The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  . . . Don made another of his declarations of independence. He has got to have a studio of his own, here at the house, and his own telephone, and his own money and his own friends. . . . And he quite realizes that he has to do nearly all of the getting himself. He only asked of me that I shall understand. Well, I do—and I sincerely believe that things would be much better if he could achieve all these objectives. The trouble is, some of them are really opposed to other deeper wishes, or perhaps one should rather say fears, in his nature. For example, he would do much better to have a studio away from the house altogether. . . . [H]e says jokingly that he wants to keep an eye on me. And I suspect that this isn’t entirely a joke. He is afraid of leaving me too much alone. He doesn’t want my independence.7

  In fact, Isherwood understood Bachardy so well that he sometimes left him no room to discover who he was for himself. This was an especially excruciating feature of the trap Bachardy felt he was in, and he was often at pains to reverse the power structure implied by the vast difference in their ages. The diary records constantly shifting chemistry between them. They had no established code to follow, not only because they were homosexual, and not only because of the age difference, but also because there never can be a code between two individuals who are continually seeking a more complete fulfilment of self and of vocation. One or the other of them was always trying something new; neither possessed a nature that was easily—if ever—satisfied. And so their relationship followed an ambivalent, wayward path as each felt by turns that it was supporting or holding him back, satisfying his appetites or denying them; they drew closer and apart, closer and apart. A diary entry for June 1962 records, “after the party, drunk, Don told me he wants me to go away to San Francisco and leave him alone all summer. . . .” But the very same entry introduces Bachardy’s wish to be initiated by Swami Prabhavananda. A week later, they went together to Vedanta Place so he could learn how to meditate, and indeed on December 18 that year, Bachardy became Swami’s disciple. This reaffirmed the depth of his devotion to Isherwood as his model in life and created a new, public bond between them: a shared form and place of worship.

  In June 1962, they turned their garage into the talked-of studio, and Isherwood overcame his fear of material expenditure so they could improve the house as well. The construction produced moments of intense and precarious joy. Over a few days at the end of the month, he described its progress:

  Don and I lay on the deck, which still has no railing and seems as insecure as a flying carpet, with the wind blowing up between the floorboards and the whole Canyon floating in the air around you. . . .

  The workmen have now put up the trellis over the deck, casting a barred shadow. Don is in raptures. The framing of the view gives him exquisite pleasure and now he keeps saying how happy he is here and how happy he is with me. And so, of course, I am happy too. . . .8

  But the new domestic arrangements and the mantra were not enough. Things fell apart again in early August, and Isherwood left for Laguna Beach to stay with Swami, much as he used to do when he was unhappy with Bill Caskey in 1950. Almost immediately, Bachardy prevailed upon him to return home, over Swami’s strong objections. Isherwood’s tone, as he records episodes of screaming and anger, grows grimmer each time the episodes recur, although his underlying convictions do not change. On his fifty-eighth birthday, he writes: “Do I hate Don? Only the selfish part of me hates him, for rocking the boat. When I go beyond that, I feel real compassion, because he is suffering terribly. I still don’t know if he really wants to leave me, or what. And I don’t think he knows.”9 By September, Isherwood was considering that he ought to move out for a few months because he was older, surer, stronger, and he sensed that he was undermining Bachardy’s efforts to grow up:

  Not to do this is to force him to go away, and this is wrong because he is the one who didn’t feel really at home in this house, and now that he has his own studio he should be free to enjoy it.

  Then why don’t I go away? Because it is such a lot of fuss and I don’t want to leave my home and above all my books. I want to stay here and get on with my work, in my own tempo. . . .

