From October 1957 to January 1958, Isherwood and Bachardy went on another long trip, this time right around the world, visiting Japan and southeast Asia and then travelling to India, where they stayed at the Ramakrishna Math and Mission and visited several other places in Calcutta and the surrounding area. Isherwood was gathering impressions and information for his biography of Ramakrishna, but he recorded nothing about this trip in his diary. Possibly he used all his observations in the biography itself—as he had done in his travel book, The Condor and the Cows, about his trip to South America—but the absence of any excited response during this pilgrimage to the scene of Ramakrishna’s life is entirely in keeping with the fact that the essence of Vedanta, for Isherwood, lay in his own devotion to Swami. In fact, Isherwood’s lack of affinity for Indian culture meant that such a trip probably made him feel distanced from Ramakrishna, rather than drawing him closer.
When he returned to California in 1958, Isherwood became involved in a number of projects that took him away from the real work of writing fiction, but to which he was attracted by the lure of earning large sums of money and by the pleasure of collaborating with others. In March, David Selznick hired him to develop a screenplay about Mary Magdalene; then, after several months of long, intimate conversations with Isherwood at high wages, Selznick moved on to another writer and later abandoned the project. From October 1958 to January 1959, Isherwood and Bachardy together wrote a play which they titled The Monsters. Ultimately, despite the riveting energy created between them while they worked on it, they decided it was an embarrassing failure. Around the same time, Isherwood also began a writing relationship with Gavin Lambert, and over the next few years the two worked on a film and on a television idea together—much as Isherwood had once done with Lesser Samuels—but they had no real success with either of their projects. Later, in April 1959, Isherwood went to New York to discuss collaborating with Auden on a musical version of I Am a Camera, but this, too, came to nothing.
During this period, Isherwood had yet another admonishing physical setback: he fell asleep at the wheel of his car in November 1958 and had a fairly bad accident. Nobody else was injured, but Isherwood broke his nose and some ribs, tore his pleura (which was very painful), and was badly cut and bruised. Thus it was not until March 1959 that he made much progress with Down There on a Visit. Once he got going with the first section, “Mr. Lancaster,” he wrote steadily and constructively for many months. By June he was well on with the second section, “Ambrose,” and he also produced what he called a “queer” story, “Afterwards.” In the middle of this wonderfully productive time, the long years of vagrancy and wandering from home to home, which had characterized Isherwood’s life from the end of the 1920s until he met Don Bachardy, were brought to a final close. In June 1959 Isherwood and Bachardy bought 145 Adelaide Drive, a slight and airy run of rooms perched on the side of the steep canyon wall overlooking the ocean at Santa Monica. They were to live there together for the rest of Isherwood’s life. After a late summer trip to Europe, they moved in on September 30.
Isherwood made another important commitment during this watershed year, 1959. He took up teaching at Los Angeles State College. For the man who had deliberately ruined his promising career at Cambridge in order to free himself from his mother’s ambition that he become a university don, this was a remarkable development. And it marks, perhaps more than anything else, the final conclusion to his rebellious youth and the end of his need to run away from himself. He was now prepared to accept a place among the figures of the Establishment, and to undertake a relationship to the young that was entirely different from the romantic and fatherly bond he had shared outside society and in defiance of society with the many boys who had, in a sense, led up to and culminated in Don Bachardy. As a teacher, Isherwood adopted a formal, institutionalized role which required that he address youth as a group and within a thoroughly conventional framework.
All this presumed he had something he could teach the young, and anxieties attended his new stature. These were different from, but closely associated with his anxieties about being responsible for Bachardy. Around the time that he took up his first teaching post, Isherwood recorded in his diaries a number of dreams that reflect his fear of failing to come up to his public reputation. The dreams mingle his feeling about himself in several related roles—as traveller, writer, collaborator with the increasingly celebrated genius, Auden, and also as companion to Bachardy. On November 26, 1959, he wrote:
A dream last night.
