Lost Years Read online

  1953 January 6, Caskey leaves for San Francisco and ships out again; February 14, Isherwood begins relationship with Don Bachardy; February 20–26, Bachardy’s brother Ted has a nervous breakdown and is committed; April 25, Bachardy moves out of his mother’s apartment and into his own furnished room in Hollywood; May 16, Bachardy moves into Marguerite and Harry Brown’s apartment in West Hollywood; August 5, Isherwood completes The World in the Evening; September, Isherwood moves out of Evelyn Hooker’s garden house, at her request, and stays at the Browns’ apartment with Bachardy; September 19, Isherwood and Bachardy move together into their own apartment; during October, Isherwood’s article on Ernst Toller appears in Encounter; also in 1953, How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, translated with Swami Prabhavananda, is published.

  1954 January, Isherwood begins editing an anthology, Great English Short Stories, and plans a biography of Ramakrishna as well as various new pieces of autobiographical fiction; January 25, he begins work for Eddie Knopf at MGM on Diane; June, The World in the Evening is published in the U.S. and the U.K.; August 25, Isherwood completes script for Diane; August 26, Isherwood turns fifty; during the spring and summer, John Collier writes a screenplay based on John van Druten’s play, I Am a Camera, and Julie Harris accepts the lead; November, Isherwood and Bachardy visit Tennessee Williams in Key West to watch filming of The Rose Tattoo in which Isherwood plays a bit part; December, they travel to Mexico with Jo and Ben Masselink and Isherwood has an idea for a new novel which will eventually be called Down There on a Visit.

  1955 Isherwood gets more work at MGM on Diane and writing The Wayfarer, a script about Buddha; February 10, Bachardy starts his junior year at UCLA; February 12, Maria Huxley dies; March 18, Ted Bachardy has another breakdown and is hospitalized again; May 2, Diane starts filming; May 18, Bachardy’s twenty-first birthday party; May 28, Isherwood begins writing his new novel first conceived in Mexico; June 8, he meets Thom Gunn; June 22, Isherwood sees preview of film, I Am a Camera; October 12, Isherwood leaves with Bachardy for New York City and on October 20, they sail from New York for Tangier; October 30, they sail for Italy and in mid-December continue on to Somerset Maugham’s house in France; by Christmas, they are in Munich; December 28, they arrive in Paris.

  1956 January, Isherwood and Bachardy arrive in London; January 30–February 6, Isherwood stays with his mother and brother at Wyberslegh and sees Marple Hall for the last time (it will be demolished in 1959); March 6, Isherwood begins writing his new novel, calling it, for the moment, The Lost; March 11, Isherwood and Bachardy leave England for New York and California; during April, they buy 434 Sycamore Road; July 2, Bachardy enrolls at Chouinard Art School; September 24, Isherwood begins work on Jean-Christophe for Jerry Wald at Fox.

  1957 February 12, Isherwood discovers a lump on the side of his belly; February 15, the tumor is successfully removed and proves benign, but ill health and depression persist; April, Isherwood prepares an introduction for a new edition of All the Conspirators, to be published in U.K.; early July, Isherwood and Gavin Lambert begin television project for Hermione Gingold, Emily Ermingarde; August 15, Jean-Christophe is shelved by Fox; October 8, Isherwood and Bachardy begin around-the-world trip, via Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bali, Bangkok, and Angkor; November 30, they fly to Calcutta and in December continue on to London.

  1958 January 30, Isherwood and Bachardy reach Los Angeles (via New York); February 2, Bachardy returns to Chouinard Art School; February 11, Isherwood renews work on his novel and on the Ramakrishna biography; February 25, Bachardy begins taking painting classes from Vernon Old; mid-March, Isherwood begins work on Mary Magdalene for David Selznick, until late June; July 5, Isherwood completes a new foreword for U.S. edition of All the Conspirators; October, Isherwood and Bachardy begin writing a play, The Monsters; during the autumn, Isherwood and Lambert begin revising the film script of The Vacant Room.

  1959 Mid-January, Isherwood and Bachardy complete The Monsters; March 7-April 13, Isherwood writes “Mr. Lancaster,” the first part of the final draft of his novel; March 20, he signs on to teach at Los Angeles State College; April, the first installment of Ramakrishna and His Disciples appears in the March/April issue of the Vedanta Society magazine; May 1, Bachardy takes his first job as a professional artist; Isherwood begins writing “Ambrose,” the second part of his novel; mid-June, Isherwood and Bachardy undertake to buy 145 Adelaide Drive; July 31, Isherwood finishes writing “Afterwards,” a homosexual short story; August 18, Isherwood and Bachardy travel to New York and then England where Isherwood visits Wyberslegh and sees his mother for the last time; September, they visit France and return to New York and Santa Monica; September 22, Isherwood begins teaching at L.A. State College; September 30, Isherwood and Bachardy move to 145 Adelaide Drive; October, “Mr. Lancaster” appears in The London Magazine.

  1960 L.A. State mounts exhibition on Isherwood; during the spring, Isherwood begins working with Charles Laughton on a play about Socrates; April 18, begins writing part three of his novel; May 25, he accepts a job at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) for the following autumn; June 10, begins writing “Paul,” the final part of his novel; June 15, Kathleen Isherwood dies; August 26, Isherwood completes his last handwritten diary; September 22, he begins teaching at UCSB; also in 1960, Great English Short Stories is published by Dell.

  1961 January 23, Bachardy leaves for London to study art at the Slade; April 6, Isherwood joins Bachardy in London; he works with Auden on Berlin musical, but they abandon it when Auden leaves London in mid-June; October 2, Bachardy’s first show opens at the Redfern Gallery; October 15, Isherwood returns to Los Angeles alone; December 11–12, he travels to New York to meet Bachardy.

  1962 January 2, Bachardy’s first New York show opens at the Sagittarius Gallery; January 25, Isherwood returns alone to Santa Monica and on January 28 begins teaching again at L.A. State; he plans a new novel called, at first, The English Woman; February 17, Bachardy returns; early March, Down There on a Visit is published by Methuen in the U.K. and by Isherwood’s new publisher, Simon and Schuster, in the U.S.; Isherwood’s UCSB lectures are broadcast on radio; Isherwood and Bachardy begin remodelling their garage as a studio for Bachardy; Isherwood’s novel, The English Woman, begins to evolve into A Single Man.

  1963 During the winter and early spring, Bachardy considers living alone; October, Isherwood finishes draft of Ramakrishna and His Disciples; October 21, Isherwood sends final draft of A Single Man to both his U.S. and U.K. publishers; November 22, Aldous Huxley dies; December, Isherwood travels via Japan to India with Swami Prabhavananda and thinks for the first time of writing A Meeting by the River.

  1964 January, Isherwood returns from India via Rome and New York and begins final draft of Ramakrishna and His Disciples; February, he starts to gather material for Exhumations; March, Isherwood begins working on The Loved One with Terry Southern; meets David Hockney; during the summer, Bachardy travels to North Africa, Europe, and London; July–September, Isherwood works on screenplay of Reflections in a Golden Eye; A Single Man is published in the U.S. by Simon and Schuster and, on September 10, in the U.K. by Methuen; September–December, Isherwood works on screenplay of The Sailor from Gibraltar.

  1965 January 6, Bachardy leaves for a further long spell in New York, visiting several times during the year; Isherwood finishes The Sailor from Gibraltar and Exhumations; early February, Isherwood takes up post as Regent’s Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA); spring, he begins writing A Meeting by the River; April 8, Ramakrishna and His Disciples is published by Methuen and appears in the U.S. during the summer; November 1, he begins Hero-Father, Demon-Mother (Kathleen and Frank).

  1966 Spring, Isherwood is visiting professor at UCLA; Gerald Heard has the first of many strokes; Exhumations is published in the U.S. and the U.K.; May 31, Isherwood completes third draft of A Meeting by the River; July, he agrees to work on Silent Night with Danny Mann for ABC television, travels with Mann
to Austria in September for filming; October, Isherwood visits England and stays with his brother at Wyberslegh where he reads his father’s letters; November, Cabaret, Fred Ebb and John Kander’s stage musical based on I Am a Camera, opens in New York, produced by Hal Prince.

