The Sixties

by Christopher Isherwood

  Isherwood had close friendships with women writers, artists, designers, and film stars, but he was less comfortable with women who chose a domestic role over a career or a serious personal occupation. Not only was he distressed by the unequal enslavement to financial necessity, but also he sensed in housewives a repressed bitterness. They seemed unable to avoid turning sacrifices made for their husbands’ professional success into longterm silent accusations, such as his mother might have lodged against him: that men failed to recognize or care how much women were denying themselves. Committed as he was to the private life and to the inner life he felt it should nourish, Isherwood didn’t believe it was necessary for either party to remain personally unfulfilled.

  There were many contrasts to square faculty get-togethers. He still enjoyed the well-protected gay party scene in Hollywood; even though he had already found the boy with whom he wanted to spend his life, he sometimes attended playwright Jerry Lawrence’s all-male evenings peopled by good-looking young would-be actors. The diaries also wryly report on many star parties. And at the height of the sixties, he describes a gallery opening for Bachardy which was successful to the point of hysteria, with actors, directors, playwrights, and monks cramming in, and art work flying out:

  Anne Baxter started the buying. She rushed across the room into Jo [Masselink]’s arms screaming, with a kind of tearful triumph, “I’ve bought two!” Vidya was there, viewing the scene with the amused world-weariness of a swami about to depart forever into the depths of India … and Elsa Lanchester looking almost ladylike in a dark dress, gracious and bitchy-grand; and Jennifer Selznick in white, about to leave alone to drive to Big Sur … and Dan[a] Woodbury quite drunk, saying it was a shame Rex [Evans] didn’t exhibit Don’s nudes of him, and then taking a fancy to Jim [Charlton] and leaving with him; and Gerald Heard and Michael [Barrie], bitchily arriving dead on time … and old King Vidor being encouraged by his wife to paint again; and John Houseman, a little worried because he liked Don’s work so much, almost more than he felt he should; and Cukor sly but friendly, planning a memorial supper for Maugham … and Bill Inge terribly depressed about his life, sitting glum like a bankrupt on a couch.…fn49

  Two evenings earlier, he and Bachardy had spent the evening at home with Allen Ginsberg and a few others:

  Everybody got high, and Ginsberg recorded our conversation and chanted Hindu chants, and [Peter] Orlovsky took off his woollen cap and let his long greasy hair fall over his shoulders and kept asking me if I ever had raped anyone, and the boy Stephen [Bornstein] unrolled a picture scroll he had made, under the influence of something or other, to illustrate the Bardo Thodol.fn50

  However willingly he explored the trends of the time, part of Isherwood always stood back, sometimes mocking, sometimes soberly assessing. In response to a request to endorse the Vietnam Summer antiwar project in 1967, he wrote in his diary:

  … the whole Vietnam antiwar movement is something I must keep away from … as a pacifist I must deny the rightness of every war, even the most apparently righteous ones. This war is too obviously unrighteous—indeed it is even politically deplorable.… Therefore objection to this war is primarily a political objection.… I believe Aldous would have agreed with me. And Gerald Heard.fn51

  The painful episode with Swami in India was to lead to another novel, Isherwood’s last, which he began writing in 1965, A Meeting by the River. It is a story of two brothers, a good one who becomes a Hindu monk and a bad one who tries to prevent him. The two brothers are modelled on various real life people, but both are, in a sense, also Isherwood. The “meeting” of the title is a meeting with himself, an exploration of his spiritual convictions and his human attachments embodied in two opposed character types. The bad brother, Patrick, walks away from the encounter with a sharpened appetite for the duplicitous life he was already leading; the good brother, Oliver, is illuminated by a vision of his late swami, which reassures him that both he and his brother are included in the swami’s love. Isherwood wrote in his diary when he was drafting the book:

  … the main action of the book is temptation—the temptation of any saint by any satan …

  The key line is when Oliver says that he was inviting Patrick to come and judge the swami. He has to have Patrick’s okay. He doesn’t ever get it of course. What he does get is a spiritual intervention by the swami himself, proving to him that Patrick “belongs” whether he likes it or not, knows it or not. And this, in its turn, is sort of campily confirmed by Patrick’s taking the dust of Oliver’s feet.fn52

  The formal show of respect to Oliver, who is now a swami himself, is a Hollywood gesture—extreme, slightly embarrassing; but the ritual act of devotion also expresses a true and innocent emotion struggling to life in the arch-villain Patrick.