  Aren’t I bad for him, now, under any circumstances? Probably. He only needs me in his weakness, not his strength; and he hates me for supporting his weakness.10

  From the heart of this dark period, Isherwood produced A Single Man, a novel that articulates his anxieties about living alone and which is, in a sense, his own bid for freedom—freedom from grief over lost love, freedom to reveal to conventional readers the gay “monster” he had so long been obliged to hide in his published work, freedom from the demands of the ego and the limitations of individual identity. He first conceived of the book as a novel about an English woman. But Bachardy, even as they approached the nadir of their relations together, offered the crucial insight that Isherwood should write about himself: “this morning we went on the beach and discussed The Englishwoman, and Don, after hearing all my difficulties with it, made a really brilliant simple suggestion, namely that it ought to be The Englishman—that is, me. This is very far-reaching. . . .”11

  The novel became centered in the daily routine of Isherwood’s contemporary life in California; but the technique derives from Bloomsbury, from the novels of Forster and especially Virginia Woolf, splicing together the British and American literary trad itions. It is modelled on Mrs. Dalloway, which Isherwood unreservedly praised that summer as: “one of the most truly beautiful novels or prose poems or whatever that I have ever read. It is prose written with absolute pitch, a perfect ear. You could perform it with instruments. Could I write a book like that and keep within the nature of my own style? I’d love to try.”12 Exactness of “pitch” affords subtle discrimination among sensations, enabling the author to explore the inchoate area between social existence and creaturely unconscious; Isherwood was increasingly drawn to this rich inner world both in his diaries and in almost all of his later work. When he finished reading Mrs. Dalloway just before his birthday, he wrote:

  Woolf ’s use of the reverie is quite different from Joyce’s stream of consciousness. Beside her Joyce seems tricky and vulgar and cheap, as she herself thought. Woolf ’s kind of reverie is less “realistic” but far more convincing and moving. It can convey tremendous and varied emotion. Joyce’s emotional range is very small.13

  Isherwood’s early work is sometimes criticized for having an emotionally bland and undeveloped narrator. In fact, this was a delib erate strategy for concealing the narrator’s homosexuality. Now, as the unspeakable homosexual elbowed his way to the center of A Single Man, Isherwood had found the technique to reveal the repressed feelings of such a character in all their complexity. The narrative is subtle, exact, unafraid, and powerful. Even fifty years later, the rage lurking behind the cultivated façade of the middle-aged literature professor called George frightens straight readers; civilized human beings hide this kind of anger from one another in order to be able to get along. Bachardy recognized the quality of the book right away:

  Yesterday, I showed Don the first twenty-eight pages of this second draft of my new novel. He was far more impressed, even, than I had hoped. He made me feel that I have found a new approach altogether; that, as he put it, the writing itself is so interesting from page to page that you don’t even care what is going to happen. That’s marvellous and a great incentive to go on with the work, because I feel that Don has a better nose than anyone I know. He sniffs out the least artifice or fudging. He was on his way out after reading it, and then he came back and embraced me and said, “I’m so proud of Old Dub.”14

  And, nearly a year later, it was Bachardy who came up with the title.15 Isherwood felt that the book “spoke the truth,”16 and, over the years, he referred to it with growing confidence, as his “masterpiece.”17

  Through the rest of 1962 and the start of 1963, the relationship between Isherwood and Bachardy continued its tumultuous course. In November, Bachardy wanted to separate for a few months, but Isherwood still r
efused to uproot himself: “If he wants out, then he must be the one to get out. . . . Most of the freedom Don is looking for could actually be achieved right here, living with me. He doesn’t realize that yet. Okay, he can find it somewhere outside and then come back.”18

  What Bachardy found outside was a fairly serious love affair, and he introduced his lover openly at home, pushing Isherwood to acknowledge and to condone his behavior, or perhaps to somehow share in his pleasure or validate his choice. In July, Bachardy had told Isherwood that “he wished we could speak frankly about every thing that we did.” Isherwood had warned “this wasn’t desirable” and noted in his diary Bachardy’s humorous and defiant reply, “But I get to know almost everything you do, anyway.”19 In fact, this was Bachardy’s way of warning Isherwood—the reverse would also have to be the case. He knew a great deal about Isherwood’s earlier life and loves, best described by the cliché “the stuff of legend”; modelling himself as he did on Isherwood, he, too, wanted a legendary love life, and he wanted Isherwood to know about it. He sometimes felt he had to compete with all Isherwood’s past partners as well as the optimistic boys still crowding around; so his affairs were partly conducted in self-defense, as a counterbalancing act.20 For his part, Isherwood was prepared to blind himself to things he did not want to know about Bachardy, even if Bachardy was determined he should find out. They quarrelled about the lover a few days before Christmas; the day after Christmas, Isherwood wrote:

  [These] are not things I want to dwell on yet. Maybe all will work out for the best—but I don’t know that, and I don’t even want to think it. When I suffer, I suffer as stupidly as an animal. It altogether stops me working. I am ashamed of such weakness. . . .

