Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

by Christopher Isherwood

  Brecht, Bertolt (1898–1956). German writer, poet, and dramatist; he was closely associated with the German communist party from the late 1920s onwards, though he never joined it. Brecht used the theater to promote his socialist beliefs, but only a handful of his plays are explicitly didactic, and he theorized and wrote at length about his radical approach both to theme and treatment. He worked for two years in Berlin in Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater and collaborated with the composer Kurt Weill on The Threepenny Opera (1928) and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1929). Among his best known and most widely appealing plays are Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), The Good Woman of Szechwan (1943), The Life of Galileo (1943), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948). Forced to flee the Nazis in 1933, he spent part of his exile in California, from 1941 to 1947; in 1949 he returned to East Berlin where he founded the Berliner Ensemble. Isherwood and W. H. Auden were youthful admirers of Brecht, and Isherwood translated the verses for Desmond Vesey’s 1937 English version of Brecht’s Dreigroschenroman, A Penny for the Poor. In D1, Isherwood records that in August 1943, Berthold Viertel introduced Isherwood to Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel, and their son, Stefan. When they next met, Brecht harshly criticized Isherwood’s spiritual convictions and denounced Aldous Huxley, enraging Isherwood. They continued a tentative friendship, and in April 1944 Brecht asked Isherwood to translate The Caucasian Chalk Circle; Isherwood declined partly because he had come to dislike Brecht for his ruthless and somewhat hypocritical obsession with his own beliefs and ambitions.

  Brett, Dorothy. English painter. A daughter of Viscount Esher and sister of the Ranee of Sarawak, she studied painting at the Slade. Brett became friends with D. H. Lawrence late in 1915 and was the only one of his circle to accompany Lawrence and Frieda to America in 1924 to found his utopia, Rananim. The plan soon fell apart, though Brett remained with the Lawrences in Taos and travelled with them in Mexico until she was banished by Frieda. She then lived on her own in Taos, returned to Europe where she saw Lawrence one last time in Italy, tried in vain to consummate their long restrained love, and finally settled back in New Mexico. As he mentions in his diary of the time (D1), Isherwood read her memoir, Lawrence and Brett (1933), in 1940.

  Britten, Benjamin (1913–1976). British composer. At W. H. Auden’s instigation, Britten composed the music for The Ascent of F6, and Isherwood perhaps first met Britten at rehearsals in February 1937. By March 1937, the two were friendly enough to spend the night together at the Jermyn Street Turkish Baths, though they never had a sexual relationship. Britten also wrote the music for the next Auden-Isherwood play, On the Frontier. He went to America with Peter Pears in the summer of 1939, but, as Isherwood notes in D1, returned to England halfway through the war, registering with Pears as a conscientious objector. A major figure, Britten composed songs, song cycles, orchestral music, works for chorus and orchestra such as his War Requiem (1961), and nine operas including Peter Grimes (1945), Albert Herring (1948), Billy Budd (1951), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), and Death in Venice (1973). Don Bachardy recalls that Britten withdrew gradually from his friendship with Isherwood, and Isherwood sensed it was because Britten associated Isherwood closely with Auden, against whom Britten harbored more particular griefs. But there was a reunion between Isherwood and Britten in 1976, in Aldeburgh, not long before Britten died. Pears had visited Isherwood and Bachardy while performing in Los Angeles and was able to bring about the rapprochement. Britten was frail by then and wept when he saw Isherwood.

  Brooke, Tim. British novelist; a contemporary of Isherwood at Cambridge, he later spent time in Los Angeles. His novels, pubhshed under the name Hugh Brooke, include The Mad Shepherdess (1930), Man Made Angry (1932), Miss Mitchell (1934), and Saturday Island (1935). He was a close friend of the dancer Nicky Nadeau.

  Brooks, Richard (1912–1992). American novelist, screenwriter, film director and producer. Brooks was a sports writer and radio commentator before he began writing screenplays in the early 1940s; he then went on to direct and produce. His films include The Blackboard Jungle (1955), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Elmer Gantry (1960, for which his script won an Academy Award), Sweet Bird of Youth (1964), Lord Jim (1965), In Cold Blood (1967), and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). One of his novels, The Producer, is about Hollywood.

  Buckingham, Bob. British policeman; the longtime friend of E. M. Forster. Buckingham’s wife, May, was also friendly with Forster.

