Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Oh, source of my inspiration, teach me to extend toward all living beings that fascinated, unsentimental, loving and all-pardoning interest which I feel for the characters I create. May I become identified with all humanity, as I identify myself with these imaginary persons. May my art become my life, and my life my art. Deliver me from snootiness, and from the Pulitzer Prize. Teach me to practice true anonymity. Help me to forgive my agents and publishers. Make me attentive to my critics and patient with my fans. For yours is the conception and the execution. Amen.

  In the summer of 1939, newly arrived in Los Angeles, Isherwood managed to eke out a book review and a detective-style short story, “I Am Waiting,” about his anxiety to know what the future would bring. His first work as a writer in Hollywood was collaborating with his old boss Berthold Viertel on a film script about Hitler, The Mad Dog of Europe, but by November Isherwood got his first brief studio job. Then in January 1940, through Viertel’s wife, Salka, he was hired by Gottfried Reinhardt to work at MGM on Rage in Heaven. The following summer, Isherwood’s childless uncle—Henry Bradshaw-Isherwood-Bagshawe—died, and Isherwood inherited the Marple estate. Remarkably, he passed on the entire inheritance, both money and property, directly to his younger brother. This serves to emphasize how entirely committed he was to his new life in America; he was not interested in the past, in the family, or in owning property in England. His reflections about this in his diary on July 12, 1940, when he received the news of his uncle’s death, once again make clear that England seemed to him to require that he return to a juvenile, or at least an adolescent, state of mind. The sole fascination of the Marple estate would have been the chance to turn all its formalities upside down, and he had outgrown the need to do that:

  It is too late now—not merely because of the war, but because the absurd boyhood dream of riches is over forever. It is too late to invite my friends to a banquet, to burn the Flemish tapestry and the Elizabethan beds, to turn the house into a brothel. I no longer want to be revenged on the past. Several weeks ago, I wrote to M[ummy] that Richard is to have everything, house and money. It’s his, not mine, by right, because he loves the place and is prepared to live there. I confirmed this by cable today.

  Although he was living far away from the central action of the war, Isherwood’s life during this period, like the lives of so many others, hung upon its progress. Introspective as he may have aspired to be in his new Hinduism, he listened continually to the radio during periods of crisis and followed events in the newspapers. To a degree, his spiritual progress reflected his ongoing response to the events of the war. Soon after the worst bombing in the Battle of Britain, July to October, 1940, Isherwood was formally initiated by Swami Prabhavananda on November 8, 1940, the birthday of Ramakrishna’s wife, Sarada Devi, worshipped as Holy Mother. In February 1941, he ended his domestic relationship with Vernon Old and, after living alone for a brief period, moved in with a new friend, Denny Fouts, who was then also taking up Vedanta. Isherwood was already thirty-six, too old for the newly established draft (having declared his intention to become a U.S. citizen, he was subject to the same military duties as a citizen), but during that spring he intended to volunteer as a conscientious objector at a Civilian Public Service Camp; Denny Fouts had registered as a conscientious objector and was waiting to be called up for the same type of service. Meanwhile, they undertook a monastic life together: chaste, spare and with frequent periods of meditation. This existence—the basis for the section called “Paul” in Down There on a Visit—lasted into the summer, when Fouts was indeed drafted to CPS camp and Isherwood learned that volunteers were not wanted. Instead, he made plans to go East to Haverford, Pennsylvania, where in the autumn of 1940 he began work in a Quaker refugee hostel (called the Cooperative College Workshop), helping to receive and resettle uprooted Europeans, mostly German Jews. In many ways, this time spent living and working among the diaspora of the culture by which he had been so fascinated during the early 1930s in Germany was Isherwood’s most direct contact with the war. It spawned the idea for a new novel, The School of Tragedy—a novel which, in the end, Isherwood never wrote, and for which much of the raw material lies abandoned in his wartime diaries.

