Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Logan, Joshua (1908–1988). American stage and film director, producer, and playwright. Educated at Princeton, where he headed the theatrical Triangle Club, Logan afterwards organized The University Players, including Henry Fonda, James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. In the 1930s he went to see Stanislavsky in Moscow before beginning his career as a producer in London. Usually working with others, Logan wrote, directed or produced some of the most successful ever Broadway musicals and plays, including Annie Get Your Gun (1946) and South Pacific (1949). In Hollywood he made musicals into films, and directed Bus Stop (1956), Picnic (1956), and Sayonara (1957), among others. In 1956 Logan asked Isherwood to write a script for him based on a children’s story by T. H. White, Mistress Masham’s Repose, but Isherwood didn’t like the novel and turned Logan down.

  loka. Hindu term for sphere or plane of existence.

  Loos, Anita (1891–1981). American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. Isherwood met Loos through Aldous and Maria Huxley soon after arriving in Hollywood and sometimes attended the Sunday lunches at which Loos entertained her circle of emigré friends. She created the art of silent film captions and later wrote over 200 screenplays for sound movies. An example of her profuse talent, her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925)—written solely to amuse H. L. Mencken—became a play, then a movie, then a musical comedy for stage, and finally a film of the musical comedy. By the time Huxley arrived in Hollywood, Loos was the doyenne of screenwriting. He had previously introduced himself to her in New York and she launched him in studio writing. She also introduced him socially, and it was through Loos that Huxley met Salka Viertel. In addition to her many successful plays and films, she wrote several volumes of autobiography in which Isherwood is occasionally mentioned.

  Lord, Bart. Amateur actor. A boyfriend of Ted Bachardy with whom Ted lived for a few years during the 1950s. Lord is an avid movie and show-business fan. He and Ted fell out of touch as a result of Ted’s mental breakdowns.

  Löwenstein, Prince Hubertus zu (1906–1984). German liberal-Catholic historian. Löwenstein was an early proponent (like Harold Nicolson) of a European Economic Community which would incorporate Germany into a new European order and stop Hitler’s rise. Expatriated by Hitler in 1934 for writing an “anti-German” book, he worked as a journalist and academic in England and then the U.S. He was a founder of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the German Academy of Arts and Sciences in Exile which included Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, and other prominent artists and intellectuals. By late 1939, when Isherwood refers to him, Löwenstein was trying to enlist support for a Provisional Government of the German Republic, and to raise a German legion to fight under a red, gold and black flag against the Nazis. He lectured widely on his plans for postwar reconstruction and argued against the total destruction of Germany, on the view that annihilation would prepare the ground for a third world war. This view ultimately caused some refugee Germans to break with him, for instance, Thomas and Klaus Mann.

  Luhan, Mabel Dodge (1879–1962). American writer, patron, salon hostess; married four times. Her four volumes of memoirs, begun in 1924, were published during the 1930s and were greatly admired by D. H. Lawrence, who was both attracted and repelled by her. Born in Buffalo, New York, to great wealth, she was sent to Europe in 1901 to recover from a nervous breakdown. She lived in a Medici Villa in Florence, wore Renaissance dress, had lovers, befriended Gertrude Stein, and entertained lavishly. In 1912 she returned to New York where she set up her famous salon at 23 Fifth Avenue, and had an affair with the radical journalist John Reed (Ten Days That Shook the World). Next she moved to Taos, New Mexico where she met Tony Luhan, a Pueblo Indian whom she married in 1923. The Indian way of life became her religion, and she believed that she and her husband were Messiahs by whose leadership white civilization would be culturally and spiritually redeemed. She brought others to Taos to celebrate her new way of life, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Leopold Stokowski, the sociologist John Collier, and Lawrence. During the 1920s and 1930s she worked for land reform, self-determination, and medical benefits for the Indians.

  Lynes, George Platt (1907–1955). American photographer. Lynes first photographed W. H. Auden and Isherwood during their brief visit to New York in 1938. In the spring of 1946 he photographed Isherwood again and encouraged Bill Caskey in his efforts to become a professional photographer. Later, in 1953, Lynes photographed Bachardy. Lynes made his living from advertising and fashion photography as well as portraits (his work appeared in Town and Country, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue), but he is also known for his photographs of the ballet, male nudes, and surrealistic still lifes; he did many portraits of film stars and writers.

