Liberation

by Christopher Isherwood

  Isherwood’s observation is tidy with hindsight, but it is no self-reinvention. The letter had been rash and defiant, and he knew Hamilton was indiscreet. It was quoted in the Daily Express in November 1939, launching the worst of the public criticism of his and of Auden’s decision to remain in America after the war started.

  As Isherwood dug into the motives for his past actions and became increasingly candid about his generation, former friends in England seemed to understand him less and less. Some admired him for coming out as a homosexual, but they were bewildered and critical when he came out with other truths. In 1973, he asked John Lehmann not to publish their correspondence because when he reread his letters to Lehmann, Isherwood found that they said only what he had presumed Lehmann had wanted to hear at the time: “They are dull, mechanical, false. Don was horrified by their insincerity when he read them—he hadn’t believed that even old Dobbin could be capable of such falseness.”45 He stood by the long-established friendship, but when Lehmann pressed for an explanation, Isherwood was evasive:

  Once started, I might have found myself cutting much deeper and telling John why my letters to him during the war were so false—namely because I knew he wasn’t on my side, I knew he didn’t believe I was serious about Vedanta or pacifism and I knew he would disapprove, on principle, of any book I wrote while I was living in America. I was false because I didn’t want to admit how deeply I resented his fatherly tone of forgiveness of my betrayal of him and England—“England” being, in fact, his magazine. . . .The stupid thing is that I’m fond of him in a way, and that I’ve often defended him, even. I think, as everybody in London thinks, that he’s an ass and that he has almost no talent. But I am fond of him, which is more than most people are.46

  In fact, it had been many years since Lehmann and others had understood who Isherwod was or what he believed. Although some of Isherwood’s most beautiful writing in his diaries is about his childhood home in the north of England and about his visits there to his brother Richard, and although he chronicled the London social scene with energy whenever he visited, he never felt comfortable in England for any length of time. When he had returned to live there with Bachardy in 1961, he wrote:

  I realize now, on this trip, that my longing to be away from England had really nothing to do with a mother complex or any other facile psychoanalytical explanation. No, here is something that stifles and confines me. I wish I could define it. Maybe the island is just too damned small. I feel unfree, cramped. I long for California.47

  He preferred California and its beaches even to Manhattan. The casualness and undress of Californian life freed him from any preconceptions about identity or social class—minimal clothes revealed little about status; names were pared away to a syllable or two and titles dropped; speech was relaxed towards a uniform drawl. The British theater critic Ken Tynan, who had known Isherwood since 1956 in London and who settled in Los Angeles for a time during the 1970s, remarked in his diary on “the classlessness that [Isherwood] shares with almost no other British writer of his generation. (I’ve seen him in cabmen’s pull-ups and grand mansions, with no change of manner or accent.)”48 Like Whitman or Kerouac, Isherwood had a promiscuous curiosity about his fellow men, and he knew he could find out more about them if he met them on an equal footing.

  Perhaps the widest gulf between Isherwood and his English friends was religious. When he had nearly completed My Guru and His Disciple, he found that he could not summarize for publication the beliefs on which he meditated every day because he feared derision back in England. In the past, Isherwood had been silenced and even made ill when he was unsure of what he wanted to say and whether he was justified in saying it. In the 1920s, it was “the liar’s quinsy”;49 in the early 1960s, when his relationship with Bachardy profoundly wobbled, undermining his religious certainty and throwing him into conflict with Swami, he lost his voice for reading aloud in the Hollywood temple, and in India, where he was obliged to lecture to hundreds at Vivekananda’s centenary celebrations, took to his bed with fever and stomach troubles. But by the late 1970s, his books had made clear who he was, and there was now no risk of hypocrisy in saying what he believed:

  What is holding me up? . . . surely I can make some statement?

  This block which I feel is actually challenging, fascinating. It must have a reason, it must be telling me something.