  Isherwood was in Haverford when Pearl Harbor was bombed and the U.S. entered the war. The draft age was raised to forty-four, but still he was not called up, and he continued working at the hostel. He did very little writing, except in his diary. The following summer, 1942, he wrote another short story, “Take It or Leave It,” which portrays the breakdown of a marriage over the inability of the highly conventional husband and wife to communicate with one another except through their private diaries. When the mixed passions expressed in the diaries at last come into the open, the marriage is not fulfilled but finally destroyed; neither can face the other. Some of the characters and names in the tale are drawn from the American friends and acquaintances among whom Isherwood lived in Haverford, and the theme reflects Isherwood’s sense of isolation and unreality among the staid and marriage-oriented Quakers, whose wholesome virtue sometimes felt to him as oppressive as the genteel middle-class attitudes he had left behind in England with his mother. He rebelled against the Quakers only in small, essentially comic ways but clearly they aroused in him relics of guilt and anger stronger than any he had felt yet in America. He was, for the first time in a long while, concealing his homosexuality from the people among whom he was living, and he did this so successfully that one woman refugee he befriended fell seriously in love with him without recognizing that he was homosexual. In Haverford, his diary must have felt to him like the only place where he could express himself forthrightly, yet the short story “Take It or Leave It” (perhaps what he might have liked to say to the Quakers about his true self) seems to question whether a diary record is in fact any more genuine than the public persona offered to the world on a day-to-day basis. Isherwood introduces the story with a literary device—the narrator explains that although the story has occurred to him, it really ought to be told by someone else, a different kind of writer. This serves to emphasize Isherwood’s discomfort with his identity in Haverford, and it is the first ominous sign of the alienation from his true narrative voice which was to overtake him when he later tried to write a novel about the time he spent there.

  In July 1942, when the refugee hostel closed down, Isherwood returned to California. The Battle of the Pacific was at its height, and the war in Europe at its blackest; the Germans reached Stalingrad in September. He seemed unable to settle into any home of his own during this period, but lived alternately with various friends, Chris Wood in Laguna and Peggy Rodakiewicz in Beverly Hills. In roughly October, he began working with Swami Prabhavananda on a translation of the central religious text of Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita, or The Song of God. In November 1942 he went back to work at the movie studios, this time at Paramount, as an expert on the conscientious-objector position for Somerset Maugham’s The Hour Before Dawn. And at the end of the year, for the Vedanta Society magazine, he wrote an attractive fable in the childlike style of Katherine Mansfield, “The Wishing Tree,” which evokes what he had come to understand as the true religious attitude, that asks nothing of God but simply recognizes and is awed by God’s existence.

  As the Germans began to retreat from Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943, Isherwood finished working at Paramount and, after much consideration, moved into the Vedanta Center on Ivar Avenue in Hollywood. He was now seriously attempting to become a Hindu monk. He suffered gravely over the loss of his privacy and freedom, but he found he was able to work in the monastery. He continued with the translation of the Bhagavad Gita, and by May he was at last able to begin writing his next novel, Prater Violet. Like Mr. Norris Changes Trains, it begins as social comedy and ends by obliquely depicting the dark tragedy of Europe on the brink of the Second World War. “Friedrich Bergmann” is not merely a portrait of Isherwood’s mentor Berthold Viertel. The narrator, “Christopher Isherwood,” recognizes Bergmann’s face on meeting as
“the face of a political situation, an epoch. The face of Central Europe.”6 Bergmann’s genius as an artist and a film director epitomizes the highest aspirations of European culture, but—as if by some Nietzschean principle—his neurotic artistic perfectionism and appealing sensuality—at once subtle and childishly melodramatic—make him the willing lackey of the British studio bosses:

  The face was the face of an emperor, but the eyes were the dark, mocking eyes of his slave—the slave who ironically obeyed, watched, humored and judged the master who could never understand him; the slave upon whom the master depended utterly—for his amusement, for his instruction, for the sanction of his power; the slave who wrote the fables of beasts and men.7

