning gay liberation movement. The book sold faster than any other he had ever written.

  Isherwood conceded in interviews and letters that he had moved beyond the brute facts in writing Christopher and His Kind, because he wanted it to read as a novel rather than a memoir.7 In earlier works, as the book itself makes clear, he had moved away from facts not only to heighten dramatic effect but also to avoid writing about his homosexuality. But in Christopher and His Kind he no longer wished to avoid writing about his homosexuality; on the contrary he wished to tell about it in detail. This new impulse, to reveal rather than to conceal, is a continuation of the impulse according to which he had begun the reconstructed diary in 1971 (indeed, Christopher and His Kind incorporates whole passages from the reconstructed diary), and Isherwood’s ability in the 1976 autobiography to deal forthrightly with his sexuality, as the underpinning for the trajectory of his life, grew directly out of the confidential and, as it had once seemed, insignificant work he had already done recapturing his postwar life from 1945 to 1951. Christopher and His Kind was a relatively shocking book, even as late as 1976. The reconstructed diary is far more shocking; even now, some passages have been altered or removed to protect the privacy of a few of Isherwood’s friends and acquaintances who are still alive.

  Isherwood’s reconstructed diary is sexually explicit partly because, for the first time ever, it could be. In 1971, seven years after the publication of his assertively homosexual novel A Single Man (1964), two years after the Stonewall riot in New York, and well into the cultural and sexual revolution spawned during the 1960s, he was comfortable committing to paper (though not necessarily for publication) details of personal relationships such as he would for years previously either never have written down or otherwise felt compelled to destroy. Since the end of the 1950s, censorship laws in the United States had been gradually relaxed; court decisions had increasingly required the post office to deliver magazines formerly ruled obscene and had permitted publication and sale of books that might once have attracted a ban. Even the Hollywood Code, governing censorship of films, gave way during the 1960s. Although some of the sex acts which Isherwood describes in the reconstructed diary were still widely illegal, he could without much risk of penalty record the true habits and attitudes of the homosexual milieu in which he had long lived in semi-secrecy.

  Lost Years, the reconstructed diary which began for Isherwood as a task of personal recollection and amusement, can now be seen to have a more general significance as a work of social history. For it aimed to recapture the mood and behavior of a little recognized group which was soon to make itself known to the popular consciousness. Isherwood had studied history with enthusiasm and panache as a schoolboy; later, his revulsion from the dry, academic discipline he encountered at Cambridge propelled him toward literature as if it were an alternative to history, and in his case a mightily preferred one. But his autobiographies, travel books and novels—even the early, most genuinely fictionalized ones—all bear the mark of his historical outlook. He had a journalist’s instinct for knowing where to go and who to observe and talk to, and he rendered his vivid personal impressions with a historian’s sense of the interconnection between the popular psyche and the facts of social and political change. In his best work, Isherwood consistently achieved the task laid
out for literature by his schoolmate and lifelong friend, Edward Upward, who believed that imaginative literature could not escape its relation to material reality and that the socially responsible writer ought to portray the forces at work beneath the surface of material reality which will shape the future of society.

  Upward became a dogmatic Marxist in the early 1930s, and he explained in a 1937 essay that:

  For the Marxist critic . . . a good book, is one that is true not merely to a temporarily existing situation but also to the future conditions which are developing within that situation. The greatest books are those which, sensing the forces of the future at work beneath the surface of the past or present reality, remain true to reality for the longest period of time.8

  Isherwood first became seriously involved with political ideas during his years in Berlin; he had strong communist sympathies in the 1930s, but he never joined the party. His regret, and moreover his sense of guilt, at not having been able to commit himself like Edward Upward to the revolutionary cause of the workers in Europe and England, contributes to the bitter tension of his slim masterpiece Prater Violet (1945); related feelings about being away from England during the war fuelled his ingenious and somewhat brittle arguments about emigration and pacifism in his wartime diaries and in his next novels, The World in the Evening (1954) and Down There on a Visit (1962). For most of his life, Isherwood was not politically committed. As an artist, he abstained, and he bore the guilt of turning his back on worthy causes about which he thought and wrote but in which he took no active role. But as he was finally able to write in his reconstructed diary, “Christopher was certainly more a socialist than he was a fascist, and more a pacifist than he was a socialist. But he was a queer first and foremost.”9

  Gay liberation was the only movement for social change to which Isherwood ever felt personally and entirely committed. In July 1971 he noted in his diary that he felt compelled, now, to mention his homosexuality to everyone who interviewed him, and just a few months earlier he had confessed that he was attracted to the idea of himself as “one of the Grand Old Men of the movement.”10 His later work fulfils Upward’s principles in a way that Upward could not have foreseen in 1937 (though Upward read and admired virtually all that Isherwood wrote in the 1970s). Upward had written in the same 1937 essay:

  A writer, if he wishes at all to tell the truth, must write about the world as he has already experienced it in the course of his practical living. And if he shares the life of a class which cannot solve the problems that confront it, which cannot cope with reality, then no matter how honest or talented he may be, his writing will not correspond to reality. . . . He must change his practical life, must go over to the progressive side of the conflict. . . .11

  For Upward, the struggle was a class struggle, and the progressive side of the struggle was the side of the workers. He divorced his own class to join the workers, and even gave up his writing, for a time, to do communist party work. For Isherwood, the struggle proved to be a sexual struggle, and he was already on the progressive side, the side of the homosexuals; but that side had yet to assemble itself. And it took Isherwood several decades to find the way to acknowledge his side openly, both in his life and in his work.

