Auden were youthful admirers of Brecht, and Isherwood translated the verses for Desmond Vesey’s 1937 English version of Brecht’s Dreigroschenroman, A Penny for the Poor. In D 1, Isherwood records that in August 1943, Berthold Viertel introduced Isherwood to Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel, and their son, Stefan. When they next met, Brecht harshly criticized Isherwood’s spiritual convictions and denounced Aldous Huxley, enraging Isherwood.
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They continued a tentative friendship, and in April 1944 Brecht asked Isherwood to translate The Caucasian Chalk Circle; Isherwood declined partly because he had come to dislike Brecht for his ruthless and somewhat hypocritical obsession with his own beliefs and ambitions.
Brett, Dorothy. English painter. A daughter of Viscount Esher and sister of the Ranee of Sarawak, she studied painting at the Slade. Brett became friends with D. H. Lawrence late in 1915 and was the only one of his circle to accompany Lawrence and Frieda to America in 1924 to found his utopia, Rananim. The plan soon fell apart, though Brett remained with the Lawrences in Taos and travelled with them in Mexico until she was banished by Frieda.
She then lived on her own in Taos, returned to Europe where she saw Lawrence one last time in Italy, tried in vain to consummate their long restrained love, and finally settled back in New Mexico. As he mentions in his diary of the time (D 1), Isherwood read her memoir, Lawrence and Brett (1933), in 1940.
Britten, Benjamin (1913–1976) . British composer. At W. H. Auden’s instigation, Britten composed the music for The Ascent of F 6, and Isherwood perhaps first met Britten at rehearsals in February 1937. By March 1937, the two were friendly enough to spend the night together at the Jermyn Street Turkish Baths, though they never had a sexual relationship. Britten also wrote the music for the next Auden–Isherwood play, On the Frontier. He went to America with Peter Pears in the summer of 1939, but, as Isherwood notes in D 1, returned to England halfway through the war, registering with Pears as a conscientious objector. A major figure, Britten composed songs, song cycles, orchestral music, works for chorus and orchestra such as his War Requiem (1961), and nine operas including Peter Grimes (1945), Albert Herring (1948), Billy Budd (1951), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), and Death in Venice (1973). Don Bachardy recalls that Britten withdrew gradually from his friendship with Isherwood, and Isherwood sensed it was because Britten associated Isherwood closely with Auden, against whom Britten harbored more particular griefs. But there was a reunion between Isherwood and Britten in 1976, in Aldeburgh, not long before Britten died. Pears had visited Isherwood and Bachardy while performing in Los Angeles and was able to bring about the rapprochement. Britten was frail by then and wept when he saw Isherwood.
Brooke, Tim. British novelist; a contemporary of Isherwood at Cambridge, he later spent time in Los Angeles. His novels, published under the name Hugh Brooke, include The Mad Shepherdess (1930), Man Made Angry (1932), Miss Mitchell (1934), and Saturday Island (1935). He was a close friend of the dancer Nicky Nadeau.
Brooks, Richard (1912–1992) . American novelist, screenwriter, film director and producer. Brooks was a sports writer and radio commentator before he began writing screenplays in the early 1940s; he then went on to direct and produce. His films include The Blackboard Jungle (1955), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Elmer Gantry (1960, for which his script won an Academy Award), Sweet Bird of Youth (1964), Lord Jim (1965), In Cold Blood (1967), and 306
Glossary
Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). One of his novels, The Producer, is about Hollywood.
Buckingham, Bob. British policeman; the longtime friend of E. M. Forster.
Buckingham’s wife, May, was also friendly with Forster.
Burgess, Guy (1910–1963) . British diplomat and double agent. Burgess became a communist while at Cambridge, and he was secretly recruited by the Soviets during the 1930s. He worked for the BBC until joining the Foreign Office in the mid-1940s and was meanwhile employed also by MI5. In May 1951, having been recalled from his post in Washington under Kim Philby, Burgess was warned by Anthony Blunt that he was suspected of espionage. He disappeared with Donald Maclean, also a double agent, and it eventually became clear the pair had defected to Moscow (their presence there was announced in 1956). Isherwood first met Burgess in 1938 in London, where Burgess was also friendly with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, and Burgess introduced Isherwood to Jacky Hewit. Hewit had been Burgess’s lover until Burgess met Peter Pollock that year. After roughly a decade with Pollock, Burgess lived with Hewit again intermittently during the three years leading up to his defection. See also D 1.
Burra, Edward (1905–1976) . English painter and ballet and theatrical designer; he studied at the Royal College of Art. Burra sought out scenes of low life in French cities and ports during the late 1920s and visited New York in the 1930s and 1940s chiefly to paint subjects in black Harlem. He was somewhat influenced by the surrealists and from about the time of the Spanish Civil War he began to introduce into his paintings masked figures such as Isherwood mentions, along with soldiers, skeletons, and bird-men.
Bynner, Witter (1881–1968) . American poet. Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke launched a spoof literary movement, “Spectrism,” to parody Pound’s Imagism. Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments achieved wide recognition, and Bynner went on to write more seriously under the identity he adopted for the hoax, Emmanuel Morgan. Afterwards he translated Tang poetry from the Chinese with the scholar Kiang Kang-hu. He had a tortured friendship with D. H. Lawrence and disliked Lawrence’s characterization of him as Owen Rhys in The Plumed Serpent, which paved the way for his own bitter book about Lawrence, Journey with Genius (1951). Bynner lived in Santa Fe with his friend Bob Hunt, and also had a house in Mexico, at Lake Chapala.
Cadmus, Paul (1904–1999) . American painter of Basque and Dutch background; trained by his parents and at the National Academy of Design in New York. He worked briefly in advertising, travelled and painted in Europe at the start of the 1930s, and joined the U.S. government Public Works of Art Project in late 1933. Lincoln Kirstein became interested in Cadmus’s work after they met in New York in the mid-1930s, and Kirstein later married Cadmus’s sister, Fidelma, also trained as a painter. Cadmus drew Isherwood in February 1942
in New York, where Cadmus lived, and the two became friends as Isherwood tells in D 1. Eventually Cadmus settled in Connecticut with Jon Andersson, continuing to paint into his nineties.
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Caffery, Jamie. American journalist and landscape designer. Caffery’s family was from Louisiana; he worked as a researcher for Fortune magazine and also had jobs with Time and Life before moving to England where he took up gardening. In 1950 he went to Tangier with David Herbert and became garden columnist for the Tangier Gazette. Eventually Caffery settled on the Costa del Sol as a landscape designer. The uncle Isherwood mentions, Jefferson Caffery (1886–1974), was ambassador to Paris from 1944 to 1949 (he had previously been ambassador to Cuba and Brazil and afterwards was ambassador to Egypt).
Jefferson Caffery married at fifty but had no children.