Lost Years by Christopher Isherwood Read Free Book Online Page A

had decided against the project:
    Yesterday morning I saw Evelyn Hooker and told her that I can’t write her book with her. I think I explained why I can’t quite lucidly and I think I convinced her. The analogy of
Kathleen and Frank
was very useful, in doing this, because Kathleen’s diaries can be likened to Evelyn’s files of case histories. The diaries, like the case histories, can be commented on, they can be elucidated and conclusions can be drawn from them; but they can’t be rewritten because nothing can be as good as the source material itself. What is embarrassing—and what I think sticks as a reproach against me in Evelyn’s mind—is that I told her, in the Saltair Avenue days, I was prepared to write a “popular” book about homosexuality with her. Of course I was always saying things like this, quite irresponsibly, subconsciously relying on the probability that I wouldn’t ever be taken up on them. To Evelyn yesterday I said, “Well, you know, in those days I was nearly always drunk”; which, the more I think of it, was a silly tactless altogether second-rate remark. 25
    Indeed, it was during the Saltair Avenue days that Isherwood had made an analogous promise to Swami Prabhavananda: that he would write a biography of Ramakrishna. Swami persistently reminded Isherwood of the promise, and Isherwood fulfilled it, taking more than a decade to write
Ramakrishna and His Disciples
(1965). He had to submit each chapter of the biography to the order for approval, and the project made him into a quasi-official historian of the Ramakrishna movement. Likewise, through his later works and his diaries, he was to become a historian of the homosexual movement, but without professional psychology or any other “official” involvements; instead, he was to tell its history through his own experience. Although Isherwood slighted the idea of rewriting Evelyn Hooker’s case histories, he was already reflecting upon a similar project on his own terms. Later that same month he records that he has begun to take notes about the private behavior patterns of Don Bachardy (“Kitty”) and himself (“Dobbin”). Despite his outcry against psychology, his description of his plan is technical, as if he intended to produce a special kind of case history of his own:
    On the 17th, I started a sort of notebook on Kitty and Dobbin—I’ll try to write it rather like a study in natural history; their behavior, methods of communication, feeding habits, etc. I had very strong feelings that I ought not to record all this, that it was an invasion of privacy. But where else have I ever found anything of value? The privacy of the unconscious is the only treasure house. And as a matter of fact, Don is always urging me to write about us. I have no idea, yet, what I shall “do” with this material after I’ve collected it. I’ll just keep jotting things down, day by day, and see what comes of it. 26
    Like all of Isherwood’s work, this project was to begin with external observation and recording. By invading his own privacy, by being frank to the point of indiscretion, he could unlock what he calls “the only treasure house,” the unconscious. Ordinary habits, the routine of daily life, accurately noted, would reveal the inward, original activity of the mind in its rich, dreamy, nonpersonal, eternal existence. Thus, like a scientist—or perhaps like a spy or a thief—Isherwood set out to make himself and Don Bachardy the subject of a domestic field study.
    But the notebook of Kitty and Dobbin was also abandoned, and in the end Isherwood left no specific account of his intimate life with Bachardy. Although his diaries from 1953 onward comprise an episodic narrative of their years together, he never fully analyzed their relationship nor explained its mythology. The names alone, Kitty—suggesting a creature soft and vulnerable, quick to