Liberation (6 page)

There are only a few hints at the beginning of the 1980s that the increasingly hectic sexual activity and drug-taking of some of Isherwood's circle might be starting to wear them out. Tony Richardson, for instance, seems to grow tired. And in September 1981, Isherwood records that one young friend has a sore throat, “Poor angel, he really is a martyr to V.D.” In the very next entry, another phones to warn that he has hepatitis; so Isherwood and Bachardy both get gammaglobulin shots because the boy had kissed Isherwood at a party.
⁵⁹
In 1983, a boy who sits for Bachardy is suffering from cancer: “He carried on about the treatments he'd had for cancer and created a quite powerful death gloom, which he thickened by showing us two lesions on his legs.”
⁶⁰
Later the boy died after being ill for about ten years; he proved to be the first AIDS fatality Isherwood and Bachardy knew. Many of their friends were to die of AIDS thereafter, but Isherwood never wrote about their deaths or about the epidemic.

The disease of his generation, and the one he most feared, was cancer. In April 1981, he wrote: “Loss of hair. Loss of taste and consequent loss of weight—down to 147 and ½—no big deal, this.”
⁶¹
But it was a big deal; the beautiful life he had forged with Bachardy could survive anything but “this.” That autumn, Isherwood was diagnosed with prostate cancer. And he used the diary, as ever, to try to understand what he felt about it:

 

Well, the moment has come when I must recognize and discuss the situation with myself, which means, as usual, writing it down and looking at it in black and white. I have got some sort of malignancy, a tumor, and that's what's behind all this pain. They will treat it, of course. . . . I shall get used to the idea, subject to fits of blind panic. . . .

What I have to face is dying. . . .

I pray and pray to Swami—to show himself to me, no matter how—as we've been promised that he will, before death. . . .

I get fits of being very very scared. . . .

Don says that I should work, and he is absolutely right. I remember how wonderful Aldous Huxley was, working right to the end. I have promised Don that I'll get on with my book.

The love between me and Don has never been stronger, and it is heartbreakingly intimate. Every night he goes to sleep holding the old dying creature in his arms.
⁶²

 

His fears came and went, and he struggled humbly with them. He continued to be happy with Bachardy, and he experienced powerful visions of Swami which he recorded in the diary and which suggest that what he had always hoped for from his religion was there for him at the end:

 

Sometimes I feel the death fear bothering me again. I pray hard to Swami, asking him to make me feel his presence, “Now and in the hour of death.” The response I get from this is surprisingly strong. I'm moved to tears of joy and love. I pray for Darling also, seeing the two of us kneeling together in his presence. Religion is about nothing but love—I know this more and more.
⁶³

 

In the 1980s, Isherwood made fewer and fewer diary entries. They have a tenderness and pathos unlike the smart and cynical writer of his youth. His psyche was so tuned and disciplined by a lifetime spent writing, that even as the grammar vanishes and the commas are no longer placed, he shapes his prose with a cadence of ending. As he fades physically and presses towards transcendence, he continues to report factually on his experience, finding words for the body's creaturely, unconscious existence on the threshold of an awesome physical transformation: “. . . I'm not in a good state. Death fears—that's to say, pangs of foreboding—recur often. They seem to be part of a quite natural physical condition; the pangs of a dying animal, thrilling with dread of the unknown.”
⁶⁴

His final entry touches on the chief themes of his life, his love for Bachardy and his continuing pleasure in the literary rivalries of his youth which still seethe by letter backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. Spender, he reports, is too embarrassed to admit he has been knighted by the Queen because he mocked Auden in the leftist thirties for proudly collecting a Gold Medal for Poetry from the King, and he knows Isherwood will remember. Upward compares Spender's ambition to Macbeth's; he will stop at nothing to outdo Auden, the literary king of their generation: “(Edward Upward, in a letter, made us roar with laughter by quoting Banquo's line: ‘Thou hast it now. . . .')”
⁶⁵
Isherwood made the entry on Independence Day 1983, the anniversary of Swami's death in 1976 and of Vivekananda's in 1902; on this numinous date, he seemed already to be looking forward to his own liberation—and laughing.

