Isherwood felt guilty that he had failed to find a way for Heinz to escape permanently from Germany, that he had failed to be a committed social revolutionary, that he had failed to return to England during the war, that he had failed to become a monk. How could either one of them conduct a successful love relationship while shouldering such burdens? Gradually Isherwood became promiscuous with countless others, and as it progresses the reconstructed diary increasingly becomes a Proustian catalogue of all the relationships in which he tried and failed to find, or to be, the ideal companion. Without self-defense, the narrative obliquely reveals, again and again, Isherwood’s further guilt over having loved and left so many.
As a form of confession and expiation, the reconstructed diary is presided over by the ghost of E. M. Forster. In the 1970 Thanksgiving diary entry in which he first mentioned his plan to write it, Isherwood had commented: “I have also had the idea that my
memoir of Swami might be published with a memoir of Morgan,
based on his letters to me. So that the book would be a Tale of Two Gurus, as it were.”2 Forster died just a year before Isherwood began writing the reconstruction, and in the interval Isherwood supervised the publication of Forster’s own explicitly homosexual work,
Maurice, which had lain waiting many decades to reach print.3 The publication of Maurice in 1971 may have been a spur to begin the reconstruction when he did and to make it as explicit as he did.
While Swami gave Isherwood unconditional love, Forster judged.
And it was Forster’s moral character which made Isherwood feel the need to judge himself. Isherwood writes in the reconstructed diary that “he thought of Forster as a great writer and as his particular master.” In the late 1940s, even though he had already known Forster for a decade and a half (since 1932), he was still in awe of him.
Somewhat surprisingly, he was not in awe of Forster as a writer: “It was as a human being that Forster awed him. Forster demanded truth in all his relationships; underneath his charming unalarming exterior he was a stern moralist and his mild babylike eyes looked deep into you. Their glance made Christopher feel false and tricky.”4 Forster let Isherwood know, for instance, that he disapproved of the way
1 P. 55.
2 Diaries 1960–1983, November 26, 1970.
3 Written 1913–1914; revised 1959–1960.
4 Pp. 94–5.
Introduction
xxvii
Isherwood handled his 1938 affair with the ex-chorus boy Jacky Hewit, and by 1971 when Isherwood wrote the reconstructed account of this prewar episode, he openly conceded that he felt guilty about promising to bring Hewit to America and then never sending for him.
Forster’s moral influence can be seen reaching forward into many areas of Isherwood’s life, providing a standard against which Isherwood implicitly measured other actions, even the many about which Forster knew nothing. By the time he wrote the reconstructed diary, the intensity of guilt had abated, but the need to judge his youthful self as Forster might once have judged him persisted.
If Forster demanded of Isherwood that he come to terms with past actions, Isherwood’s other guru, Swami Prabhavananda, offered a style of thought that looked to the future. Swami’s unconditional love existed in the context of a philosophy where guilt had no role.
The spiritual aspirant in Vedanta aims to leave the concerns of the world behind, and in meditation, which Isherwood practiced every day for many years, to remember was not as important as to forget.
By the end of the 1940s, it was time for Isherwood to leave his past and his burden of guilt behind him. The years of turmoil and waste were to be followed by tremendous new achievements.
A new American friend, Speed Lamkin, helped him to find a way forward with The World in the Evening by cutting out the part of the book that was most closely connected to Isherwood’s old European life and his former, English successes. Oddly enough, Lamkin seems to have hit on his solution through a lack of historical awareness and perhaps even without recognizing why his advice was so useful. He read the manuscript during the spring of 1951 and told Isherwood,
“The refugees are a bore.”1 They were based on the real-life refugees, mostly German and Austrian Jews, to whom Isherwood
had taught English in Haverford, Pennsylvania, during the early part of the war. Isherwood’s determination to write about the refugees––
demonstrated by vain years of effort––was evidently fed by the power of his social conscience and by the allure of his former success in writing about the German middle classes. After all, his descriptions of his Berlin acquaintances, to whose shabby and trivial lives he had once been able to give a bohemian glamor of complete originality, had made his reputation. And the moral viewpoint associated with E. M. Forster and with Isherwood’s friend Edward Upward, as well as Isherwood’s own puritanism, might have urged him to persist with such a socially worthy subject.
1 P. 284.
xxviii
Introduction
Speed Lamkin’s moral viewpoint––if he had one at all––was the opposite of Forster’s or Upward’s. He was unabashedly, vulgarly ambitious. He was a clever boy from a small town in the South who had come to Hollywood to become rich and powerful and famous.
He shared none of Isherwood’s guilt or anxiety about social revolution, the cause of the workers, pacifism or the war. He was shallow and ruthless, and his ruthlessness was something which Isherwood desperately needed at this point in his life. As with his novels, so with his life: certain themes had to go. The refugees had to go; guilt had to go; and as Isherwood knew and Lamkin kept reminding him,
Caskey had to go. Isherwood recalls of Speed’s comment on the refugees: “Speed with his ruthlessness had disregarded Christopher’s feelings and expressed his own. Christopher could never be grateful enough to him.”1
Lamkin was quintessentially American, and he beckoned
Isherwood forward into Isherwood’s chosen new culture, with its easy rewards and its endless appetite for change. For the Isherwood of the 1930s, immersed in and obsessed by Germany, the refugees would have been an ideal subject. But Isherwood was now immersed in and obsessed by America. In Christopher and His Kind Isherwood explains that he had learned to speak German “simply and solely to be able to talk to his sex partners.” This had given German a powerful erotic significance: “For him, the entire German language
. . . was irradiated with Sex.”2 From the start of the 1940s he wanted to have sex with American boys, and it was the American language which became charged for him with erotic energy. As he observed in his Thanksgiving diary entry of 1970, his poetry, his fiction always consisted of his reactions to real experience; with the refugees, he was trying to force himself to write about something that was no longer intensely real to him. He observes in the reconstructed diary that even Berthold Viertel––a refugee and mentor once commanding the quality of attention from Isherwood which resulted in one of his finest novels, Prater Violet––became unimportant when Isherwood’s sense of personal identification with the German diaspora faded: “As Christopher became increasingly detached from his own German-refugee persona (which belonged to the post-Berlin years of travel around Europe with Heinz) Viertel had lost his power to make
Christopher feel guilty and responsible for him.”3 And some of the Haverford refugees had themselves begun to lose interest in Germany. In contrast to the German and Austrian artists and intellec-1 P. 284.
2 C&HK, U.S., p. 21; U.K., p. 23.
3 P. 148.
Introduction
xxix
tuals Isherwood knew in Hollywood, who were proudly nurturing their native cultural heritage until they could return home after the war, the more ordinary refugees in Haverford, despite their sophistication and cynicism, wanted and needed to learn English and to learn what Isherwood’s Haverford boss, Caroline Norment, called the “American Way of Life.”1 Unlike many of their Hollywood