Lost Years (5 page)

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 Home Burns's
The Gallery
(1947), Calder Willingham's
End as a Man
(1947), and Willard Motley's
Knock on Any Door
(1947).
¹³
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.”
¹⁴
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.”
¹⁵

Isherwood makes clear in the reconstructed diary how greatly he admired Caskey's outspokenness about his sexuality. Sometimes Caskey's belligerence was too abrasive. For instance, he became bitterly angry with the Chilean painter Matta and his wife, when Matta well-meaningly said that he himself had tried sex with men, and Isherwood and Caskey never saw the Mattas again. But on other occasions Caskey was killingly witty about his homosexuality. To Natasha Moffat's friendly insult that she was glad to be seated next to “a pansy” during a dinner party at Charlie Chaplin's house, he replied: “Your slang is out of date, Natasha—we don't say ‘pansy' nowadays. We say ‘cocksucker.'” Natasha Moffat had a reputation for energetically offbeat behavior, and her sophisticated Parisian past as an intimate of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre made her tough enough for such repartee. Isherwood recalls in the reconstructed diary that her remark was loud and silenced the group; Caskey's more shocking reply restored the balance. And Isherwood goes on to write of his younger self, “Christopher, who truly adored Caskey at such moments, sat glowing with pride in him.”
¹⁶
His own good manners would never permit him to behave as Caskey did, and he was capable, personally, of feeling embarrassment. “Caskey never suffered from embarrassment. He didn't give a damn what anybody knew about him.”
¹⁷
Isherwood was immensely attracted to Caskey's bold insistence on the truth, his impatience with social nicety, his willingness to startle and disrupt. He recognized a need for such behavior and privately he identified with it.

The rebelliousness in Caskey which Isherwood so adored was among the chief things, in the end, which drove them apart. Their relationship was a constant struggle for power. Neither Caskey nor Isherwood was ever able to admit to the other that he was in love; each held back—guarded, suspicious, unwilling to trust. They often fought violently; Caskey could make Isherwood lose his temper so badly that Isherwood would shout and sometimes hit Caskey, especially when they were drunk. And Isherwood recalls in the reconstructed diary that drunkenness became a prevalent, destructive necessity: “drinking was a built-in dimension of their relationship; while sober, he felt, they never achieved intimacy.”
¹⁸
With the drinking came bad moods and lethargy, so that Isherwood worked less and less. The psychological conflict in their relationship was mirrored and underpinned by growing sexual incompatibility, and in contrast to Isherwood's earlier love affairs, they shared no mythology about one another. They lived continually in the plain light of day, with no natural indulgence in fantasy, no artless playfulness, no imaginative games or magical naming. This made Isherwood feel the relationship was more grown-up than his others, but it also made the relationship harder to sustain. Through their mutual distrust and inability to yield, the pair were confined to a routine of selfconscious passion and relied upon forced playacting to fuel their lovemaking. Isherwood gave way to Caskey's aggressiveness almost out of politeness, but eventually certain tasks of role playing grew wearying. He admits that he would have split from Caskey sooner had he not feared to live alone; and indeed his fear of being alone shaped his romantic behavior throughout his life.

Nevertheless, the years with Caskey were Isherwood's first longterm domestic arrangement with a man close to his own age and emotional maturity. He felt genuinely proud of Caskey's social charm and included him entirely in his own social life, introducing Caskey to his various circles of friends—emigré artists and intellectuals like the Viertels, the Huxleys, and the Stravinskys as well as Greta Garbo and other film people in Hollywood; Swami Prabhavananda and his devotees at the Vedanta Society; literary friends like E. M. Forster and Stephen Spender in England, W. H. Auden and Lincoln Kirstein in New York; new friends like Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal; and many others. Introducing Caskey so widely contributed to a new and more open sense of himself as a homosexual. During the war years, when Isherwood lived among the Quakers and refugees in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and later when he tried to become a Hindu monk, he kept his sexuality quarantined from his everyday life. In Haverford he had concealed it; as an aspiring monk at the Vedanta Center he had tried during months of celibacy to rise above it. But once he fell in love with Caskey, everything changed; for a time he allowed his sexuality to shape his life as a whole.

During the same period, he became increasingly at home in a circle of close California friends of whom many were homosexual and most were at ease with homosexuality, so that his identity became established with solidity in the community around him. He was at first troubled by the consistency and honesty this began to require of him. As a young man, he had enjoyed the fragmented life which resulted from living in different countries among discrete groups of friends—shuttling between London and Berlin; fleeing through Greece, Portugal, Denmark and elsewhere with Heinz; shipping out to China with Auden; tasting Manhattan on the return journey. Travelling had afforded him semi-secrecy and any number of escape routes from commitment and from himself He had engaged in simultaneous love affairs and played freely with several personalities and social strategies, just as he played with the characters in his books. But his postwar life in California permitted him no hiding places. As he writes in the reconstructed diary: “Christopher found that his life had become all of a piece; everybody knew everything there was to know about him. In theory, he saw that this was morally preferable; it made hypocrisy and concealment impossible. In practice, he hated it.”
¹⁹

The unification of his life and identity brought to the fore with a new seriousness the question of who he really was and wanted to be. Now he could not escape the results of his actions, and he would be forced to live more deliberately, with a new sense of self and responsibility. But it would take some years before he could achieve coherence between his moral outlook and his day-to-day behavior, and even longer before such coherence would be reflected in his writing. At first the fact that he no longer needed to guard his identity from his separate circles of friends and colleagues simply fed the growing undiscipline of his life in the late 1940s. He may have stopped bothering to write in his diary partly because he no longer needed to keep up a private, unifying narrative about his true self, the self at the controlling center of his various, sometimes less than genuine, social lives. But over the longer term, he would continue to need his diary to understand himself, and by the time he began writing in it again—occasionally in 1948, then gradually more often by the early 1950s—he would already be writing about a different person. In the 1970s he would still be trying to achieve, in his reconstructed diary, a coherent account of the changes which had taken place in him during the dissipated personal aftermath of the war.

