1 P. 182.
2 D 1, pp. 389–94.
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philosopher, social critic, published poet, and novelist whose work Isherwood later came to admire; Aufderheide a movie camera technician who read widely and wrote poetry on the side; Novak a
philosophy student at UCLA. Sam From himself was a successful businessman. Others who were part of The Benton Way Group at
various times––including Isadore From, David Sachs, Edouard
Roditi, Fern Maher—were psychoanalysts, philosophers, scholars, social workers, artists.
Evelyn Caldwell, soon to marry and change her name to Evelyn
Hooker, was the psychologist specializing in Rorschach techniques who was about to begin what became her life’s work: studying the homosexual community in Los Angeles. She attended many homosexual parties where she joined in the revelry but also engaged in long, personal conversations with the other guests, and within a year of the party where she and Isherwood met, she started to circulate extensive questionnaires and conduct scores of interviews and psychological tests. In 1956, at a professional conference in Chicago, she was to challenge widespread opinion among her colleagues when she presented the first results of her research, which demonstrated that expert psychologists could not distinguish homosexuals from heterosexuals on the basis of then standard, widely used personality tests. In fact, her results from these types of tests showed that as high a percentage of homosexuals as heterosexuals were psychologically well adjusted. She, like Isherwood, was to become a hero of gay liberation.
The conversation at Benton Way parties was friendly but also
highbrow and wide-ranging, addressing literature, social change, and, as Isherwood recalls of the all-night party in 1949, the nature of homosexual love. That night the “Symposium,” as he calls it,
“continued until dawn.” Then Isherwood returned home with Alvin Novak, the young man he deemed to be the Alcibiades of the group.
In the reconstructed diary Isherwood exposes his mixed motives of passion and idealism and even recalls an element of farce: a drunken Sam From came along with Isherwood and Novak, evidently hoping for sex, then politely passed out, eliminating himself from competition. Isherwood writes in the reconstructed diary that “he later looked back upon that night as having been highly romantic. It was unique, at any rate. Christopher never went to a party that was quite like it.”1
In The Benton Way Group Isherwood had found a small intellec-
tual community seriously and capably examining the predicament of 1 P. 198.
xviii
Introduction
the homosexual in modern society and at the same time pursuing an experiment in living that offered them some of the benefits of conventional family life without oppressing their sexuality. In a sense, he had found a new version of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) where he had, as he put it in Christopher and His Kind, first been “brought face to face with his tribe”1 in Berlin in late 1929. According to Christopher and His Kind, Hirschfeld’s respectable, scientific approach to sexuality had at first offended Isherwood’s puritanism, but in the end
Isherwood was captivated by Hirschfeld’s persona as a “silly solemn old professor.”2 Over the years he came to honor Hirschfeld and his personally dangerous campaign to revise the German criminal code so that homosexual acts between men would be legal.
Hirschfeld was homosexual, Evelyn Hooker was not; and yet there are obvious parallels in their work and in their practical style of approach. Isherwood became close friends with Evelyn Hooker, and just as in Berlin he had rented a room from Hirschfeld’s sister immediately next door to the Institut f ür Sexualwissenschaft, so at the beginning of the 1950s he rented the garden house at Evelyn Hooker’s property on Saltair Avenue in Brentwood. His interest in the study of homosexuality was far from superficial, and he evidently wished to involve himself with it both officially and personally. For Isherwood, and for his close friend W. H. Auden, sexual emanci-pation in Berlin had resulted partly from their anonymous access, as foreigners, to willing boys they met easily in bars and on the streets, and partly from the newly dawning self-understanding which
resulted from conscious study of homosexuality and, in Auden’s case, from a brief attempt at psychoanalysis. At Hirschfeld’s institute, sexual love in all its strange and familiar forms was classified, codified, categorized. Along similarly analytical lines, Isherwood and Auden talked endlessly between themselves and with other friends about their relationships, and they read and also talked about Proust, Gide, Corvo, Freud, Jung, Georg Groddeck, Edward Carpenter, and many others. None of these literary and psychological texts offered them a satisfactory account of who they were. In their own work, throughout their careers, each of them continued to consider and address the question in any number of ways––veiled and indirect at first, then, in Isherwood’s case, increasingly overt as the years went by. The earnest scientific thoroughness with which Evelyn Hooker, like Hirschfeld, approached her research, lent Isherwood’s way of life in California a 1 Christopher and His Kind (C&HK) (New York, 1976), p. 16; (London, 1977), p. 20.
2 C&HK, U.S., p. 17; U.K., p. 20.
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xix
reassuringly dull legitimacy and probably contributed to his increasing openness about his homosexuality in his writing as well as in his personal life.
In the early 1950s when he was living next door to Evelyn
Hooker, Isherwood agreed to write a popular book with her about homosexuality. The plan came to nothing, in part because when Don Bachardy moved into the garden house with Isherwood,
Hooker’s husband became anxious that Bachardy’s youthful appearance would cause a scandal, and the Hookers asked Isherwood to move out. This left Isherwood and Bachardy homeless––a tiny echo of the crisis Isherwood had experienced when Heinz Neddermeyer was refused entry to England in 1934––and it caused a terrible strain in Isherwood’s friendship with Evelyn Hooker. Two decades later, in December 1970, just as Isherwood was wondering what to write next after Kathleen and Frank, she reminded him of the project. But the idea made him anxious, and his reaction was perhaps still colored by resentment at her failure to stand by him in his relationship with Don Bachardy. On December 11 he wrote:
Saw Evelyn Hooker yesterday. She wants me to work with her
on a “popular” book on homosexuality. . . . I am doubtful about the project. It seems that I shall have to read through sixty case histories and then write about them––which really means retell them, and what the hell is the use of that? Non-writers never understand what writers can and cannot do. They think they can tell you what to say and that you will then somehow magically resay it so it’s marvellous. However, I didn’t want to refuse straight away. I’ll read some of the stuff first and try to find out exactly what it is that Evelyn expects. She is a very good woman and her intentions are of the noblest and I would like to help her, if I can do so without becoming her secretary.
Isherwood read through just two of the case histories and felt certain that the language of psychology was not his own language. In
February he wrote:
This morning I also finished the second of the two files I
borrowed from Evelyn Hooker. What a plodding old donkey
Psychology is! Evelyn’s questions are full of phrases like, “his own processes of sexual arousal are on an ascending incline,” “I don’t have a very clear picture of how much mutual stimulation is going on,” “the primary stimulation is on the head of the penis, would that be true?,” “while I have asked you many questions about
sexual preferences and gratifications, I have not really asked you xx