Free Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir by John Lehmann

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 your love-voice, and your signature on documents? I know I am.
         
    He ended his letter with a confession that was news to me, though I had guessed that something of the sort was going on: ‘As you may have gathered from the above remarks, I have become very much interested in Yoga philosophy, due to Gerald Heard. He is a very great man. A kind of walking Athens. And terribly funny. We see him a lot. Oh yes, and I met Huxley, who is nice, but oh so bookish and inclined to be pontifical … . Must go now and make the beds.’
    Like many other friends of Christopher, I felt dismay at these hints of him becoming a convert to Yoga. Not only did I feel that it would draw him away from me, but I thought of Heard as rather a phoney. However, as Christopher’s involvement grew deeper, I decided that I could not judge sensibly from London, and I never discussed the subject with him in letters, though frequently with his other English friends, who almost without exception expressed their anxiety and mystification. The conversion did, I think, create a gulf between him and Wystan, who, ever more firmly holding to his family Anglicanism, expressed the view that Yoga was ‘mumbo- jumbo’ and was not to be moved; it was not only that Wystan’s life in New York grew to have less in common with Christopher’s in the movie-world of California, though that was important in their gradual estrangement. I am pretty certain that Wystan would not have been sympathetic to Christopher’s view of the ultimate necessity of writing about sainthood, as expressed in his ‘Problems of the Religious Novel’ in Vedanta and the West , any more than I was. Wystan was, I believe, never a pacifist in the sense that Christopher became one, when he faced up to the possibility that in a war he might have to fire at Heinz. The further stage of his argument that he couldn’t shoot anyone in an opposing army because he might be somebody’s Heinz seemed to me rather thin. After all, the number of those who have friends on both sides in a war must be rather small - though I was one of them myself. This condition caused me much agony of mind when I thought of my Austrian friends, but the need to defeat Hitler seemed to me over-riding. Though my war service was confined to the Home Guard, I could never have been the kind of all-out pacifist that Christopher had become, but I respected him for his decision if not for his logic.
    And then the long-dreaded war broke out, and soon after the outbreak the persecution of Christopher and Wystan as deserters and cowards. Personally, I was very sorry that they were not going to be in England with us, not to know how they would have reacted to what we were about to experience, as we had the wonderful poems of Louis MacNeice (who came back from America) about the Blitz. There was an obstinate core of die-hards who seemed to have got it into their heads that the more vocal anti-fascists were responsible for the war. One thing that these head-hunters had forgotten, or chose deliberately to forget, was that Christopher and Wystan had left England at a time when war seemed to be indefinitely postponed in the comforting aftermath of the Munich agreement. In any case these critics had always disliked and suspected them, and now seemed a capital opportunity to strike. In the House of Commons Major Sir Jocelyn Lucas set the ball rolling by asking the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour whether steps had been taken, or would be taken, to summon British citizens of military age,  such as Mr W.H. Auden and Mr Christopher Isherwood, for registration and calling-up in view of the fact they were seeking refuge abroad. The popular press was