Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Mausi. See Steuermann, Margeret.

  maya. In Vedanta, maya is the cosmic illusion, the manifold universe which the individual perceives instead of perceiving the one reality of Brahman; in this sense, maya veils Brahman. But maya is inseparable from Brahman and can also be understood as the manifestation of Brahman’s power; together maya and Brahman make Ishvara, the personal God. Maya has a double aspect encompassing opposite tendencies, toward ignorance (avidya) and toward knowledge (vidya). Avidya-maya involves the individual in worldly passions; vidya-maya leads to spiritual illumination.

  Medley, Robert (1905–1995). English painter. Robert Medley attended Gresham’s School, Holt with W. H. Auden, and the two remained close friends after Medley left for art school at the Slade. In London, Medley became the longtime companion of the dancer Rupert Doone and was involved with him in 1932 in founding the Group Theatre, which produced The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F6, and On the Frontier. Medley also worked as a theater designer and teacher, founding the Theatre Design section at the Slade in the 1950s before becoming Head of Painting and Sculpture at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1958.

  Messel, Rudolf. A wealthy and socially well-connected left-wing English journalist, pacifist, and aspiring Labour politician whom Isherwood may have met in the 1930s through Gerald Heard, a friend of both.

  Mesta, Perle. Hostess and political figure. Mesta was prominently involved in the National Woman’s Party, co-chaired Truman’s 1949 inaugural ball, and then became his Ambassador to Luxembourg, 1949–1953. Her story inspired Irving Berlin’s musical Call Me Madam, released as a film in 1953. Isherwood met her in 1956 through Speed Lamkin.

  Metro, also Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. See MGM.

  MGM. The preeminent Hollywood studio from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s; Isherwood began writing for MGM at the start of 1940, his second Hollywood job. As its name suggests, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was formed by a three-way merger: during the 1920s, Loewe’s Inc., owner of the Metro Pictures Corp., bought the Goldwyn Studios at Culver City—destined to become the Hollywood headquarters of MGM. The new company, Metro-Goldwyn, then bought the Louis B. Mayer Pictures Corp. Mayer thus became head of the most important Hollywood studio for the next thirty years, administering it with Irving Thalberg and Harry Rapf. Their stars included Garbo, Norma Shearer, Gable, Joan Crawford, the Barrymores, Elizabeth Taylor, Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and Greer Garson. Among the directors and producers associated with MGM were George Cukor, Clarence Brown, Victor Fleming, Mervyn LeRoy, Vincente Minnelli, Busby Berkeley, David O. Selznick and Arthur Freed. MGM was favorably publicized by the Hearst papers because Mayer invited Hearst to base his Cosmopolitan Pictures Corporation at MGM. The studio reached its apogee between 1935 and 1945, despite problems after Thalberg’s death in 1936. Then conflicts gradually developed between Mayer, William Schenck (who ran the New York office), and Dore Schary, head of production from the late 1940s. Mayer resigned in 1951. After that, increasingly rigorous enforcement of the Sherman anti-trust laws eventually forced Loewe’s Inc. to separate production from distribution, and Schary, who remained head of the studio until 1956, lacked the power to equal past successes. Financial losses and management upheavals plagued the studio in the 1960s, and MGM stopped making films in 1974.

  Mike, also Mikey. See Leopold, Michael.

  Michael. See Barrie, Michael.

  Milam, Webster. Webster was among the handful of men who moved into “Brahmananda Cottage” at the Vedanta Center with Isherwood in 1943; he was then a seventeen-year-old high-school student. His family lived in Avondale, Arizona, and he had a sister, Jean Milam, who was engaged to a young man in the army. By 1949, Webster had left the Vedanta Center, and he soon married. Isherwood also mentions a cousin of Webster, Franklin (Frank), who joined the monks at Trabuco around 1955; Frank later became Asima Chaitanya.

  Millard, Paul. American actor. Millard lived with Speed Lamkin in West Hollywood for a few years during the 1950s. He briefly called himself Paul Marlin, then later changed to Millard; his real name was Fink. He was good looking and his acting career was relatively successful on the New York stage and on TV, but eventually he joined his mother’s real estate business and invested in property. He owned an apartment building on Norma Place in West Hollywood, and during 1959 and 1960 he loaned Bachardy a little house just behind it, meant for guests, to use as a studio. Around this time, the two had an affair which Isherwood apparently did not know about.

  Miller, Dorothy. Cook and cleaner to Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy from 1958 onwards. On their recommendation she later kept house for the Laughtons as well, both in Hollywood and in Charles Laughton’s house next door to Isherwood and Bachardy in Adelaide Drive.

  Milne, A. A. English playwright and author of Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). He created many pacifists with his 1933 book Peace with Honour, but Milne came to regard war as a lesser evil than Hitlerism. He argued in support of the war in October 1939 in the Fortnightly Review, calling it “a civil war, or war of ideas, a revolt against an intolerable form of government,” and in numerous letters to the Times. Later, he published two pamphlets, War Aims Unlimited and War with Honour.

  Miltown. A tranquilizer evidently widely used in the 1950s. Generically called meprobamate.

  Minton, John (1917–1957). English painter and theater designer. His painting was admired by Wyndham Lewis, and he taught at several London art schools. Isherwood met him in London in 1948 through Minton’s friend, Keith Vaughan, and Minton drew Bill Caskey. Minton took his life with a drug overdose.

  Moffat, Ivan. British-American screenwriter; son of Iris Tree and her American husband Curtis Moffat. Moffat was educated at Dartington and served in the U. S. military during World War II. He returned to Los Angeles in early 1946 as an assistant to the director George Stevens, before becoming a writer. He assisted Stevens on A Place in the Sun (1951), was his associate producer for Shane (1953), and co-wrote Giant (1956), before going on to work for Selznick on Tender Is the Night. Moffat’s first wife was Natasha Sorokin, a Russian, who had for a time formed a ménage à trois with Simone de Beauvoir (her former teacher) and Jean-Paul Sartre—described in de Beauvoir’s L’invitée (1943), where Natasha appears as “Natalie.” The marriage broke up at the start of the 1950s, leaving a daughter, Lorna. Moffat then had a long succession of beautiful and talented girlfriends. Eventually he married Kate Smith, an Englishwoman whose family fortune derives from the book and stationery chain, W. H. Smith. Isherwood admired Moffat’s considerable wit and charm; moreover, although Moffat has always been heterosexual, Isherwood evidently identified with him, both as an expatriate and as a romantic adventurer. He based the main character in the first draft of Down There on a Visit on Moffat (this character later turned into Isherwood himself) and he also based “Patrick” in A Meeting by the River partly on Moffat.

  Monkhouse, Patrick. English journalist. Patrick Monkhouse was raised in Disley, near Marple, and became an intimate friend of Isherwood by the time they were adolescents. He was at Oxford a year or two ahead of W. H. Auden, and edited The Oxford Outlook. Later, he achieved a senior position at the Manchester Guardian and married. In the early 1920s, Patrick’s father, Allan Monkhouse, wrote a novel, My Daughter Helen, in which one of the main characters, Marmaduke, is partly modelled on the adolescent Isherwood. For years, Isherwood was fruitlessly attracted to Patrick’s younger brother John, while Patrick’s sister Rachel was half in love with Isherwood. At the start of the 1930s Rachel had an affair with André Mangeot; afterwards, she married and lived with her husband at Wyberslegh during the 1930s, eventually feuding over the house with Kathleen Isherwood. Isherwood first became friendly with Patrick’s youngest sister Mitty (Elizabeth) when he visited Wyberslegh in 1947.

  Morgan. See Forster, E. M.

  Mortimer, Raymond (1895–1980). English literary and art critic; he worked for numerous magazines and newspapers as both writer and editor and wrote a number of books on painting and the decorative
arts as well as a novel. From 1948 onward Mortimer worked for the Sunday Times and spent the last nearly thirty years of his life as their chief reviewer. He was at Balliol with Aldous Huxley and later became a close friend of Gerald Heard, introducing Heard to Huxley in 1929.

  Mortmere. An imaginary English village invented by Isherwood and Edward Upward when they were at Cambridge together in the 1920s; the inhabitants were satires of generic English social types, and were all slightly mad. As part of their rebellion against public school and university, Upward and Isherwood shared an elaborate fantasy life which was described by Isherwood in Lions and Shadows. The fragmentary stories the two wrote for each other about Mortmere were eventually published as a collection in 1994; Upward’s The Railway Accident appeared on its own in 1949.

  Moss, Stanley (b. 1935). American poet. He was on the staff of Botteghe Oscura in Rome, where Isherwood met him in 1955. Later he became poetry editor of the New American Review before setting himself up as an art dealer in New York. He published several volumes of poems and founded a small press in the Hudson Valley.

  Moulaert, Sophie. Maria Huxley’s niece, daughter of Maria’s sister, Jeanne, by Jeanne’s first husband, René Moulaert, a theatrical designer. Sophie arrived in the U.S. at sixteen in November 1939 and lived with the Huxleys during the war. She finished her education, briefly studied acting, and then worked as a bilingual secretary at Warner Brothers. After the liberation of Paris, she joined the Free French Forces and returned to Europe. Later she worked for UNESCO and married.

  mudra. Symbolic hand gesture; in Hindu ritual, the mudras connect external actions with spiritual ideas, helping to focus the mind on God.

  Murray, Don (b. 1929). American actor; also occasionally writer, producer, director. Murray played the sailor in the original production of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo and then came to Hollywood with his wife, Hope Lange, to make Bus Stop (1956), for which he received an Academy Award nomination opposite Marylin Monroe. Afterwards his career was less impressive, though he acted in many films and on TV. He had two children with Hope Lange before the marriage broke down at the end of the decade. In 1960, Isherwood did a treatment for a film about Sardinia for Murray and Walter Wood, but eventually Isherwood and Bachardy lost touch with Murray. He was a pacifist and did refugee relief work for the Quakers during the 1950s.

  Murray, Hope. See Lange, Hope.

  Murrow, Edward (1908–1965). American journalist and broadcaster, at CBS from 1935. Murrow made radio broadcasts from England throughout the war. Later, he worked in television in the U.S., both as presenter and producer of widely watched news programs. His interviews with public figures—such as the one with Robert Oppenheimer which Isherwood mentions in 1956—were influential.

  Myrdal, Gunnar, Alva, and Jan. Parents and brother of Derek Bok’s fiancée and wife, the philosopher Sissela Myrdal Bok. Gunnar Myrdal, the political economist, and his wife, Alva Reimer Myrdal, the sociologist, first became famous in 1934 for their book, Crisis in the Population Question, which frankly discussed sexuality and family planning and proposed social reforms that became the basis for the Swedish Welfare State. He also wrote An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) and Development and Underdevelopment (1956) and was later awarded a Nobel Prize for economics. She won a Nobel for her work in nuclear disarmament. Their son, Jan Myrdal, an outspoken communist, travelled extensively and wrote on subjects as varied as Albania, Kampuchea, China after Mao, French realism in literature and the silk road; one of his books repudiates his parents for their lack of attention to him during his childhood.

  Nadeau, Nicky. American dancer. Isherwood had a sexual relationship with him in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Possibly he met Nadeau through Chris Wood’s wealthy Bel Air friend Karl Hoyt; Nadeau had an affair with Hoyt and later, towards the end of the 1950s, with Chris Wood.

  Naeve, Lowell. American painter. Naeve went to prison as a conscientious objector during World War II, and practiced passive resistance there. He described his experiences in A Field of Broken Stones (1950), written with David Wieck and including Naeve’s own illustrations. Naeve’s book was produced by The Libertarian Press in Glen Gardner, New Jersey, and it was excerpted in another small press book, Prison Etiquette: The Convict’s Compendium of Useful Information (Retort Press, Bearsville, New York, 1950), for which Isherwood wrote the preface (reprinted in Exhumations).

  Neddermeyer, Heinz. German boyfriend of Isherwood; Heinz was about seventeen when they met in Berlin, March 13, 1932. Their love affair, the most serious of Isherwood’s life until then, lasted about five years. Hitler’s rise forced them to leave Berlin in May 1933, and afterwards they lived and travelled in Europe and North Africa. In a traumatic confrontation with immigration officials at Harwich, Heinz was refused entry on his second visit to England in January 1934, so Isherwood went abroad more and more to be with him. In 1936 Heinz was summoned for conscription in Germany and Isherwood scrambled to obtain or extend permits for Heinz to remain in the ever-diminishing number of European countries which would receive him. An expensive but shady lawyer failed to obtain a new nationality for Heinz; he was expelled from Luxembourg on May 12, 1937, and returned to Germany where he was arrested the next day by the Gestapo and later sentenced—for “reciprocal onanism” and draft evasion—to a three and a half year term combining imprisonment, forced labour, and military service. He survived, married in 1938, and with his wife, Gerda, had a son, Christian, in 1940. Isherwood did not see Heinz again until 1952 in Berlin, though he corresponded with him both before and after this visit. Heinz’s conscription first turned Isherwood towards pacifism. Their shared wanderings are described in Christopher and His Kind, and their friendship also serves as one basis for the “Waldemar” section of Down There on a Visit.

