Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

by Christopher Isherwood

The late author of Goodbye to Berlin describes his "lost years" in postwar Santa Monica, New York, and London, a time spent in frantic socializing, increasing dissipation, and debilitating anxiety and despair.

Genres: Biography, Memoir, LGBT, Autobiography, Gay

432 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

English-born American writer Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood portrayed Berlin in the early 1930s in his best known works, such as Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the basis for the musical Cabaret (1966). Isherwood was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist.

With W.H. Auden he wrote three plays— The Dog Beneath the Skin (1932), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938). Isherwood tells the story in his first autobiography, Lions and Shadows .

After Isherwood wrote joke answers on his second-year exams, Cambridge University in 1925 asked him to leave. He briefly attended medical school and progressed with his first two novels, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932). In 1930, he moved to Berlin, where he taught English, dabbled in Communism, and enthusiastically explored his homosexuality. His experiences provided the material for Mister Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1938), still his most famous book.

In Berlin in 1932, he also began an important relationship with Heinz Neddermeyer, a young German with whom he fled the Nazis in 1933. England refused entry to Neddermeyer on his second visit in 1934, and the pair moved restlessly about Europe until the Gestapo arrested Neddermeyer in May 1937 and then finally separated them.

In 1938, Isherwood sailed with Auden to China to write Journey to a War (1939), about the Sino-Japanese conflict. They returned to England and Isherwood went on to Hollywood to look for movie-writing work. He also became a disciple of the Ramakrishna monk, Swami Prabhavananda, head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. He decided not to take monastic vows, but he remained a Hindu for the rest of his life, serving, praying, and lecturing in the temple every week and writing a biography, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965).

In 1945, Isherwood published Prater Violet, fictionalizing his first movie writing job in London in 1933-1934. In Hollywood, he spent the start of the 1950s fighting his way free of a destructive five-year affair with an attractive and undisciplined American photographer, William Caskey. Caskey took the photographs for Isherwood’s travel book about South America, The Condor and The Cows (1947). Isherwood’s sixth novel, The World in the Evening (1954), written mostly during this period, was less successful than earlier ones.

In 1953, he fell in love with Don Bachardy, an eighteen-year-old college student born and raised in Los Angeles. They were to remain together until Isherwood’s death. In 1961, Isherwood and completed the final revisions to his new novel Down There on a Visit (1962). Their relationship nearly ended in 1963, and Isherwood moved out of their Santa Monica house. This dark period underpins Isherwood’s masterpiece A Single Man (1964).

Isherwood wrote another novel, A Meeting by the River (1967), about two brothers, but he gave up writing fiction and turned entirely to autobiography. In Kathleen and Frank (1971), he drew on the letters and diaries of his parents. In Christopher and His Kind (1976), he returned to the 1930s to tell, as a publicly avowed homosexual, the real story of his life in Berlin and his wanderings with Heinz Neddermeyer. The book made him a hero of gay liberation and a national celebrity all over again but now in his true, political and personal identity.

Reviews

[Sketchbook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life before Van Druten's play "I Am a Camera" launched the mostly unknown-in-US Isherwood (1904-1986). While living in Santa Monica, two Isherwood books were published in the US, 1945 -- "Prater Violet" and then "The Berlin Stories," from the '30s. CH detested the noise and grit of NYC. Having emigrated fr UK, he went west. The rainbow: Santa Monica, a charming SoCal oceanfront town, was home to film-lit names from Europe: Huxley, Mann, Brecht, John Collier, Stravinsky, Franz Werfel - plus Bertold Viertel and his hostess w the mostess wife, Salka, a jolly, big deal at MGM for her Garbo screenplays. (Hollywood contracts could keep one alive). Oh. Don't forget the Monica beach....w its cruisey sands. SoCal: a saucy place to hump and bump.

By 1945, CH was getting film assignments via connections, and swarming near Swamis - anything Hindu-y, he had a spiritual streak -- but found his writing career in a curious limbo, yet: sex kept him alive. He details his very orgasmic life in this "memoir," written in the early '70s and published by his heir Don Bachardy in 2,000. Here's an immersion into CH: it's not a necessary read for casual CH readers, but if you want to know about his life in the US before he became "famous" -- with the John Van Druten play, 1951 -- it's a riveting social/sexual document.