Don and I were leaving on a journey. Our hosts (presumably) were seeing us off. I said to them, “One of my mottoes in life is: Always visit the outlying islands. It’s amazing the people you find living there. And the others always try to discourage you from going. They say: There’s nothing on it but sheep.”
The feel of this dream wasn’t good. I was too pleased with myself. I was showing off. Because the truth was, I knew that I hadn’t visited the outlying islands. Or only very seldom.
This dream seems to refer in particular to the “Ambrose” episode which Isherwood was writing at the time for Down There on a Visit; “Ambrose” takes place on a Greek island, and Isherwood both as author and in the persona of narrator was laying claim to a special knowledge of the rather exotic personalities in the tale, notably Ambrose himself. In a way, the ironically self-deprecating title he eventually chose for the book, Down There on a Visit, successfully responds to the anxieties expressed in his dream by making fun of his status as a mere tourist.
On January 13, just after the end of his first semester (with his characteristically revealing psychosomatic propensity, he had lost his voice during the final class), he recorded another dream:
A dream, the night before last: Auden and I were talking—apparently after a lecture. (Don was present, too, but played no part.) Wystan and I were in great spirits, laughing. I said, “When you talked about the future, I thought you’d give the whole show away.” “No—” said Wystan, “they didn’t notice anything. I knew they wouldn’t—” (Obviously he was referring to the audience.) Then I laughed some more, and kicked at a long electric light cord that lay on the floor. (In my workroom, here?) “My god,” I said, “why don’t we drop this whole farce?”
Now the amazing thing about this dream is this: I am sure that in the dream, Wystan and I were dead—but no one knew it.
All those years ago, when he had first arrived in New York, Isherwood had disbelieved in himself as a public personality, and so, from his own point of view, he had felt he failed while Auden succeeded. But now those famed young writers of the 1930s—who did frequently lecture together—were indeed long dead, and a new Christopher Isherwood had come into being. The new Christopher Isherwood is keenly aware, as Isherwood in his diaries always emphasized he was aware, of a disparity between his public reputation and his private doubts about his talent and achievements; moreover, the material of the dream implies Isherwood’s suspicion that being in the company of Auden had partly sustained his own reputation and might always continue to do so. The light cord on the floor, which he so unconcernedly kicks, seems to represent the possibility that the dreamer could, in the punning symbolism of dreams, pull the plug and expose the “truth” about their friendship and respective achievements. And the fact that the cord might be in his own workroom seems to refer to the way in which Isherwood’s work, his novels, are the means by which he might do this. (He had already told the story of his friendship with Auden and others in Lions and Shadows, but forty years later he was to expose this version as not really true to life when he wrote his next, “truer” piece of autobiography, Christopher and His Kind, in which he was able to describe the homosexual dimension of his friendship with Auden and others and also to describe the uncertainties and difficulties which persistently circumscribed his writing.) But perhaps the most important thing about the dream is that both Isherwood and Auden were laughing. After a semester’s worth of teaching, Isherwood had begun to feel lighthearted about
these old insecurities. They were becoming objectified and emerging from a place of repression in the form of dreams because he was in fact discarding them. He had outgrown them at last.
Isherwood was a success as a teacher, and other teaching jobs were to follow over the coming years. Although he still found aspects of institutional life tedious and frustrating, he found acceptance and formal recognition gratifying. On February 17, 1960 he wrote in his diary:
The people at the L.A. State College library, without saying a word to me in advance, have made an exhibit: “Christopher Isherwood—Man of Letters,” with the foreign translations of my books which I gave them, plus newspaper articles, etc. etc. I was really touched and pleased and surprised.
And then on May 30, 1960 he wrote something even more important:
On the 24th they had a “reception” for me at State College. … The president shook my hand and told me, “You’re the kind of person we want here.” How often I have been told the opposite! He gave me a printed testimonial and we were photographed as it changed hands.
