introduced Caskey to his friends, so that his life became more unified than ever before, but he was unable to achieve the same unity in his work. Although he put homosexual and bisexual characters into his novel, and portrayed them sympathetically, he was not writing from the center of his own homosexual sensibility. In his diary at the time he argued that his main character “has got to be me . . . it must be written out of the middle of my consciousness.”1 But in the
reconstructed diary he ridicules this younger aspiration: “How could he write out of the middle of his consciousness about someone who was tall, bisexual and an heir to a fortune?”2 There was a kind of apartheid in his work between the writer and the man, and it was stopping all progress.
Paralleling his difficulties in writing as a homosexual were his difficulties in writing as an American. Prater Violet, though written in California, is a book about England and Europe, and it is written in Isherwood’s prewar style. The World in the Evening shows that even by the early 1950s, Isherwood had not yet discovered an American style. And despite his work for the American movies, his ear had not yet adjusted to the American speech patterns he tried to use in The World in the Evening; he managed only a phoney blandness. When Isherwood first visited home after the war, in 1947, some of his English friends commented that his accent had changed. To them, he sounded American, though to Americans he sounded English. He
had certainly begun to spell words in the American way, a gradual transformation which would continue for many years. But in the late 1940s the change was not yet fully wrought.
By the time he wrote his last three novels––Down There on a Visit, A Single Man, and A Meeting by the River––the wit of the young Christopher Isherwood––the edgy, embarrassable voice, the controlled mania, the half-acknowledged hyperbole––had begun to give way to a plainer, more sedate tone, relying for its humor on circumstance and narrative point of view more so than on heightened mood 1 August 17, 1949, D 1, p. 414.
2 P. 200.
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and temperament. He could still achieve comic tension; for instance, his description in A Single Man of George preparing, like a magician, to teach his morning class, is bursting with the old, barely restrained glee, and even surpasses the similar, earlier descriptions of his own teacher “Mr. Holmes” in Lions and Shadows. At the same time, the underlying polemic of A Single Man is more prominent than in
Isherwood’s earlier works. In A Meeting by the River the structure and implied argument of the novel, though subtle, are even more
prominent, and the epistolary characterizations of the two English brothers seem stiff and unnatural, as if Isherwood could no longer write in the English idiom that had once been his own. In his maturity, Isherwood seemed increasingly impelled to write in his own authentic voice, to write about real events, and to express his opinions and judgements; the transparent, styleless style he cultivated in America was better suited to truth-telling than to fiction. And this was the style in which he would begin to untangle and explain the impulsive, excited, and even neurotic commitments and crises of his youth.
For his autobiographical works of the 1970s, Isherwood’s style became even plainer. It was not even noticeably American (as, for instance, it had been in A Single Man). It was contemporary,
cosmopolitan, without striking local color. When he was struggling to get started with Christopher and His Kind, he fretted in his diary that his style had changed for the worse, but he was confident that his subject matter was weighty and worthwhile: “When I reread my
earlier work, I feel that perhaps my style may have lost its ease and brightness and become ponderous. Well, so it’s ponderous. At least I still have matter, if not manner.”1 In fact, he was noticing the transformation which had begun many years before, and which had continued along the lines of his personal development and according to the needs of his subject matter. Now, he was no longer in the business of making myths, but rather of trying to explain how he had made myths in the past. Despite the explicit sexual revelations in the reconstructed diary, Isherwood’s purpose was not, as it had been, for instance, in A Single Man, to outrage the procreating middle classes with his portrayal of homosexual anger and the paranoia he felt was characteristic of minorities. The reconstructed diary is neither angry nor apologetic in tone (Isherwood had come to feel his wartime diaries were unduly apologetic). Instead, it has a kind of anthropological matter-of-factness––describing his work, his social life, his memories and fantasies, his many sexual liaisons with friends, strangers, and occasionally lovers much as he might have described 1 Diaries 1960–1983, November 2, 1973.
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them for the benefit of a sex researcher like Evelyn Hooker, but in the plain, literary language he had evolved for himself.
His flat, explanatory, almost pedagogic prose in some ways
resembles the mature social realism of his friend Edward Upward whose prose models included John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Cowper, and George Gissing. And the transformation in Isherwood’s style corresponds to a similar change in Upward’s. It can also be compared to changes in Auden’s poetic style. All three of them abandoned the fantastic brilliance of their youth for a more earnest style in maturity. The abundance of quasi-mystical imaginative energy in their early writing disappeared as each converted to a set of beliefs which absorbed that energy on a different––higher––plane.
Their writing became more understated and more cautious as they became aware they were writing in relation to what they held to be absolute truths. This happened earliest to Upward when he converted to Marxism; he wrote one last feverishly mystical piece, Journey to the Border (1938), about his conversion, and then fell silent altogether for several decades. It happened more gradually to Auden after he returned to Christianity and to Isherwood after he took up Vedanta. For the same reason that Isherwood wrote his biography of the mystic Ramakrishna from the point of view of a skeptic and in the short, reiterative cadences of the King James Bible, he wrote his late autobiographical works in heavily ordinary modern prose and incorporated into them whole passages from his diaries, un-embellished: he wanted the experiences to shine through the
writing rather than to seem to be created by the writing. This unpretentious late prose style was for him the most convincing medium in which to recount, in My Guru and His Disciple, the story of his reverence for Swami Prabhavananda, and it differs little from the style of his diaries in which he tells the episodic story of his love for Don Bachardy.
Just as the reconstructed diary tells of Isherwood’s repeated failure to get on with his novel, so it also tells of his repeated failure to get on with his life. As with his work, so with William Caskey: Isherwood started and restarted the relationship, never certain whether Caskey loved him, never able to impose order on their increasingly drunken domestic life. Some of their most tender moments were brought on by their shared sense of guilt over how cruel they were to one another; yet guilt also appears to have been a main stumbling block to progress between them. Isherwood observes that “both Caskey and Christopher were entering upon their relationship with powerful feelings of guilt. . . . Neither of them would admit to their guilt, xxvi
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except by the violence with which they reacted against it.”1 Caskey felt guilty that he was not a good Catholic, that he had not had an honorable discharge from the navy, that he did not love his family.