In Lost Years, the reconstructed diary, Isherwood tells how throughout the late 1940s he started and restarted the book he at first called The School of Tragedy and eventually published as The World in the Evening. He recalls that he was never sure of his subject, never sure how to tell his story nor how to give life to a narrator of whose identity and sexuality he was uncertain. In a sense, Isherwood had come to a deadlock with himself because, for a time, his identity as a writer and his identity as a homosexual were at odds. He had introduced Caskey to his friends, so that his life became more unified than ever before, but he was unable to achieve the same unity in his work. Although he put homosexual and bisexual characters into his novel, and portrayed them sympathetically, he was not writing from the center of his own homosexual sensibility. In his diary at the time he argued that his main character “has got to be me . . . it must be written out of the middle of my consciousness.”29 But in the reconstructed diary he ridicules this younger aspiration: “How could he write out of the middle of his consciousness about someone who was tall, bisexual and an heir to a fortune?”30 There was a kind of apartheid in his work between the writer and the man, and it was stopping all progress.
Paralleling his difficulties in writing as a homosexual were his difficulties in writing as an American. Prater Violet, though written in California, is a book about England and Europe, and it is written in Isherwood’s prewar style. The World in the Evening shows that even by the early 1950s, Isherwood had not yet discovered an American style. And despite his work for the American movies, his ear had not yet adjusted to the American speech patterns he tried to use in The World in the Evening; he managed only a phoney blandness. When Isherwood first visited home after the war, in 1947, some of his English friends commented that his accent had changed. To them, he sounded American, though to Americans he sounded English. He had certainly begun to spell words in the American way, a gradual transformation which would continue for many years. But in the late 1940s the change was not yet fully wrought.
By the time he wrote his last three novels—Down There on a Visit, A Single Man, and A Meeting by the River—the wit of the young Christopher Isherwood—the edgy, embarrassable voice, the controlled mania, the half-acknowledged hyperbole—had begun to give way to a plainer, more sedate tone, relying for its humor on circumstance and narrative point of view more so than on heightened mood and temperament. He could still achieve comic tension; for instance, his description in A Single Man of George preparing, like a magician, to teach his morning class, is bursting with the old, barely restrained glee, and even surpasses the similar, earlier descriptions of his own teacher “Mr. Holmes” in Lions and Shadows. At the same time, the underlying polemic of A Single Man is more prominent than in Isherwood’s earlier works. In A Meeting by the River the structure and implied argument of the novel, though subtle, are even more prominent, and the epistolary characterizations of the two English brothers seem stiff and unnatural, as if Isherwood could no longer write in the English idiom that had once been his own. In his maturity, Isherwood seemed increasingly impelled to write in his own authentic voice, to write about real events, and to express his opinions and judgements; the transparent, styleless style he cultivated in America was better suited to truth-telling than to fiction. And this was the style in which he would begin to untangle and explain the impulsive, excited, and even neurotic commitments and crises of his youth.
For his autobiographical works of the 1970s, Isherwood’s style became even plainer. It was not even noticeably American (as, for instance, it had been in A Single Man). It was contemporary, cosmopolitan, without striking local color. When he was struggling to get started with Christopher and His Kind, he fretted in his diary that his style had changed for the worse, but he was confident that his subject matter was weighty and worthwhile: “When I reread my earlier work, I feel that perhaps my style may have lost its ease and brightness and become ponderous. Well, so it’s ponderous. At least I still have matter, if not manner.”31 In fact, he was noticing the transformation which had begun many years before, and which had continued along the lines of his personal development and according to the needs of his subject matter. Now, he was no longer in the business of making myths, but rather of trying to explain how he had made myths in the past. Despite the explicit sexual revelations in the reconstructed diary, Isherwood’s purpose was not, as it had been, for instance, in A Single Man, to outrage the procreating middle classes with his portrayal of homosexual anger and the paranoia he felt was characteristic of minorities. The reconstructed diary is neither angry nor apologetic in tone (Isherwood had come to feel his wartime diaries were unduly apologetic). Instead, it has a kind of anthropological matter-of-factness—describing his work, his social life, his memories and fantasies, his many sexual liaisons with friends, strangers, and occasionally lovers much as he might have described them for the benefit of a sex researcher like Evelyn Hooker, but in the plain, literary language he had evolved for himself.
