Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir (9 page)

The German Refugee part of his life was mainly in Salka Viertel’s circle, where the Manns and many other Germans in California gathered. What he didn’t say in this letter was that he had talked the Vedanta people into accepting his homosexual life, the idea being that any deep attachment to another human being was to be deplored in a Yoga initiate, but that sex didn’t matter. To his English friends it looked as if he had found a way of having his cake and eating it.

The MGM part of his life must eventually have been a disappointment to him. He was kept very busily at work, partly for MGM and partly for other film moguls, but very few of the scripts he worked on were ever used for films - sometimes his scripts were scratched and other script-writers were brought in, sometimes they never got to shooting at all, sometimes he never even got a credit when it was shot. He must have had a special skill or he would not have got so many jobs. He was remarkably cool and philosophical about it, and treated it all as a way of making money while learning about the film-world. ‘The studio,’ he said to a friend on one occasion, ‘is just an office I visit in the daytime.’ The first serious opportunity he had was given him by Gottfried, Max Reinhardt’s son, an MGM producer who was a friend of the Viertels, to write the dialogue for a screenplay of James Hilton’s 
Rage in Heaven
, but though the film was made it was ruined by squabbles on the set and was badly received. In spite of this ill-omened start, he had been offered a year’s contract by MGM. He wrote to me in April 1940:

This studio has just finished 
The Mortal Storm
 - which will probably be good, but terribly funny, because the nice Germans are played by Americans, and the nasty ones by German refugees. I am just about to start a picture about Chopin, who is to be whitewashed for Robert Donat. Actually, I think he was the most unpleasant of all geniuses. George Sand was much too good for him …. First line of our picture: ‘Hullo’. Last

line: ‘Let’s hope and pray he is.’ You can guess the rest.

The picture was never made, but the work was obviously profitable for him, because he wrote: ‘the weather is terrific - 94 in the shade - and all the beaches crowded. Money swirls around me like autumn leaves. I pick up some of it and throw it away again - there is really nothing to spend it on; except the books which remind me of England. I have quite a library, all the poets.’

The front cover of the June 1941 edition of
Penguin New Writing
. The issue contained a reprint of Isherwood’s ‘The Nowaks’, described by John Lehmann in his foreword as ‘perhaps the finest story we have ever published’.

_______________________________________

1

Daylight: European Arts and Letters, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,
a magazine which first came out in 1941, published by the Hogarth Press.

2

Isherwood’s memoir of the poet Ernst Toller, ‘The Head of a Leader’, was published in the first issue of
Encounter
in 1953.

I
n the same letter (16 April 1940) he gave vent to the feeling that had for long oppressed him, that his new-found pacifism was alienating him from the friends he had left in England:

Of course, the news from Europe makes one feel unspeakably wretched - especially as many people here regard it as an exciting football game, in which they would rather like to play. It is strange to live amongst these psychically virgin Californians, with their sound teeth and intact nerves. Partly it is very stimulating; partly it makes you feel lonely. Sometimes I think that I must return to Europe, anyhow, at any price -just to merge my individual aches in the big general ache. I’m afraid I should feel myself just as much of an outcast there.

There are few people I could honestly agree with, about this war. You would understand, I think. But what about Stephen, and the others? Believing what I do, there’s simply no place for me in existing society - even in the opposition. And, not being a prophet, like Wystan, I can’t raise my voice in the wilderness. The way things look now I shall most likely end up 
in prison - or, if I’m lucky, the Red Cross.

A year later, he wrote:

It’s no use - I shall never write anything till this war’s over. My voice is changing, like a choirboy’s, and I can’t find the new notes. But I am more certain than ever that something is happening inside (surely it is to everyone who isn’t a stone, these days) and there will be something to show for this exile. 
Or perhaps I shouldn’t call it exile - for I love California. If a dozen people I know were here, I couldn’t imagine a better home. You must certainly join us, one day.

In the same letter he repeated, briefly, what he had told me in several previous letters: ‘I am trying to get on, as hard as I can, with Yoga. It’s what I think about most, nowadays.’

My knowledge at first hand of the early stages of Christopher’s conversion to Yoga (though I dearly would have loved to talk it all over with him), up to the episode of La Verne, is gleaned entirely from such occasional remarks in his letters as I have just quoted. Nevertheless, in view of the fact that it became more and more important to him, I think I must try and insert a few notes of elucidation, derived from various statements at various times by Christopher himself (not in letters to me), and other sources. I do it without any firm conviction that I have got it right, never having been at any time in my life attracted to Yoga, and inclining rather to Auden’s view that there is a lot of mumbo-jumbo in it, in spite of the fact that a dear and intelligent friend such as Christopher became a convert.

Christopher went out to California partly to get into the movie-world, but also to find re-affirmation and explanation from Gerald Heard of his newly found pacifism. But Gerald Heard was already practising Yoga in the sense that he had already acquired the habit of meditation and prayer as a means of coming closer to the Godlike Reality which is within every individual. He initiated Christopher into meditation and lectured him on the central meaning and aspirations of Vedanta, which is built on the ancient Hindu scriptures, or Vedas. Christopher, having long ago discarded the traditional Christianity in which he had been brought up, and suffering from the profound spiritual con
fusion he described so vividly in his letters to me, was powerfully attracted by what Heard preached to him. Not long after he started his meditations and his study of Vedanta, he asked Heard to introduce him to Prabhavananda, the Swami who directed the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Prabhavananda was a very remarkable man, boyish-looking we are told though already in his forties, completely unaffected and unpretentious, with a remarkable gift for expounding Vedanta for the novices who were serious in their wish to learn. Christopher fell almost at once for his charm and simplicity, and some time that summer (1940) asked him to be his guru, or mentor, and initiate him into the mysteries of Vedanta with the ultimate idea of becoming a monk. The Vedanta Society had its home at 1946 Ivar Avenue, with an only recently erected temple in the garden. Heard already did his meditations twice a day for three hours each, but the Swami (a name which is roughly equivalent to ‘Father’ in Catholic parlance) counselled Christopher to start with something far less strenuous while he was learning. Christopher also made a clean breast of his need to work in the movie-world, and of his homosexuality, as I have already mentioned.

