Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Stravinsky, Vera (1888–1982). Russian-born actress and painter. Second wife of Igor Stravinsky; she was previously married three times, the third time to the painter and Ballets Russes stage designer Sergei Sudeikin. In 1917, Vera Arturovna Sudeikin fled St. Petersburg and the bohemian artistic milieu in which she was both patroness and muse, travelling in the south of Russia with Sudeikin before going on to Paris where she met Stravinsky in the early 1920s; they fell in love but did not marry until 1940 after the death of Stravinsky’s first wife. Isherwood met Vera Stravinsky with her husband in August 1949 and found her extremely charming and very beautiful. She became an adored longterm friend. Her paintings were in an abstract-primitive style influenced by Paul Klee, childlike and decorative. She had her first show in March 1955 at the Galleria Obelisco in Rome.

  Stroud, Bill. A friend of Michael Barrie in the mid-1950s. He was somewhat unpredictable, and Barrie had trouble with the friendship when Stroud became critical of Gerald Heard. Eventually he disappeared to the East Coast.

  Sudhira. A nurse of Irish descent; she was a probationer nun at the Vedanta Center when Isherwood arrived to live there in 1943. Her real name was Helen Kennedy. In youth she had been widowed on the third day of her marriage. Afterwards she worked in hospitals and for Dr. Kolisch, and first came to the Vedanta Center professionally to nurse a devotee. Her parents were members of the original cooperative colony in the desert at Llano (where the Huxleys later briefly lived) and she had spent some time there as a child. She enlisted in the navy in January 1945, and later married for a second time and returned to nursing.

  Suez crisis. Isherwood followed its development throughout 1956. Egypt’s President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company (in which shares were held mostly by British and French investors) in late July 1956, proposing to pay for the Aswan Dam with canal tolls after international loan offers for the project were withdrawn. The Israelis invaded on October 29, claiming Egyptian provocation; they were followed by Anglo-French air attacks and, in early November, troops. But international opposition forced the British and French to halt their operation almost immediately. They withdrew in December and the Israelis left in March 1957. U.N. troops remained for a decade.

  In November 1956, Isherwood also alludes to the tensions which mounted between Turkey and Syria when Turkey, which had joined the U.S. sponsored Baghdad Pact and had also recognized the state of Israel, pressured Syria to break its alliance with Egypt (Syria shared joint command with Egypt and Jordan during the Suez war). During this time, the Soviets, a traditional threat to Turkey, began to supply weapons to Syria and Egypt in response to the crisis. Eventually, on November 26, Turkey withdrew its ambassador to Israel until differences with other Arab states could be resolved.

  Swami. Used as a title to mean “Lord” or “Master.” A Hindu monk or religious teacher. Isherwood used it in particular to refer to his own guru and he pronounced it Shwami; see also Prabhavananda.

  Swamiji. An especially respectful form of “Swami,” but also a particular name for Vivekananda towards the end of his life.

  Szczesny, Berthold. Isherwood met Szczesny in The Cosy Corner on his first brief visit to Berlin in March 1929 and returned to Germany hoping to spend the summer with him in the Harz Mountains. But Szczesny, then called “Bubi,” was in trouble with the police, fled to Amsterdam, and from there shipped out to South America. Subsequently he came to London working on board a freighter and smuggling refugees into England. As Isherwood tells in The Condor and the Cows, Szczesny eventually returned to Argentina, became part-owner of a factory and married an Argentine woman of privileged background. He and Isherwood met again there and in New York.

  Taber, Phil. A disciple of Swami Prabhavananda. He lived at Trabuco during the 1950s, but never took any vows. He left Vedanta in 1959.

  tamas. Darkness, inertia, stupidity. See guna.

  Tantra. A religious philosophy whose followers mainly worship Shakti, the Mother of the Universe, and who understand the universe in terms of the relationship between Shakti and Shiva. Shakti represents the energy or dynamic power of Brahman—creating, preserving, dissolving the universe; Shiva, the father aspect, represents Brahman—the transcendent Absolute which is revealed through the grace of Shakti. Tantra is preoccupied with spiritual practices and ritual forms of worship, seeking liberation and rebirth through direct knowledge that the individual soul is one with the Godhead (Shiva-Shakti). Tantra is also the name of the scriptures associated with worshipping Shakti; it was originally a type of Hindu sacred text or ritualistic book, but usually refers to texts dealing with the secret sexual and magic practices of initiates in the cult of Shakti. Vamachara—the use of wine and women to teach freedom from the passions through sublimation and liberation—was outlawed among followers of Ramakrishna because it degenerated into sensualism. Vaishnava Vedanta and Buddhism also have Tantras.

  Tarini. See Nixon, Alice.

  Taylor, Charles (“Spud”). Los Angeles doctor; boyfriend of Isherwood’s secretary Eleanor Breese. Taylor’s speciality was proctology; he examined Isherwood in May 1957 when Isherwood was suffering persistent ill health, anxiety and depression.

