Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  One of the main ways Isherwood organized and compressed material in his fiction was to focus on his own relation to a single character: himself and Mr. Norris, himself and Sally Bowles, himself and Otto Nowak, himself and Berthold Viertel, and even in Lions and Shadows, which includes many friends, himself and one friend or mentor at a time, chapter by chapter. This practice corresponds to the way he seems often to have handled real-life relationships, and culminates in My Guru and His Disciple, which describes his relationship with the Swami. Isherwood’s narrative persona in these works tended in the early years to be a bit like the narrator in a Henry James short story: bland, obtuse, without sexual identity, and intensely focused on the other figure in the tale—as if the quest to discover the true character of the other figure were as important as the quest to discover the holy grail. As Isherwood matured as an artist, his narrative persona became more vivid, more complicated, more dynamic, and in most respects truer to Isherwood’s actual personality; in A Single Man—a small but undoubted masterpiece—the persona emerged as a character in its own right. But this was only in 1964, and as Isherwood points out in Christopher and His Kind, earlier in his career, it was not possible for him to write forthrightly about a homosexual character, and particularly not about himself as a homosexual. When he was writing Mr. Norris Changes Trains he “wasn’t prepared to admit that the Narrator was homosexual,”16 first because he feared to create a scandal, and second, because he did not want to shift the reader’s attention away from Mr. Norris. The reader, he argued, would have been distracted if the narrator had been “an avowed homosexual, with a homosexual’s fantasies, preferences and prejudices.” Indeed, he explained, “The Narrator would have become so odd, perhaps so interesting, that his presence would have thrown the novel out of perspective.” Thus, he left the narrator without explicit sexuality because he “dared not make the Narrator homosexual. But he scorned to make him heterosexual.”17

  The problem of the narrator didn’t go away with Mr. Norris; Isherwood continued to be plagued by the difficulty that he could not without scandal and without possible legal difficulties write about homosexuality in the way that he might have liked to. In Prater Violet, the Isherwood character has a sex life, but his lover, referred to as “J.,” is a genderless cypher without emotional importance: “After J., there would be K. and L. and M., right down the alphabet.”18 When Isherwood introduced two explicitly homosexual episodes into The World in the Evening, written during the early 1950s, his publishers in both London and New York asked for changes. In fact, Isherwood had foreseen such a request, and he had deliberately drafted these sex scenes rather strongly in order to be able to agree to alterations and still retain the minimum of detail that he felt was essential for his artistic purposes. In her 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf argued that most nineteenth-century women novelists couldn’t really write what they wanted to because there existed only a patriarchal tradition in which to write and because they were continually preoccupied as artists by having to apologize for or cover up their imaginative differences as women:

  The whole structure, therefore, of the early nineteenth-century novel was raised, if one was a woman, by a mind which was slightly pulled from the straight, and made to alter its clear vision in deference to external authority. One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation … she was thinking of something other than the thing itself.19

  It seems clear that The World in the Evening is marred in a similar way both by repressed anger and by syrupy attempts at conciliation and apology, and it is no accident that the far more successful A Single Man is modelled on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (which Isherwood reread as he was preparing to write his own book). Instead of a day in the life of a Mayfair hostess, he offers a day in the life of a homosexual Englishman who is a literature professor in California. A Single Man is a boldly political book and offers none of the deference to conventional mores found in Isherwood’s earlier novels.

