Read Online Lost Years by Christopher Isherwood - Free Book Online Page B

diary the idea of returning to the subject of the refugees and writing a novel solely about them. But he never did; they, too, were part of the past of which he had to let go. Their story survives only in his wartime diaries, an adequate and important historical account. As for Caskey, his story is contained in the reconstructed diary.
    Isherwood would never cease to be aware of the way in which all success, and indeed all art, excludes or marginalizes somebody. In a sense, his art tries to do the opposite, but whatever is brought to the fore must push something else aside. As a schoolboy he had written to his mother: “I have an essay on ‘omission is the Beginning of all Art’ which it may amuse you to see.” 45 And as he explains at some length in
Christopher and His Kind
, much of the difficulty he had with his work, throughout his career, can be understood as his struggle with the question of how the artist decides what to leave out of his art. The subjects not chosen, the themes not addressed, haunt the imagination with the pain of their rejection; for the novelist who feels a strong loyalty to historical fact, the necessity to omit is like the burden of original sin, a crime of neglect which must precede the possibility of artistic creation.
    Isherwood was fascinated throughout his life with marginal figures and with minorities. He himself was a member of what was for centuries one of the most oppressed and anonymous minorities in human society: during the first half of his life, the society which raised and educated him also told him that he was a criminal. Thus, he willingly and with eager curiosity associated with others who, for various reasons, were called criminals and were pushed like him to the margin of society. The shady figures of the Berlin demi-monde—Mr. Norris and the like—had once offered him fruitful ground for his art. But Isherwood was not prepared to live his whole life in the shadows. As a writer and a man he wished to move into the mainstream and forward into the future.
    Looking back in the 1970s, recalling the struggle to focus his life and his artistic energies by cutting away the boring, the unglamorous, the unsuccessful, he still reflected upon what had been pushed aside. Gus Field, personifying as he did the guilt from which Isherwood wished to free himself, is a figure well suited to claim not only Isherwood’s but also the reader’s final attention in the reconstructed diary. With Isherwood’s mature success as a writer had come the confidence to unveil both those aspects of his character and his past actions of which society disapproved and also those aspects of his character and past actions of which he himself disapproved; they were not generally the same. By reconstructing them explicitly in
Lost Years
he was able to make some of the differences clear. In its portrayal of Isherwood’s sexuality,
Lost Years
is a boldly political book. Perhaps much more surprising, it is also implicitly and persistently moral, describing and judging—often with harsh self-criticism—even the minutiae of daily conduct, in order to try to redefine what is genuinely good and genuinely evil in human relationships.
----
    1 He had lost his pocket diary for 1946, and he noted in his diary on September 2, 1971 that during the postwar period even his pocket diaries were not kept up every day.
    2 All of these entries have already been published in Christopher Isherwood,
Diaries Volume One 1939–1960 (D1)
, ed. Katherine Bucknell (London, 1996; New York, 1997). In the reconstructed diary, Isherwood usually calls these diaries “journals,” thereby distinguishing them from his day-to-day diaries.
    3 Christopher Isherwood, Diaries 1960–1983 (unpublished), November 26, 1970.
    4
D1
, pp. 455–6.
    5 Diaries 1960–1983, September 14, 1973.
    6 Diaries 1960–1983, October 29, 1973.
    7 Interview with W. I. Scobie and letter to Isherwood’s