"Christopher Isherwood," photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1950. Larger.
Los Angeles is the kind of place that promises fame, fortune, and adventure. But we all know that such contracts always come with fine print.
Even before his arrival, Christopher Isherwood was already wary about Los Angeles, where the anguish of broken promises even seems to haunt decaying dwellings.
Many of its houses—especially the grander ones—have a curiously disturbing atmosphere, a kind of psychological dankness which smells of anxiety, over-drafts, uneasy lust, whisky, divorce, and lies. "Go away," a wretched litle ghost whispers from the closet, "go away before it is too late. I was vain. I was silly. They flattered me. I failed. You will fail, too. Don't listen to their promises. Go away. Now, at once." But the new occupant seldom pays any attention to such voices. Indeed, he is deaf to them, just as the pioneers were deaf to the ghosts of the goldfields.
Christopher Isherwood settled in California in 1939. He published his essay "Los Angeles" in his book Exhumations in 1966.
Exhumations, Penguin Books, paperback book jacket, 1969.
California makes no promises to its emigrants, but thanks to the mythology of El Dorado, people still come here expecting something for nothing.
By the time he settled here in 1939, writer Christopher Isherwood was just one among many emigrants to arrive in California, where he claimed "a good deal of the covered wagon atmosphere still exists."
California is a tragic country—like Palestine, like every Promised Land. Its short history is a fever-chart of migrations—the land rush, the gold rush, the oil rush, the movie rush, the Okie fruit-picking rush, the wartime rush to the aircraft factories—followed, in each instance, by counter-migrations of the disappointed and unsuccessful, moving sorrowfully homeward. You will find plenty of people in the Middle West and in the East who are very bitter against California in general and Los Angeles in particular. They complain that the life there is heartless, materialistic, selfish. But emigrants to Eldorado have really no right to grumble. Most of us come to the Far West with somewhat cynical intentions. Privately, we hope to get something for nothing—or, at any rate, for very little. Well, perhaps we shall. But if we don't, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Christopher Isherwood's essay "Los Angeles" is included in the collection Exumations, published in 1966.
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