Best-Kept Boy in the World (7 page)

Peter asked a Romanian acquaintance who lived in
Paris to serve as the caretaker of his apartment while he was away
for the duration of the trouble. He feared that his art collection
might be confiscated by the Nazis and began to ship the
masterpieces to London, including Picasso’s
Girl Writing,
which was six feet high and four feet wide, had been in his
collection for several years and was one of the most valuable. Fear
in Paris of invasion was mounting so steadily that even before he
could arrange for more paintings to be shipped, Peter left, leaving
everything in his apartment, not even packing his luggage, and
traveled from Paris to Calais aboard a troop train in a compartment
filled with soldiers who “sat all the way in absolute silence, no
one saying a word.”
⁵³
Denny had been traveling with Jean
in Finland and reached London a few days after Peter. Peter was
disgusted with both of them; as he told Cyril, if only they had
moved faster when he told them to, they’d all be on their way to
Mexico or Bali to sit out the war; Peter could have bought their
way out for all of them. Now they all were stuck in London for the
duration.

By the end of September, it was clear that no one
would be returning to France in the near future, and Connolly again
raised with Peter the idea of founding a literary magazine. Peter
now viewed such a venture as a part of the war effort, an act of
defiance in the face of the German threat, an undertaking that
could be viewed as an effort to shore up the bulwarks of
civilization, to defend culture. This time he agreed with
Connolly’s proposal and, on October 18, 1939, their venture began
when Peter, as the financial backer and publisher, signed a
contract to print the first four issues. In addition to funding the
venture, Peter would be the art editor, responsible for securing
essays and illustrations on modern art, and would help edit the
issues. Cyril Connolly was the editor. Stephen Spender was selected
by Peter to be assistant editor, primarily to try to stabilize the
mercurial, and lazy, Connolly. And the associate editor on the
masthead was: Denham Fouts. It wasn’t long, a month, before Glenway
Wescott in New York City received a letter from Denny in London
“asking me to contribute and to solicit contributions to a
magazine,
Horizon
.”
⁵⁴

Peter had modest expectations for
Horizon
. He
hoped that it would cover the expenses he was footing of printing
the thousand copies of each issue and paying the staff salaries,
fees to contributors, postage and advertising. As it happened, the
journal was published with just the right formula at just the right
time, and from the first issue, was a success. The pre-publication
plans for a first printing of one thousand copies to be issued in
January of 1940 increased to a run of 2,500. Every copy sold in a
few days, as did another quick follow-up printing of 1,000 more.
The second issue had a planned printing of 5,000 copies which was
increased to 7,000 and which promptly sold out.
Horizon
built up to a circulation of 100,000 copies per issue, an unheard
of figure for a literary magazine. The biggest problem, in fact,
became securing enough paper with War rationing to print the
magazine.

Peter loved his work because it afforded him another
opportunity to discover and promote young artists by featuring
their work in
Horizon
, with high quality reproductions and
critical commentary. As Peter wrote to Cecil Beaton (“my dear
Cee”), “What this country needs is
more and MORE
Art.
Otherwise life is not worth the trouble. These are my War Aims and
I am trying my best to attain them and shall continue to do so. Art
must be put into everything—not just Writing, Painting, etc.; the
whole World most swim with Art.”
⁵⁵

Peter and Cyril worked well together and became
close friends, with Cyril playfully calling Peter “Pierre” or
“Peter Wattie,” and Peter calling Cyril “Squirrel,” “Papa,”
“Squiggles,” or “Squig”; as another worker at
Horizon
noted,
“they were almost in love with each other—very
flirty.”
⁵⁶
But Peter’s genius was in knowing how to stay
in the background so that Cyril’s genius would emerge and energize
the magazine. “All I want you to do is to put in exactly what you
like as you know I think your judgment is better than anyone
else’s, you silly thing; if I am asked an opinion I shall try to be
sincere. My opinion about something is
not
a prohibition and
I really resent it being taken as one.”
⁵⁷

Cyril Connolly was
Horizon
. It reflected his
moods, his opinions, his interests, his tastes. His work on the
review made him something of a celebrity. “I think,” he said, “the
chill wind that blows from English publishers with their black
suits and thin umbrellas, and their habit of beginning every
sentence with ‘We are afraid’ has nipped off more promising buds
than it has strengthened.” It was Connolly’s hope to encourage
literary and artistic talent through
Horizon
. In setting his
high standards as the benchmark for the magazine, he brought his
audience up to those standards. “It was the right moment,” Connolly
said later, “to gather all the writers who could be preserved into
the Ark.”
⁵⁸
And it was Connolly’s genius, his intuition,
to know who to solicit, and his charm that encouraged them to
contribute to
Horizon
. And aboard the ark they came: T.S.
Elliott, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Truman Capote, Philip
Toynbee, Marshall McLuhan, Ralph Ellison, W.H. Auden, Edith
Sitwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, C. Day Lewis, Stephen Randall Jarrell,
E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bowen,
V.S. Pritchett, Kenneth Clark, Dylan Thomas, George Orwell. Peter
soon saw that his own intuition had been correct, that Connolly is
a “brilliant editor because he’s like a brothel keeper, offering
his writers to the public as though they were girls, and himself
carrying on a flirtation with them.”
⁵⁹

As the threat of invasion of Great Britain grew,
Peter sent Denny to the United States to get him out of harm’s way,
away from the dangers of a war that now seemed inevitable, away
from the easy access to drugs which had become increasingly
important in his life. He had Denny bring with him for safe keeping
Picasso’s huge painting,
Girl Writing
.

On June 15, 1940, Denny and Jean Connolly set sail
from Dublin for the United States.

“A GENIUS FOR ENJOYING HIMSELF”

January 19, 1939.

“Well,” Christopher Isherwood said as he boarded the
French liner,
Champlain
, in Southampton, bound for New York,
“we’re off again.”

“Goody,” replied his travelling companion and friend
since childhood, W.H. Auden.
¹

The two had heard the rumbles of war growing closer
and been part of the artistic drain from England that so distressed
Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson. The loss of these two men was
especially devastating; Connolly considered Auden the country’s
“one poet of genius,” and Isherwood as “the hope of English
fiction.”
²

Auden adapted quickly to New York City, but
Isherwood was baffled. “Oh God, what a city!” he wrote to his
English publisher soon after arriving; “The nervous breakdown
expressed in terms of architecture. The sky-scrapers are all
Father-fixations. The police-cars are fitted with air-raid sirens,
specially designed to promote paranoia. The elevated railway is the
circular madness.”
³
He hadn’t a clue how he could earn a
living there. And he was tormented by doubts about why he had left
England. He considered himself a pacifist, but questioned why: were
his beliefs sincere or was he really fleeing the dangers of serving
his country?

A letter from Gerald Heard, a friend of Auden’s who
had met Isherwood in England, urged Christopher to come visit him
in Los Angeles where he was studying Eastern mysticism, yoga and
pacifism. Heard, who had been a science commentator for the BBC and
the author of books on religion and human consciousness, had left
England two years earlier with Aldous Huxley. Isherwood welcomed
his invitation. “If you couldn’t get hold of Bernard Shaw,”
Isherwood once said of Heard, “perhaps he was the next best thing
...the most fascinating person I’ve ever met.”
⁴
With a
desire to explore more deeply the core of his beliefs on war and
peace, and with the hope that he could earn a living writing for
the movies, Isherwood left on a Greyhound bus on a sightseeing trip
across the country, arriving in Los Angeles later in May.

Isherwood found the dandy he remembered from England
looking emaciated, sporting a long beard and a painter’s smock over
his dungarees and sneakers, and engaging in endless, though erudite
and spell binding, monologues on pacifism and asceticism, spreading
a gospel that “to become a true pacifist, you had to find peace
within yourself; only then, he said, could you function
pacifistically in the outside world.”
⁵
Heard was a
student of Vedanta, a Hindu philosophy, and followed a daunting
regime of meditating six hours a day, interspersed with yoga and a
diet, which consisted primarily of raisins, raw carrots, and tea.
Isherwood was fascinated and receptive, and over the course of
extended conversations, become intrigued by this Eastern religion.
He had happened upon it at just the right time in his life. “To
seek to realize my essential nature is to admit that I am
dissatisfied with my nature as it is at present,” Isherwood would
write later when he had reached a point of being able to articulate
what he was experiencing. “It is to admit that I am dissatisfied
with the kind of life I am leading now.”
⁶
Embracing this
philosophy led to prolonged self analysis and reflection in an
attempt to cease to be himself and to understand the very core of
his being. When Heard felt Isherwood was ready, he introduced him
to Swami Prabhavananda, a Hindu monk and the founder of the Vedanta
Society of Southern California. At the same time, Isherwood found
employment in Hollywood working on M-G-M movie scripts.

A year later, two more émigrés from England met up
with Isherwood.

Denny and Jean had landed in New York City early in
the summer of 1940, and on one of their whims took yoga classes
together—and together, a few weeks later, made their way to Los
Angeles. As Christopher Isherwood recalled it, on August 13 “a
young American named Denny Fouts had arrived in Los
Angeles.”
⁷

Isherwood invited Jean and Denny, along with a
mutual friend, Tony Bower, an American film correspondent who had
been introduced to Isherwood in 1937 by Jean and Cyril Connolly, to
join him for lunch at the Beverly Brown Derby “with its atmosphere
of overstuffed dullness and melancholy midday rum.”
⁸
Christopher found Jean to be thinner than the last time he had seen
her, “really beautiful with her big gentle cow eyes.”
⁹
He looked at Denny as if examining an alien creature. As he wrote
in his diary:

If I try to remember how Denny struck me ...I think
of the lean, hungry, tanned face, the eyes which seemed to be set
on different levels, slightly overlapping, as in a late Picasso
painting; the bitter little rosebud mouth; the strangely erect
walk, almost paralytic with tension. He had rather sinister
clothes—wash-leather jerkins, bell-bottomed sailor’s trousers,
boxer’s sweaters. They were sinister because they were intended for
laughing, harmless boys, not as a disguise for this tormented
addict, this wolf-like inverted monk, this martyr to pleasure. His
good-looking profile was bitterly sharp, like a knife edge; his
Floridian drawl seemed a sinister affection. Goodness he was sour!
For a while, his sourness was stimulating: then you began to feel
as if you were suffering from quinine poisoning.
¹⁰

Denny described himself to Isherwood “as having been
a spectacularly successful homosexual whore.” Isherwood had heard
that he had “had a number of affairs with rich men and that they
had given him a lot of money. He made much of this, speaking of
having been ‘kept’ by them, and watching your face as he used the
word to see if you would wince.”
¹¹
Christopher later
would realize that Denny “laid the whore act on rather thickly” and
that, in many ways, he was very much like the Sally Bowles
character in the novel he had written the year before,
Goodbye
to Berlin
: “they both tended to play-act their
lives.”
¹²
Both Jean and Denny had hangovers when
Christopher met them, “which they nursed with the greatest
satisfaction; while steadily tanking up for the next
blind.”
¹³

Isherwood would turn thirty-five later that month.
Already an acclaimed author, his fiction was regarded as avant
garde, groundbreaking, at the forefront of a new school of
literature—the documentary novel. At the beginning of
Goodbye to
Berlin
, (much later popularized as the musical and film
Cabaret
), Isherwood wrote his famous line: “I am a camera
with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”
Indeed, the basis of all his writing was autobiography, and he
placed himself—often as a character named “Christopher,” or even
“Christopher Isherwood”—in much of his fiction. His diaries and
memoirs contain the contemporaneous material that would become his
novels, and the novella he would write about Denny is like a home
movie of their lunch that day in August, and a recording of their
next five years together. It was in 1949 that Isherwood first
contemplated writing a short story about Denny, but not until March
of 1956 that his ideas about Denny had begun to crystallize so that
he could write to a friend: “As regards the novel, I have started
it—half a page! Virgil is definitely to be Denny
Fouts.”
¹⁴
He would work on this book for four more
years.