Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  Some of the inner rage he feels against me is because of the fact that I am going to leave him. He feels that this is a trick which I shall play on him—have, indeed, already played, by involving us so with each other. Any sign I show of illness, even of fatigue, makes him intensely nervous; he behaves as if it were a kind of bitchery on my part.26

  And Isherwood’s own friends were dying. Laughton in 1962 and Huxley in 1963 died before their time. Anyway, they were much older than Isherwood. So were Forster and Gerald Hamilton who died in 1970, and Stravinsky and Gerald Heard who died in 1971. But 1973 took contemporaries and friends of his youth—William Plomer; Jean Ross, who was the real-life original of Sally Bowles; and Auden, his closest English friend, whom he followed to Berlin in 1929, with whom he collaborated on three plays during the 1930s, and with whom he emigrated to America in January 1939:

  Wystan died yesterday—or anyhow sometime during the night of September 28–29. . . .This is still so uncanny. I believe it, I guess, but it seems utterly against nature. Not because I thought Wystan was so tough as all that. He seemed to have been ruining his health for years. And then, whatever he may have said, he was awfully lonely—isolated is what I mean—he made a wall around himself, for most people, by his behavior and his prejudices and demands. Perhaps he deeply wanted to go. His death seems uncanny to me because he was one of the guarantees that I won’t die—at least not yet. I think most of us, if we live long enough, have such guarantee figures. On the other hand, the fact that he has gone first makes the prospect of death easier to face. He has shown me the way. . . .

  An odd thing: That night he died—or rather, in the afternoon here, which might have been the exact time of his death in Vienna—I started a sore throat, the first I’ve had in a long long while, and it got so bad during our nighttime that I couldn’t swallow. And today, despite doses of penicillin, I still have a fever and headache and feel lousy. This makes me glad. I like to believe that he sent me a message which got through to me.27

  Did the message admonish Isherwood, like sore throats triggered by encounters with Auden in the 1920s, to be true to his inner nature, and to tell the truth in his writing? In his early auto biography Lions and Shadows, Isherwood writes of the Auden character, Hugh Weston, “I caught a bad cold every time we met: indeed the mere sight of a postcard announcing his arrival would be sufficient to send up my temperature and inflame my tonsils.”28 Isherwood was now struggling to get started with the book that was to become Christopher and His Kind. Auden’s death not only warned him that he had better hurry, it also freed him to handle the material without anxiety that he might bruise Auden’s feelings or invade his well-guarded privacy. In his lifetime, Auden never publicly acknowledged he was a homosexual, and he told friends he wanted no biography. Isherwood was among the few who could tell Auden’s story—or his own story for that matter—and he knew this. As he wrote in his diary when Christopher and His Kind was nearly finished: “I am writing little bits about Wystan in my book. . . . I can’t help feeling, wishes or no wishes, it is better if those who knew Wystan write now, instead of leaving it to those who didn’t know him, a generation or two later.”29

  About a month after Auden’s death, Isherwood saw that Christopher and His Kind must above all explain why he himself left England—to find somewhere that he could live as a homosexual. To his countrymen, to the press, Isherwood’s departure in 1939 had long been seen as the turning point in his career and the decision on which both he and Auden had been publicly and harshly judged as war shirkers. But their emigration began years earlier, and it was a departure in their friendship just as much as it was a departure from their native land:

  . . . I want to have this book start with our departure for America. But I have now realized that I can only put our departure in perspective if I begin with Germany—why I went there—“to find my sexual homeland”—and go on to tell about my wanderings with Heinz and his arrest and the complicated resentment which grew up out of it, against Kathleen and England, Kathleen as England. . . . I feel that it must start with my going to Berlin— not with my first trip out there to see Wystan, or with my visit to Wystan in the Harz Mountains that summer, but with my real emigration sometime later in the year. . . .30

  The book had to be a personal statement that he was a homosexual, and it had to show how this fact had shaped his life—how he had had to go abroad alone to Berlin to explore his sexuality freely, how once he had found a boy he loved, British immigration officials had denied the boy entry back into England and thereby forced Isherwood to go abroad to live with him until Hitler’s rise made even their itinerant life impossible. Reluctant as he was to join any group, Isherwood accepted gay liberation as his own cause. But he was slow to engage with it because he feared to attract attention to himself as a member of Swami Prabhavananda’s congregation. In the summer of 1970, he was invited to address the National Students Gay Liberation Conference, and he wrote in his diary:

  I feel quite strongly tempted to accept this invitation (as indeed I’ve often wanted in the past to accept others like it). I highly enjoy the role of “the rebels’ only uncle” (not that I would be, this time—for there are scores of others—and Ginsberg their chief ) and, all vanity aside, I do feel unreservedly with them, which is more than I can say for ninety percent of the movements I support. But something prevents me from accepting. Oddly enough, it all boils down to not embarrassing Swami by making a spectacle of myself which would shock his congregation and the women of Vedanta Place! I can admit this because I am perfectly certain there’s no other motive. I am far too sly and worldly-wise to suppose that I’d be injuring my own “reputation” by doing this. Quite the reverse; this is probably the last opportunity I’ll ever have of becoming, with very little effort, a “national celebrity.” And I hope I’m not such a crawling hypocrite as to pretend I wouldn’t quite enjoy that, even at my age!31