  Am I perhaps inhibited by a sense of the mocking agnostics all around me—ranging from asses like Lehmann to intelligent bigots like Edward? Yes, of course I am. In a sense, they are my most important audience. Everything I write is written with a consciousness of the opposition and in answer to its prejudices. . . . I must state my beliefs and be quite quite intransigent about them. I must also state my doubts, but without exaggerating them. . . .

  The doubts, the fears, the backslidings, the sense of alienation from Swami’s presence, all these are easily—too easily— described. One mustn’t overemphasize them. What’s much more important is a sense of exhilaration, remembering, “I have seen it,” “I have been there.”50

  In fact, Isherwood’s initiation into Vedanta was no more mystical or irrational than Edward Upward’s conversion to communism. Upward’s autobiographical trilogy, The Spiral Ascent, shows that he followed his ideology inflexibly, sometimes at the cost of his writing and his personal happiness, and blinding himself to the crimes of Stalin. Auden also turned to religion, adopting again in the early 1940s the high Anglican faith of his upbringing. Why couldn’t Upward or Auden take Isherwood’s Hinduism seriously? In the historical drama of their 1930s, intellectual debate focused on Marxism, fascism, nationalism, socialism, even Freudianism and eventually Christianity. When Vedanta, Isherwood’s deus ex machina, appeared from outside this cultural narrative, they simply rubbed their eyes in disbelief. They could not recognize it, and they made little effort to learn more about it.

  Auden’s personal myth proved to be the myth of the return, a circling back to the abandoned Christian beliefs of his childhood and even, at the very end of his life, a physical return to live in Christ Church, Oxford. Auden rediscovered his roots, and made much of their familiarity and exact fit. Isherwood kept progressing away from his roots, which is not a satisfying myth to those he left behind. If the hero of the quest never returns, how is anyone to know whether he really found the grail? Even Auden, convinced that Isherwood had a gift for befriending his inferiors, presumed that Swami was one of them. For one thing, Swami did not appear to Auden to be grim enough. The Anglican Church told Auden that as a homosexual he was a sinner; without repentance and without God’s grace, he would go to hell. In Vedanta there is no hell, no place where one dwells eternally as a result of committing sins. Indeed, there are no sins, only errors. About his sexuality, Isherwood recalled in his diary, “right at the start of our relationship, I told Swami I had a boyfriend (and . . . he replied, ‘Try to think of him as Krishna’) because my personal approach to Vedanta was, among other things, the approach of a homosexual looking for a religion which will accept him. . . .”51 To Swami, all sex was a worldly appetite which spiritual aspirants should try to overcome on the path to liberation, but it made no difference whether the sexual object was the same or the opposite sex. Moreover, as Isherwood realized when he was writing My Guru and His Disciple:

  . . . this book differs in kind from books on other subjects because there is no failure in the spiritual life. . . . I can’t say that my life has been a failure, as far as my attempts to follow Prabhavananda go, because every step is an absolute accomplishment.52

  As these diaries affirm, Isherwood’s vision is essentially a comic one, and it is based on love. His English friends were cynical about love. But love is what both Isherwood and Auden set out to find when they left England for America. Isherwood found not only love but also happiness. Auden proclaimed that if you had sex with your beloved, the vision of Eros (as he called it) would necessarily fade.53 His failure to find long-term reciprocal love provided him with plentiful mat
erial for austere lyrics about unrequited longing and love betrayed. In Isherwood’s case, the vision stayed. In 1977, he wrote about Bachardy: “Our relationship is indescribable— though I guess I must try to describe it someday. It has moments which seem to blend the highest camp with the highest love with the highest fun and delight.”54 Happiness and religious joy are hard to write about; Dante is often excused for being boring in the Paradiso and most readers prefer the Inferno, just as they prefer Milton’s Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained. In his diaries, Isherwood records plenty of hell with his heaven, but even so, happiness can also provoke envy and resentment and criticism. He knew that his life might seem schmaltzy to others, a Hollywood tale, too good to be true, and so he avoided exposing it or he cast it as camp. Just before publishing My Guru and His Disciple, he worried whether his readers would grasp what he was doing:

