Lost Years

by Christopher Isherwood

  The third idea is obviously suggested by Christopher’s relations with Michael Leopold:

  A middle-aged, “established” writer and a very young writer, still unpublished. The middle-aged writer is going through a period of complete impotence, but the young one doesn’t know this. He is tremendously impressed by the older man and quite overwhelmed when the latter asks him to stay. Every morning, the young man sits down joyfully in the living room, thinking, “We are working under the same roof,” and writes as never before, in a fever of inspiration. Meanwhile, the older man goes up to his study and stays there all day, pretending to work. Does the young man unconsciously “cure” him? Perhaps.

  What strikes me as remarkable here is the speed with which Christopher’s creative metabolism has functioned. Barely ten days after their first meeting, Michael has been “assimilated” and transformed into a fiction character. This was the sincerest compliment that Christopher—being Christopher—could possibly have paid him and their relationship. Michael had somehow touched the nerve of Christopher’s imagination.

  34 The day-to-day diary’s list of books Christopher read in 1949 includes: The Blood of the Martyrs (Naomi Mitchison), The Servant (Robin Maugham), Concluding (Henry Green), The Season of Comfort (Gore Vidal), The Narrow Corner (Maugham), The Heat of the Day (Elizabeth Bowen), The Tower of London (Ainsworth), The Ides of March (Thornton Wilder), Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), Two Worlds and Their Ways (Compton-Burnett), A Long Day’s Dying (Frederick Buechner), Love in a Cold Climate (Nancy Mitford), The Oasis (Mary McCarthy), Herself Surprised (Joyce Cary), The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles), The Lottery (Shirley Jackson).

  Christopher had reread The Narrow Corner that year because Fred Zinnemann was considering remaking it as a film. (It had already been made in 1933, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) Dipping into it before writing this (August 6, 1973) I feel again what Christopher felt then, that it is Maugham’s one really magic novel—by which I suppose I merely mean that it is the novel I would have vaguely yearned for if he hadn’t written it, the Maugham book which is custom-created for Christopher and his particular fantasies. I love its setting in the Spice Islands, its dreamy languid equatorial atmosphere, its romantic queerness. I love Dr. Saunders (the most sympathetic of all Maugham’s doctors) and Ah Kay (the most adorable of his Chinese boys) and Captain Nichols (for being so wonderful at the funeral of the Japanese pearl diver). Erik, with his goodness, is rather a bore, and so is Fred with his sulks and the stilted dialogue Maugham gives him to speak. But the poetic idea of Fred, under the curse of his own sex appeal, is terrific. I think this could be an unforgettable film, if it was directed by the right man—not Zinnemann. Zinnemann soon dropped the project.

  The Tower of London was another book that Christopher reread that year. It had been one of his childhood favorites and, as far as I remember, it didn’t disappoint him at all—he still felt the magic of the Cruikshank illustrations, smelt the smell of the period and was aware of a privately perceived relationship between the Tower of London and Marple Hall. (I think this was created by Ainsworth’s narrative technique, which is absurd and yet curiously effective: in the midst of a melodramatic scene, Ainsworth will unexpectedly turn his novel into a guidebook. For example: the Spanish Ambassador, Renard, has been muttering threats against the life of Lady Jane Grey and resolves that Mary shall have the throne. Suddenly he stops to look at the White Tower, and Ainsworth describes it, ending with a couple of sentences which bring us out of the period and right up to the date when they were written: “The round turret, at the north-east angle, was used as an observatory by the celebrated astronomer Flamsteed, in the reign of Charles the Second. The principal entrance was on the north, and was much more spacious than the modern doorway, which occupies its site.” Christopher, during his boyhood at Marple Hall, had guided visitors around and lectured them on the history of the building; he had thus developed a double-image awareness of past and present. So Ainsworth’s Victorian guidebook voice didn’t seem anachronistic to him. Quite the reverse. In the midst of these long-ago Tudor treasons and head choppings, it was Ainsworth’s voice which made history credible, and the rooms of the Tower—even its dungeons and its torture chamber—familiar and almost cozy. . . . Of course it must be added that, although Ainsworth is a painstaking antiquarian, the tone of his melodrama is unmistakably nineteenth century, not sixteenth.)

  When I saw The Ides of March on the 1949 list, I couldn’t remember anything about it, except that it had been Christopher’s favorite among the new books he read that year. Now (August 19, 1973), having just finished rereading it, I admire it very much—partly because it is the kind of historical novel I would like to have written, if I were a historical novelist. Wilder is a bit too elegant for my taste, and too arch, and too much of a name-dropper—such a scholarly closet queen. But his method of telling the story through fictitious documents seems to me the best imaginable, when you’re dealing with a character as remote from us in time as Caesar is. In fictitious documents, you can stylize dialogue acceptably because the reader isn’t being asked to believe that this is exactly how the character talked. In direct narrative, the same dialogue would sound hopelessly artificial, because direct narrative makes an implicit claim to be realistic.

  The Sheltering Sky was Christopher’s first experience of Paul Bowles’s writing. He felt that he liked the book—particularly its evocation of North Africa—much better than he liked its author’s tone of voice. Bowles has an air of only just barely tolerating the presence of the reader. “Don’t stick around on my account,” he seems to be saying, “you’re going to loathe this place” (indicating the Sahara desert) “and you’ll never understand these people” (meaning the Arabs). Christopher felt, and I still feel, that Bowles’s arrogance is peculiarly Frog—you could call him an English-speaking French anti-novelist. But, still and all, he’s readable and few of the Frogs are.

  Christopher liked Two Worlds and Their Ways as much but no more than he had liked Manservant and Maidservant. However, Two Worlds and Their Ways contains a tremendous passage which Christopher has been quoting ever since he read it: “We think our little failings have their own charm. And they have not. And they are great failings.” The Blood of the Martyrs disappointed him. Mitchison was suffering, he thought, from leftist Christianity—which is the dreariest kind of leftism, and of Christianity. . . . Concluding disappointed him too: it seemed rather dull. . . . Being almost invariably bored by satire, he wasn’t disappointed in Nineteen Eighty-Four—merely bored by it. . . . The Servant is mere closet-macabre—one of those novels in which queerness is equated with Evil and loss of class status with Degradation. . . . Christopher thought The Season of Comfort better than Gore Vidal’s earlier novels—excluding Williwaw—but that wasn’t saying much. . . . In a journal entry of March 2, 1949, Christopher quoted an arty-farty phrase from The Heat of the Day, which he hadn’t yet finished. “Quite exciting,” he adds, “and some good characters”—but my memory assures me that it was trash. . . . Christopher recommended A Long Day’s Dying in a blurb. I can’t remember why. I have never been able to get through any other book by its author; when you open them, moths fly out. . . . As for the other books on the list (by Mitford, McCarthy, Cary and Jackson) Christopher found them charming, entertaining, clever and altogether worthy of praise—by The New Yorker. They weren’t, any of them, his dish.

  1950

  ON JANUARY 1, Bill Harris arrived to stay with Christopher. He had come from New York to California to visit his mother, who was living in La Jolla. Bill was greatly excited about Jack Fontan, his new lover. Jack had a small but prominent part in South Pacific, which had opened in New York the previous April. The character Jack played was called Staff Sergeant Thomas Hassinger on the program, but he was already known to hundreds of queers as “The Naked Sailor.” Wearing nothing but a pair of the shortest shorts, without underwear, Jack sprawled in the midst of the group which sang “What ain’t we got? We ain’t got dames”—displaying nearly
all of his large and magnificent body, including glimpses of his genitals. Bill had a reclining photograph of him stark naked; it had had to be shot in three separate sections because of Jack’s great length. Bill proudly displayed it on a shelf in the bedroom where he slept during his visit.

  Bill Harris and Jack Fontan had met each other in the late fall and Bill had immediately moved in with Jack, who was living in an abandoned synagogue. When the cold weather began, their waterpipes froze. Bill had to fetch water in pails from a shop below—he spoke of himself as being “like Rebecca at the well.” The cold was so intense that they couldn’t get warm even when holding each other in bed. Bill and Jack tried to remedy this by lifting the bed onto two chests of drawers—one at each end—over the gas oven, but, when they climbed into bed, the bed broke in half Since they couldn’t use the toilet, they had to shit into newspapers and then leave their shit packages outside on the windowsill until they froze solid and could be carried downstairs and left in a trash can. . . . Bill described these hardships to Christopher with the sentimental relish of an infatuated lover.

  (To return to the subject of Jack Fontan’s shorts in South Pacific, Jack tells me—August 4, 1973—that, when rehearsals started, the minor characters were given a pile of military garments and told to pick out the ones that fitted them. So Jack got himself a navy work-shirt, pants and a pair of shoes. When Joshua Logan, the director, arrived to inspect the costumes, he promptly ordered Jack to take off his shirt and his shoes. He then called for a pair of scissors and snipped away the legs of Jack’s pants, just above the knee. This didn’t satisfy him, however. He kept snipping higher and higher, until Jack’s legs were left bare right up to the crotch. Logan then decided that Jack could put the shoes on again.

  Jack wasn’t in the habit of wearing underwear. So he came on stage on the first night with nothing under his shorts. After the show had been running a few days, the stage manager told him there had been complaints from ladies sitting in the front rows. Jack was to put on jockeys. When Logan heard of this, he was very angry. The jockeys were prohibited. Logan’s instructions to the box-office were: “If they don’t want to see his balls, they can have their money returned.”)

  Bill Harris stayed at the Rustic Road house during most of January—from the 1st to the 11th, from the 17th to the 28th and from the 31st to February 3, when he returned to New York. The visit was a success, from Christopher’s point of view; Bill was a model guest, helpful with household chores, always ready to make himself agreeable to callers and to keep himself occupied when Christopher had to work or go out. Aside from this, he was a cheerful, responsive companion. He showed an interest in all Christopher’s doings and concerns which seemed feminine in the very best way. I think Bill enjoyed his visit too—even including his unpleasant psychic experience which is described on see here. This was anyhow a happy period in his life, because of Jack Fontan—and there is a peculiar pleasure in talking about a current love affair to a sympathetic ex-lover. Bill and Christopher shared pleasant memories of sex with each other. Bill knew that Christopher’s interest in Jack Fontan was therefore more than merely polite; it had a quality of identification. But Bill also knew that Christopher wasn’t in the slightest degree jealous, wasn’t carrying even the last ember of a torch. So the two of them could be perfectly relaxed together.

  On January 3, there is a journal entry about The School of Tragedy. Christopher is still bothered by the problem of narration—shall it be told in the third person or in the first? Christopher obviously wanted to write in the first person, through Stephen’s mouth, but he saw two difficulties if the story is told retrospectively, “I fear the necessarily indulgent tone, the wise smile over the mistakes of the past”; but if, on the other hand, the story is told from day to day, in a diary, “This seems too contrived. Why should he be taking all this trouble to present his experiences, to make them into an aesthetic performance, if he is really suffering?”

  So Christopher returns to a consideration of a narrative in the third person, “I . . . hear a very simple tone of voice. Something inside me keeps saying Candide. . . . When I want him to be articulate, analytical, he must express himself in conversation. Ditto when he tells anything about the past. But when we’re listening to his mind, we should really only get his feelings. Very important, this.”

  In this entry, Christopher also tries to state the theme of the novel—that Stephen, who is chronically guilty because he is torn between a Quaker background and an urge toward bohemianism, discovers how to overcome his guilt “by understanding the lives of those who aren’t guilty—Sarah, [Gerda,] Dr. Kennedy and the best of the refugees.”

  Looking back, I feel that a novel written by Christopher with this subject matter was foredoomed. Because Christopher didn’t—and I still don’t—understand the kind of guilt which would make such a story credible. To a writer of my temperament, prolonged guilt is distasteful and boring as a theme for fiction. The character of Stephen Monk doesn’t come to life because Christopher was bored by him. At the very end of the book, Stephen says, “I . . . forgive myself from the bottom of my heart,” but his tone rings false. The words were actually Christopher’s; he had once said them to Iris Tree, but in a quite different, campy, playacting tone, with a deep comic sigh, when they were talking about sin: “God knows, Iris, I forgive myself—from the bottom of my heart.” After which they had both roared with laughter. When Stephen speaks the line one doesn’t laugh. One is embarrassed.

  On January 5, there is a charming anecdote about Bo and Kelley (see here) in the journal. For reasons of discretion, presumably, they are referred to in the journal by initials only, and nothing is said about why Kelley was in jail at that time. As far as I remember, he had been arrested on the Riviera Beach near Point Dume. This beach was perfectly safe for bare-ass swimming and sex making in 1945 (see here) but more and more houses had been built on the headland since then and their builders thought they had bought the view as well. So they proceeded to edit it to their liking. Those tiny figures in the far distance, away down there amongst the dunes—you couldn’t see if they were nude or make out what they were doing, unless you used binoculars. So the police were called in and given binoculars and told to watch. And so there were roundups of view spoilers—one of which included Kelley. (In those days, when a queer had served a jail sentence and his straight friends asked him what he had been in jail for, he would reply, with a wry, suggestive smile, “Making a U-turn.” Such is the humor of a persecuted tribe, which isn’t allowed even to speak openly of its sufferings.) This is the anecdote: Bobo took Howard Kelley a sweater to wear in jail. Kelley spent a whole afternoon, with another prisoner, cleaning it by picking off hairs belonging to Bo and Kelley’s three cats. Kelley was able to identify the hairs of each cat. They sorted the hairs into three piles and put each pile into a separate matchbox.

  On January 13, Christopher had Norman Mailer to dinner, with Salka Viertel (who probably helped cook). The day-to-day diary also mentions “Ted and Mrs. Anderson, John and Mrs. Hamlin” as guests. I’m pretty sure that Ted Anderson and John Hamlin were paraplegics, and that it was Ted who had given Fred Zinnemann and Carl Foreman (see here) a lot of advice while The Men was being written and filmed. Indeed, I think the character played by Brando in the film was to some extent based on Ted Anderson. In the film, Brando marries Teresa Wright and they go through the problem of an impotent paraplegic married to a sexually potent and physically active woman. At the end of the film they are still together, however. Ted and his wife finally split up, but that was after a fairly long marriage.

  Norman Mailer was in town (I think) because of a project to film his novel The Naked and the Dead. (There were many delays and the picture wasn’t actually made and released until 1958.) Norman and Christopher got along well together. Norman, in those days, was a deceptively quiet and polite young man who amused Christopher by his sudden outbursts of candor. They didn’t meet often, but I am unable to put a date—unless it is this one—to
my memory of Norman entertaining a fairly large group of paraplegics at Christopher’s house.1 According to my memory, Christopher had asked his paraplegic guests in advance if there was any available celebrity they would like to meet. All had agreed on Mailer. He arrived on time, neatly dressed, demure and sober. The women present were obviously reassured. Then he began to tell stories about his army life—perfectly harmless funny little stories, with no horrors in them, no sex, no venereal disease. All that was startling was the dialogue. “By that time, the sergeant was beginning to get a little bit impatient, so he said to me—” Mailer kept the same nicey-nice party smile on his face as he continued, without the least change of tone, “Why, you mother-fucking son of a bitch, another word out of you and I’ll ram this mop right up your ass!” The male guests roared. The women blinked and tried to smile—reflecting, no doubt, that they had read talk as rough as this in Mailer’s novel; coming from his mouth, you couldn’t call it vulgarity; it was practically literature.

  On January 17, Aldous Huxley and Christopher met and talked about their film story Below the Equator (see page 207 [note]). On the 23rd, they met again, this time with John Huston. I think it was Huston who had originally suggested that they should write a story for him to direct. Meanwhile, on January 19, the day-to-day diary records that Christopher saw Lesser Samuels about a movie story. This must have been The Vacant Room, a ghost story set in a Los Angeles bungalow court. I think the original idea was Lesser’s, but Christopher was particularly interested in showing that a “haunting” can take place in an unremarkable small modern building.

  On January 22, Russ Zeininger, Curtis Harrington, Bill Harris and Christopher drove to The High Valley Theatre in the Upper Ojai Valley (see here) to see a performance of Ethan Frome. It had been adapted by Iris Tree (who was later sued by the owners of the authorized adaptation, which Ruth Gordon had played in New York). Iris, Ford Rainey and Betty Harford played Zeena, Ethan and Mattie. Oliver Andrews, Betty’s future husband, designed the set—which is the only part of the production I remember, because it was so absurdly arty. Oliver decided that the bobsled was the symbol of the whole tragedy and that it therefore ought to dominate the stage throughout. So there it was at the back of the set, standing on its end and looking like an expressionist war memorial. This in itself would have been stupid rather than absurd. But then the moment came when Ethan and Mattie had to convert the symbol into a stage prop. Placing the sled in a horizontal position on top of a steep structure which represented a hill, they climbed onto it and rode it offstage. The hazards of this ride were ridiculously realistic. The heavy sled shook the lightweight hill to its foundations and, a moment later, it could be heard and felt hitting a bank of cushions behind the scenes with a force which seemed sufficient to carry it straight through the wall of the theater. The whole audience gasped—but it was the wrong kind of gasp, expressing concern for the fate of Ford Rainey and Betty Harford, as if they had been circus acrobats risking their lives. At that instant, they ceased to be Ethan and Mattie. This farcical stunt annihilated their characters and nullified the rest of the play.2