  1967 January, Isherwood begins working in more earnest on the book which eventually will be called Kathleen and Frank; spring, he corrects proofs of A Meeting by the River which is published in April in the U.S. and in June in the U.K.; May, he returns to England to look at family papers at Wyberslegh for Kathleen and Frank, carrying some back to California with him; also in 1967. Isherwood works with James Bridges on a play of A Meeting by the River.

  1968 Isherwood adapts Bernard Shaw’s novella The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God for the stage, and also adapts Wedekind’s Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box; Bachardy again spends time in London and in New York; spring, Hockney begins work on a double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy; October, Isherwood again begins writing Kathleen and Frank; also during 1968, Isherwood and Bachardy work together on the play of A Meeting by the River.

  1969 The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God opens at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles; July, Isherwood and Bachardy travel to Tahiti, Bora Bora, Samoa, New Zealand and Australia and begin work on a screenplay of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God for Tony Richardson; also in 1969, Essentials of Vedanta is published.

  1970 February—April, in London together, Isherwood and Bachardy continue to work on stage version of A Meeting by the River; Isherwood sends final draft of Kathleen and Frank to U.S. and U.K. publishers; also in 1970, E. M. Forster dies, leaving Isherwood the rights to Maurice.

  1971 Isherwood completes revisions to Kathleen and Frank; February, Isherwood and Bachardy start work on a TV script of Frankenstein for Universal Studios; April 6, Stravinsky dies; August 14, Gerald Heard dies; August 26, Isherwood begins writing reconstructed diary of the “lost years,” 1945–1951; October, Kathleen and Frank is published by Methuen; also in 1971, Isherwood undergoes hand surgery for Depuytren’s contracture.

  1972 January, Isherwood sees preview of film Cabaret, based on the musical, and the U.S. edition of Kathleen and Frank is published by Simon and Schuster; Isherwood and Bachardy undertake another TV script for Universal, The Lady from the Land of the Dead; April, the Los Angeles premiere of James Bridges’ production of A Meeting by the River; also in 1972, Isherwood receives an award from the Hollywood Writers’ Club for a lifetime of distinguished contributions to literature.

  1973 Isherwood and Bachardy travel to London for the filming of Frankenstein; they visit Wyberslegh and afterwards go to Switzerland and Rome; summer, they work together on a screenplay of A Meeting by the River; Jean Ross dies; September 29, Auden dies; October, Isherwood begins a new autobiographical book eventually titled Christopher and His Kind; December, Isherwood and Bachardy’s screenplay, Frankenstein: The True Story, is published by Avon Books.

  1975 Isherwood works with Bachardy on a TV script adapted from Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned.

  1976 May, Isherwood completes the final draft of Christopher and His Kind; July 4, Swami Prabhavananda dies; November, Isherwood’s new U.S. publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux, publishes Christopher and His Kind; Frankenstein: The True Story wins best scenario at the International Festival of Fantastic and Science Fiction Films.

  1977 March, the U.K. edition of Christopher and His Kind is published by Methuen.

  1979 May 15, Richard Isherwood dies of a heart attack; Isherwood and Bachardy collaborate on October.

  1980 My Guru and His Disciple is published in the U.S. and the U.K.; July 16, Isherwood hears that Bill Caskey is dead; October, with drawings by Bachardy, is published.

