Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Hoover, Bob. A lover of Ted Bachardy during the mid-1950s, and afterwards a loyal friend, occasionally helping him financially. Hoover worked as a travel agent. His main interest is movie-going.

  Hope, also Hope Murray. See Lange, Hope.

  Hopper, Richard (Dick). American dress designer. Hopper was a classmate of Bachardy at the Chouinard Art Institute in the 1950s. Afterwards he worked with the celebrated Hollywood dress designer, Edith Head, who won numerous Academy Awards for her costuming.

  Howard, also Tinker. See Austen, Howard.

  Hoyningen-Huene, George (1900–1968). Russian born photographer. Hoynin-gen-Huene was the son of an American diplomat’s daughter and a Baltic baron who had been chief equerry to Tsar Nicholas II. By the end of World War I he was an exile in Paris, where he studied art and sold drawings to a fashion magazine. Eventually he became a regular photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, and, after 1936, for Harper’s Bazaar. He also published a number of books containing his photographs of Greece, Egypt, North Africa, and Mexico. After the war, Hoyningen-Huene settled in Hollywood where he taught photography and was color consultant on many films for his longtime friend George Cukor. He also made several amateur documentaries (16mm, about twenty minutes long), which Isherwood describes in his diary. Isherwood met Hoyningen-Huene in the late 1940s or early 1950s, through Gerald Heard and the Huxleys.

  homa fire. Prepared according to scriptural instructions, the homa fire is considered to be a visible manifestation of the deity worshipped. Offerings to the deity are placed in the fire. The homa ritual aims at inner purification and, at the end of it, the devotee mentally offers his words, thoughts, actions and their fruits, to the deity.

  Howard, Brian (1905–1958). English poet and aesthete of American parentage; an outspoken anti-fascist. Howard was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where W. H. Auden became friends with him. He was exceedingly dissolute, a heavy drinker and a drug user, and never lived up to his promise as a writer. Evelyn Waugh’s character Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags is modelled on Howard, and Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited is also partly inspired by him. Howard lived a vagrant’s life, moving from place to place in Europe, and was often in Paris. Isherwood met him in Amsterdam in 1936, during the period when each of them was trying to find a country where he could live with his German boyfriend—Howard’s boyfriend was a Bavarian called Anton Altmann (Toni). Howard was an RAF aircraftman during the war. He committed suicide with a drug overdose.

  Hoyt, Karl. A close friend of Chris Wood during the early 1940s. Like Wood, Hoyt was wealthy. He was drafted into the army during World War II and afterwards settled in a Bel Air mansion. He had a relationship with the dancer Nicky Nadeau during the late 1940s.

  Huene, George. See Hoynigen-Huene, George.

  Hunter, Allan and Elizabeth. He was a Congregational minister and a close associate of Gerald Heard with whom Heard continually met and conversed about spiritual matters. Hunter’s church was the main Christian focal point of Heard’s California milieu. Isherwood met Hunter at a conference organized by Heard in 1940, and the Hunters participated in the La Verne seminar in 1941, when Isherwood came to have great respect for Elizabeth Hunter. The Hunters had a son and a daughter. Allan Hunter was the author of Secretly Armed, in which he included the story of the pacifist Pat Lloyd, also at the La Verne seminar. In Hunter’s version, the Lloyd character is called “Mike,” and he is actually court-martialled and sentenced to be shot before he comes up with the proposal that he act as a soldier in every way apart from firing a loaded weapon (see the chapter “Safety First”).

  Huntington Hartford Foundation, The. Funded by the A&P grocery stores multi-millionaire, Huntington Hartford, the foundation was on a large plot of land in Rustic Canyon in Pacific Palisades, north of Sunset Boulevard. In addition to the existing ranch house, Hartford built several cottages on the surrounding acreage in order to offer artists, writers, and musicians a place to live and work for up to three months. The foundation began in 1949; by 1951, there were 150 people there. Frank Taylor, a trustee of the foundation, took Isherwood to see Hartford in July 1950, pressing Isherwood to become a trustee as well. Speed Lamkin was also on the board, along with Robert Penn Warren and others; their job was to give away three-month fellowships for young writers. Isherwood never respected Hartford and found the management of the foundation inefficient and too easily swayed by gossip and favoritism; he resigned in 1952 when a resident writer was ousted from his fellowship for having an unauthorized overnight guest.

  Huxley, Aldous (1894–1963). English novelist and utopian. Not long after he arrived in Los Angeles, Isherwood was introduced to Huxley by Gerald Heard. Huxley was then writing screenplays for MGM for a large weekly salary, and he and Isherwood later collaborated on several film projects. Like Heard, Huxley was a disciple of Prabhavananda, but subsequently he became close to Krishnamurti, the one-time Messiah of the Theosophical movement. Huxley was educated at Eton and Oxford, a grandson of Thomas Huxley and brother of Julian Huxley, both prominent scientists. In youth he published poetry, short stories, and satirical novels such as Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923) about London’s literary bohemia and Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor where Huxley lived and worked during World War I. He lived abroad in Italy and France during the 1920s and 1930s, part of the time with D. H. Lawrence—who appears in his Point Counter Point (1928)—and Lawrence’s wife, Frieda. In 1932 he published Brave New World, for which he is most famous, and Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology with Commentaries; his last novel written in England is Eyeless in Gaza (1936).

  An ardent pacifist, Huxley joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1935, but became disillusioned as Europe moved towards war. His Ends and Means (1937) was regarded as a basic book for pacifists. In April 1937 he sailed for America with his first wife, Maria, and their adolescent son, accompanied by his friend Gerald Heard and by Chris Wood. After spending the summer at Frieda Lawrence’s ranch in Taos, Huxley’s plans to return to Europe fell through when a screenplay was accepted in Hollywood and he became ill there and convalesced for nearly a year. He was denied U.S. citizenship on grounds of his extreme pacifism. California benefitted his health and eyesight—he had been nearly blind since an adolescent illness. After Many a Summer (1939) is set in Los Angeles, and Huxley wrote many other books during the period that Isherwood knew him best, including Grey Eminence (1941), Time Must Have a Stop (1944), The Devils of Loudun (1952), and The Genius and the Goddess (1956).

  Huxley’s study of Vedanta was part of a larger interest in mysticism and parapsychology, and beginning in the early 1950s he experimented with mescaline, LSD, and psilocybin, experiences which he wrote about in The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956). In 1961 the house he shared with his second wife, Laura, was consumed in a brush fire. Apart from the novel he was completing at the time, Island (1962), all his books and papers were lost. Huxley and Isherwood planned two screenplays together: Jacob’s Hands, about an animal healer, and Below the Equator (later called Below the Horizon), which they worked on in 1949–1950. In 1960 Huxley found a malignant tumor on his tongue but refused surgery in favor of less radical treatment; eventually the cancer killed him.

  Huxley, Julian Sorel (1887–1975). English zoologist, philosopher, public servant; brother of Aldous Huxley. Isherwood met him in December 1939 when he was visiting Hollywood. Like his brother, Julian was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford; afterwards he worked primarily as an academic in Oxford, America, and London. Julian pioneered the field study of animal behavior and his contributions to evolution and genetics marked turning points in these fields. Later he became concerned with over-population and conservation; he was the first director-general of UNESCO in 1946 and helped to set up the World Wildlife Fund and similar organizations. He published many books and monographs, and was an influential popularizer of science.

  Huxley, Laura Archera. Italian second wife of Aldous Huxley. Isherwood first met her in the spring of
1956 at the Stravinskys’ after she and Huxley married secretly in March; she was then about forty years old. Daughter of a Turin stock-broker, Laura Archera had been a concert violinist since adolescence, then worked briefly in film. She became a psychotherapist, sometimes using LSD therapy on her patients, and published two highly popular books on her psychotherapeutic techniques. Her 1963 bestseller, You Are Not the Target, was an early self-help book. She also published a children’s book and a memoir about Huxley, This Timeless Moment. She first befriended Aldous and Maria Huxley in 1948 and used her special method of therapy on Huxley to help him recapture lost parts of his childhood. He incorporated some of her psychotherapy results into his utopia novel, Island. After Huxley’s death, Laura Huxley continued to live in the Hollywood Hills and eventually became a children’s rights campaigner.

  Huxley, Maria Nys (1898–1955). Belgian first wife of Aldous Huxley. Isherwood met her in the summer of 1939 soon after he arrived in Los Angeles. Maria Nys was the eldest daughter of a prosperous textile merchant ruined in World War I. Her mother’s family included artists and intellectuals, and her childhood was pampered, multi-lingual, and devoutly Catholic. She met Huxley at Garsington Manor where she lived as a refugee during World War I; they married in Belgium in 1919 and their only child, Matthew, was born in 1920. Before her marriage, Maria showed promise as a dancer and trained briefly with Nijinsky, but her health was too frail for a professional career. She had little formal education and devoted herself to Huxley and to his career. Her premature death resulted from cancer. According to Huxley, she was a natural mystic and had “pre-mystical” experiences in the desert in California in the 1940s.