Textual Note

American style and spelling are used throughout this book because Isherwood himself gradually adopted them. English spellings mostly disappeared from his diaries by the end of his first decade in California, although he sometimes reverted to them, for instance when staying at length in England. I have altered anomalies in keeping with the general trend; however, I have retained idiosyncrasies of phrasing and spelling which have a phonetic impact in order that his characteristically Anglo-American voice might resound in the writing, and I have let stand some English spellings that are accepted in American since Isherwood had no reason to change these. I have generally retained his old-fashioned habit of liberal capitalization because this is often a key, like quotation marks but with less emphasis, to his private language of camp.

I have made some very minor alterations silently, such as standardizing passages which Isherwood quotes from his own published books, from other published authors, and from letters. I have standardized punctuation for most dialogue and quotations, for obvious typos (which are rare), and very occasionally to ease the reader's progress. I have usually retained Isherwood's characteristic use of the semi-colon followed by an incomplete clause. I have spelled out many abbreviations, including names, for which Isherwood sometimes used only initials, because I believe he himself would have spelled these out for publication, and I have corrected the spellings of many names because he typically checked and corrected names himself. Square brackets mark emendations of any substance or interest and these are often described in a footnote. Around his sixty-seventh birthday, Isherwood began to misspell names and occasionally transposed them or got them wrong in some other way; he had seldom made such errors before. For simple misspellings of this kind, I have generally not added footnotes. But for more significant and potentially confusing errors, I have done so, especially where Isherwood himself draws attention to them.

Square brackets also mark information I have added to the text for clarity, such as surnames or parts of titles shortened by Isherwood. And square brackets indicate where I have removed or altered material in order to protect the privacy of individuals still living.

This book includes a seven-month run of entries from Isherwood's 1976 pocket diaries; these were pre-printed appointment books, seven days to a page, in which he jotted down whom he met each day and, very briefly, main events. He called them his day-to-day diaries. The entries fill a gap in the first half of the year when he stopped writing in his diary while finishing
Christopher and His Kind
. The rationale for including the day-to-day diaries follows Isherwood's own example in handling a longer gap in his much earlier diaries, from 1945 until 1948. In 1955, he made an outline of the missing years based on his pocket diaries, and he drew on this outline later when he wrote the memoir published posthumously as
Lost Years
.

Readers will find supplemental information provided in several ways. Footnotes explain passing historical references, identify people who appear only once, offer translations of foreign passages, gloss slang, explain allusions to Isherwood's or other people's works in progress, give references to books of clear significance to Isherwood, sometimes provide information essential for making sense of jokes or witticisms, and so forth. For people, events, terms, organizations, and other things which appear more than once or which were of long-term importance to Isherwood and for explanations too long to fit conveniently into a footnote, I have provided a glossary at the end of the volume. The glossary gives general biographical information about many of Isherwood's friends and acquaintances and offers details of particular relevance to Isherwood and to what he recorded in his diaries. A few very famous people—Bette Davis, Liza Minnelli, Elton John, John Travolta—do not appear in the glossary because although Isherwood may have met them more than once, he knew them or at least wrote about them in their capacity as celebrities. Others who were intimate friends—Truman Capote, David Hockney, Igor Stravinsky, Tennessee Williams—are included even though their main achievements will be familiar to many readers. This kind of information is now easily available on the internet, but a reader of this diary should be able to find what he or she immediately wishes to know and to get a feel for what Isherwood himself or his contemporaries may have known, without putting the book down and turning to a computer. Isherwood has audiences of widely varied ages and cultural backgrounds, and I have aimed to make his diaries accessible to all of them. Where he himself fully introduces someone, I have avoided duplicating his work, and readers may need to use the index to refer back to figures introduced early in the text who sometimes reappear much later.

Hindu terminology is also explained in the glossary in accordance with the way the terms are used in Vedanta.

In any book of this size, there are many details which do not fit systematically into even the most flexible of structures, but I hope that my arrangement of the supplemental materials will be consistent enough that readers can find what help they want.

Acknowledgements

For me, this volume completes a task of more than fifteen years. My life has been transformed by the long and inspiring engagement with Christopher Isherwood, whom I never met, and Don Bachardy, whose friendship I cherish. I will always be grateful for their lives recorded in these diaries and for the opportunity entrusted to me by Don to prepare the diaries for publication. The passage of time has even brought with it a new life, my third child and youngest son, Jack Maguire; his father and I are proud that he is a godson to Don.

