Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

by Christopher Isherwood

  On November 30, Speed Lamkin and Gus Field came to talk about their Sally Bowles play. Later, Speed took Christopher and Caskey to have dinner with Marion Davies. This visit is described in the journal. Christopher was impressed by the prisonlike atmosphere of the house—your drinks were served to you by uniformed, armed cops; by the gold plate on the sideboard; by the heavily felt presence of nonpresent Hearst, now bedridden and referred to as “the Man Upstairs”; by the paranoid-fascist conversation of two men from the New York headquarters of some Hearst publication; by the little office dominated by a portrait of General MacArthur—from which, according to Speed, the whole Hearst empire was controlled; and also, most of all by Davies herself.39

  After supper, when the New Yorkers had been called upstairs to see Hearst, Davies took Christopher, Speed and Caskey into the office. She was very drunk now and wanted to dance. She did the splits, over and over again, to the music of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Her legs parted without effort, like an open banana skin, but, once down on her sacrum, she was helpless and had to be hauled giggling to her feet by her partners. They kept this up until 3:30 a.m., when her nurse, who had been reading, all this while, in a dressing room adjoining one of the downstair toilets, appeared and led Davies off to bed.

  Speed revelled in all this. Christopher says in the journal:

  He adores this smell of power, in a sort of Balzacian way. With his vulgarity, snobbery and naive appetite for display, he might well become a minor Balzac of Hollywood. There is something about him I rather like, or at any rate find touching. He is so crude and vulnerable, and not malicious, I think. He reminds me of Paul Sorel, but he is much more intelligent; and he has energy and talent.

  On December 5, Caskey and Christopher drove to Laguna and spent their first night in the new house. It was in South Laguna, actually—number 31152 on Monterey Street, which wound around the hillside above the Coast Highway, looking down on Camel Point and the beach below it. You could get to the beach much more directly on foot, by a narrow downhill trail. High above was the modernistic house built for Richard Halliburton, the madcap explorer, shortly before his death. This part of Laguna was sleepy and sparsely inhabited in those days especially during the winter months.

  Number 31152, like its neighbors, was built in country-cottage style, with a disproportionately long garden sloping down rather steeply to the road. (The houses on the opposite side of Monterey Street stood so much lower that you could see right over them, out to the ocean horizon.) During World War II, several whores had lived at 31152 and had entertained service men there. Caskey felt that this had given the place “a party atmosphere.”40

  The rest of December was spent in moving into the Monterey Street house. This required several trips back and forth. On December 15, they brought Christopher’s books down to Laguna in the station wagon; the books were so heavy that a tire blew out, near Newport Beach. On the 22nd, they rented a truck and brought down the furniture. (This was chiefly furniture given to Caskey by his mother. 31152 was partially furnished by its owner, as 333 had been.) After this, Caskey made two more trips to Santa Monica, on the 27th and the 29th, to collect the last of their belongings from 333. So they weren’t completely established at 31152 until just before New Year’s Eve. Hayden Lewis and Rod Owens came down to spend it and New Year’s Day with them.41

  * * *

  1 If Mailer had been at the party on December 10, the day-to-day diary would surely have mentioned him. On March 10, 1950, Mailer visited Christopher with his wife but nothing is said about any other guests.

  2 These negative impressions are all that remain now. But maybe Christopher liked the acting at the time when he saw it. Either that, or he was being very polite when he gave a quote which The Los Angeles Times printed: “The best acting I have ever seen this unusually talented group do.” (Betty Harford showed me the clipping, October 1973.)

  3 The word “hypnotist” always sounds slightly derogatory. Aldous, who greatly respected and liked LeCron, refers to LeCron in his letters as a psychotherapist.

  4 Speed was then twenty-two.

  [5 See D1, pp. 458–63.]

  6 In this dialogue, Emlyn Williams very slightly accented the misters and the miss. The effect was mocking, but the mockery was so subtle that Chaplin would only have made himself ridiculous if he had taken offense at it.