Everyone at the studios, it seemed to him, was gay. But professionally careful. ~ The messenger boys, in their 20s, were all horny cutes (Helmet Dantine had a fav, he recalls), and soon Chris had his own sweet....whose rump, he discovered, provoked a penicillin shot.. Poor fella was embarrassed. So was CH. ~ This duet ended when the dim sweetie told CH that he was hotter than Gary Cooper! CH blanched, "depressed by this absurdity." ~ Since CH is always honest, he admits that he was a sexual snob -- "like most people" -- and needed a lover who could impress friends.

Hating to be alone, to live alone, he soon found a savvy young photographer, 24, with whom he was "with" for about 5 years, during this period of the book, though their relationship was Open Bed with others, amid a sexual - go -round where chaps were met (and traded) and no one was ever fussed up. Meantime, at the studios, CH, smoking and drinking too much, worked on scripts that went nowhere or were turned into flop films.

The volume ends as Van Druten finishes "I Am a Camera," which changed CHs life, and is headed for Broadway starring Julie Harris.

CH had a nice friendship with the marvelous (het) writer John Collier who wanted to rewrite the ending to Proust's "Recherche." Having been led to believe that Charlus, Saint-Loup, etc were all gay, Collier decided this should be a deception. They had a guilty secret: They were all in show business! It could not be admitted to. ~~ If you dont read this entertaining and very well-writ memoir, hurry on to the stories from the wild imagination of John Collier.

Isherwood knew Maugham: TIME magazine said that he inspired Larry Darrell in "The Razor's Edge." CH had a boyish charm and studied Indian mysticism, like Darrell, but was very irritated, writing to TIME that this rumor "poisoned my life." It trivialized, he felt, his own mystical seriousness. (The precious decadent Elliott Templeton was based on the American fop, Henry "Chips" Channon, who purred with pleasure. You can find his bio on YT).

[Richard Jespers · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the completion of this book I’ve now read all 3,069 pages of Isherwood’s diaries. Though he calls this one a memoir, it is a reconstructed diary of the years 1945-1951. In essence, Isherwood keeps two records: a day-to-day account of people he interacts with, major and minor events. In the more expanded Diaries Volumes One – Three, he writes out detailed accounts of events, observations, prejudices, fears about his health, and high and low spots with his lovers, particularly Don Bachardy. In Lost Years, however, Isherwood holds nothing back. Except for changing some names of partners, he tells all about his sex life during these six years. At one point he quietly boasts (or otherwise he would not mention it) that he has had over 400 sex partners (and he’s only in his forties, heh, heh). His pattern in this volume is to list the day-to-day events, and, as of this writing (1973) he combs his (excellent) memory to expound on those events. At the same time, as a heavy drinker, he often admits he can remember little or nothing about things he has written.

Still, he does comment on his writing projects, his relationship at the time (a younger man, William Caskey, a photographer), and notes about books he is reading and films he’s worked on as a screenwriter or viewed for entertainment. His prejudices against Jews, the French, and dark-skinned people seem more entrenched than when he is older. Again, is he a victim of his time and place of birth, or does he willfully deny that these prejudices are immature and wrong-headed? In spite of his flaws, I find much to admire in Isherwood: a man who creates, sings, listens to and critiques his own tunes. Opinionated people often become that way because they realize they are correct about so many things, and that reinforcement causes them to be even more opinionated. We trust them. And often we should.

Some nuggets:

Editor Katherine Bucknell, from her Introduction: “Isherwood never gave up his writing as [Edward] 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 American 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” (xiv).

Writing about himself in the third person, CI says, helps him to separate himself from the “I” of the rest of his writing: “Isherwood would never cease to be aware of the way in which all success, and indeed all art, excludes or marginalizes somebody. In a sense, his art tries to do the opposite, but whatever is brought to the fore must push something else aside. As a schoolboy he had written to his mother: ‘I have an essay on “omission is the Beginning of all Art” which it may amuse you to see.’ And he explains at some length in Christopher and His Kind, much of the difficulty he had with his work, throughout his career, can be understood as his struggle with the question of how the artist decides what to leave out of his art. The subjects not chosen, the themes not addressed, haunt the imagination with the pain of their rejection; for the novelist who feels a strong loyalty to historical fact, the necessity to omit is like the burden of original sin, a crime of neglect which must precede the possibility of artistic creation” (xxxiii).

