Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

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, she 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 her with Stravinsky in August 1949. She painted in an abstract-primitive style influenced by Paul Klee, childlike and decorative. She appears throughout D.1, D.2, and in Lost Years.

  Stromberg, Hunt, Jr. (1923–1985). American T.V. executive; son of Hunt Stromberg (1894–1968), who was one of MGM’s most profitable and powerful film producers from the mid-1920s until he retired in 1951. Stromberg Jr. began his career as a theater producer and moved to T.V. early in the 1950s. He worked with James Aubrey at CBS on the original idea for the series “Have Gun, Will Travel” (1956) and during the 1960s, he supervised “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Green Acres,” and “Lost in Space.” He was fired from CBS at the time of Aubrey’s downfall in 1965 and for a time ran a production partnership with Aubrey until Aubrey took over MGM Studios in 1969. Later, Stromberg worked at Universal Studios. He produced “Frankenstein: The True Story” (1973), written by Isherwood and Bachardy and “The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb” (1980) adapted by Herb Meadow from Barry Wynne’s book. He appears in D.2.

  Sudhira. A nurse of Irish descent, born Helen Kennedy; she was a probationer nun at the Hollywood Vedanta Society when Isherwood arrived to live there in 1943. 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 Society professionally to nurse a devotee. She enlisted in the navy in January 1945 and later married for a second time and returned to nursing. She appears in D.1 and Lost Years, and she is mentioned in D.2.

  Summers, Claude. American academic with a doctorate from the University of Chicago. As Isherwood records, he lectured on A Single Man in 1976; he went on to write a book-length critical study, Christopher Isherwood (1980). He also published books and articles on seventeenth- and twentieth-century literature and textual studies and also on gay and lesbian themes, including a critique of E.M. Forster, Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall (1990), and gay and lesbian encyclopedias, surveys, and collections. He is William E. Stirton Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. His companion and frequent co-author is Ted-Larry Pebworth, also a Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Pebworth got his Ph.D. at Louisiana State University, is a scholar of English Renaissance literature, on which he has published widely, and is an editor and a member of the advisory board for The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne.

  Swahananda, Swami. Monk of the Ramakrishna Order, from India; born near Habiganj, now in Bangladesh, and educated at Murari Chand College, Sylhet, and at the University of Calcutta where he got an M.A. in English. He was initiated in 1937 by Swami Vijnananda, a direct disciple of Ramakrishna, joined the order in 1947 and took his final vows in 1956. He was head of the Delhi Ramakrishna Mission, and then in 1968 was sent to the San Francisco center as assistant to Swami Ashokananda. Later, he became head of the Berkeley center, and in 1976, he was moved to Hollywood to replace the late Swami Prabhavananda. As a young monk, he edited Vedanta Kesari, a scholarly publication of the Ramakrishna Order, and he went on to publish numerous articles and books of his own. He appears in D.2.

  Swami. Used as a title to mean “Lord” or “Master.” A Hindu monk who has taken sannyas, the final vows of renunciation in the Hindu tradition. Isherwood used it in particular to refer to his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, and he pronounced it Shwami; see Prabhavananda.

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

  Sweet, Paula. American painter, from Carmel, New York, trained at Syracuse and at the Sir John Cass College of Art in London. She is also a sculptor and a jewelry and clothing designer.

  Szczesny, Berthhold. 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, with whom he had two sons. He is mentioned in D.1 and Lost Years. One of his sons, Juan Szczesny, is mentioned in this diary; he sat for Bachardy, May 10, 1980.

  Tadatmananda. See Markovich, John.

  tamas. See guna.

  Ted. See Bachardy, Ted.

  Tennant, Stephen (1906–1987). British poet, aesthete, eccentric; youngest son of Lord Glenconner, a Scottish peer, and Pamela Wyndham, a cousin of Oscar Wilde’s paramour, Lord Alfred Douglas. He studied painting at the Slade and worked for decades on a novel which he never completed. He was known for his extravagantly camp dress and manners, his interior decorating, and spending the last seventeen years of his life mostly in bed. He was an intimate friend of Cecil Beaton and was photographed by him several times, and he had a long affair with Siegfried Sassoon. He is said to be a model for Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and for Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate. He is mentioned in D.2.

  Tennessee. See Williams, Tennessee.

  Thakur. Literally master or lord; a familiar name for Ramakrishna among his devotees. See also Ramakrishna.

  Thompson, Nicholas. American theatrical agent, based in London. He was introduced to Isherwood and Bachardy by Robin French and became the London agent for A Meeting by the River. He appears in D.2.

