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deprivation and pain. They wanted to forget about their European past, assimilate into American culture and get on with their lives. Many of them did this rapidly and successfully; they virtually evaporated into America. Isherwood needed to do the same. His decision to drop the refugees from
The World in the Evening
is emblematic of his shedding of his old continental affinities along with his burden of guilt; finally he began to accept his new homeland and his unknown, solitary future.
    But Speed Lamkin did not persuade Isherwood to abandon his social conscience altogether. The reconstructed diary grinds to an uncadenced, almost shapeless halt in 1951, stranded tellingly upon Isherwood’s account of his dealings with a friend of Speed Lamkin, Gus Field. Field is a minor character in Isherwood’s narrative, but a minor character whose fate compares suggestively with the fate of the refugees and even with the fate of Caskey. Lamkin and Field, with Isherwood’s permission, wrote a stage adaptation of
Goodbye to Berlin
. Isherwood liked it, but his friends Dodie Smith and her husband Alec Beesley (rich through Dodie’s talent as a playwright) did not. So the Beesleys connived that John van Druten should undertake the same project. Van Druten’s adaptation,
I Am a Camera
, would eventually place Isherwood on the road to fame and relative fortune, despite wrangles when van Druten took the largest share of the royalties. When the time came to make clear to Lamkin and Field that van Druten’s version of
Goodbye to Berlin
was to receive Isherwood’s imprimatur, Lamkin accepted the new situation cheerfully and offered no recriminations, thereby abandoning his own script and ingratiating himself successfully with the little group behind van Druten’s version. Field, though, who behaved just as well as Lamkin, was excluded and ignored. Isherwood writes in the reconstructed diary:
    As for Gus Field, he took the news well, too. Which was more admirable, since he got very little gratitude from Christopher or anybody else for doing so. If he was invited to the Beesleys’, it was only once or twice. Speed dropped him. Christopher only saw him occasionally. He was treated as a bore and an outsider—and that, from Christopher’s point of view, was what he was. 41
    Speed had called the refugees boring; Isherwood calls Gus Field a bore. To be boring was an unacceptable crime in Isherwood’s new Speed Lamkin-style drive for success. Perversely, Field became the scapegoat himself for the ill treatment meted out to him by Isherwood and the Beesleys. As with the refugees and Caskey, Field and the guilt he inspired in Isherwood and his friends, had to go.
    And yet part of Isherwood brooded over the excluded, marginalized figure of Gus Field, resulting in the strange non-ending of the reconstructed diary. For Isherwood, the Field episode was closed but not resolved. He had originally planned, at Thanksgiving 1970, that the reconstructed diary might carry through to 1955—or at least to 1953, when he met Don Bachardy. But by March 1974, as he was writing about the end of 1950, his ambition had shrunk: “I would like to record the winter of 1951–1952, even if I go no further.” 42 In September the same year, advancing slowly, he had again reduced his aims, “I’ve reached January 1951. I would like, at least, to get the rest of that year recorded, particularly the production of
I Am a Camera
.” 43 Finally, in January 1977, with
Christopher and His Kind
already published, he had made only a little further progress, though he still planned to continue: “. . . thus far, I’ve reached May 1951 and I would like to carry the narrative on until at least the end of 1952.” 44 But he never returned to the task, and in the end he never got beyond the shadow of Gus Field—the necessary victim of Isherwood’s success. From time to time, Isherwood also mentions in his