Isherwood would never cease to be aware of the way in which all success, and indeed all art, excludes or marginalizes somebody. In a sense, his art tries to do the opposite, but whatever is brought to the fore must push something else aside. As a schoolboy he had written to his mother: “I have an essay on ‘omission is the Beginning of all Art’ which it may amuse you to see.”45 And as he explains at some length in Christopher and His Kind, much of the difficulty he had with his work, throughout his career, can be understood as his struggle with the question of how the artist decides what to leave out of his art. The subjects not chosen, the themes not addressed, haunt the imagination with the pain of their rejection; for the novelist who feels a strong loyalty to historical fact, the necessity to omit is like the burden of original sin, a crime of neglect which must precede the possibility of artistic creation.
Isherwood was fascinated throughout his life with marginal figures and with minorities. He himself was a member of what was for centuries one of the most oppressed and anonymous minorities in human society: during the first half of his life, the society which raised and educated him also told him that he was a criminal. Thus, he willingly and with eager curiosity associated with others who, for various reasons, were called criminals and were pushed like him to the margin of society. The shady figures of the Berlin demi-monde—Mr. Norris and the like—had once offered him fruitful ground for his art. But Isherwood was not prepared to live his whole life in the shadows. As a writer and a man he wished to move into the mainstream and forward into the future.
Looking back in the 1970s, recalling the struggle to focus his life and his artistic energies by cutting away the boring, the unglamorous, the unsuccessful, he still reflected upon what had been pushed aside. Gus Field, personifying as he did the guilt from which Isherwood wished to free himself, is a figure well suited to claim not only Isherwood’s but also the reader’s final attention in the reconstructed diary. With Isherwood’s mature success as a writer had come the confidence to unveil both those aspects of his character and his past actions of which society disapproved and also those aspects of his character and past actions of which he himself disapproved; they were not generally the same. By reconstructing them explicitly in Lost Years he was able to make some of the differences clear. In its portrayal of Isherwood’s sexuality, Lost Years is a boldly political book. Perhaps much more surprising, it is also implicitly and persistently moral, describing and judging—often with harsh self-criticism—even the minutiae of daily conduct, in order to try to redefine what is genuinely good and genuinely evil in human relationships.
* * *
1 He had lost his pocket diary for 1946, and he noted in his diary on September 2, 1971 that during the postwar period even his pocket diaries were not kept up every day.
2 All of these entries have already been published in Christopher Isherwood, Diaries Volume One 1939–1960 (D1), ed. Katherine Bucknell (London, 1996; New York, 1997). In the reconstructed diary, Isherwood usually calls these diaries “journals,” thereby distinguishing them from his day-to-day diaries.
3 Christopher Isherwood, Diaries 1960–1983 (unpublished), November 26, 1970.
4 D1, pp. 455–6.
5 Diaries 1960–1983, September 14, 1973.
6 Diaries 1960–1983, October 29, 1973.
7 Interview with W. I. Scobie and letter to Isherwood’s U.K. publisher (at Methuen) quoted in Brian Finney, Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography (London, 1979), p. 282.
8 “Sketch for a Marxist Interpretation of Literature,” The Mind in Chains: Socialism and the Cultural Revolution, ed. C. Day-Lewis (London, 1937), pp. 46–7.
9 P. 190.
10 Diaries 1960–1983, April 19, 1971.
11 “Sketch for a Marxist Interpretation of Literature,” pp. 51–2.
12 The World in the Evening (New York, 1954), p. 66; (London, 1954), p. 79.
13 Isherwood met Burns in 1947, and records in the reconstructed diary that he wished he had had time to know him better. End as a Man he called “an exciting discovery and the beginning of Christopher’s (more or less) constant enthusiasm for Willingham’s work” (p. 176, n.). Of Knock on Any Door he writes, “Christopher was much moved . . . when he read it; this was his idea of a sad story. He fell in love with the hero and wrote Willard Motley a fan letter” (p. 140, n.2). Motley’s hero, a heterosexual petty criminal who hustles as trade part time, personifies the absolute defiance of authority which so often captivated Isherwood in his real-life acquaintances.
