ABSTRACT
Auden and Isherwood received a grand welcome in New York, but parted on their separate ways; though remaining friendly, they did not cooperate in another work. Isherwood was bound for the colony of English expatriates in Los Angeles, pacifist by persuasion and dedicated to what Auden regarded, with his usual common sense, as Hindu ‘mumbo-jumbo’. Their guru was Gerald Heard (of whom Hogben said to me, ‘Gerald heard, but not understood.’) Aldous Huxley, more intellectually respectable, was another. High-minded and spiritual to a degree, though not without a taste for the things of this world distinctly carnal in flavour, they were pacifists. Auden was not a pacifist; common sense again told him that that was not a practical proposition, not a viable political position, in this wicked world, with humans as they are.
