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necessarily. The problem really is as follows: The main thing I have to offer as a writer are my reactions to experience (these are my fiction or my poetry, or whatever you want to call it). Now, these reactions are more positive when I am reacting to actual experiences, than when I am reacting to imagined experiences.
Yet, the actuality of the experiences does bother me, the brute facts keep tripping me up, I keep wanting to rearrange and alter the facts so as to relate them more dramatically to my reactions.
Facts are never simple, they come in awkward bunches. You find yourself reacting to several different facts at one and the same time, and this is messy and unclear and undramatic. I have had this difficulty many times while writing Kathleen and Frank. For
instance, Christopher’s reactions to Kathleen are deplorably complex and therefore self-contradictory, and therefore bad drama.
On the one hand, Isherwood was restating, and perhaps redis-
covering, something he had long known: that his reactions to real experience were more vivid, more intense than anything he could invent. On the other hand, he conceded that writing accurate history was a more severe discipline than writing fiction, because he could not alter the facts to conform to his artistic intention. As early as 1953
he had described in his diary his “lack of inclination to cope with a constructed, invented plot––the feeling, why not write what one experiences from day to day?” Then, in 1953, he had attributed the feeling to the fact that he had fallen in love with Don Bachardy:
“Why invent––when Life is so prodigious?” And he had added,
“Perhaps I’ll never write another novel. . . .”1 Yet he had gone on to write several of his best novels over the twelve or thirteen years following 1953. But eventually the fiction did stop. Isherwood wrote his last novel, A Meeting by the River, in 1965 and 1966; by the time it was published in 1967, he was already hard at work on Kathleen and Frank, which is based so closely on his parents’ letters and diaries that it incorporates long passages from them, “brute facts,” which he could not rearrange and which forced him to struggle with the complexity and contradiction of real life. As soon as he finished correcting the proofs of Kathleen and Frank, he began reconstructing the lost years of his own life, 1945 to 1951, according to a similar version of the newly established method.
In September 1973, Isherwood at last began to get on, as he had envisioned in the Thanksgiving diary entry, with “something else as well.” This was to be an autobiographical book, about his life in 1 D 1, pp. 455–6.
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America, in which he planned to tell, according to an inspiration derived from Jung, his “personal myth.”1 It would share publicly some of his wartime diaries as well as the fruits of the “knitting” he had done in the meantime, and it would be for him a new kind of book. By late October the American autobiography began to
undergo a metamorphosis, because Isherwood realized that he could not explain why he had emigrated to America without first telling about the personal crisis which had occurred when his German
lover Heinz Neddermeyer had been turned away from England by
an immigration official in January 1934. So he shifted the book’s focus backward to the decade of the 1930s, in order to tell the story of the events which drove him away from England in search of what he called “my sexual homeland.”2 Isherwood and Heinz had been forced to wander through Europe in search of a country where they could settle together, safe from Hitler’s persecution of homosexuals and from his conscription; finally, Heinz was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1937, just inside the German border. When
Isherwood at last published this autobiography as Christopher and His Kind in 1976, he overnight became a hero of the burgeoning gay liberation movement. The book sold faster than any other he had ever written.
Isherwood conceded in interviews and letters that he had moved beyond the brute facts in writing Christopher and His Kind, because he wanted it to read as a novel rather than a memoir.3 In earlier works, as the book itself makes clear, he had moved away from facts not only to heighten dramatic effect but also to avoid writing about his homosexuality. But in Christopher and His Kind he no longer wished to avoid writing about his homosexuality; on the contrary he wished to tell about it in detail. This new impulse, to reveal rather than to conceal, is a continuation of the impulse according to which he had begun the reconstructed diary in 1971 (indeed, Christopher and His Kind incorporates whole passages from the reconstructed diary), and Isherwood’s ability in the 1976 autobiography to deal forthrightly with his sexuality, as the underpinning for the trajectory of his life, grew directly out of the confidential and, as it had once seemed, insignificant work he had already done recapturing his postwar life from 1945 to 1951. Christopher and His Kind was a relatively shocking book, even as late as 1976. The reconstructed diary is far more 1 Diaries 1960–1983, September 14, 1973.
2 Diaries 1960–1983, October 29, 1973.
3 Interview with W. I. Scobie and letter to Isherwood’s U.K. publisher (at Methuen) quoted in Brian Finney, Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography (London, 1979), p. 282.
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shocking; even now, some passages have been altered or removed to protect the privacy of a few of Isherwood’s friends and acquaintances who are still alive.
Isherwood’s reconstructed diary is sexually explicit partly because, for the first time ever, it could be. In 1971, seven years after the publication of his assertively homosexual novel A Single Man (1964), two years after the Stonewall riot in New York, and well into the cultural and sexual revolution spawned during the 1960s, he was comfortable committing to paper (though not necessarily for
publication) details of personal relationships such as he would for years previously either never have written down or otherwise felt compelled to destroy. Since the end of the 1950s, censorship laws in the United States had been gradually relaxed; court decisions had increasingly required the post office to deliver magazines formerly ruled obscene and had permitted publication and sale of books that might once have attracted a ban. Even the Hollywood Code,
governing censorship of films, gave way during the 1960s. Although some of the sex acts which Isherwood describes in the reconstructed diary were still widely illegal, he could without much risk of penalty record the true habits and attitudes of the homosexual milieu in which he had long lived in semi-secrecy.
Lost Years, the reconstructed diary which began for Isherwood as a task of personal recollection and amusement, can now be seen to have a more general significance as a work of social history. For it aimed to recapture the mood and behavior of a little recognized group which was soon to make itself known to the popular
consciousness. Isherwood had studied history with enthusiasm and panache as a schoolboy; later, his revulsion from the dry, academic discipline he encountered at Cambridge propelled him toward
literature as if it were an alternative to history, and in his case a mightily preferred one. But his autobiographies, travel books and novels––even the early, most genuinely fictionalized ones––all bear the mark of his historical outlook. He had a journalist’s instinct for knowing where to go and who to observe and talk to, and he
rendered his vivid personal impressions with a historian’s sense of the interconnection between the popular psyche and the facts of social and political change. In his best work, Isherwood consistently achieved the task laid out for literature by his schoolmate and lifelong friend, Edward Upward, who believed that imaginative literature could not escape its relation to material reality and that the socially responsible writer ought to portray the forces at work beneath the surface of material reality which will shape the future of society.