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Authors: Christopher Isherwood

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BOOK: Liberation
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He was still startlingly handsome with his piercing eyes, shaggy eyebrows, straight nose and downturned mouth which was constantly turning up in a smile. He had a lot of charm but his charm did not stand in the way of his expressing strong opinions, especially about literature. How open writers are with one another is partly a question of nationality (the English are thick-skinned, the French thin-skinned, the Americans very thin-skinned) and generation (writers in the nineteenth century were much franker than twentieth-century writers). Isherwood came from a knock-about world of confident, upper-middle-class men and women from Oxford or Cambridge; they never minced words, any more than Martin Amis or Christopher Hitchens mince words now.

But of course he wasn't really one of his old London crowd. He'd been a pacifist and had moved to America on the brink of World War II, which had earned him the enmity of most of his countrymen—and of some Brits even to this day. He was openly gay; sophisticated heterosexuals treat gays as if they're a bad joke that's gone on too long. Tiresome. A bit silly. Tiresome and juvenile. And then, worst of all, he was a Hindu. That seemed a very “period” thing to be in Britain, something out of the dubious, not quite hygienic mysteries of Madame Blavatsky, a pure product of the 1890s. In America, Hinduism was more puzzling than anything (“Why didn't he go directly on to Zen?” most of us wondered; Hinduism seemed to Zen what Jung seemed to Freud: seedy, not very rigorous, slightly embarrassing).

He was a wonderful host, and that's how I choose to recall him. Carefully dressed, he'd climb out of an easy chair and greet a friend warmly, show him around his house. I remember seeing a photo of the very young Don with Marilyn Monroe and Chris with Joan Crawford (“our dates,” Chris emphasized). In his study he showed me a school picture of Auden and himself, something he kept close by. He mentioned Tennessee Williams (“We had an affair in the 1940s when we were both still rather presentable”). There were Hockneys to be seen and works by other artist friends and of course Don's studio to be visited. If we drove to a nearby restaurant for dinner Chris lay down in the back seat (“I was driving Don mad with all my wincing, so if I lie down I don't see anything or complain”). It gratified me that even if I was a very marginal player in his drama, nevertheless he accorded me all his warmth and cleverness and kindness, if only for an evening.

 

Edmund White

New York City

February 25, 2011

Introduction

In his novels and autobiographies, Isherwood typically traces one thread at a time—a single character or relationship, at most a milieu in cross-section over a short period. In the pages of his diaries, he weaves together, entry by entry, week by week, the surprisingly diverse areas of his life, every thread touching upon, reinforcing, and contrasting with every other thread, so that the rich cloth of his own life also portrays the fleeting sensibility of his time. The pages teem with personalities, but even as Isherwood becomes an icon of the gay liberation movement and a sought-after participant in the celebrity culture which burgeoned in the 1970s, he continues to tell us as much about his housekeeper, his doctor, the boy trimming his hedge, or his weird and reclusive brother in the north of England as he does about David Bowie or John Travolta, Elton John or Jon Voight. Isherwood was fond of a great many people. He was a practiced, self-conscious charmer who worked hard to draw others to him. Some of his acquaintances and friends have been surprised and upset by what he wrote about them in his diaries, concluding that he withheld from them in life his true opinion recorded secretly. But what he wrote in the diaires is not what he
secretly
thought, it is what he
also
thought, on the particular day when he wrote it. It is part of a complete portrait that is perhaps never even completable. To him, a human individual was comprised of many traits; he found the so-called bad traits just as interesting and sometimes more attractive than the so-called good traits. Here is what he wrote about the woman doctor he selected in his old age to see him out of the world: “She's a nonstop talker, an egomaniac, a show-biz snob, and extremely sympathetic. Don's in favor of her, too.”
1
And he criticized nobody more harshly in his diaries than he criticized himself and his companion, the American painter Don Bachardy, whose physical glamour and creative vitality transfigured Isherwood's last thirty-three years.

Throughout his writing life, Isherwood urged himself to work at his diary more often. In 1977, he wrote, “isolated diary entries are almost worthless . . . the more I read the later diaries, the more I see how worthwhile diary keeping is.”
2
He tracked his weight, his sleeping patterns, his trips to the gym, his illnesses and injuries; he recorded chance encounters, fragments of dialogue, and jokes, along with the more obviously important progress of his books and film scripts, his private life and his friendships, his teaching and public appearances. Thomas Mann once wrote that “only the exhaustive is truly in
teresting”;
3
for Isherwood a more accurate phrase might be only the exhaustive is truly illuminating. He wanted to make a record of the whole human creature in context, in its natural habitat, so that he could consider and analyse its habits and commitments, its rituals and choices. He used his diaries as raw material for his novels and autobiographies, but also as a place to evaluate his life and decide whether to change his course. As a follower of Ramakrishna, he meditated almost every day for nearly fifty years, training himself to withdraw from his ego and study it from the outside; this complemented his diary writing, further developing his detachment and making his powers of observation the more acute.

But he was also looking for something more. He was a follower of Freud, too, and above all Jung, and he believed that he could edge the unconscious, the rich inner life, out into the open if he took note of everything it was delivering into the conscious arena. He kept a constant watch at the threshold between the inner and the outer worlds, impatient for new pieces of information, monitoring the revealing accretions of facial expression, posture, gesture, dress, casual gossip, dreams, all of which form the backdrop for premeditated speech and deliberate action. He jotted down coincidences, synchronicities, and numinous dates, trawling among them for clues to a hidden trajectory, an unrecognized mythology. Any stray detail could be the all-important detail that might unlock hidden meaning. His appetite for this hidden meaning increased as he grew older because he began to look upon the threshold separating the conscious and the unconscious mind as the very threshold which was separating him from death. Over his disciplines of observation and assessment hovered an ultimate goal: absolute knowledge might bring absolute liberation.

 

At the end of the 1960s, Isherwood and Bachardy began to work together writing plays and movie scripts. Collaborating brought them enormous pleasure, but in order to make money they had to keep several proposals going at one time. As this diary makes clear, they were well aware that whatever work they put in might eventually come to nothing because every project waited for the interest of a studio boss or a theatrical backer who could finance it, and then for a director and actors—preferably stars—who were equally committed and could make themselves available all at the same time. The diary charts how they and a number of their friends—writers like Ben Masselink, Jim Bridges, Ivan Moffat, Gavin Lambert, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, directors like Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger, John Boorman—had to adapt their talents constantly according to changing tastes, changing social values, and new technology. Throughout the 1970s, formats also changed more quickly than ever before, sometimes for unpredictable commercial reasons, as story-telling possibilities diversified from feature films into television, including live T.V. drama, T.V. serials, made-for-T.V. films, and videotapes.

While Isherwood was working on his books and Bachardy painting or drawing every day, they remained alert to script writing opportunities. These came haphazardly, as individualized whims of the popular culture of the day, someone else's idea of what would sell. One of the few projects which they themselves originated, making a play out of Isherwood's novel
A Meeting by the River
, occupied them off and on for a number of years. It had some success in small staging, but made a resounding flop on Broadway in 1979. Actors, directors, and agents were mercilessly sketched by Isherwood in his diaries as he and Bachardy struggled to get the play put on. During the spring of 1970, Isherwood spent a month alone in England, waiting around for occasional meetings about a production that never happened; he endured this lonely episode of anticipation and disillusionment by socializing extravagantly and by making a vivid record of swinging London in his diary.

Such episodes amount to a kind of cautionary tale. In fact, Isherwood was almost indifferent to the ultimate fate of the stage and screen writing he did with Bachardy. A novel was entirely his to control, but plays and screenplays depended on the input of countless other people. As a longtime Hollywood writer, once he had sold his contribution, he tried to forget about it. In 1973, when he and Bachardy watched the television film of their “Frankenstein: The True Story,” they were both horrified at what had been done with their work, yet he wrote: “the life we have together makes all such disasters unimportant, even funny. . . .”
4

Never the less, their script went on to win Best Scenario at the International Festival of Fantastic and Scientific Films in 1976. In fact, the gothic fantasy was an ideal subject for them, and their version reflects their life together in a number of revealing ways. They made Frankenstein's creature beautiful, thus uncovering the Pygmalion myth latent in Mary Shelley's story and recasting it as a coded tale for their tribe. Their “monster” is presented as a suitable love object, and he stands for the “monstrous” homosexual—as George feels certain his neighbors see him in
A Single Man
—who in 1973 when “Frankenstein: The True Story” was broadcast in the U.S. would still have been a shocking subject for television. But their monster's beauty is betrayed by his makers. The creative process is reversed through a scientific error, and he begins to show on his face and body the moral decay of Dr. Frankenstein and his assistant Henry Clerval—as if he were the portrait and they the living originals in Oscar Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Gray
.

Plenty have looked upon Bachardy as Isherwood's creature. Certainly he was a great beauty when Isherwood met him on the beach in Santa Monica in the early 1950s; he was preternaturally intelligent, strangely innocent for all his apparent sexual precocity, and still genuinely unformed. Isherwood once wrote that what he most adored about the very young Bachardy was that, “He is so desperately alive”;
5
in a grimly funny sense, this is exactly the problem with Frankenstein's creature. But although Isherwood took Bachardy travelling, encouraged him to read, to converse, to go to college, to go to art school, to pursue his talent to the maximum, he could not make him happy. And so the creative process reversed, and moral ugliness began to show in the perfect boy. In their script, the struggles of Frankenstein's creature hilariously exaggerate Bachardy's predicament; and the sly, Edwardian charm of Dr. Polidori—the mad, malevolent scientist they added to the story and named after Byron's real life physician, John Polidori—mocks Isherwood's own. Indeed, Polidori and most of their characters seem to have walked out of the pre-Monty Python fantasy world which Isherwood invented with his boyhood friend Edward Upward in the 1920s and which they called Mortmere.

Isherwood was mildly contemptuous of the Universal executives and their enthusiasm for “Frankenstein.” “When people say it is a ‘classic,'” he wrote, “they really mean only that the makeup is a classic, as long as Boris Karloff wears it.”
6
Nevertheless, he was flattered to be wanted by the striving world of commercial television, and it was easy for him to share in their nostalgia for the lost atmosphere of his own cinema-besotted childhood. “It pleases my vanity that I am still employable and that my wits are still quick enough to play these nursery games.”
7
Outsiders suspected Bachardy's contribution, much as they had suspected the relationship since it began. In one studio meeting, an executive seemed to Isherwood to be “astonished to hear that Don had
any
opinion of his own. No doubt Don is being soundly bitched already as a boyfriend . . . brought along for the ride.”
8
Isherwood found the rudeness toward Bachardy close to unbearable, and neither he nor Bachardy had any illusions about the authenticity or indeed the difficulty of their collaboration. The diary reveals that they both felt impatient with Bachardy's inexperience as a scriptwriter: “Don is upset because he feels he is a drag on me. Actually he is and he isn't. . . . without him I wouldn't work on the fucking thing at all. And he does very often have good and even brilliant ideas.”
9
As they thrashed about trying to bring their story to a close, Isherwood records proof of this:

 

. . . we have made one tremendous breakthrough, entirely due to Don. He has had the brilliant idea that the Creature shall carry Polidor[i] up the mast and that they shall both be struck by the same bolt of lightning—killing Polidor[i] and invigorating the Creature! This is a perfect example of cinematic symbolism. For, as Don at once pointed out, it was always Polidor[i] who hated electricity and Henry (now part of the Creature) who believed in it.
10

 

Polidori is past his prime, and his hands have been eaten away to mere claws by an accident with his chemicals, symbolizing his moral deformity—his craze for power. But because of his hands, Polidori, the monomaniac, cannot work alone. As it happens, Isherwood was suffering from Dupuytren's Contracture, which was deforming and disabling his own left hand. He had been having trouble typing for some time, and so, experienced, bossy and power hungry though Isherwood was, Bachardy typed everything when they worked together. In September 1971, just after the “Frankenstein” script was finished, Isherwood had surgery to alleviate the condition.

The image of the aging scientist electrocuted by the very bolt which rejuvenates the Creature also makes fun of the changing dynamic in the sexual relationship between Isherwood and Bachardy, as Bachardy now had more partners and Isherwood fewer. And it resonates with the fact that Bachardy's career was taking off. About a year before writing “Frankenstein,” in September 1970, he was the only portrait artist included in a group show organized by Billy Al Bengston and hung in Bengston's studio. The other artists were Ed Moses, Larry Bell, Joe Goode, Tony Berlant, Ed Ruscha, Ron Davis, Ken Price, and Peter Alexander. These were some of the most exciting and successful American painters, printmakers, and sculptors of Bachardy's generation, mostly Californians. A few of them became friends, and their names appear more and more in Isherwood's diary from 1970 onward as Bachardy introduced them into Isherwood's life. Bachardy recalls that they were a somewhat macho group in which being gay was barely acceptable, although it helped that Isherwood was an older, established writer.
11
Such a nuance demonstrates that Bachardy was admired by the best of his contemporaries for the quality of his work—in spite of being somebody's attractive young boyfriend rather than because of it.

Around this time, Bachardy was also taken on by a new dealer, Nicholas Wilder. During the 1970s, Wilder was to become the most influential contemporary art dealer in Los Angeles. He discovered and promoted a number of West Coast artists and showed Hockney, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, and Cy Twombly. Wilder offered Bachardy an exhibition of his black and white portrait drawings, and Bachardy decided to show Wilder his recent color portraits, which nobody but Isherwood and Bachardy's previous dealer, Irving Blum, had seen: large-scale, head-and-shoulder images painted on paper in limpid water-based acrylics.
12
According to Isherwood:

 

Don was very dubious about the paintings, afraid that Nick would be put off by them—which was only natural, after the negative reactions of Irving Blum. But I argued that a dealer is like a lawyer, you can't afford to have secrets from him if you want him to represent you, and Don agreed and we finally picked out about a dozen paintings—that's to say mostly the blotty watercolors.

BOOK: Liberation
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