Teaching provided Isherwood with a source of steady income that, unlike film work, did not interfere with his writing. But, more importantly, the persona of himself as a teacher is the one that he eventually found he could write about. Just as the community of his colleagues found him entirely acceptable, he also found himself entirely acceptable. In his next novel, A Single Man, written in 1963, he was to bring long-hidden aspects of his own character and personality out into the open—including his homosexuality—in the figure of George, the middle-aged Englishman and professor of literature. This role offered Isherwood respectability and accountability and required no further justification of himself to society. By the time he wrote the book, Isherwood seems to have been remarkably at ease with the idea of himself as a professor.
Meanwhile, in 1960, Charles Laughton asked Isherwood to help him write a play about Socrates in which Laughton could star, and this began another collaborative friendship, which lasted until Laughton’s death in 1962, when Isherwood finally abandoned the project. Isherwood steamed onward with Down There on a Visit, now writing the “Waldemar” section, about the Munich crisis and based on his relationship with Heinz Neddermeyer and with other friends he knew in Berlin and London during the 1930s. He still toyed with titles, calling the novel The Others from about February 1960 and then by June reverting once again to The Lost. In May he accepted a new teaching post, at the University of California at Santa Barbara, reaffirming his commitment to his new role. In June his mother died. He was deeply affected by this, sadder than might have been expected from someone who had so outspokenly rebelled against and criticized his mother from so young an age. Still, he pressed on with his book, finishing the last section, “Paul,” about his friendship during the war with Denny Fouts. By August 1960, he was drafting a frame for the novel. That same year saw the publication of his anthology, Great English Short Stories. Down There on a Visit eventually appeared in 1962.
Don Bachardy was also growing up. He had completed his education at UCLA and at the Chouinard Art Institute, and he was now intermittently obtaining professional drawing assignments. The years to come would bring profound conflict in Isherwood’s relationship with him, as Bachardy struggled to establish his own independent identity, as an artist and as a man. Ultimately the conflict would be resolved, but not without great pain and difficulty and a tremendous effort of love, something of which Isherwood was at last genuinely capable. There would be more books, more plays and screenplays, more trips with Bachardy, and also more operations and ill health as Isherwood grew older. Isherwood’s next novel, A Single Man, draws obviously and significantly on experiences described in the diaries up to 1960, but also upon Isherwood’s life after that date and upon the process of aging and the challenge of continuing in his mature identity—no longer a renegade English writer, but now a permanent member of a community in which he wished openly to co-exist with others like and unlike himself. Christopher Isherwood the narrator figure quietly reporting from the edge of the picture was no more; the new Isherwood was to make increasingly clear to his readers who and what he really was. The work of the remainder of Isherwood’s career was not to be about the doomed, the marginalized, and the lost; it was, in general, to be about the discovered, the invited, the admitted, the found.
1 The little book is now lost, but this passage appears in Kathleen and Frank (New York, 1971), p. 348; (London, 1972), pp. 250–251.
2 The 1917 diary is at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin, and the 1918 diary is at The McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
3 Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties (London, 1938), p. 73. Upward records the influence of Barbellion in No Home But the Struggle, the third volume of his autobiographical novel, The Spiral Ascent (London, 1977), p. 681. He also implies that he and Isherwood might have begun keeping the diaries in early 1925, a year later than Isherwood says in Lions and Shadows.
