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They were based on the real-life refugees, mostly German and Austrian Jews, to whom Isherwood had taught English in Haverford, Pennsylvania, during the early part of the war. Isherwood’s determination to write about the refugees—demonstrated by vain years of effort—was evidently fed by the power of his social conscience and by the allure of his former success in writing about the German middle classes. After all, his descriptions of his Berlin acquaintances, to whose shabby and trivial lives he had once been able to give a bohemian glamor of complete originality, had made his reputation. And the moral viewpoint associated with E. M. Forster and with Isherwood’s friend Edward Upward, as well as Isherwood’s own puritanism, might have urged him to persist with such a socially worthy subject.
    Speed Lamkin’s moral viewpoint—if he had one at all—was the opposite of Forster’s or Upward’s. He was unabashedly, vulgarly ambitious. He was a clever boy from a small town in the South who had come to Hollywood to become rich and powerful and famous. He shared none of Isherwood’s guilt or anxiety about social revolution, the cause of the workers, pacifism or the war. He was shallow and ruthless, and his ruthlessness was something which Isherwood desperately needed at this point in his life. As with his novels, so with his life: certain themes had to go. The refugees had to go; guilt had to go; and as Isherwood knew and Lamkin kept reminding him, Caskey had to go. Isherwood recalls of Speed’s comment on the refugees: “Speed with his ruthlessness had disregarded Christopher’s feelings and expressed his own. Christopher could never be grateful enough to him.” 37
    Lamkin was quintessentially American, and he beckoned Isherwood forward into Isherwood’s chosen new culture, with its easy rewards and its endless appetite for change. For the Isherwood of the 1930s, immersed in and obsessed by Germany, the refugees would have been an ideal subject. But Isherwood was now immersed in and obsessed by America. In
Christopher and His Kind
Isherwood explains that he had learned to speak German “simply and solely to be able to talk to his sex partners.” This had given German a powerful erotic significance: “For him, the entire German language . . . was irradiated with Sex.” 38 From the start of the 1940s he wanted to have sex with American boys, and it was the American language which became charged for him with erotic energy. As he observed in his Thanksgiving diary entry of 1970,
his
poetry,
his
fiction always consisted of his reactions to real experience; with the refugees, he was trying to force himself to write about something that was no longer intensely real to him. He observes in the reconstructed diary that even Berthold Viertel—a refugee and mentor once commanding the quality of attention from Isherwood which resulted in one of his finest novels,
Prater Violet
—became unimportant when Isherwood’s sense of personal identification with the German diaspora faded: “As Christopher became increasingly detached from his own German-refugee persona (which belonged to the post-Berlin years of travel around Europe with Heinz) Viertel had lost his power to make Christopher feel guilty and responsible for him.” 39 And some of the Haverford refugees had themselves begun to lose interest in Germany. In contrast to the German and Austrian artists and intellectuals Isherwood knew in Hollywood, who were proudly nurturing their native cultural heritage until they could return home after the war, the more ordinary refugees in Haverford, despite their sophistication and cynicism, wanted and needed to learn English and to learn what Isherwood’s Haverford boss, Caroline Norment, called the “American Way of Life.” 40 Unlike many of their Hollywood counterparts, they had lost everything and, in some cases, suffered great physical