Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir (15 page)

But this epilogue was never written, or at any rate was not published with the book. He wrote to me about the very last stages in its long-drawn-out birth in December 1960, just before Christmas: ‘Yes, the novel is finished, and indeed largely revised. However the last longest and most horrendous section, nearly as long as
The Memorial
, isn’t! Heaven alone knows what it is like, let alone what you all will think of it; I can only tell you that I feel far fewer misgivings than I did about Whirled in the Evenink. This, for better or worse, is
me’

I read
Down There on a Visit
in July of the following year, and wrote to Christopher after ‘having gradually abandoned everything else: tribute to your witchery, as powerful as ever. When I got to the end, I could hardly believe I’d read a book of 100,000 words. In fact, I enjoyed it immensely, and found myself laughing over “Mr Lancaster” just as much as - if not more than - when I first read it.’ I then launched into some critical observations, in the usual way between us.

‘Mr Lancaster’ seems to me far the most successfully realised of the four pieces; partly because Mr Lancaster is fully developed himself as a comic-tragic character, partly because the narrator is seen in the perspective of time by a second Isherwood. ‘Ambrose’ is my next favourite. I think you convey the utterly bizarre quality of the island colony wonderfully well. At the same time I think more might have been stated - or seen. Without indecency, Ambrose’s relations with the boys could have been made more explicit. As it is, in fact, they scarcely exist at all. And I am a little uncomfortable about the narrator-Waldemar relationship: I just can’t believe it without sex as the bond. And yet ‘you’ go out of your way to say that ‘you’ didn’t love him
personally.
(I am much less critical of ‘Ambrose’ after several re-readings, because I am struck by the sheer marvellousness of the writing.) The ‘Waldemar’ episode which follows it, came nearest to disappointing me. It seemed to me too much taken up with the details of your Munich crisis - and not seen in perspective, either …. It is full of dread and bitterness about England, the times etc., but suffers from too little character drawing. In ‘Paul’ I felt the lack of ‘perspective’ even more, though it is a far more fascinating piece. Partly it is due, I think to the fact that Yoga plays so important a part, and you want to - or have to - preach about it. But more, I believe it is due to not having got yourself properly outside the Paul-narrator relationship. Every now and then I found myself missing the
second
Isherwood rather badly. Why did the narrator find Paul so utterly intriguing? Again without the indication of sexual tastes in common it’s difficult to be entirely convinced; because Paul just doesn’t seem worth it … .

Looking over all this, it strikes me as an extreme case of cantankerous old editor Lehmann finding as much fault as possible. But I think you know me well enough to know how such criticism can coexist within a general feeling of delight and admiration. And my objections to Paul may of course be because I’m non-conducting to Gerald Heard mysticism.

Though not going as far as the
New York Times
critic who found Paul ‘despicable’, I have never been able to take him on Christopher’s valuation. But I know younger readers who delight in the whole book and put it on the par with
Goodbye to Berlin. 
With
Prater Violet
, I certainly consider ‘Mr Lancaster’ and ‘Ambrose’ the best things that Christopher wrote in fiction after the translation to America, even the much-admired
A Single Man 
which, with its complete change of technique, came next.

____________________________________________

1

31 Egerton Crescent, where Lehmann had moved to in 1945.

2

An Irish writer, published in
New Writing,
who lived in New York at this

time.

3

The novelist.

§
Look Down in Mercy
was Walter Baxter’s first novel.

4

The American musician and novelist.

5

Vol.l of Lehmann’s autobiography,
The Whispering Gallery
, was p
ublished by Longmans in 1955.

The publisher of
New World Writing -
an American paperback series in imitation of
Penguin New Writing.

# John Lehmann’s dog Carlotta.

6

The second volume of Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1960 by Longmans.

T
owards the end of October 1959, Christopher sent me the typescript of a long short story which he had been telling me about for some time. It was called ‘Afterwards’ and was about 20,000 words long - a length he had always excelled in, but in other ways it was very different from anything else he ever wrote (or at any rate anything I ever saw). It has never been published, though stories in the same genre have been posthumously published for E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey.

The story is told in the first person by a homosexual young man who has recently lost his lover in a flying accident. He is obsessed by the memory of this lover, Tom, and feels he can never pick up the threads of life again. Then one day, at the gym, he sees two young men ‘who are almost too beautiful together’, Forrest and Leonard. He starts a friendship with them, and they begin spending two or three evenings a week together, though there is nothing sexual at this stage in their relationship. One evening, however, the two young men are unable to get home and spend the evening in the narrator’s flat, where he sees them make love together, and is much excited by the scene. Then, a 
few days later, Forrest comes alone to the narrator, and tells him that he has met someone who knows him and knows about Tom, who hasn’t been mentioned before. Forrest shows an immense curiosity about their affair, and manages to persuade the narrator to show him the albums of photographs he has kept of Tom and himself together. When Forrest has gone home, the narrator finds that one nude photograph of himself and Tom is missing. Forrest finally confesses to having stolen the photograph because he was so excited by it. Very soon the narrator and Forrest, almost inevitably, start an affair together, but the narrator is not happy about it, and goes off to New York. When he comes back, he finds that Forrest has started a promiscuous life, and has left Leonard. It is scarcely a surprise that Leonard and the narrator should thereupon fall into one another’s arms; and the story ends with them planning a new life together.

