Lost Years

by Christopher Isherwood

  Stravinsky, Vera (1888–1982). Russian-born actress and painter. Second wife of Igor Stravinsky; she was previously married three times, the third time to the painter and Ballets Russes stage designer Sergei Sudeikin. In 1917, Vera Arturovna Sudeikin fled St. Petersburg and the bohemian artistic milieu in which she was both patroness and muse, travelling in the south of Russia with Sudeikin before going on to Paris where she met Stravinsky in the early 1920s; they fell in love but did not marry until 1940 after the death of Stravinsky’s first wife. Vera Stravinsky’s paintings were in an abstract-primitive style influenced by Paul Klee, childlike and decorative. She appears often in D1.

  Sudhira. A nurse of Irish descent; she was a probationer nun at the Hollywood Vedanta Center when Isherwood arrived to live there in 1943. Her real name was Helen Kennedy. She had been widowed in youth, and first came to the Vedanta Center professionally to nurse a devotee. After the war she married for a second time and returned to nursing. Isherwood tells about her in detail in D1.

  Sutherland, Graham (1903–1980). English artist. Sutherland began his career as an etcher and engraver and took up oil painting by the mid-1930s, producing semi-abstract pictures inspired by the landscape of Pembrokeshire. He was an official war artist during World War II, employed to depict bomb damage. After the war he began painting religious subjects, and in 1949 he painted a portrait of Somerset Maugham, thus embarking on a new phase as a portrait painter. His best-known work is an enormous tapestry, Christ in Glory, which he designed during the 1950s for the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. He also worked with ceramics and designed for the stage. From the late 1930s, Sutherland and his wife lived half the year in France and half in Trottiscliffe, Kent.

  Swami. Used as a title to mean “Lord” or “Master.” A Hindu monk or religious teacher. Isherwood used it in particular to refer to his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, and he pronounced it “Shwami,” according to the Sanskrit phonetics Prabhavananda taught him; see Prabhavananda.

  Swamiji. An especially respectful form of “Swami,” used in particular as a name for Vivekananda in his later years.

  Taxman, Barry. American composer; raised in the Midwest and educated at Yale and the University of Chicago. He was associated for a time with the University of California at Berkeley and his music is regularly performed in Berkeley where he settled.

  Taylor, Frank (1915–1999). American publisher and movie producer, born in upstate New York and raised as a Roman Catholic. Taylor was turned down by the draft for health reasons and made a meteoric rise in New York publishing during the war years. He began in advertising at Harper and Brothers, the Saturday Review of Literature, and then Reynal & Hitchcock where he was able to move to the literary side during the war and discovered his first bestsellers, Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith and, later, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. After the war, he visited England and established literary friendships which helped him expand the list of American and international authors he was already publishing, such as Arthur Miller, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Saint-Exupéry, Le Corbusier, and Brecht. He vainly tried to start his own publishing firm, worked briefly at Random House, then in 1948 went to Hollywood to produce movies, first of all at MGM, later at Fox. Despite critical recognition and ubiquitous success on the Hollywood social scene, he was victimized during the McCarthy period for his former associations with the communist party—he was a labor activist throughout his early career in New York—and eventually toward the end of 1951 he returned to New York. There, in 1952, he became editor-in-chief at Dell, achieving huge success during the paperback revolution. But Hollywood beckoned again, and Taylor produced The Misfits (1960) with his old friend Arthur Miller. As he records in D1, Isherwood worked with Taylor on film ideas in the 1950s—including The Journeying Boy, a detective story by Michael Innes, and I Am a Camera—and he prepared the 1960 anthology Great English Short Stories for Taylor at Dell. During the 1960s and 1970s, Taylor ran the trade division at McGraw-Hill where he published Marshall McLuhan, Eldridge Cleaver, Germaine Greer, and Nabokov, among others.

  Taylor, Nan (b. 1915). American radio hostess; born and raised in Minnesota as a Roman Catholic. Her maiden name was Skallon. Taylor trained as an actress at the University of Minnesota and afterwards had a children’s radio show in New York. During the war, she worked with Bennett Cerf, presenting a books program. She gave up her career when she moved to Hollywood with her husband, Frank Taylor, and looked after their four sons, Michael, Mark, Curtice, and Adams. When the Taylors returned east, they settled in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she founded the town’s first daycare center and, later, during the 1970s, became head of the Board of Education. She was also president locally of the English Speaking Union. The Taylors divorced in the 1970s and Nan remarried, though she remained close to her first husband.

  Thomas, Dylan (1914–1953). British poet, born and raised in Wales, where his father was the English master at Swansea Grammar School. Thomas began writing poetry in childhood, left school early and published his first book, 18 Poems, in 1934 while working as a journalist. In London he also worked as a scriptwriter and broadcaster for the BBC and wrote stories as well as poems. His marriage in 1937 to Caitlin Macnamara was famously stormy and drunken, but Thomas’s work nevertheless attracted critical acclaim and a wide audience. After the pair moved back to Wales together in 1949, he made a series of taxing reading tours through the USA because he needed the money. He died in New York of alcohol poisoning in November 1953. His Collected Poems appeared in 1952, and he completed a version of his radio play Under Milk Wood not long before he died.

  Todd, Thelma (1905–1935). American movie actress. She owned an establishment on the Pacific Coast Highway north of Santa Monica incorporating a restaurant, a gambling casino and a whorehouse, and she was murdered there. Afterwards the restaurant—named Chez Roland after Gilbert Roland with whom Todd was supposed to be in love—remained in business for many years; Isherwood always referred to it as “Thelma Todd’s.”

  Tooker, George. American painter. He became Paul Cadmus’s lover after they met at the Art Students League in New York in 1942, and he was friendly with Cadmus’s circle. During the 1950s he moved to Vermont with another artist, William Christopher, and continued his career there.

  Trabuco. Monastic community founded by Gerald Heard in 1942, on a ranch about sixty miles south of Los Angeles and roughly twenty miles inland. An anonymous benefactor provided $100,000 for the project, and Isherwood’s cousin, Felix Greene, administered the practical side, buying the property and constructing the building, which could house fifty. By 1949 Heard found the responsibility of leading the group too much of a strain and Trabuco was given to the Vedanta Society.

  Tree, Iris (1896–1968). English actress, poet, and playwright; third daughter of actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree. She published three volumes of poetry and wrote poems and articles for magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as Botteghe Oscure, Poetry Review, and The London Magazine. In youth she travelled with her father to Hollywood and New York and married an American, Curtis Moffat, with whom she had her first son, Ivan Moffat, born in Havana. Until 1926 she lived mostly in London and in Paris where she acted in Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle; she toured with the play back to America where she met her second husband, the Austrian Count Friedrich Ledebur, with whom she had another son, Christian Dion Ledebur (called Boon) in 1928. Iris Tree had known Aldous and Maria Huxley in London, and they introduced Isherwood to her in California during the war. With Alan Harkness, she brought a troupe of actors to Ojai to start The High Valley Theatre, and she adapted, wrote, and acted in plays for the group, including her own Cock-a-doodle-doo. She moved often—from house to house and country to country—and in July 1954 left California for good, settling in Rome where she worked on but never finished a novel about her youth. Her marriage to Ledebur ended in 1955. Isherwood modelled “Charlotte” in A Single Man partly on Iris Tree and wrote much about her in D1.

  Turville-Petre, Francis. English archaeol
ogist, from an aristocratic Catholic family. Isherwood met the eccentric Turville-Petre through W. H. Auden in Berlin in 1929, and it was at Turville-Petre’s house outside Berlin that Isherwood met Heinz Neddermeyer in 1932. In 1933 when Isherwood and Heinz fled Germany, they spent nearly four months on Turville-Petre’s tiny island, St. Nicholas, in Greece. Turville-Petre is the model for “Ambrose” in Down There on a Visit.

  Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. One of Hollywood’s five biggest studios. It was formed by a merger between Twentieth Century Pictures and Fox Film Corporation. Darryl F. Zanuck ran it from 1935 to 1952 and again from 1962 with his son Richard Zanuck. Alan Ladd Jr. took over in the 1970s, and Twentieth Century-Fox has since been sold and resold, eventually to Rupert Murdoch. Its many stars have included Shirley Temple and Marilyn Monroe, and Fox produced the first widescreen Cinemascope film, The Robe, in 1953, followed by other big screen spectaculars, including The King and I (1956), Cleopatra (1963), and The Sound of Music (1965). Isherwood worked at Fox scripting Jean-Christophe in 1956 and 1957, but the film was never made.

  UFOs. In June 1947 an Idaho businessman, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing through the window of his private plane, near Mt. Rainier, flying objects which he described to the press as looking like “skipping saucers.” So many more “sightings” followed around the country that the U.S. military officially investigated the possible threat to national security. In his 1950 book Is Another World Watching? (The Riddle of the Flying Saucers in the U.K.), Gerald Heard described many of these early UFO sightings. He believed they were either top secret, ultra-fast experimental aircraft which the government was covering up or, more exciting to him, visitors from Mars. Among the numerous accounts of flying saucers analyzed by the U.S. Air Force between 1947 and the mid-1950s, about ten percent of reported sightings were never accounted for. As the terminology indicates, they remain Unidentified Flying Objects. Official U.S. investigations were abandoned in 1969.

  Upward, Edward (b. 1903). English novelist and schoolmaster. Isherwood met Upward in 1921 at their public school, Repton, and followed him to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. They were closely united by their rebellious attitude toward family and school authority and by shared literary interests. In the 1920s they created the fantasy world, Mortmere, about which they wrote surreal, macabre, and pornographic stories and poems for each other; their excited schoolboy humor is described in Lions and Shadows where Upward appears as “Allen Chalmers.”

  Upward made his reputation in the 1930s with his short fiction, especially Journey to the Border (1938), the intense, almost mystical, and largely autobiographical account of a young upper-middle-class tutor’s conversion to communism. Then he published nothing for a long time, writing only fragments while he devoted himself to schoolmastering (he needed the money) and to communist party work. From 1931 to 1961 he taught at Alleyn’s School, Dulwich, where he became Head of English and a housemaster; he lived nearby with his wife, Hilda, and their two children, Kathy and Christopher.

  After World War II, Upward and his wife became disillusioned by the British communist party, and they left it in 1948; but Upward never abandoned his Marxist-Leninist convictions. In the face of psychological difficulties of some magnitude, he returned to his writing in earnest towards the end of the 1950s, and eventually produced a massive autobiographical trilogy, The Spiral Ascent (1977)—comprised of In the Thirties (1962), The Rotten Elements (1969), and No Home but the Struggle. The last two volumes were written on the Isle of Wight, where Upward retired in 1962, and they have been followed by several collections of short stories. Upward remained a challenging and trusted critic of Isherwood’s work throughout Isherwood’s life, and a loyal friend. He is often mentioned in D1.

  van Druten, John (1901–1957). English playwright and novelist. Isherwood met van Druten in New York in 1939, and they became friends because they were both pacifists. Of Dutch parentage, van Druten was born and educated in London and took a degree in law at the University of London. He achieved his first success as a playwright in New York during the 1920s, emigrated in 1938 and became a U.S. citizen in 1944. His strength was light comedy; among his numerous plays and adaptations were Voice of the Turtle (1943), I Remember Mama (1944), Bell, Book, and Candle (1950), and I Am a Camera (1951) based on Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Many of these were later filmed. In 1951, van Druten directed The King and I on Broadway. Van Druten usually spent half the year in New York and half near Los Angeles on the AJC Ranch, which he owned with Carter Lodge. He also owned a mountain cabin above Idyllwild which Isherwood sometimes used. A fall from a horse in Mexico in 1936 left van Druten with a crippled arm, and partly as a result of this, he became attracted to Vedanta and other religions (he was a renegade Christian Scientist). He was a contributor to Isherwood’s Vedanta for the Western World, and there are numerous accounts of him in D1.

  van Leyden, Ernst and Karen. Dutch painters and decorative artists. They specialized in painting on glass, and they were responsible for a mural painted on glass in Jay de Laval’s restaurant Café Jay. Karen van Leyden also painted screens and panels. The van Leydens had been friendly with Brian Howard in Portugal in 1933 when Howard travelled there with Cyril and Jean Connolly and Howard’s boyfriend Toni. During the 1940s and early 1950s they lived on Barrington Avenue in Brentwood, which was then still rustic with open fields, and they converted the large barn on the property into their studio.

