Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

by Christopher Isherwood

  Nevertheless, the years with Caskey were Isherwood’s first longterm domestic arrangement with a man close to his own age and emotional maturity. He felt genuinely proud of Caskey’s social charm and included him entirely in his own social life, introducing Caskey to his various circles of friends—emigré artists and intellectuals like the Viertels, the Huxleys, and the Stravinskys as well as Greta Garbo and other film people in Hollywood; Swami Prabhavananda and his devotees at the Vedanta Society; literary friends like E. M. Forster and Stephen Spender in England, W. H. Auden and Lincoln Kirstein in New York; new friends like Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal; and many others. Introducing Caskey so widely contributed to a new and more open sense of himself as a homosexual. During the war years, when Isherwood lived among the Quakers and refugees in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and later when he tried to become a Hindu monk, he kept his sexuality quarantined from his everyday life. In Haverford he had concealed it; as an aspiring monk at the Vedanta Center he had tried during months of celibacy to rise above it. But once he fell in love with Caskey, everything changed; for a time he allowed his sexuality to shape his life as a whole.

  During the same period, he became increasingly at home in a circle of close California friends of whom many were homosexual and most were at ease with homosexuality, so that his identity became established with solidity in the community around him. He was at first troubled by the consistency and honesty this began to require of him. As a young man, he had enjoyed the fragmented life which resulted from living in different countries among discrete groups of friends—shuttling between London and Berlin; fleeing through Greece, Portugal, Denmark and elsewhere with Heinz; shipping out to China with Auden; tasting Manhattan on the return journey. Travelling had afforded him semi-secrecy and any number of escape routes from commitment and from himself He had engaged in simultaneous love affairs and played freely with several personalities and social strategies, just as he played with the characters in his books. But his postwar life in California permitted him no hiding places. As he writes in the reconstructed diary: “Christopher found that his life had become all of a piece; everybody knew everything there was to know about him. In theory, he saw that this was morally preferable; it made hypocrisy and concealment impossible. In practice, he hated it.”19

  The unification of his life and identity brought to the fore with a new seriousness the question of who he really was and wanted to be. Now he could not escape the results of his actions, and he would be forced to live more deliberately, with a new sense of self and responsibility. But it would take some years before he could achieve coherence between his moral outlook and his day-to-day behavior, and even longer before such coherence would be reflected in his writing. At first the fact that he no longer needed to guard his identity from his separate circles of friends and colleagues simply fed the growing undiscipline of his life in the late 1940s. He may have stopped bothering to write in his diary partly because he no longer needed to keep up a private, unifying narrative about his true self, the self at the controlling center of his various, sometimes less than genuine, social lives. But over the longer term, he would continue to need his diary to understand himself, and by the time he began writing in it again—occasionally in 1948, then gradually more often by the early 1950s—he would already be writing about a different person. In the 1970s he would still be trying to achieve, in his reconstructed diary, a coherent account of the changes which had taken place in him during the dissipated personal aftermath of the war.

  In August 1949, Isherwood attended an all-night party at the house of Sam From. The other guests whom he mentions in his 1955 outline of the period20 and in his reconstructed diary were Evelyn Caldwell, Paul Goodman, Charles Aufderheide and Alvin Novak. These were members and friends of The Benton Way Group, a bohemian ménage, mostly from the Midwest, sharing a house in Benton Way, in Los Angeles. They were intellectuals, generally highly educated, and predominantly homosexual. Goodman was a philosopher, social critic, published poet, and novelist whose work Isherwood later came to admire; Aufderheide a movie camera technician who read widely and wrote poetry on the side; Novak a philosophy student at UCLA. Sam From himself was a successful businessman. Others who were part of The Benton Way Group at various times—including Isadore From, David Sachs, Edouard Roditi, Fern Maher—were psychoanalysts, philosophers, scholars, social workers, artists.