  7 Since writing this, I discovered from the day-to-day diary for 1951 that Christopher and Caskey went to a party at the Chaplins’ on March 24. This seems to prove that the alleged peeing incident took place then, and not on May 13, 1950. Still, it should be noticed that ten months elapsed between the two meetings. So it could be argued that the alleged peeing did take place (seemingly or actually) on May 13, 1950, that the Chaplins were angry with Christopher for a long while but then decided to give him another chance, that he was invited on March 24, 1951 but behaved badly, and that therefore they struck him off their guest list forever. In any case, March 24, 1951 does seem to have been their last meeting.

  [8 Fritz Field, Whitfield Connor, Eileen Erskine, Ramsay Hill; adapted by Richard E. Davis, directed by Andrew Clore. The one-hour broadcast was on May 14 with Don Rickles announcing and a commentary by Irwin Edman.]

  [9 The screenplay was first called Below the Equator and later retitled Below the Horizon.]

  10 Here is an outline of Hubbard’s theory, taken from Inside Scientology by Robert Kaufman, published in 1972. Kaufman is admittedly hostile but probably not too unfair:

  The single source of our grief here on earth is found to lie in engrams, recordings of overwhelmingly painful events which, unbeknownst to us, were imprinted on our reactive minds over the years whenever the analytical mind shorted-out due to stress.

  . . . One has only to locate these incidents on the patient’s time track and have him relive them in all their grisly detail. Several relivings are generally sufficient to erase an engram and its harmful effect. A person who gets rid of all his engrams in this manner is called a Clear. He is then completely free from neuroses and psychosomatic symptoms, gifted with total recall, and possessed of an almost superhuman I.Q. . . .

  However, I don’t believe that Christopher’s refusal to try Dianetics was simply due to skepticism. Christopher had—and I still have—a deep-seated reluctance to try tinkering with his own psychological mechanism. When Christopher was young, he would have explained this reluctance by saying that he was afraid of inhibiting his creative process; while at Cambridge, he had been told of a young Georgian poet who was unable to write a single line after having been “successfully” psychoanalyzed. Nowadays, I would say I believe that the unconscious must by its nature remain unconscious. It doesn’t belong to me. It is my means of communication with what is nonpersonal and eternal. All attempts to meddle with it are therefore attempts to impose my will and my ideas of what is good for me upon the infinitely greater wisdom of the nonself. As such they can only be self-damaging and anyhow doomed to failure. (To do Ron Hubbard justice, it must be said that he can have had no such qualms—for, in those days at any rate, he didn’t believe that there is any such thing as the unconscious. According to him, man has only a conscious analytical mind and a reactive mind which is, to quote from Robert Kaufman, “a stimulus—response mechanism, a moronic, miasmal carryover from caveman days”—utterly inferior to the conscious mind, in other words, and an obstacle to our development as human beings.)

  11 “The great effort I [must] make is to realize that this fighting is actually taking place, that people are being killed, that the fighting may spread into a general war . . . even that Los Angeles and other cities may be bombed—perhaps with atom bombs. It is very hard to realize the horror of all this—precisely because I have already spent most of one war right here in this city and so the prospect seems deceptively familiar and scarcely more than depressing. The danger of taking the war unseriously is a truly hideous spiritual danger. If I give way to it, I shall relapse into the smugness of the middle aged, who have nothing much
to fear because they won’t be drafted, or the animal imbecility of queens who look forward to an increase in the number of sailors around town.

  “To see Jo and Ben Masselink this morning. Both are worried. . . . Told Ben how much I liked his travel-book manuscript, which delighted Jo; she embraced me several times. In this time of anxiety, one sees how motherly she is. Her Baby may be taken away from her. And this is really heartbreaking, because they so deserve to be happy. They have built up such a charming, yet modest life together. Jo is so industrious, and clever, making swimming suits for her customers. Ben works so hard at his writing. They are gay and bright-eyed and grateful for every instant of pleasure, and yet they demand so little in order to enjoy it.