  While he was still working on A Meeting by the River, Isherwood also began a book about his parents, a new kind of autobiography, which he eventually called Kathleen and Frank. In 1966, he travelled to Austria where he worked on a Christmas T.V. special about the song “Silent Night,” and he combined this with another trip to England, partly to review family papers that he wanted to use for the memoir. The memoir is the first in the trilogy of personal histories, or what he also called personal mythologies, which begins with the courtship and marriage of his parents during the reign of Queen Victoria and his father’s death in World War I, moves on, in Christopher and His Kind, to thirties Berlin and life on the run from the Nazis with his first serious lover, Heinz Neddermeyer, then concludes, in My Guru and His Disciple, with an account of his religious conversion in southern California and his life as a follower of Ramakrishna. Many authors turn to memoir in middle age, and perhaps this was the natural progression for Isherwood, but it is a striking coincidence that he turned away from fiction once and for all and became newly interested in the facts about who he was and how he came to be that way just as Broadway attempted to assign him permanently to a sexually neutral destiny as “Herr Issyvoo,” a stage figure based vaguely on the invented narrator in his own Berlin stories.

  Isherwood had attempted a Berlin musical with Auden and Chester Kallman, but he had nothing to do with Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, which opened on Broadway in November 1966, and he was never able to like it. Bachardy went to New York without him to see it and to attend, on November 28, Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. Isherwood was delighted to be allowed to stay home in Santa Monica. But his diaries show his satisfaction when Cabaret proved to be a hit, even quoting from reviews. In fact, Cabaret changed Isherwood’s life. It provided him with significant income, boosted in 1972 by proceeds from the film, and it made him, willy-nilly, a celebrity. The musical won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Director, and it was a hit all over again in London when it opened in 1968 with Judi Dench in her first-ever singing role. Later, the film made Liza Minnelli a super star. On February 28, 1972, she was on the covers of both Time and Newsweek dressed as Sally Bowles; that March, the film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor (Joel Gray). “Herr Issyvoo” is still the “role” for which Isherwood is most widely recognized. But “Herr Issyvoo” had never been the real Christopher Isherwood. It was to be quite a task to reclaim his identity for himself.

  Early on, Isherwood had an insight that Kathleen and Frank was “not about my father and my mother, it’s about me. I mean, it is like an archaeological excavation. I dig into myself and find my father and my mother in me. I find all the figures of the past inside me, not outside.”fn53 But the more he discovered in their letters and diaries about what his parents actually thought and experienced, the more absorbed he became by them. It was lack of information about his father that had led Isherwood to devise in adolescence an imaginary father who fulfilled his own needs but left him at odds with the real world in which he must live:

  … I really didn’t know my father at all … the myth about him was created for my own private reasons—i.e., that I needed an anti-heroic hero to oppose
to the official hero figure erected by the patriots of the period, who were my deadly enemies.… [C]ertain aspects of my father had to be suppressed, because they were disconcertingly square; e.g. his references in his letters to “real men” etc.fn54

  He now had materials that enabled him to pick apart his youthful myth, and so better understand himself as its maker. And he entirely rediscovered his mother, the figure who in his youth represented for him everything against which he wished to rebel. At one time, he had feared he would be swallowed up in her grief and her longing for the past, now he regretted his unkindness in not asking to read her diaries while she was still alive: “There all the while, in the drawers of her desk, lay the rows of little volumes of her masterpiece.”fn55 He explored with compassion every nuance of her relationship with her selfish and demanding parents who nearly prevented her from marrying and having a life of her own. And he recognized in his grandmother, Emily Greene Machell Smith, “a great psychosomatic virtuoso who could produce high fevers, large swellings and mysterious rashes within the hour; her ailments were roles into which she threw herself with abandon.”fn56 His own subtle and neurotic temperament beautifully fitted into the family portrait, and so did the all-absorbing mutual fascination he shared with Bachardy. Moreover, the Victorian atmosphere of tasselled drapery and ferns which was the setting for his grandmother’s magnificent camp—a full-time activity for members of a newly rich class very much at its leisure—chimed revealingly with the vestiges of India-under-the-Raj that still clung to Swami’s more earthly self.

  Towards the end of 1967, Isherwood began writing a play of A Meeting by the River with Jim Bridges. He also began adapting for the stage Bernard Shaw’s story “The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God,” which led to a fiery production in the age of Black Power. Then, in 1968, around the time that Hockney began working on his celebrated double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy, Bachardy began to work professionally as Isherwood’s co-writer, first on the dramatization of A Meeting by the River, then on an adaptation of I, Claudius for Tony Richardson. They used the job to justify a trip in July and August 1969 to Tahiti and Australia, where Richardson was filming Ned Kelly starring Mick Jagger as the outlaw. Jagger, two years after the notorious Redlands drug bust, had recently been rearrested for possession of marijuana and was in Australia by permission of the judge who had agreed to delay his trial for the filming; Marianne Faithfull, rearrested with him, had marked her arrival in Sydney by swallowing a suicidal dose of barbiturates as the airplane landed. She was in the hospital in a coma, from which she luckily recovered. Of his own arrival on the set Isherwood wrote:

  … Tony Richardson, looking like the Duke of Wellington, in a kind of Inverness mackintosh cape; we embraced in front of the whole crew and the actors, including Mick Jagger. It was such an improbable encounter, after these thousands of miles, like Stanley and Livingstone, rather. Mick Jagger, very pale, quiet, good-tempered, full of fun, ugly-beautiful, a bit like Beatrix Lehmann; he has the air of a castaway, someone saved from a wreck, but not in the least dismayed by it.fn57

  The ranch house where they worked with Richardson on the script was heavily guarded to keep away gangs of students who had vowed to kidnap Jagger. “[T]here were ten policemen sitting up in the kitchen all night, waiting for the students who never showed. Incidentally, without knowing it, they were guarding a pot party which was going on in the living room!”fn58 By December, the Isherwood–Bachardy script for I, Claudius had been dropped, though Richardson seemed to regret it. He wrote from London “that he wished we had been with him, implying that, in that case, we might have worked together.”fn59 In fact, Isherwood and Bachardy themselves had probably not spent enough time working on the script together; Bachardy had been preoccupied with a new and rather serious boyfriend. As collaborators, they were to have more success with later projects, though not for Richardson.

  Despite separations and set-backs, Isherwood valued more and more the privilege denied his parents of spending his life with Bachardy over the long term. On his sixty-third birthday, he admonished himself not to feel guilty about his happiness but instead to understand it as the very evidence he perpetually sought that he was living in the right way. Happiness was not a distraction from spiritual intentions, but the path towards self-understanding and perpetual bliss:

  My life with Don seems, as of this minute and indeed of the past couple of months in general, to be in a marvellous phase of love, intimacy, mutual trust, tenderness, affection, fun, everything. We have plenty of money and more to come, presumably, very soon from Cabaret.… My health is good.… And I am very lucky to have work to occupy me for many many months ahead. What is bad, as of now, is my apparent spiritual condition.… I do “keep the line open” and try, throughout the day, to make acts of recollection. I am of course terribly uneasy about my “worldly” happiness; fearing to lose it and yet knowing that of course it will be necessary to lose it before I can find ananda. (Having said this, I suddenly ask myself.… How can love be profane if it really is love? In my own case, hasn’t my relation with Don now become my true means of enlightenment?)fn60

  Throughout the 1960s, Isherwood continued to fight the spiritual dryness that had worried him ever since Swami initiated him in 1939. He hungered to experience his belief as an emotion, not just an idea. Early in 1968, Swami fell gravely ill and was put into intensive care; in April, when he had recovered, he told Isherwood he had expected to die. If this was the camp of brinksmanship, the very real possibility of losing Swami had an enormous effect on Isherwood, intensifying his love for him and also his faith. Swami reported that he had seen his own guru, Brahmananda, coming towards him twice during his illness; he told Isherwood he had decided that if he recovered he would meditate more, and he told him that he had lost all personal desires. Isherwood writes, “his face seemed to shine with love and lack of anxiety. I thought to myself, I am in the presence of a saint.…”fn61 Over the following year, Isherwood noted that Swami could now “convey, as almost never before to the same degree, an absolute spiritual guarantee: this thing is true.”fn62 Thereafter, Isherwood focused on Swami more and more as Swami grew older and frailer. Ever since the death of his father in World War I, Isherwood had had an enormous curiosity about death; he wanted to find out, in the most literal and specific sense against his own needs in the future, what would happen to Swami when Swami died.

  A different and greater address to his spiritual dryness was made by the youth and energy of Bachardy. If Swami, an old man, was his teacher, Bachardy, a young man, was the lesson set. By the end of the decade, Isherwood had indeed come to see his spiritual path as being made available to him through Bachardy. “[Don] wrote such a wonderful letter yesterday, and I realize more than ever that this is IT. Not just an individual. Or just a relationship, but THE WAY. The way through to everything else.”fn63 Thus, the conflict between his private emotional life and his spiritual life, which had reached its crisis during his journey to India, was resolved—his love for Bachardy and his devotion to Swami and Ramakrishna were one and the same.

  fn1 “The Choice,” The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933).

  fn2 “Writing,” The Dyer’s Hand (1962), p. 19.

  fn3 June 20, 1961.

  fn4 Feb. 12, 1962.

  fn5 Feb. 23, 1962.

  fn6 Apr. 16, 1962.

  fn7 June 25 and 27, 1962.

  fn8 Aug. 26, 1962.

  fn9 Sept. 10, 1962.

  fn10 Sept. 18, 1962.

  fn11 Aug. 22, 1962.

  fn12 Aug. 26, 1962.

  fn13 Nov. 29, 1962.

  fn14 See Aug. 2, 1963.

  fn15 Sept. 7, 1964.

  fn16 See Oct. 31, 1963 and Nov. 23, 1964.

  fn17 Nov. 27, 1962.

  fn18 July 10, 1962.

  fn19 Conversation with me, Oct. 2006.

  fn20 Dec. 26, 1962.

  fn21 Feb. 6, 1963.

  fn22 Feb. 9, 1963.

  fn23 Feb. 9, 1963.

  f
n24 Jan. 3, 1963.

  fn25 Letter to me, Apr. 26, 2008.

  fn26 March 20, 1963.

  fn27 Apr. 14, 1963.

  fn28 Apr. 26, 1963.

  fn29 May 3, 1963.

  fn30 May 18, 1963.

  fn31 Feb. 12, 1962.

  fn32 Oct. 31, 1963.

  fn33 Aug. 9 and 20, 1963.

  fn34 Chptr. VII.

  fn35 Oct. 16, 1962.

  fn36 Prt. II, chptr. 3.

  fn37 June 2, 1963.

  fn38 Sept. 19, 1963.

  fn39 Nov. 1, 1963.

  fn40 Nov. 22, 1962.

  fn41 Dec. 31, 1963.

  fn42 Jan. 2, 1964.

  fn43 Jan. 2, 1963.

  fn44 Jan. 3, 1963.

  fn45 “Notes on ‘Camp’,” Partisan Review, vol. 31, no. 4, 1964, pp. 515–530; rpt. Against Interpretation (1966).

  fn46 Jan. 7, 1965.

  fn47 Apr. 19, 1961.

  fn48 May 13, 1962.

  fn49 Jan. 8, 1966.

  fn50 Jan. 8, 1966.

  fn51 Jul. 19, 1967. Heard was still alive but increasingly unwell from an ongoing series of strokes.

  fn52 Jan. 4, 1966.

  fn53 Nov. 30, 1966.

  fn54 Jan. 22, 1967.

  fn55 Kathleen and Frank (K&F), chptr. I.

  fn56 K&F, chptr. I.

  fn57 Sept. 5, 1969.

  fn58 Sept. 5, 1969.

  fn59 Dec. 10, 1969.

  fn60 Aug. 29, 1967.

  fn61 Apr. 11, 1968.

  fn62 May 31, 1969.

  fn63 Apr. 26, 1968.

  Textual Note

  American style and spelling are used throughout this book because Isherwood himself gradually adopted them. English spellings mostly disappeared from his diaries by the end of his first decade in California, although he sometimes reverted to them, for instance when staying at length in England. I have altered anomalies in keeping with the general trend; however, I have retained idiosyncrasies of phrasing and spelling which have a phonetic impact in order that his characteristically Anglo-American voice might resound in the writing. And I have let stand some English spellings that are accepted in America; Isherwood had no reason to change these.