  Evelyn Caldwell, soon to marry and change her name to Evelyn Hooker, was the psychologist specializing in Rorschach techniques who was about to begin what became her life’s work: studying the homosexual community in Los Angeles. She attended many homosexual parties where she joined in the revelry but also engaged in long, personal conversations with the other guests, and within a year of the party where she and Isherwood met, she started to circulate extensive questionnaires and conduct scores of interviews and psychological tests. In 1956, at a professional conference in Chicago, she was to challenge widespread opinion among her colleagues when she presented the first results of her research, which demonstrated that expert psychologists could not distinguish homosexuals from heterosexuals on the basis of then standard, widely used personality tests. In fact, her results from these types of tests showed that as high a percentage of homosexuals as heterosexuals were psychologically well adjusted. She, like Isherwood, was to become a hero of gay liberation.

  The conversation at Benton Way parties was friendly but also highbrow and wide-ranging, addressing literature, social change, and, as Isherwood recalls of the all-night party in 1949, the nature of homosexual love. That night the “Symposium,” as he calls it, “continued until dawn.” Then Isherwood returned home with Alvin Novak, the young man he deemed to be the Alcibiades of the group. In the reconstructed diary Isherwood exposes his mixed motives of passion and idealism and even recalls an element of farce: a drunken Sam From came along with Isherwood and Novak, evidently hoping for sex, then politely passed out, eliminating himself from competition. Isherwood writes in the reconstructed diary that “he later looked back upon that night as having been highly romantic. It was unique, at any rate. Christopher never went to a party that was quite like it.”21

  In The Benton Way Group Isherwood had found a small intellectual community seriously and capably examining the predicament of the homosexual in modern society and at the same time pursuing an experiment in living that offered them some of the benefits of conventional family life without oppressing their sexuality. In a sense, he had found a new version of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) where he had, as he put it in Christopher and His Kind, first been “brought face to face with his tribe”22 in Berlin in late 1929. According to Christopher and His Kind, Hirschfeld’s respectable, scientific approach to sexuality had at first offended Isherwood’s puritanism, but in the end Isherwood was captivated by Hirschfeld’s persona as a “silly solemn old professor.”23 Over the years he came to honor Hirschfeld and his personally dangerous campaign to revise the German criminal code so that homosexual acts between men would be legal.

  Hirschfeld was homosexual, Evelyn Hooker was not; and yet there are obvious parallels in their work and in their practical style of approach. Isherwood became close friends with Evelyn Hooker, and just as in Berlin he had rented a room from Hirschfeld’s sister immediately next door to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, so at the beginning of the 1950s he rented the garden house at Evelyn Hooker’s property on Saltair Avenue in Brentwood. His interest in the study of homosexuality was far from superficial, and he evidently wished to involve himself with it both officially and personally. For Isherwood, and for his close friend W. H. Auden, sexual emancipation in Berlin had resulted partly from their anonymous access, as foreigners, to willing boys they met easily in bars and on the streets, and partly from the newly dawning self-understanding which resulted from conscious study of homosexuality and, in Auden’s case, from a brief attempt at psychoanalysis. At Hirschfeld’s institute, sexual love in all its st
range and familiar forms was classified, codified, categorized. Along similarly analytical lines, Isherwood and Auden talked endlessly between themselves and with other friends about their relationships, and they read and also talked about Proust, Gide, Corvo, Freud, Jung, Georg Groddeck, Edward Carpenter, and many others. None of these literary and psychological texts offered them a satisfactory account of who they were. In their own work, throughout their careers, each of them continued to consider and address the question in any number of ways—veiled and indirect at first, then, in Isherwood’s case, increasingly overt as the years went by. The earnest scientific thoroughness with which Evelyn Hooker, like Hirschfeld, approached her research, lent Isherwood’s way of life in California a reassuringly dull legitimacy and probably contributed to his increasing openness about his homosexuality in his writing as well as in his personal life.