  Isherwood’s diaries just as freely ignore contemporary literary decorums (he never had formal plans to publish them), but The World in the Evening shows the strain of Isherwood’s not being able to deal directly with the emotional truths that were his real subject. The hysterical guilt of the main character, Stephen Monk, over the relatively minor sexual “sins” of his past life is pitched melodramatically high precisely because Isherwood cannot allow Monk to confess in detail the actual nature of those “sins” as Isherwood himself might have understood them. And the puritanism of the Quakers amongst whom Monk is temporarily living had to be exaggerated in order to justify Monk’s extreme emotion. Isherwood thus substitutes contrived emotional intensity for psychological truth, and his perhaps unconscious anger that this should be necessary seems to mingle with the guilt and frustration he himself experienced while living among the Quakers. Isherwood imagines Monk as a bisexual, but the homosexual affair that Monk has is marked on Monk’s side by coy reluctance and on his lover’s side by a sulkiness so embittered as to suggest the lover deserves to be essentially unrequited. This is hardly rectified by the introduction of the two “good” homosexual characters—the hardworking doctor, Charles Kennedy, and his friend, Bob Wood—who are presented as being both settled in a long-term relationship and obviously contributing to society (Bob Wood volunteers for the army when the Second World War begins).

  The sexuality of the women with whom Monk is involved is equally oversimplified and unconvincing—Isherwood is noticeably inventing for the sake of his plot rather than drawing on observation of real-life. Monk’s second wife is a destructive nymphomaniac. His deceased first wife, Elizabeth Rydal, is an ethereal anthology figure, compiled from a variety of refined, high-minded and mortally ill women Isherwood admired—Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and probably Helen Kennedy, a beautiful Vedanta nun he was half in love with when he lived in the monastery. Rydal is disqualified from motherhood by a near fatal miscarriage and consequently disqualified from sex by the threat to her already weak heart. A sexual encounter between Monk and the healthily attractive refugee, Gerda Mannheim, was revised out of the story in Isherwood’s final draft. And Monk’s foster mother, Sarah Pennington, is middle-aged; Isherwood permits her no sexuality at all. These characters together reflect above all Isherwood’s passionate uneasiness about mature female sexuality, an uneasiness he reveals unselfconsciously in his diaries in describing his friendships with various real women. The sex life of a Sally Bowles figure was undaunting to him, because, after all, she might almost have been portrayed as a young boy, but Isherwood invariably flinched at any direct expression in a more adult woman of sexual appetite. Possibly this uneasiness was exacerbated by the great effort he made to be celibate during the war, but the seeds for it may be detected in his mother’s sudden widowhood during his childhood and in his own sense of guilt in refusing to submit to her obsessive involvement with her lost marriage. He evokes such emotions in The World in the Evening when Elizabeth Rydal describes a scene from Macbeth in which the recently widowed Lady Macduff, “so utterly, angrily alone with her tragedy,” watches her young son and “longs to break down the barrier between them, to get through to him and make him share what she feels, somehow, even if she has to hurt him.”20 The mutual destructiveness of the mother-son relationship had been a central theme of Isherwood’s earlier novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial, where the antagonism is presented in the context of the First World War and its effect upon Isherwood’s whole generation. A revealing diary notation made in Haverford points to the sexual dimension (reiterated elsewhere) of the standoff between mother and son. In his entry for April 28, 1942, Isherwood describes how Caroline Norment, his boss at the Quaker refugee hostel in Haverford, has become jealous of another woman about to be married and flirts with one of the male refugees over lunch, openly enjoying his flattery: �
��I couldn’t be more ashamed if it were my own mother,” he concludes. Caroline Norment is the real-life original for Sarah Pennington in The World in the Evening, but in the novel Isherwood removed all signs of her sexual appetite as if to make her an entirely “good” character and an acceptable, refined mother figure. Indeed, he attributes to her some of the saintly qualities he had observed in Swami Prabhavananda, who had long been celibate. How much more poignant she might have been if she were, as in his diary impression of her, hungry for men.