  Van Meegeren, Han (1889–1947). Dutch painter and perhaps the greatest forger ever; he painted a number of Vermeers and De Hooghs which were accepted as authentic and which hung in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until 1945 when Van Meegeren was arrested as a collaborator because he was associated with the sale of a Dutch master painting to Goebbels. To clear himself of the charge of collaborating, Van Meegeren confessed that the Goebbels painting and certain others were his own work. A two-year scientific study confirmed his claim, uncovering his immensely complex process and also his remarkable talent. He was sentenced to a year in prison and died there of a heart attack.

  van Petten, Bill (1922–1989). American film administrator. Van Petten came from a wealthy oil family, read widely, especially in Sufi literature, and eventually converted to Islam. For two years he was assistant to the Saudi Arabian Minister of Information and helped to establish an Imax theater at the royal palace. He also supervised the filming of documentary footage there. He lived in Santa Monica, for many years in the same building with Jim Charlton.

  Van Vechten, Carl (1880–1964). American novelist and poet, critic of music and dance, and, late in life, photographer. He was a prolific writer and a figure of New York’s bohemia, frequenting Harlem clubs and greatly contributing to popular recognition of black artists during the Harlem Renaissance. He was also an early editor of Gertrude Stein. Among his seven novels are The Tattooed Countess (1924) and Nigger Heaven (1926). He was married to Fania Marinoff.

  Vaughan, Keith (1912–1977). English painter, illustrator, and diarist. He worked in advertising during the 1930s and was a conscientious objector in the war; later he taught at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and the Slade, as well as briefly in America. Isherwood met him in 1947 at John Lehmann’s and bought one of his pictures, “Two Bathers,” a small oil painting still in his collection. Vaughan’s diaries, with his own illustrations, were published in 1966.

  Vidal, Gore (b. 1925). American writer. Vidal introduced himself to Isherwood in a café in Paris in early 1948, having previously written to him and sent the manuscript of his novel The City and the Pillar. They became lasting friends. Later, Isherwood also met Howard Austen (Tinker), Vidal’s companion from 1950 onward. Vidal was in the army as a young man; afterwards he wrote essays on politics and culture as well as many novels, including Williwaw (1946), Myra Breckenridge (1968, dedicated to Isherwood), and the multi-volume American chronicle comprised of Burr (1974), Lincoln (1984), 1876 (1976), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1989), and Washington, D.C. (1967). Dur
ing the 1950s Vidal wrote a series of television plays for CBS, then screenplays at Twentieth Century-Fox and MGM (including part of Ben Hur), and two Broadway plays, Visit to a Small Planet (1957) and The Best Man (1960). In 1960 he ran for Congress, and in 1982 for the Senate, both times unsuccessfully. He described his friendship with Isherwood in his memoir, Palimpsest (1995), and there are many passages about him in D1.

  Viertel, Berthold (1885–1953). Viennese poet, playwright, and film and theater director. Isherwood worked for Viertel in London as a screenplay writer and, later, dialogue director on Viertel’s film Little Friend made by Gaumont-British. This was Isherwood’s first experience in the film business, and he made it the subject of Prater Violet, in which Viertel appears as “Friedrich Bergmann.” Viertel also appears throughout D1. Viertel had settled his first wife and children in Santa Monica in 1928 and returned alone to Europe for long periods to work. His description of the life in California was a glamorous lure to Isherwood; they renewed their friendship soon after Isherwood arrived there in 1939, beginning work on a film vaguely inspired by Mr. Norris Changes Trains. At the Viertels’ house in Santa Monica Canyon Isherwood met a number of the celebrated European emigres then in Hollywood, and the friendship with Viertel led to his second Hollywood job (the first of any substance) with Gottfried Reinhardt at MGM. Viertel began his career as an actor and stage director and turned to films in the 1920s. He first made films in Germany, began directing in Hollywood from the late 1920s, and in England from 1933. Towards the end of his life he lived partly in New York and eventually, with his second wife—the German character actress Elisabeth Neumann—he returned to Europe as a theatrical director, staging, among other works, German-language productions of Tennessee Williams.