Free Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir by John Lehmann Page A

soon in full cry, but the Government decided to do nothing, even if they had been able to do anything. What was particularly wounding for the two of them was that a snide attack was made on them from a side that should have been more sympathetic - in Cyril Connolly’s new monthly, Horizon. I thought that this attack was contemptible myself, and much later, in 1942, it was followed by a satiric portrait of them in Evelyn Waugh’s new novel Put Out More Flags  as Parsnip and Pimpernel, ‘two great poets who had recently fled to New York’. This was vicious, especially as Waugh was known to have admired Christopher’s work, and it was distressing to see him joining the mob. I remember being much saddened by the hullabaloo, which struck me as grotesquely ill-informed and unfair, but that did not prevent me being irritated by the bland above-the-battle tone of Wystan’s lines in September 1st 1939 :
         
There is no such thing as the State 
    And no one exists alone;
    Hunger allows no choice 
    To the citizen or the police;
    We must love one another or die ….
          
    Christopher’s case was not improved by a leak to the press of an indiscreet letter he had written to Gerald Hamilton about the ridiculous behaviour of some of the German refugees who were crowding into California. In this letter he said: ‘I have no intention of coming back to England … .’ This statement was in conflict with what he said, in various letters to various correspondents - that he would honour his pre-war commitment to the Foreign Office to work for them if required, or join the Red Cross or a Quaker ambulance unit, but in any case the situation was radically altered for him by America’s entry into the war after Pearl Harbor, and the fact that he came thereafter under American draft law. He was by that time deep into Vedanta, had been initiated by Swami Prabhavananda and had asked him to be his guru. Very little about this crucially important development in his life came through in his letters to his friends  in England, though he wrote an account of his life at La Verne, where he had joined a seminar run by Gerald Heard in July 1941, which I printed in   Penguin New Writing -   by then established on its dizzily successful course. He still felt guilty about having written for me neither his promised piece on New York nor on Ernst Toller. He wrote to me on 3 July 1941:  ‘I  feel so terribly sorry about all the times I’ve let you down that I rack my brains to find any conceivable way of appeasing you.’ What he had an equally bad conscience about was having left in the lurch the English boy whom he had once so recklessly promised to take to New York. He kept on referring to this in his letters, and told me that he had finally plucked up courage to confess to the boy that he knew it wouldn’t work and that he must abandon hope of joining him in the USA. But he instructed me by letter and cable to channel some of the royalties he was earning from his by now brilliantly successful   Goodbye to Berlin   to this boy, to help him pay for the courses he had undertaken at Christopher’s suggestion.
    Early on in the war he asked me to find and send him some books which he had left at his home in London. I therefore arranged a day with his mother when she would be coming up from the country, and went along to Pembroke Gardens. It was a most saddening experience to go into his room and see it all covered in dust sheets: it was as if he were dead, and all our years of collaboration finally extinguished. I was haunted by the abandoned look of that room for a long time, indeed until Christopher returned to England after the war. It was in the back of my mind every time I wrote to him. ‘A Day at La Verne’, when it came, seemed like a voice from a spirit world:
          
    On the evening of July 7th, 1941, eighteen men and seven women met at one of the buildings of La Verne