4 Published in the U.S. as The Last of Mr. Norris.
5 See p. 56 in this volume.
6 Prater Violet (PV) (New York, 1945), p.17; (London, 1946), p. 12.
7 PV, U.S., p. 18; U.K., p. 13.
8 PV, U.S., p. 49; U.K., p. 39.
9 PV, U.S., p. 96; U.K., p. 77.
10 PV, U.S., pp. 122; U.K., p. 98.
11 PV, U.S., pp. 125–6; U.K., p. 100–101.
12 Christopher and His Kind (C&HK) (New York, 1976), p. 175; (London, 1977), p. 134.
13 C&HK, U.S., p. 177; U.K., p. 134.
14 C&HK, U.S., p. 178; U.K., p. 136.
15 C&HK, U.S., p. 244; U.K., p. 182.
16 C&HK, U.S., p. 185; U.K., p. 141.
17 C&HK, U.S., p. 186; U.K., p. 142.
18 PV, U.S., p. 125; U.K., p. 100.
19 A Room of One’s Own (London, 1929), p. 111.
20 The World in the Evening (WIE) (New York, 1954), p. 66; (London, 1954), p. 79.
21 WIE, U.S., p. 281; U.K., p. 311.
22 WIE, U.S., p. 281; U.K., p. 310.
23 WIE, U.S., p. 42; U.K., p. 51.
24 C&HK, U.S., p. 339; U.K., p. 252.
25 “The Choice,” ll. 1–2.
26 WIE, U.S., p. 246; U.K., p. 271.
27 The Spiral Ascent, p. 18.
The Emigration
1939–1944
January 19, 1939–December 31, 1944
THE FIRST PART of this book is based upon a series of diaries which I kept, rather irregularly, during the years 1939–1944. In the summer and fall of 1946 I worked right through them, often revising or expanding the entries and writing bridge passages of narrative to fill in the gaps. A row of dots after an entry usually indicates where the diary leaves off and a bit of explanatory narrative begins. [Sometimes short passages of explanatory narrative appear in parentheses.]
On January 19, 1939, Auden and I sailed from Southampton in the French liner Champlain, bound for New York. It was the first anniversary of our trip to China. I am always on the lookout for coincidences in dates, and I remember that this one flattered my vaguely optimistic belief that my life was somehow running to schedule.
Certainly, at that time, I had every reason to believe in the favorable aspect of my star. This post-Munich winter was the height of my little London success. I lectured, I broadcast, I was welcome at parties. I had plenty of pocket money. The Chinese travel book1 was finished. I was running an agreeable love affair in which the other partner was more deeply involved than myself, and I kept a second, third and fourth choice waiting on the sidelines in case I got bored. In public, I was carefully modest about all this. In private, to my intimate friends, I boasted, with a vulgarity that still makes me squirm as I write these lines. Auden, particularly, disliked my attitude; it hurt him because he was really fond of me. But I suppose it somehow intrigued him, too—because he once told me, almost admiringly, that I was the cruellest and most unscrupulous person he had ever met. Edward Upward, now only an occasional visi
tor, didn’t say much. Something was broken between us. I couldn’t meet his faintly ironical eye. When we were together, I covered my embarrassment with an awkward heartiness.
I think we all sensed that this was a long goodbye. M.2 cried when I left, I cried, Jacky [Hewit] cried in the taxi to the station and gave me a keepsake, his first champagne cork. Forster, who had come to see us off, asked me: “Shall I join the communist party?” I forget what I answered. I think it was “No.” At any rate, the question was oracular. The departing and the dying are credited with a kind of psychic wisdom.
As the train pulled out, there was a nasty sharp wrench, and then, as always when I am the traveler, a quick upsurge of guilty relief. Auden and I exchanged grins—grins which took us back, in an instant, to the earliest days of our friendship. Suddenly, we were twelve and nine years old. “Well,” I said, “we’re off again.” “Goody,” said Auden.
Why were we going to America? I suppose, for myself, the chief reason was that I couldn’t stop travelling. The mechanism had been set going during those years of wandering around Europe with Heinz [Neddermeyer]. I was also running away from myself: that was why I never stayed anywhere long. I could remain in Portugal, for example, as long as I could believe in an objective Portugal. But, sooner or later, Portugal would dissolve and reveal itself as the all-too-familiar, subjective “Isherwood Portugal.” Then I fled in disgust.
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