On New Year’s Eve, Christopher and Caskey gave a party. This isn’t recorded in the day-to-day diary, and I don’t remember who was invited—only that, while Caskey made preparations, Christopher sat compulsively skimming through the last pages of The Past Recaptured because he had vowed to finish Proust before the end of 1945.53
* * *
1 My original Paul character had nothing to do with Denny—indeed I thought of him long before Denny and I met. So what I have written [above] is misleadingly phrased. I never, as far as I remember, planned to put Denny into the Greek island story. On the contrary, I cut Paul out of it and used his name for a portrait of Denny in Paul. (An unfinished novel featuring the original Paul character is described in Christopher and His Kind, chapter eleven.)
[2 In Down There on a Visit (1962).]
3 I have a vivid mental picture of Asit saying goodbye to Swami, after coming out of the temple where they had prostrated before the shrine. Right then, in full view of the street, Asit bowed down and took the dust of Swami’s feet. It is my impression that I had never before seen anyone do this. Pranams weren’t part of life at the center in those days. What makes the picture more exotic is that Asit is in U.S. Army uniform—which seems most improbable, if he had already left the army!
(Note, made June 16, 1977: As I have just discovered from rereading the journal, my memory referred to September 18, 1944, the day Asit was inducted into the army, not the day he was discharged from it. If he hadn’t yet been inducted, would he have been wearing uniform? Surely not.)
[4 I.e., the Bhagavad Gita, which Isherwood and Prabhavananda had translated; see Glossary under Prabhavananda.]
[5 I.e., Vivekananda’s; see Glossary.]
[6 An American disciple of Vivekananda; see Glossary.]
[7 A disciple of Prabhavananda; see Glossary.]
[8 The article by staff correspondent James Felton appeared on February 12, 1945; see p. 22 and n. below.]
9 See chapter six, part two.
[10 Not his real name.]
[11 Not his real name.]
12 When Christopher later told John van Druten and Carter Lodge about his lovemaking with Bill at the Beesleys’, Carter professed to be shocked. He said something to the effect that it was “turning your friends’ home into a whorehouse” to do such a thing. Coming from Carter, this seemed a most mysterious piece of hypocrisy, since Carter himself had taken a shower at the Beesleys’ with Christopher, only recently, after swimming in their pool, and they had played around together—as they often did when they happened to be alone. Their relationship was intimate but casual—they had been going to bed together at long intervals ever since they first met in 1939. John knew about this—Christopher had told him—and he didn’t mind at all.
Why did Carter say he was shocked? Perhaps he resented the fact that the Beesleys would never have invited him to behave as Christopher behaved. He probably felt (and with good reason) that they didn’t really treat him as a friend—only as John’s friend.
13 In Santa Monica, he sometimes cycled with Denny. Denny had begun to compose a cycling song with Christopher, to the tune of “Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes,” but they had got no further than the first couplet: “Just a pair of cycling queens / No longer in their teens . . .”
14 I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but the story went around that Stef, with his Germanic thoroughness, decided to find out what homosexual sex was like. So he went to bed with one of his friends. It didn’t convert him, but he is supposed to have remarked later that the experience was “extremely pleasant”—or, more likely, “wirklich ganz angenehm [really quite agreeable].” (Stef sometimes made you think that Thomas Mann should have been his father, rather than Brecht; he had the sort of urbanity that goes with pince-nez. And yet he was really sexy, in an odd way. I think most of us would have liked to go to bed with him.)
15 The Information Please Almanac says that Roddy was born in September 1928—in which case he would have been only sixteen at this time. Since writing the above, I have been reliably informed that Roddy was eighteen when he had the affair with Tom—which means that it can’t have happened until the fall of the following year. I still trust my memory as far as Tom’s statement is concerned, but no doubt he was bragging a little to impress Denny, that tireless chicken hawk. Tom would want to make Roddy seem as young and as wild as possible, because that would make him more desirable in Denny’s eyes.
16 The day-to-day diary entry of February 24, 1945, refers to “the twins”; these were probably Jeff and Curly.
[17 Not his real name.]
