Christopher Isherwood’s reputation has stood on shaky ground ever since he and W. H. Auden left Europe for the United States in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War. It was seen by many in England as abandonment, even flight, and ill-wishers scoffed as the two writers who had been the darlings of literary anti-fascism throughout the Thirties turned tail for America the moment war seemed imminent.

There is a certain amount of justice in this interpretation of events, as Isherwood himself was only too aware, though he considered himself a committed pacifist and stated that, should war break out, he would be perfectly willing to return to England and do whatever work the government might require of conscientious objectors. In the event, he did not go back to England, but he did volunteer for wartime work with the Quakers in Pennsylvania, helping European refugees to get settled and launched in the United States. Yet he was never to be easy in his mind about his own motivations for emigrating. In 1944 he wrote to Cyril Connolly that  

our coming to America … was an altogether irresponsible act, prompted by circumstances —like our trip to China, and my wanderings about Europe after 1933. When the war broke out in 1939, it was a fifty-fifty chance what I’d do. I was a bit bewildered, a bit guilty, pulled by personal relationships to stay here, and pulled by others to return. I delayed, because that is always easiest. Then came the press attacks, and cowardice and defiance hardened. Yes, I quite admit that there was cowardice— not of the Blitz … but chiefly because I knew that, if I returned to England, I would have to take the pacifist position and strike out on my own line—not yours.

In view of the sort of war it would turn out to be, with untold suffering inflicted on millions of defenseless people, Isherwood’s rationalizations and his individual brand of pacifism now seem self-indulgent and unreasoned. He tended to confront issues of political or social principle by personalizing them, often in inappropriate ways, a fact of which he was aware: “I have never been able to grasp any idea except through a person.” His reluctance to go to war stemmed from affection for the friends of his Berlin days, particularly Heinz Neddemeyer, his former lover who had been forced into the Nazi army. “Suppose I have in my power an army of six million men,” he proposed. “I can destroy it by pressing an electric button. The six millionth man is Heinz. Will I press the button? Of course not—even if the 5,999,999 others are hundred per cent Jew-baiting blood-mad fiends (which is absurd).”

There is a clear failure in logic here, as well as a lack of judgment. In quotations like the above, one hears distinct echoes of the writer who, in his writing and his life, influenced Isherwood more than any other: E. M. Forster. It was Forster who had declared the absolute primacy of personal relationships, and who had made the statement—felt by many at the time to herald a joyous liberation from the forces of mindless nationalism but in retrospect a deeply disturbing opinion—that if he were given a choice between betraying his friend and betraying his country, he hoped he should have the courage to betray his country. Forster’s influence, for better and for worse, is everywhere evident in Isherwood’s life and work.

Many people found it hard to forgive Isherwood, either for his initial defection or for the success that, as an American, he continued to enjoy. Seven years ago in the pages of this magazine, for example, David Pryce-Jones attacked him in an aggrieved tone:

No other contemporary writer was so petted and indulged. Invariably his prose style was praised for making no demands upon the reader… . Born into a prosperous and well-connected family in Cheshire, Isherwood was numbered among those who had a stake in the country, as he liked to boast. The family manor house dated back to the seventeenth century… . Some rich uncle could be relied on to give him a private income; some influential friend was always ready to bail him out of trouble or to buy him a ticket for traveling.

This is a somewhat extreme view, and while it reflected a certain truth about the youthful Isherwood, it no longer applied to the older one. When Isherwood eventually inherited the seventeenth-century manor house and the rich uncle’s estate, he signed the entire package over to his younger brother without a backward glance, readily resigning himself to an uncertain financial future as a screenwriter. The charge that Isherwood’s writing makes “no demands upon the reader” is equally reductive: in fact his talent, if never fully realized in a “great” work, produced several exquisite and original minor ones: Mr. Norris Changes Trains, Goodbye to Berlin, Prater Violet, and A Single Man. He was a master of English prose in whose hands the language achieved singular beauty and lucidity, modestly disguised as simplicity.

For all his faults, Isherwood was hardly the monster of selfishness which his critics like to depict, and the publication of the first volume of Isherwood’s diaries offers the reader ample opportunity to make his own judgments about his character. This volume, which covers the period from Isherwood and Auden’s departure for America in 1939 until 1960, when he was writing Down There on a Visit, fills nine hundred pages; a second one, progressing from 1960 until the writer’s death in 1986, will follow. The decision of Isherwood’s companion, Don Bachardy, to publish the diaries in full seems perverse. Isherwood looked on journal writing as a duty, and forced himself to make frequent entries whether or not he had anything to say. As a result, at least half of the diaries consist of repetitious and uninteresting material: complaints about boyfriends and neighbors, or injunctions to himself to work harder, to straighten out his love life, to cut down on smoking and drinking, to diet, to spend more time at prayer or meditation.

About the last named: Isherwood had met the Indian Swami Prabhavananda in 1939, soon after settling in Los Angeles, where he would live the rest of his life. Auden, he wrote, “had his Anglo-Catholicism to fall back on… . I had nothing of this kind, and I didn’t yet clearly realize how much I was going to need it.” “Certainly, my own life badly needed some kind of discipline. I was still suspicious of the occult, however, and hated anything which sounded like ‘religion.’” Nevertheless he converted to Hinduism soon after meeting the Swami, and was to adhere to that faith for the rest of his life; he even spent an unsuccessful, faintly ludicrous year as a novice monk in the Vedanta Center on Ivar Avenue.

Only a genius, possibly, can give universal meaning to his own spiritual struggle. Isherwood was certainly no Augustine, and his efforts toward what he refers to as “ego-bashing” are at worst tedious, at best conducive only to a certain cynical, unedifying amusement. When Swami urges him to send thoughts of peace and goodwill toward people of all countries, he observes that it is “easy as long as I think of typical people in each country,” but that “for some reason, it is most difficult to send goodwill toward the South Americans.” He finds it painfully difficult to focus his mind on prayer:

Arrived to find the shrine room empty. Tried to pray for my friends, but could feel absolutely no affection for anybody… . Then the usual bad feelings—vanity, because Swami came in late and saw that I was already in the shrine; self-accusations, because I’m not in England…. Then satisfaction, because, technically, I’m still keeping all the rules. Then sex thoughts. Then resentful feelings toward Chris and Gerald and Peggy and Paul Sorel.

To give him his due, he stuck with it over the years, but prayer was never to come easily or naturally to him. “If I really desire God more than anything else,” he wrote, “then I must desire my periods of prayer more than anything else. (I most certainly don’t.)”

Isherwood never ceased to revere the Swami, with whom he collaborated on a number of publications including a translation of the Bhagavad Gita, and who was the subject of his 1980 book, My Guru and His Disciple. But in the diaries Swami comes across as a charlatan: how seriously are we to take a Hollywood spiritual guide who happily admits his greatest heroes to be Greta Garbo and the Duke of Windsor? One can only smile at Swami’s suggestion that Isherwood had the makings of a saint. (Even Isherwood, who in fact had a very shrewd estimate of just how far his own spiritual enlightenment reached, suspected that Swami was laying it on thick because of his usefulness as a free translator, writer, and propagandist.) And the Ivar Avenue monastery, far from being the calm refuge Isherwood hoped to find, turned out, not very surprisingly, to be a hotbed of jealousy and petty rivalries.

Isherwood was also, if not a disciple, at least an admirer of Gerald Heard, one of the foremost quacks of his day, apostle of spiritual growth through hallucinogenic drugs, electromagnetic radiation, UFOs, and other branches of pseudo-science and pseudo-religion—a New Ager before the New Age. Isherwood’s tolerance for Heard and his claptrap is mystifying, considering his very real ability, always his stock in trade as a novelist, to skewer the phony and the inflated.

He certainly had no difficulty doing so in his ordinary friendships. On John van Druten, for example: “sententious…. [saying] ‘What have I ever suffered in comparison with what the Rosenbergs are feeling, waiting for execution?’ I guess, when he talks like this, one is supposed to fall on one’s ass with amazement at such charity and cosmic sensibility.” Or on his sometime friend Peggy Kiskadden: “Peggy is much concerned with the change of life and anxious not to try to be attractive any more. (She will, though.) She is transferring her sexual vanity to her children, as bankers transfer money from a city which may be bombed.”

Such telling, economical strokes of characterization are what made Isherwood’s novels so persistently clever and attractive; they are also what make the diaries worth reading, in spite of all the excess baggage:

Thomas Mann died last Friday—tidily, as he did everything. There was a greatness in his dry neatness… . He was somehow very supporting—not because of his great gestures, his “open letters” to world leaders, his public self-questionings. No, he was lovable in a tiny, cozy way—he was kind, he was genuinely interested in other people, he kept cheerful, he was gossipy, he was quite brave—he had the virtues of an admirable nursery governess.

More often the negative predominates. Bette Davis is an “arrogant and not overly talented parrot-faced bitch”; Lee Strasberg an “unspeakable arch-ass.” John Lehmann “watches himself with the greatest respect, to see what he’ll do next—but alas no humor”; Lehmann’s autobiography induces “doldrums… . All accounts of childhood are boring, except the very greatest, and his is not the very greatest or the greatest or even the very.” Aldous Huxley is fastidious: “stupidity afflicts him like a nasty smell— and how eagerly he sucks at the dry teats of books! … Every time I open my mouth he is obscurely pained and distressed. I am such a hopeless ignoramus, such a barbarian.”

As is evident from the cast of characters here, Isherwood’s circle of acquaintance was enormous. His feet were firmly planted in two Hollywood camps—the movie industry and the community of expatriate European intellectuals, which included Mann, Huxley, Heard, Berthold and Salka Viertel, Igor and Vera Stravinsky. He was also one of the most prominent members of what could be described as a sort of international gay confraternity, including Auden, Forster, Lincoln Kirstein, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, John Gielgud, and Somerset Maugham. The result is that the unlikeliest combinations of people are likely to turn up in these pages: Dylan Thomas at the Players Restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, pawing Shelley Winters’s breasts over the dinner table; Bertrand Russell and Greta Garbo hobnobbing at a beach party. (Isherwood, incidentally, agreed with Peter Viertel’s opinion that Garbo was a “dumb cluck.”)

For all his intelligence Isherwood was a surprisingly unintellectual writer, brilliant at observation, less so at analysis. He was never a very serious thinker; his real gift was for comedy, often comedy of the silliest and most lightweight sort. But because of the circumstances of his life and the political attitudes he struck, he took on something of a symbolic role in the intellectual life of the century. Just what he was supposed to be symbolic of depended on the observer: he was variously seen as a romantic wanderer, a courageous anti-fascist, a parlor-pink, a coward, a mystic, a pioneer of gay liberation. To cast Isherwood in these roles, however, is probably to take him more seriously than he should be taken—certainly more seriously than he took himself. There was always a goofy absurdity about him, which he exploited brilliantly in his fictional self-portraits, and which he seldom loses sight of in the diaries. Though he made an unremitting effort to impose a serious structure on his life, his strong suit, ultimately, was frivolity.