14 P. 159, n. 1.
15 P. 54.
16 P. 235.
17 P. 182.
18 P. 53.
19 p. 182.
20 D1, pp. 389–94.
21 P. 198.
22 Christopher and His Kind (C&HK) (New York, 1976), p. 16; (London, 1977), p. 20.
23 C&HK, U.S., p. 17; U.K., p. 20.
24 Diaries 1960–1983, February 22, 1971.
25 Diaries 1960–1983, March 2, 1971.
26 Diaries 1960–1983, March 19, 1971.
27 p. 60, n.2.
28 Diaries 1960–1983, November 26, 1970.
29 August 17, 1949, D1, p. 414.
30 P. 200.
31 Diaries 1960–1983, November 2, 1973.
32 P. 55.
33 Diaries 1960–1983, November 26, 1970.
34 Written 1913–1914; revised 1959–1960.
35 Pp. 94–5.
36 P. 284.
37 P. 284.
38 C&HK, U.S., p. 21; U.K., p. 23.
39 P. 148.
40 D1, April 28, 1942, p. 220.
41 P. 286.
42 Diaries 1960–1983, March 28, 1974.
43 Diaries 1960–1983, September 11, 1974.
44 Diaries 1960–1983, January 2, 1977.
45 February 13, 1921, to Kathleen Isherwood, in Christopher Isherwood, The Repton Letters, ed. George Ramsden (Settrington, England, 1997), p. 14.
Lost Years
January 1, 1945–May 9, 1951
August 26, 1971.
I AM WRITING this to clarify my project to myself, not actually to begin work on it. Before I can do that I shall have to read through my day-to-day diaries for 1944 and 1945, to find out how much explanation is going to be needed before I can start the narrative itself.
This is the situation: I have day-to-day diaries (just saying what happened in a few words) from 1942 to the present day, except for the 1946 diary, which is lost. I also have journals which begin in 1939 and cover the same period.[1] All have time gaps in them. But the biggest gaps occur in one particular area—there are no entries whatever for 1945, 1946 or 1947 (though my life from September 20, 1947 to March 1948 is covered in The Condor and the Cows). The 1948 journal has rather less than twenty entries, 1949 around fifteen, 1950 about the same number, 1951 about twelve, 1952 about fourteen. (It’s interesting to notice what a small variation there is for these years—my journal keeping seems to follow a predictable wave-movement.) 1953 is perhaps the worst year of all, about eleven, and 1954 isn’t much better. Then the journal keeping picks up frequency and has remained fairly adequate ever since.
So this is my project: I am going to try to fill in these gaps from memory—up to the end of 1952 at least and maybe up to the end of 1954.
I shall write, to begin with, on the odd-numbered pages, leaving the even-numbered facing pages for after-thoughts and notes.
Because the “I” of this period is twenty years out of date, I shall write about him in the third person—working on Kathleen and Frank has shown me how this helps me to overcome my inhibitions, avoid self-excuses and regard my past behavior more objectively.
The last entry in the 1944 journal makes it fairly obvious that Christopher has already decided to leave Vedanta Place (on Ivar Avenue, as it then still was—the name was changed only after the freeway was built). Christopher doesn’t admit this, but he emphasizes the importance of japam,[2] rather than the importance of being with Swami,[3] or of having daily access to the shrine,
or of living in a religious community. You can make japam under any circumstances, no matter where or how you are living.
In the 1944 journal, Christopher says that he finished the revised draft of Prater Violet on October 15. In the 1944 day-to-day diary he says he finished revising Prater Violet on November 25—so this must have been a revision of the revised draft.4 Anyhow it must have been finished and sent off to the publishers before the end of that year.
