Although primarily associated with the 1930s, Christopher Isherwood's ongoing interest depends on two events of the 1970s: the film Cabaret, as culmination of the process by which his prose writings about Sally Bowles and Berlin were adapted, first for the stage, then for a musical, and finally for the screen; and Isherwood's own decision to revisit that terrain in Christopher and His Kind, which established him as a key figure of the gay liberation movement. The present volume also has a double temporal focus, drawing on his diaries and journals of the immediate post-second World War period, which Isherwood revisited in the early 1970s to engage in a sustained dialogue with his earlier self.
These years are "lost" in more than one sense. The allusion in his title to that classic study of alcoholism, The Lost Weekend, is deliberate. Isherwood appears to have spent the five years awash in a sea of alcohol and this in part at least is responsible for the frequent lacunae and bouts of amnesia with which he and the reader are confronted. Frequently, there is no record in the diaries or journals of many of the key events or conversations and he is led to berate his younger self for his narcissism and inattention as much as for his boozing.
Isherwood addresses his younger self in the third person in order to "overcome his inhibitions, avoid self-excuses and regard my past behaviour more objectively". But the device is also needed because that earlier self is someone who seeks not to know but to flee self-confrontation, as the alcoholic haze would suggest. Isherwood is in a way conducting a psychoanalytic session, with himself as his own patient; seeking above all to understand the difficulties he was encountering in making the transition from a more closeted life as a gay Englishman to the "relatively uninhibited" Christopher of the West Coast.
The war had seen an influx of artistic emigres from Europe to Los Angeles. Isherwood is frequently employed as a scriptwriter by Gottfried and Wolfgang Reinhardt (sons of Max); Thomas Mann is writing Dr. Faustus and Aldous Huxley is experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. But what complicates Isherwood's artistic snobbishness, which might have drawn him more exclusively to identify with such a group, is the homosexuality which claims his strongest allegiances: "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", he writes.
A double life is certainly possible under such circumstances; many of the writers and film-makers with whom Isherwood mixed were to practice it. But the partner with whom he is most identified through these years, photographer Bill Caskey, will not hear of it. For the voluble Caskey, unlike the messenger boys and life guards of the beach where so much of the gay activity was centred, was (in Isherwood's wonderful phrase) a "social amphibian" who could mix readily with both sets.
As a result, Christopher was confronted with the possibility of an integrated life: "In theory, he knew that this was morally preferable; it made hypocrisy and concealment impossible. In practice, he hated it." It is clear why Isherwood sought out and stayed in Southern California; as a place where homosexuals enjoyed a greater degree of freedom at the time, and where an interest in spiritual enlightenment was not going to be sneered at. It was the inner Englishman who would voice the kind of derision he most had to fear, rather than any outward social objection; and it is with his own inner demons that this memoir is concerned.
The diary form allows Isherwood to write, as he puts it, out of the middle of his consciousness. The fiction he is writing at the time is still centred on heterosexual couples. The diary form permits a greater degree of honesty, but it does not preclude invention, of course. The editor of these memoirs, Katherine Bucknell, on more than one occasion challenges Isherwood's claims of sexual relations with the other person's denial of same. Maybe the latter individual is still hung up; but maybe Isherwood is flattering himself.
He claims that in every satisfying sexual relationship there must be a myth - such as that of Whitman's American Boy. With Caskey he denied that there was any. And yet he is not immune to the racial myth and can assert that "part of the polarity between them was that of Irishman and Englishman". And the occasional evidences of anti-Semitism are not countered by Isherwood's Jewish lovers, since he sees it as part of the erotic attraction. This book is not designed to make you like Christopher Isherwood; one senses that the author doesn't much like himself either. But the effort to understand him the better makes for a fascinating read, in what is an important document in the evolving history of our times.
Anthony Roche lectures in the Department of English at University College Dublin and is the editor of the Irish University Review.