  In the early 1950s when he was living next door to Evelyn Hooker, Isherwood agreed to write a popular book with her about homosexuality. The plan came to nothing, in part because when Don Bachardy moved into the garden house with Isherwood, Hooker’s husband became anxious that Bachardy’s youthful appearance would cause a scandal, and the Hookers asked Isherwood to move out. This left Isherwood and Bachardy homeless—a tiny echo of the crisis Isherwood had experienced when Heinz Neddermeyer was refused entry to England in 1934—and it caused a terrible strain in Isherwood’s friendship with Evelyn Hooker. Two decades later, in December 1970, just as Isherwood was wondering what to write next after Kathleen and Frank, she reminded him of the project. But the idea made him anxious, and his reaction was perhaps still colored by resentment at her failure to stand by him in his relationship with Don Bachardy. On December 11 he wrote:

  Saw Evelyn Hooker yesterday. She wants me to work with her on a “popular” book on homosexuality. . . . I am doubtful about the project. It seems that I shall have to read through sixty case histories and then write about them—which really means retell them, and what the hell is the use of that? Non-writers never understand what writers can and cannot do. They think they can tell you what to say and that you will then somehow magically resay it so it’s marvellous. However, I didn’t want to refuse straight away. I’ll read some of the stuff first and try to find out exactly what it is that Evelyn expects. She is a very good woman and her intentions are of the noblest and I would like to help her, if I can do so without becoming her secretary.

  Isherwood read through just two of the case histories and felt certain that the language of psychology was not his own language. In February he wrote:

  This morning I also finished the second of the two files I borrowed from Evelyn Hooker. What a plodding old donkey Psychology is! Evelyn’s questions are full of phrases like, “his own processes of sexual arousal are on an ascending incline,” “I don’t have a very clear picture of how much mutual stimulation is going on,” “the primary stimulation is on the head of the penis, would that be true?,” “while I have asked you many questions about sexual preferences and gratifications, I have not really asked you questions couched in his terms of the basic mechanics of sex.” I really can’t imagine myself working with Evelyn on this sort of thing; it would be like having to write a book in a foreign language. But I mustn’t prejudge the issue. I must wait until we have had a talk and I have found out just exactly what it is she wants me to contribute.24

  By March he had decided against the project:

  Yesterday morning I saw Evelyn Hooker and told her that I can’t write her book with her. I think I explained why I can’t quite lucidly and I think I convinced her. The analogy of Kathleen and Frank was very useful, in doing this, because Kathleen’s diaries can be likened to Evelyn’s files of case histories. The diaries, like the case histories, can be commented on, they can be elucidated and conclusions can be drawn from them; but they can’t be rewritten because nothing can be as good as the source material itself. What is embarrassing—and what I think sticks as a reproach against me in Evelyn’s mind—is that I told her, in the Saltair Avenue days, I was prepared to write a “popular” book about homosexuality with her. Of course I was always saying things like this, quite irresponsibly, subconsciously relying on the probability that I wouldn’t ever be taken up on them. To Evelyn yesterday I said, “Well, you know, in those days I was nearly always drunk”; which, the more I think of it, was a silly tactless altogether second-rate remark.25

  Indeed, it was during the Saltair Avenue days that Isherwood had made an analogous promise to Swami Prabhavananda: that he would write a biography of Ramakrishna. Swami persistently reminded Isherwood of the promise, and Isherwood fulfilled it, taking more than a decade to write Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965). He had to submit each chapter of the biography to the order for approval, and the project made him into a quasi-official historian of the Ramakrishna movement. Likewise, through his later works and his diaries, he was to become a historian of the homosexual movement, but without professional psychology or any other “official” involvements; instead, he was to tell its history through his own experience. Although Isherwood slighted the idea of rewriting Evelyn Hooker’s case histories, he was already reflecting upon a similar project on his own terms. Later that same month he records that he has begun to take notes about the private behavior patterns of Don Bachardy (“Kitty”) and himself (“Dobbin”). Despite his outcry against psychology, his description of his plan is technical, as if he intended to produce a special kind of case history of his own:

