Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

by Christopher Isherwood

  June 14. Swami had an operation—I’m nearly sure it was for hernia—at the Queen of Angels Hospital. In the large thin notebook Christopher writes that he has roughed out the opening of the novel but that he feels that he has only a beginning and an end, very little to put in the middle. Also he is worried that he won’t be able to make his characters interesting—there are so many of them. He tries to find an “experience” for each of the principal characters—something from which each one of them can learn his or her lesson in The School of Tragedy. He makes a list of these experiences. And then draws one of his not very illuminating diagrams.

  June 15. Gerald Heard, Margaret Gage (at whose house Gerald was living), Michael Barrie and Mr. and Mrs. LeCron came to 333 East Rustic Road after supper, bringing with them a medium named Sophia Williams. My impression is that Christopher and Caskey had also invited a few people—maybe Hayden Lewis, Rod Owens, Lennie Newman, Carlos McClendon.

  Sophia Williams had been “discovered,” I think, by the Huxleys. She displayed her powers in the interests of psychic research, not for money. Exactly what her powers were was a question which interested Gerald particularly. It was probably he who had arranged for this sitting.

  As I remember, the party sat down on a semicircle of chairs in the living room, facing towards its windows which overlooked the creek. Sophia Williams sat more or less in the middle of the semicircle. She wasn’t isolated from the others. She could easily have touched either of her neighbors. One of these was Gerald.

  Sophia made no attempt to create a “spiritual” atmosphere. She said that the electric lights could be left on and that people could smoke and drink if they wished. She herself took a Scotch. I believe she smoked too, but I won’t swear to that.

  After a short period of silence, a sound was heard—at first it seemed like the whine of a mosquito. The sound came out of the empty space near the windows; it was definitely localized. As they all listened, it became louder or more distinct and was recognizable as a tiny voice.

  If only Christopher had written down in his journal at least a few of the things it said. Why didn’t he? Because, as usual, he was too lazy. Because, no doubt, his next morning’s memory was fuddled with drink. However, I do remember that he and Caskey and their guests were much more impressed by the voice itself than they were by its statements, which seemed to them to be rather ordinary séance talk. Questioned by Sophia, the voice said it was Christopher’s father. I’m pretty sure that Christopher had already told Sophia that his father was dead—and this seemed anyhow to be a suspiciously conventional act of politeness, that the Spirit World should choose to address Sophia’s senior host. The voice certainly wasn’t Frank’s voice, even allowing for psychic distortion and “long distance,” and it told Christopher nothing that Sophia couldn’t have known or guessed at.

  Next day, Caskey and Christopher discussed the séance with Gerald Heard. He was inclined to believe that Sophia Williams had produced the voice ventriloquially, perhaps without being conscious that she was doing so. While the voice was speaking, Gerald had watched her and seen that there was great tension in the muscles of her neck and back. He agreed that the production of the voice at this distance from the ventriloquist would anyhow be a remarkable feat.

  Quite aside from the voice, Sophia managed to astonish them all, that evening. While they were sitting there, the frogs in the channel outside the windows set up a concerted croaking. This was usual at that time of the year—it was so loud that it could be heard right across the Canyon. Someone said jokingly to Sophia that she should make the frogs be quiet. She answered, in a matter-of-fact way, that she would try. Almost at once, the frogs stopped croaking and were silent from then on.

  On June 17, Christopher went to visit Swami at the Queen of Angels Hospital—he was the pet of all the nuns. Probably their enthusiasm for his cuteness and sweetness was complicated by a sense of guilt; under the pretext of nursing him, they were associating with a preacher of a heathen cult, and not even trying to get him to see the Light!

  On June 18 and 20, there are entries in the large thin notebook which show that Christopher is worried about the great number of characters in his novel. But he hasn’t yet seriously considered the possibility of getting rid of them, because he is still determined to write about his life at the Haverford refugee hostel. Instead, he plans to change the character of Sarah (Caroline Norment) and make her “a happy-go-lucky, the-Lord-will-provide kind of person.” By doing this, he reasons, the hostel will become “much more of a mess . . . and . . . the more of a mess it is, the more opportunities I obviously have for being interesting and amusing about it.” (When one watches a writer—especially if he is oneself—floundering about like this, one begins to dream of a computer which would present his material to him in terms of all the conceivable ways it could be handled—thereby saving him from wasting months, even years. Or are these flounderings of some ultimate value?)

