Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir (16 page)

Well, I shall probably write more, when I’ve read it again and properly digested it; but meanwhile all my congratulations.

I’m down at the cottage with Alexi now back from S. Africa, and Rudy [my golden retriever], and the weather is sublime and the rhododendrons and azaleas are bursting out everywhere and the birds singing like mad. (I saw one thrush trying out all its trills and cadenzas while it hunted for worms in the lawn - as if Joan Sutherland were to practice her arias 
while shopping in a super-market.) My ‘Christ the Hunter’
¹
has been recorded by the BBC, and I do believe added up to something - I won’t say more. When I get back from Switzerland I’ve got to face up to selling No. 31.

___________________________

John Cullen worked for Methuen, who published 
A Single Man
 in 1964.

___________________________

In these years Christopher lost two friends who had become very dear to him, Aldous Huxley and Charles Laughton; as well as his mother, who died at the age of ninety-one in June 1960. Huxley’s death, which occurred on the same day as President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, was not followed by any religious or other celebration in America, except a walk by a group of his friends along the highway that he had taken every day as long as his health allowed it. In London a packed gathering assembled at the Friends’ Meeting House where his brother Julian delivered a deeply moving address, and Yehudi Menuhin played the violin. Laughton, who died also of cancer in December 1962, was much missed by Christopher, who wrote to me of his death: ‘It was a long weary death, the most painful I have ever had to watch. Either they should find a cure for cancer or finish them off; it’s too awful and useless. Peggy [my sister Beatrix] will be especially sad, I expect.’ I think that Christopher and Laughton might have become successful collaborators in many things besides the planned Socrates film, as they enjoyed the same jokes and had the same basic attitude to homosexuality. But it was not to be.

In December 1963 Christopher was persuaded by Swami Prabhavananda to accompany him and two other of his followers on a brief visit to Calcutta, in order to attend the centenary celebrations for Vivekananda
^§
His experiences there helped him to complete the weary task of his
Ramakrishna and His Disciples,
a duty work vetted chapter by chapter by the Ramakrishna Order, and published without any enthusiasm on his part in April 1965. But the visit also, more satisfactorily, gave him an idea how to organize the new novel which was already stirring in his mind and in due course became
A Meeting by the River.
But before he started work on this, his final novel, he was deflected by a suggestion from an English admirer that he should collect his stray articles, book reviews and other miscellaneous writings, which he envisaged in some sense as part of his autobiography. It was published with the wry title of
Exhumations
in 1966. Though inevitably uneven in interest, it is full of plums and essential reading for the Isherwood enthusiast. He was further deflected by new engagements in the film studios, when Tony Richardson agreed to direct a film from Evelyn Waugh’s
The Loved One
with Christopher and Terry Southern working on the script together. Something went wrong with the collaboration, and the film was not a success. He also prepared a script for Tony Richardson on Carson McCullers’s
Reflections in a Golden Eye
; but Richardson backed out, and the film was produced by John Huston from another script. He prepared a third script for Richardson from Marguerite Duras’s novel
The Sailor from Gibraltar
, which was even unluckier. In fact the long months in the studios brought him nothing but temporary financial help. In his letters to me between June 1964 and April 1965, he refers frequently to the books he was preparing and his script-writing. In April 1965 he wrote:

I hardly expect you to like my Ramakrishna book [he didn’t send it to me]. It is too ‘party line’. Perhaps I shall be able to convey my relation to all that more vividly when I write something exclusively autobiographical. I probably told you that I am doing a book of bits and pieces, called
Exhumations
? Methuen is supposed to publish it in the autumn. And now I am trying another (short) novel. Quite a new departure, all letters and diary entries. But I’m very dubious if it will work.

It takes place in India in a monastery, and is about two brothers. One of them is just about to take his final vows as a Hindu monk, and the other comes to visit him, simply horrified but determined to be broad-minded. And all hell (on a tiny scale) breaks loose! Doesn’t that sound like the least-likely-to-succeed story of the year?

He added: ‘You will have to watch
The Loved One
narrowly to catch a glimpse of me! There are actually a couple, during John Gielgud’s funeral, unless they have been cut out at the last moment.’ The glimpses were not cut out, and Christopher can still be seen in the film, in his only appearance in a movie prepared by himself. By May 1966 I had read and reviewed
Exhumations
, 
and Christopher wrote to me: ‘I was really delighted and moved by your review of
Exhumations.
Not only that you liked it and wrote about it so perceptively, but also because I felt so much warmth of friendship beneath what you wrote. Altogether, the reception of the book has been a happy surprise to me …. No American reviews are out yet.’

During the sixties and seventies our relationship changed to some extent, because Christopher visited England more frequently and because I began to visit America on long stints as a lecturer and visiting professor. The result was many fewer letters between us and meetings instead in London or California. During the first half of 1961 Don enrolled in the Slade for six months, and Christopher came over as often as his work, in particular his courses at Santa Barbara, permitted. He and Don went for a holiday in the South of France, and then when Don had finished at the Slade he had to stay in Europe some weeks longer to deal with various commissions for portrait drawings which were steadily accumulating. During the mid-sixties Christopher started the preparatory work on a book about his parents,
Kathleen and Frank
, which had germinated in his mind after his mother’s death. The research for this book completely altered his view of his father, dominated before now by his mother’s fixation with her husband as a hero-figure after his death in battle. This heroic ideal had become the mainspring of Christopher’s revolt against family and country. He now came to see his father as a frustrated artist, always longing to escape from the claims of his military calling.

In the spring of 1967, after apologizing for the usual writer’s block which had prevented him writing letters, he wrote:

now I’m happy to say I’m off to the races - I have written seventy-some pages. What the book is really about, I don’t know yet; and whether what it is about is in the least interesting is another moot question. Perhaps the only interesting thing will be the construction, as I shall dart about back and forth in time. There will be a lot of research to do in England anyway, before I can produce a finished version. I have to read at least fifteen to twenty years of my Mother’s day-to-day diaries, and endless correspondence, and also delve 
into my ancestor Judge Bradshaw’s past. If only I could prove he was queer!

Your autobiography is so fascinating, and such a picture of your time. I read a review of it (I mean of
Proposition
²
by Peter Quennell (?)) in which he seemed to object that you are so kind to everyone, as though this were a fault. Intelligent comment does
not
have to be malicious - how few people know that nowadays. I was interested to read the same thing said - but approvingly - in a review in the
London Magazine
of the Cocteau book about people he has known. I adore Cocteau and it is true, I think. Your reference to him is very amusing.

Meanwhile, in the middle of the long, slow grind of
Kathleen and Frank
, Christopher had written ‘the least-likely-to-succeed story of the year’ in three drafts, the last being finished in the spring of 1966 - though even that draft was altered after criticism by John Yale, one of the two followers of Vedanta who had become Swamis after the visit to India.
A Meeting by the River
was published in the spring of 1967, and is Christopher’s most ambitious attempt to write ‘the religious novel’, ending as it does with a vision in which the brother who is becoming a Hindu monk feels himself mystically united with his ‘guru’ - the idea of which had obsessed Christopher for so many years. I cannot say that this mystical climax made me sympathetically disposed to the work, but I recognize that it is a work of extreme subtlety and complexity, in which the relationship between the two brothers, Patrick and Oliver, is explored in all its actual and potential aspects so that the reader cannot be certain whether they are intended to be in love with one another or two sides of one deeply divided person. What I could and do admire is the skill of the story-telling in which letters and diary extracts and reflections are alternated, and the shock of surprise when it is revealed that Patrick has a homosexual lover, Tom, whom he is thinking about and passionately remembering as his aeroplane goes on humming through the night on the way to India. What I am still unable to take is the letter of rejection which Patrick sends to Tom after 
his drunken telephone-call, which seems to me disgustingly priggish and false, particularly in its advice to Tom to try marriage - to a woman.

I must admit that I have never read the re-writing of
A Meeting by the River
as a play, which Christopher prepared with Don in 1968, and is said by some critics to be a considerable artistic improvement on the novel. It has been produced in America, but so far has not been published. They also re-wrote it again as a film-script, making further alterations of emphasis; but it has never been made into a movie. In his letter to me in the spring of 1967, Christopher had added at the end:

I absolutely have to come to England before too long, so I look forward to seeing you. It is so nice that through all these years we have never really lost touch with each other. I wish I could say that for all of my old friends. Of course, in some instances, there are good reasons. We had Wystan to stay the other day, and there too, I was happy to feel that underneath the great structure of his public image the friend was still absolutely there.

Our friendship had lasted thirty-five years when he wrote that letter, and was still as warm and cloudless on my side as it was on his. When I first knew him he had only one novel to his credit,
All the Conspirators
, which attracted little enough notice when first published, and only sold a few hundred copies. During the thirty-five years of our friendship all that was to change phenomenally. His story ‘The Nowaks’ in
New Writing
No.1 was spotted as the work of a writer of style, wit and warmth.
The Memorial
, the first novel he published with the Hogarth Press, had aroused my enthusiasm when I read it in typescript: it had equally little success in sales, but attracted the attention of the serious critics. The second Hogarth novel,
Mr Norris Changes Trains
, was a deservedly unqualified success and showed that this new author had an exceptional gift for comic characterization and skill in telling a story. With the little book
Sally Bowles
, which was originally intended as a contribution for
New Writing,
he was away. It was probably the most popular of his stories, being made - as I’ve said - into a play and a film, and then into a musical 
before it finally appeared as the film
Cabaret.
His migration to the USA, which came shortly after, seemed to set him back for a bit, but after the partial failure there of his next novel,
Goodbye to Berlin,
he showed himself back on the top of his form with
Prater Violet,
and was already being talked of as the hope of the English novel, with the future in his hands.

From very early on we had shared our most intimate secrets, and rejoiced with one another over our successes - whether in our writings or other public ventures - and over our special friendships. Although he knew my reservations about his Vedanta beliefs, he never pushed them under my nose, nor did I ever during the war question his new-found pacifism even though I deeply regretted his absence from the profound experiences we were undergoing - an absence which I feared would create a gulf between us. But it didn’t. If I had doubts about any of his literary schemes I stated them as frankly as I could, and he never appeared to resent my criticisms because I think my fundamental love of and faith in his work was always apparent to him. I could always count on him for sympathy and encouragement in anything I undertook myself, whether it was for the books I was writing or for more editorial ventures or my publishing struggles, or, later on, my attempts to convey something of my values about literature to young American students. When I think of him now, I think first of the pleasure that I always felt when he came to see me or I visited him, his bubbling zany wit and his freewheeling imaginative gift for turning any situation that one discussed with him, however troubling it might seem to one, into absurdity and fantasy. A friend in a million, a friend of the greatest rarity. I don’t know what a life that has had its ups and downs would have been like without him.