  I keep wondering how people will receive the book. I have almost no idea. Sometimes I think, after all, the material itself is so remarkable that some people must find it fascinating. But I think many others will be repelled by the weepy devotional tone of certain passages. Also by a very private kind of camp, which sometimes expresses itself in stock religious phrases which aren’t meant to be taken literally—though how is the reader to know that?55

  In 1962, the American philosopher and critic Susan Sontag wrote, “Camp is esoteric—something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques. Apart from a lazy two-page sketch in Christopher Isherwood’s novel The World in the Evening (1954) it has hardly broken into print.”56 Since then, camp has broken not only into print, but into song, film, T.V., and merchandising for children. It is no longer an esoteric or private code, and yet Isherwood’s use of camp to express religious feelings does remain private and unexplained. Sontag doesn’t address it; Isherwood himself in The World in the Evening had only touched on a connection between religion and camp when she sketched her “Notes on ‘Camp.’” In The World in the Evening, Charles Kennedy—modelled on Lincoln Kirstein, a likely influence on Isherwood’s own understanding of camp—contrasts camp with Quaker plainness, explaining to Stephen Monk that “a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich” is Low Camp. On the other hand:

  High Camp is the whole emotional basis of the Ballet, for example, and of course Baroque art. . . . true High Camp has an underlying seriousness. You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is largely camp about religion. The Ballet is camp about love. . . .”57

  Camp was a central resource in Isherwood’s writing. And he balanced it with “tea-tabling,” a kind of understatement which he and Edward Upward discovered in youth in the novels of E.M. Forster, and which Alan Chalmers, the Upward character, explains in Lions and Shadows:

  The whole of Forster’s technique is based upon the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down until they sound like mother’s meeting gossip . . . In fact, there’s actually less emphasis placed on the big scenes than on the unimportant ones . . . It’s a completely new kind of accentuation—like a person talking a different language.

  Armed with these methods of highlighting and lowlighting, Isherwood was like an electrical technician with a complex set of dimmer switches. He could achieve fresh effects of great variety even with the most familiar materials.

  His later style is far from baroque. In My Guru and His Disciple it is remarkably unshowy. It is intimate, frank, self-deprecating, and, in fact, its very plainness is like a disguise, camouflage even, for the remarkable thing it undertakes to reveal, the life of religious devotion. Its understated quality, achieved through the tea-table technique, requires us to lean in, to look more closely, to listen more carefully. Baroque art was produced by institutionalized religion. The force and wealth of the Catholic Church, the state, the national culture was behind it. Isherwood’s camp is a guerrilla effort. It is deployed on behalf of a minority, and it must do two things at once—edge into the light something marginal, unacceptable, beyond the pale of the culture, and protect that very thing from attack. It must be both expressive and guarded, articulate and secretive.

  In his earlier work, Isherwood deploys camp just as Sontag observed, as the private code and badge of identity for the main urban clique she had in mind, homosexuals. Take Mr. Norris Changes Trains: how could anyone “in the know” avoid reading Mr. Norris as a homosexual like his real life original Gerald Hamilton? Consider his plump white hands, his wig, his over-large bottle of scent, his fretful anxiety—the exaggerated attributes of a woman of a certain age. Norris’s young girlfriends with their whips offer an overt “perversion” which fulfils readers’ expectation but also throws them off the track. Like a schoolboy trying out a big philosophical idea and following it with a dirty joke, Isherwood’s narrative exaggerates to precisely the degree which permits it to claim, implicitly, it was all a joke. The author didn’t really mean it; readers never really saw what they thought they saw. It is a small surprise attack from which he can pull back quickly.

  Isherwood used camp to write about dangerous subjects, subjects which his audience would find morally, philosophically repugnant, subjects about which he could not risk talking straight. He used camp, with its lighthearted playfulness, to tempt the audience in, to suggest that what he was saying was unimportant, not serious, and that there was no risk in being exposed to it. He used it to write about what was nearest his heart. Once he was out as a homosexual, he used camp to write about the growing band of disciples who believed that Ramakrishna was an incarnation of God and could inspire them to spiritual liberation.

  It was genuinely scary for Isherwood to come out as a Hindu, and his doubts heightened his vulnerability. His diaries reveal how difficult it was for him to argue on behalf of something he himself was continuously working to believe in. The moment of exhilarated certainty, the vision, is difficult to capture and easy to dismiss. Yet, in his diaries, Isherwood’s religious life becomes convincing because acts of devotion are repeated again and again and again. Moments of vision and certainty regularly recur and increase in intensity as his love for Bachardy, Swami, and Ramakrishna are gradually manifested over time. This kind of repetition doesn’t work in fiction, which calls for turning points, climaxes, denouements. And a simple statement, a summary of beliefs, cannot convince because it is intellectual and does not engage the emotions. Camp addresses the emotions, releases laughter and joy, and thereby disarms the reader.

  Remarkably, Isherwood never mentions AIDS in these diaries. He was not aware of the disease while he was still well enough to write. Thus, his account of gay liberation has an almost innocent feeling of gradual and certain triumph, and it fulfils an expectation of social change with which he had been living ever since the 1930s: the Marxist dialectic still—finally—applies personally to him and to everyone like him. Homosexuals prepared to bring their private lives into the political arena, at the expense, for a time, of romance and even dignity, could at last participate in the revolution:

  A bit of paper has been lying on my desk for months. On it I have written: “For the homosexual, as long as he lives under the heterosexual dictatorship, the act of love must be, to some extent, an act of defiance, a political act. This, of course, makes him feel apologetic and slightly ridiculous. That can’t be helped. The alternative is for him to feel that he is yielding to the compulsion of a vice, and that he is therefore dirty and low. That is how the dictatorship wants him to feel.” I have copied this here so I can throw the paper away. It isn’t clearly expressed but it means something important to me.”58

  The blossoming which Isherwood portrays of the London gay scene, in contrast to Los Angeles, is dandified and softened by an atmosphere of aristocratic aestheticism; Lord Byron in ruffled linen
hovers in its background. Of a party in London he might tell us that the boys wore shiny eye shadow or silk trousers in appealing pastel hues and kissed on the lips at parting; in Santa Monica, he tells of meetings, parades, leaflets, and accommodating himself to people he must work with regardless of whether he finds it easy to be friends with them. Reading such passages now is like reading about the last summer parties before the Great War.

  There are only a few hints at the beginning of the 1980s that the increasingly hectic sexual activity and drug-taking of some of Isherwood’s circle might be starting to wear them out. Tony Richardson, for instance, seems to grow tired. And in September 1981, Isherwood records that one young friend has a sore throat, “Poor angel, he really is a martyr to V.D.” In the very next entry, another phones to warn that he has hepatitis; so Isherwood and Bachardy both get gammaglobulin shots because the boy had kissed Isherwood at a party.59 In 1983, a boy who sits for Bachardy is suffering from cancer: “He carried on about the treatments he’d had for cancer and created a quite powerful death gloom, which he thickened by showing us two lesions on his legs.”60 Later the boy died after being ill for about ten years; he proved to be the first AIDS fatality Isherwood and Bachardy knew. Many of their friends were to die of AIDS thereafter, but Isherwood never wrote about their deaths or about the epidemic.

  The disease of his generation, and the one he most feared, was cancer. In April 1981, he wrote: “Loss of hair. Loss of taste and consequent loss of weight—down to 147 and ½—no big deal, this.”61 But it was a big deal; the beautiful life he had forged with Bachardy could survive anything but “this.” That autumn, Isherwood was diagnosed with prostate cancer. And he used the diary, as ever, to try to understand what he felt about it: