Introduction
xi
Upward became a dogmatic Marxist in the early 1930s, and he
explained in a 1937 essay that:
For the Marxist critic . . . a good book, is one that is true not merely to a temporarily existing situation but also to the future conditions which are developing within that situation. The
greatest books are those which, sensing the forces of the future at work beneath the surface of the past or present reality, remain true to reality for the longest period of time.1
Isherwood first became seriously involved with political ideas during his years in Berlin; he had strong communist sympathies in the 1930s, but he never joined the party. His regret, and moreover his sense of guilt, at not having been able to commit himself like Edward
Upward to the revolutionary cause of the workers in Europe and England, contributes to the bitter tension of his slim masterpiece Prater Violet (1945); related feelings about being away from England during the war fuelled his ingenious and somewhat brittle arguments about emigration and pacifism in his wartime diaries and in his next novels, The World in the Evening (1954) and Down There on a Visit (1962). For most of his life, Isherwood was not politically committed.
As an artist, he abstained, and he bore the guilt of turning his back on worthy causes about which he thought and wrote but in which he took no active role. But as he was finally able to write in his reconstructed diary, “Christopher was certainly more a socialist than he was a fascist, and more a pacifist than he was a socialist. But he was a queer first and foremost.”2
Gay liberation was the only movement for social change to which Isherwood ever felt personally and entirely committed. In July 1971
he noted in his diary that he felt compelled, now, to mention his homosexuality to everyone who interviewed him, and just a few months earlier he had confessed that he was attracted to the idea of himself as “one of the Grand Old Men of the movement.”3 His later work fulfils Upward’s principles in a way that Upward could not have foreseen in 1937 (though Upward read and admired virtually all that Isherwood wrote in the 1970s). Upward had written in the same 1937 essay:
A writer, if he wishes at all to tell the truth, must write about the world as he has already experienced it in the course of his practical 1 “Sketch for a Marxist Interpretation of Literature,” The Mind in Chains: Socialism and the Cultural Revolution, ed. C. Day-Lewis (London, 1937), pp. 46–7.
2 P. 190.
3 Diaries 1960–1983, April 19, 1971.
xii
Introduction
living. And if he shares the life of a class which cannot solve the problems that confront it, which cannot cope with reality, then no matter how honest or talented he may be, his writing will not correspond to reality. . . . He must change his practical life, must go over to the progressive side of the conflict. . . .1
For Upward, the struggle was a class struggle, and the progressive side of the struggle was the side of the workers. He divorced his own class to join the workers, and even gave up his writing, for a time, to do communist party work. For Isherwood, the struggle proved to be a sexual struggle, and he was already on the progressive side, the side of the homosexuals; but that side had yet to assemble itself. And it took Isherwood several decades to find the way to acknowledge his side openly, both in his life and in his work.
Isherwood never gave up his writing as Upward did; for he was a writer above all, not an activist, even when it came to his homosexual kind. By writing in explicit sexual detail about his intimate behavior and that of his close friends and acquaintances in the years immediately following the war, he was portraying the hidden energies and affinities of homosexual men all over the United States who during that period were gathering increasingly in certain, mostly coastal cities as peace and prosperity returned to a country much altered by vast wartime mobilization. This hidden social group, whose consciousness of itself as a group was intensified by the demographic shifts brought about by the war and then extended throughout the 1950s, was to emerge in its own right as a significant force of change in America and in western culture generally during the final third of the twentieth century. Much of this change began in southern
California, and Isherwood was living at its source. His personal myth is part of, and in many ways emblematic of, the larger myth of the group to which he belonged; and his reconstruction of his life during the postwar years foretells much of what was to come.
In The World in the Evening, the novel he was working on during the lost years of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Isherwood wrote more explicitly and more sympathetically than ever before about homosexual and bisexual characters. And he manipulated his publishers and compromised with convention just enough to succeed in getting into print two unsensational homosexual love scenes and a few somewhat more subversive ideas and psychological insights. The sentiments he recorded in his reconstructed diary in 1971, about his sense of 1 “Sketch for a Marxist Interpretation of Literature,” pp. 51–2.
Introduction
xiii
political commitment to queers, were already articulated clearly in The World in the Evening by his character Bob Wood, who remarks on joining the army, “I can’t be a C.O. because, if they declared war on queers––tried to round us up and liquidate us, or something––I’d fight. I’d fight till I dropped. I know that. I’d be so mad I wouldn’t even feel scared. . . . So how can I say I’m a pacifist?”1
Possibly Isherwood felt emboldened to write more candidly about homosexuals after reading Gore Vidal’s novel The City and the Pillar, which Vidal had sent to him in manuscript before its 1948 publication. Three other books which he mentions in the reconstructed diary as having made an even stronger impression on him around the same time, and which have forthright and unsettling passages about homosexuals, were John Horne Burns’s The Gallery (1947), Calder Willingham’s End as a Man (1947), and Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door (1947).2 American attitudes to homosexuality were changing generally in the postwar period in any case, and 1948 also saw the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s massive volume of research, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male––begun in 1938 and based on countless interviews which suggested that as many as thirty-seven percent of men had at least one homosexual experience after the onset of adolescence.
Closer to his heart, Isherwood was almost certainly influenced by the defiant personal style of his companion of the late 1940s, the photographer William Caskey, who was fully capable of the sorts of remarks Isherwood put into the mouth of his character Bob Wood.
Wood is partly modelled on Isherwood’s later lover and longterm friend Jim Charlton, but Isherwood writes in the reconstructed diary that, “Bob Wood isn’t a portrait of Jim, however; he is described as a crusader, a potential revolutionary––which Jim certainly wasn’t and isn’t.”3 Caskey, on the other hand, “declared his homosexuality loudly and shamelessly and never cared whom he shocked. He was a pioneer gay militant in this respect––except that you couldn’t imagine him joining any movement.”4
1 The World in the Evening (New York, 1954), p. 66; (London, 1954), p. 79.
2 Isherwood met Burns in 1947, and records in the reconstructed diary that he wished he had had time to know him better. End as a Man he called “an exciting discovery and the beginning of Christopher’s (more or less) constant enthusiasm for Willingham’s work” (p. 176, n.). Of Knock on Any Door he writes, “Christopher was much moved . . .
when he read it; this was his idea of a sad story. He fell in love with the hero and wrote Willard Motley a fan letter” (p. 140, n.2). Motley’s hero, a heterosexual petty criminal who hustles as trade part time, personifies the absolute defiance of authority which so often captivated Isherwood in his real-life acquaintances.