  1981 October, Isherwood learns that he has a malignant tumor in the prostate.

  1983 July, Isherwood makes his last diary entry.

  1986 January 4, Isherwood dies in Santa Monica.

  Lost Years

  A Memoir 1945–1951

  Christopher Isherwood

  Edited and Introduced by

  Katherine Bucknell

  Introduction

  On his sixty-seventh birthday, August 26, 1971, Christopher Isherwood began to write the autobiographical memoir which is contained in this volume, about his life in California and New York and his travels abroad to England and Europe from January 1945 to May 1951. He called the work a reconstructed diary, and he intended it to recapture a lost period following World War II when he had all but abandoned his lifelong habit of keeping a diary. He based the reconstructed diary on his memories and on what he called his “day-to-day diaries,” the pocket-sized appointment books in which he regularly noted the names of people he saw on a given day and sometimes, cryptically, what they had done together.1 He also drew on the handful of diary entries he did make during the lost years2 and on letters he had written at the time (he asked for some letters to be returned to him for reference), and he consulted a few friends for their own recollections. The reconstructed diary, never completed by Isherwood but also never destroyed, is now published for the first time as Lost Years: A Memoir 1945–1951.

  Like his earlier autobiography about the 1920s, Lions and Shadows (1938), Lost Years describes the relationships and experiences which gave inner shape to Isherwood’s life during the period it portrays, but in contrast to Lions and Shadows, the memoir begun in 1971 is based as closely as possible on fact. Unlike Isherwood’s other diaries, kept contemporaneously with the events they recorded, the manuscript of the reconstructed diary shows many alterations, often using white-out. Moreover, it is heavily annotated with Isherwood’s own footnotes, which comment, correct, and elaborate on his narrative. With a scholarly precision he might have mocked when studying history at Cambridge in the 1920s, he sharply scrutinized and questioned his memories, trying to establish exactly what happened and to understand why.

  Lions and Shadows had aimed to entertain and was prefaced by Isherwood’s disclaimer that “it is not, in the ordinary journalistic sense of the word, an autobiography; it contains no ‘revelations’; it is never ‘indiscreet’; it is not even entirely ‘true.’” Isherwood goes on to say, “Read it as a novel.” But Lost Years is the second book in a major new phase—roughly the final third of his career—in which Isherwood moved away from semi-fictionalized writing towards pure autobiography. It does contain revelations; it is highly indiscreet; and it foregoes deliberate artifice in order to try to recapture actual past events. It should not be read as a novel, although its aspiration to be true is partly reflected in its effort—deeply characteristic of Isherwood—to record and account for the way in which mythological significance arises from real events. In the reconstructed diary, as elsewhere in Isherwood’s work, the play of fantasy and emotion is recognized and incorporated as a dimension of real experience.

  Isherwood completed Kathleen and Frank, his detailed historical book about his parents, in the autumn of 1970. Having spent several years in prolonged meditation upon the heterosexual bond between his parents—they shared a late-Victorian, upper-middle-class marriage which was perfectly happy until devastated by Frank Isherwood’s death in World War I—he seemed to need to react by writing about the very different affinities which shaped his own life. He was no longer motivated by the spirit of rebellion that governed his youth, but certainly, at first, by a spirit of relief and light-heartedness. On Thanksgiving Day 1970, thankful that he had completed Kathleen and Frank, he wondered in his diary, “What shall I write next?” He considered a book about his relationship with his spiritual teacher Swami Prabhavananda—a book he would only begin half a decade later—but he knew already that such a book could not be a novel:

  Surely it would be better from every point of view to do this as a factual book? Well of course there is the difficulty of being frank without being indiscreet: but that difficulty always arises in one form or another. For example, it is absolutely necessary that I should say h
ow, right at the start of our relationship, I told Swami I had a boyfriend (and that he replied, “try to think of him as Krishna”) because my personal approach to Vedanta was, among other things, the approach of a homosexual looking for a religion which will accept him.3

  For Isherwood, a book about his religious life, when he came to write it, would have to begin by addressing the question of his sexuality. So he went on to propose to himself that he write a book expressly about his sexuality and sketched out a plan for the reconstructed diary which he would, in fact, begin on his birthday the following August:

  Then there is the fairly big chunk of diary fill-in which I might do, covering the scantily covered period between January 1, 1945 and February 1955—or maybe February 1953, when I met Don [Bachardy], because that’s the beginning of a new era. This would be quite largely a sexual record and so indiscreet as to be unpublishable. It might keep me amused, like knitting, but I should be getting on with something else as well.