  M. Isherwood’s mother. He called her “Mummy” and began letters to her with “My Darling Mummy,” and later, “Dearest Mummy,” but he invariably wrote “M.” in his diaries. See also Isherwood, Kathleen. A few times in his diaries Isherwood uses “M.” for Mahendranath Gupta, the schoolmaster who became Ramakrishna’s disciple and recorded Ramakrishna’s conversations and sayings in his diaries, later compiling them in Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita or The Gospel of Ramakrishna; all such uses of “M.” for Mahendranath Gupta are pointed out in footnotes.

  MacDonald, Madge. British nurse. MacDonald worked at UCLA Hospital during the 1950s and attended Isherwood and Bachardy at home when they had hepatitis in 1956.

  MacKenna, Kenneth (Ken) (1899–1962). American actor; he occasionally directed films and became a longtime producer at MGM. He was married to the actress Mary Philips who appeared in films in the 1940s. Isherwood met him in 1941 when MacKenna was head of the story department at MGM.

  Macklem, Francesca (Jill). Secretary to Fred Shroyer at Los Angeles State College. Isherwood became friendly with her in 1959 when he began teaching there. Macklem had a life-threatening heart condition. She was married three times, the third time to her first husband, Les Macklem, again; they had two children.

  MacNeice, Louis (1907–1963). English poet, born in Belfast. MacNeice was an undergraduate at Oxford with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender and collaborated with Auden on Letters from Iceland (1937). He worked as a university lecturer in classics and later for the BBC as a writer and producer while publishing numerous volumes of verse, verse translation, autobiography, and plays for radio and stage.

  Maharaj. See Brahmananda, Swami.

  Mahamaya. In Hindu belief, the Mother of the Universe. She has two oppposed impulses: she conceals Brahman from man because she makes its single reality appear as the manifold universe, and yet through her grace man can overcome his ignorance, discover Brahman, and realize his oneness with it.

  Mangeot, Olive. English wife of the Belgian violinist André Mangeot; mother of Sylvain and Fowke Mangeot. Isherwood met the Mangeots in 1925 and worked for a year as part-time secretary to André Mangeot’s string quartet which was organized from the family home in Chelsea. The Mangeots’ warm and chaotic household offered an irresistible contrast to the cool formality of Isherwood’s own, and Olive, energetic but easy-going, was an attractive rival to Kathleen in the role of mother. Isherwood brought all his friends to meet Olive when he was in London. She is the original of “Madame Cheuret” in Lions and Shadows and Isherwood drew on different parts of her personality for the characters “Margaret Lanwin” and “Mary Scriven” in The Memorial. She had an affair with Edward Upward and through his influence became a communist. Later she separated from her husband and for a time shared a house with Jean Ross and her daughter in Cheltenham.

  Mangeot, Sylvain (1913–1978). Younger son of Olive and André Mangeot. Isherwood’s friend, Eric Falk, initially introduced Isherwood to the Mangeot family because Sylvain, at age eleven, had a bicycle accident which confined him to a wheelchair for a time, and Isherwood had a car in which he could take Sylvain for outings. They grew to know each other well during the time that Isherwood worked for Sylvain’s father, and together they made a little book, People One Ought to Know, for which Isherwood wrote nonsense verses to accompany Sylvain�
�s animal paintings (the little book was eventually published in 1982, but one pair of verses appeared earlier as “The Common Cormorant” in W. H. Auden’s 1938 anthology The Poet’s Tongue). Sylvain is portrayed as “Edouard” in Lions and Shadows. Later he joined the Foreign Office and then became a journalist, working as a diplomatic correspondent, an editor, and an overseas radio commentator for the BBC.

  Mann, Erika (1905–1969). German actress and author; eldest daughter of Thomas Mann. Isherwood first met Erika Mann in the spring of 1935 in Amsterdam through her brother Klaus; she had fled Germany in March 1933. Her touring satirical revue, “The Peppermill” (for which she wrote most of the anti-Nazi material), earned her the status of official enemy of the Reich and she asked Isherwood to marry her and provide her with a British passport. He felt he could not, but contacted W. H. Auden who instantly agreed. The two met and married in England on June 15, 1935, the very day Goebbels revoked Mann’s German citizenship. In September 1936, Erika emigrated to America with Klaus and unsuccessfully tried to reopen “The Peppermill” in New York. As the war approached, she lectured widely in the USA and wrote anti-Nazi books, two with Klaus, trying to revive sympathy for the non-Nazi Germany silenced by Hitler.

  Mann, Gottfried (Golo) (1909–1994). German historian, writer, publicist; Gottfried Mann was the third child of Thomas Mann and Katja Pringsheim. He trained as an academic, emigrated in 1933, and in 1940 escaped to the USA from internment in France. He taught history at several California colleges during the 1940s and 1950s, then returned to Germany as a Professor of Political Science in 1960. He is the author in German of a substantial work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history and has written many other historical and political works which demonstrate a continuing preoccupation with literature. He is also editor of and contributor to a German language ten-volume history of the world.

  Mann, Klaus (1906–1949). German novelist and editor; Heinrich Klaus Mann was the eldest son of Thomas Mann. Isherwood became friendly with him in Berlin in the summer of 1931. By then Klaus had written and acted with his sister, Erika, in the plays which launched her acting career, and he had published several novels in German (a few appeared in English translations) and worked as a drama critic. Klaus travelled extensively and lived in various European cities even before he left Germany for good in 1933; he emigrated to America in 1936 when his family settled in Princeton. He lived in New York, continued to travel to Europe as a journalist, and eventually settled for a time in Santa Monica. He became a U.S. citizen and served in the U.S. army during the war. He founded the magazine Die Sammlung (The Collection) in Amsterdam in 1933, and later he founded another magazine, Decision, which first appeared in New York in December 1940 and was forced by the war to close in January 1942. He wrote his second volume of autobiography, The Turning Point (1942), in English. When Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941, Klaus helped Isherwood to end a long dry period by persuading him to write a memorial about her for Decision; Klaus committed suicide eight years later in Cannes and Isherwood then wrote a reminiscence about him for a memorial volume published in Amsterdam in 1950, Klaus Mann—zum Gedaechtnis. Both reminiscences—of Woolf and Klaus Mann—were later reprinted in Exhumations.

  Mann, Thomas (1875–1955). German novelist and essayist; awarded the Nobel Prize in 1929. Mann was patriarch of a large and talented literary family; he and his wife Katja Pringsheim Mann (daughter of a mathematics professor and Wagner expert) had six children. Thomas Mann’s own novels and stories are among the greatest German literature of this century. They include Buddenbrooks (1901), Tonio Kröger (1903), Death in Venice (1912), The Magic Mountain (1924), Doktor Faustus (1947), and The Confessions of the Confidence Trickster Felix Krull (1954). Mann lectured in support of the Weimar Republic both in Germany and abroad during the 1920s, and he publicly dissociated himself from the Nazi regime in 1936, taking Czech citizenship (though he had already remained in Switzerland since a 1933 holiday). Isherwood first met Mann in Princeton where Mann was a visiting professor after his flight from the Nazi regime. Then in 1941, Mann moved with his family to Pacific Palisades and became part of the circle of German emigrés and artists in which Isherwood sometimes moved. Later the Manns returned to Switzerland.

  mantram or mantra. A Sanskrit word or words which the guru tells his disciple when initiating him into the spiritual life, and which is the essence of the guru’s teaching to this particular disciple. The mantram is a name for God and usually includes the word Om; the disciple must keep the mantram secret and meditate for the rest of his life on the aspect of God which the formula represents. Repeating the mantram (making japam) purifies the mind and leads to the realization of God. With the mantram, the guru often gives a rosary—as Swami Prabhavananda gave Isherwood—on which the disciple may count the number of times he repeats his mantram.

  Marguerite, also Marguerite Brown, later Marguerite Harrity. See Lamkin, Marguerite.

  Maria. See Huxley, Maria Nys.

  Marmorston, Jessie. American endocrinologist. Her husband was Larry Weingarten, a friend of Eddie Knopf, and Isherwood met her at a dinner party in 1954, through Knopf. She gave Isherwood vitamin and hormone shots and became a permanent medical adviser to him and a close friend. She was especially important during his depressive phase in 1957.

  Marple Hall. The Bradshaw Isherwood family seat; see entries for Frank Bradshaw Isherwood, Henry Bradshaw Isherwood, and Richard Bradshaw Isherwood.