Christopher remained devoted to the Swami, as he describes in
My Guru and His Disciple
(published in England in 1980), and always received sympathy and ease of spirit from him even in the times when he felt he could no longer bear the discipline and rituals of becoming a Hindu monk - which he never did become - or when the old life of sexual promiscuity beckoned with a fatal attraction. His devotion was strongly reinforced by a task they undertook together, of translating the Hindu epic, the
Bhagavad-Gita
, which itself is part of a greater epic, the 
Mahabharata.
The Swami prepared a rough translation into English from the Sanskrit, and Christopher’s task was to turn it into a polished style that would be acceptable to English readers. After they had been at work on it for some months they put the result of their labours before an intelligent English friend, Margaret Kiskadden. Her judgement was discouraging. She felt that there was too much un-English locution, archaic and clumsy, too much too close to the original Sanskrit, and that the general effect was as awkward as that of earlier English versions. Christopher had 
let Aldous Huxley see it, and he had agreed with her. The two translators had at first been profoundly depressed by this verdict. Then suddenly Christopher had a flash of inspiration, and translated the opening passages into verse with a strong rhythmic beat. Encouraged by the effect this had on the Swami and their adviser, he set about re-casting the whole version into a mixture of verse and prose, which he believed would more effectively render the quality of the original. This was the version which was eventually published, and gave them confidence to tackle various other translations from the Sanskrit. At the same time it seems to have loosened the writing block that Christopher had been suffering from. He had started a new short novel rather earlier, but had put it aside. This he now took up again, as he described in his letter to me of 9 January 1943:

before the sudden call to the movie-swamp stopped it, I was beginning a study of Berthold working at Gaumont British, which I intend to call
Prater Violet.
And, after that, I want to do the story of Heinz. And, after that, a somewhat modified version of ‘Paul is Alone’ (remember ?). Three novelettes, to make a volume. Is it just a dream? I don’t know. I was as excited as hell when I got ready to start: the only trouble is that I’ll have to find a new
tone of voice
: because the ventriloquist has changed somehow, and needs a new dummy …

Eventually the short novel was published by itself, in America in 1945 and in England the following year, as
Prater Violet. 
Christopher was always planning combinations and permutations of his shorter novels, and in this case the material of ‘Paul is Alone’ was transformed into the last episode of
Down There on a Visit
, while ‘the story of Heinz’ never got written at all, for though Waldemar lived with the narrator on the Greek island in ‘Ambrose’, he can only be considered a shadow of Heinz.
Prater Violet
showed that the old magician had lost none of his cunning: the structure was masterly, the pace beautifully controlled, and Dr Bergmann one of his most brilliant tragi-comic creations. The ‘tone of voice’ which had worried Christopher so much was largely settled by the fact that Dr Bergmann was a German refugee and that much of the dialogue was in movie-jargon; but the new 
Christopher made himself heard in the last scene where an almost mystical relationship, of spiritual father and son, is hinted at between Bergmann and the narrator.

In the same letter Christopher, who had just seen the Penguin with ‘A Day at La Verne’ in it, wrote:

I was very embarrassed by my La Verne thing; it reads like the parish magazine; but I’m sure you did right to print it. It administers a kind of sour sip of quinine flavored with prigdom. I wouldn’t feel I had to do so much apologizing, now; or be so gloomy. I sound as if I were being exiled to the salt mines, instead of starting a new life of the most absorbing interest and adventure, which this has actually been and is being …. They recently lowered the age-limit, so I’m going to live at the Vedanta ‘monastery’ here in Hollywood, as from next month: more about this in another letter …. Well, I must stop for now, with so much love as ever, and God bless you, John, in 1943. You’re one of my last real links with England, now. But we’ll meet again, and before long, I feel.

Christopher’s euphoria about living at the ‘monastery’ does not seem to have lasted very long. The chief trouble, one cannot help feeling, was sexual restlessness. I do not know what caused ‘Vernon’ to go back to New York at the end of 1940, but in any case it was not the end of their relationship. They continued to correspond at long intervals, and then in the end he came back to California, because it seemed Christopher needed him. Meanwhile Christopher had various affairs, one particularly intense one with a beautiful young man he calls Alfred, which faded out as soon as ‘Vernon’ reappeared at the end of August. It is possible that Christopher’s new friendship with Tennessee Williams, insatiably promiscuous, had something to do with his increasing restlessness. There was also the influence of another new friendship, which became increasingly important in Christopher’s life at this time. Denny Fouts was born in Florida, and when he was sixteen was swept off from home by a passing cosmetics tycoon to begin his career as the Best Kept Boy in the World. His sexual successes included a large variety of rich and aristocratic connections of both sexes, and just before the war 
he landed up in the household in Paris of Peter Watson, heir to a margarine fortune, who was to finance Cyril Connolly’s
Horizon 
when he moved to London very soon after. In 1940, when the German attacks on London intensified, Peter insisted on him going back to the
USA.