Lost Years

by Christopher Isherwood

  McClendon, Carlos (b. 1923). American designer and shop owner. McClendon was born in California and worked as an apprentice set designer at MGM and as a dancer before opening his shop, Chequer, in New York in 1954. He sold clothes of his own design for men and women, furniture, and art objects, and he travelled widely to acquire raw materials and finished goods, including ethnic textiles and folk art from Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and elsewhere. He spent time living in Haiti and in Mexico as well as in New York, and he eventually opened Chequer West in West Hollywood, frequented like his New York shop by theater, movie and entertainment people, and designers and costumiers. Isherwood met McClendon through Denny Fouts and John Goodwin in the 1940s when McClendon often visited the beach in Santa Monica. The friendship continued long after McClendon left Los Angeles in the early 1950s. Eventually McClendon settled in New Mexico.

  McDowall, Roddy (1928–1998). British actor and photographer. McDowall began his education at a Catholic school in a south London suburb and made his first movie when he was eight years old. When the Blitz began, he was evacuated to the USA and became a Hollywood star as a teenager after appearing as the crippled boy in How Green Was My Valley (1941) and, with Elizabeth Taylor, in Lassie Come Home (1943). During the 1950s he took stage and television roles in New York, where he won a Tony Award for his supporting role in The Fighting Cock in 1960. He returned to Hollywood in the 1960s and starred in Planet of the Apes (1968), most of the sequels, and the television series. Other films include My Friend Flicka (1943), Thunderhead, Son of Flicka (1945), Orson Welles’s Macbeth (1948), The Subterraneans (1960), The Longest Day (1962), Cleopatra (1963), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Funny Lady (1975), and Fright Night (1985). He published several books of his photographs, mostly of celebrities.

  Medley, Robert (1905–1995). English painter. Robert Medley attended Gresham’s School, Holt, with W. H. Auden, and the two remained close friends after Medley left for art school at the Slade. In London, Medley became the longtime companion of the dancer Rupert Doone, and was involved with him in 1932 in forming The Group Theatre, which produced The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F6, and On the Frontier. Medley also worked as a theater designer and teacher, founding the Theatre Design section at the Slade in the 1950s before becoming Head of Painting and Sculpture at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1958.

  Menotti, Gian Carlo (b. 1911). Italian-born composer, librettist, and conductor. Menotti emigrated to the USA, where he studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and began to establish an international reputation with his operas from the late 1930s. He won Pulitzer Prizes for The Consul (1950) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954), and his widely known opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951), was the first to be written expressly for American television.

  MGM. The preeminent Hollywood studio from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s; Isherwood began writing for MGM at the start of 1940, his second Hollywood job. Formed by a three-way merger between Loewe’s Incorporated (owner of the Metro Pictures Corporation), the Goldwyn Studios, and the Louis B. Mayer Pictures Corporation, the studio was run by Mayer with Irving Thalberg and Harry Rapf Stars included Garbo, Norma Shearer, Gable, Joan Crawford, the Barrymores, Elizabeth Taylor, Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and Greer Garson; among the directors and producers were George Cukor, Clarence Brown, Victor Fleming, Mervyn Leroy, Vincente Minnelli, Busby Berkeley, David Selznick and Arthur Freed. MGM reached its apogee between 1935 and 1945, then management conflicts gradually developed and enforcement of the Sherman antitrust laws eroded its power. Financial losses and further management upheavals plagued the studio throughout the 1960s, and MGM has been the object of various corporate takeovers since then.

  Minton, John (1917–1957). English painter and theater designer. His paintings were admired by Wyndham Lewis, and he taught at several London art schools. He took his life with a drug overdose.

  Moffat, Ivan (b. 1918). British-American screenwriter; son of Iris Tree and Curtis Moffat. He was educated at Dartmouth and served in the U.S. military during World War II. Afterwards he assisted the director George Stevens on A Place in the Sun (1951), was Stevens’s associate producer for Shane (1953), and co-wrote Giant (1956) before going on to work for Selznick on Tender Is the Night (1962). He met his first wife, Natasha Sorokine, in Paris at the end of the war; the marriage broke up at the start of the 1950s, leaving a daughter, Lorna. Moffat then had a series of beautiful and talented girlfriends until marrying Kate Smith, an Englishwoman, whose family fortune derived from the book and stationery chain, W. H. Smith. He often appears in D1.

  Monkhouse, Allan (1858–1936). English journalist and theater critic; father of Isherwood’s boyhood friend, Patrick Monkhouse. Allan Monkhouse also wrote plays and fiction, including a novel, My Daughter Helen (1922), in which one of the main characters, Marmaduke, is partly modelled on the adolescent Isherwood.

  Monkhouse, Patrick. English journalist. Patrick Monkhouse was raised in Disley, near Marple, and became Isherwood’s close friend by the time they were adolescents. He was at Oxford a year or two ahead of W. H. Auden, and edited The Oxford Outlook.

  Moraturi, Pancho. Wealthy Argentine. Longtime lover, companion, and supporter of Bill Harris. In his April 1949 preface to The Condor and the Cows (“To the Reader”) Isherwood names Moraturi and Harris among those whom he wishes to thank for helping him and Caskey during their visit to Buenos Aires.

  Morris, Phyllis. British actress. She was a student with Dodie Smith (later Beesley) at the Academy of Dramatic Art (precursor to RADA) in London during World War I, and they remained close friends for life. Morris came from a wealthy family. She was a stage actress, but played minor roles in a few Hollywood films after the war—for instance, That Forsyte Woman (1949). She also wrote children’s books and plays.

  Mortimer, Raymond (1895–1980). English literary and art critic; he worked for numerous magazines and newspapers as both writer and editor and wrote books on painting and the decorative arts as well as a novel. Mortimer was at Balliol College, Oxford, with Aldous Huxley and later became a close friend of Gerald Heard, introducing Heard to Huxley in 1929. He was also intimate with various Bloomsbury figures and an outspoken advocate of their work. From 1948 onward Mortimer worked for The Sunday Times and spent the last nearly thirty years of his life as their chief reviewer.

  Nadeau, Nicky. American dancer. Isherwood had a sexual relationship with him in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Possibly he met Nadeau through Chris Wood’s wealthy Bel Air friend Karl Hoyt; Nadeau had an affair with Hoyt and later, towards the end of the 1950s, with Chris Wood. He is mentioned in D1.

  Nanny. See Avis, Annie.

  Neddermeyer, Heinz. German boyfriend of Isherwood; Heinz was about seventeen when they met in Berlin, March 13, 1932. Their love affair, the most serious of Isherwood’s life until then, lasted about five years. Hitler’s rise forced them to leave Berlin in May 1933 and afterwards they lived and travelled in Europe and North Africa. In a traumatic confrontation with immigration officials at Harwich, Heinz was refused entry on his second visit to England in January 1934, so Isherwood went abroad more and more to be with him. In 1936 Heinz was summoned for conscription in Germany, and Isherwood scrambled to obtain or extend permits for him to remain in the ever-diminishing number of European countries which would receive him. A shady lawyer failed to obtain him a new nationality, and finally Heinz was expelled from Luxembourg on May 12, 1937, and returned to Germany. There he was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced—for “reciprocal onanism” and draft evasion—to a three-and-a-half-year term: six months’ imprisonment, then one year of labour, and two years of military service. Nonetheless, he married in 1938, and with his wife, Gerda, had a son, Christian, in 1940. Isherwood did not see Heinz again until 1952 in Berlin, though he corresponded with him both before and after this visit. Heinz’s conscription first turned Isherwood towards pacifism. Their shared wanderings are described in Christopher and His Kind and thei
r friendship also serves as one basis for the “Waldemar” section of Down There on a Visit. He is sometimes mentioned in D1.

  Nin, Anaïs (1903–1977). American writer. Nin was born just outside Paris, raised in New York from age eleven, and spent most of the 1920s and 1930s back in Paris seeking out the company of writers, intellectuals, and bohemians. She was a model, a dancer, and a teacher, and later became a psychoanalyst, as well as writing novels, short stories, and literary criticism. She is now best known for her six-volume Diary which began to appear in the 1960s and which tells, among other things, about her Parisian friendship with Henry Miller. She had many love affairs and was married twice. Her second husband, Rupert Pole, is a stepgrandson of Frank Lloyd Wright. By the 1970s the pair had settled in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles in a house designed by Wright’s grandson, Eric Lloyd Wright.

  Norment, Caroline. American Quaker relief worker and administrator. Norment was director of the American Friends Service Committee’s Cooperative College Workshop, the refugee hostel in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where Isherwood worked as a volunteer during the war. She was in her fifties when Isherwood first met her in late summer 1941. She had previously done relief work in Russia and Germany, and she had also served as Dean of Women at Antioch College in Ohio. As he mentions in Lost Years, Isherwood wondered whether Norment somehow attracted or unconsciously caused fires. In his wartime diaries he had recorded for April 30, 1942 that there was a bad fire at the hostel, Norment’s fifth. In two earlier fires she had lost most of her possessions; later, there were two more near fires also at the hostel (D1, pp. 212–14). Norment is the original of Sarah Pennington in The World in the Evening; Isherwood took the character’s first name from the actress Sara Allgood, whom Norment resembled.

  Novak, Alvin (b. 1928). American pianist, born in Chicago. He moved to Los Angeles as a teenager with his family, and his father died shortly afterwards. Novak put himself through college at UCLA, where he studied philosophy and met other members of The Benton Way Group with whom he became closely involved. At twenty-six, when he graduated, he began a new life in New York, developing his gift for the piano into a professional career as a teacher and performer. Later he lived increasingly on Long Island, organizing concerts in the Hamptons as well as teaching and performing there.

  Obin, Philomé (1891–1986). Haitian painter. Obin was an important figure in the Haitian art movement and one of the first to apply to the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince in the early 1940s. He was a devout Protestant, and reportedly prayed and sang hymns while he painted; among his important works were a Crucifixion and a Last Supper for the Saint-Trinité Episcopal Cathedral in Port-au-Prince.

  Ocampo, Victoria. Argentine writer, critic, editor, and publisher. She owned and edited Sur (South), the international literary magazine for which Isherwood had agreed, a few years before he met her, to assemble the work of some modern writers to be translated into Spanish. She also ran her own small publishing house—Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf were among the contemporary writers she introduced to her Argentine audience. Her background was privileged and traditional, and she was celebrated as a beauty in her youth, but she was bohemian and an outspoken feminist who preferred to write in French rather than Spanish. During the 1950s she was imprisoned by the Perón regime. She was a close friend of Maria Rosa Oliver, who helped her with Sur, and of Tota Cuevas de Vera. In early 1948, Isherwood and Caskey visited the three of them in Buenos Aires and in the nearby seaside resort, Mar del Plata.

  O’Hara, John (1905–1970). American journalist, short story writer, and novelist, from Pennsylvania. Many of his books were later reworked as movies, including Butterfield 8 (published 1935, filmed 1960), A Rage to Live (1949, filmed 1965), and Ten North Frederick (1955, filmed 1958). Pal Joey (1940) was adapted for the stage as a musical comedy by O’Hara himself with Rodgers and Hart, who wrote songs for it which are still well-known, such as “My Funny Valentine” and “The Lady Is a Tramp.” It was filmed in 1957.

  O’Keeffe, Georgia (1887–1986). American painter. Raised on a farm in Wisconsin, she studied art in Chicago and New York early in the century and was a pioneer of American modernism. Her early work was abstract; later she became more figurative, painting townscapes and landscapes as well as the flower and plant forms for which she is most widely known. O’Keeffe married the photographer Alfred Stieglitz in 1924. He had promoted the work of European artists such as Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Brancusi and later of American artists, including O’Keeffe, in a series of New York galleries from just after the turn of the century. Camera Work, which Isherwood mentions, was published from his first gallery and eventually included not only photography, but all the visual arts, as well as criticism, reviews, and new American writing. O’Keeffe wintered in New Mexico from the 1930s and settled there in 1946 after Stieglitz died, although from the 1950s she began to travel widely.

  Old, Vernon (not his real name). American painter; raised in New York City and New England and educated partly at Catholic boarding school. Isherwood met Vernon Old in 1938 when first visiting New York, and Vernon featured in Isherwood’s decision to return to New York in 1939. They moved to Los Angeles together that spring, but split up by mutual agreement in February 1941. Vernon then lived unsteadily on his own, working on his painting. He could not return to his family as his parents were divorced and he did not like his mother’s second husband. During the war, he tried to become a monk, first in a Catholic monastery in the Hudson Valley and later at the Hollywood Vedanta Center and at Ananda Bhavan, another center which became the Sarada Convent, in Montecito. Later, he married and had a son before divorcing. His painting career was increasingly successful, and in the late 1950s he tutored Don Bachardy. He appears in Christopher and His Kind and in My Guru and His Disciple (as “Vernon,” without a surname) and in D1.