  Burgess, Guy (1910–1963). British diplomat and double agent. Burgess became a communist while at Cambridge, and he was secretly recruited by the Soviets during the 1930s. He worked for the BBC until joining the Foreign Office in the mid-1940s and was meanwhile employed also by M15. In May 1951, having been recalled from his post in Washington under Kim Philby, Burgess was warned by Anthony Blunt that he was suspected of espionage. He disappeared with Donald Maclean, also a double agent, and it eventually became clear the pair had defected to Moscow (their presence there was announced in 1956). Isherwood first met Burgess in 1938 in London, where Burgess was also friendly with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, and Burgess introduced Isherwood to Jacky Hewit. Hewit had been Burgess’s lover until Burgess met Peter Pollock that year. After roughly a decade with Pollock, Burgess lived with Hewit again intermittently during the three years leading up to his defection. See also D1.

  Burra, Edward (1905–1976). English painter and ballet and theatrical designer; he studied at the Royal College of Art. Burra sought out scenes of low life in French cities and ports during the late 1920s and visited New York in the 1930s and 1940s chiefly to paint subjects in black Harlem. He was somewhat influenced by the surrealists and from about the time of the Spanish Civil War he began to introduce into his paintings masked figures such as Isherwood mentions, along with soldiers, skeletons, and bird-men.

  Bynner, Witter (1881–1968). American poet. Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke launched a spoof literary movement, “Spectrism,” to parody Pound’s Imagism. Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments achieved wide recognition, and Bynner went on to write more seriously under the identity he adopted for the hoax, Emmanuel Morgan. Afterwards he translated Tang poetry from the Chinese with the scholar Kiang Kang-hu. He had a tortured friendship with D. H. Lawrence and disliked Lawrence’s characterization of him as Owen Rhys in The Plumed Serpent, which paved the way for his own bitter book about Lawrence, Journey with Genius (1951). Bynner lived in Santa Fe with his friend Bob Hunt, and also had a house in Mexico, at Lake Chapala.

  Cadmus, Paul (1904–1999). American painter of Basque and Dutch background; trained by his parents and at the National Academy of Design in New York. He worked briefly in advertising, travelled and painted in Europe at the start of the 1930s, and joined the U.S. government Public Works of Art Project in late 1933. Lincoln Kirstein became interested in Cadmus’s work after they met in New York in the mid-1930s, and Kirstein later married Cadmus’s sister, Fidelma, also trained as a painter. Cadmus drew Isherwood in February 1942 in New York, where Cadmus lived, and the two became friends as Isherwood tells in D1. Eventually Cadmus settled in Connecticut with Jon Andersson, continuing to paint into his nineties.

  Caffery, Jamie. American journalist and landscape designer. Caffery’s family was from Louisiana; he worked as a researcher for Fortune magazine and also had jobs with Time and Life before moving to England where he took up gardening. In 1950 he went to Tangier with David Herbert and became garden columnist for the Tangier Gazette. Eventually Caffery settled on the Costa del Sol as a landscape designer. The uncle Isherwood mentions, Jefferson Caffery (1886–1974), was ambassador to Paris from 1944 to 1949 (he had previously been ambassador to Cuba and Brazil and afterwards was ambassador to Egypt). Jefferson Caffery married at fifty but had no children.

  Campbell, Sandy (d. 1988). American stage actor; educated, for a time, at Princeton. He appeared with Tallulah Bankhead in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and published a book of letters about the production. Campbell was also a fact checker at The N
ew Yorker and worked with a number of well-known writers including Truman Capote, who especially requested his assistance in 1964 with In Cold Blood. He was Donald Windham’s lover for many years, and eventually set up a specialist publishing business with Windham in Italy.

  Capote, Truman (1924–1984). American novelist, born in New Orleans. Capote worked at The New Yorker in the early 1940s and contributed to other magazines. In 1946 he won the O. Henry Prize for his short story, “Miriam,” and then he began to write longer works, including Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), The Grass Harp (1951), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), and the non-fiction novel In Cold Blood (1966). In later years, Capote travelled extensively and sometimes lived abroad; drink and drugs accelerated the end of his life. Isherwood also writes about him in D1.