His flat, explanatory, almost pedagogic prose in some ways resembles the mature social realism of his friend Edward Upward whose prose models included John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Cowper, and George Gissing. And the transformation in Isherwood’s style corresponds to a similar change in Upward’s. It can also be compared to changes in Auden’s poetic style. All three of them abandoned the fantastic brilliance of their youth for a more earnest style in maturity. The abundance of quasi-mystical imaginative energy in their early writing disappeared as each converted to a set of beliefs which absorbed that energy on a different—higher—plane. Their writing became more understated and more cautious as they became aware they were writing in relation to what they held to be absolute truths. This happened earliest to Upward when he converted to Marxism; he wrote one last feverishly mystical piece, Journey to the Border (1938), about his conversion, and then fell silent altogether for several decades. It happened more gradually to Auden after he returned to Christianity and to Isherwood after he took up Vedanta. For the same reason that Isherwood wrote his biography of the mystic Ramakrishna from the point of view of a skeptic and in the short, reiterative cadences of the King James Bible, he wrote his late autobiographical works in heavily ordinary modern prose and incorporated into them whole passages from his diaries, unembellished: he wanted the experiences to shine through the writing rather than to seem to be created by the writing. This unpretentious late prose style was for him the most convincing medium in which to recount, in My Guru and His Disciple, the story of his reverence for Swami Prabhavananda, and it differs little from the style of his diaries in which he tells the episodic story of his love for Don Bachardy.
Just as the reconstructed diary tells of Isherwood’s repeated failure to get on with his novel, so it also tells of his repeated failure to get on with his life. As with his work, so with William Caskey: Isherwood started and restarted the relationship, never certain whether Caskey loved him, never able to impose order on their increasingly drunken domestic life. Some of their most tender moments were brought on by their shared sense of guilt over how cruel they were to one another; yet guilt also appears to have been a main stumbling block to progress between them. Isherwood observes that “both Caskey and Christopher were entering upon their relationship with powerful feelings of guilt. . . . Neither of them would admit to their guilt, except by the violence with which they reacted against it.”32 Caskey felt guilty that he was not a good Catholic, that he had not had an honorable discharge from the navy, that he did not love his family. Isherwood felt guilty that he had failed to find a way for Heinz to escape permanently from Germany, that he had failed to be a committed social revolutionary, that he had failed to return to England during the war, that he had failed to become a monk. How could either one of them conduct a successful love relationship while shouldering such burdens? Gradually Isherwood became promiscuous with countless others, and as it progresses the reconstructed diary increasingly becomes a Proustian catalogue of all the relationships in which h
e tried and failed to find, or to be, the ideal companion. Without self-defense, the narrative obliquely reveals, again and again, Isherwood’s further guilt over having loved and left so many.
As a form of confession and expiation, the reconstructed diary is presided over by the ghost of E. M. Forster. In the 1970 Thanksgiving diary entry in which he first mentioned his plan to write it, Isherwood had commented: “I have also had the idea that my memoir of Swami might be published with a memoir of Morgan, based on his letters to me. So that the book would be a Tale of Two Gurus, as it were.”33 Forster died just a year before Isherwood began writing the reconstruction, and in the interval Isherwood supervised the publication of Forster’s own explicitly homosexual work, Maurice, which had lain waiting many decades to reach print.34 The publication of Maurice in 1971 may have been a spur to begin the reconstruction when he did and to make it as explicit as he did.
