Lost Years

by Christopher Isherwood

  Throughout February, Christopher worked on the two film stories, with Huxley and with Samuels. Mike Leopold came down to stay with him several times; Christopher also saw Russ Zeininger and Don Coombs. He had supper with the Stravinskys, Jo and Ben Masselink, the Kiskaddens, the Zinnemanns. The Zinnemanns often showed their guests a film, after supper. On February 25, Dr. Bors (from the Birmingham Hospital, see here) was one of the Zinnemanns’ guests. He proudly announced that he had brought a film of his own which he was going to run for them. It turned out to be a documentary of an unusually bloody operation, shot in color. Some of the ladies present were so revolted that they nearly vomited. But Dr. Bors was happily unaware of this. He left under the impression that he had provided everybody with a delightful evening’s entertainment. (A few days before this, The Men had been screened for the patients at Birmingham Hospital. Christopher had gone there to see it.)

  On March 5, Samuels and Christopher finished The Vacant Room. Christopher continued to work with Huxley on Below the Equator and Samuels was asked to give them his advice—they met three times. When Samuels and Christopher turned in a copy of their story to Christopher’s agent, Jim Geller, Christopher typed a special title page for it: “The Vacant Room. A Masterpiece.” The joke fell flat, because Geller couldn’t get anybody interested in the story.

  Christopher saw Mike Leopold only four times that month. I think Christopher must also have been going to bed with Jim Charlton, because only one other sex mate (Zeininger) is mentioned in the day-to-day diary and because Christopher and Jim had supper together often.

  On the 16th, Christopher had supper with the Huxleys. Gerald Heard and Michael Barrie were there, also a hypnotist named Leslie LeCron3 and his wife. On the 22nd, the LeCrons invited Christopher to have supper at their house. There were no other guests. I think it had been more or less agreed in advance that LeCron would try to hypnotize Christopher. Christopher himself was skeptical. Several people had tried to hypnotize him already and had failed. He told LeCron this, and LeCron replied that the failure had probably been due to Christopher’s attitude. Christopher expected a hypnotist to overpower his will. “That’s the wrong attitude,” LeCron told him, “you have to cooperate. I can’t make you do anything as long as you think of me as an opponent and keep bracing yourself to resist me. My will isn’t stronger than yours. You mustn’t think like that.” LeCron certainly didn’t look as if his will was stronger than Christopher’s, or anybody else’s. From Christopher’s point of view LeCron’s amiably harmless appearance was reassuring and it undoubtedly contributed to the success of their experiment. As far as I remember, LeCron told Christopher to fix his eyes on one of LeCron’s eyes and begin to count backwards from one hundred. Very soon, Christopher found himself relaxing from an upright to a horizontal position on the sofa. He lay there in a comfortable sprawl, feeling, as he said, like a puppet with all its strings loose. He was quite conscious and rather amused by his condition. He told LeCron that he knew he could assert his will but that he simply didn’t want to. He remained in this light hypnotic trance for several minutes, until LeCron roused him by snapping his fingers.

  Christopher’s relaxation had been even deeper than he had realized. This only became evident to him after he had left LeCron’s house and was driving home. He experienced a state of euphoria so intense that I can recall it as I write these words. Christopher was no longer an individual driver, keeping a wary eye on other drivers—alert for possible drunks, slowing down to force tailgaters to pass him, pulling out to avoid being trapped behind slowpokes. He was part of the traffic, moving in perfect harmony with all the other cars, like a dancer in a ballet. Never once, that evening, did he have to brake or accelerate abruptly; when he changed lanes, he described faultless curves, slipping into his new position with exactly the right amount of spare distance between himself, the car ahead and the car behind. Christopher thought of himself as being a well-adjusted driver. He was seldom consciously nervous even in bad weather and heavy traffic. But now he realized how tense he ordinarily was.

  At the end of the hypnotizing, LeCron had given Christopher a posthypnotic suggestion: “You’re going to sleep better tonight than you’ve ever slept before.” When Christopher got into bed, he did indeed fall into a profound sleep, from which he woke next morning unable to remember who or where he was for several seconds. This moment of amnesia wasn’t in the least alarming. It was accompanied by a sense of calm joy.

  On April 2, Christopher had supper with Mr. and Mrs. Richard Brooks. Christopher probably first met Brooks when they were both working at MGM in 1948. I may be wrong but I think that this supper party was at a house the Brookses were living in on the slopes of the Hollywood Hills looking out over the Valley. Anyhow, Christopher did visit them in such a house and later used it for the setting of the first scene of The World in the Evening. I remember that they kept their bedroom immaculately neat, with all their clothes and superfluous belongings stored away in adjoining closets or bathrooms. When they entertained, the guests were free—were indeed almost challenged—to wander through this bedroom as though it were an extra living room. The Brookses seemed to be saying: “Go ahead—search! You won’t find any clue to our private life, or to what sort of people we really are.”

  There was, nevertheless, one damning clue to Richard’s character which lay hidden in the house—and which Richard, characteristically, couldn’t resist the temptation to reveal—the living room was wired for sound. At the end of the evening, Richard would play back the tape to any guests who cared to listen—thereby, I suppose, making at least a few permanent enemies at each party. I remember a recorded murmur of unintelligible drunken conversation, out of which Christopher’s voice arose, embarrassingly clear and precise, saying: “King Lear really is a most extraordinarily silly story!”

  On April 9, Christopher had supper with Speed Lamkin. I guess this must have been their first meeting. I have no idea who brought them together. Possibly, Speed simply phoned Christopher and introduced himself; that would have been like him. I don’t recall how Christopher then reacted to this bold sexy naughty niggery young man,4 with his mischievous eyes and “aw, c’mon—you know you want to” grin. Speed’s first novel, Tiger in the Garden, was being published that year, and his self-confidence was overwhelming. Probably Christopher was a bit overwhelmed, a good deal amused and intrigued, but very much on his guard. I say this because he took Speed after supper to see Jim Charlton—which suggests that he wanted to park Speed in Jim’s bed, rather than face three or four more hours of Speed’s sparkling dialogue. Speed was really funny, but his name-dropping soon got to be a bore and his tale telling was so indiscreet that you became afraid to open your mouth lest you should provide him with more gossip fodder. . . . All in all, I’m sure Christopher would have been very much surprised if he had been told, then, that he would one day become really fond of Speed and even take Speed’s opinions seriously.

  On April 10, fairly early in the morning, Christopher got a call from Dylan Thomas, whom he had never met. Dylan was downtown at the Biltmore and due to give a reading at UCLA that afternoon. The UCLA English department had made no arrangements for his transportation out to the campus, merely told him to take a bus. Christopher found this outrageous and volunteered to drive down and pick him up.

  The events of that memorable day were recorded in the journal—not at the time but much later, on December 8, 1953, about a month after Dylan’s death. (Stephen Spender had asked Christopher to contribute to some obituary article on Dylan and Christopher had declined, saying that his memories involved other people, who might be offended—he meant chiefly Majal Ewing, head of the UCLA English department. But it was Stephen’s request which prompted Christopher to make this journal entry.)[5]

  The journal records only Ivan Moffat’s account of Dylan’s visit to Charlie Chaplin, that evening—which is that Dylan was drunk and that Chaplin was therefore offended. But I remember another version of the story (by Frank Taylor?) which soun
ds truer and is certainly funnier: when Chaplin was asked if Dylan might visit him, he said, “Yes, but don’t bring him unless he’s sober.” Dylan’s escorts, including Ivan and Christopher, agreed to this. However, when they all arrived, the escorts were stumbling drunk and it was only Dylan who made a perfect gentlemanly entrance, saying in bell-clear tones, “It’s a great honor to meet you, Mr. Chaplin.”

  On April 19, Caskey returned to Rustic Road, after an absence of just over five months. Since I don’t have any of Caskey’s letters belonging to that period, I don’t know what the atmosphere of their reunion was. Had they discussed their difficulties and resolved to make a fresh start? Or had they avoided discussion, just hoping for the best? I strongly suspect the latter. In a journal entry made on April 24, Christopher doesn’t mention Caskey at all. This may mean that Christopher is superstitiously afraid of writing anything optimistic about the prospects for their life together.

  They started seeing people at once—Hayden Lewis, Rod Owens, Jim Charlton, Lennie Newman, the Beesleys and Jay Laval, who was now in charge (I believe) at the Mocambo. On April 23, they went to dinner with the Chaplins. Emlyn and Molly Williams were there too. I’m pretty sure that they had never met Chaplin before.

  Toward the end of dinner, as I remember it, Christopher went out of the dining room to pee. When he returned to the table, he found that Emlyn was questioning Chaplin, while the other guests sat silent, listening. Emlyn is a shockingly frank questioner. His manner is at once authoritative and playful, never in the smallest degree apologetic. He questions you with the air of a doctor, who has the right to ask his patient absolutely anything and who is teasing the patient for being embarrassed and reluctant to answer. Chaplin was certainly embarrassed. As Christopher entered, Emlyn was asking:

  “Mr. Chaplin,6 tell me—did Mr. Hearst really murder Mr. Ince?”

  Charlie wriggled in his seat: “No—no of course not. That story’s ridiculous—absolutely untrue.”

  “But Mr. Chaplin, you were—involved with Miss Marion Davies?”

  This time, Chaplin glanced quickly down the table to be sure that Oona wasn’t present—she too had left the table. “Well yes, yes I was.”

  “But didn’t Mr. Hearst know that?”

  “Yes. I suppose so. He must have known. Yes, I’m sure he did.”

  “And didn’t he object?”

  “Oh yes, he certainly objected. But, after all,” Chaplin was still acting embarrassed, only now it was obvious that he was beginning to enjoy Emlyn’s cross-examination, “there wasn’t much he could do about it.”

  “Mr. Chaplin—did you have an affair with Miss Pola Negri?”

  “No. Oh no. Absolutely not. Quite out of the question. Wasn’t my type at all.”

  Who knows what else Emlyn might have asked! Alas, right after Chaplin’s reply, Oona came back into the room and that page of Hollywood history was blotted forever.

  On May 13, Christopher and Caskey went to the Chaplins’ again—for what was to be, unless the day-to-day diary has omitted to record a later meeting, Christopher’s last visit. (Caskey went to lunch with them next day, alone.) So it would appear that this was the evening on which Christopher is alleged to have passed out and peed on a sofa—see page 199 and [note].7

  There was another dramatic incident at the Chaplins’ which I can’t put a date to exactly—it may well have happened earlier that evening. All I am sure of is that it was at a dinner at which Natasha Moffat (see here) was present—which means that Ivan was probably there too.

  When the guests took their places in the dining room, Natasha and Caskey found that they were to sit next to each other. Whereat Natasha exclaimed, loudly and clearly: “Oh good, Billy! I always like sitting next to a pansy.” Natasha was now entering her lively, crazy phase, in which she would often behave in this “spontaneous” style. This was no intended bitchiness. From her point of view, she was being friendly. She quite liked Caskey and she was implying that he, like other pansies, was an entertaining dinner partner. That was all.

  It was more than enough. The deathly silence which followed her remark proved that everybody at the table had heard it.

  In the midst of that silence, with the utmost good humor, in his laziest southern drawl, Caskey replied: “Your slang is out of date, Natasha—we don’t say ‘pansy’ nowadays. We say ‘cocksucker.’”

  I don’t think anybody ventured to laugh. Such words were still genuine shockers in those days. But there was a surge of grateful relief A member of the insulted minority had spoken up, thereby saving the majority from the embarrassment of trying to defend it and him—or from the guilt of failing to do so. No doubt the several Jews present were especially conscious of this. Natasha herself, amused but not in the least abashed by Caskey’s retort, began talking to him about something else. Christopher, who truly adored Caskey at such moments, sat glowing with pride in him. But Christopher’s pride can’t have been visible to others—at least, not to the lady who sat at his side. She, kind soul, evidently supposed that his feelings had been deeply wounded. In a muddle-headed attempt to console him for being what he was, she told him, “You mustn’t feel too badly about this.” Then, lowering her voice and glancing over at her husband, she added, “You know something? Bob and I can’t have children either!”

  On May 15, Christopher went to the NBC studios to listen to a radio performance of Prater Violet. I can’t remember who was in this, but it seemed fairly effective.[8]

  Also on May 15—and again on the 17th and 23rd—Christopher visited Leslie LeCron. I think this was to take lessons in auto-hypnotism, which was one of LeCron’s specialties. LeCron claimed (and Aldous Huxley confirmed this) that it is possible to put yourself into a light hypnotic trance, for the purpose of overcoming anxiety, relaxing and sleeping. According to LeCron, this kind of trance is never dangerously deep—if the house were to catch fire, you would regain normal consciousness at once. Christopher never mastered the autohypnotic technique—maybe he was afraid of using it, despite LeCron’s reassurances. But he did sometimes use, with good effect, a method of autosuggestion which LeCron had also taught him. First you lie on your back on the floor. Then you successively tense and relax the muscles in every part of your body, from head to feet. Then you tell yourself a story about yourself, in the third person. The story varies, according to the kind of result you want to produce. You could say, for example: “His energy was amazing. People said that he ran up and down stairs like a young man. His sitting posture was perfect, so he was able to write hour after hour without tension. Then he could run on the beach for a mile or more, dismissing all worries from his head and enjoying the strength of his own body, like an animal. When night came, he was all ready for fun, parties, entertainment, sex—” Or you could say: “He was exhausted—absolutely worn out and happy to rest, knowing that he had done his work well and earned his repose. Tired, relaxed, content, his mind quite calm, he lay waiting for sleep—”

  On June 5, Aldous Huxley and Christopher finished their film story, Beyond the Horizon (Equator?)[9]

  On June 7, Christopher went for the first time to the Long Beach Veterans Hospital. Many, if not all of the paraplegics he had been visiting at Birmingham (see here) had just been transferred there. This was a much longer drive and in those days, before the freeways had been built, it took a lot more time than it would now. Christopher was probably unwilling to admit to himself, at first, that the extra distance would gradually deter him from going there. He would have done better to break off his visiting at once. As it was, he impressed and pleased the paraplegics he knew by seeming to have remained faithful to them. Later, when he stopped coming to Long Beach, they must have felt that he had let them down.

  The day-to-day diary also records that on June 7 Christopher began a rough draft of The School of Tragedy. The large thin notebook has a June 7 entry which Christopher probably wrote to get himself into the mood to start work. Characteristically, Christopher begins with a pessimistic statement: “Now, aft
er all these delays and indecisions, I must admit to myself that I still don’t see my way clearly.” He is subconsciously trying to use negative suggestion here—to make himself write by saying, “Don’t—you’re not ready.”

  On June 12, Christopher saw LeCron again. I may be wrong but I believe this was the occasion on which LeCron began urging Christopher to practice the techniques of Dianetics. Ron Hubbard’s book had just been published and LeCron took it very seriously.10 He wanted Christopher to “restimulate his engrams,” and specifically to try to reexperience his own birth. Christopher didn’t want to try. He decided that LeCron was crazy, as far as this one subject was concerned, and he got himself out of LeCron’s office as quickly and politely as he could. LeCron didn’t take offense at this. He and Christopher continued to see each other socially.