Lost Years (3 page)

1962
January 2, Bachardy's first New York show opens at the Sagittarius Gallery; January 25, Isherwood returns alone to Santa Monica and on January 28 begins teaching again at L.A. State; he plans a new novel called, at first,
The English Woman
; February 17, Bachardy returns; early March,
Down There on a Visit
is published by Methuen in the U.K. and by Isherwood's new publisher, Simon and Schuster, in the U.S.; Isherwood's UCSB lectures are broadcast on radio; Isherwood and Bachardy begin remodelling their garage as a studio for Bachardy; Isherwood's novel,
The English Woman
, begins to evolve into
A Single Man
.

1963
During the winter and early spring, Bachardy considers living alone; October, Isherwood finishes draft of
Ramakrishna and His Disciples
; October 21, Isherwood sends final draft of
A Single Man
to both his U.S. and U.K. publishers; November 22, Aldous Huxley dies; December, Isherwood travels via Japan to India with Swami Prabhavananda and thinks for the first time of writing
A Meeting by the River
.

1964
January, Isherwood returns from India via Rome and New York and begins final draft of
Ramakrishna and His Disciples;
February, he starts to gather material for
Exhumations
; March, Isherwood begins working on
The Loved One
with Terry Southern; meets David Hockney; during the summer, Bachardy travels to North Africa, Europe, and London; July–September, Isherwood works on screenplay of
Reflections in a Golden Eye; A Single Man
is published in the U.S. by Simon and Schuster and, on September 10, in the U.K. by Methuen; September–December, Isherwood works on screenplay of
The Sailor from Gibraltar
.

1965
January 6,
Bachardy leaves for a further long spell in New York, visiting several times during the year; Isherwood finishes
The Sailor from Gibraltar
and
Exhumations
; early February, Isherwood takes up post as Regent's Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA); spring, he begins writing
A Meeting by the River
; April 8,
Ramakrishna and His Disciples
is published by Methuen and appears in the U.S. during the summer; November 1, he begins
Hero-Father, Demon-Mother (Kathleen and Frank
).

1966
Spring, Isherwood is visiting professor at UCLA; Gerald Heard has the first of many strokes;
Exhumations
is published in the U.S. and the U.K.; May 31, Isherwood completes third draft of
A Meeting by the River
; July, he agrees to work on
Silent Night
with Danny Mann for ABC television, travels with Mann to Austria in September for filming; October, Isherwood visits England and stays with his brother at Wyberslegh where he reads his father's letters; November,
Cabaret
, Fred Ebb and John Kander's stage musical based on
I Am a Camera
, opens in New York, produced by Hal Prince.

1967
January, Isherwood begins working in more earnest on the book which eventually will be called
Kathleen and Frank
; spring, he corrects proofs of
A Meeting by the River
which is published in April in the U.S. and in June in the U.K.; May, he returns to England to look at family papers at Wyberslegh for
Kathleen and Frank
, carrying some back to California with him; also in 1967. Isherwood works with James Bridges on a play of
A Meeting by the River
.

1968
Isherwood adapts Bernard Shaw's novella
The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God
for the stage, and also adapts Wedekind's
Earth Spirit
and
Pandora's Box
; Bachardy again spends time in London and in New York; spring, Hockney begins work on a double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy; October, Isherwood again begins writing
Kathleen and Frank
; also during 1968, Isherwood and Bachardy work together on the play of
A Meeting by the River
.

1969
The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God
opens at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles; July, Isherwood and Bachardy travel to Tahiti, Bora Bora, Samoa, New Zealand and Australia and begin work on a screenplay of Robert Graves's
I, Claudius
and
Claudius the God
for Tony Richardson; also in 1969,
Essentials of Vedanta
is published.

1970
February—April, in London together, Isherwood and Bachardy continue to work on stage version of
A Meeting by the River
; Isherwood sends final draft of
Kathleen and Frank
to U.S. and U.K. publishers; also in 1970, E. M. Forster dies, leaving Isherwood the rights to
Maurice
.

1971
Isherwood completes revisions to
Kathleen and Frank
; February, Isherwood and Bachardy start work on a TV script of
Frankenstein
for Universal Studios; April 6, Stravinsky dies; August 14, Gerald Heard dies; August 26, Isherwood begins writing reconstructed diary of the “lost years,” 1945–1951; October,
Kathleen and Frank
is published by Methuen; also in 1971, Isherwood undergoes hand surgery for Depuytren's contracture.

1972
January, Isherwood sees preview of film
Cabaret
, based on the musical, and the U.S. edition
of Kathleen and Frank
is published by Simon and Schuster; Isherwood and Bachardy undertake another TV script for Universal,
The Lady from the Land of the Dead
; April, the Los Angeles premiere of James Bridges' production of
A Meeting by the River
; also in 1972, Isherwood receives an award from the Hollywood Writers' Club for a lifetime of distinguished contributions to literature.

1973
Isherwood and Bachardy travel to London for the filming of
Frankenstein
; they visit Wyberslegh and afterwards go to Switzerland and Rome; summer, they work together on a screenplay of
A Meeting by the River
; Jean Ross dies; September 29, Auden dies; October, Isherwood begins a new autobiographical book eventually titled
Christopher and His Kind
; December, Isherwood and Bachardy's screenplay,
Frankenstein: The True Story,
is published by Avon Books.

1975
Isherwood works with Bachardy on a TV script adapted from Scott Fitzgerald's
The Beautiful and Damned
.

1976
May, Isherwood completes the final draft of
Christopher and His Kind
; July 4, Swami Prabhavananda dies; November, Isherwood's new U.S. publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux, publishes
Christopher and His Kind; Frankenstein: The True Story
wins best scenario at the International Festival of Fantastic and Science Fiction Films.

1977
March, the U.K. edition of
Christopher and His Kind
is published by Methuen.

1979
May 15, Richard Isherwood dies of a heart attack; Isherwood and Bachardy collaborate on
October
.

1980
My Guru and His Disciple
is published in the U.S. and the U.K.; July 16, Isherwood hears that Bill Caskey is dead;
October,
with drawings by Bachardy, is published.

1981
October, Isherwood learns that he has a malignant tumor in the prostate.

1983
July, Isherwood makes his last diary entry.

1986
January 4, Isherwood dies in Santa Monica.

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 years
²
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-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 novel:

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: