183 “Sonnenuntergang” (“Sunset”).
184 Landing Zone, designated by number rather than location for security.
185 La Pensée grecque et les origines de l’esprit scientifique (Greek Thought and the Origins of the Scientific Spirit).
186 Klabund’s 1925 play, adapted from the Chinese; Brecht titled his version The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
187 “An Office for the Dead,” mostly excerpted from An Indian Study of Love and Death (1905) by Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble), an Irish disciple of Vivekananda.
188 Isherwood’s arrangement is sometimes still used.
189 “Girl Reading” (1934); see Glossary under Fouts.
190 “In treating the so-called … there are two sides to the question, namely the front side and the backside.”
191 Russian-born actor and film star (nephew of the playwright), he incorporated the insights of Eastern philosophy and of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy into his acting system.
192 Girish Chandra Ghosh, Bengali playwright, actor and director, who gave up his worldly life to become a devotee of Ramakrishna.
193 Boyhood name of Vivekananda.
194 Keshab Chandra Sen, Indian reformer and spiritual leader, influenced by Christianity and personally by Ramakrishna, believed himself divinely appointed to teach a New Dispensation of God’s law.
195 Mahendranath Gupta, see Glossary under M.
196 Polish-American opera singer retired in Santa Barbara.
197 Comfort.
198 Bower’s article appeared in January 1944 under the pseudonym Anthony Bourne, and Roerick’s reply in March; see Glossary under Bower and Roerick.
199 Orwell edited the book, published in 1943.
200 “Warsaw siege victims not wanted.” See Glossary under Warsaw.
201 Letters of Swami Vivekananda, April 18, 1900.
202 American playwright and screenwriter (1903–1963).
The Postwar Years
1945–1956
January 1, 1945—December 26, 1949
[FROM THE START of 1945 until late 1947, Isherwood made no entries at all in his diary. The affair with “X.” (Bill Harris) lasted only until February 1945, when Harris left for New York. A few days earlier, Isherwood had become jealous when a soldier arrived for a tryst at Harris’s apartment while Isherwood was there. Harris fled wearing only his bathrobe and, in the street, told Isherwood that he couldn’t stand “all this love.” Later Isherwood and the soldier left together and had drinks at the soldier’s apartment. There were other brief relationships, including one with a boy called Steve Conway. Then in June 1945, Isherwood met William Caskey, who was to prove far more important in his life. Over the course of the summer, Isherwood and Caskey, just turned twenty-four, began a serious affair, and this, perhaps more than anything else, finally precipitated Isherwood’s long meditated departure from the monastery in August 1945—nine days after the war ended. Caskey came to stay as soon as Isherwood had his own apartment (the chauffeur’s bedroom and bathroom at the Beesleys’ current rented house), and a few months later they moved into Denny Fouts’s empty apartment while Fouts was away in the East. For the next six years, Isherwood and Caskey lived mostly together, and their relationship involved Isherwood with many other new friends in Santa Monica.
During 1945, Isherwood worked off and on at Warner Brothers. He devoted some time in February to a screenplay of Wilkie Collins’s 1860 novel, The Woman in White (later finished by another writer, Stephen Moorehouse Avery, and released in 1948). Then from June to September, he worked for Wolfgang Reinhardt, scripting Somerset Maugham’s Up at the Villa (1941). Isherwood polished this script during an extra week at the studio in late September 1945, but the film was never made. He also tried to advise Maugham on filming The Razor’s Edge, and arranged meetings for Maugham and George Cukor with Swami Prabhavananda, but in the end the script for The Razor’s Edge was written by Lamarr Trotti, the film was directed not by Cukor but by Edmund Goulding, and Isherwood and Prabhavananda’s advice about the teachings of the fictionalized Indian holy man “Sri Ganesha” were largely ignored. Prater Violet was published that November (the U.K. edition appeared the following year), and also during the autumn Isherwood travelled a little with Caskey.
At the start of 1946, Isherwood had to undergo an operation: a Dr. A. D. Gorfain removed a median bar from the top of Isherwood’s urethra, inside the bladder. To guard against infection during the operation, Gorfain tied off Isherwood’s sperm tubes, making him sterile and unable to ejaculate more than a few drops of semen. Isherwood did not understand the consequences of the operation until after it was completed. In later years he came to believe it might have been unnecessary, but he insisted he had suffered no adverse effects in his sex life—perhaps the reverse. And yet from the end of the 1940s onward, he occasionally refers in his diary to being partially (and inexplicably) impotent.
In the spring of 1946, when Denny Fouts returned from New York, Fouts and Caskey quarrelled so fiercely that Isherwood and Caskey left Fouts’s apartment and went to live over Salka Viertel’s garage. This all but ended Isherwood’s friendship with Fouts. That same year, Isherwood revised his 1939–1944 journals and worked with Swami Prabhavananda on a translation of Shankara’s The Crest Jewel of Discrimination. Caskey had decided to become a professional photographer soon after moving in with Isherwood, and during this period he was studying in preparation, probably at Santa Monica City College. Towards the end of 1946, Isherwood became an American citizen, and he began helping Lesser Samuels with a film treatment which was to bring them both a large sum of money. They called the story Judgement Day in Pittsburgh and sold it to RKO for $50,000. The treatment was Samuels’s idea, and Isherwood collaborated out of friendship, but contributed little professionally. (RKO released the film in 1949 as Adventure in Baltimore, written by Lionel Houser and starring Shirley Temple, Robert Young and John Agar.)
Once the treatment was finished, Isherwood made his first postwar journey back to England, at the beginning of 1947. He saw many of his London friends, was introduced to new ones, and twice he went north to visit his mother and his brother Richard who, during the war, had moved together back to Wyberslegh Hall, Isherwood’s birthplace in Cheshire. He also stayed with Olive Mangeot in Cheltenham, where he saw Jean Ross (the original of “Sally Bowles” in Goodbye to Berlin), now the mother of a daughter, Sarah, by Claude Cockburn. Olive Mangeot’s housekeeper and cook, Hilda Hauser, whom Isherwood had known since the 1920s (she appears as “Rose” in Lions and Shadows), was with them, looking after a young granddaughter, Amber, so-called because she was half black, half white: Hilda’s daughter, Phyllis, had been raped by a black G.I. during the war and left the baby with Hilda. While Isherwood was in Cheltenham, Rosamond Lehmann’s former husband, the communist painter Wogan Philipps, asked him to serve as interpreter at a hearing conducted in German in a nearby prisoner of war camp. Philipps and his second wife, Cristina, employed German and Italian prisoners of war as farmhands, a common practice at the time. One of their German laborers was accused of having participated, as an S.S. member, in a massacre of civilians in Russia. The Philippses could not believe the charge, but the laborer was found guilty and prevented from returning to farm work. Then, at the end of March, during Isherwood’s second stay in Cheshire, he and his mother visited the family solicitor, and Isherwood signed the papers which formally made over the Marple and Wyberslegh estates to his brother Richard, an intention Isherwood had indicated when he first inherited the property on his Uncle Henry’s death in 1940.
Despite his relatively steady relationship with Caskey, Isherwood expressed a lively interest in various other men that he met. While in London, he stayed a night with his old boyfriend, Jacky Hewit, and he also renewed other once romantic friendships. He lunched with a young man that he found attractive, Neville King-Page, after meeting him at a party at John Lehmann’s in April, but nothing came of it. Then on board the Queen Elizabeth on the way back to New York, Isherwood be
came friendly with John Holmes, who had worked for the Canadian government during the war.
Caskey was waiting for Isherwood in New York, and they soon sublet an apartment belonging to Isherwood’s friends, James and Tania Stern, who were away in Europe. During that spring and summer in New York there were numerous parties and outings. E. M. Forster was visiting from England, and Isherwood saw him several times. In mid-May, Caskey and Isherwood went to stay with a wealthy acquaintance, Ollie Jennings, in his summer house at Sneden’s Landing, an artists’ colony on the Hudson River just north of the Palisades. Jennings was accompanied by his Mexican boyfriend Ben Baz, a commercial artist, and also by another man with whom Baz was then friendly, Bill Bailey. While they were at Sneden’s Landing, Isherwood and Caskey visited the Chilean-born surrealist painter, Roberto Sebastián Matta Echaurren and his wife. Matta Echaurren mentioned some homosexual experiences he had had, and Caskey responded angrily, causing a fierce argument.