In August 1949, Isherwood attended an all-night party at the house of Sam From. The other guests whom he mentions in his 1955 outline of the period
²⁰
and in his reconstructed diary were Evelyn Caldwell, Paul Goodman, Charles Aufderheide and Alvin Novak. These were members and friends of The Benton Way Group, a bohemian ménage, mostly from the Midwest, sharing a house in Benton Way, in Los Angeles. They were intellectuals, generally highly educated, and predominantly homosexual. Goodman was a philosopher, social critic, published poet, and novelist whose work Isherwood later came to admire; Aufderheide a movie camera technician who read widely and wrote poetry on the side; Novak a philosophy student at UCLA. Sam From himself was a successful businessman. Others who were part of The Benton Way Group at various times—including Isadore From, David Sachs, Edouard Roditi, Fern Maher—were psychoanalysts, philosophers, scholars, social workers, artists.

Evelyn Caldwell, soon to marry and change her name to Evelyn Hooker, was the psychologist specializing in Rorschach techniques who was about to begin what became her life's work: studying the homosexual community in Los Angeles. She attended many homosexual parties where she joined in the revelry but also engaged in long, personal conversations with the other guests, and within a year of the party where she and Isherwood met, she started to circulate extensive questionnaires and conduct scores of interviews and psychological tests. In 1956, at a professional conference in Chicago, she was to challenge widespread opinion among her colleagues when she presented the first results of her research, which demonstrated that expert psychologists could not distinguish homosexuals from heterosexuals on the basis of then standard, widely used personality tests. In fact, her results from these types of tests showed that as high a percentage of homosexuals as heterosexuals were psychologically well adjusted. She, like Isherwood, was to become a hero of gay liberation.

The conversation at Benton Way parties was friendly but also highbrow and wide-ranging, addressing literature, social change, and, as Isherwood recalls of the all-night party in 1949, the nature of homosexual love. That night the “Symposium,” as he calls it, “continued until dawn.” Then Isherwood returned home with Alvin Novak, the young man he deemed to be the Alcibiades of the group. In the reconstructed diary Isherwood exposes his mixed motives of passion and idealism and even recalls an element of farce: a drunken Sam From came along with Isherwood and Novak, evidently hoping for sex, then politely passed out, eliminating himself from competition. Isherwood writes in the reconstructed diary that “he later looked back upon that night as having been highly romantic. It was unique, at any rate. Christopher never went to a party that was quite like it.”
²¹

In The Benton Way Group Isherwood had found a small intellectual community seriously and capably examining the predicament of the homosexual in modern society and at the same time pursuing an experiment in living that offered them some of the benefits of conventional family life without oppressing their sexuality. In a sense, he had found a new version of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) where he had, as he put it in
Christopher and His Kind,
first been “brought face to face with his tribe”
²²
in Berlin in late 1929. According to
Christopher and His Kind,
Hirschfeld's respectable, scientific approach to sexuality had at first offended Isherwood's puritanism, but in the end Isherwood was captivated by Hirschfeld's persona as a “silly solemn old professor.”
²³
Over the years he came to honor Hirschfeld and his personally dangerous campaign to revise the German criminal code so that homosexual acts between men would be legal.

Hirschfeld was homosexual, Evelyn Hooker was not; and yet there are obvious parallels in their work and in their practical style of approach. Isherwood became close friends with Evelyn Hooker, and just as in Berlin he had rented a room from Hirschfeld's sister immediately next door to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, so at the beginning of the 1950s he rented the garden house at Evelyn Hooker's property on Saltair Avenue in Brentwood. His interest in the study of homosexuality was far from superficial, and he evidently wished to involve himself with it both officially and personally. For Isherwood, and for his close friend W. H. Auden, sexual emancipation in Berlin had resulted partly from their anonymous access, as foreigners, to willing boys they met easily in bars and on the streets, and partly from the newly dawning self-understanding which resulted from conscious study of homosexuality and, in Auden's case, from a brief attempt at psychoanalysis. At Hirschfeld's institute, sexual love in all its strange and familiar forms was classified, codified, categorized. Along similarly analytical lines, Isherwood and Auden talked endlessly between themselves and with other friends about their relationships, and they read and also talked about Proust, Gide, Corvo, Freud, Jung, Georg Groddeck, Edward Carpenter, and many others. None of these literary and psychological texts offered them a satisfactory account of who they were. In their own work, throughout their careers, each of them continued to consider and address the question in any number of ways—veiled and indirect at first, then, in Isherwood's case, increasingly overt as the years went by. The earnest scientific thoroughness with which Evelyn Hooker, like Hirschfeld, approached her research, lent Isherwood's way of life in California a reassuringly dull legitimacy and probably contributed to his increasing openness about his homosexuality in his writing as well as in his personal life.