Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood

  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 inexperie
nce 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.

  Well, to Don’s amazement and to my much smaller amazement but huge joy and relief, Nick loved the watercolors and was altogether impressed by Don’s versatility and said that he wants to give Don a show in which the whole front room of the gallery is full of watercolors with a few drawings in the back room. And, when we met Nick again, yesterday evening, at the opening of a show of Charles Hill’s work, Nick told Don that he had nearly called him that afternoon, because “I can’t get your painting out of my mind.”13

  Only two of the paintings sold, yet Bachardy considers the exhibition was his successful public launch as a painter.14

  Bachardy’s growing self-confidence added to Isherwood’s contentment. In December 1972, Isherwood describes their life together as “my idea of the ‘earthly paradise.’”15 He longed to write about the mysterious beauty of their relationship. In March 1971, he had begun a notebook about himself and Bachardy in their secret animal identities—Bachardy as the vulnerable and irresistible “Kitty” with unpredictable claws, Isherwood as the stubborn workhorse “Dobbin”—but he felt that any such project about their attachment was impossible:

  I shall never, as long as we are together, be able to fully feel or describe to myself all that our love means; it is much much too close to me. Don tells me from time to time that I should write about it, but how? Even my attempt to keep a diary of the Animals has failed. I can’t see any of this objectively. Any more than I can really grasp what Swami means and has meant to me, in an entirely dfferent way.16

  The following summer he observed, “the objection is, as always, that I feel it is a kind of sacrilege to write about the Animals at all, except privately.”17

  Only in his diaries was he able to record scraps of detail about himself and Bachardy. On Christmas Eve 1973, driving to a Palm Springs house party hosted by John Schlesinger, they talked at length of the form into which their relationship was settling and of Bachardy’s present attitude toward various aspects of his life. Isherwood’s account of their conversation implies they no longer had sex with one another and that, by mutual agreement, Bachardy looked for that with others:

  I asked how he feels about his meditation and he said that it is now definitely part of his life but that he doesn’t at all share my reliance on Swami as a guru. “If anybody’s my guru, you are.” Well, that’s okay, as long as he merely believes in my belief in Swami. Then I asked him about sex. He said that he doesn’t mind our not having sex together any more; he agreed with me that our relationship is still very physical. The difficulty is that what he now wants is a sex object, not a big relationship, because he’s got that with me. But no attractive boy wants to be a sex object; he wants to be a big relationship. I suppose I knew all this, kind of. But it was good to talk about it. Our long drives in the car are now almost our only opportunities to have real talks. As Don himself says, he is obsessed by time and always feels in a hurry, unless he is actually getting on with doing something. He says that there are now quite often moments, while he is drawing, when he feels that this is the one thing he really wants to do and experiences a great joy that he is actually doing it. But, even during the drawing, he says that he also feels harassed because he isn’t drawing as quickly and economically as he could wish.18

  They still slept together, and Bachardy recalls that this kept them physically close. Sex had dwindled only because it no longer seemed necessary. In fact, they did have sex on several occasions after this conversation, “as an instinctive means of reassuring ourselves that it was still plausible, that nothing had basically changed between us.”19 But the passionate sexual jealousy and conflicts of the 1960s were behind them, and other aspects of their relationship had become relatively more important. They identified more and more closely with one another until, as Isherwood wrote in 1975, “we are no longer entirely separate people.”20 Isherwood twice records in the diary that they could not tell their speaking voices apart, for instance, when they were revising their script of A Meeting by the River, “A weird discovery we have both made: since using the tape recorder to record our discussions of the play, we have both realized that we cannot be certain which of our voices is which!”21

  But into the Animals’ “golden age,” as Bachardy once called it,22 death was creeping. Isherwood was a year older than Bachardy’s father. Fit and boyish as he was, his very body revealed the future bearing down on both of them; time together was short. Bachardy had the greater darkness to face, and he saw it clearly. Life with an old man, followed by the death of the old man. He says that he trie
d not to think about it.23 Bachardy was more restless and more impatient than Isherwood by temperament, and whatever natural anxiety he possessed about the passage of time must have been exacerbated by living as he had done since youth, with a man thirty years his senior. If, as he told Isherwood during the drive to Palm Springs, the activity of drawing or painting lifted Bachardy out of time and freed him, at least a little, from this obsessive anxiety, nevertheless, his perception of what was to come is painfully evident in his work. He says that people praise his portraits generously as long as they are of somebody else. When they see their own faces emerge under his hand, they are often silent because they are shocked at how starkly the portraits reveal their advancing age.24

  But of course, Isherwood also felt the passage of time, and in his diary he frequently mentions the poignancy this cast over his contentment: “the joy of waking with [Don] in the basket—the painful but joyful tenderness—painful only because I am always so aware that it can’t last forever or even for very long, Kitty and Old Drub will have to say goodbye.”25 He knew that he was growing increasingly dependent on Bachardy, who drove him more and more often in the car and performed an ever greater share of domestic and social chores, and, as always, he recognized how difficult their situation was for Bachardy: