Some time during his first two terms at Cambridge, late in 1923 or early in 1924, Isherwood again began to keep a diary. Initially this was part of the playful, excited fantasy life that he shared with his school and university friend Edward Upward. Having read Barbellion’s Journal of a Disappointed Man, the pair began “keeping a journal of our imaginary lives called The Diary of Two Shapes.”3 But while their impulse toward fantasy led them to make up an entire town, Mortmere, about which they wrote juvenile, surrealist stories for one another, their commitment to reality quickly began to produce a record of their actual experience. Each adopted the diary-keeping habit and sustained it, more or less, for the rest of his life.
Diary keeping attests both to Isherwood’s obsession with the passage of time and to his puritanical need to account for himself. On June 5, 1958, he wrote in his diary: “Who are you—who writes all this? Why do you write? Is it compulsion? Or an alibi—to disprove the charge of what crime?” In a sense, Isherwood wrote in his diary to provide evidence, week by week, that he was neither wasting his life nor spending it in the wrong way: that he was paying attention, that he was doing something of value, that he was keeping a record. Despite the gentrified atmosphere associated with his birth and lineage as the grandson of the squire of Marple Hall in Cheshire, Isherwood was heir to a Puritan work ethic. His father’s family traced their descent from John Bradshaw, the judge who sentenced Charles I to death; Isherwood’s father was a second son, obliged to earn a living reluctantly in the army. Isherwood’s duty-ridden mother was the daughter of a middle-class Victorian wine merchant whose business was just successful enough to afford him the life of a gentleman of leisure. The moderate wealth and class privilege to which Isherwood was born were nonetheless accompanied by high expectations of achievement, perhaps most of all on the part of his mother and, later, himself.
Isherwood used his diary to discipline himself in periods of laziness or dissipation, to clarify his thoughts, and to right himself in moments of spiritual uncertainty. Lapses in his diary keeping are revealing in this respect. During the late 1940s, he lived wildly for a time—he drank, kept late hours, was extremely promiscuous—and a gaping hole opened in his chronicle. Perhaps he simply felt too ashamed to record this period of his life, but certainly without setting down events in his diary he seemed unable to reflect upon and to master his behavior. Those years led him into a despair from which he only emerged simultaneously with a return to writing regularly in his diary. Don Bachardy recalled in 1994 that over the many years of nights which they spent sleeping very close beside one another, Isherwood would sometimes cry out in his sleep, a yelping animal cry, not human. At these moments, Bachardy sensed that, in his sleep, Isherwood was in a place of horror, and he would wake Isherwood, who would always express his relief. But Isherwood never could say where he had been; he could never precisely articulate the dream nor, it seems, could he rid himself of it. In his diaries, though, language rules over inchoate fears, over the chaos of experience, over the passage of time. Page upon page reflect the clarity of his mind, his absolute mastery of syntax, his easily ranging, precise diction, his effortless power of description, his gaiety, his delight in the ridiculous. As his curling line of ink stretches from inches into yards and, probably, miles, over a million words pile up, but only a few words are ever altered. There are hardly any mistakes of any kind. The diaries are an endless transcript of life—without blot, without error, without misstatement, without verbal crime. The recordkeeper is perfectly trained, alert, even fastidious.
But Isherwood goes well beyond simply recording what happens. He tries persistently to understand what his record means. A process of continual examination—the Socratic prerequisite for a worthy life—was applied not only to himself but also to his impressions of the society in which he was living, and this process of examination and reflection was the central task of his fiction, for which the diaries served as his raw material. He analyzed and dissected his observations, lifting out an episode here, a character there, and combining them with others, perhaps originally unrelated; then he invented whatever additional circumstances and atmosphere were necessary to convey certain essential qualities of his experience and of the fabric of society around him. Like Auden, Isherwood was fundamentally anti-Romantic in his determination to demystify the work of the artistic imagination, and thus he described in Christopher and His Kind—his autobiographical account of his life and his writing in the 1930s—the method whereby his real life friends and acquaintances in Berlin, Gerald Hamilton and Jean Ross, for instance, came to be represented in his novels of the 1930s, as “Mr. Norris” in Mr. Norris Changes Trains4 and “Sally Bowles” in Goodbye to Berlin. In this way, Christopher and His Kind opens the workshop door and shows the reader precisely how Isherwood, as a writer, created art from experience. Readers of Isherwood’s post-1939 diaries can observe the process even more closely. In particular Isherwood drew on the diaries contained in this volume (1939–1960) for his novels The World in the Evening, Down There on a Visit, and A Single Man, as well as for his much later autobiographical book My Guru and His Disciple.
