Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir (12 page)

John Lehmann with his two sisters, Beatrix, the actress, and Rosamond the novelist, photographed in August 1953.

Christopher and Don Bachardy in June 1972.

A lithograph of Christopher and Don Bachardy done in 1976 by David Hockney.

      

C
hristopher’s plan to devote the next few months to preparing the ground for his new novel was postponed by a fresh project. He had been offered a contract to write a travel book by both Methuen in London and Random House in New York, and he and Bill Caskey set out for their six months’ wandering in South America on 19 September 1947. He must have written to me a number of letters from various points of stay, but they have mysteriously all disappeared, except for a few postcards. In Buenos Aires he met the famous editor of the literary magazine
Sur,
Victoria Ocampo, who had already been in correspondence with
New Writing
for several years; and also, to his surprise, the original ‘German Boy’ of his first adventures in Berlin, Berthold or Bubi, as he then called him. Bubi, now prosperous after many setbacks, was delighted to see Christopher, and proudly showed him a row of his books on the shelves of his living-room - though he couldn’t yet read English.

On their way back they spent several days in Paris, where they chanced to meet Wystan and Chester on their way to Ischia, and made a new friend: Gore Vidal, who was a tremendous 
admirer of Christopher, and who knew that he had thought very highly of his homosexual novel,
The City and the Pillar
(which I had published in England, not without difficulty). They remained very good friends to the end, and Christopher dedicated
A Single Man
to him. They also paid a sad, farewell visit to Denny Fouts, who was seriously ill from drug excesses in Peter Watson’s flat. He died the following year in Rome.

Christopher and Bill spent the latter part of June and early July 1948 in London, and while they were there a new offer of film work arrived from MGM. The job was to revise a script based on Dostoevsky’s
The Gambler
which had already been worked on by Ladislas Fodor. Christopher found the work difficult, as his own ideas did not blend easily with Fodor’s. He wrote to me from his new address in Santa Monica, 333 East Rustic Road, on 6 November:

My life, since I reached California, has been divided into two phases. The first, before Caskey joined me, was work at the studio, on the Dostoevsky picture, which is now being shot. (Called
The Great Sinner
- did you know he actually meditated writing a book of that name, the old ham!?) It is not Dostoevsky, but it is somewhat magnificent, owing to $3,000,000 worth of sets, costumes and high-powered talent. Anyhow, I disclaim all responsibility - unless, of course, you like it! This first phase also included a lot of whisky drinking and a good deal of running around town, in the process of which I lost nearly ten pounds and a great deal of sleep. Then Caskey arrived and found this house, which we hope to stay in for a couple of years. It is very nice, and really quite rustic, under some sycamores, near the ocean, beside a creek. I feel like Vanzetti’s description of Sacco ‘a worker from his boyhood, with a good job and pay, a bank account, a good and lovely wife, and a neat little home at the verge of a wood, near a brook … .’ Madly respectable!

Caskey paints, carpenters, sews and cooks untiringly, and so far we have had only
one
wild party. I am churning out a travel-book, which is going to be my longest and worst work, I fear. I just can’t do straight journalism, and the truth is that South America
bored
me, and I am ashamed that it bored me, 
and I hate it for making me feel ashamed. However, I am determined to go through with it and then get on with the novel, which at least will be an
honourable
failure.

The Condor and the Cows,
as the travel book was called when it was finished, proved to have many fans, particularly in England, where it was chosen
Evening Standard
‘Book of the Month’ when it came out in 1949. It was illustrated with nearly a hundred photographs taken by Bill Caskey. Later on, Christopher revised his opinion of the book, and even came to regard it as one of his best. The work on it, and the Dostoevsky contract for MGM, and, it must be admitted, the whisky drinking, meant that the new novel progressed very slowly indeed, but go on it did.

