Lost Years by Christopher Isherwood Read Free Book Online

dawning self-understanding which resulted from conscious study of homosexuality and, in Auden’s case, from a brief attempt at psychoanalysis. At Hirschfeld’s institute, sexual love in all its strange and familiar forms was classified, codified, categorized. Along similarly analytical lines, Isherwood and Auden talked endlessly between themselves and with other friends about their relationships, and they read and also talked about Proust, Gide, Corvo, Freud, Jung, Georg Groddeck, Edward Carpenter, and many others. None of these literary and psychological texts offered them a satisfactory account of who they were. In their own work, throughout their careers, each of them continued to consider and address the question in any number of ways—veiled and indirect at first, then, in Isherwood’s case, increasingly overt as the years went by. The earnest scientific thoroughness with which Evelyn Hooker, like Hirschfeld, approached her research, lent Isherwood’s way of life in California a reassuringly dull legitimacy and probably contributed to his increasing openness about his homosexuality in his writing as well as in his personal life.
    In the early 1950s when he was living next door to Evelyn Hooker, Isherwood agreed to write a popular book with her about homosexuality. The plan came to nothing, in part because when Don Bachardy moved into the garden house with Isherwood, Hooker’s husband became anxious that Bachardy’s youthful appearance would cause a scandal, and the Hookers asked Isherwood to move out. This left Isherwood and Bachardy homeless—a tiny echo of the crisis Isherwood had experienced when Heinz Neddermeyer was refused entry to England in 1934—and it caused a terrible strain in Isherwood’s friendship with Evelyn Hooker. Two decades later, in December 1970, just as Isherwood was wondering what to write next after
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, she reminded him of the project. But the idea made him anxious, and his reaction was perhaps still colored by resentment at her failure to stand by him in his relationship with Don Bachardy. On December 11 he wrote:
    Saw Evelyn Hooker yesterday. She wants me to work with her on a “popular” book on homosexuality. . . . I am doubtful about the project. It seems that I shall have to read through sixty case histories and then write about them—which really means retell them, and what the hell is the use of that? Non-writers never understand what writers can and cannot do. They think they can tell you what to say and that you will then somehow magically resay it so it’s marvellous. However, I didn’t want to refuse straight away. I’ll read some of the stuff first and try to find out exactly what it is that Evelyn expects. She is a very good woman and her intentions are of the noblest and I would like to help her, if I can do so without becoming her secretary.
    Isherwood read through just two of the case histories and felt certain that the language of psychology was not his own language. In February he wrote:
    This morning I also finished the second of the two files I borrowed from Evelyn Hooker. What a plodding old donkey Psychology is! Evelyn’s questions are full of phrases like, “his own processes of sexual arousal are on an ascending incline,” “I don’t have a very clear picture of how much mutual stimulation is going on,” “the primary stimulation is on the head of the penis, would that be true?,” “while I have asked you many questions about sexual preferences and gratifications, I have not really asked you questions couched in his terms of the basic mechanics of sex.” I really can’t imagine myself working with Evelyn on this sort of thing; it would be like having to write a book in a foreign language. But I mustn’t prejudge the issue. I must wait until we have had a talk and I have found out just exactly what it is she wants me to contribute. 24
    By March he