  Thomson, Virgil (1896–1989). American composer, music critic, author; born in Kansas and educated at Harvard. During the 1920s, he lived off and on in Paris, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger and met the young French composers, including Poulenc and Auric, who were known as “Les Six” and who were, like him, influenced by Satie. He became friendly with Gertrude Stein, who supplied libretti for his operas Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947). In 1940, he returned permanently to New York. He was the music critic for the Herald Tribune for a decade and a half, published eight books on music, including American Music Since 1910 (1971), and composed prolifically. His third and last opera, Lord Byron, on a libretto by Jack Larson, was planned for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but instead premiered at the Juilliard Opera Center in April 1972. His film scores include The Plough That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938), both directed by Pare Lorentz, and Louisiana Story (1948), directed by Robert Flaherty. His companion for many years was Maurice Grosser. He appears in D.2.

  Tony. See Richardson, Tony.

  Trabuco. Monastic community sixty miles south of Los Angeles and about twenty miles inland; founded by Gerald Heard in 1942. Heard anonymously provided $100,000 for the project (his life savings), and he 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 he renamed the community after buying the ranch at Trabuco. Isherwood’s cousin on his mother’s side, Felix Greene, oversaw the purchase of the property and the construction of the building, which could house fifty. By 1949 Heard found leading and administering the group too much of a strain, and he persuaded the Trustees to give Trabuco to the Vedanta Society. It opened as a Vedanta monastery in September 1949.

  Turner, Charles. African-American actor and director, trained at Yale School of Drama, whic
h is among the several places he has also taught. He has performed on and off Broadway and in T.V. and films.

  Turville-Petre, Francis (1904–1941). English archaeologist, from an aristocratic Catholic family. Isherwood met the eccentric Turville-Petre through 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 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.

  Tynan, Kathleen. See entry for Tynan, Kenneth.

  Tynan, Tracy. See entry for Tynan, Kenneth.

  Tynan, Kenneth (Ken) (1927–1980). English theater critic, educated at Oxford. During the 1950s and 1960s, he wrote regularly for the London Evening Standard, then for The Observer, The New Yorker, and other publications. He was literary adviser to the National Theatre 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!, which opened in New York in 1969 and in London in 1970. His first wife, from 1951, was the actress and writer Elaine Dundy, with whom he had a daughter, Tracy Tynan, later a costume designer for films. In 1963, he began an affair with the newly married Kathleen Halton Gates (1937–1995), a Canadian journalist and, later, novelist and screenwriter, raised in England; they married in 1967 and settled for a time in the U.S. with their children, Roxana and Matthew. Isherwood first met Ken and Elaine Tynan in London in 1956, and they are mentioned in D.1 and D.2.

  UCLA. University of California at Los Angeles.

  Unger, Ray (d. 2006). American artist and astrologer. He was the companion of Jack Fontan for fifty-three years, and, like Fontan, was known for his beauty. For some years, they managed a gym together in Laguna Beach, the Laguna Health Club. Unger was well read, well informed, talented and intelligent, without ambition for public recognition. He was an especially close friend to Bachardy.

  Upward, Edward (1903–2009). English novelist and schoolmaster. Isherwood first met him in 1921 at their public school, Repton, and followed him (Upward was a year older) to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Their close friendship was inspired by their shared attitude of rebellion toward family and school authority and by their literary obsessions. In the 1920s they created the fantasy world Mortmere, about which they wrote surreal, macabre, and pornographic stories and poems for each other; their excited schoolboy humor is described in Lions and Shadows where Upward appears as “Allen Chalmers.” Upward made his reputation in the 1930s with his short fiction, especially Journey to the Border (1938), the intense, almost mystical, and largely autobiographical account of a young upper-middle-class tutor’s conversion to communism. Then he published nothing for a long time while he devoted himself to schoolmastering (he needed the money) and to Communist party work. From 1931 to 1961 he taught at Alleyn’s School, Dulwich, where he became head of English and a housemaster; he lived nearby with his wife, Hilda, and their two children, Kathy and Christopher. After World War II, Upward and his wife became disillusioned by the British Communist party and left it, but Upward never abandoned his Marxist-Leninist convictions. Towards the end of the 1950s, he overcame writer’s block and a nervous breakdown to produce a massive autobiographical trilogy, The Spiral Ascent (1977)—comprised of In the Thirties (1962), The Rotten Elements (1969), and No Home But the Struggle. The last two volumes were written in Sandown, on the Isle of Wight, where Upward retired in 1962. They were followed by four collections of short stories. Upward remained a challenging and trusted critic of Isherwood’s work throughout Isherwood’s life, and a loyal friend. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.

  Urquhart-Laird, Tommy (b. 1943). Secretary and lover to John Lehmann during the 1970s. He arrived in London from Scotland in 1961 hoping to become an actor. Instead, he did odd jobs, including working as a builder, until he met Lehmann in 1972 and moved into his flat in Cornwall Gardens. He remained there until 1978 when the arrangement collapsed because of Urquhart-Laird’s drinking.

