And he nurtured Isherwood’s Berlin stories from I Am a Camera to Cabaret. Auden’s poem “Lay Your Sleeping Head My Love” and George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant” debuted in Lehmann’s anthology New Writing. Day Lewis became household names because of Lehmann’s promotion of their work. He brought Brecht and García Lorca to British audiences. Lehmann’s “pale narrowed quizzing eyes” had discovered most of the crop of young political writers who revolutionized writing in the thirties. His mane had gone gray before he was thirty, and he spoke slowly in a commanding, precise baritone that “might have belonged to a Foreign Office expert.” Since his youth, he had projected an air of authority verging on pomposity. He was three years younger than Isherwood, but seemed a generation older. Lehmann was a different kind of attractive, a full head taller, leonine. Small and still boyish though he was over sixty, Isherwood retained the seductive, irreverent charm that made it “impossible not to be drawn to him.” He had bright blue sparkling eyes, a flop of brown hair raked across his forehead, and a shelf of eyebrow that had grown wild and white with age. Isherwood and Lehmann made a striking pair-two gay British expatriates of distinctly opposite types.
Lehmann, then the Woolfs’ assistant, had persuaded them to publish Isherwood’s novel The Memorial. They first met in the early 1930s, in the damp Bloomsbury office of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. He and Lehmann had been friends for almost forty years. It was just before Thanksgiving 1970.Ĭhristopher Isherwood had summoned him. Over Lehmann’s left shoulder the gray glint of the Pacific Ocean shimmered in the mist.
Far off, a mirror image in the steep face of the opposite canyon. Hard top twisting below, a little house with a peaked Tudor roof almost hidden among the green of eucalyptus, live oak and pines, flat boxy roofs, down down down a cascade of curves and rectangles like a Cezanne landscape. The room offered an extravagant, improbable view. Here at the north end of Santa Monica it was still possible to believe in the wildness and innocence of California. Entering the living room gave an uncanny feeling of going outdoors-the small house was bright and expansive, even on a misty November morning. Twenty feet below the road a small modern house nestled in the hillside. The wooden gate snapped shut behind him, and John Lehmann descended the steps carved into the canyon wall. Start with the Fact That He Was Homosexual
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