The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  House Un-American Activities Committee. A four-member subcommittee of the anti-communist HUAC held hearings in Los Angeles in April 1962, and the hearings were heavily picketed. On the second day, a handful of supporters of the HUAC marched against the picket. As Isherwood records in his diary on April 27, one of his students compared the scene to the stand-off at Little Rock Central High School in September 1957, when nine black students, testing the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling against segregation in schools, tried to attend the previously all-white school. They were turned back day after day in front of a threatening mob of about 1,000 white antidesegregationists.

  Howard. See Austen, Howard.

  Howard, Donald (Don) (1927–1987). American literary scholar and university professor; he was born in St. Louis, raised in Boston, and educated at Tufts, Rutgers, and the University of Florida, where he wrote his dissertation on fourteenth-century English literature. He published books on Langland, the Gawain poet, and most notably on Chaucer, and he also wrote essays about many other aspects of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He taught at Ohio State and Johns Hopkins before becoming an associate professor at the University of California at Riverside in 1963. Afterwards he taught at UCLA and, from 1974, at Stanford. He died of AIDS.

  Hoyningen-Huene, George (1900–1968). Russian-born photographer, also known as George Huene; 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 published books containing his photo graphs of Greece, Egypt, North Africa, and Mexico. After the war, he settled in Hollywood where he taught photography and was color consultant on films for his longtime friend George Cukor. He also made several amateur documentaries. Isherwood met him in the late 1940s or early 1950s, through Gerald Heard and the Huxleys. He appears in D.1.

  Huston, John (1906–1987). American film director, screenwriter, actor. Son of actor Walter Huston and father of actress Anjelica. As a young man, he was California lightweight boxing champion, served as an officer in the Mexican cavalry, worked briefly as a reporter in New York, and lived down and out in Paris and London. He wrote a number of successful scripts in the 1930s and 1940s before his directing debut with The Maltese Falcon (1941). During World War II, he filmed documentaries in battle conditions as a member of the army signal corps and was awarded the Legion of Merit for his bravery. Afterwards, he directed many further celebrated films, including The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1947, two Academy Awards: Best Director, Best Screenplay; his father won a third: Best Supporting Actor), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The African Queen (1951), Beat the Devil (1954), The Misfits (1960), The Man Who Would be King (1975), and Prizzi’s Honor (1985). In 1952, he moved with his fourth wife, Ricki Soma, and their family to Ireland. Isherwood was friendly with Huston by 1950, possibly through the Huxleys or through Gottfried Reinhardt who produced The Red Badge of Courage. Huston appears in D.1 and Lost Years. Hutchins, Robert (1899–1977). American educator, born in New York, educated at Oberlin and Yale. He was Dean of Yale Law School while still in his twenties, President of the University of Chicago at thirty, and later Chancellor there. He was also chairman of the board of editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, an associate director of the Ford Foundation, founder and president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, and author of books on education in modern democratic society. He was a long-time friend of Aldous Huxley. Huxley, Aldous (1894–1963). English novelist and utopian; 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 he lived and worked during World War I and where he met his first wife, Maria. The Huxleys lived abroad in Italy and France during the 1920s and 1930s, partly with D.H. Lawrence—who appears in Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928)—and Lawrence’s wife, Frieda. In 1932 Huxley published Brave New World, for which he is most famous.

  An ardent pacifist, Huxley joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1935, and his Ends and Means (1937) was a basic book for pacifists. In April 1937, he sailed for America with his wife and son, accompanied by Gerald Heard and Heard’s friend Chris Wood. Plans to return to Europe fell through when he failed to sell a film scenario in Hollywood, became ill there, and convalesced for nearly a year. He was denied U.S. citizenship on grounds of his extreme pacifism. California benefited 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 there, including Grey Eminence (1941), Time Must Have a Stop (1944), The Devils of Loudun (1952), The Genius and the Goddess (1956).