  Usha. A nun at the Vedanta Society and later at the convent in Santa Barbara; originally called Ursula Bond and, after sannyas, Pravrajika Anandaprana, which was sometimes shortened to Ananda. She was a German Jew, educated in England, and came to the U.S. as a young refugee during the war. Until the war ended, she worked for the U.S. government as a censor. She had been married before taking up Vedanta, and she had a daughter, Caroline Bond; she left three-year-old Caroline with the child’s father, but Caroline later joined the Hollywood convent where she was known as Sumitra, took brahmacharya vows, and remained for about ten years before leaving to join an ashram that emphasized Sanskrit and scriptural study. Later, Sumitra did graduate work in Sanskrit and became a free-lance editor. Anandaprana appears, as Usha, in D.1 and D.2.

  Vaccaro, Brenda (b. 1939). American stage, screen, and T.V. actress; born in Brooklyn, raised in Dallas, trained at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse. She began her career on Broadway, where she appeared in Cactus Flower (1965), How Now, Dow Jones (1967), and The Goodbye People (1968). Her films include Midnight Cowboy (1969), Once is Not Enough (1975; Academy Award nomination), Ten Little Indians (1990), and The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996).

  Valen, Mark. A local friend introduced to Isherwood and Bachardy by Rick Sandford; he grew up in Los Angeles and worked for the Landmark Theater chain, beginning as a ticket taker and eventually selecting and programming their films all over the country. He sat for Bachardy many times.

  Vandanananda, Swami (1915–2007). Hindu monk of the Ramakrishna Order. He arrived at the Hollywood Vedanta Society from India in the summer of 1955 and eventually became chief assistant, replacing Swami Asheshananda. In 1969 he returned to India, was head of the Delhi Center, and later, at Belur Math, became Assistant Secretary of the order, and then General Secretary. He appears in D.1 and D.2.

  van Druten, John (1901–1957). English playwright and novelist. Isherwood met him in New York in 1939, and they became friends because they were both pacifists. Van Druten’s family was Dutch, but he was born and educated in London and took a degree in law at the University of London. He achieved his first success as a playwright in New York during the 1920s, then emigrated in 1938 and became a U.S. citizen in 1944. His strength was light comedy; among his numerous plays and adaptations, many of which were later filmed, were Voice of the Turtle (1943), I Remember Mama (1944), Bell, Book, and Candle (1950), and I Am a Camera (1951), based on Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Van Druten acquired a sixty percent share in material that he used in I Am a Camera from Goodbye to Berlin; Isherwood retained a forty percent share. Anyone acquiring rights after van Druten needed his agreement or, after his death, the agreement of his estate. In 1951, van Druten directed The King and I on Broadway. He also wrote a few novels and two volumes of autobiography, including The Widening Circle (1957). He usually spent half the year in New York and half near Los Angeles on the AJC Ranch, which he owned with Carter Lodge. He also owned a mountain cabin above Idyllwild which Isherwood sometimes used. A fall from a horse in Mexico in 1936 left him with a permanently crippled arm; partly as a result of this, he became attracted to Vedanta and other religions (he was a renegade Christian Scientist), and in his second autobiography he describes a minor mystical experience which he had in a drug store in Beverly Hills. He was a contributor to Isherwood’s Vedanta for the Western World, and there are numerous accounts of him in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.

  Vanessa. See Redgrave, Vanessa.

  Van Horn, Mike. American artis
t and fashion illustrator, especially for Lord & Taylor. A close friend of Bachardy. In the early 1970s, he left Los Angeles for New York State where he renovates country properties. He appears in D.2.

  Van Petten, William (Bill) (d. mid-1980s). Local reporter, for The Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. He grew up in La Jolla and in 1965 introduced Tom Wolfe to the beach scene there, which Wolfe wrote about in The Pump House Gang. He was also an early source of stories, later corroborated, that Richard Nixon was a belligerent drunk and beat his wife. He lived at the bottom of Santa Monica Canyon in an apartment once inhabited by Jim Charlton. He had a small independent income and often travelled abroad, especially to the Middle East. He had radiation treatment for cancer during the 1960s, and the treatment damaged his face and eyes. He appears in D.2.

  Van Sant, Tom (b. 1931). Californian sculptor, painter, conceptual artist, and kite maker; he produced the first satellite map of earth, the Geosphere Image, and founded the Geosphere Project to model issues of earth resource management. He appears in D.2.

  Vaughan, Keith (1912–1977). English painter, illustrator, and diarist. He worked in advertising during the 1930s and was a conscientious objector in the war; later he taught at the Camberwell School of Art, the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and the Slade, as well as briefly in America. Isherwood met him in 1947 at John Lehmann’s and bought one of his pictures, Two Bathers, a small oil painting, still in his collection. Vaughan’s diaries, with his own illustrations, were published in 1966. He appears in D.1, D.2, and Lost Years.

  Vedanta Place. The Vedanta Society of Southern California was able to adopt the address Vedanta Place when, in 1952, the Hollywood Freeway cut off the tail end of Ivar Avenue where the society was located, leaving it in a cul-de-sac. The property, previously 1946 Ivar Avenue, had been the home of Carrie Mead Wyckoff, later known as Sister Lalita. As Isherwood tells in D.1, he lived at the Hollywood society as a novice monk during World War II.