[18 Not his real name.]
[19 Not his real name.]
20 May 14, 1973. An explanation has just occurred to me. It sounds ridiculous, but then psychological insights often do, according to the psychologists. (I realize it’s possible that I got this out of one of their books and have chosen to forget that I did.)
Is The Blond maybe an archetype peculiar to the British Collective Unconscious? (I’m not using “archetype” in its strict Jungian sense, of course, because the Jungian archetype “can . . . manifest itself [spontaneously] anywhere, at any time.” [“A Psychological View of Conscience,” Civilization in Transition, Collected Works, volume 10.] But it’s the most descriptive word I can think of.) The Blond, in relation to a primitive Briton, would be the blond Norseman or Saxon invader of his homeland. The Blond conquers, plunders, rapes. He is the masculine yang to Britain’s feminine yin. As an individual Briton, you are free to deny that you are feminine, to fight him and get killed—but that’s your own affair. The Blond is unalterably yang. As for Christopher, he was quite ready to be yin.
So much for the archetype theory. It may account for Christopher’s feelings about blonds as a group. But the fact remains that many of the blonds in Christopher’s life were definitely un-yang—pretty, feminine boys who wanted to be fucked. This compels me to theorize further: maybe Christopher unconsciously took over the role of Invader when he went to live in Germany and later in the States? He couldn’t become The Blond (though he did, occasionally, dip his forelock in the peroxide bottle) but, as The Invader, he could fuck yin boys even if they happened to be blonds. If the blond boy was yang, Christopher merely had to stop being an invader and think of himself as a yin Briton!
Still, I can’t believe that Christopher literally thought of himself as an invader—that is such a Jewish fantasy. Certainly, he wanted to “possess” Germany and the United States; not by conquering them, however, but by exploring them and learning to love them. He tried to do this by looking for an ideal German and later an ideal American Boy, through whom he could explore and love these countries.
[21 Stimulated the anus with the tongue.]
22 John Collier was an ardent Proustian.
23 Extracts from the Time article:
Ten years ago Christopher Isherwood was one of the most promising of younger English novelists, and a member of the radical pacifist literary set sometimes known as “the Auden circle.” Now, thinking seriously of becoming a swami (religious teacher), he is studying in a Hindu temple in Hollywood, California.
Much-travelled author Isherwood’s early novel, The Last of Mr. Norris . . . was a grisly eyewitness account of British pro–Nazis in Berlin. His Journey to a War (with verse commentary by W. H. Auden) was a stark, unromanticized look at embattled China. Now this rebellious son of a British lieutenant colonel lives monastically with three other men and eight women in a small house adjoining the alabaster temple of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. He shares his income and the housework with his fellow students, and daily ponders the teachings of his master, Swami Prabhavananda.
. . . Three times each day Isherwood repairs to the temple, sits crosslegged between grey-green walls on which are hung pictures of Krishna, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, other great religious teachers. The Swami enters bareheaded, wearing a long, bright yellow robe that sweeps the floor. He too sits crosslegged, pulls a shawl around him and for ten
minutes meditates in silence. Then in a ringing bass he chants a Sanskrit invocation, repeats it in English, ending with the words “Peace, Peace, Peace!”
This dispassionate ceremony is the ritual of a mystical order of which slight, agreeable, cigarette-smoking Swami Prabhavananda is the Los Angeles leader.
. . . Larry, the dissatisfied young hero of Somerset Maugham’s current bestselling novel, The Razor’s Edge, whose search for faith ended in Vedanta, is said to be modelled on Isherwood.
24 I see from the day-to-day diary that Christopher was earning six hundred dollars a week.
25 Sam and Eddie From were twins, but they didn’t look much alike, because Eddie had kept a huge Jewish nose and Sam had had his bobbed. Both of them were little and skinny and lively. Christopher had met Eddie first, I think, sometime in 1944.
Sam was in business and had made a lot of money. Eddie was inclined to sneer at him for this. Eddie’s role was that of the outspoken brother who preferred poverty to selling out; later he became an amateur psychiatrist. (For all I know, he now has a degree.)
Sam and Eddie had friends in common—Charles Aufderheide, who worked at Technicolor, and Sam’s lover, George [Bill], and Evelyn Hooker, and an older woman called Fauna(?) [probably Fern Maher], and David Sachs, the baby-faced professor of philosophy. They sometimes called themselves The Benton Way Group, because Sam owned a house there in which most of them lived, on and off.
26 His view of England and English politics was thoroughly realistic, however. After the English elections of July 1945, he won hundreds of dollars because he had bet that Labour would get in. His American colleagues were all so sentimental about Churchill that they refused to believe he could lose. Christopher also refused to believe it but for a different reason—he wanted Churchill’s defeat so badly that he didn’t dare think it was possible.
27 Another favorite subject of their conversation was the German language. Collier, being a Francophile, found the sound of German funny. Christopher humored him in this, and read him German aloud, making it sound as absurd as he could. Collier laughed till the tears poured down his scarlet face when Christopher read lines from Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz, which were meant to be funny, or from Liliencron’s poems, which weren’t. Collier adored Busch’s use of ejaculations and onomatopoeic words—such as “Schnupdiwup!” “Knacks!” “Plumps!” “Rums!” “Schwapp!” [“Whoops!” “Crack!” “Splosh!” “Bang!” “Whoosh!”] But he was just as much amused by Liliencron’s perfectly serious line: “Zum schlanken Fant in blauen Puffenwams.” [“To the slender coxcomb in the blue puffed doublet,” in “Una ex hisce morieris” (“One of You Here Will Die”).] “Puffenwams” became his favorite joke word.
28 Aldous Huxley (see Letters of Aldous Huxley) wrote to Anita Loos on October 13, 1945: “Matthew was fortunately absent when the violence broke out on the picket line, but he got arrested and spent some hours in jail on the following day. He is going north to Berkeley in another week or so, to take some courses at the U. of C. . . . The reading job is a dead end . . .” Matthew may not have been involved in the worst violence, but I remember a newspaper photograph of him, dodging a car which was being driven to break through the picket line. Matthew had narrowly escaped being hit and was curving his body over the car’s fender with considerable grace, like a bullfighter. I am also pretty sure that Aldous himself came to the studio one day and walked with the pickets, as a gesture of solidarity.
[29 A mistake; Earl McGrath is the name of a different person, who was living in Santa Monica during the early 1950s. See D1, p. 454.]
30 Bill Caskey.
31 Don Coombs, see here.
[32 Writer and producer William Jacobs.]
33 Arensberg believed that Bacon had been secretly buried in the chapter house of Lichfield Cathedral. In 1924 he had published an appeal to the dean and chapter of the cathedral to admit publicly that this was so and that they were all of them members of a secret society founded by Bacon himself. Arensberg had visited Lichfield in 1923. His suspicions were confirmed when the verger showed him a picture in Ogilby’s translation of Virgil, with the remark, “Curious, isn’t it?” For the picture—which showed Aeneas plucking the golden bough that gave him the right of way into the abode of the dead—was marked with the Rosicrucian motto “Ex Uno Omnia” [All from One]. And Arensberg recognized “Omnia” as an anagram of the Spanish word iamon, which means “a gammon of bacon.” [Correct Spanish would be jamón.] However, in spite of the verger’s apparent hint and other clues that Arensberg imagined he had found, he was unable to get the dean (the Very Reverend H. E. Savage) to admit that their secret society had been covering up the facts. He even accused the dean of obliterating certain signs by which the location of Bacon’s grave had been formerly marked. His statement ends: “I have put the truth on record and the truth will make its way.” (Arensberg took it for granted, of course, that the grave, if opened, would be found to contain proofs of Bacon’s divine nature, his authorship of Shakespeare, etc.)
The dean obviously thought Arensberg was crazy. I’m fairly sure Arensberg showed Christopher a letter which the dean had written him, breaking off all further communications—“After the events of last Thursday, there can be no friendly relations between us.” In telling the story, Christopher used to claim that Arensberg had been caught in the act of digging a tunnel under the road between his lodgings and the chapter house; he was trying to get at Bacon’s grave. But this was probably just Christopher’s imagination.
34 Devotion was a film about the Brontës, with Ida Lupino as Emily and Arthur Kennedy as Branwell. Christopher was able to see it in the projection room because he was friendly with Keith Winter, who had worked on the script.
35 It may well be that Huxley made some memorable remarks on this historic evening. Perhaps he repeated what he had written to Julian Huxley earlier that same day (see Letters of Aldous Huxley): “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again—and when they [have] succeeded, more or less, his name will be Humpsky Dumpsky and his address, poste restante Moscow.”
36 It was released in 1946, with Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains. Collier got first credit, with Joseph Than. Produced by Henry Blanke, directed by Irving Rapper.
[37 Hypocrite.]
[38 Not his real name.]
39 Moor Born is a play by Dan Totheroh, first performed in New York in 1934. It must have remained a favorite piece for amateur actors all these years, for when I asked about it at the Samuel French library today (January 13, 1972) they recognized the name at once and produced a copy.
BRANWELL: I didn’t want to go to my grave unsung . . . obscure . . . a nobody. . . . It’s too late now . . . too late for me.
EMILY: Perhaps not too late. Strange things can happen to you, for you are moor born, Branwell. Yes . . . moor born . . . and what the moors took from you, they may return.
40 The Woman in White was finally made and released in 1948, with Henry Blanke credited as its producer. Stephen Morehouse Avery got sole credit as its writer.
41 Wolfgang wanted to stick close to the Maugham story. His chief deviation from it was to have Rowley plant some clues around the corpse so that the Italian police are tricked into thinking that Karl (called Paul in the script) has been killed by the Gestapo, which makes them hastily drop the case and announce that death was due to heart attack. This was Wolfgang’s idea and I think it works very well—culminating in a good cross-purpose comedy scene between the Italian chief of police and the German consul, in which they both deplore the carelessness of the Gestapo’s murder methods.
The code prevented Wolfgang and Christopher from making it clear that Mary and Paul actually have sex together before he shoots himself Rereading the script today, I can’t be sure just how much of a disadvantage this would have been, if the film had been made. (It never was.) The scene as Maugham wrote it is more convincing, but not entirely so. It might have got some wrong laughs. And Maugham’s dial
ogue is hardly to be believed—he makes Karl say things like, “You have shown me heaven and now you want to thrust me back to earth”!
Christopher once summarized the plot to Collier as, “Humped, bumped, and dumped”—referring to the fate of the Karl—Paul character.)
[42 Not his real name.]
43 According to Garson Kanin (Remembering Mr. Maugham), Willie didn’t begin work on his screenplay until November. Kanin says that Willie asked Cukor to show him the existing screenplay and was so horrified by it that he offered to write one himself, for free. I am almost sure Kanin is wrong about the date, however.
(June 24, 1977: Kanin was wrong. I have just seen the revised final draft of Maugham’s Razor’s Edge screenplay. It is dated July 25, 1945.)
44 When Maugham was about to publish The Razor’s Edge, in 1944, he had written to Swami for an exact translation of the verse from the Katha Upanishad on which the title of the novel is based. Swami (or maybe Christopher) had replied, explaining carefully that the image of a razor’s edge is used to suggest a narrow and painful path (the path to enlightenment) and that therefore one should not say, “It is difficult to cross,” as some translators do, but rather, “It is difficult to tread.” Maugham ignored this piece of advice, however. The translation he used in his novel was, “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over,” which is almost as ambiguous as “to cross.”
I don’t remember that I ever saw a copy of Willie’s screenplay. It was never used. Cukor left the picture and it was finally directed by Edmund Goulding, with a new script (or perhaps a revised version of the original one) by Lamar Trotti. Christopher, at Swami’s suggestion, wrote to Trotti, offering free technical advice on the Indian sequence. Trotti never answered. And when the picture was made the Indian scenes had several mistakes in them. Shri Ganesha’s teaching was idiotically distorted.