  For Swami, there was more at risk than awkward feelings. The Vedanta Society of Southern California was his life work; he was growing older, and it was unclear how the society would continue after he died. Nobody around him possessed his subtle understanding of how to make Vedanta accessible and plausible for Westerners. His separate insights about the personal character and temperament of each of his followers allowed him to recognize and love them as individuals; he applied no strict set of rules day to day, yet he never deviated from his own assured spiritual path. Many who tried to help him had far less patience and far less flexibility of mind. A few were against him. Some objected to the fact that he allowed the nuns to keep house alongside the monks in Hollywood. In India, women joined a separate order, the Sarada Math, but in Southern California, two institutions were implausible because the few hundred devotees were not enough to populate them. Vedanta took root in Southern California through the generosity of women, and there were generally more women than men in the congregation. Swami recognized that the order could not succeed in contemporary Californian culture unless it offered the same spiritual opportunities to women as to men. Only a few of his colleagues and superiors at Belur Math had been to the U.S., and most had not spent long there; they relied on his reports. But anything which might suggest to them that his style of leadership was giving rise to sexual impropriety threatened all that he had achieved. In 1970, Isherwood recorded:

  [Swami] says of Belur Math, “They are waiting for me to die”; in other words, they won’t send him an assistant because, after he is dead, they can send one who’ll do exactly what they want. And what do they want? Apparently to do away with nuns in the U.S. Swami takes all this quite calmly, seems to find it mildly amusing. But now he says he will seriously consider training some of the monks to give lectures. He remembers that Vivekananda said once that Vedanta societies should be run by Americans.32

  Five years later, Swami made clear to Isherwood that he was consciously holding on to life until someone he trusted was sent to replace him:

  . . . Swami had another spiritual experience. . .
.This time it was a vision during sleep. He was feeding Holy Mother and he began to weep. “I could have wept myself to death,” he said. “When the doctor examined me, he said ‘You have had a shock.’ It was like a heart attack. . . .When I wish to die, I can die. Whenever I wish. But I don’t want to die yet—not until this place is saved.”33

  His love of Swami and his respect for the circumstances in which Swami was performing his life’s mission had guided Isherwood when he decided not to write in Ramakrishna and His Disciples about Ramakrishna’s cross-dressing,34 an episode which fascinated and inspired him and which was easily misunderstood. And even after Swami’s death, when he used passages from his diary in My Guru and His Disciple, he altered details that might distress members of Swami’s congregation or expose the Hollywood Vedanta Society to criticism or misunderstanding at the Math. For example, his description of the 1963 departure of a group from Hollywood for the sannyas ceremony at the Math of two American monks, Prema and Krishna, and for the simultaneous centenary celebrations for Vivekananda, reads like this in his diary:

  It is no annihilating condemnation of the devotees—about fifty of whom had come to the airport to see us off—to say that they would have felt somehow fulfilled if our plane had burst into flames on take-off, before their eyes. They had built up such an emotional pressure that no other kind of orgasm could have quite relieved it. The parting was like a funeral which is so boring and hammy and dragged out that you are glad to be one of the corpses. Anything rather than have to go home with the other mourners afterwards!

  Swami wouldn’t leave until Franklin [Knight] arrived; he had to park the car which brought the boys from Trabuco. The fact that it was he who arrived last seemed to dramatize his role as The Guilty One, and his farewell from Swami was a sort of public act of forgiveness. He was terribly embarrassed, with all of us watching—especially all those [women] who knew what he did.

  So we got into the plane at last and it took off. Swami said, “To think that all this is Brahman and nobody realizes it!” I sat squeezed between him and Krishna; the Japan Air Line seats are as close together as ever. Despite my holy environment, I couldn’t help dwelling on the delicious doings on the couch, yesterday afternoon. I didn’t even feel ashamed that I was doing so. It was beautiful.35

  In My Guru and His Disciple, Isherwood condensed the passage for good literary reasons, but in dropping sentences which might have caused offence—Franklin Knight reportedly behaved inappropriately toward a woman outside the congregation—he also muted its vigor and its hyperbolic wit, losing the potent atmosphere and the comedy of the original. He even changed the sensual and sentimental convictions of the last three sentences into a relatively hollow pseudo-political statement:

  December 18–10. About fifty people came to the airport to see us off. The parting was like a funeral which is so boring and hammy that you are glad to be one of the corpses. Anything rather than have to go home with the other mourners afterwards!

  We got onto the plane at last and it took off. Swami said, “To think that all this is Brahman and nobody realizes it!” I sat squeezed between him and George; the Japan Air Lines seats are as tight-packed as ever. Despite my holy environment, I couldn’t help dwelling on yesterday afternoon’s delicious sex adventure. I even did so rather defiantly.36

  He made no such concessions in writing Christopher and His Kind; even though he wrote it half a decade earlier, he didn’t have to. He met Swami only in 1939, so he was free to be as candid as he liked about his life before that. And by the time he completed his final draft in May 1976, Swami Swahananda was already taking over from Prabhavananda at the Hollywood Vedanta Society. Prabhavananda died in July 1976, and Christopher and His Kind was published in the U.S. in November and the following March 1977 in the U.K. Swami was never to know that the book carried Isherwood into the heart of the gay political movement. The publicity was massive, both for and against it, the tours exhausting, and Isherwood’s sense of fulfillment very great. Just before Christmas 1976, Isherwood wrote:

  San Francisco was drastic and New York even more so. Both were reassuring, because I found I could hold my own in the rat race. Indeed, I often surprised myself and Don because I was so quick on the uptake during interviews. . . . But I couldn’t possibly have gotten through the New York trip without Don, who was sustaining me throughout. I have never known him to be more marvellous and angelic.

  Perhaps the most moving experience was going down to the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in the village and signing copies of my book, with a line of people, mostly quite young, stretching all the way down Christopher Street and around the corner. I had such a feeling that this is my tribe and I loved them.37

  Isherwood was a national celebrity after all, not as Herr Issyvoo, the narrative device distorted by Broadway and the movies into a popular bisexual mannequin, but in his own right, as the homosexual writer he had gradually brought into the open during his years in California. Even his rivalrous friend Gore Vidal acknowledged his fame, with the half-mocking line, “They’re beginning to believe that Christopher Street was named after you.”38

  Isherwood’s hard-won happiness with Bachardy was also celebrated, and it was to become a model of gay partnership among his ever expanding gay following—admired, envied, gossiped about, emulated. He went on reporting what he could about it in his diaries, and eventually Bachardy was to take over and continue the task, in his own diaries and above all in his paintings, producing perhaps his finest portraits ever during the last months of Isherwood’s life. When Isherwood was too ill to do anything else, he could still sit for Bachardy, and he wanted to. So Bachardy painted him every day, on what proved to be his deathbed. He collected many of the portraits in a book, Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood (1990), including nudes with their swags of given-out flesh and, over and over again, the haunted face of a creature stunned by the approach of the long-expected reality, the pain and darkness. The eyes question, even plead for mercy, but the spare, black acrylic lines—as if the brush itself were wearing mourning—are irrefutable. In late 1985, Bachardy began to notice that Isherwood seemed too ill to care about or comment on their shared project and he stopped showing him the daily results; whereupon Isherwood, with pictures drying on the floor around their bed on which he lay, said, “I like the ones of him dying.”39 Even after Isherwood died on January 4, 1986, Bachardy went on painting the beloved body, getting to grips with life and death, just as Isherwood had endeavoured to do through his relationship with Swami and in his diary through so many preceding years. Bachardy concludes in his introduction to the Last Drawings, “I was able to identify with him to such an extent that . . . [i]t began to seem as if dying was something which we were doing together.”40 Thus, the two longtime transgressors went together over the most awful threshold and made it into a work of art, illuminating their vigil, exposing every detail.

  Swami was an outpost of the Ramakrishna Order, working to fulfil the order’s mission in a foreign culture, and relying on intermittent communication with colleagues in India whose day-to-day experiences moved them each moment along a separate trajectory, further and further from mutual understanding. Isherwood understood this because he was in the same situation with old friends and colleagues in England, with whom the finer filaments of intellectual and emotional harmony had long been severed. Even with Auden, once his closest friend, there were huge gaps. Brooding on their lives after Auden’s death, he wrote:

  All yesterday and again this morning I have been looking through Wystan’s letters and manuscripts—that tiny writing which I find I can, almost incredibly, decipher. He is so much in my thoughts. I seem to see the whole of his life, and it is so honest, so full of love and so dedicated, all of a piece. What surprises me is the unhesitating way he declared, to the BBC interviewers, that he came to the U.S. not intending to return to England. Unless my memory deceives me altogether, he was very doubtful what he should do when the war broke out. He loved me very much and I behaved rather ba
dly to him, a lot of the time. Again and again, in the later letters, he begs me to come and spend some time alone with him. Why didn’t I? Because I was involved with some lover or film job or whatnot. Maybe this is why he said—perhaps with more bitterness than I realized—that he couldn’t understand my capacity for making friends with my inferiors!41

  Auden first decided to settle in New York when he and Isherwood visited there in July 1938, and he had told his brother as early as August 1938 that he intended to move to America permanently and to become a citizen.42 The outbreak of World War II tempted him to change his mind, but he did not.43 Isherwood judged both his and Auden’s youthful behavior strictly, and also their subsequent rationalizations about it. In one of his diary entries, he records a sudden insight about himself: that once he had settled in southern California, he had deliberately tried to cut off any possibility of returning to England by sending home an offensive letter which he knew would be made public:

  . . . the letter I wrote to Gerald Hamilton in 1939, attacking the war propaganda made by Erika and Klaus Mann and others, was really a device, to get myself regarded as an enemy in England and therefore make it impossible for me to “repent” and return. That was why I chose Gerald Hamilton to send my letter to—I knew he would broadcast it.44