July and August 1947 were a continual progress from one summer community to another: visits to W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman on Fire Island; to Truman Capote and his companion Newton Arvin on Nantucket; to Paul Cadmus in Provincetown with a group of New York friends (including George Tooker, Cadmus’s boyfriend of the period; the painter Jared French whom Cadmus had lived with before French married in 1937; Sandy Campbell, also a former lover of Cadmus; and Donald Windham). At the beginning of August, Caskey and Isherwood attended a celebrity-studded party in New York (Garbo and Noël Coward were among the guests), hosted by “Horst,” the German-born fashion photographer who was the protégé of George Hoyningen-Huene. And they went on several expeditions with Lincoln Kirstein. Kirstein was then trying to revive the reputation of the sculptor Elie Nadelman and was a force behind the Nadelman retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948, for which he wrote the catalogue essay. He took them to see some sculptures by Nadelman, and he also took them to Washington D.C. to see a collection of art works confiscated in Germany by the U.S. government and brought to America in secret. Kirstein had special access to the 22,000-odd cultural treasures which had been hidden in a salt mine for safety during the war. Eventually they were exhibited around the country, and then returned to Germany. Stephen Spender was teaching at Sarah Lawrence, in Bronxville, New York, and Isherwood and Caskey also visited him in Fairfield, Connecticut, not far from the college.
In September 1947, Isherwood and Caskey left for South America together. On the way, Isherwood once again began to record his life in detail, and his diary of their South American trip was published as a travel book, The Condor and the Cows (1949), with photographs by Caskey. The journey began by ship, from New York to La Guaira, Venezuela, at the northern end of the continent; then they voyaged west to Cartagena, Colombia. From Cartagena they went overland via Bogotá and with many other stopovers to Quito in Ecuador, then continued down near the western coast to Lima, Machu Picchu, and Lake Titicaca in Peru, across the southwest corner of Bolivia by way of La Paz and south again through Argentina to Buenos Aires.
The Condor and the Cows concludes in March 1948, and the diary printed here picks up soon after that, in April 1948, when Isherwood and Caskey were travelling onward by ship, from Argentina, by way of Montevideo, Rio, and Dakar to Le Havre in France. In Paris, Isherwood saw Denny Fouts for what proved to be the last time and met Gore Vidal for the first time. He also saw Auden there, before taking Caskey to London, where he introduced him to many friends. From London, Isherwood and Caskey went on to Wyberslegh, and in June they attended the first-ever Aldeburgh Festival, organized by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, on the Suffolk coast. Caskey wanted to photograph the English painter Graham Sutherland, so in the beginning of July he and Isherwood went to Sutherland’s house, probably with an introduction from a friend of Isherwood’s. The two of them sailed for New York together in mid-July, and Isherwood went on alone to Los Angeles to begin work on The Great Sinner. This was an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Gambler and incorporated aspects of Dostoevsky’s own life and elements from his other works. The script had already been written by the emigré Hungarian playwright, Ladislaus Fodor, and Isherwood was hired—by Gottfried Reinhardt—to refine it. (The 1949 film starred Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner and was directed by Robert Siodmak.)
By mid-August Isherwood had begun to spend time with Jim Charlton, with whom he found he could be exceedingly happy, but when Caskey returned in late September, Isherwood and Caskey moved into a little house together on East Rustic Road while Isherwood finished his MGM job for Gottfried Reinhardt. That autumn, Isherwood’s original American boyfriend, Vernon Old, got married, and Denny Fouts died in Rome of a heart attack evidently precipitated by his drug habit. These events suggest a closing cadence to Isherwood’s first decade in America. And the next few years with Caskey—1948 to 1951—were to be increasingly confused and unhappy.
The year 1949 began with Isherwood’s discovery that his books had been damaged by a flood in the cellar of James and Tania Stern’s building on East Fifty-second Street in Manhattan; he had stored them there after living in the apartment with Caskey. Meanwhile, he continued working for Gottfried Reinhardt at MGM and finished writing The Condor and the Cows during the spring. He also took up again what was to prove a long and painful struggle to write his next novel, partly based on his wartime experiences in America; his working title was The School of Tragedy, but eventually he published the book as The World in the Evening.