  Not long after he arrived in Los Angeles, Isherwood was introduced to Huxley by Gerald Heard. Huxley and Isherwood collaborated on three film projects together during the 1940s: Jacob’s Hands, about a healer, Below the Equator (later called Below the Horizon), and a film version of The Miracle, Max Reinhardt’s 1920s stage production. Like Heard, Huxley was a disciple of Prabhavananda, but subsequently he became close to Krishnamurti, the one-time Messiah of the theosophical movement. Huxley’s study of Vedanta was part of his 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 May 1961, the house he shared with his second wife, Laura, on Deronda Drive in the Hollywood Hills, was consumed in a brush fire. Huxley saved the novel he was writing, Island (1962), and three suits; otherwise all his books and papers were lost. Laura preserved only her Guarneri violin and a few clothes. On May 26, Time Magazine reported, “While firemen restrained the nearly blind British author from rushing into the blaze, Huxley wept like a child.” Huxley’s letter describing the scene and stating that there were neither tears nor any need for him to be restrained appeared in Time on June 16.

  In 1960 he found a malignant tumor on the back of his tongue. He refused surgery in favor of radium needle treatment at the site of the tumor, a procedure recommended by his surgeon friend, Max Cutler. The tumor went and Huxley retained his power of speech. Eventually a new tumor appeared in his neck; Cutler removed it surgically, but then a third grew in the same location. Huxley died of cancer on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He appears throughout D.1 and Lost Years, and Isherwood helped the novelist Sybille Bedford with her Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Volume 1 1894–1939 (1973) and Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Volume 2 1939–1963 (1974).

  Huxley, Laura Archera (1911–2007). Italian second wife of Aldous Huxley. Isherwood met her in the spring of 1956 at the Stravinskys’ after she and Huxley married secretly in March. She was the daughter of a Turin stockbroker, had been a concert violinist from adolescence, and worked briefly in film. She became a psychotherapist, sometimes using LSD therapy on her patients, and she published two popular books on her psychotherapeutic techniques. Her 1963 bestseller, You Are Not the Target, was an early self-help book. She also published a memoir about Huxley, This Timeless Moment (1968), and a children’s book. 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 utopian novel, Island. Before marrying Huxley, Laura lived for many years with Virginia Pfeiffer; after the marriage, she and Huxley settled in a house adjacent to Virginia’s. After Huxley’s death, she eventually became a children’s rights campaigner. She appears in D.1.

  Huxley, Maria Nys (1898–1955). First wife of Aldous Huxley; eldest daughter of a prosperous Belgian 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 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. Her premature death resulted from cancer. Isherwood met her in the summer of 1939 soon after he arrived in Los Angeles. She appears in D.1 and Lost Years. Huxley, Matthew (1920–2005). British-born only child of Aldous and Maria Huxley. He was brought to America in adolescence and Isherwood met him in Santa Monica in 1939. He attended the University of Colorado intending to become 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, 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. He appears in D.1 and in Lost Years.

  Igor. See Stravinsky, Igor.

  Inge, William (Bill) (1913–1973). American playwright, born and educated in Kansas and at the University of Kansas; he earned a teaching degree in Tennessee and taught high-school and college English, then became the music and drama critic for the St. Louis Star-Times. In 1944, he interviewed Tennessee Williams, who befriended him and took him to Chicago to see The Glass Menagerie; afterwards, Inge accepted another university teaching job and wrote his first play, Farther Off from Heaven, which was produced in 1947 by Margo Jones at the Dallas Civic Theater. His next play, Come Back, Little Sheba, opened on Broadway in 1950 to great praise, and he won a Pulitzer Prize and two Drama Critics Awards for Picnic (1953). Bus Stop (1955) and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) were equally acclaimed, but in the 1960s his stage work failed repeatedly. His plays were adapted for film mostly by others, but he received an Academy Award for Splendor in the Grass (1961), which he co-produced; his other screenplays are All Fall Down (1962) and Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965, under the pseudonym Walter Gage). In 1963, he moved from New York to Los Angeles, and in the late 1960s, he briefly returned to teaching at the University of California at Irvine. He wrote two novels, Good Luck Miss Wyckoff (1970) and My Son Is a Splendid Driver (1971). He was depressive and had problems with alcohol. Isherwood and Bachardy first met Inge in New York in 1953 during the original run of Picnic. He is mentioned in D.1.

  International situtation, December 1965. December 9 and 10 saw the most intensive bombing so far of North Vietnam and further marine landings in the Quanting foothills, a Vietcong stronghold. There were already about 180,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. U.S. forces were also bombing Laos to disrupt supply routes. The Soviets criticized the U.S. aggression and asserted that North Vietnam should begin peace talks only on its own terms. Also on December 9, Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the press that China might decide to engage the U.S. in a wider war, and President Johnson asked for civilian spending to be kept down in 1966 budget proposals to allow for increasing military needs in the new year. Iris. See Tree, Iris.

