Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

by Christopher Isherwood

  Pilates, Joseph (1880–1967). German-born exercise guru, of Greek ancestry. Pilates was frail in childhood and began bodybuilding in adolescence to overcome fears of tuberculosis; he was also a gymnast, boxer, skier, and diver. He and a brother performed a Greek statue act in a circus which was touring England at the outbreak of World War I. Pilates was interned and passed the time teaching self-defense, bodybuilding, and wrestling to his fellow internees while beginning more systematically to develop his exercise method. By one account he also became a nurse and designed his unusual exercise apparatus by attaching springs to hospital beds for patients who could not move. He returned to Germany for a time after the war and trained police in Hamburg. There, during the early 1920s, he also met members of the dance world who incorporated some of his techniques into their own practices, and who began to teach them to other dancers. Pilates helped train the heavyweight boxer, Max Schmelling, and Schmelling persuaded him to emigrate to the U.S., where Pilates established a studio in New York in 1926. The studio was frequented by dancers from George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, and Pilates’ followers included many other prominent dancers and choreographers, as well as numerous actors and musicians. His method (he called it “Contrology”) is used increasingly widely today.

  Plomer, William (1903–1973). British poet and novelist; born and raised in South Africa. He met Isherwood in 1932 through Stephen Spender. In South Africa, Plomer and Roy Campbell had founded Voorslag (Whiplash), a literary magazine for which they wrote most of the satirical material themselves (Laurens van der Post also became an editor). Plomer taught for several years in Japan, then in 1929 settled in Bloomsbury where he was befriended by the Woolfs; they had already published his first novel, Turbott Wolfe, in 1926 at the Hogarth Press. In 1937 Plomer became principal reader for Jonathan Cape where, among other things, he brought out Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. During the war he worked in naval intelligence. In addition to his own poems and novels, Plomer also wrote several libretti for Benjamin Britten, notably Gloriana (1953). A 1943 arrest for soliciting a sailor in Paddington station was hushed up, but led Plomer to destroy early correspondence with homosexual friends and to practice extreme circumspection in his private life.

  Pollock, Peter (b. 1921). English steel heir; the family fortune left him with small private means. Pollock was still a public school boy when Guy Burgess met him in Cannes in 1938, and they were lovers for about a decade. Burgess recruited Pollock to help MI5 spy on foreigners in England. In 1955 Pollock and his later longterm companion, Paul Danquah, a lawyer and actor, began sharing their Battersea flat with Francis Bacon, who lived with them until 1961 and became an intimate friend. Pollock and Danquah afterwards settled in Tangier, where, for a time, Pollock ran a beach bar, The Pergola.

  Porter, Cole (1891–1964). American composer and lyricist, educated at Yale University, Harvard Law School, Harvard School of Music, and also in Paris. His Broadway hits include Anything Goes (1934) and Kiss Me, Kate (1948), and many of his individual lyrics, such as “Let’s Do It,” “You’re the Top,” and “I Get a Kick Out of You,” are permanently lodged in the popular imagination. Isherwood was fond of Cole Porter and, according to Don Bachardy, believed that a third party had made mischief between them, possibly by repeating (perhaps inaccurately) a remark made by Bill Caskey. The friendship ended just a year or two before Porter’s death, preventing any reconciliation.

  Porter, Katherine Anne (1890–1980). American novelist and short story writer, born in Texas; best known for Ship of Fools (1962). She was a good friend of Glenway Wescott who may have suggested she meet Isherwood and Caskey.

  Prabha. Originally Phoebe Nixon, she was the daughter of Alice Nixon (“Tarini”), and after taking her final monastic vows, Prabha became Pravrajika Prabhaprana. The Nixons were wealthy Southerners. Isherwood first met Prabha in the early 1940s in the Hollywood Vedanta Center, where she handled much of the administrative and secretarial work, and he grew to love her genuinely. By the mid-1950s, Prabha was head nun at the Sarada Convent in Santa Barbara.