  Isherwood never gave up his writing as Upward did; for he was a writer above all, not an activist, even when it came to his homosexual kind. By writing in explicit sexual detail about his intimate behavior and that of his close friends and acquaintances in the years immediately following the war, he was portraying the hidden energies and affinities of homosexual men all over the United States who during that period were gathering increasingly in certain, mostly coastal cities as peace and prosperity returned to a country much altered by vast wartime mobilization. This hidden social group, whose consciousness of itself as a group was intensified by the demographic shifts brought about by the war and then extended throughout the 1950s, was to emerge in its own right as a significant force of change in America and in western culture generally during the final third of the twentieth century. Much of this change began in southern California, and Isherwood was living at its source. His personal myth is part of, and in many ways emblematic of, the larger myth of the group to which he belonged; and his reconstruction of his life during the postwar years foretells much of what was to come.

  In The World in the Evening, the novel he was working on during the lost years of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Isherwood wrote more explicitly and more sympathetically than ever before about homosexual and bisexual characters. And he manipulated his publishers and compromised with convention just enough to succeed in getting into print two unsensational homosexual love scenes and a few somewhat more subversive ideas and psychological insights. The sentiments he recorded in his reconstructed diary in 1971, about his sense of political commitment to queers, were already articulated clearly in The World in the Evening by his character Bob Wood, who remarks on joining the army, “I can’t be a C.O. because, if they declared war on queers—tried to round us up and liquidate us, or something—I’d fight. I’d fight till I dropped. I know that. I’d be so mad I wouldn’t even feel scared. . . . So how can I say I’m a pacifist?”12

  Possibly Isherwood felt emboldened to write more candidly about homosexuals after reading Gore Vidal’s novel The City and the Pillar, which Vidal had sent to him in manuscript before its 1948 publication. Three other books which he mentions in the reconstructed diary as having made an even stronger impression on him around the same time, and which have forthright and unsettling passages about homosexuals, were John Home Burns’s The Gallery (1947), Calder Willingham’s End as a Man (1947), and Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door (1947).13 American attitudes to homosexuality were changing generally in the postwar period in any case, and 1948 also saw the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s massive volume of research, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male—begun in 1938 and based on countless interviews which suggested that as many as thirty-seven percent of men had at least one homosexual experience after the onset of adolescence.

  Closer to his heart, Isherwood was almost certainly influenced by the defiant personal style of his companion of the late 1940s, the photographer William Caskey, who was fully capable of the sorts of remarks Isherwood put into the mouth of his character Bob Wood. Wood is partly modelled on Isherwood’s later lover and longterm friend Jim Charlton, but Isherwood writes in the reconstructed diary that, “Bob Wood isn’t a portrait of Jim, however; he is described as a crusader, a potential revolutionary—which Jim certainly wasn’t and isn’t.”14 Caskey, on the other hand, “declared his homosexuality loudly and shamelessly and never cared whom he shocked. He was a pioneer gay militant in this respect—except that you couldn’t imagine him joining any movement.”15

  Isherwood makes clear in the reconstructed diary how greatly he admired Caskey’s outspokenness about his sexuality. Sometimes Caskey’s belligerence was too abrasive. For instance, he became bitterly angry with the Chilean painter Matta and his wife, when Matta well-meaningly said that he himself had tried sex with men, and Isherwood and Caskey never saw the Mattas again. But on other occasions Caskey was killingly witty about his homosexuality. To Natasha Moffat’s friendly insult that she was glad to be seated next to “a pansy” during a dinner party at Charlie Chaplin’s house, he replied: “Your slang is out of date, Natasha—we don’t say ‘pansy’ nowadays. We say ‘cocksucker.’” Natasha Moffat had a reputation for energetically offbeat behavior, and her sophisticated Parisian past as an intimate of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre made her tough enough for such repartee. Isherwood recalls in the reconstructed diary that her remark was loud and silenced the group; Caskey’s more shocking reply restored the balance. And Isherwood goes on to write of his younger self, “Christopher, who truly adored Caskey at such moments, sat glowing with pride in him.”16 His own good manners would never permit him to behave as Caskey did, and he was capable, personally, of feeling embarrassment. “Caskey never suffered from embarrassment. He didn’t give a
damn what anybody knew about him.”17 Isherwood was immensely attracted to Caskey’s bold insistence on the truth, his impatience with social nicety, his willingness to startle and disrupt. He recognized a need for such behavior and privately he identified with it.

  The rebelliousness in Caskey which Isherwood so adored was among the chief things, in the end, which drove them apart. Their relationship was a constant struggle for power. Neither Caskey nor Isherwood was ever able to admit to the other that he was in love; each held back—guarded, suspicious, unwilling to trust. They often fought violently; Caskey could make Isherwood lose his temper so badly that Isherwood would shout and sometimes hit Caskey, especially when they were drunk. And Isherwood recalls in the reconstructed diary that drunkenness became a prevalent, destructive necessity: “drinking was a built-in dimension of their relationship; while sober, he felt, they never achieved intimacy.”18 With the drinking came bad moods and lethargy, so that Isherwood worked less and less. The psychological conflict in their relationship was mirrored and underpinned by growing sexual incompatibility, and in contrast to Isherwood’s earlier love affairs, they shared no mythology about one another. They lived continually in the plain light of day, with no natural indulgence in fantasy, no artless playfulness, no imaginative games or magical naming. This made Isherwood feel the relationship was more grown-up than his others, but it also made the relationship harder to sustain. Through their mutual distrust and inability to yield, the pair were confined to a routine of selfconscious passion and relied upon forced playacting to fuel their lovemaking. Isherwood gave way to Caskey’s aggressiveness almost out of politeness, but eventually certain tasks of role playing grew wearying. He admits that he would have split from Caskey sooner had he not feared to live alone; and indeed his fear of being alone shaped his romantic behavior throughout his life.