Hauser, Hilda. Housekeeper and cook to Olive and André Mangeot, and to Olive after the Mangeots divorced. Isherwood first met her when he began working for André Mangeot in 1925.
Hayden. See Lewis, Hayden.
Hayward, John (1905–1965) . British editor and scholar. Hayward was crippled by muscular dystrophy and was confined to a wheelchair. He shared a flat in Chelsea with T. S. Eliot from 1946 until 1957, when Eliot remarried.
Heard, Henry FitzGerald (Gerald) (c.1885–1971) . Irish writer, broadcaster, philosopher, and religious teacher. W. H. Auden took Isherwood to meet Heard in London in 1932 when Heard was already well-known as a science commentator for the BBC and author of several books on the evolution of human consciousness and on religion. A charismatic talker, Heard associated with some of the most celebrated intellectuals of the time. One of his closest friends was Aldous Huxley, whom he met in 1929 and with whom he joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1935 and then emigrated to Los Angeles in 1937 accompanied by Heard’s friend Chris Wood and Huxley’s wife and son. Both Heard and Huxley became disciples of Swami Prabhavananda.
Isherwood followed Heard to Los Angeles and through him met
Prabhavananda.
Heard broke with the Swami early in 1941, and set up his own monastic community, Trabuco College, the same year. By 1949 Trabuco had failed, and he gave it to the Vedanta Society of Southern California to use as a monastery.
During the early 1950s, Heard shared Huxley’s experiments with mescaline and LSD. He contributed to Vedanta for the Western World (1945) edited by Isherwood, and throughout most of his life he turned out prolix and eccentric books at an impressive pace; these included The Ascent of Humanity (1929), The Social Substance of Religion (1932), The Third Morality (1937), Pain, Sex, and Time (1939), Man the Master (1942), A Taste for Honey (1942, adapted as a play by John van Druten), The Gospel According to Gamaliel (1944), Is God Evident?
(1948), and Is Another World Watching? (1950, published in England as The Riddle of the Flying Saucers; see also UFOs). There were many more books.
Heard is the original of “Augustus Parr” in Down There on a Visit and of
“Propter” in Huxley’s After Many a Summer (1939). He also appears in My Guru and His Disciple and throughout D 1.
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Glossary
Heinz. See Neddermeyer, Heinz.
Hersey, John (1914–1993) . American writer; born in China, educated at Yale. He was Time magazine’s Far East correspondent from 1937 to 1946, and during the same period he published his Pulitzer Prize-winning documentary novel, A Bell for Adano (1944; filmed the following year). Hersey wrote various other semi-fictionalized books about World War II, and a pamphlet-length, first-hand account of the effects of nuclear explosion, Hiroshima (1946). There were many further novels, short stories and works of nonfiction, several of which were dramatized.
Hewit, Jack (1917–1998). English dancer, spy, and civil servant; son of a metal worker. He won a scholarship to ballet school, but his father forbade him to accept it, so he ran away from home and began dancing in revues. He met Guy Burgess while dancing in the chorus of No, No, Nanette and became Burgess’s lover; Burgess involved him in counterespionage work for MI5.
Through Burgess, Hewit also met Anthony Blunt, and became Blunt’s lover as well. Burgess and Blunt ran Hewit’s spy career for him, passing on his intelligence to the KGB as well as to MI5. Isherwood met Hewit towards the end of 1938 through Burgess and mentions him in D 1. During the war, Hewit joined the Royal Artillery, but was transferred back to MI5; afterwards, he joined UNESCO. He lived with Burgess at different periods, including the three years leading up to Burgess’s defection to the Soviet Union in May 1951. The connections with Burgess and Blunt bedeviled Hewit in later life, though he was able to join the Civil Service as a clerk in 1956 and left as a Higher Executive Officer in 1977. He published one short story, “Tales of Cedric” (1991).
Hirschfeld, Magnus (1868–1935) . German sex researcher; founder of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, where he studied sexual deviancy.
Hirschfeld wrote books on sexual-psychological themes and dispensed psychological counselling and medical treatment (primarily for sexually transmitted diseases). He was homosexual and campaigned for reform of the German criminal code in order to legalize homosexuality between men. His work was jeopardized by the Nazis and he was beaten up several times; he left Germany in 1930 and died in France at around the same time that the Nazis raided his institute and publicly burned a bust of him along with his published works.
Isherwood took a room next door to the Institute in 1930 and first met Hirschfeld then, through Francis Turville-Petre.
Holmes, John (1910–1988) . Canadian diplomat, author, and teacher. Holmes was born in Ontario and educated at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Toronto, and the University of London. He held many diplomatic and academic posts in Canada and abroad. When Isherwood met him in 1947, Holmes was completing a three-year post as First Secretary at Canada House in London and preparing to spend a year as the Chargé d’affaires at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow. Later he represented Canada at the U.N.
and served as the Assistant Under Secretary of State for External Affairs (1953–1960). When he retired from public service, he became the Director General of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and was a Professor of International Relations at the University of Toronto. His books include a Glossary
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two-volume work The Shaping of Peace: Canada and the Search for World Order, 1943– 1957 (1979 and 1982) and Life with Uncle: The Canadian-American Relationship (1982).
Hooker, Evelyn Caldwell (1907–1996). American psychologist and psychotherapist, trained at the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins; professor of psychology at UCLA where for a time she shared an office with the Rorschach expert, Bruno Klopfer, who was impressed by her work and assisted and encouraged her. Hooker was among the first to view homosexuality as a normal psychological condition. Encouraged by her involvement with The Benton Way Group and, according to Alvin Novak, inspired in particular by her close friendship with Sam From––to whom, Novak recalls, she was especially drawn, and who was equally drawn to her––she worked with and studied homosexuals in the Los Angeles area for many years. At Klopfer’s urging, she first presented her research publicly at a 1956 conference in Chicago, demonstrating that as high a percentage of homosexuals as heterosexuals were psychologically well-adjusted. The paper, entitled “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual,” was later published in a Burbank periodical, Projective Techniques (this was the journal of the Society for Projective Techniques and the Rorschach Institute; it later changed its title to Journal of Projective Techniques and Personality Assessment). Born Evelyn Gentry, she took the name Caldwell from a brief first marriage, then changed to Hooker when she married Edward Hooker, a professor of English at UCLA and a Dryden scholar, at the start of the 1950s. Isherwood lived in the Hookers’ garden house on Saltair Avenue in Brentwood for a time in 1952‒1953. He describes the friendship in D 1.
Hopper, Hedda (1890–1966) . American actress and Hollywood columnist.
She began in silent movies and went on to act in many sound films, but she was best known for her influential columns. She also wrote several volumes of autobiography.
Horst (1906–1999) . German-born fashion photographer. Horst B. Horst (also known as Horst Bohrmann) was a shopkeeper’s son, from a small German town; he studied art history in Hamburg, then persuaded Le Corbusier to take him on as an architectural assistant in Paris in the early 1930s. In Paris he became a protégé of the Russian-born, half-American photographer George Hoyningen-Huene with whom he worked for many years. Like Hoyningen-Huene, Horst photographed Parisian and Russian emigré society, and took countless pictures for Vogue and other fashion magazines. Another mentor was the American fashion photographer George Platt Lynes. Horst eventually made New York his home, but frequently travelled and worked in Europe.