Lost Years

by Christopher Isherwood

  As for Gus Field, he took the news well, too. Which was more admirable, since he got very little gratitude from Christopher or anybody else for doing so. If he was invited to the Beesleys’, it was only once or twice. Speed dropped him. Christopher only saw him occasionally. He was treated as a bore and an outsider—and that, from Christopher’s point of view, was what he was.

  * * *

  [1 Not his real name.]

  2 In connection with this, I have a memory which is very vivid but which I suspect slightly, simply because I can’t find any reference to it in the day-to-day diary. Jim Charlton came to spend the night at Monterey Street, not long after Christopher’s fuck with Lennie. In the morning Jim walked into Christopher’s and Caskey’s bedroom, naked, with a hard-on. Caskey was asleep. Jim grinned at Christopher, lifted him naked out of bed and carried him out of the room and into the guest bedroom. This was a typical specimen of Jim’s he-man camp; Christopher found it funny but also sexually exciting. He wanted Jim to fuck him, and, when Jim started to, Christopher began flexing and unflexing his sphincter muscle in imitation of Lennie Newman. It was an amateur performance but it impressed Jim. “Where did you learn that whore trick, for Christ’s sake?” he growled. The fuck was a huge success.

  [3 “Hear you this Triton of the minnows?” with which Coriolanus scoffs at the people’s tribune, Sicinius.]

  4 Referring to an earlier party (April 27–28) Christopher writes [on May 6]: “All sorts of people came down for the weekend, and I was cheerful and it ‘went’ very well. But afterwards I felt—well, sort of disturbed in my inmost nest. It was hard to settle down on the eggs again. (The eggs, this week, were a rather stupid review I did of a book on Katherine Mansfield.)” [Sylvia Berkman, Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study for Tomorrow, reprinted in Exhumations.]

  [5 Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin reissued in one volume by the Hogarth Press.]

  Glossary

  This glossary does not include entries for people adequately introduced by Isherwood himself in his text, nor does it incorporate information from the text. Readers should use the index to locate Isherwood’s own descriptions.

  Ackerley, J. R. (1896–1967). English author and editor. Ackerley wrote drama, poetry, and autobiography, and is known for his intimate relationship with his dog, described in two of his autobiographical books. He was literary editor of The Listener from 1935 to 1959, and published work by some of the best and most important writers of his period; Isherwood contributed numerous reviews during the thirties. Their friendship was sustained in later years partly by their shared acquaintance with E. M. Forster.

  Adorno, Theodor (1903–1969). German philosopher. In 1933, he emigrated to Oxford and then to the U.S. where he became friends with Thomas Mann; later, he returned to his academic career in Frankfurt. Adorno was a critic of phenomenology, existentialism, and neo-positivism. He also wrote about music, language, and literature.

  Agee, James (1909–1955). American poet, novelist, journalist, and screenwriter; born in Tennessee and educated at Harvard. Agee’s first book was a 1934 volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He became famous for his collaboration with the photographer Walker Percy on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), about Alabama sharecroppers during the Depression (an assignment rejected by Fortune magazine). Later he wrote two semi-autobiographical novels, The Morning Watch (1951) and A Death in the Family (1957), the second of which was published posthumously and won a Pulitzer Prize (it won another Pulitzer when adapted for the stage as All the Way Home). Agee was on the staff of Time as well as Fortune, and he became widely known as a film critic. His screenplays included The African Queen (1951, with John Huston) and an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (1953).

  AJC Ranch. Carter Lodge, John van Druten, and the British actress and director Auriol Lee (who had directed several of van Druten’s plays) bought the ranch in the early 1940s. They named it “AJC” for Auriol, John, Carter. Lee died in a car accident not long afterwards. Van Druten also owned a forest cabin nearby, in the mountains above Idyllwild.

  Allgood, Sara (1883–1950). Irish actress. At the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Allgood created the part of “Juno Boyle” in Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey. Isherwood evidently saw the first London run of Juno and the Paycock between November 1925 and May 1926. Allgood repeated the role of “Juno” for Hitchcock’s 1930 film, and later settled in Hollywood where she made numerous films.

  Almond, Paul (b. 1931). Canadian director, producer, screenwriter; educated at McGill University and at Oxford, where he was president of the poetry society and edited the undergraduate literary magazine Isis. On leaving Oxford, Almond joined a British repertory company before returning to Canada in the early 1950s to work as a TV director and later in film. He made Isabel (1967), Act of the Heart (1970), and Journey (1972) starring his first wife, Geneviève Bujold. His second wife, Joan, is a photographer. With a life-long literary friend, Michael Ballantyne, Almond published a memoir, High Hopes: Coming of Age at the Mid-Century (1999).

  Andrews, Oliver. California sculptor, on the art faculty at UCLA. He died suddenly of a heart attack during the 1970s, while still in his forties.

  Angermayer, Ken (Kenneth Anger) (b. 1929). American filmmaker and author. His films include Fireworks (1947), Eaux d’Artifice (1953), and Scorpio Rising (1964). Angermayer grew up in Hollywood. His sensationalist book, Hollywood Babylon (1975), exposes the habitual excesses of many stars and the ruthless way in which some stars were exploited.

  Arvin, Newton (1900–1963). American literary critic and professor of literature; born in Indiana and educated at Harvard. Arvin taught at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and published biographies of Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whitman, and Melville. The Melville biography (which he was working on in Nantucket when Isherwood visited in the summer of 1947) won the National Book Award in 1951. He also contributed to scholarly journals and to The Nation, The New Republic, and, later, Vogue and Vanity Fair. He was unsuccessfully married for eight years, from 1932 to 1940, to a former student, Mary Garrison. Arvin met Truman Capote at Yaddo in June 1946, and they began an intense love affair which lasted several years. In 1960, Arvin was arrested when his large collection of erotic photographs and stories was discovered by the police; he informed on a number of colleagues and close friends, then had a nervous breakdown and lost his job at Smith. Not long afterwards, he discovered he had terminal cancer.

  Ashton, Frederick (Freddy) (1906–1988). British choreographer and dancer, born in Ecuador, raised in Peru, and educated in England from 1919. Ashton studied with Léonide Massine and Marie Rambert. She was the first to commission a ballet from him, in 1926. In the late 1920s, he worked briefly as a dancer and choreographer in Paris. Then in 1935, he joined the Vic-Wells (later Sadler’s Wells) Ballet where he spent the rest of his career. The company gradually evolved into the Royal Ballet, and in 1963 he succeeded Ninette de Valois as its director. Sadler’s Wells had its first New York season and U.S. tour in the autumn of 1949, with The Sleeping Beauty as its centerpiece, and they toured again the following autumn.

  Auden, W. H. (Wystan) (1907–1973). English poet, playwright, librettist, critic. Perhaps the greatest English poet of his century and one of the most influential. He and Isherwood met as schoolboys at St. Edmund’s School, Hindhead, Surrey, where Auden, two and a half years younger than Isherwood, arrived in the autumn of 1915. They wrote three plays together—The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), On the Frontier (1938)—and a travel book about their trip to China during the Sino-Japanese war—Journey to a War (1939). A fourth play—The Enemies of a Bishop (1929)—was published posthumously. As well as doing several stints of schoolmastering, Auden worked for John Grierson’s Film Unit, funded by the General Post Office, for about six months during 1935, mostly writing poetry to be used as sound track. He and Isherwood went abroad separately and together during the 1930s, famously to Berlin, and finally emigrated together to t
he United States in 1939. After only a few months, their lives and interests diverged (Auden settled in New York while Isherwood went on to California). but they remained close friends until Auden’s death. Auden is caricatured as “Hugh Weston” in Lions and Shadows and figures centrally in Christopher and His Kind. There are many passages about him in D1.

  Aufderheide, Charles. American technician, from the Midwest. Aufderheide came to Los Angeles with Ruby Bell and the From twins. He began working on cameras at Technicolor soon after he arrived, and he continued there for about thirty years. According to a friend, Alvin Novak, Aufderheide’s personal qualities were largely responsible for the longterm harmony of The Benton Way Group: he had quick insight into the needs and motives of his circle of acquaintances and friends, liked to entertain, and was able to talk practically on a wide range of sophisticated subjects. The Benton Way Group became a special haven for certain intellectuals who belonged neither to the Hollywood film world, nor to the continental high culture of the refugee community. The Benton Way Group were almost exclusively Americans, apart from the Egyptian-born scholar and intellectual Edouard Roditi (who was evidently attracted to them precisely because they were unlike himself). Aufderheide also wrote poetry, and after he died his friends collected some of his verses in a book.

  Avis, Annie (d. 1948). Christopher Isherwood’s nanny, from near Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk. She was employed by Isherwood’s mother in October 1904, when Isherwood was two months old and Avis herself was about thirty, and she remained with the family for the rest of her life. She never married, though she had once been engaged (her fiancé died). Isherwood and his younger brother, Richard, were close to Nanny and, in childhood, spent more time with her than with their mother. 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. Richard later felt that Nanny had made a favorite of Isherwood. Isherwood wrote in Kathleen and Frank that he loved Nanny dearly; in adolescence he had bullied her, but he had also shared intimate secrets with her. And he recalled that Nanny never criticized him.

  Bachardy, Don (b. 1934). American painter; Isherwood’s companion from 1953 onwards. Bachardy accompanied his brother, Ted Bachardy, on the beach in Santa Monica from the late 1940s, and Isherwood occasionally saw him there. They were introduced in November 1952, met again in February 1953, and began an affair which quickly became serious. Bachardy was then an eighteen-year-old college student. He studied languages and theater arts at UCLA, then attended Chouinard Art School and, later, the Slade School of Art in London. His portraits have been widely shown, and he has published his drawings in several books including October (1980) with Isherwood and Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood (1990). Bachardy figures prominently in D1.

  Bachardy, Ted (b. 1930). Elder brother of Don Bachardy. After a number of breakdowns, Ted Bachardy was diagnosed as a manic-depressive schizophrenic. When well, he worked at various jobs: as a tour guide and in the mail room at Warner Brothers, as a sales clerk in a department store, and as an office worker in insurance companies and advertising agencies.

  Bacon, Francis (1909–1992). British painter, born in Dublin. Bacon worked as an interior decorator in London during the late 1920s and lived in Berlin in 1930, around the time that he taught himself to paint. He showed some of his work in London during the 1930s, but came to prominence only after the war when his controversial Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion made him suddenly famous in 1945.

  Barada. A nun first introduced to the Hollywood Vedanta Center by Sarada Folling in 1943. Her original name was Doris Ludwig; later, after taking final vows in the Ramakrishna Order, she was called Pravrajika Baradaprana. Barada was interested in music and composed Vedantic hymns. Eventually she became a senior nun at the Sarada Convent in Santa Barbara.

  Barnett, Jimmie. American painter and metaphysical teacher. Isherwood knew him when Barnett was a devotee at the Hollywood Vedanta Center; later Barnett settled in the Southwest.

  Barrie, Michael. A one-time singer with financial and administrative talents; friend and secretary to Gerald Heard from the late 1940s onward. Barrie met Heard through Swami Prabhavananda and lived at Trabuco as a monk until about 1955. Later, Barrie nursed Heard through his five-year-long final illness until Heard’s death in 1971. Isherwood often mentions him in D1.

  Barton-Brown, Monsignor. British papal chamberlain; an acquaintance of Isherwood’s friend Gerald Hamilton from just after World War I, when Barton-Brown was attached to the Vatican. Barton-Brown was Hamilton’s priestly counterpart in an attempt, at the start of World War II, to avert the conflict by arranging a meeting between Axis and Allied diplomats on neutral ground (the Vatican was proposed). Barton-Brown and Hamilton contacted various highly placed Catholic officials, and when Hamilton was refused an exit permit to travel from England to Dublin—where he hoped to be able to communicate more easily with Rome—Barton-Brown arranged for him to travel in disguise as a member of a party of Irish nuns. But Hamilton was arrested at Euston station before he could depart, and as Isherwood tells, spent six months in Brixton prison.

