Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir (8 page)

How are you feeling? What are your plans? You sound so very unperturbed, amidst all the screaming we hear from the distant European shores.

He ended with some cheerless news about his books in America:
‘Goodbye to Berlin
is now the most utter flop, final and irrevocable. Most people I meet don’t even know it has been published; even when they know my name and other writing quite well. This is good for the soul, no doubt, but bad for the pocket. My national debt is increasingly alarming.’

I found this a curious and illuminating failure of American taste.
Goodbye to Berlin
had to wait for John van Druten to turn part of it into the play
I am a Camera
before it sailed into everyone’s consciousness. And this was not till 1951, when Dodie and Alec Beesley (by design) dared him one afternoon to tackle it.

When Christopher and ‘Vernon’ reached Hollywood, they 
settled in at first at 7136 Sycamore Trail, and had very soon made contact with Gerald Heard, Christopher Wood, and the Huxleys; and had made the acquaintance of Berthold Viertel’s wife, Salka, script-writer to Greta Garbo and a power in the film world. He wrote to me in July:

Here I am living very quietly, seeing hardly anyone, and hoping vaguely that when Berthold arrives he will get me a movie job. Life with ‘Vernon’ reminds me very much of life with Heinz - except that he is even more serious, hates going out in the evenings, reads Suetonius, Wells and Freud, and goes to Art School. If I were happier inside myself I would be very happy. But I never cease worrying about Europe. My ‘change of heart’ about War, and the use of force generally, has only strengthened and been confirmed. I am sure this is how I will feel for the rest of my life. I’m afraid this will mean I shall lose a lot of friends but, I hope, none of the real ones. I am often very homesick for London, and the Hogarth Press office, Stephen’s jokes about his psycho-analysis, walks with Morgan [E.M. Forster.]
 near Abinger Hammer, Peggy’s imitations, rows with my Mother. When I think of my friends, I remember them all laughing. The Past appears entirely in terms of jokes. The driving forces, which separate people, are so dull, really. Just their needs and greeds: sex and money and ambition. Oh dear, why do we have to have bodies? By the time they’ve been satisfied, there is only half an hour a day left over for Talk.

And talk is all that finally matters.

He described the mood he was in more fully in this letter, and rather alarmed me.

Right now, I am like the ground under this part of California. I am settling down, and there is a ‘fault’ inside me which may produce earthquakes. So it is better to keep off me altogether. I am only too liable, literally, to let you down. For the last six weeks or more, I have been working on something for the autumn number of
New Writing.
First it was a piece 
about New York; then it was a study of Toller.
²
Today I realized that neither of them will do. New York needs endless polishing. The Toller piece just sounds stupid and patronising and rather offensive. It has a certain smart-alecky value, but I was fond of Toller, and can’t publish it as it stands. I doubt if you’d want to print it, either. So once again, I am the criminal, the oath-breaker. And, once again, I can only say I’m sorry.

John, I am so utterly sick of being a person -Christopher Isherwood, or Isherwood, or even Chris. Aren’t you too? Don’t you feel, more and more, that all your achievements, all your sexual triumphs, are just like cheques, which represent money, but have no real value? Aren’t you sick to death of your face in the glass, and your business-voice, and your love-voice, and your signature on documents? I know I am.

He ended his letter with a confession that was news to me, though I had guessed that something of the sort was going on: ‘As you may have gathered from the above remarks, I have become very much interested in Yoga philosophy, due to Gerald Heard. He is a very great man. A kind of walking Athens. And terribly funny. We see him a lot. Oh yes, and I met Huxley, who is nice, but oh so bookish and inclined to be pontifical … . Must go now and make the beds.’

Like many other friends of Christopher, I felt dismay at these hints of him becoming a convert to Yoga. Not only did I feel that it would draw him away from me, but I thought of Heard as rather a phoney. However, as Christopher’s involvement grew deeper, I decided that I could not judge sensibly from London, and I never discussed the subject with him in letters, though frequently with his other English friends, who almost without exception expressed their anxiety and mystification. The conversion did, I think, create a gulf between him and Wystan, who, ever more firmly holding to his family Anglicanism, expressed the view that Yoga was ‘mumbo-
jumbo’ and was not to be moved; it was not only that Wystan’s life in New York grew to have less in common with Christopher’s in the movie-world of California, though that was important in their gradual estrangement. I am pretty certain that Wystan would not have been sympathetic to Christopher’s view of the ultimate necessity of writing about sainthood, as expressed in his ‘Problems of the Religious Novel’ in
Vedanta and the West
, any more than I was. Wystan was, I believe, never a pacifist in the sense that Christopher became one, when he faced up to the possibility that in a war he might have to fire at Heinz. The further stage of his argument that he couldn’t shoot anyone in an opposing army because he might be somebody’s Heinz seemed to me rather thin. After all, the number of those who have friends on both sides in a war must be rather small - though I was one of them myself. This condition caused me much agony of mind when I thought of my Austrian friends, but the need to defeat Hitler seemed to me over-riding. Though my war service was confined to the Home Guard, I could never have been the kind of all-out pacifist that Christopher had become, but I respected him for his decision if not for his logic.