  Taylor, Frank. American movie producer (The Misfits) and publisher. Taylor worked at MGM in Los Angeles and was also an editor at Dell Publishers in New York. His double life extended to his personal circumstances as well; he had a number of children with his wife, Nan, and a series of male lovers. Taylor introduced Isherwood to various acquaintances, including in the 1950s John Keating (a young actor) and Van Varner. Over the years, Isherwood worked with Taylor on a number of film projects: these included The Journeying Boy or The Vacant Room and a movie written with Klaus Mann—which came to nothing—about Han Van Meegeren, the forger, and his dealings with the Nazis. Isherwood also prepared the 1960 anthology Great English Short Stories for Taylor at Dell. Taylor was on the Board of Trustees at the Huntington Hartford Foundation and introduced Isherwood as a new trustee. The Taylors entertained frequently, and Isherwood often attended parties at their house.

  Ted. See Bachardy, Ted.

  Ten, also Tennessee. See Williams, Tennessee.

  Terry. See Jenkins, Terry.

  Thakur. Hindu term for Master or Lord; a familiar name for Ramakrishna among his devotees.

  Thom, Richard. Thom’s parents had been devotees of Swami Prabhavananda in Portland, Oregon, and Thom began preparing to be a monk while still in high school. He lived at the Vedanta Center with Isherwood and the other probationer monks briefly in 1943, until he got into trouble and was expelled from school. After various jobs, he joined the marines in the autumn of 1943.

  Thurau, Fräulein Meta. Isherwood’s landlady in Berlin from December 1930 when he took a room in her flat in Nollendorfstrasse 17. She is the original of “Fräulein Lina Schroeder” in Goodbye to Berlin (“Fräulein Schneider” in John van Druten’s stage version, I Am a Camera).

  Tinker. See Austen, Howard.

  Tis. See Bok, Margaret Welmoet.

  Tito. See Renaldo, Tito.

  Todd, Thelma (1905–1935). American movie actress. She owned a Hollywood establishment incorporating a restaurant, a gambling casino and a whorehouse, and she was murdered there. Afterwards the restaurant, Chez Roland (named after Gilbert Roland with whom Todd was supposed to be in love), continued for many years.

  Toller, Christiane Grautoff (1917–1974). German actress; daughter of a prominent art historian and wife of Ernst Toller. They met when she was only sixteen, in 1932, and married in exile in London in 1935. She worked in Hollywood and New York after their emigration, but the marriage failed, adding to Toller’s depression. Isherwood probably first met her in Sintra in 1936.

  Toller, Ernst (1893–1939). German poet and playwright. Toller fought in World War I and afterwards became a pacifist and a left-wing revolutionary. In 1919 he went to prison for five years for his participation in the communist government of Bavaria, but continued writing. A Jew, Toller fled the Nazis, worked in London, New York, and Holl
ywood, wrote several more poems and plays, then hanged himself in May 1939 in New York, several weeks after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. Toller stayed with Isherwood in Sintra in the spring of 1936, possibly because either Isherwood or Stephen Spender invited him, and W. H. Auden was there at the time working with Isherwood on The Ascent of F6. Auden translated the lyrics for Toller’s satirical musical play Nie Wieder Frieden! (No More Peace!) which was produced at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill that June, 1936, and published in 1937. The title mocks the popular German slogan of the 1920s, “Nie Wieder Krieg” (No More War). After Toller’s suicide, Auden wrote a poem for him, “In Memoriam Ernst Toller.”

  Tom. See Wright, Tom.

  Trabuco. The monastic community sixty miles south of Los Angeles and about twenty miles inland which was founded by Gerald Heard in 1942. An anonymous benefactor provided $100,000 for the project, and Heard consulted at length with various friends and colleagues as well as with members of the Quaker Society of Friends about how to organize the community. In 1940 he planned only a small retreat called “Focus,” then renamed the community after buying the ranch at Trabuco. Isherwood’s cousin on his mother’s side, Felix Greene, administered the practical side of the project, beginning with buying the property and constructing the building which could house fifty. By 1949 Heard found leading and administering the group too much of a strain and, wishing to retire, persuaded the trustees to give Trabuco to the Vedanta Society. It opened as a Vedanta monastery in September 1949.

  Tree, Iris. English actress and poet; third daughter of actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree. She published three volumes of poetry (two before 1930, a third in 1966) and wrote poems and articles for magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as Botteghe Oscura, Poetry Review, and The London Magazine. In youth she travelled with her father to Hollywood and New York and married an American, Curtis Moffat, with whom she had her first son, Ivan Moffat, born in Havana. Until 1926 she lived mostly in London and in Paris where she acted in Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle; she toured with the play back to America where she met her second husband, the Austrian Count Friedrich Ledebur, with whom she had another son, Christian Dion Ledebur (called Boon) in 1928. Iris Tree had known Aldous and Maria Huxley in London, and they introduced Isherwood to her in California during the war. With Allan Harkness, she brought a troupe of actors to Ojai to start a repertory theater, The High Valley Theater, concentrating on Chekhov. Many of them were pacifists like herself. She moved often—from house to house and country to country—and in July 1954 left California for good, settling in Rome where she worked on but never finished a novel about her youth. Her marriage to Ledebur ended in 1955. Isherwood modelled “Charlotte” in A Single Man partly on Iris Tree.

  Trevor-Roper, Patrick (b. 1916). British ophthalmologist; younger brother of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. He had a distinguished London career in practice and research and wrote a book, Blunted Sight: An Inquiry into the Effects of Disordered Vision on Character and Art (1971). Isherwood first mentions him in 1956, though they may have met previously.

  Truman. See Capote, Truman.

  Turville-Petre, Francis. English archaeologist, from an aristocratic Catholic family. Isherwood met the eccentric Turville-Petre through W. H. Auden in Berlin in 1929, and it was at Turville-Petre’s house outside Berlin that Isherwood met Heinz Neddermeyer in 1932. In 1933 when Isherwood and Heinz fled Germany, they spent nearly four months on Turville-Petre’s tiny island, St. Nicholas, in Greece. Turville-Petre, known among the boys in the Berlin bars as “Der Franni,” inspired the character of the lost heir in W. H. Auden’s play The Fronny and in Auden and Isherwood’s The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935); he is also the model for “Ambrose” in Down There on a Visit.

  Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. One of Hollywood’s five biggest studios; formed in 1935 when Joseph Schenck’s Twentieth Century Pictures merged with William Fox’s Fox Film Corporation. Darryl Zanuck headed production from 1935 to 1952, and then the studio was run by Spyros Skouras for a decade. Zanuck returned as president from 1962, and Richard Zanuck headed production for his father until the 1970s when he formed his own production company (Zanuck-Brown). After the Zanucks, Alan Ladd Jr. took over, and Twentieth Century-Fox has since been sold and resold, eventually to Rupert Murdoch. Its many stars have included Shirley Temple and Marilyn Monroe. Fox bought the rights to a French invention producing a new wider screen image, and in 1953 came out with the first Cinemascope film, The Robe; all the studios soon achieved similar widescreen techniques, but Fox made the largest number of big screen spectaculars over the following decade, including The King and I (1956), Cleopatra (1963), and The Sound of Music (1965). Isherwood worked at Fox scripting Jean-Christophe in 1956 and 1957, but the film was never made.

  Tynan, Kenneth (1927–1980) and Elaine Dundy Tynan. English theater critic and his American first wife, an actress, novelist and playwright. During the 1950s and 1960s Tynan wrote regularly for the London Evening Standard and then for the Observer, as well as for The New Yorker and other publications. He was literary adviser to the National Theatre in London from its inception in 1963, but his anti-establishment views brought about his departure before the end of the decade. His support for realistic working class drama, by new playwrights such as Osborne, Delaney and Wesker, as well as for the works of Brecht and Beckett, was widely influential. Many of his essays and reviews are collected as books. At the end of stage censorship in 1968 he devised and produced the sex revue Oh, Calcutta! (1969). Elaine Dundy acted intermittently, mostly for TV, then published a best-selling novel The Dud Avocado (1958) and wrote a successful play, My Place, in 1962. The Tynans married in 1951, but the marriage became unstable and increasingly belligerent. In the early 1960s, Tynan began an affair with the newly married Kathleen Gates, a cool, ambitious Canadian journalist raised in England, and they married in 1967. Isherwood first met Kenneth and Elaine Tynan in London in 1956 and later saw them again when they visited California.

  UCLA. University of California at Los Angeles.

  UFOs. In June 1947 an Idaho business man, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing through the window of his private plane near Mt. Rainier, flying objects which he described to the press as looking like “skipping saucers.” So many more “sightings” followed around the country that the U.S. military officially investigated the possible threat to national security. In his 1950 book Is Another World Watching? (The Riddle of the Flying Saucers in the U.K.), Gerald Heard described many of these early UFO sightings. He believed they were either top secret, ultra-fast experimental aircraft which the government was covering up or, more exciting to him, visitors from Mars. Among the vastly numerous accounts of flying saucers analyzed by the U.S. Air Force between 1947 and the mid-1950s, about ten percent of reported sightings were never accounted for. As the Air Force terminology points out, they remain Unidentified Flying Objects. Official U.S. investigations were abandoned in 1969.

  Uhse, Bodo (1904–1963). German novelist and journalist. Uhse was a Nazi for roughly a year towards the end of the 1920s; then he joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s and fought in the Spanish Civil War. From 1933, he lived abroad in France, Mexico, and the U.S. and returned in 1948 to live in East Berlin, where he worked as a literary editor. He published novels, essays, and travel stories in German from the mid-1930s onward. Isherwood and Berthold Viertel worked with him briefly in 1939; possibly Isherwood had met Uhse previously in Berlin.

  Ujjvala. An elderly devotee who had known Vivekananda and other direct disciples in her youth; she died while staying at the Vedanta Center in 1955.

  Uncle Henry. See Isherwood, Henry Bradshaw.

  Unity. Twentieth-century American religious movement based on Protestantism, but also teaching reincarnation and regeneration of the body. Unity emphasizes health and success.

  The Uplifters. A men’s club founded in the early decades of the century in a ranch-like setting in Santa Monica Canyon. It offered a retreat from women and family life where the members c
ould relax and drink as much as they liked (hence the name, for lifting up of glasses).