The story of how
Sally Bowles
was turned into the play
I am a Camera
has often been told, but I cannot refrain from relating the circumstances again here, as they were told to me. It seems that about this time Christopher was beginning to be worried about his finances. The advances on the travel book had long been exhausted, and the money from MGM for the Dostoevsky script had just kept him going since then. His friends were worried for him, too, and in particular Dodie Smith and her husband Alec Beesley. It occurred to them that one of the best ways for him to earn some money would be for
Sally Bowles
to be dramatized, and that the ideal person to do the job would be John van Druten, who had a ranch near Palm Springs, and who had already had some professional dealings with Christopher. Their plan was to put the idea into van Druten’s mind as a challenge and as if by chance one day. Van Druten swallowed the bait, and produced a draft play, assimilating other parts of
Goodbye to Berlin
into Sally’s story, in a few weeks. He also found the money to back it, and though Christopher wasn’t over-enthusiastic about it in script, it was put on in Hartford, Connecticut at the beginning of November 1951. Christopher told me frequently afterwards that he was quite sure that Julie Harris as Sally made it a success, giving a fantastically brilliant performance of creative imagination. It was transferred to the Empire Theatre in New York at the end of November, and in spite of the reservations of some of the critics it soon became clear that it was going to be a big hit. A British production, with Dorothy Tutin as Sally, was put on in 1954, and was also a hit. Christopher made money out of both these productions, and continued to make much needed money. It was the biggest break he had had since he came to the USA, and continued to have, with some money coming in for the rest of his life, especially when the play was followed by a film, and the film by a musical, and the musical by a film of the musical with Liza Minnelli in the star part.

Meanwhile, the work on the new novel went slowly forward, but with many doubts and problems. One of the chief problems was the tone of voice, which had been masked in
Prater Violet
by the fact that the main character was a foreigner who spoke in the narrative in rather broken English. He wrote to me in April 1951:

Am pleased to report that my novel is really moving. But much to do yet. It’s the most complicated bitch of a thing I ever attempted. After this, I go back to old poker-face Christopher Isherwood and his reportage. Real novels are too difficult. We are as poor as mice and Bill is working as a gardener. But this house is delightful. I do wish I could come over, but don’t dare to move until the rough draft of the novel is finished. And no money.

It was not till September 1952 that I was given a further report on the novel - and on his relationship with Bill Caskey:

Billy is in Japan, working on a boat which goes via Hong Kong, Manila, to Singapore - and then home. I’ll see him in November. He is blissfully happy, and so is our relationship. I emphatically do
not
agree with Cocteau’s ‘
mes soeurs, n’aimez pas les marins’!
 … The novel goes very slow, but steady. I’m sure I’ll finish it now, but am not so sure it isn’t a bit gooey. Love, love, love, love! All the characters are either female or queer.

And, finally, at the end of October 1953, when the
London Magazine
had just been founded, *

I think I would like to do you a Los Angeles letter ….

____________________

*  Lehmann founded and edited the
London Magazine.

____________________

Just as soon as some revisions are finished on my novel. The American publisher (Random House) is more critical of it than Alan White (Methuen) - ironically enough, more bothered by some censorship problems - but he seems to like it very much, too; and I can meet his objections without throwing out anything I honestly like. This job should take, let’s say, three more weeks.

The World in the Evening
had been sent to his publishers on both sides of the Atlantic in August, when he had confessed to Edward Upward that it was ‘terribly slipshod, and vulgar and sentimental in a Hollywoodish way’. Personally I felt that there was something wrong with almost all the characters - they didn’t ring true - particularly the protagonist, Stephen Monk, and the writing all through lacked the usual zest. Part of the trouble, I feel sure, lay in the fact that the author was dealing with heterosexual relationships beyond his normal range, while the homosexual relationship between Charles and Bob, even in the re-written version, gives an almost embarrassing impression of arch coyness at times. His increasing obsession with sainthood, foreshadowed in his article ‘Problems of the Religious Novel’, which had originally appeared in
Vedanta and the West
, is shown in the character of Aunt Sarah, and is not fully convincing. One original touch was his brief exposition of Low Camp and High Camp, which was to have considerable influence on his generation and indeed pass into the language, but this one prophetic and witty passage does not redeem the whole novel. I think that most of Christopher’s admirers would agree with his own later judgement, that
The World in the Evening
was his ‘worst novel’.