Isherwood reveals a romantic notion has: “The rest of the day was spent at Bill’s La Cienega apartment. It seems to me now that La Cienega was perhaps the most romantic street in Los Angeles, in those days. It had an un-American air of reticence, of unwillingness to display itself. Its shops were small and unshowy; its private houses were private. Also—and this was what really appealed to Christopher—it seemed to have a bohemian, self-contained life of its own. It was a ‘quarter,’ which didn’t make any effort to welcome outside visitors. Many of its dwellers were hidden away in odd little garden houses and shacks, within courtyards or on alleys, behind the row of buildings which lined the street. It was in one of these that Bill lived” (15).

A bit of literary gossip: “Katherine Anne [Porter] treated them like favored nephews; she even cooked meals for them. Unfortunately, however, beneath Christopher’s deference and flattery, there was a steadily growing aggression. By her implicit claim to be the equal of Katherine Mansfield and even Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne had stirred up Christopher’s basic literary snobbery. How dare she, he began to mutter to himself, this vain old frump, this dressed-up cook in her arty finery, how dare she presume like this! And he imagined a grotesque scene in which he had to introduce her and somehow explain her to Virginia, Morgan [Forster] and the others . . . [t]hus Katherine Anne became the first of an oddly assorted collection of people who, for various reasons, made up their minds that they would never see Christopher again. The others: Charlie Chaplin, Benjamin Britten, Cole Porter, Lincoln Kirstein” (68-9).

CI became acquainted with the famed Joseph Pilates, designer of physical education for compromised bodies, when CI joined the man’s gym: “Mr. Pilates was a bully and a narcissist and a dirty old man; he and Christopher got along very well. When Christopher was doing his workout, Pilates would bring one of his assistants over to watch, rather as the house surgeon brings an intern to study a patient with a rare deformity. ‘Look at him!’ Pilates would exclaim to the assistant, ‘That could have been a beautiful body, and look what he’s done to it! Like a birdcage that somebody trod on!’ Pilates had grown tubby with age, but he would never admit it; he still thought himself a magnificent figure of a man. ‘That’s not fat,’ he declared, punching himself in the stomach, ‘that’s good healthy meat!’ He frankly lusted after some of his girl students. He used to make them lie back on an inclined board and climb on top of them, on the pretext that he was showing them an exercise. What he really was doing was rubbing off against them through his clothes; as was obvious from the violent jerking of his buttocks” (120). Lust may be in the eye of the beholder!

CI on screenwriting, something he did to pay the bills: “Christopher had always been a model employee. He despised amateurs like Brecht who, when they condescended to work at a film studio, whined and sneered and called themselves whores or slaves. Christopher prided himself on his adaptability. Writing a movie was a game, and each game had a different set of rules. Having learned the rules, Christopher could play along with enjoyment—especially if he had a fellow player like Gottfried Reinhardt who was enjoying himself too. Once Christopher had accepted the fact that this game was to be played according to the Viennese code, he became almost as Viennese as Gottfried and Fodor. I have no doubt that some of the script’s most Viennese touches were contributed by him, though I can’t remember which they were” (152).

CI quotes author Cyril Connolly: “. . .the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece . . . no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having made the admission, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, for they will not acknowledge that it is their present way of life which prevents them from ever creating anything different or better” (275).

This statement may have continued to resonate with Isherwood as his life progressed, because he kept an active social (and often sexual) life, rife with smoking and drinking. Though he did finally give up the former, drinking (though he was not a classic alcoholic, often giving it up for weeks or months at a time) to excess remained a part of his life until quite late in life.

Isherwood begins keeping journals when he is a schoolboy and continues during his short time at Cambridge. He continues while living in 1930s pre-Nazi Berlin. After he writes The Berlin Stories, he destroys those diaries, thinking that they have served their purpose, that he’d rather relive his past through his fiction than his journals. However, he lives to regret his decision and spends the rest of his life attempting to document his life. I believe that perhaps these diaries may end up being his true literary legacy. They provide the scaffolding upon which his other twenty or so works rest. And for all his “fumbling,” his is a life truly fulfilled. He both works hard and has a great deal of fun, and he never apologizes for either.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Yet, the actuality of the experiences does bother me, the brute facts keep tripping me up…Facts are never simple, they come in awkward bunches.”

“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.”

“I have no right to sneer at Christopher’s soul searchings, just because they were conducted amidst bottles and boys – but they do embarrass me.”

In Isherwood’s first volume of diaries a big chunk is missing, a lost weekend that lasted several years. Here, having written this in the ‘70s (in the 3rd person), he very frankly fills in those missing details. If I highlighted every mention of him being drunk or having sex, much of the book would be highlighted. California’s flourishing, semi-secret gay scene helped him move past his guilty feelings about not becoming the Hindu monk he, for a moment, thought he was going to be. Promiscuity was his way of life during these years & he was quite successful at it.

I found it fascinating how easily he slid into bed with men he'd just met & how he had long-term casual sex relationships with so many friends & acquaintances. For Isherwood sex wasn't just physical pleasure, though it certainly was mainly that, but it also seemed to be a way of bonding with other men, a way of showing camaraderie. Often it did seem like he was trying to add to the notches on his bedpost to boost his own ego.

It’s not all sex & booze. That compelling mix of Hollywood gossip, writing struggles, famous writer/artist friends (Auden, Forster, Capote, Huxley, Stravinsky, on & on), books he loved or hated, the shift from one life to another as he embraced his fascination with America & let his British/European self fade away. Isherwood’s insights into relationships is interesting, the idea of a mutual myth being key to a happy coupling. This intimate mythology allows for playfulness & imagination. His relationship during these years did not have that myth, being fueled by drunkenness & distractions. Not monogamous by any means, allowing for very free sexual exploration still couldn’t make it work. Yet he struggled to leave it, his fear of being alone too strong. Really, he was searching for the ideal companion.

Isherwood’s writing is just so captivating, even with his many faults (arrogance, hypochondria are milder ones) he’s such great company, funny & observant, as generous as he is critical. Really his diaries are incredible social & historical documents. His accounts of the social & sex lives of gay men during a time when most of what they did in private (& sometimes in public!) was illegal is described graphically (too much for some? not enough for others?). But they are an important look at how this group, often forced into hiding, was beginning to develop a consciousness of itself as a group, something which led right into the gay rights movement later on.

[Lizara · Rating 5 out of 5]

si gran parte de la población mundial desciende de Genghis Khan y no de Christopher Isherwood es porque no era hetero, en serio.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very personal 'partial' memoir of several years central to the life of Christopher Isherwood. Having read The Berlin Stories--Goodbye to Berlin and Mr. Norris Changes Trains-- I wanted to find out more about the life of the author. This is a good place to start. It is a very literary memoir as one might expect, but the cavalcade of characters is a bit amazing as Isherwood ran with a very interesting crowd of artists of all stripes in addition to authors. For the more obscure references there is a helpful glossary of more than sixty pages. The index helps as well. This is a book that may be dipped into and read a bit at a time without losing too much, or if you prefer more continuity you may read it straight through--enjoying yourself as much, I hope, as I did.

[Alex Morales · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started this book well over a year ago, put it down for several months, and then resumed reading it earlier this year. Whereas there were parts that were interesting, for all intents and purposes, it's as much a diary as it is a memoir, and some days are more interesting than others. If one is really keen on Isherwood and his peer group, then I would recommend reading this book. However, if one has no idea of who he is, then I don't think it would be all that great of a read.

[Virgowriter (Brad Windhauser) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really struggled through this. No clear story. Yes, it's memoir based on his personal journals, but it reads more like a collection of details rather than events/details used to create a sense of who he was then. Puzzling decision to tell all this in third person, which creates further emotional distance. A couple useful anecdotes about the issues faces gays during this era, as well as brief run-ins with Capote and Vidal.

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

He knew a lot of people in the literary world and it was interesting to read about Haliburton whose book The Flying Carpet I once owned and liked. But most of his interests were not mine.

[Karl · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a fan of Isherwood's writing I appreciated this book - quite intimate and personal memories, and at times quite coarse, unvarnished and a bit shocking in its frankness

[Umi · Rating 4 out of 5]

All the gossipy stuff you'd hoped would be in the diaries, plus lists of what he read every year!

[Fredrik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cast o' characters:
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