  Prabhavananda, Swami (1893–1976). Hindu monk of the Ramakrishna Order. Gerald Heard introduced Isherwood to Swami Prabhavananda in July 1939. On their second meeting Prabhavananda began to instruct Isherwood in meditation, and in November he initiated Isherwood, giving him a mantram and a rosary. From February 1943 until August 1945 Isherwood lived monastically at the Hollywood Vedanta Center, but decided he could not become a monk as Swami wished. (Isherwood invariably pronounced it Shwami, as he had been taught phonetically by Prabhavananda.) He remained Prabhavananda’s disciple and close friend for life. Their relationship is described in My Guru and His Disciple, which is based on the many passages about Prabhavananda in Isherwood’s diaries.

  Prabhavananda was born in a Bengali village northwest of Calcutta and was originally named Abanindra Nath Ghosh. As a teenager he read about Ramakrishna and about his disciples Vivekananda and Brahmananda, and he met Ramakrishna’s widow, Sarada Devi. At eighteen, he visited the Belur Math—the chief monastery of the Ramakrishna Order beside the Ganges outside Calcutta—where he met Brahmananda and was so affected that he briefly abandoned his studies in Calcutta to follow him. Because he was studying philosophy, Abanindra returned to Belur Math regularly for instruction in the teachings of Shankara, but he still placed greater importance on his political beliefs and became involved in militant opposition to British rule, mostly as a propagandist. After a second peculiarly compelling experience with Brahmananda, he suddenly decided to give up his political activities and become a monk. He took his final vows in 1921, when his name was changed to Prabhavananda.

  In 1923 Prabhavananda was sent to the United States to assist the swami at the Vedanta Society in San Francisco; later he opened a new center in Portland, Oregon. He was joined in Portland by Sister Lalita and, in 1929, founded the Vedanta Society of Southern California in her house in Hollywood, 1946 Ivar Avenue. Several other women joined them. By the mid-1930s the society began to expand and money was donated to build a temple, which was dedicated in July 1938. Prabhavananda remained the head of the Hollywood Center until he died.

  Isherwood and Prabhavananda worked on a number of books together, including a translation of the Bhagavad Gita (1944), and Prabhavananda contributed to two collections on Vedanta edited by Isherwood. Also, Prabhavananda persuaded Isherwood to write a biography of Ramakrishna, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1964).

  pranam. A salutation of respect made by folding the palms, or by touching the saluted one’s feet and then touching one’s own forehead (i.e., taking the dust of the saluted one’s feet), or by prostrating.

  prasad. Food or any other gift that has been consecrated by being offered to God or to a saintly person in a Hindu ceremony of worship; the food is usually eaten as part of the meal following the ritual, or the gift given to the devotees.

  Pritchett, V. S. (1900–1997). British literary critic, short story writer, and novelist; raised mostly in various suburbs of London. He worked abroad as a photographer and journalist before publishing his first novel in 1929. His short stories began to appear in London magazines such as The Cornhill and The New Statesman during the 1920s and were later collected in diverse volumes; he also contributed criticism to The New Statesman for several decades, and was its literary editor just after World War II, when Isherwood saw him in London. Pritchett’s literary-critical books include The Living Novel (1946) and studies of Balzac, Turgenev, and George Meredith. He also published two volumes of autobiography.

  puja. Hindu ceremony of worship; usually offerings—flowers, incense, food—are made to the object of devotion, and other ritual, symbolic acts are also carried out depending upon the occasion.

  quota visa. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, known as the Quota Act, dictated that the number of immigrants admitted annually from any one country could not exceed two per cent of the existing U.S. population deriving from that same national origin (as determined by the 1890 census), although a minimum quot
a of 100 immigrants was permitted to all countries. As the vast majority of Americans at that time traced their ancestry to Great Britain, British nationals could immigrate with ease.

  Rainey, Ford (b. 1908). American actor, born in Idaho. Rainey made his professional stage debut in 1932 and had acted on Broadway by 1939, but his roles were small. During the 1950s and early 1960s he appeared in a few Hollywood films, including Westerns, and went on to act for television shows such as Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and Perry Mason. He divorced his first wife in 1950, then married again in 1954.

