Houseman, John (1902–1988) and Joan. Romanian-born writer, director, producer, and actor; his real name was Jacques Haussmann. His mother was British and he was educated in England, then travelled to Argentina and the U.S. as an agent for his father’s grain business which collapsed during the Depression. He worked as a journalist and translated plays, then in 1934, directed Virgil Thomson’s opera of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts, a Broadway hit. Afterwards, he collaborated with Orson Welles with whom he founded the Mercury Theater in 1937. He produced Welles’s film Citizen Kane (1941), but after a disagreement over who developed the story, he went on to work for David Selznick in Hollywood, then as a producer on his own was responsible for a string of widely admired films, including The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). He returned often to direct on Broadway, taught at Vassar, was Artistic Director of the American Shakespeare Festival in the late 1950s, and later of the UCLA Professional Theater Group, and he ran the drama division at Juilliard from 1967. He took his first of many movie roles in Seven Days in May (1964), and he won an Academy Award for his supporting role in The Paper Chase (1973), which he reprised in the T.V. series. He divorced his first wife and, in 1950, married a beautiful and stylish French woman, Joan Courtney, with whom he had two sons. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Howard. See Austen, Howard.
Howard, Donald (Don) (1927–1987). American literary scholar and university professor; he was born in St. Louis, raised in Boston, and educated at Tufts, Rutgers, and the University of Florida, where he wrote his dissertation on fourteenth-century English literature. He published books on Langland, the Gawain poet, and most notably on Chaucer, and he also wrote essays about many other aspects of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He taught at Ohio State and Johns Hopkins before becoming an associate professor at the University of California at Riverside in 1963. Afterwards he taught at UCLA and, from 1974, at Stanford. He died of AIDS.
Hoyningen-Huene, George (1900–1968). Russian-born photographer, also known as George Huene; son of an American diplomat’s daughter and a Baltic baron who had been chief equerry to Tsar Nicholas II. By the end of World War I, he was an exile in Paris, where he studied art and sold drawings to a fashion magazine. Eventually he became a regular photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, and, after 1936, for Harper’s Bazaar. He published books containing his photo graphs of Greece, Egypt, North Africa, and Mexico. After the war, he settled in Hollywood where he taught photography and was color consultant on films for his longtime friend George Cukor. He also made several amateur documentaries. Isherwood met him in the late 1940s or early 1950s, through Gerald Heard and the Huxleys. He appears in D.1 and D.2.
Hubrecht, Peggy. British or American widow of Daniel Hubrecht (1909–1972), a Dutchman born in Cambridge, England. They lived in Indonesia in the 1950s, then settled in Tangier, where they lived at the foot of the old mountain road, below Noël Mostert.
Hundertmark, Gary. Gay activist. He was one of the first directors of the National Gay Archives when they opened officially on Hudson Street in Hollywood in 1979.
Hunt. See Stromberg, Hunt, Jr.
Hunter, Allan. Congregational minister and author with whom Gerald Heard often met and conversed about spiritual matters. Hunter’s church was the Christian focal point of Heard’s California milieu. As he tells in D.1, Isherwood met Hunter at a conference organized by Heard in 1940, and, in 1941, Hunter and his wife, Elizabeth, participated in the La Verne seminar. They had a son and a daughter.
Hussein, Waris (b. 1938). Anglo-Indian film and stage director, born in Lucknow, educated at Eton and Cambridge. He studied theater design at the Slade School of Art and trained at the BBC, where he directed the first episode of “Dr. Who.” He went on to make successful T.V. plays, literary adaptations, and mini-series in the U.K. and the U.S. He also directed at the National Theatre in London and made a few feature films.
