Within days of appearing on the cover of Time, Baldwin received a phone call from Robert Kennedy, who was now attorney general. A mutual friend, Dick Gregory, had suggested Kennedy talk to Baldwin about what could be done to end the strife in the South. Baldwin visited the Kennedy home in Virginia for breakfast, then arranged a meeting in New York the next day for Kennedy with a few figures whom he thought would help him see the light: singers Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, sociologist Kenneth Clark, actor Rip Torn, and veteran activist Jerome Smith. The meeting did not go well. Tempers were lost; Hansberry walked out, disgusted to be in the room with a powerful man who just didn’t get it. Baldwin and Clark went to a TV studio soon afterward and filmed a conversation that can be seen on YouTube: Clark is calm and collected, but Baldwin, beneath his precise diction and eloquent sarcasm, is still furious. Kennedy finished the meeting angry himself, but later said his anger helped him see the other point of view and committed him more deeply to civil rights.
Events moved still faster. Baldwin traveled all over the country, giving speeches, appearing on television, expressing doubt about the power of black nonviolence against the violence of the Southern whites. He attended the March on Washington and heard King declare, “I have a dream,” but didn’t speak himself. A month later, a black church in Birmingham was firebombed by white supremacists and four little girls were killed. It was another violent turning point. Baldwin appeared on a Sunday morning talk show in New York with the German-born theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The two men shared their moral shock over the crime. Then Baldwin said that Negroes are “the only hope this country has.” Most Americans “don’t have any longer a real sense of what they live by. I really think it may be Coca-Cola.”
John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November and Lyndon Johnson became president. Baldwin continued to make speeches and write articles, but he also finished a play, Blues for Mr. Charlie.
Inevitably, a backlash set in, from blacks as well as whites. Black critics found him too white-identified, while white critics found him too political. Freedomways magazine criticized Another Country because one did not feel his “love of his people in his writing”—the same criticism that Philip Roth got from fellow Jews for Goodbye, Columbus. But when Blues for Mr. Charlie opened on Broadway in April 1964, starring Diana Sands and Rip Torn, Philip Roth attacked it in the New York Review of Books for being too righteous: “If there is ever a Black Muslim nation, and if there is a television in that nation, then something like Acts Two and Three of Blues for Mr. Charlie will probably be the kind of thing the housewives will watch on afternoon TV.” It was hard to make literature in the 1960s without somebody jumping on you, including fellow artists. A few months later Roth attacked Tiny Alice.
That summer President Johnson succeeded in driving the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. He then ran for president against Barry Goldwater. On Labor Day, his campaign broadcast the famous “daisy” commercial: a little girl with a flower is juxtaposed with a nuclear explosion and Johnson drawls in voiceover: “We must either love each other or we must die.” One of his speechwriters obviously knew W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” with its famous line, “We must love one another or die.” (Auden complained to a friend, “One cannot let one’s name be associated with shits,” and rashly removed the poem from his Collected Shorter Poems the following year.)
Baldwin was in England in February 1965, invited to Cambridge University to debate the question: “Has the American dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?” Arguing in the negative was another American, William F. Buckley, publisher/editor of a new conservative magazine, the National Review. The gray-on-gray television footage of the debate shows Baldwin at his most eloquent, especially in his quiet, damning description of the daily experience of being black in America.
By the time you are thirty, you have been through a kind of mill. And the most serious effect of the mill you’ve been through is not the catalogue of disasters—the policeman, the taxi drivers, the waiters, the landlady, the landlord, the banks, the insurance companies, the millions of details twenty-four hours of every day which spell out to you that you are a worthless human being. It is not that. It is that by that time you’ve begun to see it happening in your daughter or your son or your niece or your nephew.
His bitter emphasis of the words landlady and landlord is electric, enabling us to see real people; his focus on daily humiliations rather than on horrors makes the experience easier for whites to enter imaginatively. Buckley could offer little in response except flick his tongue and murmur a few words about not being too quick to judge America negatively simply because its black population was treated unfairly.