  In the novel’s denouement, Bergmann is easily manipulated by his British employers, and his attempt to impress upon them the importance of the socialist uprising in Austria in February 1934, along with his insistent prophecy of the coming war, are as quickly suppressed as the socialists were themselves by Dollfuss. The dilemma of the film hero Rudolf, which Bergmann sketches for Isherwood as potentially symbolizing “the dilemma of the would-be revolutionary writer or artist, all over Europe,”8 paralyzes both the Isherwood character and Bergmann. Each becomes absorbed entirely in completing the film, despite doubting its artistic value, and in pursuing bourgeois success and comfort; neither remains committed to the cause of the workers. When Bergmann says to Isherwood during the uprising, “I am bitterly ashamed that I am here, in safety,”9 he seems to refer not only to his wife and child in Vienna, but also to those fighting there for what he himself purports to believe in. And the remark reverberates, as indeed does the whole novel, within the circumstances of the Second World War during which Isherwood was writing it. Berthold Viertel’s own wife and three sons had been safely in Santa Monica since 1928. But in his diaries, Isherwood describes a number of other refugees, both in Hollywood and in Haverford, who arrived in America while their wives and children or other members of their family were left behind in Europe, sometimes in grave danger; one, Ernst Jurkat, received news in Haverford that his wife, a Jew, had died in a concentration camp in Austria. And the sense of guilt expressed by some of these individuals, and recorded by Isherwood, unavoidably suggests the guilt borne silently by all those who were safe during the war, and in particular by the figure of the artist and intellectual upon whom Isherwood so ruthlessly and self-accusingly focuses in Prater Violet.

  In the summer of 1943, the U.S. began retaking islands in the Pacific, and in July the Allies invaded Sicily in heavy fighting. In August 1943, after Isherwood had been celibate for six months, Denny Fouts introduced him to a young man called Bill Harris, toward whom Isherwood felt an almost overwhelming sexual response; in his diaries he at first could bring himself to refer to Harris only as “X.” Lust preoccupied Isherwood increasingly, and he began to leave Ivar Avenue from time to time for spells of ordinary life, usually staying with friends and sometimes having small sexual adventures. He was still determined to become a monk, and his various projects of work were going well. In November he suddenly realized that a passage in the Bhagavad Gita he was working on could be brought to life if it were written in the Audenesque style of Old English verse, and he rapidly revised all the rest of the translation so that the various tones and moods of the Gita were rendered in appropriate English styles, alternating between prose and verse. In early 1944 he worked on a film idea with Aldous Huxley, Jacob’s Hands, and he completed the rough draft of Prater Violet by July. But meanwhile, in March 1944, he felt that he had fallen in love with Bill Harris, and by April he decided that he could never become a monk.

  Isherwood resolved to remain in the monastery at Ivar Avenue until he felt certain what he should do next, but in fact having made this resolution, he moved restlessly from one place to another for most of the following year, living for a time at the Vedanta Center in Santa Barbara, intermittently at Chris Wood’s in Laguna, and returning to Ivar Avenue for long spells, during which his moods fluctuated between calm stability, when he could meditate, pray, and work, and anxious claustrophobia, when he became almost hysterical with pent-up nerves and self-criticism. His inability to settle down is reflected in the conclusion to Prater Violet, where he describes the narrator as “A traveller, a wanderer.”10 In Prater Violet Isherwood lingers over the suggestion that this spiritual vagrancy derives from a deep ambivalence toward death. War and death work as one complex of images, in the novel, of inevitable darkness, both feared and desired, and the narrator meditates upon these images as he walks along the King’s Road in the company and companionship of Friedrich Bergmann, the man whom he looks upon as a father and whom he loves as a father—thus once again referring to the enormous impact upon Isherwood of losing his own real father during the First World War:

  Death, the desired, the feared. The longed-for sleep. The terror of the coming of sleep. Death. War. The vast sleeping city, doomed for the bombs. The roar of oncoming engines. The gunfire. The screams. The houses shattered. Death universal. My own death. Death of the seen and known and tasted and tangible world. Death with its army of fears. …

  It can never be escaped—never, never. Not if you run away to the ends of the earth (we had turned into Sloane Street), not if you yell for Mummy, or keep a stiff upper lip, or take to drink or to dope. That fear sits throned in my heart. I carry it about with me, always.

  For a time, Isherwood evidently felt that life in the monastery offered him safety from fear, but in the end, as he implies in Prater Violet, the annihilation of self that the monastic vows seemed to him to require was worse than fear:

  And, at this moment, but how infinitely faint, how distant, like the high far glimpse of a goat-track through the mountains between clouds, I see something else: the way that leads to safety. To where there is no fear, no loneliness, no need of J., K., L., or M. For a second, I glimpse it. For an instant, it is even quite clear. Then the clouds shut down, and a breath of the glacier, icy with the inhuman coldness of the peaks, touches my cheek. “No,” I think, “I could never do it. Rather the fear I know, the loneliness I know … For to take that other way would mean that I should lose myself. I should no longer be a person. I should no longer be Christopher Isherwood. No, no. That’s more terrible than the bombs. More terrible than having no lover. That I can never face.”11

  Isherwood uses a slight, evanescent image for the spiritual life—the narrow goat-track disappearing through the clouds. It evokes the heights of the Himalayas and the solitude and harshness of a difficult journey, a path as difficult to tread as the razor’s edge, and one from which Isherwood now veered away, determined that he could never entirely relinquish his identity, his ego, however committed he continued to be to Ramakrishna and to Swami Prabhavananda.

  During the summer of 1944 the war turned decisively in favor of the Allies. The D-Day landings in Normandy went ahead on June 6; in Italy the Allies took Rome and then, in mid-August, invaded southern France. On August 24, the French underground rose in Paris and de Gaulle soon took charge of a provisional French government. Meanwhile in California, Isherwood turned forty on August 26, and during the same month the translation he had made with Swami Prabhavananda of the Hindu gospel, the Bhagavad Gita, was published. Isherwood finished Prater Violet, his first novel written in America, on October 15 and polished it until late November, while also preparing an introduction to Vedanta for the Western World, a collection of writings from the magazine of the Vedanta Society written mostly by monks and devotees, including Prabhavananda, Heard, Huxley, Isherwood himself, and many others.

  In this period of energy and optimism, both in the war and in his personal life, Isherwood brought his first group of American diaries to a close on New Year’s Eve 1944. Yet neither the war nor his future were settled. He seemed to be certain that the first phase of his commitment to Vedanta had come to an end, for he knew that he could never become a monk: he had come to recognize that he was a social and a sexual creature, and that he both wanted and needed to
live in the world. He was poised and ready to leave the monastery, but his feelings for Bill Harris were not sufficient to move him. His relationship with Swami was untarnished, but he felt unsuited to the institutional life which was becoming increasingly suffocating as Prabhavananda’s followers grew in number. Often in his diary Isherwood makes remarks to the effect that he felt himself to be a devotee of Swami Prabhavananda, but not of the Ramakrishna Order. Before entering the monastery, he had required special reassurance from Swami that while becoming a monk meant taking vows of poverty and chastity, it did not necessarily mean having to conduct lecture courses, officiate at rituals, or attend social lunches with uncloistered lady devotees—all things to which the Swami himself devoted a great deal of time. The Swami seemed never to forget how antipathetic organized religious life was to Isherwood’s nature, and he happily permitted Isherwood to live remarkably freely.

  Isherwood clearly recognized that his involvement with Bill Harris was essentially a sexual infatuation, for although the relationship undermined his resolve to remain celibate, he did not leave the monastery for Harris. By February 1945 the affair was over. But in the summer, Isherwood fell in love again, far more deeply and seriously, with a young man recently discharged from the navy, Bill Caskey. They met in the late spring, and by August they were seriously involved. Isherwood was working in the film studios again, on various projects, and the war was at last drawing to a close. Hitler killed himself in April; Germany surrendered in May. Japan surrendered on August 14, and nine days later, on August 23, Isherwood left Ivar Avenue for good. He moved into his own tiny apartment attached to the house of his friends, Dodie Smith and her husband, Alec Beesley, and Caskey at once began to come and stay with him there.

  At the end of the war in the victorious countries, the sense of release, of joy, of abandon, must have been almost immeasurable in every quarter, and for Isherwood, to be in love, to be free of the difficulties of institutional life, of the commitment to long hours of prayer and meditation, of continual self-questioning, and to be certain at last that, whatever his life was for, it was not for adhering to monastic vows—all this was evidently intoxicating. The discipline and effort of the previous five years seemed suddenly unnecessary. He recorded nothing at all in his diary during this period, and indeed he hardly made any entries for the remainder of the 1940s. Thus some of the events of the missing years are described in a bridging narrative which introduces the second part of this volume. During the next five years, from 1945 to 1950, the excitement and enthusiasm which came with peacetime gradually turned for Isherwood to dissipation and chaos and eventually to despair. The years missing from his diary, while he was living with Bill Caskey, are years during which things went gradually, pervasively wrong with Isherwood’s life, and during which his career as a writer briefly but quite genuinely foundered. The years with Caskey were certainly not wasted years, but they were, in more than one sense, lost years.