  Cartier-Bresson, Henri (b. 1908). French photographer. He studied art and literature before starting to take photographs at the beginning of the 1930s, and much later in his career, during the 1970s, he returned to painting and drawing. He also worked in film, as an assistant to the French filmmaker Jean Renoir, towards the end of the 1930s. After the war, around the time Isherwood met him, Cartier-Bresson helped to found Magnum Photos, the independent photographic agency.

  Caskey, William (Bill) (1921–1981). American photographer, born and raised in Kentucky. Isherwood and Caskey met in June 1945 and by August had begun a serious affair. They split for good in 1951 after intermittent separations. Later Caskey lived in Athens and travelled frequently to Egypt. As well as taking photographs, he made art objects out of junk and for a time had a business beading sweaters. There are many passages about him in D1.

  Cerf, Bennett (1898–1971). American publisher. Cerf was the founder of Random House, Isherwood’s (and W. H. Auden’s) first American publisher. He had persuaded Faber and Faber jointly to commission Journey to a War, and in early March 1939, when Isherwood was newly arrived in New York, Cerf gave him a $500 advance on his next (unwritten) novel. Cerf founded the Modern Library and held senior posts at Random House until his death. He is popularly known for his books of jokes and humor.

  Charlton, Jim (1919–1998). American architect. During the war, Charlton flew twenty-six missions over Germany including a July 1943 daylight raid on Hamburg. From 1948 he and Isherwood shared a friendly-romantic attachment that lasted through a number of years and a number of other lovers. Isherwood tells more about Charlton in D1. Towards the end of the 1950s Charlton married a wealthy Swiss woman called Hilde, a mother of three, and had a son with her in September 1958. The marriage ended in divorce. Afterwards he lived in Hawaii until the late 1980s before returning to Los Angeles. He wrote an autobiographical novel called St. Mick.

  Cockburn, Claud (1904–1981). British journalist; educated at Berkhamsted and Keble College, Oxford. After a stint as New York correspondent for the London Times, Cockburn joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the early 1930s and began producing a weekly newsletter, The Week, about the political state of Europe. He was also diplomatic correspondent for the Daily Worker. Later, he became a columnist for The Sunday Telegraph and contributed to various English journals. He wrote a novel, Beat the Devil (1953), and published half a dozen volumes of autobiography.

  Cockburn, Jean. See Ross, Jean.

  Collier, John (1901–1980). British novelist and screenwriter. Best known for His Monkey Wife (1930), he also wrote other fantastic and satirical tales. Isherwood admired his short stories. Collier was poetry editor of Time and Tide in the 1920s and early 1930s and came to Hollywood in 1935. In 1951 he moved to Mexico, though he continued to write films, including the script, deplored by Isherwood in D1, for the film version of I Am a Camera.

  Connolly, Cyril (1903–1974). British journalist and critic; educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. Connolly was a regular contributor to English newspapers and magazines. He wrote one novel, The Rock Pool (1936), followed by collections that combined criticism, autobiography, and aphorism: Enemies of Promise (1938) and The Unquiet Grave (1944). Further collections appeared after the war, displaying his gift for parody. In 1939, Connolly founded Horizon with Stephen Spender and edited it throughout its publication until 1950. Connolly was married three times: first to Jean Bakewell, who divorced him in 1945, then to Barbara Skelton from 1950 to 1956, and finally, in 1959, to Deirdre Craig with whom he had a son, Matthew, and a daughter, Cressida. From 1940 to 1950 he lived with Lys Lubbock, who worked with him at Horizon; they never married, but she changed her name to Connolly by deed poll. He also appears in D1.

  Coward, Noel (1899–1973). English actor, playwright, and composer; he also published verse, short stories, a novel, and two volumes of autobiography. Coward became famous in his twenties in his own play, The Vortex (1924), and went on to write the witty and sophisticated comedies for which he is known best, including Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1933), Blithe Spirit (1941), and Present Laughter (1942). He put together musicals and revues for which he wrote his own scores and lyrics and sang with stylish nonchalance. One of Coward’s wartime films, In Which We Serve (1942), won an Academy Award, but his reputation declined after the war. He occupied himself with cabaret appearances in London and Las Vegas until a revival of interest in his earlier plays began in the 1960s.