Huston, John (1906–1987). American film director, screenwriter, actor. Son of actor Walter Huston and father of actress Anjelica. As a young man, he was California lightweight boxing champion, served as an officer in the Mexican cavalry, worked briefly as a reporter in New York, and lived rough in Paris and London. He wrote a number of successful scripts in the 1930s and 1940s before his directing debut with The Maltese Falcon (1941). During World War II, he filmed documentaries in battle conditions as a member of the army signal corps and was awarded the Legion of Merit for his bravery. Afterwards, he directed many further celebrated films, including The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1947, two Academy Awards: Best Director, Best Screenplay; his father won a third: Best Supporting Actor), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The African Queen (1952), Beat the Devil (1954), The Misfits (1960), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and Prizzi’s Honor (1985). In 1952, he moved with his fourth wife, Ricki Soma, and their family to Ireland. In 1972, he moved to Mexico. His fifth wife, from 1972 to 1977, was Celeste Shane, known as Cici. Isherwood was friendly with Huston by 1950, possibly through the Huxleys or through Gottfried Reinhardt who produced The Red Badge of Courage. Huston appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Huxley, Aldous (1894–1963). English novelist and utopian; educated at Eton and Oxford; a grandson of Thomas Huxley and brother of Julian Huxley, both prominent scientists. In youth, he published poetry, short stories, and satirical novels such as Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923) about London’s literary bohemia and Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor, where he lived and worked during World War I and where he met his first wife. The Huxleys lived abroad in Italy and France during the 1920s and 1930s, partly with D.H. Lawrence—who appears in Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928)—and Lawrence’s wife, Frieda. In 1932 Huxley published Brave New World, for which he is most famous.
An ardent pacifist, Huxley joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1935, and his Ends and Means (1937) was a basic book for pacifists. In April 1937, he sailed for America with his wife and son, accompanied by Gerald Heard and Heard’s friend Chris Wood. Plans to return to Europe fell through when he failed to sell a film scenario in Hollywood, became ill there, and convalesced for nearly a year. He was denied U.S. citizenship on grounds of his extreme pacifism. California benefitted his health and eyesight—he had been nearly blind since an adolescent illness. After Many a Summer (1939) is set in Los Angeles, and Huxley wrote many other books there, including Grey Eminence (1941), Time Must Have a Stop (1944), The Devils of Loudun (1952), and The Genius and the Goddess (1956).
Not long after he arrived in Los Angeles, Isherwood was introduced to Huxley by Gerald Heard. Huxley and Isherwood collaborated on three film projects together during the 1940s: Jacob’s Hand, about a healer, Below the Equator (later called Below the Horizon), and a film version of The Miracle, Max Reinhardt’s 1920s stage production. Like Heard, Huxley was a disciple of Prabhavananda, but subsequently he became close to Krishnamurti, the one-time Messiah of the Theosophical movement. Huxley’s study of Vedanta was part of his larger interest in mysticism and parapsychology, and beginning in the early 1950s he experimented with mescaline, LSD, and psilocybin, experiences which he wrote about in The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956).
Huxley died of cancer on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years, and Isherwood helped the novelist Sybille Bedford with her Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Volume 1 1894–1939 (1973) and Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Volume 2 1939–1963 (1974).
Huxley, Laura Archera (1911–2007). Italian second wife of Aldous Huxley. Isherwood met her in the spring of 1956 at the Stravinskys’ after she and Huxley married secretly in March. She was the daughter of a Turin stockbroker, had been a concert violinist from adolescence, and worked briefly in film. She became a psychotherapist, sometimes using LSD therapy on her patients, and she published two popular books on her psychotherapeutic techniques. Her 1963 bestseller, You Are Not the Target, was an early self-help book. She also published a memoir about Huxley, This Timeles
s Moment (1968), and a children’s book. She first befriended Aldous and Maria Huxley in 1948 and used her special method of therapy on Huxley to help him recapture lost parts of his childhood. He incorporated some of her psychotherapy results into his utopia novel, Island. Before marrying Huxley, Laura lived for many years with Virginia Pfeiffer; after the marriage, she and Huxley settled in a house adjacent to Virginia’s. After Huxley’s death, she eventually became a children’s rights campaigner. She appears in D.1 and D.2.
Huxley, Maria Nys (1898–1955). First wife of Aldous Huxley; eldest daughter of a prosperous Belgian textile merchant ruined in World War I. Her mother’s family included artists and intellectuals, and her childhood was pampered, multi-lingual, and devoutly Catholic. She met Huxley at Garsington Manor where she lived as a refugee during World War I; they married in Belgium in 1919 and their only child was born in 1920. Before her marriage, Maria showed promise as a dancer and trained briefly with Nijinsky, but her health was too frail for a professional career. She had little formal education and devoted herself to Huxley. Her premature death resulted from cancer. Isherwood met her in the summer of 1939 soon after he arrived in Los Angeles. She appears in D.1 and Lost Years, and she is mentioned in D.2.
Igor. See Stravinsky, Igor.
Inge, William (Bill) (1913–1973). American playwright, born and educated in Kansas and at the University of Kansas; he earned a teaching degree in Tennessee and taught high-school and college English, then became the music and drama critic for the St. Louis Star-Times. In 1944, he interviewed Tennessee Williams, who befriended him and took him to Chicago to see The Glass Menagerie; afterwards, Inge accepted another university teaching job and wrote his first play, Farther Off from Heaven, which was produced in 1947 by Margo Jones at the Dallas Civic Theater. His next play, Come Back, Little Sheba, opened on Broadway in 1950 to great praise, and he won a Pulitzer Prize and two Drama Critics Awards for Picnic (1953). Bus Stop (1955) and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) were equally acclaimed, but in the 1960s his stage work failed repeatedly. Although his plays were adapted for film mostly by others, he received an Academy Award for Splendor in the Grass (1961), which he co-produced; his other screenplays are All Fall Down (1962) and Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965, under the pseudonym Walter Gage). In 1963, he moved from New York to Los Angeles, and in the late 1960s, he briefly returned to teaching, at the University of California at Irvine. He wrote two novels, Good Luck Miss Wyckoff (1970) and My Son Is a Splendid Driver (1971). He was depressive and had problems with alcohol. Isherwood and Bachardy first met Inge in New York in 1953 during the original run of Picnic. He is mentioned in D.1 and D.2.
Isherwood, Frank Bradshaw (1869–1915). Isherwood’s father; second son of John Bradshaw Isherwood, squire of Marple Hall, Cheshire. He was educated at Sandhurst and commissioned in his father’s old regiment, the York and Lancasters, in 1892 at the age of twenty-three. He left for the Boer War in December 1899, caught typhoid, recovered, and served a second tour. In 1902 he left his regiment and became adjutant to the Fourth Volunteer Battalion of the Cheshire Regiment, based locally, in order to be able to offer his wife a home despite his meager income. He married Kathleen Machell Smith in 1903, and they settled for a time in a fifteenth-century manor house, Wyberslegh Hall, on the Bradshaw Isherwood family estate. In 1908, Frank rejoined his regiment and the family, now including Christopher, followed the regiment to Strensall, Aldershot, and Frimley; in 1911 a second son, Richard, was born and the family moved again to Limerick, Ireland, early the following year. Frank was sent from Limerick via England to the Front Line almost as soon as war was declared in the summer of 1914, and he was killed probably the night of May 8, 1915 in the second battle of Ypres in Flanders, although the exact circumstances of his death are unknown. Isherwood felt that Frank was temperamentally unsuited to the life of a professional soldier, though he was dutiful and efficient. He was a gifted watercolorist, an excellent pianist, and he liked to sing and take part in amateur theatricals. He was also a reader and a story-teller. He was shy and sensitive, mildly good-looking, and a keen and agile sportsman. He was conservative in taste, in values, and in politics, but, unlike Kathleen, he was agnostic in religion and was attracted to theosophy and Buddhism. Isherwood wrote about his father in Kathleen and Frank.
Isherwood, Kathleen Bradshaw (1868–1960). Isherwood’s mother, often referred to as “M.” in the diaries. Only child of Frederick Machell Smith, a wine merchant, and Emily Greene. She was born and lived until sixteen in Bury St. Edmunds, then moved with her parents to London. She travelled abroad and helped her mother to write a guidebook for walkers, Our Rambles in Old London (1895). In 1903, aged thirty-five, she married Frank Isherwood, a British army officer. They had two sons, Isherwood, and his much younger brother, Richard. When Frank Isherwood was lost in World War I, it was many months before his death was officially confirmed. Isherwood’s portrait of his mother in Kathleen and Frank is partly based on her own letters and diaries. She was also the original for the fictional character Lily in The Memorial. Like many mothers of her class and era, Kathleen consigned her sons to the care of a nanny from infancy and later sent Isherwood to boarding school. Her husband’s death affected her profoundly, which Isherwood sensed and resented. Their relationship was intensely fraught yet formal, intimate by emotional intuition rather than by shared confidence. Like her husband, Kathleen was a talented amateur painter. She was intelligent, forceful, handsome, dignified, and capable of great charm. Isherwood felt she was obsessed by class distinctions and propriety. As the surviving figure of authority in his family, she epitomized everything against which, in youth, he wished to rebel. He deemed her intellectual aspirations narrow and traditional, despite her intelligence, and she seemed to him increasingly backward looking. Nonetheless, she was utterly loyal to both of her notably unconventional sons and, as Isherwood himself recognized, she shared many qualities with him. There are many passages about her in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Isherwood, Richard Graham Bradshaw (1911–1979). Christopher Isherwood’s brother and only sibling. Younger by seven years, Richard was also backward in life. He was reluctant to be educated and never held a job in adulthood, although he did National Service during World War II as a farmworker at Wyberslegh and at another farm nearby, Dan Bank. In childhood, he saw little of his elder brother, who was sent to boarding school by the time Richard was three. Both boys spent more time with their nanny, Annie Avis, than with their mother. Richard later felt that Nanny had preferred Christopher; she made Richard nervous and perhaps was cruel to him. When Richard started school as a day boy at Berkhamsted in 1919, he lodged in the town with Nanny, and his mother visited at weekends. Isherwood by then was at Repton. The two brothers became closer during Richard’s adolescence, when Isherwood was sometimes at home in London and took his brother’s side against their mother’s efforts to advance Richard’s education and settle him in a career. During this period Richard met Isherwood’s friends and helped Isherwood with his work by taking dictation. Richard was homosexual, but he seems to have had little opportunity to develop any long-term relationships, hampered as he was by his mother’s scrutiny and his own shyness.
