Lost Years (67 page)

Holmes, John (1910–1988).
Canadian diplomat, author, and teacher. Holmes was born in Ontario and educated at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Toronto, and the University of London. He held many diplomatic and academic posts in Canada and abroad. When Isherwood met him in 1947, Holmes was completing a three-year post as First Secretary at Canada House in London and preparing to spend a year as the Chargé d'affaires at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow. Later he represented Canada at the U.N. and served as the Assistant Under Secretary of State for External Affairs (1953–1960). When he retired from public service, he became the Director General of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and was a Professor of International Relations at the University of Toronto. His books include a
two-volume work
The Shaping of Peace: Canada and the Search for World Order, 1943–1957
(1979 and 1982) and
Life with Uncle: The Canadian-American Relationship
(1982).

Hooker, Evelyn Caldwell (1907–1996).
American psychologist and psychotherapist, trained at the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins; professor of psychology at UCLA where for a time she shared an office with the Rorschach expert, Bruno Klopfer, who was impressed by her work and assisted and encouraged her. Hooker was among the first to view homosexuality as a normal psychological condition. Encouraged by her involvement with The Benton Way Group and, according to Alvin Novak, inspired in particular by her close friendship with Sam From—to whom, Novak recalls, she was especially drawn, and who was equally drawn to her—she worked with and studied homosexuals in the Los Angeles area for many years. At Klopfer's urging, she first presented her research publicly at a 1956 conference in Chicago, demonstrating that as high a percentage of homosexuals as heterosexuals were psychologically well-adjusted. The paper, entitled “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual,” was later published in a Burbank periodical,
Projective Techniques
(this was the journal of the Society for Projective Techniques and the Rorschach Institute; it later changed its title to
Journal of Projective Techniques and Personality Assessment
). Born Evelyn Gentry, she took the name Caldwell from a brief first marriage, then changed to Hooker when she married Edward Hooker, a professor of English at UCLA and a Dryden scholar, at the start of the 1950s. Isherwood lived in the Hookers' garden house on Saltair Avenue in Brentwood for a time in 1952–1953. He describes the friendship in
D1
.

Hopper, Hedda (1890–1966).
American actress and Hollywood columnist. She began in silent movies and went on to act in many sound films, but she was best known for her influential columns. She also wrote several volumes of autobiography.

Horst (1906–1999).
German-born fashion photographer. Horst B. Horst (also known as Horst Bohrmann) was a shopkeeper's son, from a small German town; he studied art history in Hamburg, then persuaded Le Corbusier to take him on as an architectural assistant in Paris in the early 1930s. In Paris he became a protégé of the Russian-born, half-American photographer George Hoyningen-Huene with whom he worked for many years. Like Hoyningen-Huene, Horst photographed Parisian and Russian emigré society, and took countless pictures for
Vogue
and other fashion magazines. Another mentor was the American fashion photographer George Platt Lynes. Horst eventually made New York his home, but frequently travelled and worked in Europe.

Houseman, John (1902–1988).
American movie producer and actor. Houseman began as a stage producer and founded the Mercury Theater with Orson Welles in 1937. He produced Welles's
Citizen Kane
(1941) and then worked for David Selznick in Hollywood. After the war he worked in theater, film, and, eventually, television. He produced a long string of successful, widely admired films before taking the first of many acting roles in
Seven Days in May
(1964), and he won an Academy Award for his supporting role in
The Paper Chase
(1973).

Howard, Brian (1905–1958).
English poet and aesthete of American parentage; an outspoken antifascist. Howard was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he became friends with W. H. Auden. He was exceedingly dissolute, a heavy drinker and a drug user, and he never lived up to his promise as a writer. Evelyn Waugh's character Ambrose Silk in
Put Out More Flags
is modelled on Howard, and Anthony Blanche in
Brideshead Revisited
is also partly inspired by him. Howard lived a vagrant's life, moving from place to place in Europe, and was often in Paris. Isherwood met him in Amsterdam in 1936, during the period when each of them was trying to find a country where he could live with his German boyfriend—Howard's boyfriend throughout the 1930s was a Bavarian known as Toni. At the start of the war, Toni was interned in the south of France; Howard worked for his release evidently in vain, but after the fall of France, Toni escaped to New York via Tangier. He found work loading trucks at night, and soon married a wealthy American woman. Howard worked briefly for British intelligence and then joined the RAF as a clerk and later a public relations writer. After the war he again travelled to and from Europe, with his new companion Sam Langford, struggling with alcoholism and eventually with tuberculosis which propelled him ever faster into drug addiction. When Langford died in their new home in the south of France, Howard committed suicide with a drug overdose.