  Beaton, Cecil (1904–1980). English photographer, theater designer, and author. Beaton photographed the Sitwells in the 1920s and went on to photograph the British royal family, actors, actresses, writers, and many other public figures. From 1939 to 1945 he worked successfully as a war photographer. He was a dandy and a creature of style, and his numerous costume and set designs for stage and screen were widely admired. In Hollywood his most celebrated achievements were Gigi (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964), for which he won two Academy Awards. Isherwood and Beaton were contemporaries at Cambridge, but became friendly only in the late 1940s when Beaton visited Hollywood (with a production of Lady Windermere’s Fan which he had designed and in which he was acting).

  Beesley, Alec (d. 1987) and Dodie Smith Beesley (1896–1990). She was an English playwright, novelist, and actress, known professionally as Dodie Smith. He was a conscientious objector and an unofficial legal advisor to other conscientious objectors in Los Angeles during the war; he also managed her career. The Beesleys spent a decade in Hollywood because of Alec’s pacifist convictions, and Dodie wrote scripts there for Paramount and her first novel, I Capture the Castle. They returned to England in the early 1950s. Isherwood met the Beesleys in November 1942, through Dodie’s close friend and confidant John van Druten. Some details for the marriage between Stephen Monk and the writer Ehzabeth Rydal in The World in the Evening are taken from the Beesleys’ professional and domestic arrangements, and Ehzabeth Rydal’s correspondence with her friend Cecilia de Limbour resembles the voluminous letters continually exchanged between Dodie and John van Druten. Isherwood dedicated the novel to the Beesleys. In the summer of 1943, the Beesleys mated their dalmatians, Folly and Buzzle, and Folly produced fifteen puppies—inspiring Dodie’s most famous book, The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), later filmed by Walt Disney. See D1 for more passages about the Beesleys (and about their dogs).

  Bennett, Ronald. American actor, born in New England. A member of Michael Chekhov’s Chekhov Theater Studio. Bennett taught drama at Brown University as well as at The High Valley Theatre.

  Berns, Walter. American academic. He met Bill Goyen in the navy when they served on the same battleship, and after the war they built an adobe house together in Taos, New Mexico, near Dorothy Brett and Frieda Lawrence with whom they became friends. Frieda Lawrence introduced them to Stephen Spender when Spender visited Taos in 1948 with Leonard Bernstein. At the time, Berns hoped to become a writer, but in 1949, he left Taos to study at the London School of Economics and for a few months he and Goyen lived at the Spenders’ house. Berns went on to the University of Chicago where he got a doctorate in Political Science; in 1951 he married, and he and his wife had three children. Berns taught at Yale, Cornell, the University of Toronto, and finally, Georgetown University. When he retired from teaching in 1994, he became a resident scholar
at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He has published numerous books and articles.

  Bill, George. American engineer; he worked in the aerospace industry in Los Angeles, possibly at Lockheed.

  Bill, also Billy. See Caskey, William.

  Bo. Wallace Bobo; see Index and see also D1.

  Bok, Ben. Eldest son of Peggy Kiskadden and Curtis Bok, a Philadelphia lawyer and judge. Ben became a wolf breeder near Llano, California.

  Bower, Tony. American friend of Jean and Cyril Connolly; Isherwood met him in Paris in 1937. Bower’s accent and manners gave the impression he was English; his mother became Lady Gordon-Duff through a second marriage, and his sister, Jean Gordon-Duff, was a great beauty. He wrote about film for a New York paper and was drafted into the U.S. Army twice during the war. During the late 1940s he worked at New Directions and eventually became editor of a New York art magazine. He was murdered in his Park Avenue apartment in 1972, evidently by a young man he picked up in a bar, possibly The Klondike, near Fifth Avenue in the West Forties. Bower was the model for “Ronny” in Down There on a Visit and there are passages about him in D1.

  Brackett, Charles (1892–1969). American screenwriter and producer; from a wealthy East Coast family. He began as a novelist, then became a screenwriter, and later a producer, often working with the Austro-Hungarian writer-director Billy Wilder. Brackett was one of five writers who worked on the script for Garbo’s Ninotchka (1939). He won an Academy Award as writer-producer of The Long Weekend (1945), and he produced The King and I (1956), as well as working on numerous other films. When Isherwood knew him best during the 1950s, Brackett worked for Darryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox, where he remained for about a decade until the early 1960s. Brackett appears in D1.