In 1941, he returned permanently with his mother and Nanny to Wyberslegh— signed over to him by Isherwood with the Marple Estate—where he eventually lived as a semi-recluse. Nanny died in 1948, and after Kathleen Isherwood’s death twelve years later, Richard was looked after first by a married couple, the Vinces, and then by a local family, the Bradleys. He became a heavy drinker, Marple Hall fell into ruin and became dangerous, and he was forced to hand it over to the local council which demolished it in 1959, building several houses and a school on the grounds. Eventually, Richard moved out of Wyberslegh into a new house on the Marple Estate; the Dan Bradleys lived in a similar new house next door. When he died, he left most of the contents of his house to the Dan Bradleys and the house itself to their daughter and son-in-law. Richard’s will also gave money bequests to the Dan Br
adleys, Alan Bradley, and other local friends. Family property and other money were left to Isherwood and to a cousin, Thomas Isherwood, but Isherwood himself refused the property and passed some of his share of money to the Dan Bradleys. Richard appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.
Isherwood, Thomas Bradshaw (1921–2002). Christopher Isherwood’s first cousin, only son of Frank Isherwood’s younger brother, Jack Bradshaw Isherwood. Thomas was heir to what remained of the family estate after the deaths of Richard and Christopher, and he was the last of the Bradshaw Isherwood line.
Ishvara. God with attributes; Brahman and maya united; the personal god.
Ivan. See Moffat, Ivan.
Ivory, James (b. 1928). American film director; born in Berkeley, raised and educated in Oregon. He studied film at UCLA, served in the army, then began making documentaries, including one about India, which resulted in his meeting Ismail Merchant there in the early 1960s and forming a lifelong personal and business partnership with him. Ivory co-wrote his early screenplays with novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and had a number of subsequent successes with her. His work includes Shakespeare Walla (1965), Savages (1972), The Europeans (1979), Heat and Dust (1983), The Bostonians (1984), A Room with a View (1985, Academy Awards for Screenplay, Art Direction, Costumes, nominations for Best Picture and Best Director), Maurice (1987), Howards End (1992, Academy Awards for Best Actress, Screenplay Adaptation, Art Direction, nominations for Best Picture), The Remains of the Day (1993, Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Director), The Golden Bowl (2001), Le Divorce (2003), and The White Countess (2005).
James, Edward (Eddie) (1907–1984). Youngest child and only son of Willie James and Evelyn Forbes; heir to an American railroad fortune. His parents frequently entertained King Edward VII at West Dean Park. Edward James was a godson and rumored to be son of the monarch, although he himself evidently thought he was a grandson, and his mother a beloved illegitimate daughter. He was an early patron of the Surrealists (especially Dali), and was married briefly in the 1930s to Tilly Losch, the Austrian ballerina, launching a ballet company to further her career. His poetry appeared in vanity editions, paid for by himself. Isherwood knew James by the start of the 1950s, probably through the Stravinskys who, with the Baroness D’Erlanger, were among his close friends in Hollywood, and James appears in D.1. He spent much of his time in Mexico where he was friendly with the English painter Leonora Carrington and a young Indian man called Plutarcho Gastelum, and where he had a coffee finca in Xilitla (pronounced he-heet-la), near Tampico. There, he was often accompanied by the mysterious German writer “B. Traven” (Albert Otto Max Feige). In the last decade of his life, James built an uninhabited concrete city in the jungle, a surrealist art work.
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