counterparts, they had lost everything and, in some cases, suffered great physical deprivation and pain. They wanted to forget about their European past, assimilate into American culture and get on with their lives. Many of them did this rapidly and successfully; they virtually evaporated into America. Isherwood needed to do the same.
His decision to drop the refugees from The World in the Evening is emblematic of his shedding of his old continental affinities along with his burden of guilt; finally he began to accept his new homeland and his unknown, solitary future.
But Speed Lamkin did not persuade Isherwood to abandon his social conscience altogether. The reconstructed diary grinds to an un-cadenced, almost shapeless halt in 1951, stranded tellingly upon Isherwood’s account of his dealings with a friend of Speed Lamkin, Gus Field. Field is a minor character in Isherwood’s narrative, but a minor character whose fate compares suggestively with the fate of the refugees and even with the fate of Caskey. Lamkin and Field, with Isherwood’s permission, wrote a stage adaptation of Goodbye to Berlin.
Isherwood liked it, but his friends Dodie Smith and her husband Alec Beesley (rich through Dodie’s talent as a playwright) did not. So the Beesleys connived that John van Druten should undertake the same project. Van Druten’s adaptation, I Am a Camera, would eventually place Isherwood on the road to fame and relative fortune, despite wrangles when van Druten took the largest share of the royalties.
When the time came to make clear to Lamkin and Field that van Druten’s version of Goodbye to Berlin was to receive Isherwood’s imprimatur, Lamkin accepted the new situation cheerfully and offered no recriminations, thereby abandoning his own script and ingratiating himself successfully with the little group behind van Druten’s version.
Field, though, who behaved just as well as Lamkin, was excluded and ignored. Isherwood writes in the reconstructed diary:
As for Gus Field, he took the news well, too. Which was more
admirable, since he got very little gratitude from Christopher or anybody else for doing so. If he was invited to the Beesleys’, it was only once or twice. Speed dropped him. Christopher only saw
1 D 1, April 28, 1942, p. 220.
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Introduction
him occasionally. He was treated as a bore and an outsider––and that, from Christopher’s point of view, was what he was.1
Speed had called the refugees boring; Isherwood calls Gus Field a bore. To be boring was an unacceptable crime in Isherwood’s new Speed Lamkin-style drive for success. Perversely, Field became the scapegoat himself for the ill treatment meted out to him by
Isherwood and the Beesleys. As with the refugees and Caskey, Field and the guilt he inspired in Isherwood and his friends, had to go.
And yet part of Isherwood brooded over the excluded, marginalized figure of Gus Field, resulting in the strange non-ending of the reconstructed diary. For Isherwood, the Field episode was closed but not resolved. He had originally planned, at Thanksgiving 1970, that the reconstructed diary might carry through to 1955––or at least to 1953, when he met Don Bachardy. But by March 1974, as he was
writing about the end of 1950, his ambition had shrunk: “I would like to record the winter of 1951–1952, even if I go no further.”2 In September the same year, advancing slowly, he had again reduced his aims, “I’ve reached January 1951. I would like, at least, to get the rest of that year recorded, particularly the production of I Am a Camera.”3
Finally, in January 1977, with Christopher and His Kind already published, he had made only a little further progress, though he still planned to continue: “. . . thus far, I’ve reached May 1951 and I would like to carry the narrative on until at least the end of 1952.”4
But he never returned to the task, and in the end he never got beyond the shadow of Gus Field––the necessary victim of Isherwood’s success. From time to time, Isherwood also mentions in his diary the idea of returning to the subject of the refugees and writing a novel solely about them. But he never did; they, too, were part of the past of which he had to let go. Their story survives only in his wartime diaries, an adequate and important historical account. As for Caskey, his story is contained in the reconstructed diary.
Isherwood would never cease to be aware of the way in which all success, and indeed all art, excludes or marginalizes somebody. In a sense, his art tries to do the opposite, but whatever is brought to the fore must push something else aside. As a schoolboy he had written to his mother: “I have an essay on ‘omission is the Beginning of all Art’ which it may amuse you to see.”5 And as he explains at some 1 P. 286.
2 Diaries 1960–1983, March 28, 1974.
3 Diaries 1960–1983, September 11, 1974.
4 Diaries 1960–1983, January 2, 1977.
5 February 13, 1921, to Kathleen Isherwood, in Christopher Isherwood, The Repton Letters, ed. George Ramsden (Settrington, England, 1997), p. 14.
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length in Christopher and His Kind, much of the difficulty he had with his work, throughout his career, can be understood as his struggle with the question of how the artist decides what to leave out of his art. The subjects not chosen, the themes not addressed, haunt the imagination with the pain of their rejection; for the novelist who feels a strong loyalty to historical fact, the necessity to omit is like the burden of original sin, a crime of neglect which must precede the possibility of artistic creation.
Isherwood was fascinated throughout his life with marginal figures and with minorities. He himself was a member of what was for
centuries one of the most oppressed and anonymous minorities in human society: during the first half of his life, the society which raised and educated him also told him that he was a criminal. Thus, he willingly and with eager curiosity associated with others who, for various reasons, were called criminals and were pushed like him to the margin of society. The shady figures of the Berlin demi-monde
––Mr. Norris and the like––had once offered him fruitful ground for his art. But Isherwood was not prepared to live his whole life in the shadows. As a writer and a man he wished to move into the main-stream and forward into the future.
Looking back in the 1970s, recalling the struggle to focus his life and his artistic energies by cutting away the boring, the unglamorous, the unsuccessful, he still reflected upon what had been pushed aside.
Gus Field, personifying as he did the guilt from which Isherwood wished to free himself, is a figure well suited to claim not only Isherwood’s but also the reader’s final attention in the reconstructed diary. With Isherwood’s mature success as a writer had come the confidence to unveil both those aspects of his character and his past actions of which society disapproved and also those aspects of his character and past actions of which he himself disapproved; they were not generally the same. By reconstructing them explicitly in Lost Years he was able to make some of the differences clear. In its portrayal of Isherwood’s sexuality, Lost Years is a boldly political book. Perhaps much more surprising, it is also implicitly and persistently moral, describing and judging––often with harsh self-criticism––even the minutiae of daily conduct, in order to try to redefine what is genuinely good and genuinely evil in human
relationships.
Textual Note
This diary describing the years 1945 to 1951 was written by Christopher Isherwood between 1971 and 1977. It fills a gap of about half a decade following World War II when Isherwood had kept his diary very irregularly. He wrote nothing about his day-to-day life from January 1945 until September 1947 when he began a travel diary––published as The Condor and the Cows (1949)––about his trip with his companion of the late 1940s, William Caskey, through South America. After the South American trip, Isherwood began occasionally to write in his diary again, but not until the early 1950s did he reestablish his old routine of writing several times a week. The entries that he did make during the late 1940s and early 1950s are printed in his Diaries Volume One 1939– 1960, along with an outline he made, probably in 1955, showing some of the main events of those years.