  Closely connected to the longstanding artistic problem of the inadmissible homosexual narrator was the problem, for Isherwood, of writing about pacifism so soon after the war. In his own particular case, his pacifism was inextricably bound up with his homosexuality, and he could not fully account for one without bringing in the other. In The World in the Evening, Bob Wood voices sentiments that perhaps reflect Isherwood’s own, but which Isherwood’s need to conceal his homosexual identity prevented him from expressing openly: “Compared with this business of being queer, and the laws against us, and the way we’re pushed around even in peacetime—this war hardly seems to concern me at all.”21 When Wood joins the army he explains to Monk, “I can’t be a C.O. because, if they declared war on the queers—tried to round us up and liquidate us, or something—I’d fight. I’d fight till I dropped. I know that. I’d be so mad, I wouldn’t even feel scared. … So how can I say I’m a pacifist?”22 Wood’s outspoken rage looks forward to Isherwood’s novel of the early 1960s, A Single Man, for which some parts of The World in the Evening seem to be a very dry run.

  At the time that Isherwood wrote The World in the Evening, it seems he still felt sensitive and uncertain about how to present what his own role had been in the war, and this perhaps explains one decision about the novel which in a way changed the direction of his career. While he was struggling to write what he was then still calling The School of Tragedy, Isherwood turned to friends for advice, discussing the work endlessly with Dodie Smith in particular. Another friend, Speed Lamkin, advised him on May 29, 1951, “The refugees are a bore.” So Isherwood took almost all of the refugees out of the book and set them aside for a later project. He found himself able at last to get on faster with the writing, but he had in fact jettisoned the only material that provided him with any direct point of contact with the war, and he had cut himself off from the relation to German culture which had nourished his fiction throughout the 1930s. The detailed observations which do survive in his wartime diaries—of the relatively ordinary refugees who arrived almost unnoticed in Haverford and seemed to evaporate into the atmosphere of America—offer a provocative contrast to his chronicles of the more glamorous and sometimes exceptionally gifted refugees Isherwood knew in Hollywood, in particular because the latter were obviously shaping American culture just as much as they were being shaped by it. But in The World in the Evening, the war is only background, a remote conflagration in which others are suffering and in which the main character, Stephen Monk, feels he ought to be more involved; it operates almost solely as an engine of guilt and the book has only a weak sense of connection to the historical period in which it is set. During the period that he was writing the novel, Isherwood repeatedly says of himself in his diaries that he is running away from something that he cannot identify. Likewise, Stephen Monk says of himself near the beginning of The World in the Evening, “What am I doing here? What’s going to happen to me? What is it that I’m afraid of?”23 For a long time Isherwood, it seems, simply did not want to understand himself, nor to examine his own psychology and motivations too closely. As his relationship with Caskey was nearing its end, he tried to substitute the strict discipline of monastic life for the self-analysis and self-understanding which he had always achieved through writing and which was necessary in order for him to grow. Isherwood needed discipline, and what he had learned by living in the monastery was useful to him throughout the remainder of his life, but he knew that he must not rely on the Swami’s way of life too much—it was too easy a solution. On August 29, 1951, he wrote in his diary:

  What I now dimly begin to see is that there must be no more categorical relationships. I believe that’s what went wrong with Bill and me, and Ivar Avenue and me. Trying to fix a situation and ensure security by involving yourself, is no good. No good saying: “Now I’m married” or “Now I’m a monk”—and therefore I’m committed. It is simply weakness to talk that way.

  Above all, Isherwood needed to write, for this was the only way he could rigorously examine and try to understand his experience. Once he began to make progress with The World in the Evening, however artistically unsatisfactory the final result, and once he began to make more frequent entries in his diary, then at last his life began to improve.

