Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  On leaving the monastery in 1945, Isherwood at first continued happy and productive. He began another translation with Swami Prabhavananda, the Crest Jewel of Discrimination, Shankara’s eighth-century philosophical poem about the path to God through knowledge of how to distinguish what is real (God) from what is not real (the universe). Prater Violet appeared in Harper’s Bazaar during the summer and was published as a book in November. But Isherwood was devoting a great deal of attention to Caskey, to domestic arrangements, to travel, to earning money at the studios to pay for their life together; less and less time was spent writing fiction. Caskey was handsome and possessed a forthright Kentucky-Irish eloquence that Isherwood found captivating; moreover, he was adventurous and independent, and he had the sort of rebellious nature to which Isherwood throughout his life was instantly attracted—as with Edward Upward and Swami Prabhavananda. But, more than being rebellious, Caskey was fundamentally belligerent; problems arose right from the start over his need for conflict, although initially his fights were not with Isherwood. In September 1945 Denny Fouts loaned his Santa Monica apartment to Isherwood and Caskey while he was out of town for a number of months; when Fouts returned in the spring, the three were to live together. But Caskey picked a jealous fight with Fouts which became so ferocious that Caskey and Isherwood were forced to move out of the apartment, and the friendship between Fouts and Isherwood was never the same afterwards. Other quarrels are recorded later on in Isherwood’s diaries, and it seems clear that even in the most ordinary social conversation, Caskey’s wit was bitterly caustic and his temper easily fired.

  Caskey and Isherwood next settled in Salka Viertel’s garage apartment, in April 1946. There they had probably their happiest and most productive months together. That summer and autumn, Caskey studied photography with the intention of making it his career. Isherwood had begun working early in the spring on a piece of fiction based on his experiences with the refugees in Haverford, and he was also planning a short novel about the time he and Heinz Neddermeyer had spent with Francis Turville-Petre in Greece. The second project was put off for a few years, while his plan for the first was quickly taking on epic proportions. Perhaps as a kind of preparation for writing about Haverford in precisely the way that he wanted to, that summer and autumn Isherwood revised his wartime diaries, producing the relatively polished version which makes up the first part of this volume. But he didn’t get far with the projected novel.

  On November 8, 1946, six years to the day since he had been initiated by Swami Prabhavananda (Isherwood, with his love of numinous dates, perhaps was able to influence the exact day), he formally became a U.S. citizen. And just after the start of the new year, 1947, he finished working with Lesser Samuels on an original treatment for a film, Judgement Day in Pittsburgh, about an art student drawn into scandal when she paints a picture of her beloved’s face attached to a mostly nude body copied from Michelangelo. Thus, when Isherwood made his first trip back to England after the war (choosing to travel on another magic date, January 19, on which he and Auden had sailed for China in 1938 and for the U.S. in 1939), he was an American citizen and he was, at least soon after he arrived, as rich as a writer returning home from the dream of Hollywood ought to be. For while he was staying with his mother and brother at Wyberslegh, their home on the Marple estate, Isherwood received a dramatic telegram from Samuels saying that they had been paid $50,000 for their film treatment. (The script based on their treatment was later written by someone else, and the film was released by RKO in 1949 as Adventure in Baltimore.)

  Because Caskey wanted to, Isherwood and Caskey lived in New York throughout the spring and summer of 1947, after Isherwood returned from England in April. Isherwood was struggling with his novel about the Quakers and the refugees, which by now he was calling The School of Tragedy, but he accomplished almost nothing amid the busy social life that he and Caskey were leading. Then, on September 19, the two of them set sail from New York for South America on a seven-month journey which Isherwood described in his second travel book, The Condor and the Cows. This was the last really fruitful time they spent together. Caskey took the haunting photographs for The Condor and the Cows, which make clear he had more than a slender talent. And the necessity of recording their journey for the travel book triggered in Isherwood his old diary-keeping impulse: in April 1948, at the end of their South American tour when he and Caskey were on board ship bound for Africa and Europe, he made the first proper entries in his diary since the war. Still, the habit of keeping the diary regularly was to take some years to reestablish itself entirely.

  Their trip ended with another stay in England, and by the time Isherwood returned to California in the summer of 1948, to take a job writing a script based on Dostoevsky’s The Gambler for Gottfried Reinhardt, he had been gone a year and a half, much of the time travelling. Caskey lingered in New York, and Isherwood arrived in California alone. Their relationship was by now far from monogamous, and Isherwood established several other romantic friendships during this period; sometimes he was promiscuous in a casual and energetic way. But Caskey soon joined him in California and they settled down together again in October 1948. Throughout this period, and despite his travels, Isherwood’s faith in Swami Prabhavananda continued quietly to ballast him. Their Shankara book had been published in 1947 while Isherwood was away, and during the autumn of 1948, guru and disciple began yet another time-consuming translation, the yoga aphorisms of Patanjali. This exposition of Hindu spiritual disciplines and meditation techniques, formulated some time between the fourth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D. by the obscure Patanjali, eventually appeared in 1953, with Prabhavananda and Isherwood’s modern English commentary, as How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali.

  In October Isherwood finished working on the Dostoevsky film, The Great Sinner, and he soon got more film work in early 1949. In April 1949 he finished writing The Condor and the Cows, but he was floundering with his novel, The School of Tragedy. He worked on another script idea with Lesser Samuels, The Easiest Thing in the World—although they never repeated the bonanza they had achieved with Judgement Day in Pittsburgh—and he and Samuels also worked with Aldous Huxley on another film project, Below the Equator. Then in November 1949, Caskey left to go to the East Coast for a number of months.

  Isherwood had affairs with various other men while Caskey was gone, and produced little serious work, although at the last of the year he squeezed out a memorial about his friend Klaus Mann, who had committed suicide in May. In fact, Isherwood seemed to be laboring against a genuine writer’s block. And this was combined with actual physical impotence. On December 14, 1949, he wrote in his diary:

  Then there is this constant sexual itch, which never seems to be satisfied—or very seldom—because it is accompanied by a certain degree of impotence. And there is a hyper-tension, worse, I think, than I have ever experienced.

  And so I fail to write. I put it off and put it off, and I do nothing about getting a job, and I drift toward complete pauperism with nothing in sight. I am lazy and dreamy and lecherous. I hate being alone. I don’t exactly want Billy back—at least, I certainly don’t want him the way he was when he left. And I am fundamentally unserious in my approach to other people. I don’t believe in myself or my future, and all my “reputation” is just a delayed-action mechanism which only impresses the very young.

  In 1946, Isherwood had undergone an operation on his urethra, inside the bladder, during which the doctor had tied off the sperm tubes, making Isherwood sterile and, in Isherwood’s view, limiting his production of semen. Isherwood maintained that this did not adversely affect his sexual performance, and physiologically this should have been correct; but physiologically there is also no reason why such an operation should have affected his production of semen. Isherwood’s self-acknowledged and immensely subtle propensity for symbolic psychosomatic symptoms seems a more likely cause for the reduced semen production, and it seems equally likely that the psychological effects of th
e operation may have contributed over the longer term to the impotence that he sometimes suffered. His imaginative paralysis during this period was worse than what he had experienced when he first lived in New York with Auden and with Vernon Old because then the entire culture was preparing to undergo a massive convulsion and his anxieties were, in a sense, widely shared, even emblematic. Now his crisis was private and entirely personal. Indeed it reveals the way in which the war had perhaps only delayed Isherwood in coming to terms with himself.

  In 1950, Isherwood and Lesser Samuels tried out yet another script idea, a ghost story which they called The Vacant Room. Caskey came back to California in April, and then in June war broke out in Korea, reanimating Isherwood’s old war fears, and making it even more difficult for him to work. Though the Korean war seemed more remote than the previous war, and though it presented itself with less urgency and magnitude in the society as a whole, it seems to have contributed to Isherwood’s rising sense of panic about what he was doing with his life. Also, he feared that Caskey, despite having already served in the navy and being given a neutral discharge after becoming involved in a homosexual scandal, might be drafted. During the summer of 1950 Isherwood began reviewing for a literature and arts magazine, Tomorrow, evidently so that he would be regularly engaged in serious reading and thinking. Towards the end of the year, he and Caskey made an attempt at a fresh start in their relationship: they moved together to South Laguna, down the coast from Los Angeles, in December.

  On December 11, 1950 Isherwood wrote in his diary:

  Calm, meditation, work, regular habits, study, discipline, proper exercise; the absolute necessary regime for middle age. The past two years have been so incredibly wasteful. I’ve been like an engine with the belt slipping. And yet I know quite well how to employ the proper technique. (I certainly ought to, after impressing everybody with the clarity of my comments on Patanjali! What an old hypocrite, if I don’t follow them!) The whole art of intentional living is in variety. You don’t want to write your novel? Very well, do some other work, answer letters, get on with translating, read something instructive, take exercise, fix something in the garden, and fill every crack, every odd moment, with japam.

  The phrase “intentional living,” learned from Gerald Heard during the early 1940s (Isherwood first mentions it January 9, 1940), encapsulates Isherwood’s apparent wish to lead his life on purpose and with a purpose, rather than allowing things to go on happening at random. And the word “art” implies his aim to make all parts of his life harmonious and lucid, even beautiful, as he had once done with his novels. He looked to the routine of domestic chores and japam (repeating and meditating upon the mantra given him by Swami) practiced in his monastic life during the war to help reestablish a measure of self-mastery. But his life with Caskey was too far out of control, and they now hit what was for Isherwood an all-time low of dissipation, with ceaseless spontaneous parties running late into the night, excessive promiscuity, and jealous, angry conflict. Isherwood longed for domestic tranquillity, a predictable routine, the possibility of getting his work done; and yet he was entirely unable to communicate this constructively to Caskey who refused to take a job and who continually drank too much. Isherwood knew by now that the more he pressed and tried to persuade Caskey, the more defiant Caskey, became, and he seems to have recognized in Caskey the embattled posture of his own youth. He cherished Caskey’s flamboyantly antagonistic way with others, and he also blamed himself for trying to control in Caskey the self-destructive willfulness that, during this period, he was unable to control in himself. On April 27, 1951 Isherwood wrote in his diary:

  What I really am trying to run away from is myself.