Hoyt, Karl.
A close friend of Chris Wood during the early 1940s. He was drafted into the army during World War II and afterwards settled in Bel Air, the Los Angeles suburb.

Huston, John (1906–1987).
Film director, screenwriter, and actor. Huston wrote scripts for a number of successful films during the 1930s and early 1940s before making his directing debut with
The Maltese Falcon
(1941); he directed many more movies during the following fifty years—including
The Treasure of Sierra Madre
(1947),
The African Queen
(1952),
Beat the Devil
(1954),
The Misfits
(1960).
Fat City
(1971), and
Prizzi's Honor
(1985).
The Red Badge of Courage
(1951) was adapted from Stephen Crane's novel about the Civil War. Huston also continued intermittently as a writer and occasionally acted.

Huxley, Aldous (1894–1963).
English novelist and utopian. Not long after he arrived in Los Angeles, Isherwood was introduced to Huxley by Gerald Heard. Huxley was then writing screenplays for MGM for a large weekly salary, and he and Isherwood later collaborated on several film projects. Like Heard, Huxley was a disciple of Prabhavananda, but subsequently he became close to Krishnamurti, the one-time Messiah of the theosophical movement. Huxley was educated at Eton and Oxford, a grandson of Thomas Huxley and brother of Julian Huxley, both prominent scientists. In youth he published poetry, short stories, and satirical novels such as
Crome Yellow
(1921) and
Antic Hay
(1923), drawing on life in London's literary bohemia and at Lady Ottoline Morrell's Garsington Manor, where Huxley worked as a conscientious objector during World War I. He lived abroad in Italy and France during the 1920s and 1930s, part of the time with D. H. Lawrence—who appears in his
Point Counter Point
(1928)—and Lawrence's wife, Frieda. In 1932 Huxley published
Brave New World
, for which he is most famous.

An ardent pacifist, Huxley joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1935, but
became disillusioned as Europe moved towards war. His
Ends and Means
(1937) was regarded as a basic book for pacifists. In April 1937 he sailed for America with his first wife, Maria, and their adolescent son, accompanied by Gerald Heard and by Heard's friend Chris Wood. Huxley's plans to return to Europe fell through when he tried and failed to sell a film scenario in Hollywood, became ill there, and convalesced for nearly a year. California benefitted his health and eyesight—he had been nearly blind since an adolescent illness—but he was denied U.S. citizenship on grounds of his extreme pacifism.
After Many a Summer
(1939) is set in Los Angeles, and Huxley wrote many other books during the period that Isherwood knew him best, including
Grey Eminence
(1941),
Time Must Have a Stop
(1944),
The Devils of Loudun
(1952),
The Genius and the Goddess
(1956).

Huxley's study of Vedanta was part of a larger interest in mysticism and parapsychology, and beginning in the early 1950s he experimented with mescaline, LSD, and psilocybin, experiences which he wrote about in
The Doors of Perception
(1954) and
Heaven and Hell
(1956). In addition to
Below the Equator
(later called
Below the Horizon
) Huxley and Isherwood also worked together on two other screenplay ideas during the 1940s:
Jacob's Hands
, about a healer, and a film version of
The Miracle
, Max Reinhardt's celebrated 1920s stage production. Isherwood often writes about Huxley in
D1
.

In 1960 Huxley found a malignant tumor on his tongue but refused surgery in favor of less radical treatment; he died of cancer on the same day John F. Kennedy was shot.