In the journal, November 30, Christopher says, “The X. situation is beginning again.”
“X.” was Bill Harris.5 Denny Fouts[6] met him first. He had been in the army but only for a short while and was now going to college. The 1943 day-to-day diary, with the maddening vagueness common to all the early day-to-day diaries, records that, on August 21, Denny came down to Santa Monica to visit Christopher, who was staying for a few days at 206 Mabery Road, opposite the Viertels’ home, 165—accompanied by “little Bill” and “blond Bill.” I don’t remember who “little Bill” was. I am almost certain that “blond Bill” was Harris. His blond hair was then the most immediately striking feature of his beauty, especially when he had his clothes on and you couldn’t see his magnificent figure. Aside from this, Christopher used to be fond of describing his first glimpse of Bill Harris—how the erotic shock hit him “like an elephant gun” and made him “grunt” with desire, and how, at the same time, he felt angry with Denny for bringing this beautiful temptation into his life, to torment him.7 Christopher first saw Harris through the window of the bathroom of 206, just as Harris was arriving with Denny in the car. This in itself fixes the date if my memory is accurate, because Christopher never stayed in that house again.
However, Bill Harris has nothing to do with the sex adventure referred to in the 1943 journal as having taken place on August 24. Christopher had gone into the ocean and was swimming with his trunks off; he was wearing them around his neck, as he often did. A man came along the beach—which was almost deserted in those wartime days—saw him, took his own trunks off, came into the water and started groping Christopher. What made the situation “funny and silly” was that the man was deaf and dumb. They both laughed a lot. Christopher refused to have an orgasm but he had been excited, and he jacked off later, when he had returned to the house.
The other sexual encounters referred to in the 1943 journal were with a boy named Flint,8 whom Christopher met on the beach on September 20, and with Pete Martinez, a few days later.
It is odd that “X.” (Harris) isn’t referred to at all in the 1943 journal. It seems probable that Christopher saw very little of him after their first meeting on August 21. In the 1944 journal (March 13) Christopher writes, “A few days after this entry, I started to fall in love, with someone whom I’ll call X. . . .” etc. etc. The 1944 day-to-day diary doesn’t mention Bill Harris until April 5, when Christopher saw him in Santa Monica. (He had previously been living out at Pomona or someplace in that area; perhaps he had now moved to the beach.) After this, the day-to-day diary mentions him from time to time—not often, because Christopher was sick quite a bit and in bed. They had sex for the first time while they were both staying at Denny’s apartment, 137 Entrada Drive. They were alone together there from June 26 to 29. Denny had gone off to San Francisco telling Bill to paint the living room before he returned. (Denny always saw to it that his guests made themselves useful.)
In the 1944 journal, Christopher pays a tribute to Harris’s “decency and generosity.” Well he may—for he treated Harris not merely as a convenience but as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, which had to be overcome by temporarily yielding to it. “Let me go to bed with you so I can get tired of you” was basically his approach. Then, later, when Vernon [Old9] reappears on the scene, Harris gets told, in effect, that he, The Carnal Love, is to stand aside because The Spiritual Love is taking over. (Christopher was going to bed with The Spiritual Love too, however; and The Carnal Love was well aware of this!) Finally, when Christopher has first satisfied and then sublimated and then temporarily lost his lust for Vernon, he reopens his affair with Harris. This he ungraciously refers to as “the X. situation beginning again.” (There is a faint memory that the two of them had to stand very close together in a crowded trolley car going downtown, and that this was how it started.) What was Harris’s attitude to all of this? Just because he wasn’t emotionally involved, he probably found it easy to accept Christopher’s on-again, off-again, on-again behavior. Besides, he liked sex—the more of it the better—and must have found Christopher quite adequately attractive, as well as amusing to be with. If this relationship had been represented in a ballet, the dancer playing Christopher would be repeatedly changing costumes and masks and his movements would be artificial, inhibited and tense; the dancer playing Harris would be naked and usually motionless—the only sort of tension he would display would be an eager puzzled smile as he reacted to his partner’s contortions.
