3 P. 159, n.1.
4 P. 54.
xiv
Introduction
Isherwood makes clear in the reconstructed diary how greatly he admired Caskey’s outspokenness about his sexuality. Sometimes Caskey’s belligerence was too abrasive. For instance, he became bitterly angry with the Chilean painter Matta and his wife, when Matta well-meaningly said that he himself had tried sex with men, and Isherwood and Caskey never saw the Mattas again. But on other occasions Caskey was killingly witty about his homosexuality. To Natasha Moffat’s friendly insult that she was glad to be seated next to
“a pansy” during a dinner party at Charlie Chaplin’s house, he replied: “Your slang is out of date, Natasha––we don’t say ‘pansy’
nowadays. We say ‘cocksucker.’ ” Natasha Moffat had a reputation for energetically offbeat behavior, and her sophisticated Parisian past as an intimate of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre made her tough enough for such repartee. Isherwood recalls in the reconstructed diary that her remark was loud and silenced the group; Caskey’s more shocking reply restored the balance. And Isherwood goes on to write of his younger self, “Christopher, who truly adored Caskey at such moments, sat glowing with pride in him.”1 His own good manners would never permit him to behave as Caskey did, and he was capable, personally, of feeling embarrassment. “Caskey never suffered from embarrassment. He didn’t give a damn what anybody knew about him.”2 Isherwood was immensely attracted to Caskey’s bold insistence on the truth, his impatience with social nicety, his willingness to startle and disrupt. He recognized a need for such behavior and privately he identified with it.
The rebelliousness in Caskey which Isherwood so adored was
among the chief things, in the end, which drove them apart. Their relationship was a constant struggle for power. Neither Caskey nor Isherwood was ever able to admit to the other that he was in love; each held back––guarded, suspicious, unwilling to trust. They often fought violently; Caskey could make Isherwood lose his temper so badly that Isherwood would shout and sometimes hit Caskey,
especially when they were drunk. And Isherwood recalls in the reconstructed diary that drunkenness became a prevalent, destructive necessity: “drinking was a built-in dimension of their relationship; while sober, he felt, they never achieved intimacy.”3 With the drinking came bad moods and lethargy, so that Isherwood worked less and less. The psychological conflict in their relationship was mirrored and underpinned by growing sexual incompatibility, and in 1 P. 235.
2 P. 182.
3 P. 53.
Introduction
xv
contrast to Isherwood’s earlier love affairs, they shared no mythology about one another. They lived continually in the plain light of day, with no natural indulgence in fantasy, no artless playfulness, no imaginative games or magical naming. This made Isherwood feel the relationship was more grown-up than his others, but it also made the relationship harder to sustain. Through their mutual distrust and inability to yield, the pair were confined to a routine of selfconscious passion and relied upon forced playacting to fuel their lovemaking.
Isherwood gave way to Caskey’s aggressiveness almost out of
politeness, but eventually certain tasks of role playing grew wearying.
He admits that he would have split from Caskey sooner had he not feared to live alone; and indeed his fear of being alone shaped his romantic behavior throughout his life.
Nevertheless, the years with Caskey were Isherwood’s first longterm domestic arrangement with a man close to his own age and emotional maturity. He felt genuinely proud of Caskey’s social charm and included him entirely in his own social life, introducing Caskey to his various circles of friends––emigré artists and intellectuals like the Viertels, the Huxleys, and the Stravinskys as well as Greta Garbo and other film people in Hollywood; Swami Prabhavananda and his devotees at the Vedanta Society; literary friends like E. M.
Forster and Stephen Spender in England, W. H. Auden and Lincoln Kirstein in New York; new friends like Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal; and many others. Introducing Caskey so widely contributed to a new and more open sense of himself as a homosexual. During the war years, when Isherwood lived among
the Quakers and refugees in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and later when he tried to become a Hindu monk, he kept his sexuality quarantined from his everyday life. In Haverford he had concealed it; as an aspiring monk at the Vedanta Center he had tried during months of celibacy to rise above it. But once he fell in love with Caskey, everything changed; for a time he allowed his sexuality to shape his life as a whole.
During the same period, he became increasingly at home in a
circle of close California friends of whom many were homosexual and most were at ease with homosexuality, so that his identity became established with solidity in the community around him. He was at first troubled by the consistency and honesty this began to require of him. As a young man, he had enjoyed the fragmented life which resulted from living in different countries among discrete groups of friends––shuttling between London and Berlin; fleeing through Greece, Portugal, Denmark and elsewhere with Heinz;
shipping out to China with Auden; tasting Manhattan on the return xvi
Introduction
journey. Travelling had afforded him semi-secrecy and any number of escape routes from commitment and from himself. He had
engaged in simultaneous love affairs and played freely with several personalities and social strategies, just as he played with the characters in his books. But his postwar life in California permitted him no hiding places. As he writes in the reconstructed diary: “Christopher found that his life had become all of a piece; everybody knew everything there was to know about him. In theory, he saw that this was morally preferable; it made hypocrisy and concealment impossible. In practice, he hated it.”1
The unification of his life and identity brought to the fore with a new seriousness the question of who he really was and wanted to be.
Now he could not escape the results of his actions, and he would be forced to live more deliberately, with a new sense of self and responsibility. But it would take some years before he could achieve coherence between his moral outlook and his day-to-day behavior, and even longer before such coherence would be reflected in his writing. At first the fact that he no longer needed to guard his identity from his separate circles of friends and colleagues simply fed the growing undiscipline of his life in the late 1940s. He may have stopped bothering to write in his diary partly because he no longer needed to keep up a private, unifying narrative about his true self, the self at the controlling center of his various, sometimes less than genuine, social lives. But over the longer term, he would continue to need his diary to understand himself, and by the time he began writing in it again––occasionally in 1948, then gradually more often by the early 1950s––he would already be writing about a different person. In the 1970s he would still be trying to achieve, in his reconstructed diary, a coherent account of the changes which had taken place in him during the dissipated personal aftermath of the war.
In August 1949, Isherwood attended an all-night party at the house of Sam From. The other guests whom he mentions in his 1955
outline of the period2 and in his reconstructed diary were Evelyn Caldwell, Paul Goodman, Charles Aufderheide and Alvin Novak.
These were members and friends of The Benton Way Group, a
bohemian ménage, mostly from the Midwest, sharing a house in
Benton Way, in Los Angeles. They were intellectuals, generally highly educated, and predominantly homosexual. Goodman was a