Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

by Christopher Isherwood

  23 Stieglitz used to maintain that the artist only needs a minimum of subject matter to work with. A vast number of his best pictures were all taken within a radius of a few yards, inside and outside his house on Lake George, New York—the interior, the exterior, the view from the porch, the poplars, the clouds.

  24 “Shrill, blonde-white witchlike Frieda, who is very sympathetic, and Angelino, who is rather too sleek and suave. Also, his Latin sex act bores me. He picked Peggy up in his arms, and this excited little Bull so much that he bit her in the buttock—’the haunch,’ Peggy calls it.”

  Christopher says in the journal that the Del Monte ranch was “exactly as Lawrence described it in St. Mawr.” But he contradicts himself immediately by referring to the new house which Angelo had built since Lawrence’s death,

  blocking out the view from the old Lawrence house behind it; from jealousy, probably. It has a very squalid atmosphere, whereas the older house seems strangely joyful. The dead bees on Lawrence’s bed, and the yellow santo [saint’s image] and the string mat Lawrence made to sit on by the fireplace. A reproduction or small copy of the awful Lawrence painting Frieda has down in her house—the great tortured German frau dragging a factory after her by a harness of ropes and straining up towards a bearded Lawrence figure, who is rolling his eyes with horror and apparently fighting off another frau with a sword, maybe, or a radioactive rolling-pin. . . . Brett says she and Lawrence did all the work, while Frieda lay on the bed smoking cigarettes. But you can’t believe a word these women disciples say of each other.

  Christopher took to Brett very strongly (was this partly because of her utter Britishness?): “I really love her, with her hearing aid and her enormous ass and absurd bandit’s jacket. I said how good I always feel in the mornings, and she said, ‘Yes—but by the afternoon one has worried oneself into a fit.’” Christopher admired Brett’s Indian paintings—and also “a very beautiful Union Jack, faded to rose pink” which she had on the wall of her house. (On her garage door she had painted the arms of her family.) But he thought her portraits of Stokowski were ridiculous and rather like the original paintings by Van Meegeren—the ones that aren’t forgeries.

  That night, up at the Del Monte Ranch, Brett and her dog slept in Angelo’s new house, while Georgia, Peggy, Bull and Christopher lay out of doors under the pines. Brett’s dog set up a howl of the kind that dogs are supposed to utter when their master or mistress dies. So Christopher went into the house to investigate (playing the Man in Charge again) and found Brett peacefully snoring. Then Georgia told Christopher to recite poetry to put them to sleep but Christopher could only remember his basic repertoire of murder and ghost scenes from Macbeth and Hamlet. Bull loved every minute of it, because he was going to bed at the same time as, and with, the grown ups. They slept fairly well but awoke looking frowsy and crumple-faced. Christopher said, “Bull looks six, at least.” Georgia got up and went striding off through the morning woods, “walking the ditch” (as she called it), to keep the irrigation ditch clear of undergrowth. She triumphantly found that some animal had died in the tank, making the water stink. Christopher meanwhile visited Lawrence’s tomb, which he describes as “amateur-dauby.” Nevertheless, this place was for him a very sacred shrine—perhaps the most sacred of any in his literary myth world. When he later happened to mention to Peggy that he had signed the guest book in the chapel, she was shocked; she found this touristy. So he didn’t tell her that he had also taken two red flowers from the hillside in front of the chapel and pressed them in his billfold for relics.

  When they had returned to Taos, Peggy and Christopher visited Mabel Dodge Luhan

  —a great disappointment, after all the stories about her witchlike fiendishness, jealousy and ruthless egotism. Such a dowdy little old woman—as Peggy said, “She’s reverted to Buffalo.” She looks like a landlady. And her house is full of the stupidest junk. It was very sad; the feeling of the old days gone—John Reed gone—Lawrence gone—and this old frump stuck with her fat Indian man, building houses and drinking whiskey in the morning. And yet the stories persist. The woman who lent Mabel a jacket. Mabel wore it all summer, then returned it. One night, the woman was out riding in the jacket, and a bullet whizzed past her. She dismounted, ran to the nearest bush, where a young Mexican, whom she knew, was crouching with a gun. “Forgive me,” he gasped, “I thought you were Mrs. Luhan.”

  25 The Self-Sufficient Seagull

  There was a wounded bird,

  Who, like an awkward aeroplane,

  Flew with one gear down.

  It was a smooth-feathered seagull,

  Swimming in slow circles,

  Limping when aground.

  He was no fishing frolicker,

  Screeched not nobly

  Reached no mate.

  He made no cackling congress

  At the prancing place, just

  Sat in state,

  Or swooped softly,

  Quietly, along the leeshore—

  Lonely.

  [26 Not his real name.]

  [27 Not his real name.]

  [28 Not his real name.]

  [29 Not his real name.]

  [30 Not his real initials.]

  [31 Not his real name.]

  32 When Barry had a date with Christopher—or any other sex partner, presumably—he would bathe, shave, shampoo his hair and dress with extreme care. Christopher used to kid him about this, saying, “Five minutes after you arrive, you strip all those clothes off and toss them on the floor, and then we roll around till we’re slippery with sweat and stinking like pigs, and then you, having carefully brushed your teeth and washed out your mouth with antiseptic, lick my ass and get shit on your tongue, and then I fuck you till my cock’s smeared with shit which afterwards gets rubbed off on your belly—so why take all this trouble with your toilet?” [Taxman states that this passage is of doubtful authenticity and is extremely offensive and distasteful to him.]

  [33 Taxman finds this passage to be apocryphal and extremely offensive and distasteful to him.]

  34 I wish I had at least some record of Christopher’s talks with Gerald at this period. I remember only that his chief interest was in the many sightings and alleged sightings of Unidentified Aerial Objects—flying saucers. Gerald believed in them wholeheartedly and would soon publish Is Another World Watching?, in which it is stated that June 24, 1947 (the Kenneth Arnold sighting near Mount Rainier) “may prove to be one of the most important dates in history.” Gerald told Christopher that, “Liberation is my vocation, the saucers are my avocation.” He expressed the wish that one of the objects would land and require a human go-between to explain the ways of earth men to their people and to be instructed in their own culture, as far as that was possible. Gerald longed to be this go-between. I think he had elaborate fantasies about the role he would play—including the brilliant, epigrammatic lectures on Earth history he would deliver and maybe even the splendid space costumes he would wear. I remember Gerald as being very cheerful in those days. Yes—now a memory comes to me. It belongs to August 30, when, according to the day-to-day diary, Gerald, Michael Barrie and Christopher, “Picked up Harold’s Rolls.” The Rolls belonged to Harold Fairbanks—that much I’m sure of—but how Harold had acquired it, where they were taking it and for what purpose, I don’t know. It was a handsome old car, and Gerald enjoyed its faded grandeur. They were all three laughing and chattering, and suddenly Gerald exclaimed, “What good talk!” I can still picture his face as it looked at that moment, lit up with the vivid pleasure of a connoisseur. And I can hear the tone of his voice, so melodiously Irish. At such moments one glimpsed him as he must have been when he was young and unholy.

  [35 Robert Craft conducted Pierrot lunaire in New York the following October, but recalls asking Isherwood for help only with possibly improving the translation made by Ingolf Dahl (1912–1970), a composer and refugee who was a close friend of Stravinsky. According to Craft, the speaking part for Isherwood would have been in Stravinsky’s
The Flood, much later, in 1962.]

  36 Someone, I forget who, recently told me at a party that stunt riders often make bad falls deliberately, because they are paid a prearranged amount for each fall, good or bad. Huston undoubtedly knew this. He probably tolerated such cheating good humoredly, unless the stuntman overdid it.

  [37 Portrait of Hemingway, 1961.]

  [38 Matthew 18:7.]

  39 “Marion Davies, thin, pink, raddled, with luxuriant dead-looking fair hair, very innocent blue eyes, came in drunk. One wanted to say, like a Shakespearian character: ‘Alack, poor lady. . . .’ She stumbled a little and had to be helped to her chair; but she made a lot of sense, and talked seriously to the two men about business.” [D1, p. 432.]

  40 Christopher wrote in the journal on December 11:

  I like this house, despite its knotty pine walls, because it fits into a picture I have of the atmosphere of “Old Laguna”—the original colony of third-rate watercolorists, mild eccentrics, British expatriate ladies who ran “Scottish” tea shops, astrologers, breeders of poodles, all kinds of refugees from American city life. Also, this whole area of small houses, gardens of flowering shrubs and sheltered winter sunshine, sandy lanes winding up and down the steep hillside, takes me back to early memories of Penmaenmawr [Wales] and Ventnor [Isle of Wight]. I have an agreeable feeling of having come to the very last western edge of America, looking out over the pale bright Pacific—much cleaner than at Santa Monica—with nothing between me and Catalina but mist and a huge telephone pole.

  (The islands of Catalina (opposite) and Clemente (to the south) figured largely in the seascape. You could also see the Palos Verdes headland (to the northwest) on a clear day, and beyond it, on a clear night, some of the lights of Los Angeles.)

  41 Among the books Christopher read in 1950, I chiefly remember the ones he reviewed and/or was reading for the second time: The Martian Chronicles; F. M. Ford’s Parade’s End (he had read only part of this before); [Spender’s] World Within World; H. G. Wells—Prophet of Our Day, by Antonina Vallentin; Masefield’s Multitude and Solitude. Out of the rest of them, Calder Willingham’s Geraldine Bradshaw made a dazzling impression, it seemed a masterpiece of comedy, but I haven’t yet reread it. Nothing, by Henry Green, isn’t among my absolute favorites; I prefer Living, Loving and Doting. Eliot’s [The] Cocktail Party slightly nauseates me, good as it is. I find Venus Observed—and the few other Christopher Fry plays I’ve read—piss-elegant posing. Christopher enjoyed [Thor Heyerdahl’s] The Kon-Tiki Expedition, but mostly because it is about the South Pacific. Homage to Catalonia (which I think Christopher must have read before) is certainly a noble book; I honor grim old Orwell far more than I enjoy him. The same with Lowell Naeve’s A Field of Broken Stones. Miss Lonelyhearts—that’s a different matter; I neither honor nor enjoy Nathanael West. William Goyen’s The House of Breath and Donald Windham’s The Dog Star are both of them remembered as crypto-queer trifles, though I believe Christopher wrote blurbs for them. James Barr’s Quatrefoil is at least honest fag-trash. [Tennessee Williams’s] The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is trash too, but of the sort which can only be produced by a great dramatic poet. A Drama in Muslin is very minor George Moore, but I love Moore now as Christopher did then, dearly. I remember liking William Cooper’s Scenes from Provincial Life quite a lot but not quite enough; it was typical of the sort of novel the Beesleys really loved. They had recommended it to Christopher. Christopher admired Gerald Sykes’s The Quiet American [sic, Sykes’s book was The Nice American; Graham Greene’s more famous title appeared in 1955] and wrote a big blurb for it—but something tells me I’ll never reread it. And then there was Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave—this must surely have been Christopher’s second reading of it. Connolly’s most maddening, snobbish book and, for that very reason, his most fascinating and self-revealing. And it contains a passage which I keep quoting to myself:

  . . . the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece . . . no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having made the admission, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, for they will not acknowledge that it is their present way of life which prevents them from ever creating anything different or better.

  1951

  THE DECEMBER 11 journal entry, from which I’ve already quoted [in note 1, page 274], contains resolves by Christopher to make a new start with Caskey. And Caskey himself was working hard to fix up the house. I have one endearing memory of him at this time: they had brought down an icebox from somewhere and there it stood outside the back door, seemingly too large to be moved into the house through that entrance. Caskey sent Christopher away, saying, “I have to get furious with it before I can do it.” He looked very small and the icebox looked very big. But, when Christopher returned half an hour later, there it was in position, inside the kitchen.

  During the first two weeks of January, Christopher worked on a review [for Tomorrow] of the Robert Louis Stevenson omnibus published by Random House. On January 12, they bought a Ford Anglia and sold their station wagon. The Anglia seemed cramped at first, but it was sturdily built and never gave them any trouble. Christopher later described it to Iris Tree as “a very loyal little car.”

