Christopher Isherwood
L O S T Y E A R S
A Memoir 1945–1951
Edited and introduced by Katherine Bucknell
Contents
Introduction
v
Textual Note
xxxii
Acknowledgements
xxxiv
Lost Years
January 1, 1945–May 9, 1951
August 26, 1971
3
1945
7
1946
52
1947
79
1948
141
1949
175
1950
224
1951
275
Chronology
289
Glossary
299
Index
365
About the Author
Other Books by Christopher Isherwood
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
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-1 He had lost his pocket diary for 1946, and he noted in his diary on September 2, 1971
that during the postwar period even his pocket diaries were not kept up every day.
2 All of these entries have already been published in Christopher Isherwood, Diaries Volume One 1939– 1960 (D 1), ed. Katherine Bucknell (London, 1996; New York, 1997).
In the reconstructed diary, Isherwood usually calls these diaries “journals,” thereby distinguishing them from his day-to-day diaries.
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Introduction
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 noveclass="underline"
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 Introduction
vii
should say how, 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.1
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 un-publishable. It might keep me amused, like knitting, but I should be getting on with something else as well.
The project which he compared to “knitting”––recreating the
sequence and sense of his life during the late 1940s in little, unimportant stitches––did more than just keep Isherwood amused as he had at first imagined. It proved both challenging and absorbing, and for several years he attempted no other work of his own––
although during the first half of the 1970s he collaborated with Don Bachardy on a television script of Frankenstein (1971), and on three other scripts which were never made: The Lady from the Land of the Dead, The Beautiful and Damned ( both for television), and a film script of Isherwood’s novel A Meeting by the River (1967), which they had already successfully adapted for the stage. Moreover, Isherwood’s
“knitting,” somewhat like the flow of unselfconscious, free-
associative talk in psychoanalysis, evidently set his mind free to delve more directly than ever before into his private life. The very insignificance and confidentiality of the task opened new avenues to self-reflection. And so perhaps without at first realizing it, Isherwood embarked on an entirely new episode of his life’s work.
In his Thanksgiving diary entry he had gone on to ask himself whether he would ever again write fiction:
Have I given up all idea of writing another novel, then? No, not 1 Christopher Isherwood, Diaries 1960–1983 (unpublished), November 26, 1970.