  Newman, Lennie. Chef; a lapsed Mormon from Utah, Lennie was a close friend of Jay de Laval in 1946 and worked in de Laval’s restaurant as assistant chef, though he often did most of the cooking. He was a favorite drinking companion of Bill Caskey. After de Laval went to Mexico, Newman took other jobs. For a time he was the chef at Sinbad’s, a restaurant on the Santa Monica Pier.

  Nicolson, Harold. British diplomat and author; Labour MP for West Leicester from 1935 to 1945 and Parliamentary Secretary under Alfred Duff Cooper. He aligned with Eden and Churchill against Chamberlain and the Nazis. A prolific journalist with a regular column in The Spectator, Nicolson wrote, lectured, and broadcast widely throughout World War II. In his Why Britain Is at War (1939), he argued that the war was necessary to save humanity, observing that the Nazis denied the achievements of civilization over savagery—especially the Christian values of tolerance, charity and love. Though he was a close friend of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard and admired both W. H. Auden and Isherwood (saying of the latter “with Isherwood rests, to my mind, the future of the English novel”) he disapproved of their absence, their apparent detachment, and, especially in the case of Huxley, their pacifism (Auden was not a pacifist). See “People and Things,” The Spectator, April 19, 1940, p. 555.

  Nixon, Alice (Tarini). A well-travelled, wealthy Southerner who was already a regular member of Swami’s Hollywood congregation in 1943 when Isherwood first mentions her. Her daughter Phoebe, who helped with secretarial work at the Vedanta Center, eventually became a nun, known as “Prabha.” During the 1950s Mrs. Nixon lived at the Santa Barbara center where she died of stomach cancer in 1956.

  Norment, Caroline. Director of the Cooperative College Workshop, the refugee hostel in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where Isherwood worked as a volunteer during the war. Isherwood first met Norment in late August or early September 1941 and returned in October to begin work. Norment was a Quaker and the hostel was one of several administered by the Quaker relief organization, the American Friends Service Committee. She had previously done relief work in Russia and Germany, and she had also served as Dean of Women at Antioch College. She was in her fifties when Isherwood met her, and she had a Boston bull terrier call
ed Pete. Norment is the original of Sarah Pennington in The World in the Evening; Isherwood took the character’s first name from the actress Sara Allgood, whom Norment resembled.

  Ohge, Ray. Ohge ran a restaurant called Trancas, on Trancas beach north of Malibu, along the Pacific Coast Highway. In September 1955, he rented Isherwood and Bachardy his beach house, near the restaurant, for about six weeks. They left from there directly to North Africa and Europe, and met Ohge in Paris on New Year’s Eve.

  Old, Vernon (not his real name). American painter. During Isherwood’s first visit to New York in 1938, George Davis took Isherwood to meet Vernon Old at an establishment called Matty’s Cell House. Blond, beautiful, and intelligent, Vernon exactly matched the description Isherwood had given Davis of the sort of American boy he’d like to meet, and Vernon featured in Isherwood’s decision to return to New York in 1939. The pair lived together in New York and Los Angeles until February 17, 1941, when they split up by mutual agreement. Vernon then lived somewhat unsteadily on his own, working on his painting. He could not return to his family as his parents were divorced and he did not like his mother’s second husband. He remained unsettled during the war period, trying to become a monk, first in a Catholic monastery in the Hudson Valley and later at the Hollywood Vedanta Center and at Ananda Bhavan in Montecito. Eventually Vernon married Patty O’Neill (not her real name) in November 1948, and had a son, Christopher, before divorcing. His painting career was increasingly successful, and in the late 1950s he gave private instruction to Don Bachardy. He appears (as “Vernon,” without a surname) in Christopher and His Kind and in My Guru and His Disciple.

  O’Neill, Donna. A companion of Ivan Moffat. She was beautiful and married to a wealthy man who objected to her involvement with Moffat. She remained with her husband, and she also spent many years in analysis.