  On the 17th, I started a sort of notebook on Kitty and Dobbin—I’ll try to write it rather like a study in natural history; their behavior, methods of communication, feeding habits, etc. I had very strong feelings that I ought not to record all this, that it was an invasion of privacy. But where else have I ever found anything of value? The privacy of the unconscious is the only treasure house. And as a matter of fact, Don is always urging me to write about us. I have no idea, yet, what I shall “do” with this material after I’ve collected it. I’ll just keep jotting things down, day by day, and see what comes of it.26

  Like all of Isherwood’s work, this project was to begin with external observation and recording. By invading his own privacy, by being frank to the point of indiscretion, he could unlock what he calls “the only treasure house,” the unconscious. Ordinary habits, the routine of daily life, accurately noted, would reveal the inward, original activity of the mind in its rich, dreamy, nonpersonal, eternal existence. Thus, like a scientist—or perhaps like a spy or a thief—Isherwood set out to make himself and Don Bachardy the subject of a domestic field study.

  But the notebook of Kitty and Dobbin was also abandoned, and in the end Isherwood left no specific account of his intimate life with Bachardy. Although his diaries from 1953 onward comprise an episodic narrative of their years together, he never fully analyzed their relationship nor explained its mythology. The names alone, Kitty—suggesting a creature soft and vulnerable, quick to purr and quick to claw—and Dobbin—old, strong and steady, but stubborn and a little boring—tell a great deal. None of the other intimate mythologies which Isherwood describes in the reconstructed diary draws upon animal imagery. They are generally more rivalrous and combative—some derived from wrestling and boxing—or more intellectual and literary—for instance, rooted in Whitman’s poetry. Isherwood observes in the reconstructed diary that an animal myth can sustain a relationship when there is conflict: “in the world of animals, hatred is impossible; [they] can only love each other. They focus their aggression on mythical external enemies.”27 Moreover, animals have no language; their world of nestling warmth is based upon physical trust, is inchoate, and inaccessible to outsiders. In the great love relationship of his life, Isherwood, a writer, evidently surrendered to a mythology that did not depend upon language; its parameters could not be declaimed, enforced, or justified by words. They simply had to be acted out. For Isherwood, the relationship may well have been too mysterious or simply too important to dissect. In any case, it was still taking shape at the tim
e of his death, and this, too, may have made it, for him, untellable. Isherwood said in his Thanksgiving diary entry of 1970 that he could not write a book about his friendship with Swami while Swami was still alive because “the book couldn’t be truly complete until after Swami’s death.”28 Swami died in 1976; My Guru and His Disciple was published in 1980. Despite Isherwood’s own death in 1986, the story of his relationship with Don Bachardy is even now unfinished.

  Although he did not continue in the spring of 1971 with the study of Kitty and Dobbin, Isherwood circled around the idea of a factual, explicit record of his most private life until he at last began the reconstructed diary which, through the gradual accumulation of detailed, intimate, and sometimes trivial, day-to-day memories, gained access to the treasure house of the unconscious and its store of mythology. As he repeated in each of his diary entries about Evelyn Hooker, Isherwood was convinced he must write about homosexuality in his own language. The language of psychology was foreign. His “kind,” his tribe, were homosexuals; his kind were also writers. And he asserted that a non-writer, like Evelyn Hooker, could not understand this. He identified with writers, admired writers, socialized with writers. In his reconstructed diary, as in Christopher and His Kind, his identity as a homosexual is portrayed as being inseparable from his identity as a writer. And he incorporates in both of these personal histories an account of how he drew on his real-life experiences of the 1930s and 1940s for his fiction, telling how he adapted the facts of his life to suit his artistic purpose. Thus, Lost Years and Christopher and His Kind reveal not only how he had secretly lived as a homosexual, but also how he had secretly lived as a writer, continually reshaping the truth in his work. In both books, he recalls the works he hoped to write as well as the ones which came to fruition, and so measures himself, ruthlessly, against his unfulfilled ambitions as well as his actual achievements.