Huxley, Maria Nys (1898–1955).
Belgian first wife of Aldous Huxley. Isherwood met her in the summer of 1939 soon after he arrived in Los Angeles and mentions her frequently in
D1
. Maria Nys was the eldest daughter of a prosperous textile merchant ruined in World War I. Her mother's family included artists and intellectuals, and her childhood was pampered, multilingual, and devoutly Catholic. She met Huxley at Garsington Manor where she lived as a refugee during World War I; they married in Belgium in 1919 and their only child, Matthew, was born in 1920. Before her marriage, Maria showed promise as a dancer and trained briefly with Nijinsky, but her health was too frail for a professional career. She had little formal education and devoted herself to Huxley and to his work. Her premature death resulted from cancer. According to Huxley, she was a natural mystic and had “pre-mystical” experiences in the desert in California in the 1940s.

Huxley, Matthew (b. 1920).
British-born son of Aldous and Maria Huxley. Matthew Huxley was brought to America in adolescence and Isherwood met him in Santa Monica in 1939. He attended the University of Colorado with the intention of becoming a doctor, served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II, and was invalided out of the army in 1943. Much of this is recorded in
D1
. Huxley became a U.S. citizen in 1945. In 1947 he took a degree from Berkeley and later studied public health at Harvard. This became his career, and for many years he worked at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C. He also published a book about Peru,
Farewell to Eden
(1965). He married three times, and had two children with his first wife.

Hyndman, Tony.
Secretary and companion to Stephen Spender in the early
1930s. Hyndman ran away from his working-class home in Wales at eighteen and spent three years in the army before becoming unemployed and meeting Spender. He split with Spender in the autumn of 1936, became a communist, joined the International Brigade, and went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. In Spain, he was greatly disillusioned and became a pacifist. He deserted and was imprisoned, but eventually Spender, who had followed him to Spain, obtained his release. Hyndman appears as “Jimmy Younger” in Spender's
World Within World
and in
Christopher and His Kind
.

Ince, Thomas (1882–1924).
American film director and producer. Ince moved from stage and vaudeville to become an important figure in the early film industry. The studios he built at Culver City in 1916 evolved into MGM and the company, Triangle, which he formed with two other partners, D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett, eventually became United Artists. His later films were released through Adolph Zukor. Ince became mortally ill while on board William Randolph Hearst's yacht
Oneida
; his death two days later was attributed to heart failure resulting from severe indigestion, but rumor suggested that Hearst shot Ince, either because he suspected Ince of having an affair with Marion Davies or because Hearst suspected Charlie Chaplin, also on board the yacht, of having an affair with Davies and shot Ince when he mistook him for Chaplin.

Isherwood, Henry Bradshaw.
Isherwood's uncle (his father's elder brother). In 1924 Uncle Henry inherited Marple Hall and the family estates on the death of Isherwood's grandfather, John Bradshaw Isherwood. Though he married late in life (changing his name to Bradshaw-Isherwood-Bagshawe in honor of his wife), Uncle Henry had no children; thus, Isherwood was his heir, and for a time after Isherwood's twenty-first birthday he received a quarterly allowance from his uncle. The two had an honest if self-interested friendship, occasionally dining together and sharing intimate details of their personal lives. When Henry Isherwood died in 1940, Isherwood at once passed on the entire inheritance to his own younger brother, Richard Isherwood.

Isherwood, Kathleen Bradshaw (1868–1960).
Isherwood's mother. The only child of Frederick Machell Smith, a successful wine merchant, and Emily Greene, Kathleen was born and lived until sixteen in Bury St. Edmunds, then moved with her parents to London. She travelled abroad, mostly with her mother, and helped her mother to write a guidebook for walkers,
Our Rambles in Old London
(1895). She married Frank Isherwood in 1903 when she was thirty-five years old. They had two sons, Isherwood, and his much younger brother, Richard. After the second battle of Ypres in May 1915, Kathleen was told her husband (by then a colonel in the York and Lancasters) was missing, but it was many months before his death was officially confirmed, and she never obtained definite information about how he died. Isherwood's portrait of her in
Kathleen and Frank
is partly based on her own letters and diaries (he regarded the latter as her masterpiece), but heavily shaped by his attitude towards her. She was also the original for the fictional character “Lily” in
The Memorial
. Isherwood mentions her throughout
D1
.