While Swami gave Isherwood unconditional love, Forster judged. And it was Forster’s moral character which made Isherwood feel the need to judge himself. Isherwood writes in the reconstructed diary that “he thought of Forster as a great writer and as his particular master.” In the late 1940s, even though he had already known Forster for a decade and a half (since 1932), he was still in awe of him. Somewhat surprisingly, he was not in awe of Forster as a writer: “It was as a human being that Forster awed him. Forster demanded truth in all his relationships; underneath his charming unalarming exterior he was a stern moralist and his mild babylike eyes looked deep into you. Their glance made Christopher feel false and tricky.”35 Forster let Isherwood know, for instance, that he disapproved of the way Isherwood handled his 1938 affair with the ex-chorus boy Jacky Hewit, and by 1971 when Isherwood wrote the reconstructed account of this prewar episode, he openly conceded that he felt guilty about promising to bring Hewit to America and then never sending for him. Forster’s moral influence can be seen reaching forward into many areas of Isherwood’s life, providing a standard against which Isherwood implicitly measured other actions, even the many about which Forster knew nothing. By the time he wrote the reconstructed diary, the intensity of guilt had abated, but the need to judge his youthful self as Forster might once have judged him persisted.
If Forster demanded of Isherwood that he come to terms with past actions, Isherwood’s other guru, Swami Prabhavananda, offered a style of thought that looked to the future. Swami’s unconditional love existed in the context of a philosophy where guilt had no role. The spiritual aspirant in Vedanta aims to leave the concerns of the world behind, and in meditation, which Isherwood practiced every day for many years, to remember was not as important as to forget. By the end of the 1940s, it was time for Isherwood to leave his past and his burden of guilt behind him. The years of turmoil and waste were to be followed by tremendous new achievements.
A new American friend, Speed Lamkin, helped him to find a way forward with The World in the Evening by cutting out the part of the book that was most closely connected to Isherwood’s old European life and his former, English successes. Oddly enough, Lamkin seems to have hit on his solution through a lack of historical awareness and perhaps even without recognizing why his advice was so useful. He read the manuscript during the spring of 1951 and told Isherwood, “The refugees are a bore.”36 They were based on the real-life refugees, mostly German and Austrian Jews, to whom Isherwood had taught English in Haverford, Pennsylvania, during the early part of the war. Isherwood’s determination to write about the refugees—demonstrated by vain years of effort—was evidently fed by the power of his social conscience and by the allure of his former success in writing about the German middle classes. After all, his descriptions of his Berlin acquaintances, to whose shabby and trivial lives he had once been able to give a bohemian glamor of complete originality, had made his reputation. And the moral viewpoint associated with E. M. Forster and with Isherwood’s friend Edward Upward, as well as Isherwood’s own puritanism, might have urged him to persist with such a socially worthy subject.
Speed Lamkin’s moral viewpoint—if he had one at all—was the opposite of Forster’s or Upward’s. He was unabashedly, vulgarly ambitious. He was a clever boy from a small town in the South who had come to Hollywood to become rich and powerful and famous. He shared none of Isherwood’s guilt or anxiety about social revolution, the cause of the workers, pacifism or the war. He was shallow and ruthless, and his ruthlessness was something which Isherwood desperately needed at this point in his life. As with his novels, so with his life: certain themes had to go. The refugees had to go; guilt had to go; and as Isherwood knew and Lamkin kept reminding him, Caskey had to go. Isherwood recalls of Speed’s comment on the refugees: “Speed with his ruthlessness had disregarded Christopher’s feelings and expressed his own. Christopher could never be grateful enough to him.”37
Lamkin was quintessentially American, and he beckoned Isherwood forward into Isherwood’s chosen new culture, with its easy rewards and its endless appetite for change. For the Isherwood of the 1930s, immersed in and obsessed by Germany, the refugees would have been an ideal subject. But Isherwood was now immersed in and obsessed by America. In Christopher and His Kind Isherwood explains that he had learned to speak German “simply and solely to be able to talk to his sex partners.” This had given German a powerful erotic significance: “For him, the entire German language . . . was irradiated with Sex.”38 From the start of the 1940s he wanted to have sex with American boys, and it was the American language which became charged for him with erotic energy. As he observed in his Thanksgiving diary entry of 1970, his poetry, his fiction always consisted of his reactions to real experience; with the refugees, he was trying to force himself to write about something that was no longer intensely real to him. He observes in the reconstructed diary that even Berthold Viertel—a refugee and mentor once commanding the quality of attention from Isherwood which resulted in one of his finest novels, Prater Violet—became unimportant when Isherwood’s sense of personal identification with the German diaspora faded: “As Christopher became increasingly detached from his own German-refugee persona (which belonged to the post-Berlin years of travel around Europe with Heinz) Viertel had lost his power to make Christopher feel guilty and responsible for him.”39 And some of the Haverford refugees had themselves begun to lose interest in Germany. In contrast to the German and Austrian artists and intellectuals Isherwood knew in Hollywood, who were proudly nurturing their native cultural heritage until they could return home after the war, the more ordinary refugees in Haverford, despite their sophistication and cynicism, wanted and needed to learn English and to learn what Isherwood’s Haverford boss, Caroline Norment, called the “American Way of Life.”40 Unlike many of their Hollywood counterparts, they had lost everything and, in some cases, suffered great physical deprivation and pain. They wanted to forget about their European past, assimilate into American culture and get on with their lives. Many of them did this rapidly and successfully; they virtually evaporated into America. Isherwood needed to do the same. His decision to drop the refugees from The World in the Evening is emblematic of his shedding of his old continental affinities along with his burden of guilt; finally he began to accept his new homeland and his unknown, solitary future.
But Speed Lamkin did not persuade Isherwood to abandon his social conscience altogether. The reconstructed diary grinds to an uncadenced, almost shapeless halt in 1951, stranded tellingly upon Isherwood’s account of his dealings with a friend of Speed Lamkin, Gus Field. Field is a minor character in Isherwood’s narrative, but a minor character whose fate compares suggestively with the fate of the refugees and even with the fate of Caskey. Lamkin and Field, with Isherwood’s permission, wrote a stage adaptation of Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood liked it, but his friends Dodie Smith and her husband Alec Beesley (rich through Dodie’s talent as a playwright) did not. So the Beesleys connived that John van Druten should undertake the same project. Van Druten’s adaptation, I Am a Camera, would eventually place Isherwood on the road to fame
and relative fortune, despite wrangles when van Druten took the largest share of the royalties. When the time came to make clear to Lamkin and Field that van Druten’s version of Goodbye to Berlin was to receive Isherwood’s imprimatur, Lamkin accepted the new situation cheerfully and offered no recriminations, thereby abandoning his own script and ingratiating himself successfully with the little group behind van Druten’s version. Field, though, who behaved just as well as Lamkin, was excluded and ignored. Isherwood writes in the reconstructed diary:
As for Gus Field, he took the news well, too. Which was more admirable, since he got very little gratitude from Christopher or anybody else for doing so. If he was invited to the Beesleys’, it was only once or twice. Speed dropped him. Christopher only saw him occasionally. He was treated as a bore and an outsider—and that, from Christopher’s point of view, was what he was.41
Speed had called the refugees boring; Isherwood calls Gus Field a bore. To be boring was an unacceptable crime in Isherwood’s new Speed Lamkin-style drive for success. Perversely, Field became the scapegoat himself for the ill treatment meted out to him by Isherwood and the Beesleys. As with the refugees and Caskey, Field and the guilt he inspired in Isherwood and his friends, had to go.
And yet part of Isherwood brooded over the excluded, marginalized figure of Gus Field, resulting in the strange non-ending of the reconstructed diary. For Isherwood, the Field episode was closed but not resolved. He had originally planned, at Thanksgiving 1970, that the reconstructed diary might carry through to 1955—or at least to 1953, when he met Don Bachardy. But by March 1974, as he was writing about the end of 1950, his ambition had shrunk: “I would like to record the winter of 1951–1952, even if I go no further.”42 In September the same year, advancing slowly, he had again reduced his aims, “I’ve reached January 1951. I would like, at least, to get the rest of that year recorded, particularly the production of I Am a Camera.”43 Finally, in January 1977, with Christopher and His Kind already published, he had made only a little further progress, though he still planned to continue: “. . . thus far, I’ve reached May 1951 and I would like to carry the narrative on until at least the end of 1952.”44 But he never returned to the task, and in the end he never got beyond the shadow of Gus Field—the necessary victim of Isherwood’s success. From time to time, Isherwood also mentions in his diary the idea of returning to the subject of the refugees and writing a novel solely about them. But he never did; they, too, were part of the past of which he had to let go. Their story survives only in his wartime diaries, an adequate and important historical account. As for Caskey, his story is contained in the reconstructed diary.
Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951 Page 5