  On June 21, Caskey and Christopher went down to Long Beach Veterans Hospital.

  On June 25, Christopher had breakfast with Swami, who must have returned to the center from the Queen of Angels, and then gave a reading at the temple, as he sometimes did when there was no one available to give a proper lecture.

  On June 28, Christopher went to Long Beach Hospital alone. At Long Beach, for some reason I don’t remember, he found himself visiting T.B. patients as well as paraplegics. Before he visited the T.B. ward, it had been explained to him that he ought to take two precautions against infection—he should wear a white hospital gown over his clothes and he shouldn’t come too near the patient or sit on his bed. No doubt the doctors themselves thought these precautions were exaggerated and only passed them on to visitors because the hospital insurance regulations so required. But Christopher couldn’t resist milking a little melodrama from the situation. He pointedly didn’t wear a hospital gown and did sit on beds. He also called his friends’ attention to the fact that he was behaving in this way, saying that self-protective precautions only raised a barrier between you and the patients—you couldn’t talk to them naturally if you were treating them as unclean. Which was true. Still, the fact remained that Christopher was posing as a fearless Francis of Assisi.

  A journal entry on June 29 is prompted by the Korean War, which had begun on June 25 and had already caused Truman to send air and naval units to fight the North Koreans. Christopher quotes two sentences from a diary which he had been keeping during the Munich Crisis of 1938: “From now on, I’ll try to write every day. It will be a discipline—and these messages from the doomed ship may even be of some value, to somebody, later.” Applied to the Korean War by an overage civilian sitting in safety thousands of miles away, this sounds fairly hysterical. But Christopher wasn’t alone in fearing that the Korean crisis might possibly lead into World War III. And he was quite justifiably afraid that he might swing over from alarm into thick-skinned indifference.11

  Then there was the threat to Christopher’s younger friends. It seemed unlikely that Caskey would be drafted, because of his “blue discharge” from the navy (see here). Jim Charlton, Ben Masselink and Bob Craft were veterans, so they wouldn’t be called immediately. (As it turned out, none of them were ever called. Indeed, I can only remember one person Christopher had previously known who took part in the Korean War, and he had to do so because he was an air force reserve officer and an experienced World War II pilot—Brad Saurin, see here.)

  A publisher named Bill Kennedy had come into town from New York on June 27. Christopher and Caskey already knew him—maybe through Eileen Garrett the medium. They picked him up at the airport. Mrs. Garrett, whom Christopher knew through the Huxleys, had control of the magazine Tomorrow and Kennedy, I believe, was helping her reorganize it. Tomorrow had previously been devoted to psychic matters only; now it was to include short stories, assorted articles and reviews. Kennedy was urging Christopher to review books for the magazine and offering what then seemed generous terms—four hundred dollars per review. Ch
ristopher was definitely interested, for he was feeling hard up. So he was ready to be pleasant to Kennedy, whom he would otherwise have avoided. Kennedy was well-meaning but irritating and a bit of a murderee. On June 28, Caskey and Christopher took him to dine at the Holiday House, a restaurant up the coast above Malibu, romantically situated with a view over the ocean, which Christopher sometimes used for seduction suppers. Here Caskey and Christopher got drunk—Kennedy was on the wagon—and Caskey (to quote the journal) “denounced Kennedy for belonging to the entrepreneur class, staying at the Miramar, etc.” On June 30, Christopher took Kennedy for a drive, to patch things up.

  Long talk about Billy’s accusations. Kennedy had been much hurt, had even considered leaving this morning. He is full of guilt and self-depreciation (sic) and takes us all far too seriously. Billy doesn’t like him. I don’t feel much either way. But his proposals for me to work on the magazine Tomorrow may open a way out of this whole movie mess into a more serious literary life.

  The June 30 journal entry also describes a performance given by the Peruvian singer and dancer, Yma Sumac, at Salka Viertel’s house. It had been arranged as a sort of informal audition, to expose Sumac’s talents to Hollywood. Charlie and Oona Chaplin, John Huston, Iris Tree (“in a converted sari”), John Houseman, Hedy Lamarr, Ella Winter, Friedrich Ledebur with “a bored tennis-playing maharajah” and Ivan Moffat (“poker-faced, appalled by all the imitations he would have to give”) were among those present. Christopher describes the performance carefully.12 He is playing one of his literary tricks on himself—using his declared “private State of Emergency” to make himself write in his journal, not only about the war but about anything that appeals to him.

  On July 2, Christopher had supper with Peter Darms.[13] Peter was a young man he had met on the beach, two or three months previously. Christopher had been running, and when he passed the ruin of the wooden breakwater, Peter had been sitting on top of it, swinging his strong handsome legs. He was a big boy with thick blond hair, darkly suntanned. He had made some remark and Christopher had been only too willing to stop and talk to him; he had an attractively scowling good-natured face. Christopher was surprised and delighted when the young man made a shamelessly direct pass at him, rubbing his thigh against Christopher’s. They had lain down together in a sheltered place and rubbed off against each other. Christopher hadn’t seen him since then.

  Luckily, he had remembered the young man’s name and recognized it when he heard it repeated by Paul Fox, who had been going to bed with Peter Darms. Fox wasn’t particularly interested in the affair and he willingly gave Christopher Darms’s phone number. When Christopher called, Darms didn’t seem surprised. He accepted Christopher’s invitation to dinner and Christopher took it for granted that Darms remembered who he was. They met, ate, got along well and ended the evening in bed. When sex was satisfactorily completed, Peter Darms began to laugh. “My God,” he said, “I’ve just realized who you are—how we first met! I’ve been trying to figure it out all evening!”

  Peter and Christopher had sex many times after this—Christopher always fucked him. Thus they formed a pleasant uncomplicated friendship. Later, when Peter found himself a steady, serious lover, Christopher complimented the lover in the words of Lady Windermere to Lord Augustus: “[Y]ou’re marrying a very good woman!”[14]

  On July 8, Caskey and Christopher drove to Sequoia and back with Igor and Vera Stravinsky and Bob Craft. The trip is described in a journal entry next day.15 (Christopher had already failed in his resolve to keep a day-to-day record of the Korean crisis and this was to be his last entry that month.) The only reference to Korea is that Bob Craft is said to be worried about being drafted and that Stravinsky is quoted as saying that he doesn’t expect World War III, only an indefinitely prolonged border struggle between the two empires.

  On the drive to Sequoia, as they were crossing the San Fernando Valley, Igor asked them all to excuse him: “I have to think about my opera for ten minutes.” So everybody kept quiet. While Igor meditated on The Rake’s Progress, Christopher meditated on his novel. And, just as he had often found it helpful to meditate in the presence of his spiritual guru, Swami, so now the presence of this artistic guru, Igor—not his guru but certainly a very great one—apparently inspired him. He had several insights which he records on July 9 in the large thin notebook.[16] This is the only occasion in my life on which I have deliberately practiced “artistic meditation.”

  On July 9, Christopher had lunch with the Beesleys. I have said little about them in this diary because their meetings with Christopher don’t usually “make news.” But they were one of Christopher’s most important contacts throughout this period. Dodie was indeed the only person within the area of his daily life who had the authority to encourage him to keep on writing—in the sense that Swami had the authority to encourage him to keep on meditating and making japam. Christopher didn’t greatly admire Dodie’s work but that was unimportant. She was a real writer, a professional; therefore she had the authority—every bit as much as if she had been Henry James. And she was an excellent critic—even of work which wasn’t at all to her taste. Christopher discussed his novel with her whenever they met. (It wasn’t merely Christopher’s egotism which prevented them from also discussing Dodie’s writing-in-progress. Dodie was always superstitiously secretive about it.) An entry in the large thin notebook (on July 11) refers to this particular meeting. It begins: “Dodie was quite right when we talked this over on Sunday. I am starting at the wrong place. . . .”17

  On July 10, Christopher was visited by Anaïs Nin and her very handsome and much younger husband—or lover, they may not have gotten married till later—Rupert Pole. I don’t remember anything about this meeting. I’m nearly sure it was Christopher’s first with Anaïs. Maybe he had met Rupert before—because I have the impression that Rupert later claimed that Christopher had made a pass at him, which irritated Christopher greatly. (Christopher didn’t like to think of himself as a maker of hopeless passes; it was something that senile queens did.)

  What I do know is that Anaïs had sometime previously sent Christopher a copy of her novel Children of the Albatross, inscribed: “Our mutual friend Bill Kennedy tried to have us meet but you were not home. This is a preface to a future meeting. Anaïs.” Christopher had read the novel and been seriously impressed. Nevertheless, he had laid it on far too thick in his note of thanks, telling Anaïs that she had made him feel, as never before, what it is like to be a woman—and adding, “Since one could hardly say more than this to Flaubert about Bovary, I conclude that your novel also is a masterpiece.” Anaïs, being regally accustomed to courtly language from her admirers, took this tribute quite as a matter of course.

  On July 13, the day-to-day diary notes that Christopher went to the Huntington Hartford Foundation for tea. I think that Frank Taylor was probably with him. Frank did go with him to see the Hartfords on July 19 at their house in Hollywood—this is recorded in the day-to-day diary—and the reason for their visit was that Frank was urging Christopher to become one of the trustees of the foundation. My impression is that Frank himself had already become a trustee and no doubt he wanted to control the board through his nominees. Although Frank was for the time being a film producer at MGM, he still kept up his connection with the New York publishing world, and it is advantageous for a publisher to be in a position to promote literary fellowships for his authors. Hartford was full of conservative artistic opinions but fundamentally lazy and gullible; an operator like Frank could manage him easily and charmingly, without ever having to get tough. As for Christopher, he was intrigued by the idea of becoming a trustee. This was a new role for him, and the foundation, as he increasingly discovered, could be an ideal place of escape from his homelife with Caskey.

  It was a ranch house surrounded by a good deal of land, near the end of a dirt road which straggled along part of Rustic Canyon, north of Sunset Boulevard. The canyon was very hot in summer and an obvious firetrap, but it had the charm o
f sleepy old-Californian remoteness, although it was so near suburbia; and Hartford had fixed up the swimming pool and had several attractive cottages built in the surrounding woods, all ready to be filled with writers, artists and composers.

  On July 15—Caskey having gone off to Laguna Beach with Lennie Newman—Christopher drove up to the top of Mount Wilson with Peter Darms. On the way back, they stopped at the Clear Creek Forest Station, where Rupert Pole was living and working as a forest ranger. Anais was staying there with him—in defiance of the regulations, since no wives or girlfriends were permitted and there was no accommodation for them. Anaïs and Rupert had to sleep together in one large room which was shared by the other rangers; their only means of privacy was a screen. Anaïs was obviously enjoying herself as the queen of this male community, and Christopher admired the style and charm of her behavior and her foreign gaiety. The other men all seemed respectfully impressed by her and also amused by the naughtiness of her presence among them. But Christopher suspected that Rupert was horribly embarrassed. Not that that made any practical difference to the situation, for Rupert was humbly and lovingly under Anaïs’s thumb.

  From July 21 to July 23, Christopher stayed at Trabuco with John van Druten. At this period John was wondering if he shouldn’t perhaps become seriously involved in Vedanta. He never did, because Vedanta didn’t really “speak to his condition,” and because Swami didn’t altogether appeal to him as a guru. (He once outraged Christopher by remarking, quite innocently, that he was sure Swami was “a very good little man.”) Although John had formally broken with the Christian Science Church, he remained a Scientist at heart and he was deeply infected by the heresy that goodness is more real than evil—meaning that there is no reason why a human being shouldn’t enjoy an unbroken spell of health, wealth and success throughout his life. The kind of guru John was drawn to would usually be a Christian Scientist who had broken away from the Mother Church, such as Joel Goldsmith, whom John already knew (I’m almost sure) at that time and with whom he was in constant correspondence, even while he was discussing Vedanta with Swami.