Lost Years by Christopher Isherwood Read Free Book Online Page B

purr and quick to claw—and Dobbin—old, strong and steady, but stubborn and a little boring—tell a great deal. None of the other intimate mythologies which Isherwood describes in the reconstructed diary draws upon animal imagery. They are generally more rivalrous and combative—some derived from wrestling and boxing—or more intellectual and literary—for instance, rooted in Whitman’s poetry. Isherwood observes in the reconstructed diary that an animal myth can sustain a relationship when there is conflict: “in the world of animals, hatred is impossible; [they] can only love each other. They focus their aggression on mythical external enemies.” 27 Moreover, animals have no language; their world of nestling warmth is based upon physical trust, is inchoate, and inaccessible to outsiders. In the great love relationship of his life, Isherwood, a writer, evidently surrendered to a mythology that did not depend upon language; its parameters could not be declaimed, enforced, or justified by words. They simply had to be acted out. For Isherwood, the relationship may well have been too mysterious or simply too important to dissect. In any case, it was still taking shape at the time of his death, and this, too, may have made it, for him, untellable. Isherwood said in his Thanksgiving diary entry of 1970 that he could not write a book about his friendship with Swami while Swami was still alive because “the book couldn’t be truly complete until after Swami’s death.” 28 Swami died in 1976;
My Guru and His Disciple
was published in 1980. Despite Isherwood’s own death in 1986, the story of his relationship with Don Bachardy is even now unfinished.
    Although he did not continue in the spring of 1971 with the study of Kitty and Dobbin, Isherwood circled around the idea of a factual, explicit record of his most private life until he at last began the reconstructed diary which, through the gradual accumulation of detailed, intimate, and sometimes trivial, day-to-day memories, gained access to the treasure house of the unconscious and its store of mythology. As he repeated in each of his diary entries about Evelyn Hooker, Isherwood was convinced he must write about homosexuality in his own language. The language of psychology was foreign. His “kind,” his tribe, were homosexuals; his kind were also writers. And he asserted that a non-writer, like Evelyn Hooker, could not understand this. He identified with writers, admired writers, socialized with writers. In his reconstructed diary, as in
Christopher and His Kind,
his identity as a homosexual is portrayed as being inseparable from his identity as a writer. And he incorporates in both of these personal histories an account of how he drew on his real-life experiences of the 1930s and 1940s for his fiction, telling how he adapted the facts of his life to suit his artistic purpose. Thus,
Lost Years
and
Christopher and His Kind
reveal not only how he had secretly lived as a homosexual, but also how he had secretly lived as a writer, continually reshaping the truth in his work. In both books, he recalls the works he hoped to write as well as the ones which came to fruition, and so measures himself, ruthlessly, against his unfulfilled ambitions as well as his actual achievements.
    In
Lost Years,
the reconstructed diary, Isherwood tells how throughout the late 1940s he started and restarted the book he at first called
The School of Tragedy
and eventually published as
The World in the Evening.
He recalls that he was never sure of his subject, never sure how to tell his story nor how to give life to a narrator of whose identity and sexuality he was uncertain. In a sense, Isherwood had come to a deadlock with himself because, for a time, his identity as a writer and his identity as a homosexual were at odds. He had introduced Caskey to his friends, so that his life became more unified than ever before, but he was unable to achieve