  “With their example, I ought to be unfailingly kind and thoughtful in my dealings with Billy (Caskey). How can I ever be otherwise? Especially at a time like this.” [D1, pp. 423–4.]

  12 “The slant-eyed Yma and her cousin, balancing so lightly on their little feet, and uttering sudden wails of mimic despair. And the boy behind them, very close, and thrusting forward with his guitar; so that they seemed to be continually advancing upon us with the compactness and drive of a little military formation. . . . The dances had an airy uncanny birdlike authority: you got the feeling of the uncanny jungle and the discontinuous, abrupt movements of the birds. . . .” [D1, p. 425]

  [13 Not his real name.]

  14 Shortly before they entered the Sequoia park, Christopher told Igor—who had never been there before—that he would find the landscape strangely out of perspective, because at first you are surrounded by very small trees, birches, while at the same time you look up and see the giant trees on the skyline, thousands of feet above you. Igor seemed to understand what Christopher meant. He answered promptly: “Just like Shostakovich at the Hollywood Bowl.”

  Later they visited the General Sherman Tree, which is supposed to be the largest living thing on earth—274 feet tall, 101 feet around at the base, and between three and four thousand years old. When Igor stood looking up at it, Christopher didn’t feel that it made him seem smaller, as it does most people. This was a confrontation of two great stars. Igor said of the tree: “That’s very serious.”

  Igor, then sixty-eight, still had a trim well-coordinated figure. At that time, he was exercising every day. He showed a lot of energy, walking about, scrambling over rocks. He had a huge appetite and complained because they weren’t able to get a meal exactly when he wanted one.

  While they were looking at the view of Mount Whitney from Moro Rock, Igor said that Derain had told him that a mountain is the most difficult of all objects to paint.

  [15 Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, act four.]

  16 Briefly put, these insights were all about the character of Stephen. Christopher decided—for the first time, I believe—that Stephen should be bisexual. (“The degree to which this notion scares me only proves that I’m on the right track.”) Stephen has revolted from Quakerism as a young man but hasn’t escaped from the puritanism which goes with it—so his occasional homosexual affairs have been guilty. Because he feels guilty, he has behaved irresponsibly toward his male lovers. Then he takes refuge in marriage to Elizabeth Rydal. But she can’t satisfy him sexually. After her death, he marries Jane, who can. But Jane herself is promiscuous, and Stephen finds that he is jealous both of her lovers and of her. And Jane sometimes (as in the scene at the Hollywood party) deliberately takes a boy because she knows Stephen is attracted to him.

  Then, at the hostel, Stephen has his first serious homosexual relationship. He falls in love with the doctor, Charles Kennedy. It is Charles who makes the first advances, forcing Stephen to admit to his homosexuality.

  Stephen’s bisexuality “—i.e., flirting because one can’t make up one’s mind—has to be exposed spiritually, economically, politically, socially, as well as sexually. Stephen has to find adjustment on all levels before the book ends.”

  “Stephen’s conflict: he can’t subscribe to Quaker mysticism or Quaker pacifism because he hates Quaker puritanism. And yet he is by nature a mystic and a pacifist. . . . If Stephen’s ‘conversion’ means anything, it means that he can accept an apparent paradox—i.e., he still believes in God—or more than ever believes in God—while doing something the God-mongers condemn—that is, loving another man.”

  17 Dodie’s suggestion was that the novel should start with the scene at the Hollywood party and the discovery of Jane and her lover fucking in the doll’s house. So Stephen leaves for Sarah’s home, where he finds Gerda but no other refugees. He tells Gerda about Jane and she laughs, making Stephen see the funny side of the situation. Then the Traubes arrive and Dr. Kennedy comes to attend Miss Traube, who is very sick. The first time Charles Kennedy is alone with Stephen, he refers to a character in The World in the Evening. The character is female but is actually a portrait of Stephen himself—this was Elizabeth’s way of hinting to Stephen that she knew about his homosexuality. Stephen has long since realized this, and now Kennedy has guessed it. He is flirting with Stephen by asking him about this character. It is Gerda who finally tells Stephen (after he has been to bed with her—they get drunk to celebrate the news that her husband Peter has escaped from the Nazis) that he, Stephen, is in love with Charles Kennedy. So then Stephen goes to Charles and tells him. And, after that, they get together.