  On January 13, [a friend] came down to stay, bringing with him an actor [. . .] with whom he was having an affair. [This actor’s] chief claim to fame was that he looked very much like [a certain film star]. When [the star] died [. . .] leaving his role in the film [he was then making] unfinished, [the little-known actor] was used to represent [the star]—mostly with his back to the camera—in the scenes which remained to be shot.

  That evening they probably all drank a lot. Hangovers often gave Christopher a kind of feverish vitality. Waking up early, he ran down to the beach and swam in the ocean for the first time that year. When he got back to the house, he went into the guest room and found [his friend] and [the actor] naked in one of the bunk beds, making love. [The friend] suggested that Christopher should strip and climb in too. The ever-randy [friend] was all ready for more sex, although he had just had an orgasm with [the actor]. [The actor] excused himself, saying that he was pooped and couldn’t come again. He was very much in love with [Christopher’s friend], so maybe he was jealous that [the friend] should want to have Christopher. [The friend], no doubt, was just showing off Christopher found [his friend] unattractive but he fancied [the actor] and it made him wildly excited to do this in [the actor’s] presence. The bed was narrow, and Christopher, as he writhed naked in [his friend’s] arms, kept managing to rub against [the actor’s] naked body lying beside them. (I don’t quite trust this memory. I suspect that it may be partly fantasy. It’s much more probable that [the actor] retired to his own bed before [Christopher and his friend] started doing whatever they did to each other.)

  On January 17, the day-to-day diary notes that Caskey and Christopher “got air raid information.” I don’t know exactly what this was. Instructions for taking shelter, cutting off the gas at the main, laying in a supply of food suitable for sustaining life during a period of fallout? Anyhow, it is a reminder of those H-bomb-minded, Russian-menaced times.

  On January 21, Speed Lamkin and Gus Field came down for the day. They and Christopher discussed their play Sally Bowles. The first draft of it was finished.

  On January 28, Christopher finished his review of Spender’s World Within World for Tomorrow.

  On February 1, Christopher drove to Los Angeles for the day and had another discussion with Speed Lamkin and Gus Field about the Sally Bowles play. During the next eight days, Christopher worked on his novel, lay on the beach, helped Caskey entertain various visitors, was painted by Paul Sorel (so was Caskey) and went to Camille’s, the chief local gay bar. On February 10, he drove to Los Angeles, had another play discussion with Speed and Gus and then spent the night at the Hartford Foundation. The day-to-day diary m
entions that Mike Leopold, Chester Aarons, Dick LaPan and Leonard Culbrow were there. No doubt Christopher took the opportunity of going to bed with Mike. Next day, Christopher saw his boyhood friend Patrick Monkhouse, who was in Los Angeles on business, probably, for The Manchester Guardian. (See here.) I don’t remember anything about this encounter except the mood of it, which was polite embarrassed goodwill. . . . Oh yes, it comes back to me that Paddy made some remark which he evidently thought was tactless because it might seem to refer to Christopher’s homosexuality. He blushed and tried to excuse himself. Christopher, who hadn’t detected any such reference, didn’t know how to reassure him.

  On February 18, while Christopher was in Los Angeles for the weekend, he had lunch with Dodie and Alec Beesley and they discussed the Lamkin–Field Sally Bowles play. Dodie wasn’t much impressed by it. She felt that the breaking down of the wall, which Christopher so much liked, would be unworkable in actual performance. It was perhaps at this time that Dodie and Alec began to feel that something must be done to set Christopher free from his commitment to Speed and Gus.

  The large thin notebook has its first entry for the year on February 20. Christopher has now written a rough draft of the first four chapters. The opening of the novel is more or less what it will be in the finished version, but Christopher is still planning to include a big group of refugee characters and is still worrying about how he shall relate them to each other and to Stephen Monk.

  On February 25, Christopher drove to Los Angeles and spent the night at the Hartford Foundation. Next day, he had tea at the Vedanta Center with Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts. The meeting between Watts and Swami Prabhavananda wasn’t a success—at least, not from Christopher’s point of view. My memory of it is vague however and Christopher’s disapproval of Watts at that time—later, Christopher got to like him—is expressed by a mental picture of Watts’s yellow teeth, flavored with bad nicotine breath.