Book Review : Isherwood: A Half-Century of Letters Between Friends

Christopher Isherwood: A Personal Memoir by John Lehmann (Henry Holt & Co.: $15.95; 150 pages, illustrated)

Poet, critic, biographer and editor, John Lehmann’s long and distinguished literary career lends an added dimension to this affectionate portrait of Christopher Isherwood. Friends from their first meeting in 1932 until Isherwood’s death, the two men corresponded for half a century, the exchange of letters beginning when Lehmann was an apprentice manager at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s publishing house, Hogarth Press.

Lehmann and Isherwood started writing to one another almost at once, the letters increasing in frequency and frankness after Isherwood left Berlin for the Canary Islands, the haven he chose when his young German lover was refused admission to England once immigration authorities discovered evidence exposing the true nature of the relationship. Writing with discreet but absolute candor about Isherwood’s love affairs, Lehmann indicates that his own preferences made him particularly sympathetic to his friend’s emotional anguish.

Elegant Biography

While the letters written during Isherwood’s various short-lived sojourns in Europe and Hong Kong enliven the first half of the book, the structure is reinforced once Isherwood settles permanently in Southern California. In any case, the excerpts themselves are only the balloon framework of a book that becomes a spare and elegant biography, small in scale but profoundly knowledgeable about the man and his work.

Though Lehmann left his job at Hogarth soon after the initial meeting, he continued to read and comment upon Isherwood’s books, so that this memoir is actually a chronicle of a broadening and deepening talent as seen through the acute sensibility of a poet and editor. The manuscripts crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, the accompanying letters at once witty and poignant.

Until he finally made the crucial decision to live permanently in Santa Monica, Isherwood was an involuntary nomad, the frequent changes of address determined not only by his complicated love affairs but later by his intense pacifism. He could never, he confided to Lehmann, shoot at a German soldier who “might be somebody’s Heinz.”

Trauma of Separation

Once England declared war on Germany, Isherwood felt increasingly alienated from his beleaguered country, an attitude that seems to have been reciprocated even by those who most respected his literary gifts. The separation was immensely traumatic.

Early in his California experience, he wrote “John, I am so utterly sick of being a person--Christopher Isherwood, or Isherwood, or even Chris. Aren’t you too? Don’t you feel more and more, that all your achievements, all your sexual triumphs, are just like cheques, which represent money, but have no real value? Aren’t you sick to death of your face in the glass, and your business-voice, and love-voice, and your signature on documents? I know I am.”

He ended this desolate missive with the news, unsettling to Lehmann, that he had become a convert to Yoga philosophy, a decision that contributed to a lasting schism between Isherwood and W. H. Auden, as well as straining relationships with other friends who had remained in England to serve the war effort in one way or another.

At this time, Isherwood was steadily employed as a film writer here, but as was often the case, few of his scripts were ever made. As the war escalated, his pacifist beliefs antagonized more and more of his associates, and in 1943, he wrote wistfully to Lehmann “You’re one of my last real links with England now.”

During this low point, Isherwood went to live at the Vedanta monastery in Hollywood and embarked upon the relentless discipline of becoming a Hindu monk, though he could not endure its rigors for long. While in this passionately religious phase, he collaborated with a celebrated swami on a verse translation of the Mahabharata, an exercise that succeeded in releasing him from an inhibiting case of writer’s block.

In 1947 Isherwood finally felt able to return to England for a three-month visit, contributing an affecting account of his impressions to the magazine Lehmann was then editing. In 1953, after he had returned to California, Isherwood finally met Don Bachardy, the artist who would fill his emotional needs for the rest of his life. The long exile, spiritual, political and emotional, was finally over.

In “My Guru and His Disciple,” Isherwood wrote: “I knew that this time, I had really committed myself. . . . This sense of a responsibility which was almost fatherly made me anxious but full of joy”--an enduring delight that transformed and stabilized his peripatetic life. “When I think of him now,” Lehmann says at the end of this warm appreciation, “I think of his bubbling zany wit and his free-wheeling imaginative gift for turning any situation that one discussed with him, however troubling it might seem to one, into absurdity and fantasy. . . . I don’t know what a life that has had its ups and downs would have been like without him”--a tribute with a particular and special resonance now.