  Huxley, Matthew (b. 1920). British-born son of Aldous and Maria Huxley. Matthew Huxley was brought to America in adolescence and Isherwood met him in Santa Monica in 1939. He attended the University of Colorado with the intention of becoming a doctor, served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II, and was invalided out of the army in 1943. He worked briefly as a reader at Warner Brothers, and as a militant socialist he was involved in a strike there in 1945. During the same year he became a U.S. citizen. He took a degree from Berkeley in 1947 and later studied public health at Harvard. This became his career, and for many years he worked at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C. He also published a book about Peru, Farewell to Eden (1965). He married three times, and had two children with his first wife. In The World in the Evening, Isherwood used the books in Matthew Huxley’s room in his parents’ house in Llano—recorded in Isherwood’s diary February 17, 1944—together with some fictional volumes by “Elizabeth Rydal” and a few others by real authors, to make up a revealing shelf of books belonging to the doctor, Charles Kennedy (part three, chapter one).

  Hyndman, Tony. Stephen Spender’s companion in the early 1930s. Hyndman, from Wales, had run away from home at eighteen and joined the army. Spender hired him as secretary, and they shared Spender’s Maida Vale flat and travelled together. He appears as “Jimmy Younger” in Spender’s World Within World. Spender, Hyndman, Isherwood and Heinz Neddermeyer shared a house in Sintra, Portugal in the winter of 1935–1936; in the autumn Spender and Hyndman parted ways. Hyndman became a communist, joined the International Brigade, and went to fight in the Spanish Civil War where he was greatly disillusioned and became a pacifist. He deserted and was imprisoned, but eventually Spender, who had followed him out to Spain, obtained his release.

  Igor. See Stravinsky, Igor.

  Inge, William (Bill) (1913–1973). American playwright. Inge received critical acclaim for his first play, Come Back Little Sheba (1950), and won a Pultizer Prize and two Drama Critics Awards for Picnic (1953). After Bus Stop (1955) and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), however, his work was less successful. He was depressive, turned to alcohol and eventually committed suicide. Isherwood and Bachardy first met Inge in New York in 1953 during the original run of Picnic; later, in the 1960s Inge moved to Los Angeles and they saw him there.

  Iris. See Tree, Iris.

  Isherwood, Frank Bradshaw (1869–1915). Isherwood’s father. Frank was the second son of John Bradshaw Isherwood, squire of Marple Hall, Cheshire, outside Stockport, near Manchester. He was educated at Sandhurst and commissioned in his father’s old regiment, the York and Lancasters, in 1892 when he was twenty-three years old. He left for the Boer War in December 1899, caught typhoid, recovered, and served a second tour. In 1902 he left his regiment and became adjutant to the Fourth Volunteer Battalion of the Cheshire Regiment, based locally, in order to be able to offer his wife a home despite his meager income. He married Kathleen Machell Smith in 1903 and they settled for a time in a fifteenth-century manor house, Wyberslegh Hall, which was part of the Bradshaw Isherwood family estate. In 1908 Frank rejoined his regiment and the family, now including Christopher, moved several times, following the regiment; in 1911 a second son, Richard, was born and they went to Limerick, Ireland, early the following year. Frank was sent from Limerick via England to the front line almost as soon as war was declared in the summer of 1914, and he was killed probably the night of May 8, 1915 in the second battle of Ypres in Flanders, although the exact circumstances of his death are unknown. He had achieved the rank of colonel when he died. Isherwood felt that Frank had not been temperamentally suited to the life of a professional soldier, though he was dutiful and efficient. He was a gifted water-colorist, an excellent pianist, and he liked to sing and take part in amateur theatricals. He was also a reader and a story-teller. He was shy and sensitive, but good-looking in a mild way and a keen and agile sportsman. He was conservative in taste, in values, and in politics, but, unlike Kathleen, he was agnostic in religion and was attracted to theosophy and Buddhism. Isherwood wrote about his father in Kathleen and Frank.

  Isherwood, Henry Bradshaw. Isherwood’s uncle and his father’s elder brother. In 1924, Uncle Henry inherited Marple Hall and the family estates on the death of Isherwood’s grandfather, John Bradshaw Isherwood. Though he married late in life (changing his name to Bradshaw-Isherwood-Bagshawe in honor of his wife), Uncle Henry had no children; Isherwood was his heir, and for a time after Isherwood’s twenty-first birthday he received a quarterly allowance from his uncle. The two had an honest if self-interested friendship, occasionally dining together and sharing intimate details of their personal lives. When Uncle Henry died in 1940, Isherwood at once passed on the entire inheritance to his own younger brother, Richard Isherwood.