  Martinez, José (Pete). Mexican ballet dancer; his real name was Pete Stefan. Isherwood first met Martinez through Lincoln Kirstein in 1939. In 1942, Martinez worked with Isherwood at the AFSC refugee hostel in Haverford, Pennsylvania, while waiting to be drafted into the army. His family moved from Texas to Long Beach soon afterwards, and Isherwood saw him in Long Beach in 1943. Afterwards they met occasionally in New York and California. When the war was over, Martinez worked as a dance instructor.

  Masocco, Mirandi. Proprietress of the Thunderbird, a jewelry shop in Santa Fe. Masocco was a close friend of the Stravinskys for many years. She later married the film and television director Ralph Levy.

  Masselink, Ben. American writer. Probably Isherwood and Bill Caskey met Ben Masselink with his longtime companion, Jo Lathwood, in the Friendship Bar in Santa Monica; Isherwood first mentions Ben and Jo in 1949, and they became his closest heterosexual friends. During the war, Masselink was in the marines; one night on leave, he got drunk in the Friendship and Jo Lathwood took him to her apartment nearby and looked after him. When the war was over he went back to her and stayed for twenty years. Isherwood alludes to this meeting in his description of The Starboard Side in A Single Man. Although they never married, Jo took Ben’s surname, and Isherwood usually refers to them as the Masselinks. Masselink had studied architecture, and Isherwood helped him with his writing career during the 1950s. Masselink’s first book of stories, Partly Submerged, was published in 1957. He then published several novels: two about his war experience—The Crackerjack Marines (1959) and The Deadliest Weapon (1965), the second of which Isherwood greatly admired—and The Danger Islands (1964), for teenage boys. Masselink also wrote for television throughout the 1950s and in 1960 worked at Warner Brothers on the script for a film of The Crackerjack Marines. In 1967, when Lathwood was in her late sixties, Masselink left her for a younger woman, Dee Hawes, the wife of their friend, Bill Hawes.

  Masselink, Eugene. American artist and architect. A longtime associate of Frank Lloyd Wright. He helped Wright to run Taliesin and Taliesin West. Eugene Masselink was the elder brother of Ben Masselink.

  Masselink, Jo (c. 1900–1988). Women’s sportswear and bathing suit designer, from Northville, South Dakota; among her clientele were movie stars such as Janet Gaynor and Anne Baxter. Previously she had worked as a dancer and was briefly married to a man called Jack Lathwood; she kept his name professionally. She had a son and daughter with a North Dakotan, Ferdinand Hinchberger. From 1938 onwards she lived in an apartment on West Channel Road, a few doors from the
Friendship Bar, and by the late 1940s she knew many of Isherwood’s friends who frequented the bar—including Bill Caskey, Jay de Laval, and Jim Charlton. She never married Ben Masselink, though she lived with him for twenty years and used his surname. She felt a special sympathy with Isherwood in his involvement with the much younger Bachardy, because Masselink was twenty years her junior.

  Matthew. See Huxley, Matthew.

  Maugham, William Somerset (Willie) (1874–1965). British playwright and novelist. Maugham married Syrie Wellcome in 1911, and they had one daughter, Liza, but Maugham’s usual companion was Gerald Haxton, eighteen years younger, whom he met in 1914 working in an ambulance unit in Flanders. Maugham and Haxton travelled a great deal, and in 1926 Maugham bought the Villa Mauresque at Cap Ferrat where they entertained. Haxton died in 1944 and Maugham’s subsequent companion and heir was Alan Searle. Isherwood met Maugham in London in the late 1930s and saw him whenever Maugham visited Hollywood, where many of Maugham’s works were filmed. Isherwood also made several visits to Maugham’s house in France. In 1945, Isherwood worked for Wolfgang Reinhardt on a screenplay for Maugham’s 1941 novel Up at the Villa (never made), and he enlisted Swami Prabhavananda to advise Maugham on the screenplay for The Razor’s Edge (1944). Swami and Maugham met in June 1945 at The Players Restaurant on Sunset Strip and later discussions also included George Cukor, but the film was finally directed by Edmund Goulding, and the script was not by Maugham but by Lamarr Trotti. Despite their advice, Prabhavananda and Isherwood felt that the Indian scenes had mistakes and that the teachings of Shri Ganesha (the fictional holy man in Maugham’s novel) were wrongly presented. Later, in 1956, Isherwood and Swami again helped Maugham with his essay “The Saint,” about Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950), the Indian holy man Maugham had met in 1936 and on whom he had modelled Shri Ganesha. “The Saint” was published in Maugham’s Points of View (1958).