  Oliver, Maria Rosa. Argentine intellectual. Isherwood first met her during the war when she visited Hollywood in August 1944 with an introduction from Lincoln Kirstein. She asked Isherwood to find contemporary writers whose work could be translated into Spanish for her friend Victoria Ocampo’s literary magazine, Sur. When Isherwood and Caskey saw her in Argentina early in 1948, Caskey photographed her for The Condor and the Cows. Oliver’s legs were partly paralyzed, and she was confined to a wheelchair.

  Ouspenskaya’s school. The School of Dramatic Arts founded by Maria Ouspenskaya (1876–1949), a Russian actress who first arrived in Hollywood with the Stanislavsky troupe in 1923.

  Owens, Rodney (Rod). Hayden Lewis’s companion and business partner for many years from 1946; a California native. He is often mentioned in D1. After he split with Lewis, Owens became a sales person for the clothing designer Helen Rose and settled in New York.

  Patanjali. The obscure Indian compiler of the yoga sutras, the series of spare, aphoristic statements formulating the philosophy and practice of yoga. Patanjali was a follower of Sankhya philosophy, not Vedanta, and did his work sometime between the fourth century BC and the fourth century AD. In ancient times, the sutras could not be recorded in books and so were repeated from memory and elaborated and explained by a teacher. This is partly why they are so short and, on their own, seemingly difficult. In 1948, Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda began making a translation of the sutras in which they expanded and paraphrased them for modern, English-speaking devotees and also added a commentary drawing on various earlier teachers. This was published by the Vedanta Society in 1953 as How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali.

  Pears, Peter (1910–1986). English tenor. The youngest of seven children, Pears went to boarding school at six and rarely saw his family. He was sent down from Keble College, Oxford, after failing his first-year music exams, became a prep school master, studied briefly at the Royal College of Music and then joined the BBC Singers in 1934. Pears became close friends with Benjamin Britten in 1937; they shared a flat from early 1938, and began performing together in 1939. That same year, the two travelled together to New Y
ork where Pears studied singing further, and they went on to California before returning to England in 1942. Although at first they both had other relationships, their lives became increasingly fused, with Britten writing a great deal of his music for Pears, and Pears singing it expressly for Britten.

  Pembroke Gardens. The address of Isherwood’s family home in London before the war. Kathleen Isherwood lived at 19 Pembroke Gardens, Kensington, from June 1928 until mid-July 1941, when she and Richard and Nanny (Annie Avis) returned to Wyberslegh.

  Perkins, Lynn. American screenwriter. He approached Isherwood for help with a film outline for a ghost story. Evidently he was a writer for a series of action-science fiction films called The Purple Shadow Strikes (also The Purple Monster Strikes) produced in 1945 by Ronald Davidson for Republic Pictures.

  Perlin, Bernard (Bernie). American painter; associated through his work with Paul Cadmus, Jared French and George Tooker. Bill Caskey met Perlin in Miami in 1944 when they were both still in the navy. Perlin had recently survived a German attack in Greece and encouraged Caskey not to fear persecution by the admiral who was conducting a homosexual witch-hunt at their naval air base; the scandal shortly resulted in Caskey’s blue discharge. After the war, Perlin lived in Italy from the late 1940s until the mid-1950s, and later he settled in Connecticut.

  Philipps, Wogan (1902–1993). English painter and, later, politician; educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. Philipps was a communist and drove an ambulance for the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. When Isherwood saw him in 1947, he was serving as a communist councillor on the Cirencester Rural District Council. He succeeded his father as second Baron Milford in 1962 and became the first communist peer in the House of Lords. He was married three times: first, to Rosamond Lehmann; then to an Italian, Cristina, who was the ex-wife of the Earl of Huntingdon and a daughter of the Marchese Casati; and, after Cristina died in 1953, to Tamara Rust, widow of William Rust, the editor of the Daily Worker.