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let from her and rented out her house; then in the early 1950s she sold the property and moved to an apartment off Wilshire Boulevard. Eventually she returned modestly to writing for the movies, but finally moved back to Europe, although she had been a U.S. citizen since 1939. Isherwood tells about her in detail in D 1.
Viertel, Tommy. Youngest son of Berthold and Salka Viertel. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in February 1944. After the war he lived in Los Angeles where he worked for Los Angeles County. He married twice.
Viertel, Virginia ( Jigee). Peter Viertel’s first wife, from 1944 to 1959. Born Virginia Ray to working-class Americans ruined by the Depression, Jigee was a dancer in the Paramount chorus and then married the writer Budd Schulberg with whom she shared strong leftist political convictions. She and Schulberg divorced after having a daughter, Vicky Schulberg. Jigee’s second daughter, Christine Viertel, was born in Paris in 1952, and Jigee and Peter separated immediately afterwards. Salka Viertel partly raised both Vicky and Christine.
After the ruin of her second marriage, Jigee drank increasingly heavily; then in January 1960 she fell asleep with a lit cigarette and died of burns in the hospital.
She appears in D 1.
Vivekananda, Swami (1863–1902) . Narendranath Datta (also known as Naren, Narendra and later as Swamiji) was Ramakrishna’s chief direct disciple.
Ramakrishna recognized him as an “eternal companion,” a perfect soul born into the world along with the avatar and possessing some of the avatar’s characteristics. Vivekananda led the disciples after Ramakrishna’s death and founded the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. He also spent time wandering through India practicing spiritual disciplines and travelling to America and Europe, where his lectures and classes spawned the first Vedanta centers in the West. His teachings and sayings were published in various volumes, and Isherwood wrote the introduction to a 1960 selection from these.
Vividishananda, Swami. Hindu monk, from India. Vividishananda ran the Seattle Vedanta Center; Isherwood met him at the dedication of the new Portland temple in 1943 and afterwards briefly visited his Seattle center. Swami Vividishananda’s biography of Shivananda, A Man of God: Glimpses into the Life and Work of Swami Shivananda, a Great Disciple of Sri Ramakrishna––for which Isherwood wrote the foreword in 1949––was eventually published in 1957 by the Ramakrishna Math.
Waley, Arthur (1889–1966) . English poet and scholar of Chinese and Japanese; educated at Rugby and King’s College, Cambridge. Waley lived in Bloomsbury and associated with figures in the Bloomsbury group. He is best known for his translations of Chinese and Japanese literature which he began to publish during World War I. His renderings from the Chinese influenced Ezra Pound and the Imagists, among others, and his major prose translations (The Tale of Genji, Monkey) along with his scholarly writings on Japanese and Chinese art and culture contributed in England from the 1920s onward to a growing general interest in oriental literature.
Walter, Bruno. German conductor. Walter was a neighbor of Thomas Mann 360
Glossary
in Munich from before the start of World War I, and they became lifelong friends. Their children were acquainted with one another from childhood.
When the Manns first arrived to spend the summer in Brentwood in 1940, the Walters were already settled nearby. Walter also lived in New York.
Warner Brothers. One of the major Hollywood studios, founded in 1923
by the four sons of a Polish shoemaker. Warner Brothers pioneered talking pictures and later became known for realistic, often black-and-white, films. As well as gangster movies and musicals, there were numerous relatively highbrow historical and political films, and the studio was especially successful from the 1930s to the 1950s. It was increasingly run by the youngest brother, Jack Warner, although Darryl F. Zanuck and, after him, Hal Wallis, contributed to Jack Warner’s success. Warner Brothers was sold to Seven Arts in 1967
and later taken over by a conglomerate, eventually merging with Time Inc. in 1989.
Warren, Robert Penn (1905–1989) . American poet, novelist, critic, and teacher; born in Kentucky and educated at Vanderbilt, Berkeley, Yale, and Oxford. Warren won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1946 novel All the King’s Men, also his best known, and he wrote numerous other novels and works of nonfiction, mostly preoccupied with the concerns of his native South. He helped to found The Southern Review and co-edited it with Cleanth Brooks from 1935
until 1942; with Brooks he also later compiled two volumes of criticism and literary writing which spread the so-called New Criticism into many college classrooms: Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Criticism (1943).
Warren’s first volume of poetry appeared in 1935, and he won two more Pulitzer prizes for later volumes of poetry, Promises (1957) and Now and Then (1978). He also won several other major literary awards and was made America’s first poet laureate in 1986. He held university teaching posts throughout his career. For a time he was on the board of the Huntington Hartford Foundation with Isherwood, giving away three-month fellowships for young writers.
Watson, Peter. The financier behind Horizon, of which he was art editor and co-founder. Watson was heir to a margarine fortune, intelligent, and idealistically devoted to art. He collected art and befriended many artists. He was close to Denny Fouts in the 1930s and was the officially named owner of Denny Fouts’s Picasso when it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Later, he lived with Norman Fowler, whom he met in New York in 1949. The pair lived together in London until the apparently healthy and sober Watson mysteriously drowned in his bath in 1956.
Watson-Gandy, Anthony Blethwyn (Tony) (1919–1952). British RAF flying officer and scholar; educated at Westminster, King’s College, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne. His parents were minor gentry, and his father a soldier like Isherwood’s. Watson-Gandy translated from French The Rise and Splendour of the Chinese Empire (1952) by René Grousset.
Watts, Alan (b. 1915) . English mystic, religious philosopher, author, and teacher. Watts became a Buddhist while still a schoolboy at King’s School, Canterbury, Kent, and went on to study all forms of religious thought and Glossary
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practice. His many books include An Outline of Zen Buddhism (1932), Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion (1947), The Supreme Identity: An Essay on Oriental Metaphysic and the Christian Religion (1950), Nature, Man and Woman: A New Approach to Sexual Experience (1958), and Psychotherapy East and West (1961). He emigrated to America at the start of World War II, eventually settling near San Francisco where he became Dean of the American Academy of Asian Studies. He is known as a Zen Buddhist, but was also ordained as an Anglican priest in 1945. He was a close friend of Aldous Huxley, whom he first met in 1943, and he was impressed by Krishnamurti’s decision to renounce his messianic role. Krishnamurti greatly influenced Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951). Watts felt that Huxley and Gerald Heard were working toward the same synthesis of Christian and oriental mysticism as himself, and like them he experimented with LSD in the 1950s. He opposed the Hindu emphasis on asceticism: he married three times and asserted that sex improved spiritual presence. He was a figure of the San Francisco beat scene and a model for Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.