I am indebted again to the benevolence and generosity of Pravrajika Vrajaprana of the Sarada Convent in Santa Barbara. She has continued to guide my research in Vedanta, in small matters of terminology and large ones of ritual and doctrine. She has again read every page of this book in a foolhardy attempt to save me from error. I am extremely grateful to her, to Bob Adjemian, to the late Peter Schneider, and to the many other nuns and monks at the Vedanta Society of Southern California who have responded to my queries.

I have again had research assistance from Douglas Murray, Anne Totterdell, Gosia Lawik, and members of the London Library staff, and I thank each of them for their dogged professionalism. Tim Hilton methodically read for errors. Christopher Phipps contributed not only research assistance but also his sense of order and completeness in creating another fine index.

The list of those who have answered other questions is very long. Each person on it has made at least one trip to an attic or cellar to rummage through a box of old photographs or papers, even if only figuratively, and each has reported to me thoughtfully, on occasion hilariously, by phone, email, letter, or in person: Marie Mériaux Allemann, International Committee of the Red Cross Archives; Julian Barnes; Keith Berwick; the late Thomas Braun; Jude Brimmer, Archivist, Britten-Pears Foundation; John Byrne; Lucy Bucknell; Leslie Caron; Patrick Cockburn; Camilla Chandon; Tchaik Chassay; Jim Clark; Mary Clow; Anna O'Reilly Cottle; Paul Cox, Assistant Curator (Archive and Library), National Portrait Gallery, London; Robert Craft; Linda Crawford; Stephen Crook, Librarian, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library; Evan Cruikshank; Santanu Das; Marie-Pierre de Lassus; Jane Dorrell; David Dougill; Chris Freeman; Robin French; Bella Freud; Jonathan Fryer; P.N. Furbank; Christopher Gibbs; Christian-Albrecht Gollub; the late John Gross; Joseph Hacker; Donald Hall; Nicky Haslam; Selina Hastings; Nancy Hereford, Press Director, Center Theater Group; Samuel Hynes; David Jenkins; Jim Kelly; the late Frank Kermode; Jane Klain, The Paley Center for Media; Mark Lancaster; John Lahr; George Lawson; Kristen Leipert, Assistant Archivist, Whitney Museum of American Art; Richard Le Page; Michael McDonagh; Lucy Maguire; Ian Massey; Edward Mendelson; Young Hoon Moon; Robin Muir; Melissa North; Annie Ochmanek,
Art Forum
; Richard W. Oram; Peter Parker; Michael Peppiatt; Philip Ramey; Andreas Reyneke; Rodrigo Rey Rosa; Giovanna Salini, Embassy of Peru, London; Peter Schlesinger; Howard Schuman; W.I. Scobie; Alexandra Shulman; Richard Simon; Wayne Sleep; Geoffrey Strachan; Leslie Kay Swigart, Librarian, California State University at Long Beach; Daniel Topolski; Jeremy Treglown; Gloria Vanderbilt; Hugo Vickers; Barney Wan; Edmund White; Deepti Zaremba.

For permission to publish excerpts from unpublished letters of Edward Upward, I would like to thank Kathy and Jeff Allinson, from an unpublished letter of John Lehmann, Georgina Glover at the David Higham Agency and for lyrics from his song “Honky Cat,” Bernie Taupin.

My agent, Sarah Chalfant, has altogether changed my working life and made these diaries part of a new beginning for me. Thanks also to Luke Ingram, Kristina Moore, and Matthew McLean at the Wylie Agency. I remain forever grateful to Stephanie Cabot for her willing ear and good sense and to Caroline Dawnay for negotiating my role in this project. To the publishers of
Liberation
, Clara Farmer and Terry Karten, my warmest thanks for your conviction and your follow-through. In addition, I would like to thank Alison Samuel and the others at Chatto who have been such stalwart friends and hard workers in completing this long project, Sue Amaradivakara, Juliet Brooke, Anthony Hippisley, Alison Tulett and especially Rowena Skelton-Wallace.

Thank you once again, my dear friends, Richard Davenport-Hines, Isabel Fonseca, John Fuller, Bobby Maguire, and Robert McCrum for wading through and commenting on the parts of this book that Isherwood did not write.

To Jackie Edgar, Vilma Catbagan, Felisberta Rodrigues, Katrina Johnston, Elizabeth Jones, Susan Mellett, I have said thank you before, and I hope you know how much I have benefited from your help. And to Bob, Bobby, Lucy, and Jack: No kidding, I really am done now. It's all over but the reading.