Isherwood at 100

By STEPHEN MOTIKA Palisadian-Post Contributor Fifty years ago, the Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood wrote in his diary: ‘Made it! Fifty’the unimaginable age. And now comes what might be the most interesting part of life’the twenty years till seventy. What shall I do with them?’ He produced some of his best work in those two decades, including his novel ‘A Single Man’ and two volumes of autobiography. Aside from a short stint in Malibu, he lived for the whole period in Santa Monica Canyon. In 1959, he settled with his partner Don Bachardy into a house on Adelaide Drive, where he lived until his death on January 4, 1986. It was finally home for a man who spent so much of the first half of his life as a vagabond and prided himself as an ‘outsider.’ Now, in honor of his centennial, a celebration of this major figure of 20th-century letters is underway. Isherwood, who wrote nine novels, four memoirs, three plays (written with W. H. Auden), several books about Hinduism, and numerous essays and screenplays, is everywhere. The Huntington Library in San Marino has mounted an exhibition drawn from his literary manuscript collection (which they acquired in 1999), a series of concerts featuring music by composers Isherwood knew and admired, and readings and lectures. A major new biography will be published this fall, as will the debut of ‘The Christopher Isherwood Review.’ All this for the writer Gore Vidal called ‘the best English prose writer of this [the 20th] century.’ Although Isherwood was born on August 26, 1904, in High Lane, Cheshire, England, he left his native country in 1929 and never returned to live. He first went to Berlin at the invitation of his good friend, the poet W. H. Auden. Isherwood was taken with the city’s lively gay culture and bohemian nature, and spent most of the next four years there. His two novels based on his experiences in that city, collected as ‘The Berlin Stories,’ were the basis for ‘Cabaret.’ In 1939, he immigrated with Auden to the United States, where they first settled in New York. While Auden loved the city, Isherwood did not and made plans to move to California. Sue Hodson, Curator of Literary Manuscripts at the Huntington, said in a recent interview with the Palisadian-Post: ‘Isherwood was attracted to several aspects of the California lifestyle: its exotic reputation, the film industry, and the openness to different philosophical and religious ways of life.’ In September of 1939, Isherwood moved to his first residence above Santa Monica Canyon with a view of the ocean, at 303 S. Amalfi Dr. This part of the Palisades was still ‘rustic,’ home to writers and painters. Novelist Aldous Huxley, a friend of Isherwood’s, lived a mile up the hill. A mutual friend, Gerald Heard, introduced Isherwood to Swami Prabhavananda, a Hindu monk of the Ramakrishna Order and founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, that summer. Isherwood learned meditation from Prabhavananda and moved into the Vedanta Center in Hollywood in 1943 in hopes of becoming a monk. He spent the rest of the war there, but decided in 1945 that the monastic life was not for him. Freed from the constraints of a deeply religious life, Isherwood began a period of intense socializing, promiscuity and anxiety. His restlessness returned, and he spent 18 months away from California, including an extended period of time in South America. Most tellingly, he did not keep a diary or write fiction during these years. He later reconstructed the time in the memoir ‘Lost Years,’ which was published posthumously. It wasn’t until the Broadway hit of ‘I Am a Camera,’ based on his Berlin novels, in 1951 that he began to return to himself and to his diary and fiction writing. Isherwood’s diaries, which he kept until illness prevented him from writing in 1983, exhibit his incredibly straightforward personality, his emotional struggles and intellectual processes. His longtime partner Don Bachardy remembers that keeping a diary was one of the first things Isherwood told him to do; he’s kept one ever since. When the two met, Bachardy was 18 and Isherwood was 48. ‘The only valuable class I had taken up to that point was a typing class in junior high school,’ Bachardy told the Post recently. ‘Chris was completely responsible for my becoming an artist.’ In addition to supporting him through art school, ‘financially and emotionally,’ Isherwood also started Bachardy reading literature. ‘He gave me Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises,’ Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby,’ and Bront’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ to start and I just went from there.’ Bachardy’s first drawing from life was of Isherwood and he has only worked from life since then. His portraits of Isherwood appeared on each of the writer’s book jackets from the mid-1950s on. The art Isherwood encouraged Bachardy to try when they first met was the way the two connected while Isherwood was dying, as Bachardy produced dozens of ink drawings over the final weeks of his life. They were published as ‘The Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood’ and represent the last significant black-and-white work Bachardy has done. He now works in color. On Adelaide Drive, Isherwood wrote what many consider his best novel, ‘A Single Man’ (1964), chronicling the day in the life of a British professor living in Santa Monica Canyon whose younger lover has recently died. The novel is a meditation on the temporality of life, but filled with humor, compassion and intelligence. Isherwood acknowledged that it is modeled after Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ but that while writing it he was also thinking of the 1960 film, ‘La Notte,’ by Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni. The novel, which resembles in length a film script, reveals Isherwood’s passion for both literature and film. Hodson, who thinks the book is an ‘unsung masterpiece,’ said that Isherwood ‘was attracted and excited by this new medium. He thought that writers of fiction could learn something from screenplays.’ Unlike so many writers who were destroyed by Hollywood, Isherwood balanced his work for the movies with literary projects. Isherwood’s final novel, ‘A Meeting by the River,’ was published in 1967 and from that point on, he dedicated himself to autobiographical projects. ‘Christopher and His Kind’ (1976) tells the story of his Berlin years without obfuscating his homosexuality, as his Berlin fiction does. The autobiography emerged when the gay liberation movement was at a groundswell, and speaks to Isherwood’s leadership as a proponent for gay rights. In the book, Isherwood utilizes both the third-person observer (with the character ‘Christopher’) and the first person narrator participant (the ‘I’). For Hodson, this is a perfect example of Isherwood’s ability ‘to bend literary genres and to invent new forms.’ She also remarked on ‘his seamless, transparent prose’ which ‘seems so simple that its beauty and power sneaks up on you.’ Trying to fit Isherwood’s life into 10 exhibition cases was no easy task, and Hodson had to create scenes that best represented him. At first she thought she would dedicate a whole case to dealing with his pacifism, but realized that she couldn’t let her own fascination get the best of her, and folded the content in with his Vendanta experiences. One case focusing on his work in the film industry displays his screenplay for ‘The Loved One,’ while a neighboring vitrine features letters from other writers he was close to, including Truman Capote, Stephen Spender and Tennessee Williams. Hodson was delighted to be able to include video footage of Isherwood in London with flakes of falling snow catching in his eyebrows as well as a clip of him reading. ‘I really want visitors to hear him speaking,’ she said. In addition to admiring his work, Hodson also grew to like the Isherwood she met in his diaries and correspondence, ‘I found him to be an enormously humane person who was available and generous to people.’ She was impressed with his unflinching honesty, but also by his humanity. In her 25 years at the Huntington, Hodson has curated several exhibitions of great writers who happened to be rather unpleasant personalities. Following the Isherwood exhibition, Hodson is curating a selection of Bachardy’s portraits, drawn from both the Huntington and Bachardy’s personal collection. Bachardy greatly values the Huntington’s efforts to preserve Isherwood’s legacy, and encourage his own artistic efforts. Bachardy still lives in the house on Adelaide Drive, although he has added a second floor to his studio. His sitters get to look out on Santa Monica Bay and the Santa Monica Mountains. It is the view Isherwood loved, and some part of him is still there, for Bachardy said: ‘He is still very much with me. I still get advice from him.’ He added: ‘He never gave me bad advice.’ ‘Christopher Isherwood: A Writers and His World’ is on view at The Huntington Library through October 3. For more information, visit http://www.huntington.org or call (626)-405-2100.