In early August he attended a party at Sam and Isadore From’s house where he met, among others, Evelyn Caldwell, who was researching the Los Angeles homosexual community, and a young man called Alvin Novak whom he brought home with him. Around the same time, he drafted another script with Lesser Samuels, The Easiest Thing in the World, and one day at lunch with Aldous and Maria Huxley, he met Igor and Vera Stravinsky and Stravinsky’s colleague—who lived with them and accompanied them everywhere—Robert Craft. Also in August, George Bradshaw, a screenwriter, involved Isherwood in a project to encourage paraplegic and quadriplegic veterans to write stories and articles with advice from professional writers. This took place at Birmingham Hospital, in the San Fernando Valley, then an armed services hospital for veterans.
Isherwood’s diary entries are intermittent at best from April 1948 until the early 1950s. His life with Caskey was unsettled, sometimes turbulent, and Caskey’s coming and goings are not all accounted for in the record Isherwood kept during their years together. Through 1949, other young men appear in Isherwood’s life with increasing frequency. He became interested in Russ Zeininger in August, and when Caskey left town in mid-November, Isherwood again spent time with Jim Charlton. Caskey went east to Florida and was away five months, returning in April 1950 by way of Kentucky. Meanwhile, in December 1949, Isherwood and Charlton were caught together in a raid on the Variety, a gay bar on the Pacific Coast Highway. About a week later, another new friend, an English professor, Don Coombs, spent the night, and before the end of the year, a slightly more serious romance had begun with a very young man, Michael Leopold. As his relationship with Caskey grew more strained, Isherwood’s diary keeping became more regular.
Caskey returned to Rustic Road in April 1950, and that December the pair moved together to South Laguna, on the coast below Los Angeles. But their lives were increasingly in conflict, with Isherwood professing that he wanted a settled domestic routine which would permit him to work steadily in the daytime, and Caskey preferring to drink and have spontaneous parties, friends, and loud music on the record player. Several of Isherwood’s friends—Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley, and the Swami—admonished Isherwood about his way of life; the drinking and promiscuity could not be blamed entirely on Caskey’s influence. In May 1951, Isherwood left Caskey and went to stay at the Huntington Hartford Foundation, north of Los Angeles, where he felt he could work. By August, he was back in Laguna, but only briefly; he left Caskey for good in late summer, going back to the Huntington Hartford Foundation and then east in November for the opening o
f I Am a Camera, which was to make him famous well beyond his literary audience. The play was adapted by John van Druten from Goodbye to Berlin at the suggestion of Dodie Smith and her husband Alec Beesley, and it effected a kind of preliminary rescue for Isherwood from one of the most desperately undirected periods of his life. That December, Isherwood sailed for England for the third time since the war, and Caskey joined the merchant marine. Isherwood had a semi-serious affair with Sam Costidy in the spring of 1952, but the next time he returned to California, in mid-April 1952, he lived briefly at Trabuco, southeast of Los Angeles, then in an apartment in Santa Monica, and finally settled down alone in Evelyn Caldwell Hooker’s garden house, which his architect friend, Jim Charlton, remodelled for him.
He drove to Mexico with Caskey in November, but in January 1953, Caskey shipped out again in the merchant marine and a month later, Isherwood became involved with Don Bachardy, not yet nineteen, who was to become his companion for the rest of his life. Isherwood and Bachardy rapidly established the home life and routine which Isherwood had long craved, and while their relationship was to produce its own drama, Isherwood wrote with increasing regularity in his diary and he never again abandoned the practice altogether until 1983, just a few years before his death.
During the late 1940s, when Isherwood was not writing much in his diary, he did maintain his lifelong habit of recording appointments and some important events in a pocket date book. Around 1955 or soon after, he used his pocket date books to make an outline of what had happened in his life during what he considered to be the missing years: 1945 through 1949. The outline, written inside the front cover and front free endpapers of Isherwood’s 1945–1956 diary, is included here as a preamble to the 1945–1956 diary entries. Parts of the outline are cryptic, but many events that occurred in 1948 and 1949 are expanded upon and illuminated in Isherwood’s few diary entries for the same years. Other important or obscure episodes I have tried to elucidate in the paragraphs above. A few more details are explained or reiterated in footnotes, and a glance at the chronology of Isherwood’s life included at the back of this volume should clarify any uncertainties about the sequence of events. As in other sections of this book, more information about many of the people and events referred to can be found in the glossary.]
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