  Isherwood, Esther (1878–1944). Youngest sister of Isherwood’s father, fifth child of John and Elizabeth Bradshaw Isherwood. She married a clergyman, Joseph Toogood, against the wishes of her family, and had a long and happy marriage which produced a son and a daughter.

  Isherwood, Frank Bradshaw (1869–1915). Isherwood’s father; second son of John Bradshaw Isherwood, squire of Marple Hall, Cheshire. He was educated at Sandhurst and commissioned in his father’s old regiment, the York and Lancasters, in 1892 at the age of twenty-three. 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, on the Bradshaw Isherwood family estate. In 1908, Frank rejoined his regiment and the family, now including Christopher, followed the regiment to Strensall, Aldershot, and Frimley; in 1911 a second son, Richard, was born and the family moved again 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. Isherwood felt that Frank was temperamentally unsuited to the life of a professional soldier, though he was dutiful and efficient. He was a gifted watercolorist, 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 mildly good-looking, 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 (1868–1940). 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 Uncle Henry married late in life (changing his name to Bradshaw-Isherwood-Bagshawe in honor of his wife, Muriel Bagshawe), he had no children; Isherwood was his heir and, for a time after his twenty-first birthday, 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. Uncle Henry is mentioned in D.1.

  Isherwood, John ( Jack) Bradshaw (1872–1962). Isherwood’s Uncle Jack; he was the youngest son of Isherwood’s grandfather, also named John Bradshaw Isherwood, and the younger brother of Frank Isherwood. He trained as a lawyer and joined the civil service, dealing with death duties and property deeds at Somerset House in London.

  Isherwood, Kathleen Bradshaw (1868–1960). Isherwood’s mother, often referred to as “M.” in the diaries. Only child of Frederick Machell Smith, a wine merchant, and Emily Greene. She was born and lived until sixteen in Bury St. Edmunds, then moved with her parents to London. She travelled abroad and helped her mother to write a guidebook for walkers, Our Rambles in Old London (1895). In 1903, aged thirty-five, she married Frank Isherwood, a British army officer. They had two sons, Isherwood, and his much younger brother, Richard. When Frank Isherwood was lost in World War I, it was many months before his death was officially confirmed. Isherwood’s portrait of his mother in Kathleen and Frank is partly based on her own letters and diaries. 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. 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, in youth, he wished to rebel. He deemed her intellectual aspirations 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. The
re are many passages about her in D.1 and Lost Years.

  Isherwood, Richard Graham Bradshaw (1911–1979). Christopher Isherwood’s brother and only sibling, younger by seven years. He was reluctant to be educated and never held a job in adulthood, although he did National Service during World War II as a farmworker at Wyberslegh and at another farm nearby, Dan Bank. In childhood, he saw little of his elder brother, who was sent to boarding school by the time Richard was three. Both boys spent more time with their nanny, Annie Avis, than with their mother. Richard later felt that Nanny had preferred Christopher; she made Richard nervous and perhaps was 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 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 took his brother’s side against their mother’s efforts to advance Richard’s education and settle him in a career. During this period Richard met Isherwood’s friends and helped Isherwood with his work by taking dictation. Richard was homosexual, 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, he returned permanently with his mother and Nanny to Wyberslegh— signed over to him by Isherwood with the Marple Estate—where he eventually lived as a semi-recluse. Nanny died in 1948, and after Kathleen Isherwood’s death twelve years later, Richard was looked after first by a married couple, the Vinces, and then by a local family, the Bradleys. He became a heavy drinker, Marple Hall fell into ruin and became dangerous, and he was forced to hand it over to the local council which demolished it in 1959, building several houses and a school on the grounds. Eventually, Richard moved out of Wyberslegh into a new house on the Marple Estate; the Dan Bradleys lived in a similar new house next door. When he died, he left most of the contents of his house to the Dan Bradleys and the house itself to their daughter and son-in-law. Richard’s will also gave money bequests to the Dan Bradleys, Alan Bradley, and other local friends. Family property and other money were left to Isherwood and to a cousin, Thomas Isherwood, but Isherwood himself refused the property and passed some of his share of money to the Dan Bradleys. Richard appears in D.1 and Lost Years.