  There is another big entry in the notebook on July 12, which is a rough short draft of the first chapter, not too unlike the chapter which finally appeared in the printed book. On August 9, there is a redrafting of the opening paragraphs. Then no more entries in 1950. But Christopher evidently went on working during the fall.

  18 “Jim lost no time in telling me that he misses nothing and nobody in Santa Monica, is perfectly happy here, and looks forward to staying through the winter. (Just the same, he was obviously very pleased to see me, and had even bought a special bottle of rum for us to drink after we went to bed at night in the house where he sleeps.) . . . Jim is now drinking very little, having no sex, making no trips to Flagstaff, even.” [For this and ensuing quotes from journal in text and in notes, see D1, pp. 427–31.]

  19 “Peggy was pained by the untidiness in which the Kittredges live. . . . Mary Kittredge, Peggy pointed out, is a typical slovenly Southerner, and, said Peggy, there is a far wider gap between New Englanders and Southerners than between New Englanders and British. . . .

  “. . . (They gave us venison for dinner. Peggy heroically ate some.) . . .

  “Peggy says Bob Kittredge is the type of Easterner who was born one hundred years too late. He should have been an Indian guide; and now, though he comes out to the West and learns all about camping and hunting and wild life, he is really lost and isolated in the middle of the twentieth century.”

  20 Christopher later described the psychological atmosphere of this drive, in the journal: “Peggy’s guilt at having been allowed to get her own way—” i.e., by refusing to visit Monument Valley—

  (and I see she will get nothing else throughout this trip) occupied us with the most elaborate self-justifications and generalizations during most of yesterday’s drive. But I didn’t really care. I was . . . in a fairly well-balanced mood of happiness-unhappiness . . . thinking of the misery of the mess at Rustic Road . . . and of the slowly maturing war situation; and, at the same time . . . happy to be out on the endless blue levels of the plateau. . . .

  What Christopher doesn’t mention in any of these journal entries is the ambivalence of the relationship between himself and Peggy. On the one side, he is observing her and criticizing her rather bitchily. On the other side, he is playing the protective elder brother, looking after her and little Bull—who, incidentally, behaved like an angel throughout the trip. Even at this late date—they had known each other for more than ten years—their brother-sister relationship was slightly incestuous—that is to say, flirtatious. They would remind each other that they made a handsome couple and that they looked young for their ages. When they stopped that day to e
at at a roadside restaurant, it amused and pleased them both that the waitress took Christopher for Bull’s father. (Why in the world shouldn’t she have?) Peggy had the impertinence to assure Christopher that nobody would ever suspect him of being homosexual, because he seemed one hundred percent masculine. And no doubt, in the innocence of her arrogance, she sincerely believed she was paying him a compliment!

  In the journal, Christopher notes that.

  Peggy is much concerned with the change of life and anxious not to try to be attractive any more. (She will, though.) She is transferring her sexual vanity to her children, as bankers transfer money from a city which may be bombed. . . . Peggy goes on and on about her children until one could scream.

  21 “Georgia O’Keeffe’s house. The massive adobe walls—big round pine beams with cross rafters of aspen or cedar. In some rooms, old cedar has been used; it looks like bundles of firewood. The pastel colors of New Mexico—pinkish brown or grey of adobe, pale green of sage. The black modernistic chair sitting like a spider in a corner of the hot patio.”

  22 It was then that Christopher wrote in his journal and read F. M. Ford’s Parade’s End, another book he was reviewing for Tomorrow. The character of Sylvia Tietjens made him think of Caskey and the quarrels at Rustic Road:

  We cannot settle anything by bargaining. We have to live this through, with great patience, but without any of that “neither-do-I-condemn-thee” stuff. Oh, I shall never, never get out of this rut until I do that, once. The funny thing is—it’s exactly the subject of my novel (which looks promising, at present).