  Isherwood, Kathleen Bradshaw (1868–1960). Isherwood’s mother. The only child of Frederick Machell Smith, a successful wine merchant, and Emily Greene, Kathleen was born and lived until sixteen in Bury St. Edmunds, then moved with her parents to London. She travelled abroad, mostly with her mother, and helped her mother to write a guidebook for walkers, Our Rambles in Old London (1895). She married Frank Isherwood in 1903 when she was thirty-five years old. They had two sons, Isherwood, and his much younger brother, Richard. Kathleen was told her husband was missing after the second battle of Ypres in May 1915, but it was many months before his death was officially confirmed, and even then she could obtain no definite information about how he died. Isherwood’s portrait of her in Kathleen and Frank is partly based on her own letters and diaries (he regarded the latter as her masterpiece), but heavily shaped by his attitude towards her. She was also the original for the fictional character “Lily” in The Memorial. Like many mothers of her class and era, Kathleen consigned her sons to the care of a nanny from infancy and later sent Isherwood to boarding school. Her husband’s death affected her profoundly, which Isherwood sensed and resented from an early age. Their relationship was intensely fraught yet formal, intimate by emotional intuition rather than by shared confidence. Like her husband, Kathleen was a talented amateur painter. She was intelligent, forceful, handsome, dignified, and capable of great charm. Isherwood felt she was obsessed by class distinctions and propriety. As the surviving figure of authority in his family, she epitomized everything against which he wished to rebel. Her i
ntellectual aspirations were narrow and traditional, despite her intelligence, and she seemed to him increasingly backward looking. Nonetheless, she was utterly loyal to both of her notably unconventional sons and, as Isherwood himself recognized, she shared many qualities with him.

  Isherwood, Richard Graham Bradshaw (1911–1979). Christopher Isherwood’s brother and his only sibling. Younger by seven years, Richard Isherwood was also backward in life. He was reluctant to be educated, and never held a job in adulthood, although he did wartime national service as a farmworker at Wyberslegh and at another farm nearby, Dan Bank. In childhood Richard saw little of his elder brother who was sent to boarding school by the time Richard was three. Both boys were close to their nanny, Annie Avis, and spent more time with her than with their mother. Richard later felt that Nanny had made a favorite of Isherwood and made Richard himself nervous and perhaps was even cruel to him. When Richard started school as a day boy at Berkhamsted in 1919, he lodged in the town with Nanny, and his mother visited only at weekends. Isherwood by then was at Repton. The two brothers became closer during Richard’s adolescence, when Isherwood was sometimes at home in London, and Isherwood took his brother’s side against their mother’s efforts to advance Richard’s education and settle him in a career—once even calling upon his Berlin friend John Layard to intervene with Kathleen on Richard’s behalf. During this period Richard met some of Isherwood’s other friends as well and even helped Isherwood with his work by taking dictation. Richard was homosexual, and his brother may have been helpful to him in this respect, but he seems to have had little opportunity to develop any long-term relationships, hampered as he was by his mother’s scrutiny and his own shyness. In 1941, Richard returned permanently with his mother and Nanny to Wyberslegh—signed over to him by Isherwood with the Marple Estate—where he lived with them more and more as an eccentric semi-recluse. Nanny died in 1948, and after Kathleen Isherwood’s death twelve years later, Richard depended upon a local family, the Bradleys. He had become friends with Alan Bradley after the war when Bradley was working at Wyberslegh Farm, and Bradley and his wife, Edna, cared for Richard when Kathleen died. Later, Bradley’s brother, Dan Bradley, took over the role with his wife, Evelyn (Richard referred to them as the Dans). Richard was by then a heavy drinker. Marple Hall fell into ruin and became dangerous, and Richard was forced to hand it over to the local council which demolished it in 1959, building houses and a school on the grounds. He lived in one of several new houses built beside Wyberslegh, with the Dans in a similar new house next door, and when Richard died he left most of the contents of his house to the Dans and the house itself to their daughter and son-in-law. Richard’s will also provided for money bequests to the Dans, Alan Bradley, and other local friends. Family property and other money was left to Isherwood and to a cousin, Thomas Isherwood, but Isherwood refused the property and passed his share of money to the Dans.