Still, however much Isherwood’s style and technique suggest that his novels are works of observation, the diaries, with their wealth of recorded facts, make clear precisely the degree to which he departed from actual experience in his fiction. Because his style tends to be heavily understated—a technique learned from E. M. Forster—Isherwood could achieve, with the slightest coloration of tone, entirely various literary effects, even when drawing closely on real events. And like the Modernist forebears he admired—Forster, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and others—his fiction makes its point objectively, by showing rather than telling. Certainly Isherwood was a master of compression and of the select detail; moreover, he constrained his imagination, so that in his best fiction he never invented more than was necessary. Thus, his novels are works of the imagination, but they are not works of fantasy. In this respect, Isherwood’s work shares a common historical impulse with Edward Upward’s mature social-realist fiction. Upward became a doctrinaire Marxist during the early 1930s, and in his 1937 essay “A Marxist Interpretation of Literature” Upward rejected fantasy, arguing that imaginative writing reflects the material world, and must, in order to be valuable, accurately represent not only the existing and past conditions of the society in which it is written but also the forces beneath the surface of material reality which will shape the future of society. Both Isherwood and Upward were trained as historians: both were top history students at their public school, Repton, and both went up to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge with prestigious financial awards in history. (In fact, Isherwood won two awards, because he sat the scholarship exam with Upward, a year older, before he was ready to leave Repton, and won an exhibition; the following year, Isherwood won a scholarship, worth even more.) Both Upward and Isherwood found they could not bear the way history was taught at Cambridge. Upward changed subjects to English, but Isherwood was refused permission to do the same. He soon found himself defiantly spoofing the questions in his second year tripos exams and being asked to leave. And yet he went on in his fiction to write what might best be regarded as a new kind of history: subjective, intuitive, vivid, widely accessible, and, as one would expect of an intimate of Auden, informed by the new psychological understanding associated with the influence of Freud. Even when they do not record actual historical events, his novels offer a moral history of the culture and psyche of their time. At its most autobiographical, Isherwood’s history writing was, paradoxically, also highly stylized, so that it tipped over from history into mythology.
In their richness of detail, in the range of personalities they introduce, in the span of years they cover, Isherwood’s diaries are a historical record of enormous significance, and they now have the extraordinary effect of opening Isherwood’s carefully composed fictions and myths back out into the culture he was attempting to portray, recapturing in all its complex tragedy the
wartime period already lost to us and afterwards the rebuilding years which have shaped our own times.
Christopher and His Kind leaves Isherwood at the rail of the Champlain arriving in New York Harbor with Auden in January 1939. With a few days of overlap, the diaries contained in this volume take up from there. At thirty-four years of age, Isherwood was already the celebrated author of five works of semi-autobiographical fiction (the fifth, Goodbye to Berlin, just about to be published) and, with Auden, of three successfully, if unconventionally, produced plays. He had worked as a writer on two film scripts, and during the past year he had been writing his first travel book with Auden, Journey to a War, about their trip to China to observe the Sino-Japanese conflict. Isherwood had already visited America briefly on the way home from China, and, having spent most of the preceding decade away from England, in various countries in Europe and around the Mediterranean, he planned to stay in America for good.
But the transition proved far from easy. Settled in Manhattan with an American boyfriend and with Auden—who achieved startling success and celebrity almost instantly in his new surroundings—Isherwood found he could not work. He feared he had reached the end of his talent as a writer, and he became increasingly obsessed by anxiety about the possibility of a coming war and what his role in it should be. With his boyfriend (whom Isherwood called “Vernon” in Christopher and His Kind and who in these diaries appears as “Vernon Old”), Isherwood set out for California in May 1939, hoping for guidance from his pacifist friend Gerald Heard and from Aldous Huxley, both already settled there. Since boyhood Isherwood had been in love with the movies, and after working in London with the Viennese writer and director of stage and film Berthold Viertel, he had every reason to believe he might be able to find work in the Hollywood studios.
As he explains in the opening passages of his 1939 diary, Isherwood realized while crossing the Atlantic that he had always been a pacifist. His father’s profession of soldiering and, above all, his father’s death in the First World War had wreaked havoc upon Isherwood’s childhood and early years at school, and, before he died, his father himself had made fun of the fighting man’s way of life and so-called virtues. After China, Isherwood no longer found war overwhelmingly frightening, as he openly acknowledged he had found it throughout childhood and adolescence; it was not cowardice which made him refuse to fight, but conviction. He was utterly unwilling to raise his hand against the army which numbered among its force the boy he had loved and lived with through much of the past decade, Heinz Neddermeyer. On June 17, 1942 Isherwood wrote in his diary: “Heinz is in the Nazi army. I wouldn’t kill Heinz. Therefore I have no right to kill anybody.” Isherwood was publicly criticized for failing to return to England during the war, and he was accused of cowardice, among other things. But when in 1940 he wrote to the British Embassy in Washington offering to return home, he was told, in a letter of July 12, 1940, that his position in America was “understood.”5 In any case, his future lay in America, regardless of the war.
In order to be able to work in Hollywood, Isherwood had applied for a quota visa, and on June 9, 1939—three months before the war started—he had already been readmitted to the United States from Mexico as a legal immigrant, no longer a visitor. A month later, he began the lengthy procedure to obtain U.S. citizenship. Six months after that, on January 20, 1940, almost exactly a year after leaving England, he wrote in his diary about his reluctance to return:
Am I afraid of being bombed? Of course. Everybody is. But within reason. I know I certainly wouldn’t leave Los Angeles if the Japanese were to attack it tomorrow. No it isn’t that … If I fear anything, I fear the atmosphere of the war, the power which it gives to all the things I hate—the newspapers, the politicians, the puritans, the scoutmasters, the middle-aged merciless spinsters. I fear the way I might behave if I were exposed to this atmosphere. I shrink from the duty of opposition. I am afraid I should be reduced to a chattering enraged monkey, screaming back hate at their hate.
Throughout his youth, Isherwood had felt manipulated and coerced by “the newspapers, the politicians, the puritans, the scoutmasters, the middle-aged merciless spinsters,” and he had fiercely rebelled against these purveyors of conventional values by deliberately failing his exams at Cambridge, by going abroad, by wandering from home to home, by his writing. Now it seems, Isherwood was finished with rebellion, the posture of his youth. He shrank from “the duty of opposition.” In America, he had begun to turn his energies inward, to try to find out who he was and to wrestle, if need be, with himself. He wanted to remain in America so he could finish growing up.
Thus when Gerald Heard introduced Isherwood to Swami Prabhavananda in the summer of 1939, Isherwood was not only seeking direction, but he was prepared and evidently ready to offer up all the devotion and obedience that he had until then refused to yield to any figure of authority. In his youth, Prabhavananda had been involved in the Indian independence movement, and Isherwood, perhaps somewhat romanticizing the ferocity of these early terrorist activities, seems to have recognized in the Swami the same spirit of rebellion that had instantaneously attracted him, as a schoolboy, to Edward Upward. The Swami, too, had once been coerced and manipulated by the British Empire, he too had revolted, and he too had now outgrown such struggles. Perhaps more important, the Swami seemed almost entirely free from the puritanism that had so constrained Isherwood among the English middle classes. In his presence, Isherwood felt continually aware of the Swami’s gaiety, his playfulness, his joy, his seemingly boundless love—in all the years of their friendship, Isherwood never records an instance of the Swami’s expressing disapproval toward him. Swami did not regard Isherwood’s homosexuality as a sin, and Hinduism, in contrast to Christianity, does not include the Judeo-Christian emphasis upon the problem of guilt. Swami simply regarded all forms of lust as obstacles to spiritual progress.
Isherwood loved Swami Prabhavananda almost from the instant of meeting him. He believed in the Swami’s personal sanctity and above all in the Swami’s belief in God. He was to believe in this more and more as the years went by. Isherwood was a natural and persistent sceptic. In his diaries he repeatedly questions his religious convictions, but these convictions were continually and irresistibly reaffirmed through the actual person of the Swami. On September 29, 1957 Isherwood wrote in his diary:
I believe that there is something called (for convenience) God, and that this something can be experienced (don’t ask me how), and that a man I know (Swami) has had this experience, partially, at any rate. All this I believe because my instinct, as a novelist and a connoisseur of people, assures me, after long, long observation, that it is true in Swami’s case.
The guru-disciple relationship of Vedanta was eminently attractive to Isherwood’s intellectual and psychological makeup. Before meeting the Swami, Isherwood had already developed by means of a series of other quasi guru-disciple relationships, perhaps beginning with his history master, G. B. Smith, at Repton, and including, for instance, John Layard, Gerald Heard, and Berthold Viertel. The particular example of the friendship with Viertel, as Isherwood represents it in his novel Prater Violet, suggests the way in which each of these mentors was, in some sense, a father figure, partly a replacement for the real father Isherwood had lost at the vulnerable age of ten. Their very unconventionality was part of their appeal to him, for they stood well outside, and even in opposition to, the parameters of institutional authority that Isherwood had found so straitening and so diminishing. The Swami offered, in addition to his subtle personal attributes, the ultimate dimension in any father figure—a relationship with God. And Isherwood indeed relied on the Swami to make God comprehensible. In his diary for April 28, 1958 he wrote, “Lately, I have arrived at this formulation: religion—as I understand it—means a relationship. Either directly with God, or with someone who has a relationship with God: belief in another’s belief—as I have with Swami.”
Swami Prabhavananda instructed Isherwood in meditation and in Hindu
ritual and belief. Just as Isherwood had possessed sufficient intellectual flexibility and openness to enter into the imaginative intimacy and intensity of the Mortmere game with Edward Upward, and just as he had been able to immerse himself in German culture while living in Berlin, so he took wholeheartedly and seriously to the Swami’s teachings. Over the years they talked, worshipped, prayed, and meditated together, and they worked closely on translations of Hindu religious and philosophical texts. For Isherwood, Vedanta was most simply a process of gradually overcoming worldly attachments and habits of thought and behavior in order to free the spirit so that it could recognize and achieve oneness with God. The practice of Vedanta was a discipline in which he undertook to refine his mind and spirit to higher and higher levels of awareness, to purer and purer forms of love. In a sense, Vedanta proved to be a natural elaboration upon the training he had already begun by himself as an observer and recorder of his fellow man. On July 14, 1940, Isherwood set down in his diary a “prayer for writers,” which, despite a tone of self-mocking bathos towards the end, makes clear that his religion and his art were, in his own mind, part of a single endeavor, and that he wanted the same power of love to inform the practice of both:
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