Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

by Christopher Isherwood

  On December 23, Christopher went to Swami’s birthday lunch at the Vedanta Center. In the evening, he had supper with Jim Charlton at the Santa Inez Inn. This may just possibly have been the occasion of a scene which Christopher later adapted for The World in the Evening42:

  While Christopher and Jim were drinking at the bar, before supper, they attracted the notice of two large drunken men. The men had probably guessed that Jim and Christopher were queer. They were intrigued and aggressive. One of the men said to Christopher, “How about us throwing you in the pool?” Christopher told them to go ahead, adding that he was in the mood for a swim. He wasn’t at all afraid of the men, for their attitude was basically flirtatious; little as they were aware of this. The pool was heated, and Christopher was drunk enough himself to welcome the prospect of a dip and a mild scandal. One of the men picked him up in his arms, and began walking out of the bar. Christopher didn’t offer the least resistance. He was showing off for Jim’s benefit. Jim tried to interfere, but the other man blocked his path. Everybody in the bar was watching. A bartender uttered a ridiculously ineffectual warning that the pool was closed for swimming after sunset. Now, however, the manager or some other authority figure appeared and boldly told the man who was carrying Christopher that he was causing a disturbance. This was Christopher’s opportunity to dominate the situation. Loud and clear and British, he said, “This gentleman is not annoying me.” This wasn’t bar-room humor, so it failed to get a laugh from the bar guests—it merely puzzled them. It also puzzled and somehow deflated the high spirits of Christopher’s would-be ducker. He put Christopher down and staggered off.

  On December 28, there was a party on Stage 15 at MGM to celebrate the end of shooting on The Great Sinner. I don’t remember anything about this party. Christopher probably got drunk to deaden his embarrassment at having to project optimism amidst his fellow members of this losing team—for it must surely have been evident by now that The Great Sinner would be a loser, or at best a nonwinner.

  On December 31, Christopher saw the New Year in at Salka Viertel’s. I think Montgomery Clift was there among others and that this was the night when Clift insisted on drinking blood brotherhood with Christopher. They had met several times already—Clift having been introduced into the Viertel circle by Fred Zinnemann who had directed him in The Search. Whenever Clift and Christopher met, they playacted enthusiasm for each other, but they were never to become real friends. Maybe Clift found Christopher cold and standoffish. Christopher found Clift touching but ugly minded and sick.

  It seems strange that Caskey and Christopher spent this New Year’s Eve apart—and ironic that Caskey spent it with Jim Charlton. Maybe Caskey was going bar crawling and Christopher just didn’t want to come along. It doesn’t seem likely that they had actually quarrelled because, on New Year’s Day, they drove up to Ojai, taking Jim with them, and all three stayed the night at Iris Tree’s ranch.

  * * *

  1 Nevertheless, the two experiences were essentially different. Rio inspired an aesthetic excitement, Monument Valley [in northeast Arizona and southeast Utah] a primitive religious awe.

  [2 “The Postwar Years” in D1.]

  [3 Travellers crossing the equator for the first time are tried at a mock “Court of Neptune” and subjected to joke punishments.]

  [4 In Down There on a Visit.]

  5 Caskey was more Minton’s friend than Vaughan’s. Indeed Minton was an ideal playmate for Caskey, with his wild high spirits, fondness for the bottle and generally erratic behavior. I think he found Caskey attractive. He did a drawing of him which is very flattering. Vaughan certainly liked Caskey too, but Vaughan was always shy and taciturn—all the more so when Minton was around. Christopher, at that time, would have loved to go to bed with Vaughan, but Vaughan definitely wasn’t interested. No doubt Christopher’s enthusiasm for his paintings pleased Vaughan, but I believe he rather despised Christopher as a human being. There is a coldly contemptuous reference to Christopher in Vaughan’s Journal and Drawings, as he appeared to Vaughan during a dinner party at John Lehmann’s on February 25, 1952: “C.I. casual, rather rasping in speech, sentimental, looking like a dehydrated schoolboy. Enormously interested in the superficialities of life.” [The dinner was February 24, 1952.]

  [6 “My friend is coming.”]

  7 This entry is the last one made during their stay in England. After it, there is a gap of more than five months in the journal. [John Edward Allen had escaped from Broadmoor the previous July; see D1, pp. 405–6.]

  [8 In fact, Albert Herring had premiered at Glyndebourne the previous June and been performed at Covent Garden and abroad.]

  9 It may seem odd that I can’t remember such simple visual facts more clearly, but no doubt Christopher was stupid drunk on this as on so many similar occasions.

  [10 According to Vidal, he and Williams had met Forster—at a party John Lehmann gave for the two Americans—and the visit to Cambridge was made at Forster’s invitation; Vidal published his own account of the episode in Palimpsest: A Memoir (1995), pp. 190–1.]

  11 Christopher had had a slightly different kind of shock at the end of the same ballet matinée. The other ballet on the program with Job was The Clock Symphony and Christopher had been dazzled by a young dancer in it named Alexander Grant, whom he hadn’t seen before. Grant’s solo had seemed to him to express the very essence of joy. As he jumped and twirled, joy flew from him in sparks, igniting the audience. As soon as the curtain came down, Christopher hurried to Webster and asked to be introduced to this magic creature. After some delay, Alexander Grant appeared, deathly pale, on crutches. He had turned his ankle right after his first entrance, and every step he had danced had been in agony.

  12 If this sounds brutal, here’s what Beatrix Lehmann wrote to Christopher many years earlier (1938?) while she was having a sort of love affair with Viertel: “Absence of poor old B.V. for a few days—really like coming out of a madhouse into a green field.” [Almost certainly January 1938.]

  [13 A village in Kent; pronounced “Trosley” by locals.]

  14 Caskey had the Lincoln Zephyr convertible with him in the East, if he hadn’t already sold it and bought the station wagon in which he later drove back to Los Angeles. Did Christopher rent a car until his return? I don’t think he did. So maybe Hayden and Rod let him use the old Packard. Their business was already doing well, and no doubt they now had at least one other car of their own. Aside from this, Christopher could get to MGM on the trolley car which, in those days, ran right past the El Kanan and along Venice Boulevard. And there was a bus which shuttled between MGM and Hollywood. Two days after his arrival, he bought a bicycle. This was useful for getting around Santa Monica and sometimes he rode to the studio on it.

  15 This title was later to provoke sneering smiles from many of Christopher’s acquaintances; they all assumed, when they first heard it, that this was a typical piece of Hollywood vulgarity. Actually, The Life of a Great Sinner was Dostoevsky’s own title for a series of autobiographical novels—a project which he never carried out.

  16 In The Gambler he is called “Alexey Ivanovitch.” In the screenplay the name Dostoevsky is almost never mentioned; he is called “Fedor” or “Fedja.” Polina is called “Pauline.”

  17 Fodor got first credit on the completed film, and justly so.

  [18 Isherwood left the following note nearby but unnumbered:] On July 20, 1948, a well-known herpetologist named Mrs. Grace Wiley was being interviewed by a photographer (from Life magazine?), at her home, which was somewhere in the Los Angeles area. She was showing him her pet cobras. One of them, newly arrived from Sumatra, became annoyed by the clicking of the camera. Mrs. Wiley decided to put it back in its box. As she reached out to do this, the cobra bit her in the hand. She remained calm, forced the snake to release its hold, put it into its box and told the photographer where he could find the serum which she kept in the house. But the photographer was so nervous that he dropped the vial containing the serum and broke it. He then
took Mrs. Wiley to a hospital in Long Beach. However, the only snake-bite serum available at the hospital was rattlesnake serum. Rattlesnake venom destroys the red blood cells; cobra venom attacks the nerve centers. So this serum couldn’t help Mrs. Wiley. She died, ninety minutes after being bitten.

  This tragedy made a strong impression on Christopher, because of the fascination-aversion he felt toward snakes and because he had once met Mrs. Wiley, at a snake show to which Vernon Old had taken him, several years earlier. He remembered that she had exhibited two black cobras in a cage, which also contained her purse. Wanting to take something out of the purse, she had put her hand into the cage and casually pushed the cobras aside, giving them light smacks on their noses.

  Gerald Heard had known Mrs. Wiley quite well and had visited her at her house where, with his usual sangfroid, he had sat drinking tea while the cobras crawled freely about the room. Gerald reported to Christopher that Mrs. Wiley had assured him she never had any trouble with her snakes because, “You see, they know I won’t hurt them.” Much earlier in her life, as a teacher of natural history, she had been afraid of all snakes. To overcome her fear, she had made pets of the nonvenomous species and had later begun to handle rattlesnakes and cobras. She had been bitten several times. Gerald rightly praised her as a great exponent of nonviolence. But it must be admitted that she was sometimes unprofessionally careless. A lady who works at the Santa Monica Public Library has just told me (January 12, 1973) that Mrs. Wiley got fired from a job in the East because she let some venomous snakes out of their cages in a laboratory, with the result that they escaped from the building and terrified the neighbors.

  19 I don’t remember when Christopher first met Tito—but it was before he left California in January 1947. From now on, they saw each other fairly often. Caskey had known Tito longer than Christopher had—in New York, before Caskey went into the navy. Tito, when young, had a well-made exciting brown body and dark Mexican good looks. In those days his air of sadness—the sadness of the Indio triste [sad Indian]—was charming; later it turned to obstinate pathological melancholy [. . .]. Tito, when Caskey met him, was going around with Cole Porter—perhaps as a sex mate but more probably as one of the decorative nonsexmaking attendants with whom Porter liked to surround himself Caskey told Christopher that once, one rainy afternoon when there was nothing else to do, he and Tito had gone to bed together and made sex for several hours with great enjoyment.

  As for Christopher, he felt much sympathy, even love for Tito, despite Tito’s tiresome moodiness, which sometimes expressed itself in attacks of asthma. During August and September, Christopher twice stayed the night at Tito’s apartment; the two of them wanted to make love to each other because of their mutual affection. The memory of it is pleasant though the sex acts themselves weren’t satisfactory.

  Tito was an actor. About that time or a little later, he played the part of Jennifer Jones’s young brother in John Huston’s We Were Strangers. In the movie, Tito gets shot and dies in Jennifer’s arms. I have a memory of another evening (I think, in 1949) which Christopher spent with Tito, while Tito was suffering from asthma. Christopher pretended to be Jennifer Jones. Embracing Tito, he murmured in a would-be Cuban accent: “Manolo, Manolo—don’t die!” which made Tito laugh in the midst of his choking.

  The strongest bond between Tito and Christopher was that Tito was religious. He became a follower of Vedanta and a disciple of Swami. More about this later.

  20 Klaus had slashed his wrists but his condition wasn’t serious.

  21 No, says Jim (July 3, 1973), he was with Jo and Ben Masselink, not Harold, when he first met Christopher. Ben Masselink and Jim had been fellow students at Taliesin West; and Jim had had an unrequited crush on Ben.

  22 Twenty-seven was my own guess. Since I wrote it, Bill van Petten has told me he once saw Jim’s passport and it stated that he was born in 1917, meaning that he was already thirty-one in August 1948 (his birthday was on April 8).

  Later (July 1973), Jim himself told me he was born in 1919. Which of them was telling the truth? A passport is impressive, but Bill is perhaps unreliable.

  23 At that time, Jim hadn’t actually got his diploma; he didn’t get it until several years later. My impression is that he was an absolutely competent designer and draftsman but that he perhaps, in those days, had to rely on one of his colleagues or a builder with practical experience to tell him if his projected house would stand up and keep the rain out.

  24 Christopher decided, very early in their relationship, that Jim was a Dog Person. Indeed, it was impossible to think of him as being any other animal.

  25 Bob Wood isn’t a portrait of Jim, however; he is described as a crusader, a potential revolutionary—which Jim certainly wasn’t and isn’t. But Bob is described as being one of the Dog People.

  [26 Part three, chapter three.]

  27 Here are some additions and corrections, based on conversations I had with Jim in December 1972, since writing the paragraphs [above].

  Jim’s father flew into a mountain during a storm. His dead body showed almost no external injuries, only a bruise on its chin. Jim is apt to talk as if his father’s accident had been a subconsciously willed suicide—because he was bored with his wife, Jim implies—and a peculiarly inconsiderate one, since it made Mrs. Charlton so afraid of losing her child as well as her husband that she kept Jim at home with her and tried to prevent him from making friends with other boys. Jim blames his mother for his early shyness and inhibitions.

  “When I was at Wright’s, I was going crazy,” Jim says. “I used to wander around the desert behind Taliesin with a copy of Wolfe’s Of Time and the River. At night, the moonlight was pink.” The planes he saw, on the day he decided to join the air force, appeared out of a wash [i.e., a dry stream bed]. They weren’t in formation. They were flying very low, each following its individual course, hopping over rocks and clumps of cactus.

  At that time, Wright was feuding with the draft board, trying to stop it from taking away his pupils. He declared that their work with him was of far greater national importance than fighting. As a result, some of them ended up in prison. And Wright himself lost several clients, who thought him unpatriotic.

  When Jim joined the air force, it was because he wanted to fly, not to fight. He avoided being sent overseas for a long time. He moved from one base to another, flying all kinds of different planes and enjoying himself enormously. Then Jim’s great friend became depressed, thinking he was losing his looks and getting old; so he grew careless and crashed. He was found lying dead in a relaxed attitude, without external injuries, like Jim’s father.

  Jim’s father had an identical twin brother. They were both great athletes in school, but the brother was the smaller of the two. Jim’s father was nicknamed “Horse” and Jim’s father’s brother was nicknamed “Colt.”

  [28 But see Glossary under Charlton.]

  29 What I wrote here may well be more or less true. But, years after writing it (July 26, 1977), I came upon this entry in my 1960 diary (August 17); it puts our 1948 meeting in a slightly different light:

  A rather wonderful evening with Jim Charlton last night. We got nearer to our old relation than in a long while—largely because he didn’t whine and complain so much of Hilde. . . . He says that when he first met me—when I assumed I was cutting rather a glamorous figure—I was forever complaining about my age and failing powers. Now he finds me much more active and less sorry for myself, and even better looking!

  [30 Not his real name.]

  31 The house is described in A Single Man; Rustic Road is called “Camphor Tree Lane.”

  32 Some of the stage directions in the screenplay have obviously been written by Fodor. Here are three samples: “These are the 1860s, an age when gaslight is young, as is the melody that brightly fills the scene. The fashions are charming, the décolletés daring, but the shape of a feminine leg is still a secret.” “And once more his whole army of gold is thrown into battle. . . . The silence is ghost
ly. The whirling ivory ball carries destiny.” “Near the windows is the Baccarat table. . . . Surrounded by a wreath of empty chairs, it looks expectant—as though waiting to welcome the return of its nightly guest.”

  [33 Frank Taylor stated that they never had sex and that he did not find Isherwood physically attractive.]

  34 There were however at least six articles covering different phases of the trip which Christopher had written while he was still in South America. These he quoted from directly or rewrote when he worked on the book itself. The articles appeared in various magazines during 1948 or the early part of 1949.

  [35 Not her real name.]

  36 I particularly remember a general fluttering of English hearts over him in Lives of a Bengal Lancer, 1935.

  [37 According to Vernon Old, Isherwood remembers wrongly. Old recalls that Isherwood derided marriage as “an old-fashioned and bourgeois thing to do, and couldn’t imagine why we wanted it. Yet, he arranged a tiresome reception at Salka Viertel’s which everyone dreaded, but went through with to please him. I remember that Caskey fell asleep.”]

  38 Named Henry(?)

  39 About this visit, John Goodwin writes: “. . . once I told him very brutally that why he had lost all his friends (as he constantly complained of it) was that he was not himself any more. He asked in his strangely rational and yet hazy way just in what way was he different. It was hard to tell him for I meant really saying that he was not at all rational, that his habits of lying abed and living a kind of Poe existence made it difficult to share anything of the world with him. But he seemed to see finally what I meant and for a week until I left, though his habits didn’t change, he wanted to live, which was something he hadn’t cared one way or another about for a long time. He was seriously considering going to England or America to a psychiatrist which I was all for, even though I admitted to him and he agreed that they were only a very last resort.”