And then the long-dreaded war broke out, and soon after the outbreak the persecution of Christopher and Wystan as deserters and cowards. Personally, I was very sorry that they were not going to be in England with us, not to know how they would have reacted to what we were about to experience, as we had the wonderful poems of Louis MacNeice (who came back from America) about the Blitz. There was an obstinate core of die-hards who seemed to have got it into their heads that the more vocal anti-fascists were
responsible
for the war. One thing that these head-hunters had forgotten, or chose deliberately to forget, was that Christopher and Wystan had left England at a time when war seemed to be indefinitely postponed in the comforting aftermath of the Munich agreement. In any case these critics had always disliked and suspected them, and now seemed a capital opportunity to strike. In the House of Commons Major Sir Jocelyn Lucas set the ball rolling by asking the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour whether steps had been taken, or would be taken, to summon British citizens of military age, 
such as Mr W.H. Auden and Mr Christopher Isherwood, for registration and calling-up in view of the fact they were seeking refuge abroad. The popular press was soon in full cry, but the Government decided to do nothing, even if they had been able to do anything. What was particularly wounding for the two of them was that a snide attack was made on them from a side that should have been more sympathetic - in Cyril Connolly’s new monthly,
Horizon.
I thought that this attack was contemptible myself, and much later, in 1942, it was followed by a satiric portrait of them in Evelyn Waugh’s new novel
Put Out More Flags 
as Parsnip and Pimpernel, ‘two great poets who had recently fled to New York’. This was vicious, especially as Waugh was known to have admired Christopher’s work, and it was distressing to see him joining the mob. I remember being much saddened by the hullabaloo, which struck me as grotesquely ill-informed and unfair, but that did not prevent me being irritated by the bland above-the-battle tone of Wystan’s lines in
September 1st 1939
:

There is no such thing as the State 

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice 

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die ….

Christopher’s case was not improved by a leak to the press of an indiscreet letter he had written to Gerald Hamilton about the ridiculous behaviour of some of the German refugees who were crowding into California. In this letter he said: ‘I have no intention of coming back to England … .’ This statement was in conflict with what he said, in various letters to various correspondents - that he would honour his pre-war commitment to the Foreign Office to work for them if required, or join the Red Cross or a Quaker ambulance unit, but in any case the situation was radically altered for him by America’s entry into the war after Pearl Harbor, and the fact that he came thereafter under American draft law. He was by that time deep into Vedanta, had been initiated by Swami Prabhavananda and had asked him to be his guru. Very little about this crucially important development in his life came through in his letters to his friends 
in England, though he wrote an account of his life at La Verne, where he had joined a seminar run by Gerald Heard in July 1941, which I printed in
 
Penguin New Writing -
 
by then established on its dizzily successful course. He still felt guilty about having written for me neither his promised piece on New York nor on Ernst Toller. He wrote to me on 3 July 1941: 
‘I
 feel so terribly sorry about all the times I’ve let you down that I rack my brains to find any conceivable way of appeasing you.’ What he had an equally bad conscience about was having left in the lurch the English boy whom he had once so recklessly promised to take to New York. He kept on referring to this in his letters, and told me that he had finally plucked up courage to confess to the boy that he knew it wouldn’t work and that he must abandon hope of joining him in the USA. But he instructed me by letter and cable to channel some of the royalties he was earning from his by now brilliantly successful
 
Goodbye to Berlin
 
to this boy, to help him pay for the courses he had undertaken at Christopher’s suggestion.

Early on in the war he asked me to find and send him some books which he had left at his home in London. I therefore arranged a day with his mother when she would be coming up from the country, and went along to Pembroke Gardens. It was a most saddening experience to go into his room and see it all covered in dust sheets: it was as if he were dead, and all our years of collaboration finally extinguished. I was haunted by the abandoned look of that room for a long time, indeed until Christopher returned to England after the war. It was in the back of my mind every time I wrote to him. ‘A Day at La Verne’, when it came, seemed like a voice from a spirit world:

On the evening of July 7th, 1941, eighteen men and seven women met at one of the buildings of La Verne College, Southern California. Their intellectual, social and professional backgrounds differed widely. Perhaps they had nothing in common but a need, a need for a refreshed faith, a new kind of integration which would help them with the problem of their own muddled lives and the desperately anarchic world in which they lived. One should not imagine them as dedicated, or even specially devout. Some were frankly sceptical. Others winced at 
the sound of holy words which had been used to blackmail their childhood. A few were jealously on guard over the corpse of a dogma. Nearly all, at one time or another, had had a faint glimpse of some central Reality within themselves - a glimpse toward which they had feebly struggled for a while and then weakened, ruefully confessing their lack of condition. It was discipline and training which they hoped for here. We had gathered, as research-workers in any field may gather, to compare notes, to discuss techniques, and to get the inspiration which a feeling of companionship in effort can give ….

Next morning, our communal life began, according to the prearranged schedule. We were called at five o’clock. At five-thirty we gathered for an hour of group meditation. At seven, we had breakfast - in silence, while one of us read aloud. At nine, we met for an hour and a half of discussion. At eleven-thirty the midday meditation began. At one, we lunched and talked. Theoretically, the early part of the afternoon was free, but a few of us often met, in smaller units, to discuss some topic of general interest. At four there was another general discussion. At six, the evening meditation. At seven-thirty supper, with reading. At nine, bed ….

Looked at from the outside, such a programme of living as has been described above may appear unnatural, unhealthy and altogether fantastic. It did not seem so to those who took part in it … .

Fantastic it did indeed seem to his friends in London under the bombs, and fantastic in the life of the Christopher they had known. Some months before he had written to me:

I am just stuck in one of my sterile periods. So I confine myself to keeping a very detailed diary of my life here, which will provide me with plenty of raw material for later. It certainly is a very extraordinary life - one third German Refugee, one third Yoga and one third Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which has just given me a job, writing dialogue for a James Hilton story! I cannot say that I am happy, or ever could be, as long as this war lasts, but I am certainly going through one of the most interesting periods of my life, and learning a great deal. I see Berthold a lot. Huxley and Heard quite often. And there are exotic glimpses of Garbo, Krishnamurti, Bertrand Russell and Charlie Chaplin. I haven’t yet met Mickey Rooney, although I am now employed under the same roof, but no doubt I shall.