Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir (14 page)

T
he World in the Evening
was published in the summer of 1954, and was not very warmly received. I had seen it in proof before, and had written to Christopher in May trying to express my rather muted appreciation.

The arrival of the Boy Lamkin from your side of the ocean, and the fact that I’ve read the proofs of
The World in the Evening
, reminds me that it’s high time I wrote to you. If I’ve put it off again and again, it’s partly because I’ve been hoping a letter would come from you, telling me how you liked the 
London Mag.,
which has been going to you regularly …. So there.

I expect you’ve already had any amount of letters about the production of
I am a Camera
over here. Beatrix and I and Alexi all saw it together just before I went off to Italy, and enjoyed it immensely. The audience - a curious, semi-smart audience - obviously enjoyed it immensely too, and had probably not read the book to compare it. For us, there was a slight feeling that the book was not the play - no sense of
Berlin 
outside the room - but we all thought John van Druten had 
done a first-class job on it. Dorothy Tutiri was enchanting, but
not
, to me at any rate, the Sally you created, too wistful and delicate altogether. I just couldn’t take that charming actor Michael as ‘Chris’, as you, no one who knows you could, I believe: it was a strange distorting glass all the time. We’re all hoping that the success here, and the accumulation of pounds sterling, will encourage you to take another trip over very soon. Please do come. For one thing, I’d like to consult you about my autobiography
⁵
before it gets printed: it’s actually in the last stages now, and is beginning to be someone else’s life already. I feel as if I’d been writing a novel about an entirely imaginary character. Did you, by the way, get the copy of
New World Writing
with the Hogarth bit in it? I asked Victor Weybright
⁵
to send you a copy.

I’ve just been interrupted (I’m writing from the Cottage, where all the spring trees, the magnolias and cherries and Japanese azaleas are in flower) by Alexi, summoning me to see the success of his asparagus bed and the netting for the peas he’s constructed. He’s gardening like mad in this first burst of real spring weather, with Lottie
^#
beside him, and sends you his love.

Christopher, my feelings are so mixed after a first reading of the proofs of
The World in the Evening
, that I don’t know what to say. Perhaps it would be more sensible not to say anything until I’ve read it again, as I shall have to, as I want to.

Because I think it’s a wonderful achievement, with a skill in construction, a narrative flow, a freshness of style and observation that are
you
at the top of your form; I think the theme of sexual jealousy is wonderfully handled, Aunt Sarah a moving and convincing character, and so many scenes first-class - I shall say more about that later - but I’m bothered by something; perhaps it’s the Americanization of your dialogue, perhaps it’s the handling of the queer theme that doesn’t seem properly objectivized. I may be wrong; I may find I’m wrong when I reread it; but I know you would want me to say quite frankly what I felt. I wish you’d tell me what Random House objected to? It strikes me that Alan White is being courageous - in Edward Montagu’s England - as well as sensible in his stand. Do tell me what your friends over there think. I have a feeling I may be suffering from a kind of over-preparation - I have waited and longed for this novel for fifteen years, Christopher!

During the last six weeks I’ve been able to get back to the autobiography, but until then - apart from my BBC work - I’ve been entirely absorbed in the organization of the 
London Magazine.
I believe that now, with four numbers out, people can see its shape and intention. I do so very much want to know what you think. It has been very exciting, anxious, absorbing for me; and we had an absolutely amazing kick-off, with a circulation about three times what we expected at our most sanguine. It seems to be settling down now to something between 18,000 and 20,000 - far more than I ever hoped. There’s only one thing seriously wrong: no contribution from you. Do please remember how much I want you to appear in its pages. When do you finish your film job? How has it turned out? I want all your news.

This letter inspired a long reply from him, rather apologetic in tone. He wrote:

Of course I am deeply interested in your reactions to the novel. They don’t altogether surprise me. I have always felt that there was something wrong with Stephen (Monk, not Spender!). I suppose the truth is that I am such an essentially autobiographical writer that I simply cannot manipulate an I - character which isn’t me. This American voice is truly a problem. I think perhaps I should have taken much more trouble to make Stephen talk more British or more American in different parts of the book. The way / talk is such a mishmash - always was. I believe I still use locutions I caught from Berthold Viertel and the Refugees, all mixed in with old-fashioned British slang and modern American, which is probably only ninety-nine per cent correct. As for the queer part, I am conscious of having idealized both Charles and Bob, and, in another sense, Michael. Charles and Bob are idealized for propaganda purposes. (We have a joke in the studio that if you want to make a film about a Nisei, you always make him a Purple Heart soldier, a winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, a Phi Beta Kappa, and on top of that he has a white mother, and his father was only half Japanese!) Michael is idealized in order to vent my spleen against wicked bisexuals who break the hearts of innocent queens and then go waltzing back to Wifey. Random House was chiefly bothered by the queer part, and I have toned it down greatly, but I evidently didn’t succeed in curing it. Perhaps one never does, when one patches.

It was not ‘idealization’ that worried Christopher’s friends in England about Charles and Bob, but something far more embarrassing.

In the same letter he told me that the ‘Metro job’ on Diane de Poitiers had been 
huge fun, and my efforts seem to have made a real hit; so I am to go on and write the screenplay - having now concocted the story. I think it comes under the heading of permissible melodramatic camp. (I have stolen much from Balzac and Dumas.) Anyhow this means that I will be working at the Studio until around the end of August - thus, I fear, being prevented from writing the screenplay of
I am a Camera
, which I have been asked to do by Henry Cornelius, the director.

The
Diane
film was sabotaged, in Christopher’s view, by the ‘front office’ refusing to choose any of the actors he wanted himself, with the result that it was a flop. A thousand pities, because he thought that his work had been worthwhile, and indeed one of the best jobs he had ever done; also, if he had been able to take on the job of turning
I am a Camera
into a film he might have been able to prevent what so horrified and angered him - the introduction of a love-affair between Sally and the Christopher character. It was bound to happen with himself absent, but he wrote to me in September 1955: ‘For the record, I found it disgusting ooh-la-la near pornographic trash - a shameful exhibition.’

During the following years, he was much occupied with a life of Ramakrishna, which was heavy going for him; but he slogged on with it as he felt he owed it to his Swami to finish it. He had also been asked to select an anthology of
Great English Short Stories
for Dell: he chose thirteen writers, Conrad, Chesterton, George Moore, Wells, Forster, Kipling, Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Ethel Mayne, Robert Graves, Maugham, Pritchett and William Plomer. It was a good anthology, but would have been even better if copyright difficulties had not prevented him from adding Conan Doyle and Dylan Thomas, as was his original intention. He said in his Introduction:

I have made no attempt here to be definitive - as they call it - to trace the development of the Short Story in the British Isles and select the best examples of its most important types. That is one kind of anthology; valuable for students, perhaps, but a weary and dreary job for the anthologist, since there is nothing in Life or Art so depressing as that which one admires but does not love - and how can one love what is utterly and unquestionably The Best? The other kind of anthology - the kind I have tried to make - is, or should be, autobiographical.

I, the anthologist, must not waste time guessing what the reader’s taste may be; I must boldly confess my own. The reader may not approve of it or of me, but at least my book will have a certain individuality… .

Great English Short Stories
was published in 1957.

I don’t know what to tell you about my novel. It has sort of stuck, and yet I could almost publish the bits. If I do, you shall have first refusal as far as England is concerned. I promised you that already …. Am in fact full of ideas but short of money and must make some quick. So Don and I are off to New York tomorrow morning, to nose around there. And incidentally to see Stephen, Wystan, John Gielgud etc …. I ought to come to England this summer - aside from everything else, to see my mother who has passed her 90th birthday and is said to have recovered about 90% from her stroke. I shall come if I can manage it financially.

The novel was what he still called his ‘Mexican fantasy novel’. Like so many of his books, it went through a large number of transmogrifications, false starts and rearrangements, but by the time he wrote to me in June 1959 it had taken the shape we know as
Down There on a Visit
, and he had sent me the first episode, ‘Mr Lancaster’, for separate publication in the
London Magazine. 
It seemed to me to recapture some of his old spirits and ease of telling, and I wrote enthusiastically accepting it.

My dear Christopher - You can scarcely imagine what a surprise and joy it was to me to have your letter, followed so swiftly, 48 hours later in fact, by the packet from Edward containing ‘Mr Lancaster’. I swallowed it in one big, immediate, gulp, and can only say Hip-hop-hooray! If it weren’t for the studied distancing effected by your apostrophes to Youth, it might have been done at the same time as
Goodbye to Berlin.
You are in
vintage
form, and I couldn’t be more pleased and excited to have it for the
London Mag.
Is it really autobiography? Does it slip into an hitherto invisible gap between
Lions and Shadows
and
Goodbye to Berlin
? Or is it just skilfully concocted to seem like that? Anyway, as it is a part of what was originally planned as a continuous novel, I can only suppose that all the other parts are of the same epoch: I just can’t wait to read them. I had to put it down several times because I laughed so much: and then I felt how well you sprung the surprise on your reader of his suicide and the revelation of him having been
proud
of you. I shall put it into the very first number of the
LM
I can, without a word cut, occupying most of the number. But when will that be, with this bloody printing strike going on? My August number (due mid-July) is all ready to be printed, page proofs passed; my September number’s main features announced in it. If it only lasts three weeks, I can do a bit of shifting around, and everything will be all right; if longer, we’re in the soup. That everyone else is too doesn’t somehow console me. And of course books will all be jammed into one hectic period of nine weeks or so just before Christmas, my own book
- I am My Brother
⁶
- included. And as Longmans are publishing for Reynal, that goes for the American edition too.

My heart is in turmoil again, and I am more bewildered than ever before by the fact that ‘happiness’ is torment and hell.

My fondest wishes to Don - I’m so glad to hear he’s making a success in the new venture - and very much love to yourself.

Christopher replied:

I’m simply delighted that you liked ‘Mr Lancaster’ so much. There are certain things in it I expect to change when the whole book is done, but I had better not try until I see how it relates to the other parts. Edward (Upward), also, was enthusiastic: so I feel greatly reassured.

Yes - It is autobiographical. Mr Lancaster was Basil Fry, a cousin of mine, who was British Consul at Bremen. I paid him a visit at just that time. He didn’t commit suicide but died, poor devil, at some ghastly post in South America. I think it was a port in the nitrate desert of Northern Chile. I don’t think he had any particular feeling for me. And there was no episode with Waldemar.

The idea of the novel is really best expressed by my old title, ‘The Lost’. I have also been playing with something resembling ‘La-bas’, and thought of ‘Down There on a Visit’. But, actually, this is an account of four separate visits - not to hell, exactly, but to people who are living in private hells of different kinds; not entirely grim, however, and not always alone. Only two characters appear in all four episodes; Waldemar and me, at different ages. You might say, Waldemar is Heinz, but with many alterations.

In the next episode, he and I go down to Greece, right after the time in Berlin, in May 1933, and there encounter a lot of people living on an island, with an Englishman named Ambrose as their leader. This episode is really very broad farce, but with an underlying horror. Then the third episode will be in London during the Munich crisis. Waldemar will be there, living with an Englishwoman I’ve always wanted to write about. This episode is vaguest in conception so far, but I came across a diary I kept at that time which had many valuable hints in it. Then the last episode will take place in Santa 
Monica, during the last year of the war, and it will be all about Denny Fouts and yoga and drugs. And there will be an epilogue after the war, about 1952, in Berlin when Denny is dying; and I meet Waldemar again as a middle-aged married man. I hope and think this episode will be the one which gets down nearest to the nerve, as Francis Bacon puts it.