Lost Years Read Online Free Page B

somewhat like the flow of unselfconscious, free-associative talk in psychoanalysis, evidently set his mind free to delve more directly than ever before into his private life. The very insignificance and confidentiality of the task opened new avenues to self-reflection. And so perhaps without at first realizing it, Isherwood embarked on an entirely new episode of his life’s work.
    In his Thanksgiving diary entry he had gone on to ask himself whether he would ever again write fiction:
    Have I given up all idea of writing another novel, then? No, not necessarily. The problem really is as follows: The main thing I have to offer as a writer are my reactions to experience (these
are
my fiction or my poetry, or whatever you want to call it). Now, these reactions are more positive when I am reacting to actual experiences, than when I am reacting to imagined experiences. Yet, the actuality of the experiences does bother me, the brute facts keep tripping me up, I keep wanting to rearrange and alter the facts so as to relate them more dramatically to my reactions. Facts are never simple, they come in awkward bunches. You find yourself reacting to several different facts at one and the same time, and this is messy and unclear and undramatic. I have had this difficulty many times while writing
Kathleen and Frank.
For instance, Christopher’s reactions to Kathleen are deplorably complex and therefore self-contradictory, and therefore bad drama.
    On the one hand, Isherwood was restating, and perhaps rediscovering, something he had long known: that his reactions to real experience were more vivid, more intense than anything he could invent. On the other hand, he conceded that writing accurate history was a more severe discipline than writing fiction, because he could not alter the facts to conform to his artistic intention. As early as 1953 he had described in his diary his “lack of inclination to cope with a constructed, invented plot—the feeling, why not write what one experiences from day to day?” Then, in 1953, he had attributed the feeling to the fact that he had fallen in love with Don Bachardy: “Why invent—when Life is so prodigious?” And he had added, “Perhaps I’ll never write another novel. . . .” 4 Yet he had gone on to write several of his best novels over the twelve or thirteen years following 1953. But eventually the fiction did stop. Isherwood wrote his last novel,
A Meeting by the River,
in 1965 and 1966; by the time it was published in 1967, he was already hard at work on
Kathleen and Frank,
which is based so closely on his parents’ letters and diaries that it incorporates long passages from them, “brute facts,” which he could not rearrange and which forced him to struggle with the complexity and contradiction of real life. As soon as he finished correcting the proofs of
Kathleen and Frank,
he began reconstructing the lost years of his own life, 1945 to 1951, according to a similar version of the newly established method.
    In September 1973, Isherwood at last began to get on, as he had envisioned in the Thanksgiving diary entry, with “something else as well.” This was to be an autobiographical book, about his life in America, in which he planned to tell, according to an inspiration derived from Jung, his “personal myth.” 5 It would share publicly some of his wartime diaries as well as the fruits of the “knitting” he had done in the meantime, and it would be for him a new kind of book. By late October the American autobiography began to undergo a metamorphosis, because Isherwood realized that he could not explain why he had emigrated to America without first telling about the personal crisis which had occurred when his German lover Heinz Neddermeyer had been turned away from England by an immigration official in January 1934. So he shifted the book’s focus backward to the decade of the 1930s, in order to tell the story of the