  Ramakrishna (1836–1886). The Hindu holy man whose life inspired the modern renaissance of Vedanta. He is widely regarded as an incarnation of God. Ramakrishna, originally named Gadadhar Chattopadhyaya, was born in a Bengali village sixty miles from Calcutta. He was a devout Hindu from boyhood, practiced spiritual disciplines such as meditation, and served as a priest. A mystic and teacher, in 1861 he was declared an avatar: a divine incarnation sent to reestablish the truths of religion and to show by his example how to ascend towards Brahman. Ramakrishna was initiated into Islam, and he had a vision of Christ. His followers gathered around him at Dakshineswar and later at Kashipur. His closest disciples, trained by him, later formed the nucleus of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, now the largest monastic order in India. Ramakrishna was worshipped as God in his lifetime; he was conscious of his mission, and he was able to transmit divine knowledge by a touch, look, or wish. Isherwood wrote a biography, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1964), an official project of the Ramakrishna Order.

  Ram Nam. A sung service of ancient Hindu prayers which invoke the divinities Rama, his wife Sita, and the leader of Rama’s army, Hanuman. In Ramakrishna practice, Ram Nam is sung on Ekadashi, the eleventh day after the new or the full moon, a day generally observed by devout Hindus with worship, meditation, and fasting.

  Rapper, Irving (1898–1999). Hollywood film director, born in London. Rapper directed for the stage before becoming an assistant director at Warner Brothers in the 1930s. His films include Now Voyager (1942), The Corn is Green (1945), Rhapsody in Blue (1945), Deception (1946), The Voice of the Turtle (1947), The Glass Menagerie (1950), The Brave One (1956), and Marjorie Morningstar (1958).

  Rassine, Alexis (1919–1992). Ballet dancer; his real name was Alec Raysman. He was born in Lithuania of Russian parents and, from about ten years old, was brought up in South Africa. He studied ballet there and in Paris, joined the Ballet Rambert in 1938, and danced with several other companies before joining the Sadler’s Wells Ballet in 1942, where he became a principal and a star.

  Reed, John (1887–1920). American journalist. Born in Portland, Oregon, and educated at Harvard. Reed was a radical leftist and began his career covering American textile and mining strikes and reporting on Pancho Villa’s role in the Mexican Revolution. He was a war correspondent in Europe during World War I and became involved with the Bolshevik leadership in Russia. In 1917 he reported on the Bolshevik coup and then returned home for a time to try to establish a communist party in the U.S. He died in Russia and was buried in the Kremlin. Much of his reporting was published or republished in book form: Insurgent Mexico (1914), The War in Eastern Europe (1916), Red Russia (1919), and the work on the Bolshevik take-over for which he is most widely known, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). He is the subject of Warren Beatty’s film Reds (1981).

  Reinhardt, Gottfried (1911–c.1993). Austrian-born film producer. Reinhardt emigrated to the United States with his father, the theatrical producer Max Reinhardt, and became assistant to Walter Wanger. Afterwards he worked as a producer for MGM from 1940 to 1954 and later directed his own films in the United States and Europe. His name is attached to many well-known movies, including Garbo’s Two Faced Woman, which he produced in 1941, and The Red Badge of Courage, which he produced in 1951. He was Salka Viertel’s lover for nearly a decade before his marriage to his wife, Silvia, in 1944. Through Salka and Berthold Viertel, Reinhardt gave Isherwood his second Hollywood film job in 1940, and Isherwood worked for him a number of times after that. There are numerous passages about him in D1. Reinhardt and his wife eventually returned to Europe and settled near Salzburg.

  Reinhardt, Wolfgang. Film producer and writer; son of Max Reinhardt, brother of Gottfried. He produced My Love Come Back (1940), The Male Animal (1942), Three Strangers (1946), Caught (1948), and Freud (1962), for which he won an Academy Award as co-writer. As Isherwood records in D1, Reinhardt and Isherwood tried to work together several times. With Aldous Huxley they discussed making The Miracle, a film version of the play produced by Max Reinhardt in the 1920s, but nothing came of it. Reinhardt hired Isherwood to work on Maugham’s 1941 novel Up at the Villa, but the film was never made. Much later, in 1960, Reinhardt approached Isherwood to write a screenplay based on Felix Dahn’s four-volume 1876 novel, Ein Kampf um Rom (A Struggle for Rome), about the decline and fall of the Ostrogoth empire in Italy in the sixth century, but Isherwood turned the project down. Wolfgang’s wife was called Lally.