Christopher solves the problem of
 language in this story by imagining the narrator as a rather coarse-grained American homosexual who is acquainted with all the current slang for anything queers do with one another - and they do most things imaginable. This works most of the time, but at the expense of any suggestion that there is any loving tenderness in any of their activities. In fact, the story steers very close to pornography, with the organs of the actors always enormous and their emissions unceasing. But the story is redeemed from that by the extreme cunning of the telling, in particular when Forrest is revealed to have stolen the photograph, a subtle turn as good as anything imagined by Isherwood elsewhere in his work. As soon as I had read it, I wrote to him praising the psychological inventiveness of that episode, but also saying that there was an element of erotic fantasy that was dangerously near getting out of hand running right through it; in particular, I doubted whether the ending was entirely plausible, as leading to a new life-long relationship between the narrator and Leonard. It seemed to me (and still seems to me) a little hurried, a little scamped for that consummation; almost as if the author had got bored with his characters and their endless interchange of beds. He never said to me that he wanted to revise it, so one must assume that the text he sent me is as he finally wished it to be - if in fact he envisaged it as 
being published at all even as a posthumous work.

Christopher faced me with a considerable problem about showing it to other people. In his letter of 18 October he said merely that:

If you like it, you are absolutely free to show it around to any suitable readers. I would suggest Morgan Forster, just because he has let me see some things of his in this genre from time to time; but that’s a matter for your decision. I couldn’t in any case send him a copy direct to Cambridge, as I don’t know the setup there and its arrival might somehow embarrass him. Explain this to him if you
do
show him your copy.

I was extremely reluctant to send it by post anywhere, or indeed to let it go out of my keeping at all. So eventually I decided to let certain selected people read it in my house. But I was prepared to make an exception for Morgan, if necessary: I would take it down to Cambridge myself in my car, if he was not going to be available in town in the near future.

D
own There on a Visit
was published in 1962. Christopher was rather more wounded by some of the reviews than he liked to admit, particularly by one written by a London friend who specially asked if Christopher would like him to review it - and then slammed it. Christopher didn’t think that was ethical: in his view if that friend hadn’t liked it, he should have passed it on to someone else and then written to the author to explain.

Isn’t that your idea of the proper procedure or am I being unreasonable? Morgan, who didn’t much care for the book, took the trouble to write and tell me so, and I was very touched. He would
never
have stated his opinion in print.

Over here, I’ve so far had three favorable reviews in papers that count; one unfavorable, and that was sheer puritan horror. A lot of minor reviewers have been horrified too, and a lot have been favorable. But I have found very little understanding of what the book’s about - at least, as I see it. To me, the book’s about alienation, aggression, persecution-complexes, failure of communication between individuals ‘in the 
sea of life enisled’, and the way certain personalities wriggle out of all the categories people try to put them into. It is
not
, in any important way, about sex of any kind. That’s quite incidental.

I have just had a new idea for a novel, a short one. I’m very excited about it, but it will be difficult to do. Very subtle. And, believe it or not, clean as a whistle.

Don is fine. His show in New York was a huge success.

He may have one here, but probably not till the fall. I think he’ll be having another in the East during the summer. He is working hard and sends his love.

I’m working hard, too. On the Ramakrishna biography, which I want to finish up as soon as possible. And then I’m teaching at one of the local colleges, twice a week. I have, among other things, what’s called a Creative Writing class. You should just hear some of the stories the students write! I was reading one of them aloud last week to the class, and the dialogue was such (Marine Corps style) that I was afraid someone from the outside would hear and I’d be fired!

The ‘idea for a novel’ was what eventually became
A Single Man
, but once again after many transmutations. It was originally called ‘An Englishwoman’, and the chief character was to be an Englishwoman who has married a GI and then finds herself lost in California. In the final, published version, the Englishwoman is reduced to a minor role and the lead is taken by an English lecturer, the central experience of whose past life has been an affair with Jim, a young American homosexual who has been killed in an accident. It has been very much praised, and is thought by many to be Christopher’s masterpiece, at any rate of his postwar American writings. Technically it is a new departure, being a third-person autobiographical exercise, with the time-span reduced to twenty-four hours, a device he had never tried before, but he shows immense skill in coping with its challenge.

At the time he was writing it, he was, as he indicated in his letter to me, working as a professor in the University of California at Santa Barbara, which gave him much fresh material for the new novel, used with witty and sardonic effect. I think that anyone who has been through the experience of teaching English literature at an American college [see Afterword] will 
find the description of a class on an Aldous Huxley novel uncannily life-like and indeed humorous in just the right quiet 
way.

I wrote to him about
A Single Man
in May 1964:

My dear Christopher, I’m off to Switzerland the moment this holiday weekend is over (invited by something grand-sounding called the Pro Helvetia Foundation which seems to know, with cunning insight, just exactly when a middle-aged literary gent needs this kind of morale-booster), but I felt I must write before in order to tell you, at least first time over, how much I’ve enjoyed
A Single Man
, the proofs of which John Cullen* was kind enough to send me. Of course I wanted more, much more, and damn the unities (perhaps because I’ve just been re-reading
Edwin Drood
and see everything stretching out with utterly fascinating complexity into the unknown), but I think you’ve done it beautifully. I think Kenny is marvellously real, and the whole tone, the new tone, is superb. You’re funny in a new way, a sour, sardonic, merciless way, and it seems to me just to suit the person you’ve become. Years ago, just before you went to South America, you said to me you’d resolved never to be funny again; that the one thing people paid you out for in the end was entertaining them. That really meant you’d put paid to Herr Issyvoo; but
The World in the Evening
didn’t quite get the new voice right (in my opinion), and in some ways
Down There on a Visit
was a bit of a throwback. Now I think you’re right on target; though of course you 
are
entertaining, but in a new way that cuts and doesn’t give a damn about being kind.