Lost Years

by Christopher Isherwood

  Viertel, Peter (b. 1920). German-born second son of Berthold and Salka Viertel; screenplay writer and novelist. Peter Viertel attended UCLA and Dartmouth and became a freelance writer. He served in the U.S. Marines during World War II and was decorated four times. He wrote the award-winning screenplay for Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as well as other Hemingway adaptations, and his own novels are in the Hemingway vein, with subjects such as soldiering (Line of Departure, 1947), big game hunting (White Hunter, Black Heart, 1954), and bullfighting (Love Lies Bleeding, 1964). His first novel, The Canyon (published in 1941, but completed when he was just nineteen), gives a compelling adolescent view of Santa Monica as it was around the time when Isherwood first arrived there, and Isherwood mentions it in D1. Viertel’s first marriage was to Virginia Schulberg, known as Jigee, and in 1960 he married the actress Deborah Kerr. Like his mother and father he eventually resettled in Europe.

  Viertel, Salka (1889–1978). Polish actress and screenplay writer; first wife of Berthold Viertel with whom she had three sons, Hans, Peter, and Thomas. Sara Salomé Steuermann Viertel had a successful stage career in Vienna (including acting for Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater) before moving to Hollywood where she became the friend and confidante of Greta Garbo; they appeared together in the German-language version of Anna Christie and afterwards Salka collaborated on Garbo’s screenplays for MGM in the 1930s and 1940s (Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, Conquest, and others). Isherwood met her soon after arriving in Los Angeles and was often at her house socially or to work with Berthold Viertel. In the 1930s and 1940s the house was frequented by European refugees and Salka was able to help many of them find work—some as domestic servants, others with the studios. Among her guests were some of the most celebrated writers and movie stars of the time. By the mid-1940s, her husband had left her; her lover Gottfried Reinhardt had married; Garbo’s career was over; and later, in the 1950s, Salka was persecuted by the McCarthyites and blacklisted by MGM for her presumed communism. In January 1947, she moved into the garage apartment Isherwood and Caskey had let from her and rented out her house; then in the early 1950s she sold the property and moved to an apartment off Wilshire Boulevard. Eventually she returned modestly to writing for the movies, but finally moved back to Europe, although she had been a U.S. citizen since 1939. Isherwood tells about her in detail in D1.

  Viertel, Tommy. Youngest son of Berthold and Salka Viertel. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in February 1944. After the war he lived in Los Angeles where he worked for Los Angeles County. He married twice.

  Viertel, Virginia (Jigee). Peter Viertel’s first wife, from 1944 to 1959. Born Virginia Ray to working-class Americans ruined by the Depression, Jigee was a dancer in the Paramount chorus and then married the writer Budd Schulberg with whom she shared strong leftist political convictions. She and Schulberg divorced after having a daughter, Vicky Schulberg. Jigee’s second daughter, Christine Viertel, was born in Paris in 1952, and Jigee and Peter separated immediately afterwards. Salka Viertel partly raised both Vicky and Christine. After the ruin of her second marriage, Jigee drank increasingly heavily; then in January 1960 she fell asleep with a lit cigarette and died of burns in the hospital. She appears in D1.

  Vivekananda, Swami (1863–1902). Narendranath Datta (also known as Naren, Narendra and later as Swamiji) was Ramakrishna’s chief direct disciple. Ramakrishna recognized him as an “eternal companion,” a perfect soul born into the world along with the avatar and possessing some of the avatar’s characteristics. Vivekananda led the disciples after Ramakrishna’s death and founded the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. He also spent time wandering through India practicing spiritual disciplines and travelling to America and Europe, where his lectures and classes spawned the first Vedanta centers in the West. His teachings and sayings were published in various volumes, and Isherwood wrote the introduction to a 1960 selection from these.

  Vividishananda, Swami. Hindu monk, from India. Vividishananda ran the Seattle Vedanta Center; Isherwood met him at the dedication of the new Portland temple in 1943 and afterwards briefly visited his Seattle center. Swami Vividishananda’s biography of Shivananda, A Man of God: Glimpses into the Life and Work of Swami Shivananda, a Great Disciple of Sri Ramakrishna—for which Isherwood wrote the foreword in 1949—was eventually published in 1957 by the Ramakrishna Math.

  Waley, Arthur (1889–1966). English poet and scholar of Chinese and Japanese; educated at Rugby and King’s College, Cambridge. Waley lived in Bloomsbury and associated with figures in the Bloomsbury group. He is best known for his translations of Chinese and Japanese literature which he began to publish during World War I. His renderings from the Chinese influenced Ezra Pound and the Imagists, among others, and his major prose translations (The Tale of Genji, Monkey) along with his scholarly writings on Japanese and Chinese art and culture contributed in England from the 1920s onward to a growing general interest in oriental literature.

  Walter, Bruno. German conductor. Walter was a neighbor of Thomas Mann in Munich from before the start of World War I, and they became lifelong friends. Their children were acquainted with one another from childhood. When the Manns first arrived to spend the summer in Brentwood in 1940, the Walters were already settled nearby. Walter also lived in New York.

  Warner Brothers. One of the major Hollywood studios, founded in 1923 by the four sons of a Polish shoemaker. Warner Brothers pioneered talking pictures and later became known for realistic, often black-and-white, films. As well as gangster movies and musicals, there were numerous relatively highbrow historical and political films, and the studio was especially successful from the 1930s to the 1950s. It was increasingly run by the youngest brother. Jack Warner, although Darryl F. Zanuck and, after him, Hal Wallis, contributed to Jack Warner’s success. Warner Brothers was sold to Seven Arts in 1967 and later taken over by a conglomerate, eventually merging with Time Inc. in 1989.

  Warren, Robert Penn (1905–1989). American poet, novelist, critic, and teacher; born in Kentucky and educated at Vanderbilt, Berkeley, Yale, and Oxford. Warren won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1946 novel All the King’s Men, also his best known, and he wrote numerous other novels and works of non-fiction, mostly preoccupied with the concerns of his native South. He helped to found The Southern Review and co-edited it with Cleanth Brooks from 1935 until 1942; with Brooks he also later compiled two volumes of criticism and literary writing which spread the so-called New Criticism into many college classrooms: Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Criticism (1943). Warren’s first volume of poetry appeared in 1935, and he won two more Pulitzer prizes for later volumes of poetry, Promises (1957) and Now and Then (1978). He also won several other major literary awards and was made America’s first poet laureate in 1986. He held university teaching posts throughout his career. For a time he was on the board of the Huntington Hartford Foundation with Isherwood, giving away three-month fellowships for young writers.

  Watson, Peter. The financier behind Horizon, of which he was art editor and co-founder. Watson was heir to a margarine fortune, intelligent, and idealistically devoted to art. He collected art and befriended many artists. He was close to Denny Fouts in the 1930s and was the officially named owner of Denny Fouts’s Picasso when it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Later, he lived with Norman Fowler, whom he met in New York in 1949. The pair lived together in London until the apparently healthy and sober Watson mysteriously drowned in his bath in 1956.

  Watson-Gandy, Anthony Blethwyn (Tony) (1919–1952). British RAF flying officer and scholar; educated at Westminster, King’s College, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne. His parents were minor gentry, and his father a soldier like Isherwood’s. Watson-Gandy translated from French The Rise and Splendour of the Chinese Empire (1952) by René Grousset.

  Watts, Alan (b. 1915). English mystic, religious philosopher, author, and teacher. Watts became a Buddhist while still a schoolboy at King’s School, Canterbury, Kent, and went on to study all forms of religious thought and practi
ce. His many books include An Outline of Zen Buddhism (1932), Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion (1947), The Supreme Identity: An Essay on Oriental Metaphysic and the Christian Religion (1950), Nature, Man and Woman: A New Approach to Sexual Experience (1958), and Psychotherapy East and West (1961). He emigrated to America at the start of World War II, eventually settling near San Francisco where he became Dean of the American Academy of Asian Studies. He is known as a Zen Buddhist, but was also ordained as an Anglican priest in 1945. He was a close friend of Aldous Huxley, whom he first met in 1943, and he was impressed by Krishnamurti’s decision to renounce his messianic role. Krishnamurti greatly influenced Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951). Watts felt that Huxley and Gerald Heard were working toward the same synthesis of Christian and oriental mysticism as himself, and like them he experimented with LSD in the 1950s. He opposed the Hindu emphasis on asceticism: he married three times and asserted that sex improved spiritual presence. He was a figure of the San Francisco beat scene and a model for Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.

  Wescott, Glenway (1901–1987). American writer. Wescott was born in Wisconsin, attended the University of Chicago, lived in France in the 1920s, partly in Paris, and travelled in Europe and England. Afterwards he lived in New York. Early in his career he wrote poetry and reviews, later turning to fiction. His best-known works are The Pilgrim Hawk (1940) and Apartment in Athens (1945). He was President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from 1957 to 1961. From the late 1930s, Wescott, his longterm companion Monroe Wheeler, and George Platt Lynes shared a country house in New Jersey.

  Whale, James (1886–1957). British actor and stage and film director. Whale’s film career began when he arrived in Hollywood in 1930 to direct Journey’s End, which he had produced for the stage in London and New York. He went on to make other movies, including Frankenstein with Boris Karloff (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein with Karloff and Elsa Lanchester (1935), Showboat (1936), and The Man in the Iron Mask (1939). He retired in 1941 to paint, then in 1949 tried to make another film, but it was never released.

  White, J. Alan. British publisher. He joined Methuen in 1924, became a director in 1933 and retired as Chairman in 1969. He brought many new writers to the firm (which had already published Conrad and James), emphasizing the importance of taking risks on new talent. During the war, he was exempted from military service even though he was only thirty-five because his boss, C. W. Chamberlain, said he could not run the firm without him. White moved his family to Kent and commuted to London to struggle with paper and labor shortages and wartime printing regulations; at night he served in the Home Guard. Prater Violet, published in New York in 1945 but delayed in England until the spring of 1946, was Isherwood’s first publication with Methuen. White got the book for his new postwar list simply by offering Isherwood more money than any other English publisher. Methuen remained Isherwood’s U.K. publisher for the rest of Isherwood’s life, and posthumously, until 1998 when Random House attempted to take over the imprint which by then belonged to a larger group, Reed Books. Methuen achieved independence through a management buy-out, but permitted Isherwood to go to Chatto & Windus at Random House. (Random House was already publishing Isherwood’s diaries in a Vintage paperback edition; by chance, Chatto had in any case been the home since 1946 of Isherwood’s much earlier publisher, the Hogarth Press.)

  Williams, Emlyn (1905–1987). Welsh playwright and actor. Williams wrote psychological thrillers for the London stage, including Night Must Fall (1935), and is perhaps best known for The Corn Is Green (1935), based on his own background in Wales and in which he played the lead; both of these were later filmed. He acted in many other stage productions, including Shakespeare and contemporary theater. During the 1950s he toured with one-man shows of Charles Dickens and Dylan Thomas (the Dylan Thomas show was titled Growing Up). Isherwood first met Williams in Hollywood in 1950 and saw him and his wife Molly again in London and Hollywood in subsequent years.

  Williams, Tennessee (1911–1983). American playwright; Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Mississippi and raised in St. Louis. His father was a travelling salesman, his mother felt herself to be a glamorous southern belle in reduced circumstances. His essentially autobiographical play, The Glass Menagerie, made him famous in 1945, and soon afterwards he wrote A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Many of his subsequent plays are equally well-known—such as The Rose Tattoo (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1962)—and were made into films. Williams also wrote a novella, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950). When he first came to Hollywood in 1943 to work for MGM, he bore a letter of introduction to Isherwood from Lincoln Kirstein; this began a long and close friendship, with numerous visits on both coasts, often to attend openings of Williams’s plays. There are many passages about Williams in D1. Williams’s longtime companion, Frank Merlo, died of cancer in 1963.

  Windham, Donald (b. 1920). Novelist and playwright, from Georgia. Windham was a friend of Lincoln Kirstein and of Glenway Wescott as well as of Paul Cadmus and George Platt Lynes, and wrote a book, Tanaquil, based on this circle of artists. Isherwood probably met him in New York early in the 1940s, certainly by 1942. Windham worked for Kirstein at Dance Index, and ran the magazine while Kirstein was away in the army during the war. He also collaborated with Tennessee Williams—a close friend—on the play You Touched Me! (1945). Isherwood wrote a blurb for Windham’s 1950 novel The Dog Star.

  Winter, Ella. American author and translator. During the 1920s she translated from German The Diary of Otto Braun with Selections from His Letters and Poems and Wolfgang Koehler’s The Mentality of Apes. Her book about the Soviet Union, Red Virtue: Human Relationships in the New Russia (1933), was a bestseller. Winter’s first husband, Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936), was a journalist and author (she edited his letters), and she later married the American playwright and screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart. The Stewarts were neighbors of Salka Viertel in Santa Monica.

  Winter, Keith. British novelist, playwright, and screenwriter; born in Wales, educated at Berkhamsted and Lincoln College, Oxford. His 1934 play, The Shining Hour, was filmed in 1938 with Joan Crawford and Margaret Sullavan (using a script by Jane Murfin and Ogden Nash), and during the 1940s Winter worked on numerous screenplays at MGM and at Warner Brothers, where Isherwood mentions being friendly with him. One of Winter’s boarding-school novels, The Rats of Norway (1932), was staged successfully in London, but flopped in New York in 1948. Winter also wrote the first movie adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, later scripted by Isherwood and Terry Southern.

  Wood, Christopher (Chris) (d. 1976). Isherwood met Chris Wood in September 1932 when W. H. Auden took him to meet Gerald Heard, then sharing Wood’s London flat. Wood was about ten years younger than Heard, handsome and friendly but shy about his maverick talents. He played the piano well, but never professionally, wrote short stories, but not for publication, had a pilot’s license and rode a bicycle for transport. He was extremely rich (the family business made jams and other canned and bottled goods), sometimes extravagant, and always generous; he secretly funded many of Heard’s projects and loaned or gave money to many other friends (including Isherwood). In 1937 Wood emigrated with Heard to Los Angeles and in 1941 moved with him to Laguna. Their domestic commitment persisted for a time despite Heard’s increasing asceticism and religious activities. Ultimately, the household disbanded as their lives diverged, though they remained friends. From 1939, Wood was involved with Paul Sorel, also a member of the household for about five years. Wood appears throughout D1.

  Worsley, Cuthbert. English writer, theater critic, and schoolmaster. T. C. Worsley was a friend of Stephen Spender and in 1937 accompanied him to the Spanish Civil War on an assignment for the Daily Worker. Worsley returned to Spain soon afterwards to join an ambulance unit. He later wrote about this period for The Left Review and in Behind the Battle (1939), as well as in a fictionalized memoir published much later, Fellow Travellers (
1971). During the 1950s he wrote about theater for the Financial Times.

  Wright, Frank Lloyd (1869–1959). American architect. A preeminent figure in twentieth-century architecture, Wright originated the organic principle that the form of a building should develop naturally from its setting, from its function, and from its materials. He began as a designer in a Chicago firm and eventually opened his own practice, first expressing his genius for spacious, open-plan interiors in his low-standing “prairie” houses. His houses in particular tended to conform to the features of the natural landscape in which they were set, but also, he was trained as a civil engineer, and he was able to apply the principles of engineering to his architectural designs. Thus, he initiated new techniques in offices and other large public buildings—such as concrete blocks reinforced with steel rods, air conditioning, indirect lighting, panel heat, and new uses of glass. In 1910, Wright established Taliesin, near Spring Green, Wisconsin. It was both his home and an architectural school (named after a sixth-century Welsh bard). Later, in 1938, he founded Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he spent the winter months and where apprentice architects also gathered to work with him. His foundation, the Taliesin Fellowship, supported both centers.

  Wyberslegh Hall. The fifteenth-century manor house where Isherwood was born and where his mother lived with his brother, Richard, after the war; it was part of the Bradshaw Isherwood estate.