  Meanwhile, at the beginning of the 1950s, some of Isherwood’s friends were trying to solve his more practical problems for him. They felt what he needed was money. Dodie Smith and Alec Beesley conspired to challenge John van Druten to adapt some of Isherwood’s Berlin stories for the stage. Van Druten was easily tempted, mostly because he loved money himself, and he recognized the potential of Isherwood’s work. I Am a Camera began its pre-New York run in Hartford, Connecticut on November 8, 1951. Characteristically, Isherwood placed importance on the date, eleven years to the day after he was initiated by Swami Prabhavananda and six years after he became a U.S. citizen. This event, too, was to change Isherwood’s life. When the play transferred to New York at the end of November, it became a hit and Isherwood became famous, both as the author of the original story and as the stage character, Christopher Isherwood, who was in fact so unlike himself. He had a share of the earnings—though a modest one—from the play, the subsequent films, and from the musical Cabaret. Yet as Isherwood himself said of I Am a Camera in his diary entry for November 8, 1951, “This isn’t my own child.” It gave him finances and reputation, but it did not solve his artistic or personal problems. At the end of 1951, he sailed for England for his third visit since the war. He planned to spend Christmas with his mother and brother, but he was alone—really alone—for the first time in years. Caskey joined the merchant marine and shipped out from the West Coast in the opposite direction.

  In February 1952 Isherwood went back to Berlin and saw Heinz Neddermeyer for the first time since their dramatic parting in Luxembourg in 1937. Afterwards, he returned to California from England via New York. He felt greatly restored by seeing some of his oldest friends—Auden, Spender, Forster, Plomer, and others. He was determined to keep his diary more regularly, and he planned to spend more time with Swami as soon as he got back to California. Although he began another affair in New York, it proved unimportant. By early April he was home in Los Angeles, where he began in earnest the project of trying to live on his own. First he went to Trabuco, the Ramakrishna monastery south of Los Angeles, where he finished his share of work on the Patanjali translation and completed a draft of the first section of what he was still calling The School of Tragedy. From there he moved into a small apartment while he began fixing up a more permanent home in Santa Monica—the garden house belonging to his friend Evelyn Hooker and her husband. He was able to move into the garden house in the late summer of 1952, around the time of his forty-eighth birthday. That November he took a car trip to Mexico with Caskey, but their relationship was over. Caskey shipped out again early in 1953 and Isherwood spent most of January at Trabuco, where he was able at last to finish a rough draft of the novel he now finally titled The World in the Evening.

  As soon as Isherwood had established himself for the first time as a single man with a real home, his life was about to change again. In February 1953, he became involved with an eighteen-year-old college student, Don Bachardy, and it rapidly became clear that Bachardy was to be the most important person in Isherwood’s life, “the ideal companion to whom you can reveal yourself totally and yet be loved for what you are.”24 That month, Bachardy’s elder brother, Ted, whom Isherwood had known already for several years, had a nervous breakd
own—one of many—and Isherwood was drawn into the family circle when he tried to intercede with Ted and prevent him from becoming violent. Isherwood failed with Ted, who had to be hospitalized for several months, and so found himself sympathizing with Don, who was both frightened and saddened by his brother’s condition. From the outset, Isherwood’s feelings towards Don were fatherly as well as romantic; he wrote in his diary on March 6, 1953:

  I feel a special kind of love for Don. I suppose I’m just another frustrated father. But this feeling exists at a very deep level, beneath names for things or their appearances. We’re just back from a trip to Palm Springs together, which was one of those rare experiences of nearly pure joy. There’s a brilliant wide-openness about his mouse face, with its brown eyes and tooth gap and bristling crew cut, which affects everybody who sees him. If one could still be like that at forty, one would be a saint.

  By April Bachardy moved out of his mother’s apartment into a furnished room of his own so that he could spend more time with Isherwood, and then in May he moved into a friend’s apartment partly as a disguise, because the relationship was evidently attracting disapproving attention from Bachardy’s landlady and from some of Isherwood’s friends. Isherwood finished The World in the Evening in August 1953, and then trouble arose. In September, Evelyn Hooker insisted that Isherwood move out of her garden house because her husband feared the relationship with Bachardy, who looked far younger than his nineteen years, would cause a scandal. Already Bachardy was far more “home” to Isherwood than the carefully prepared domestic arrangements in the garden house, so Isherwood kept the garden house for a time as a study, and the pair soon found their own small apartment. Isherwood then settled down to revise The World in the Evening during the autumn and at Christmas he took Bachardy on his first trip to New York.