  Christmas (which I seem to hate more every year) was placid and almost joyous by comparison. . . . Don and I lay on the beach and talked affectionately. I think he would love it if he could discuss everything with me. But, alas, I am neither the Buddha nor completely senile. I have my limits. I cannot help minding. When I finally stop minding I also stop caring. Then I don’t give a shit.21

  He struggled to weather the affair, admitting to his pain and yet trying to dismiss it: “Am getting into a flap about the . . . situation. Last night I had two if not three dreams about them. . . . And meanwhile Don—no doubt because of this—remains unusually sweet and affectionate. I ought to be grateful really. Oh—idiocy.”22 That winter, the younger lovers spent more and more time together, and Isherwood feared that an alternative domestic intimacy was building up in Bachardy’s life: “. . . Don took him some of our plates; admittedly, not ones we use any more. I am wildly miserable, but only in spurts. What I am miserable about is the feeling that Don is gradually slipping away from me.”23 He was resigned to the fact that there was “no question, here, of finding any kind of solution on the personal level. I can only find a solution through prayer and japam.”24

  During this painful phase, Bachardy chose to tell Isherwood that he believed the bond between them was a mystical one. In his diary, Isherwood mentions a “sudden revelation” from Bachardy “about the Bowles experience in Tangier”; but he professes that the revelation left him feeling puzzled.25 In October 1955, when they had taken hashish with Paul Bowles and his painter friend Ahmed Yacoubi, Bachardy experienced an episode of near- madness during which he sensed a plot to incapacitate Isherwood so that Yacoubi could force sex on Bachardy while Bowles watched. Alternating with the paranoia was a blissful recognition of his love for Isherwood, his need for Isherwood, and Isherwood’s unconditional commitment to him. They left Bowles’s apartment abruptly, but the spiral of ecstasy and madness continued into the small hours. When he later read about the kundalini—the spiritual energy which, when awakened, rises from the base of the spine through the seven chakras, or centers of consciousness located in the spinal canal and cerebrum, until it illuminates the brain—Bachardy recognized that he had had a mystical experience in Tangier. As he recognized this, the experience became vivid to him all over again. He didn’t tell anyone because he was overwhelmed by the experience at the time that it occurred, and later, when he came to understand it, he thought it would sound presumptuous. He also knew that Swami disapproved of achieving mystical experiences through the use of drugs.26 By confiding in Isherwood now, he seemed to wish to reassure him that the bond between them could not be broken by ordinary love affairs.

  Even if he professed to be puzzled by Bachardy’s confidence, Isherwood continued to tell himself that the affair was a good thing for Bachardy, and just as he began to feel that it was therefore a good thing for himself, he discovered in March that Bachardy had begun a new romance. At last, Isherwood planned to move out for a while, mostly because he had found arrangements which suited him. He was reluctant to say much in his diary, remarking only that his relationship with Bachardy might end by summer or “might equally well lead to a much better relationship.”27 In mid-April, he settled in a borrowed house in San Francisco, where he concerned himself with his “psychological convalescence.” He wrote, “Oh, I did so need to be alone! Now I am resolved to get on with my work, I mean my own work; and to exercise—I am hatefully fat. . . . Oh yes, I am happy to be here. . . .”28 Within two weeks, his thoughts turned to Bachardy, but he kept his resolve to leave him alone:

  Am starting to think a lot about Don, miss him, wish he would write. But I won’t pester him. Why does he seem so unique, irreplace able? Because I’ve trained him to be, and myself to believe that he is? Yes, partly. But saying that proves nothing; the deed is done and the feelings I feel are perfectly genuine. . . . At least I have proved to myself that I can still live alone and function. In some respects I have never felt so truly on the beam.29

  It was Bachardy who was having a terrible time. Isherwood copied into his diary part of a letter from him, “‘Fits of doubt and gloom keep descending. . . . I don’t want you to worry about me. I must do this alone. I must get through by myself. And I try hard to love you instead of just needing you.’” On this, Isherwood commented, “Well, of course I am terribly worried. I am even losing my confidence that this will end all right—though I wrote him a reassuring letter.”30

  After some uncertainty about whether Bachardy might join him in San Francisco, Isherwood drove home for Bachardy’s twenty-ninth birthday on May 18. But the day was a fiasco:

  Yesterday, I rushed downtown . . . and bought him a ring with an Australian sapphire, dark blue. This morning at breakfast he shed tears, said he couldn’t accept it. Our relationship is impossible for him. I am too possessive. He can’t face the idea of having me around for another ten years or more, using up his life.

  I said I absolutely agree with him. If it won’t work, it must stop. Now he has gone out. . . . I cried a bit. Then drank coffee, felt a lot better, and began figuring. Don should start by getting a studio away from this place, where he can stay whenever he wants to. Also, he should go to a psychiatrist. (That was his idea.) And we must start thinking about selling this house.31

  Perhaps Bachardy’s protracted revolt against Isherwood was a factor in Isherwood’s own revolt, which was building up to a climax during this same period, against Swami Prabhavananda. The diaries show that Isherwood invested more and more time and conviction in Swami and his teachings as Bachardy tested to its limits his relationship with Isherwood. Ever the skeptic, Isherwood questioned in the most practical sense whatever Swami taught him, seeking a balance that could work for him as a devotee living outside the monastery in his own household. In February 1961, he had written:

  And what’s left, if Don goes out of my life? Swami and Ramakrishna: yes. As much—more so—than ever. My japam has been getting more and more mechanical. But when I told Swami this, he didn’t seem worried. He assured me that I will get the fruits of it sometime or other; and I really believe this. The only thing that sometimes disturbs me a little about his teaching is the idea that we—all of us who have “come to” Ramakrishna—are anyhow “saved,” i.e. assured of not being reborn. This distur
bs me because the idea seems too easily optimistic. But then—who am I to talk? Swami says it, and I do honestly believe that he somehow knows.32

  In a long-running show of duty, Isherwood was completing the first draft of his biography Ramakrishna and His Disciples alongside his final draft of A Single Man. And he reluctantly agreed to travel with Swami to the Ramakrishna Math, or monastery, in India at the end of 1963 to help celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Swami Vivekananda. But he was swept by waves of defiance, manifested in physical illness:

  I still have this thing in my throat. And, psychosomatically, it gets worse every Wednesday when I have to read to the family up at Vedanta Place. A passionate psychosomatic revolt is brewing against the Indian trip . . . I will not surrender my will; be made to do anything I don’t like.33

  In fact, all through 1962 and 1963, the period of his worst troubles with Bachardy and his most painful bouts of jealousy, Isherwood had a recurrent sore throat. In the summer of 1963, he twice records in his diary his intuition that the sore throat was linked to writing about Ramakrishna’s death from throat cancer.34 And he sometimes feared he himself had throat or jaw cancer. But the episodes of illness and the cancer anxiety had started earlier, and indeed, Isherwood had had trouble with sore throats long before. In Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties, Hugh Weston, the youthful Auden character, announces that tonsillitis “means you’ve been telling lies!” At that period, the lies were essentially about homosexuality; the Isherwood character concludes that his life and his writing are “sham,” so he leaves medical school with its conventional cures and travels to Berlin, where he can indulge his sexuality without guilt, supported by the theories of the American psychologist, Homer Lane: “Every disease, Lane had taught, is in itself a cure—if we know how to take it. There is only one sin: disobedience to the inner law of our own nature.”35