Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

by Christopher Isherwood

  Hartford, Huntington. Grandson and heir of the A&P grocery stores multimillionaire, Huntington Hartford, for whom he was named. He produced films and took an active interest in the arts. He was ultra-conservative, anti-communist, and homophobic. He set up the Huntington Hartford Foundation in 1949 to nurture artists, writers, and musicians. Frank Taylor assembled the board of directors, which included Isherwood, W. H. Auden, Speed Lamkin, Michael Gaszynski, and Robert Penn Warren, among others. Isherwood records more about the foundation in D1. The job of board members was to give away fellowships bringing young artists to live and work at the foundation for three months. By 1951 there were 150 people living there—a western Yaddo. The board members resigned one by one as Hartford’s views gradually emerged in intolerable forms (for instance, he wanted each of them to submit to a graphology test which he believed would reveal their respective sexual inclinations). Hartford disliked avant-garde art; he also founded a museum of contemporary art in New York to foster his theories, and the building later became his New York headquarters. Isherwood never respected Hartford and found the management of the foundation inefficient and too easily swayed by gossip and favoritism; he resigned in 1952 when a resident writer was ousted from his fellowship for having an unauthorized overnight guest. Eventually the foundation became an arts and crafts colony.

  Hatfield, Hurd (1918–c.1998). American actor; from New York City, educated at Columbia. He made his debut on the London stage and later appeared on Broadway. Hatfield began working in films in 1944 and played the lead in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), but stardom eluded him, and he is mostly admired for his stage roles. Later films include Joan of Arc (1948), El Cid (1961), and Crimes of the Heart (1986), among others.

  Hauser, Hilda. Housekeeper and cook to Olive and André Mangeot, and to Olive after the Mangeots divorced. Isherwood first met her when he began working for André Mangeot in 1925.

  Hayden. See Lewis, Hayden.

  Hayward, John (1905–1965). British editor and scholar. Hayward was crippled by muscular dystrophy and was confined to a wheelchair. He shared a flat in Chelsea with T. S. Eliot from 1946 until 1957, when Eliot remarried.

  Heard, Henry FitzGerald (Gerald) (c.1885–1971). Irish writer, broadcaster, philosopher, and religious teacher. W. H. Auden took Isherwood to meet Heard in London in 1932 when Heard was already well-known as a science commentator for the BBC and author of several books on the evolution of human consciousness and on religion. A charismatic talker, Heard associated with some of the most celebrated intellectuals of the time. One of his closest friends was Aldous Huxley, whom he met in 1929 and with whom he joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1935 and then emigrated to Los Angeles in 1937 accompanied by Heard’s friend Chris Wood and Huxley’s wife and son. Both Heard and Huxley became disciples of Swami Prabhavananda. Isherwood followed Heard to Los Angeles and through him met Prabhavananda.

  Heard broke with the Swami early in 1941, and set up his own monastic community, Trabuco College, the same year. By 1949 Trabuco had failed, and he gave it to the Vedanta Society of Southern California to use as a monastery. During the early 1950s, Heard shared Huxley’s experiments with mescaline and LSD. He contributed to Vedanta for the Western World (1945) edited by Isherwood, and throughout most of his life he turned out prolix and eccentric books at an impressive pace; these included The Ascent of Humanity (1929), The Social Substance of Religion (1932), The Third Morality (1937), Pain, Sex, and Time (1939), Man the Master (1942), A Taste for Honey (1942, adapted as a play by John van Druten), The Gospel According to Gamaliel (1944), Is God Evident? (1948), and Is Another World Watching? (1950, published in England as The Riddle of the Flying Saucers; see also UFOs). There were many more books.

  Heard is the original of “Augustus Parr” in Down There on a Visit and of “Propter” in Huxley’s After Many a Summer (1939). He also appears in My Guru and His Disciple and throughout D1.

  Heinz. See Neddermeyer, Heinz.

  Hersey, John (1914–1993). American writer; born in China, educated at Yale. He was Time magazine’s Far East correspondent from 1937 to 1946, and during the same period he published his Pulitzer Prize-winning documentary novel, A Bell for Adano (1944; filmed the following year). Hersey wrote various other semi-fictionalized books about World War II, and a pamphlet-length, first-hand account of the effects of nuclear explosion, Hiroshima (1946). There were many further novels, short stories and works of nonfiction, several of which were dramatized.

  Hewit, Jack (1917–1998). English dancer, spy, and civil servant; son of a metal worker. He won a scholarship to ballet school, but his father forbade him to accept it, so he ran away from home and began dancing in revues. He met Guy Burgess while dancing in the chorus of No, No, Nanette and became Burgess’s lover; Burgess involved him in counterespionage work for MI5. Through Burgess, Hewit also met Anthony Blunt, and became Blunt’s lover as well. Burgess and Blunt ran Hewit’s spy career for him, passing on his intelligence to the KGB as well as to MI5. Isherwood met Hewit towards the end of 1938 through Burgess and mentions him in D1. During the war, Hewit joined the Royal Artillery, but was transferred back to MI5; afterwards, he joined UNESCO. He lived with Burgess at different periods, including the three years leading up to Burgess’s defection to the Soviet Union in May 1951. The connections with Burgess and Blunt bedeviled Hewit in later life, though he was able to join the Civil Service as a clerk in 1956 and left as a Higher Executive Officer in 1977. He published one short story, “Tales of Cedric” (1991).

  Hirschfeld, Magnus (1868–1935). German sex researcher; founder of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, where he studied sexual deviancy. Hirschfeld wrote books on sexual-psychological themes and dispensed psychological counselling and medical treatment (primarily for sexually transmitted diseases). He was homosexual and campaigned for reform of the German criminal code in order to legalize homosexuality between men. His work was jeopardized by the Nazis and he was beaten up several times; he left Germany in 1930 and died in France at around the same time that the Nazis raided his institute and publicly burned a bust of him along with his published works. Isherwood took a room next door to the Institute in 1930 and first met Hirschfeld then, through Francis Turville-Petre.

  Holmes, John (1910–1988). Canadian diplomat, author, and teacher. Holmes was born in Ontario and educated at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Toronto, and the University of London. He held many diplomatic and academic posts in Canada and abroad. When Isherwood met him in 1947, Holmes was completing a three-year post as First Secretary at Canada House in London and preparing to spend a year as the Chargé d’affaires at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow. Later he represented Canada at the U.N. and served as the Assistant Under Secretary of State for External Affairs (1953–1960). When he retired from public service, he became the Director General of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and was a Professor of International Relations at the University of Toronto. His books include a two-volume work The Shaping of Peace: Canada and the Search for World Order, 1943–1957 (1979 and 1982) and Life with Uncle: The Canadian-American Relationship (1982).

  Hooker, Evelyn Caldwell (1907–1996). American psychologist and psychotherapist, trained at the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins; professor of psychology at UCLA where for a time she shared an office with the Rorschach expert, Bruno Klopfer, who was impressed by her work and assisted and encouraged her. Hooker was among the first to view homosexuality as a normal psychological condition. Encouraged by her involvement with The Benton Way Group and, according to Alvin Novak, inspired in particular by her close friendship with Sam From—to whom, Novak recalls, she was especially drawn, and who was equally drawn to her—she worked with and studied homosexuals in the Los Angeles area for many years. At Klopfer’s urging, she first presented her research publicly at a 1956 conference in Chicago, demonstrating that as high a percentage of homosexuals as heterosexuals were psychologically well-adjusted. The paper, entitled “The Adjustment of the Male Over
t Homosexual,” was later published in a Burbank periodical, Projective Techniques (this was the journal of the Society for Projective Techniques and the Rorschach Institute; it later changed its title to Journal of Projective Techniques and Personality Assessment). Born Evelyn Gentry, she took the name Caldwell from a brief first marriage, then changed to Hooker when she married Edward Hooker, a professor of English at UCLA and a Dryden scholar, at the start of the 1950s. Isherwood lived in the Hookers’ garden house on Saltair Avenue in Brentwood for a time in 1952–1953. He describes the friendship in D1.

  Hopper, Hedda (1890–1966). American actress and Hollywood columnist. She began in silent movies and went on to act in many sound films, but she was best known for her influential columns. She also wrote several volumes of autobiography.

  Horst (1906–1999). German-born fashion photographer. Horst B. Horst (also known as Horst Bohrmann) was a shopkeeper’s son, from a small German town; he studied art history in Hamburg, then persuaded Le Corbusier to take him on as an architectural assistant in Paris in the early 1930s. In Paris he became a protégé of the Russian-born, half-American photographer George Hoyningen-Huene with whom he worked for many years. Like Hoyningen-Huene, Horst photographed Parisian and Russian emigré society, and took countless pictures for Vogue and other fashion magazines. Another mentor was the American fashion photographer George Platt Lynes. Horst eventually made New York his home, but frequently travelled and worked in Europe.

  Houseman, John (1902–1988). American movie producer and actor. Houseman began as a stage producer and founded the Mercury Theater with Orson Welles in 1937. He produced Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and then worked for David Selznick in Hollywood. After the war he worked in theater, film, and, eventually, television. He produced a long string of successful, widely admired films before taking the first of many acting roles in Seven Days in May (1964), and he won an Academy Award for his supporting role in The Paper Chase (1973).

  Howard, Brian (1905–1958). English poet and aesthete of American parentage; an outspoken antifascist. Howard was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he became friends with W. H. Auden. He was exceedingly dissolute, a heavy drinker and a drug user, and he never lived up to his promise as a writer. Evelyn Waugh’s character Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags is modelled on Howard, and Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited is also partly inspired by him. Howard lived a vagrant’s life, moving from place to place in Europe, and was often in Paris. Isherwood met him in Amsterdam in 1936, during the period when each of them was trying to find a country where he could live with his German boyfriend—Howard’s boyfriend throughout the 1930s was a Bavarian known as Toni. At the start of the war, Toni was interned in the south of France; Howard worked for his release evidently in vain, but after the fall of France, Toni escaped to New York via Tangier. He found work loading trucks at night, and soon married a wealthy American woman. Howard worked briefly for British intelligence and then joined the RAF as a clerk and later a public relations writer. After the war he again travelled to and from Europe, with his new companion Sam Langford, struggling with alcoholism and eventually with tuberculosis which propelled him ever faster into drug addiction. When Langford died in their new home in the south of France, Howard committed suicide with a drug overdose.

  Hoyt, Karl. A close friend of Chris Wood during the early 1940s. He was drafted into the army during World War II and afterwards settled in Bel Air, the Los Angeles suburb.

  Huston, John (1906–1987). Film director, screenwriter, and actor. Huston wrote scripts for a number of successful films during the 1930s and early 1940s before making his directing debut with The Maltese Falcon (1941); he directed many more movies during the following fifty years—including The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1947), The African Queen (1952), Beat the Devil (1954), The Misfits (1960). Fat City (1971), and Prizzi’s Honor (1985). The Red Badge of Courage (1951) was adapted from Stephen Crane’s novel about the Civil War. Huston also continued intermittently as a writer and occasionally acted.

  Huxley, Aldous (1894–1963). English novelist and utopian. Not long after he arrived in Los Angeles, Isherwood was introduced to Huxley by Gerald Heard. Huxley was then writing screenplays for MGM for a large weekly salary, and he and Isherwood later collaborated on several film projects. Like Heard, Huxley was a disciple of Prabhavananda, but subsequently he became close to Krishnamurti, the one-time Messiah of the theosophical movement. Huxley was 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), drawing on life in London’s literary bohemia and at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor, where Huxley worked as a conscientious objector during World War I. He lived abroad in Italy and France during the 1920s and 1930s, part of the time with D. H. Lawrence—who appears in his 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, but became disillusioned as Europe moved towards war. His Ends and Means (1937) was regarded as a basic book for pacifists. In April 1937 he sailed for America with his first wife, Maria, and their adolescent son, accompanied by Gerald Heard and by Heard’s friend Chris Wood. Huxley’s plans to return to Europe fell through when he tried and failed to sell a film scenario in Hollywood, became ill there, and convalesced for nearly a year. California benefitted his health and eyesight—he had been nearly blind since an adolescent illness—but he was denied U.S. citizenship on grounds of his extreme pacifism. After Many a Summer (1939) is set in Los Angeles, and Huxley wrote many other books during the period that Isherwood knew him best, including Grey Eminence (1941), Time Must Have a Stop (1944), The Devils of Loudun (1952), The Genius and the Goddess (1956).

  Huxley’s study of Vedanta was part of a 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). In addition to Below the Equator (later called Below the Horizon) Huxley and Isherwood also worked together on two other screenplay ideas during the 1940s: Jacob’s Hands, about a healer, and a film version of The Miracle, Max Reinhardt’s celebrated 1920s stage production. Isherwood often writes about Huxley in D1.

  In 1960 Huxley found a malignant tumor on his tongue but refused surgery in favor of less radical treatment; he died of cancer on the same day John F. Kennedy was shot.

  Huxley, Maria Nys (1898–1955). Belgian first wife of Aldous Huxley. Isherwood met her in the summer of 1939 soon after he arrived in Los Angeles and mentions her frequently in D1. Maria Nys was the eldest daughter of a prosperous textile merchant ruined in World War I. Her mother’s family included artists and intellectuals, and her childhood was pampered, multilingual, 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, Matthew, 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 and to his work. Her premature death resulted from cancer. According to Huxley, she was a natural mystic and had “pre-mystical” experiences in the desert in California in the 1940s.

  Huxley, Matthew (b. 1920). British-born son of Aldous and Maria Huxley. Matthew Huxley was brought to America in adolescence and Isherwood met him in Santa Monica in 1939. He attended the University of Colorado with the intention of becoming a doctor, served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II, and was invalided out of the army in 1943. Much of this is recorded in D1. Huxley became a U.S. citizen in 1945. In 1947 he took a degree from Berkeley and later studied public health at Harvard. This became his career, and for many years he worked at the National Institute of Mental Heal
th in Washington, D.C. He also published a book about Peru, Farewell to Eden (1965). He married three times, and had two children with his first wife.

  Hyndman, Tony. Secretary and companion to Stephen Spender in the early 1930s. Hyndman ran away from his working-class home in Wales at eighteen and spent three years in the army before becoming unemployed and meeting Spender. He split with Spender in the autumn of 1936, became a communist, joined the International Brigade, and went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. In Spain, he was greatly disillusioned and became a pacifist. He deserted and was imprisoned, but eventually Spender, who had followed him to Spain, obtained his release. Hyndman appears as “Jimmy Younger” in Spender’s World Within World and in Christopher and His Kind.

  Ince, Thomas (1882–1924). American film director and producer. Ince moved from stage and vaudeville to become an important figure in the early film industry. The studios he built at Culver City in 1916 evolved into MGM and the company, Triangle, which he formed with two other partners, D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett, eventually became United Artists. His later films were released through Adolph Zukor. Ince became mortally ill while on board William Randolph Hearst’s yacht Oneida; his death two days later was attributed to heart failure resulting from severe indigestion, but rumor suggested that Hearst shot Ince, either because he suspected Ince of having an affair with Marion Davies or because Hearst suspected Charlie Chaplin, also on board the yacht, of having an affair with Davies and shot Ince when he mistook him for Chaplin.

  Isherwood, Henry Bradshaw. Isherwood’s uncle (his father’s elder brother). In 1924 Uncle Henry inherited Marple Hall and the family estates on the death of Isherwood’s grandfather, John Bradshaw Isherwood. Though he married late in life (changing his name to Bradshaw-Isherwood-Bagshawe in honor of his wife), Uncle Henry had no children; thus, Isherwood was his heir, and for a time after Isherwood’s twenty-first birthday he received a quarterly allowance from his uncle. The two had an honest if self-interested friendship, occasionally dining together and sharing intimate details of their personal lives. When Henry Isherwood died in 1940, Isherwood at once passed on the entire inheritance to his own younger brother, Richard Isherwood.