  Renaldo, Tito. Mexican actor. He played the first son in Anna and the King of Siam (1946). He was known as an exceptional cook at the Vedanta Center, which he joined and left five times. During the late 1950s and 1960s, he worked for a time in Carlos McClendon’s shop in West Hollywood. Afterwards, in the 1970s, Renaldo returned in frail health to his family in northern Mexico and fell out of touch with his Los Angeles friends. He is often mentioned in D1.

  Repton. Isherwood’s public school, near Derby.

  Richardson, Tony (1928–1991). British stage and film director. Richardson is most admired for his work in the theater, especially at the Royal Court in London during the 1950s, and he made movies from many of his productions there. His films include Look Back in Anger (1958), The Entertainer (1960), Sanctuary (1961), A Taste of Honey (1961), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and Tom Jones (1963), for which he won an Academy Award. He was married for a time to Vanessa Redgrave, with whom he had two daughters during the 1960s. Isherwood became friends with Richardson in Hollywood in 1960, and in 1964 Richardson hired him to adapt Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One for film; Richardson then gave Isherwood’s script to Terry Southern who wrote most of the dialogue. Later projects with Richardson included a script for Reflections in a Golden Eye (which John Huston did not use when he took over the film), The Sailor from Gibraltar (based on Marguerite Duras’ novel), and adaptations with Don Bachardy of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius, the God which were never made because Richardson fell out with his proposed Caligula, Mick Jagger. Richardson appears in D1.

  Robson-Scott, William (1901–1980). English teacher and scholar of German; educated at Rugby School, University College, Oxford, and in Berlin and Vienna. Robson-Scott was lecturing in English at Berlin University in 1932 when Isherwood first met him. He summered at Rügen Island that year with Isherwood, Heinz Neddermeyer, Stephen Spender, and others, and remained a close friend through the 1930s. When he returned to London, Robson-Scott became a lecturer in German, and later in German language and literature, at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he continued to teach until 1968. He married in 1947 and, with his wife, made a translation of Freud’s letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé, published in 1972.

  Rod. See Owens, Rodney.

  Rodd, Marcel. English bookseller and publisher living in Hollywood. Rodd published Prabhavananda and Isherwood’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita and Vedanta for the Western World as well as the magazine, The Voice of India (later Vedanta and the West).

  Roder, Hellmut. German emigré; Peggy Kiskadden helped Roder and his friend Fritz Mosel escape from Germany via France and Spain, then onward to Mexico and Los Angeles. Later, the pair moved to New York where they designed jewelry, especially for opera costumes. They also dealt in metal and feathers. Eventually Fritz Mosel committed suicide, and after a time, Hellmut Roder apparently did the same.

  Rodman, Selden (b. 1909). American writer and editor; educated at Yale. In the 1930s and early 1940s, Rodman publishe
d narrative poems—one about T. E. Lawrence, another about airmen. During the same period, he was co-founder and editor of a review called Common Sense and later co-founder of another magazine, Our House. He also became a director of the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, worked to promote Haitian art, and eventually wrote a number of books about Haiti and about Haitian art, as well as a verse play about the 1791 liberation of Haiti. In later years, Rodman wrote travel and guide books about Central and South America, and he produced various volumes of autobiography and commentary on modern art and poetry.

  Roerick, Bill. American actor. Isherwood met him in 1943 when John van Druten brought Roerick to a lecture at the Vedanta Center. His companion for many years was Tom Coley.

  Ross, Alan (b. 1922). English poet and journalist; editor of John Lehmann’s The London Magazine from 1961 onwards. Isherwood probably met him when he returned to London for the first time after the war.

  Ross, Jean (d. 1973). The original of Isherwood’s character Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood met Jean Ross in Berlin, possibly in October 1930, but certainly by the start of 1931. She was then occasionally singing in a nightclub, and they shared lodgings for a time in Fräulein Thurau’s flat. Ross’s father was a Scottish cotton merchant, and she had been raised in Egypt in lavish circumstances. After Berlin, she returned to England where she became close friends with Olive Mangeot. She joined the communist party and had a daughter, Sarah (later a crime novelist under the name Sarah Caudwell), with Claud Cockburn, though she and Cockburn never married.

  Roth, Sanford (Sandy). American photographer; known for his pictures of actors and actresses, and especially of James Dean. Isherwood first met Roth in 1951 when Roth photographed Isherwood with Julie Harris costumed as Sally Bowles.