  What I am trying to impose—under the disguise of “reasonableness”—is my own will. “Nothing burns in hell except the self,” and I am miserable because the self is burning.

  In the simplest, most terrible manner I am being taught that no other kind of life is possible for me. The monastery is here, is wherever I am. When Swami said: “Ramakrishna will hound you,” he wasn’t kidding.

  For the first time, Isherwood recalled longingly his circumstances at his mother’s house in Pembroke Gardens before he left London, where all his domestic requirements had been met, but where he had been able to come and go exactly as he pleased. On May 6, 1951, he wrote, “I must confess, I want to be looked after. I want the background of a home.”

  Yet Isherwood hardly devoted himself to Caskey’s welfare or need for security. Later that month, after a dramatic scene during a party, at which Isherwood had evidently too openly expressed his attraction to several other men, he finally left Caskey and Laguna and fled to the Huntington Hartford Foundation, a retreat for artists and writers in Pacific Palisades on the northern outskirts of Los Angeles, with which he had already been involved through several friends. The Huntington Hartford Foundation was a secular equivalent to the Vedanta monastery at Ivar Avenue: a sheltered community where Isherwood’s daily domestic needs would be met by institutional life. And at first, the foundation seemed to ask little of Isherwood in return. (Much later, Isherwood came to feel that the principles on which the foundation was run were hypocritical and manipulative, and he severed his ties with it.) The Swami continually encouraged Isherwood to come back, in one capacity or another, to the monastery, and even though Isherwood believed throughout this dark, confused time that Ramakrishna was somehow protecting him, he also felt certain that he needed to find his own individual solution to the problem of how he should live.

  During the rest of the summer and fall of 1951, he shot back and forth from Laguna to the Huntington Hartford Foundation just as restlessly as he had moved from place to place in other, earlier periods of personal crisis. He first went to the foundation in May, then back to Laguna in August, then back to the foundation in September for three months. In September he decided once and for all that he could not go on living with Caskey. He was writing in his diary more often, but still only fitfully, and he tried with grave endeavor to get back to work on his novel. In the end, the years with Caskey were to produce Isherwood’s least impressive literary achievement, The World in the Evening, begun in 1946, completed in the autumn of 1953, and published in June 1954. Its weaknesses are in many ways the culmination of artistic difficulties with which he had already been struggling long before he met Caskey, and the book reveals an enormous amount about Isherwood’s career.

  As a writer, Isherwood always aspired to work on an epic canvas, but he usually produced individual portraits or small groups of interrelated figures. During the 1930s, he worked on a novel about Berlin called The Lost. As he explains in Christopher and His Kind, the title was intended to describe the generation of Germans that was being “herded blindly into the future by their Nazi shepherds,”12 as well as those who would be Hitler’s victims (Bernhard Landauer), and also the moral outcasts who seemed to have no place in society at all (Sally Bowles, Otto Nowak, Mr. Norris). The characters were to be bound together by their awareness “of the mental, economic, and ideological bankruptcy of the world in which they live.”13 In other words, the novel was to represent the depleted atmosphere of a whole epoch. But Isherwood found he could not manage the massive book. The Lost was too big and unwieldy. Eventually he carved out the story of Mr. Norris from the epic canvas on which he had wished to work, observing in Christopher and His Kind, “It has been my experience that the embryos of novels tend to start their growth as interlocked Siamese twins or triplets, which can only be separated by the most delicate surgery.”14 This repeatedly proved true in his work.

  Further on in Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood explains that he decided to publish the rest of his stories about Berlin as disconnected fragments only because John Lehmann needed short pieces of material for his magazine, New Writing. This freed him from conventional obligations of plot and produced the impressionistic, open-ended form of Goodbye to Berlin, which so successfully suggests that each of the stories and characters contained within the book
is part of and even stands for the many similar and not-so similar people living outside the book, in real life. Thus the book has the desired effect of portraying a whole cultural milieu at a particular and, as it proved, immmensely significant moment in history. But this happened, according to Isherwood, by accident. Once “Otto Nowak” had appeared in New Writing and Sally Bowles had been produced as a slim individual volume by the Hogarth Press, the many neglected characters of The Lost began crowding in upon him again. In May 1936, Isherwood recalls, he was working on a book of autobiographical reminscences which he thought he might call Scenes from an Education; he planned to include in it most of what he eventually published as three entirely separate books, Lions and Shadows, Goodbye to Berlin, and his next novel, Prater Violet. As he observes of himself in Christopher and His Kind, “He probably didn’t realize how huge this book would have been.”15