Baldwin was still in England when Malcolm X was assassinated in a mosque in Harlem. Baldwin was called upon to share still more words and more thoughts. He returned to the United States to join King’s protest march from Selma to Montgomery for voter registration. He was photographed walking with Joan Baez.
Meanwhile, Lucien Happersberger had come back into his life, leaving his wife, Suzy, and moving to America. Baldwin fell in love all over again. With Baldwin and his brother David, Happersberger set up a movie company to film Blues for Mr. Charlie. David Leeming, a young Englishman who had met Baldwin in Istanbul, joined them and became Baldwin’s assistant.
In August 1965, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in six days of the worst race riots since World War II. More people read The Fire Next Time, treating it as prophetic. Baldwin found himself in still greater demand for speaking engagements, TV, and interviews. But he was exhausted. He was worn out.
Then Happersberger married Diana Sands—Yves from Another Country had fallen in love with Juanita, the heroine of Blues for Mr. Charlie. Baldwin was devastated. He broke off with Happersberger yet again, dissolved the film company and decided to give up New York for Istanbul. The betrayal by Happersberger was only the last straw. He explained his decision in a letter to Leeming, saying he had been living too selflessly and did not want to live like a Henry James character. He asked Leeming to come with him. Leeming later said, “He needed me in his arms as well as his office.” Baldwin expected Leeming to replace Happersberger as his lover. Leeming said no to that, but agreed to come to Istanbul as a secretary. (Leeming can only paraphrase this important letter in his biography, even though it was written to him. The Baldwin estate, which currently means his sister Gloria, refuses to allow his letters to be published or even quoted, since they weren’t intended for the public. As a result, not only is there no edition of Baldwin letters, his biographers must leave out his gritty, living words whenever they use his correspondence.)
Baldwin returned to his small apartment near Istanbul’s busy Taksim Square, but eventually moved to a house on a hill, a nineteenth-century building known as the Pasha’s Library, looking over the Bosphorus. He now followed the civil rights movement from a distance. He published little in 1966, but resumed work on a new novel, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, the first-person life story of a black actor/director recovering from a heart attack.
And so, in November 1966, while Truman Capote threw his glamorous masked ball in New York City, James Baldwin lived a surprisingly orderly life outside Istanbul, writing during the day and drinking only at night, playing host to visiting family and friends, including Beauford Delaney. He deepened his friendship with Engin Cezzar, working with him on screenplays and theater productions. He went for walks in the city, visiting markets and cafés, and he was certainly noticed, but there were no TV cameras.
Baldwin said he loved Istanbul because he did not feel “black” there and his homosexuality did not matter as much as it did in the United States. He said he loved the Turkish people. But in ten years of living off and on in Turkey, he never bothered to learn the language. His own other country was one of badly needed silence.
8. Love and Sex and A Single Man
Far from the worlds of television and politics, Ch
ristopher Isherwood was still writing, still quietly mining his realm in private. He worked steadily on Down There on a Visit, the Mexican novel conceived on his 1956 trip to England, while he supported himself and his young lover, Don Bachardy, with occasional movie work. Life with Bachardy was usually good, although the younger man was often frustrated and depressed. It wasn’t easy being the boyfriend of an older, recognized artist. Bachardy depended on Isherwood not only for financial and emotional support, but for whole pieces of his identity. Within a year of moving in together, the nineteen-year-old American spoke with an English accent. Encouraged by Isherwood, Bachardy began to study art himself, taking classes in drawing at the Chouinard Art Institute. He had an excellent eye and a real gift for portraiture. His personal style of detailed textures and simplified wholes was present from the start. He drew endless pictures of his partner, who was always available as a model, then did a portrait of their friend Gerald Heard, the English guru. It was promptly purchased by Igor Stravinsky. Bachardy had found his vocation.
But Isherwood was having trouble with his Mexican novel. He worked on it for nearly three years without it fully coming to life. He had good secondary characters taken from his own history, but the straight narrator eluded him, as it had in World in the Evening. He put the novel aside in 1959 to discuss plans for a possible musical derived from I Am a Camera, the John van Druten play based on Goodbye to Berlin. A young writer named Victor Chapin had sent him a script. Isherwood found it too fragmentary, too faithful to his book. He began to make notes and became excited by the project. He asked advice from Auden, who liked the idea and said the show should be “as brutal as Pal Joey”; he thought the German singer Lotte Lenya might be good as Fraulein Schroeder, the landlady. Isherwood produced an outline and discussed possible composers with Auden and Chester Kallman, who had collaborated on several operas. But nothing came of the project.
However, the detour produced a breakthrough for Isherwood with his Mexican novel. He recognized that the new novel was actually about his post-Berlin expatriate life. He didn’t need Mexico or a fictional narrator. He could use the voice of Goodbye to Berlin for a new set of linked stories. The facts of his life were subtler and truer than anything he’d been inventing. A passage in his notebook for March 17, 1959, announces the discovery:
At last!
I almost dare to say I think I see how this can be done.
Very simply. Without any fantasy construction.
Just three unrelated character-studies, which nevertheless are related, through the character of the narrator to each other.
Mr. Lancaster. Ambrose. Paul.
Which is what Down There on a Visit became, with the addition of a fourth study, a fictional version of his German boyfriend, Heinz Neddermeyer, renamed Waldemar. Mr. Lancaster was based on a stuffy older cousin, Basil Fry; Ambrose represents Isherwood’s friend, the saintly aesthete, Francis Turville-Petre; Paul was the notorious Denham Fouts, a debauched beauty from Florida who briefly joined Isherwood in a search for God through Vedanta. Other real-life portraits included Gerald Heard disguised as Augustus Parr. Just as Bachardy had sketched Heard in pencil, Isherwood now rendered him in words.
Isherwood narrates as himself, as he did in Goodbye to Berlin and Prater Violet, in four travel episodes that cover his life from a trip to Bremen in 1929 to a sojourn on a Greek island in 1934 to London during the 1938 Munich Crisis to his years in California.
People often praise his next novel, A Single Man, as his masterpiece, but Down There on a Visit is richer, more varied and ambitious. It might be my favorite Isherwood book. The prose is clear, lively, and quick, able to express a great deal in a short space, as in this verbal snapshot of Berlin after the war:
There were businessmen with flesh-roll necks and gross cigars, and women deep in make-up and heavy with jewelry, and pageboys darting back and forth like nervous fish; and it seemed to me as if they were all muttering auto-suggestively to themselves, “nothing has happened—nothing has happened—this is where nothing whatever has happened!”
The book can also be very funny:
I see my twenty-three-year-old face… so touchingly pretty that it might have been photographed and blown up for a poster appealing on behalf of the World’s Young: ‘The Old hate us because we’re so cute. Won’t you help?’
The voice is self-critical without being self-absorbed, alert to both the outside world and interior life. Isherwood captures the intense sense of place that one gets in a foreign country, and the intense sense of other people met there. The book is an intimate epic with a large cast. Isherwood’s use of the first person is pitch-perfect, not just in his own voice but in the many little narratives told by other characters.
Isherwood wondered what the novel meant as a whole, but it’s too rich to be reduced to a single idea. Down There gives us twenty-five years of expatriate life in the shadow of war. Five male and two female characters struggle to give meaning to their lives in exile through sex, money, drugs, and politics; art, religion, and love. The first four devices are discarded. Only the last three offer any hope.
Future readers would criticize Isherwood for not being entirely frank about his sexuality: Chris in the novel is Waldemar’s friend, not his lover. Isherwood plays a tricky game with his own sex life, saying nothing about it for a long time, then referring to bed partners by their initials without giving their gender. He makes his lovers unimportant, claiming he was only an observer and not involved with anyone. Paul attacks Chris at the end of the book for being detached: “You know, you really are a tourist, to your bones. I bet you’re always sending postcards with ‘down there on a visit’ on them.” Yet Paul has become an opium addict and is not the best judge of character. And the real Isherwood was often too involved with his lovers. The novel is both an accurate mirror of his experience and a funhouse mirror. In place of the truth he couldn’t tell yet, he tells a different story that is also valid. But as in Goodbye to Berlin, he doesn’t lie. We can now go back to Down There and fill in the blanks and transform the book into a gay novel.
Isherwood worked on it steadily, submitting the different sections as long short stories to various magazines. Down There was published as a book by Simon and Schuster in 1962, and was dedicated to Don Bachardy. There were some good reviews. Dorothy Parker praised it in Esquire. But despite the “just visiting” strategy, most critics were put off by the number of gay characters. “World Is Just One Big Sodom to Him” was the headline for a bad review in the Miami News. “This One’s Not for Aunt Minnie,” declared the headline in the Detroit Free Press. “It is a measure of Mr. Isherwood’s brilliance as a writer, of his remarkable skill in presenting people, places, and moods,” said the Oxford Times, “that one continues to read despite a growing aversion, despite the increasingly nauseating reek of homosexuality.” Herbert Mitgang in the New York Times snidely asked, “It’s saying a great deal about Isherwood’s ability as a novelist that perhaps he meant the reader to be repulsed—and succeeded?” Several reviewers wished the author of Goodbye to Berlin had given them another Sally Bowles instead.
The book was not the success Isherwood had hoped for. He swore to himself that he would not make the same mistake with his next novel, but would write only about heterosexuals. As was still the case with Isherwood himself, the new book would go around the block a few times to get where it needed to go.
Meanwhile, the musical based on Goodbye to Berlin had taken on a life without Isherwood. There was a question about who owned the performing rights after the Van Druten play. Sandy Wilson, author of the charming 1920s parody The Boyfriend, was hired by a producer to create a new show, Welcome to Berlin, to star Julie Andrews as Sally Bowles. (Her agent wouldn’t even let Andrews read the script, steering her instead to Mary Poppins.) A young producer named Hal Prince was also pursuing the project, but with another writer, Joe Masteroff. It was Prince who first proposed using an M.C. at the Lady Windemere Club—soon renamed the Kit Kat Club—to set the tone. There is n
o such character in the stories. After he secured the performing rights, Prince heard the Sandy Wilson songs but decided they were much too sunny for Weimar Berlin. He brought in another composer and lyricist, John Kander and Fred Ebb. Masteroff hit upon a new title: Cabaret. But the project was still years from being finished.
Bachardy had gone to London in 1961 to study art at the Slade. He enjoyed his six months of independence and had a hard time reacclimating to life with his lover when he returned to California. He was twenty-seven; he and Isherwood had been together for nearly ten years. He was no longer the boy-next-door with a crew cut and jeans. Because Isherwood kept a diary, we have a detailed record of their fights and sulks and grievances—perhaps too detailed. Most diary keepers use their journals as wailing walls, going to them only in times of anger. We can get a distorted picture of their married life. Yet Isherwood was too honest a writer, even in his diary, not to include other notes. One day he bitterly complains about Bachardy:
Right now he is nerve-strung almost to screaming point and it is misery to be with him. I’m sure he hates me and I rather hate him, I mean on the surface. Underneath things are more or less as they’ve been for years.
That “on the surface” speaks volumes. Anyone who has been in a long-term relationship will recognize the feeling. But the two lovers were going through a very rough patch.
Both were seeing other men. They had agreed from the start on an open relationship, but the rules changed depending on their states of mind and the seriousness of the outside affair.
This is a good place to say a few words about the absence of monogamy in many of the relationships in this book. Since gay couples needed to invent their own rules anyway, they often chose rules that were more flexible and realistic than those handed down by centuries of heterosexual marriage. They were never part of a tradition where the husband had all the legal rights and the wife had none. Nor did they have to worry about illegitimate children and family bloodlines. They also knew that, for men at least, sex is often just sex and has nothing to do with love. Many couples decided to let each other play outside the home. Gore Vidal and Howard Austen are the most extreme only in that they never had sex with each other. Such open agreements should be eminently practicable, except for the fact that gay men can get envious as well as jealous over whom their lovers are sleeping with. And people sometimes fall in love with their sex partners.
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Page 13