  Craft, Robert (Bob). American musician, conductor, critic, and author; colleague and adopted son to Stravinsky during the last twenty-three years of Stravinsky’s life. Craft lived and travelled everywhere with the Stravinskys except when professional commitments forced him to do otherwise. Increasingly he conducted for Stravinsky in rehearsals and supervised his recording sessions, substituting entirely for the older man as Stravinsky’s health declined. After Stravinsky died, Craft married, had a son, divorced, and later married again. He published excerpts from his diaries as Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship 1948–1971 (1972, expanded and republished in 1994), and he often appears in D1.

  Cuevas de Vera, Tota. Argentine rancher. She was married to a Spanish count with whom she had several children, and she managed an 86,000-acre estancia, El Pelado (The Bald One), near Buenos Aires. Isherwood and Caskey visited her there early in 1948, and in The Condor and the Cows Isherwood describes El Pelado as a business large enough to send an entire trainload of produce from its own railway station to Buenos Aires each week.

  Cukor, George (1899–1983). American film director. Cukor began his career on Broadway in the 1920s and came to Hollywood as a dialogue director for All Quiet on the Western Front. In the thirties he directed at Paramount, RKO, and then MGM, moving from studio to studio with his friend and producer David Selznick. He directed Garbo in Camille (1936) among others, and Hepburn in her debut, A Bill of Divorcement (1932), as well as in Philadelphia Story (1940). Other well-known work includes Dinner at Eight (1933), David Copperfield (1934), A Star Is Born (1954), and My Fair Lady (1964). As described in D1, Isherwood first met Cukor at a party at the Huxleys’ in December 1939. Later they became friends and worked together.

  Curtiss, Mina. American writer. As a young woman, she lived in London on the fringes of the Bloomsbury group; later she taught French literature at Smith College and published books on French subjects, including a biography of Georges Bizet and a translation of Proust’s letters. She married Harry Curtiss in 1924, and after his death she was the longtime lover of Alexis Saint-Léger (St.-John Perse). Like her brother, Lincoln Kirstein, Curtiss was extremely wealthy. She divided her time between Manhattan and her husband’s farm, Chapelbrook, in Ashfield, Massachusetts.

  Davies, Marion (c. 1898–1961). The Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl taken up by William Randolph Hearst, who financed her movies and tried to make her into a romantic star. Some of her films were successful, though Charlie Chaplin, with whom she also had an affair, noticed that Davies’ real talent was for comedy. Her relationship with Hearst is the basis for the story in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), although Welles’s heroine is not a close portrait. She lived with Hearst at San Simeon and at houses in Beverly Hills and
Santa Monica until he died in 1951. Ten weeks after Hearst’s death, she married Captain Horace Brown, whom she had known for many years.

  “de Laval, Jay” (probably an assumed name). Chef; he adopted the role of the Baron de Laval. In the mid-1940s he opened a small French restaurant, Café Jay, on the corner of Channel Road and Chautauqua in Santa Monica. As Isherwood tells in D1, another restaurant was established in the Virgin Islands, and in 1950 he was briefly in charge of the Mocambo in Los Angeles. Eventually he left California, settled in Mexico, and opened a grand restaurant in Mexico City in the early 1950s. There he also planned interiors with the Mexican designer Arturo Pani, and advised airlines on food, creating a menu for Mexico Air Lines and crockery for Air France. He divided his time between Mexico City and a condominium in Acapulco. De Laval was a friend of Bill Caskey before Isherwood met Caskey, and also of Ben and Jo Masselink.

  D1. Christopher Isherwood, Diaries Volume One 1939–1960, ed. Katherine Bucknell (London: Methuen, 1996; New York: HarperCollins, 1997). In Lost Years, Isherwood usually calls these diaries his journal, as distinct from his day-to-day diaries.

  Doone, Rupert (1903–1966). English dancer, choreographer, and theatrical producer. Founder of The Group Theatre, the cooperative venture for which Isherwood and W. H. Auden wrote plays in the 1930s. The son of a factory worker and originally called Reginald Woodfield, Doone ran away to London to become a dancer, then went on to Paris where he was friendly with Cocteau and met Diaghilev, turning down an opportunity to dance in the corps de ballet of the Ballets Russes. He was working in variety and revues in London during 1925 when he met Robert Medley, who became his permanent companion. Doone died of multiple sclerosis after many years of increasing illness.