In the 1944 journal, Christopher writes, “I know quite well that I shouldn’t feel guilty if I were not living at Ivar Avenue. That being true, my guilt is worthless.” Nevertheless, Christopher certainly did feel guilty—or at least embarrassed—throughout the rest of his stay at the Vedanta Center. His position was false, and several people knew this—Denny, Bill Harris, the Beesleys, John van Druten, Carter Lodge, etc. The Beesleys probably found the inconsistency of his life as a demi-monk merely amusing and cute—it seemed “human”—it excused them from feeling awed and awkward in the presence of his faith. But for Christopher, their tolerance was humiliating.
Should he have left the center much sooner than he did? Looking back, I find that I can’t say yes. It now seems to me that Christopher’s embarrassment and guilt feelings were of little importance and his “spiritual struggles” trivial. What mattered was that he was getting exposure to Swami, that his relations with Swami continued to be (fairly) frank, and that he never ceased to be aware of Swami’s love. Every day that he spent at the center was a day gained. That he kept slipping away to see Bill Harris wasn’t really so dreadful. That he had lost face in the eyes of various outside observers was a good thing—or anyhow it was a hundred times better than if he had fooled everyone into thinking him a saint.
(Remembering Christopher’s position at that time makes me feel great sympathy and admiration for Franklin [Knight] at Trabuco nowadays and for Jimmie Barnett at the Hollywood monastery. Their position is, or has been, far more embarrassing and humiliating than Christopher’s ever was. And they haven’t run away from it.)
* * *
[1 Elsewhere, Isherwood also calls these journals “diaries,” and they are published under that title. Readers may find Isherwood’s references to them by date in his Diaries Volume One 1939–1960, ed. Katherine Bucknell (London: Methuen, 1996; New York: HarperCollins, 1997), cited hereafter as D1.]
2 In the 1944 journal, it says “the final polishing” of Prater Violet was finished on November 24.
3 Bill was the younger of two brothers—the sons of an engineer. Their father had worked in the USSR and had had to leave with his family at a few hours’ notice—the Russians accused the American and British engineers of trying to sabotage a dam which they had been hired to construct. Later, they moved to Australia, where Bill and his brother became expert swimmers. Bill’s brother was very attractive, an all-round athlete and a war hero in the U.S. Air Force. Bill was the ugly brother (so he said); homely and fat up to the age of fifteen. Then he made a “decision” to be beautiful. After the war, his brother married and became fat and prematurely middle-aged.
Bill was well aware of being feminine—his resemblance to Marlene Dietrich was often remarked on—but he refused to get himself exempted from military service by declaring that he was homosexual. He wanted to be a model soldier. He worked very hard to keep his equipment clean. Then, after he’d been in the service for a week or two, he was bawled out at an inspection, and this discouraged him so much, after all his good intentions, that he burst into tears. The inspecting officer, amazed at suc
h sensitivity, sent him to the psychiatrist, which resulted in his getting an honorable discharge!
[4 Repeating a sacred Hindu word; Isherwood used a rosary. For this and all Hindu terms, see Glossary.]
[5 Isherwood’s religious teacher under whose guidance he had been living at the Vedanta Center and training as a monk. See glossary under Prabhavananda.]
[6 A close friend since 1940; for Fouts and for others not fully introduced by Isherwood see Glossary.]
7 Christopher even accused Denny of deliberately trying to seduce him from his vocation by introducing him to Harris. According to Christopher, Denny didn’t want Christopher to become a monk because it made him, Denny, feel guilty.
8 [Not his real name.] Flint tried to do a blowjob under water and was quite indignant when he began to drown. He seemed to blame the Pacific Ocean, assuring Christopher with apparent seriousness that you could blow someone beneath the surface of the Atlantic while drawing air into your mouth through his cock!