Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  I’ll try to be absolutely honest about this. Am I a coward, a deserter? Not according to my standards… Am I afraid of being bombed? Of course. Everybody is… No, it isn’t that…. If I fear anything, I fear the atmosphere of the war, the power which it gives to the things I hate—the newspapers, the politicians, the puritans, the scoutmasters, the middle-aged merciless spinsters. I fear the way I might behave, if I were exposed to this atmosphere. I shrink from the duty of opposition. I am afraid I should be reduced to a chattering, enraged monkey, screaming back hate at their hate.

  He grew more alienated than ever from his homeland. He became an American citizen after the war in 1946.

  In the meantime, he did war work with the Quakers in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania, then registered for the U.S. draft as a conscientious objector. He moved into the Vedanta Center in Los Angeles in 1944 with the intention of becoming a monk. He translated Hindu scripture for Prabhavananda, filling his head with Indian gods and goddesses. Auden, who had settled in New York, thought he was making a big mistake getting involved in this “mumbo jumbo,” but Auden was drifting back to the High Anglican beliefs of his childhood. Isherwood continued to live at the Vedanta Center even after he took a writing job at MGM. Then he fell in love with a blond ex-soldier. Nothing came of the blond, but Isherwood gave up the idea of celibate monkhood. The war ended, and he left the center and made up for lost time by throwing himself into sex and alcohol. He met Bill Caskey, a heavy-drinking, twenty-four-year-old photographer who was smart and funny, but who also brought out Isherwood’s dark side. The two fought regularly, breaking up and getting back together, again and again over the next six years.

  Isherwood was traveling with Caskey in South America when he was sent the galleys of a new novel for a quote. It was titled The City and the Pillar, and he didn’t like it at first. But on second thought he decided to blurb it. (It was a very careful blurb: “One of the best novels of its kind…”) He then wrote a long, frank letter to its author explaining his reservations, especially about Jim’s murder of Bob:

  Dramatically and psychologically, I find it entirely plausible. It could have happened, and it gives the story a climax. (I wasn’t absolutely convinced that Jim cared for Bob that much—but let that pass.) What I do question is the moral the reader will draw. This is what homosexuality brings you to, he will say: tragedy, death and defeat… Now it is quite true that many homosexuals are unhappy; and not merely because of the social pressures under which they live. It is quite true that they are often unfaithful, unstable, unreliable. They are vain and predatory, and they chatter. But there is another side to the picture, which you (and Proust) don’t show. Homosexual relationships can be and frequently are happy. Many men live together for years and make homes and share their lives and their work, just as heterosexuals do. This truth is peculiarly disturbing and shocking even to “liberal” people, because it cuts across the romantic, tragic notion of a homosexual’s fate…. I am really lecturing myself, because I, too, have been guilty of subscribing to the Tragic Homosexual myth in the past, and I am ashamed of it.

  As early as 1948 Isherwood addressed the difficulty of serving both art and gay politics, and how a good story isn’t always good politics. He was struggling with similar issues himself in his current work-in-progress, a long novel loaded with everything he’d learned in America, a book that eventually became The World in the Evening. The narrator was straight, but the novel included a shocking surprise: a subplot where two gay men live together without tragedy.

  Isherwood met Vidal that summer in Paris. Isherwood was there with Caskey. Vidal introduced himself one afternoon at the inevitable Deux Magots café. The next day Isherwood visited Vidal in his hotel room. A trick had just left, fleeing when he heard Vidal’s ami was coming. Vidal remained in bed in his underwear, chatting, flirting, while the two considered each other sexually. They decided against it and never considered it again. They spent the next few days together. Isherwood wrote up a portrait of Vidal in his diary:

  He is a big husky boy with fair wavy hair and a funny, rather attractive face—sometimes he reminds me of a teddy bear, sometimes of a duck. Caskey says he’s typical American prep school. His conversation is all about love, which he doesn’t believe in—or rather, he believes it’s Tragic…. He is very jealous of Truman [Capote], but determined not to quarrel with him because he feels that when a group of writers sticks together it’s better business for all of them…. What I respect about him is his courage. I do think he has that—though it is mingled, as in many much greater heroes, with a desire for self-advertisement.

  A month later, Isherwood was in London and saw Tennessee Williams, whom he’d met during the playwright’s brief gig at MGM. (“He’s a strange boy, small, plump, and muscular, with a slight cast in one eye; full of amused malice.”) Isherwood and Caskey shared a cab with Williams one night, riding in a classic London fog. “We are the dreaded fog queens,” declared Williams and cackled loudly. They improvised a fairy tale about the fog queens, who roam the streets whenever a fog rolls in, and the townspeople close their shutters, afraid to look. Then one day a small boy opened a window and saw them. “But they’re beautiful!” he said, and begged them to take him away. He was never seen again.

  Back in California, Isherwood broke up with Caskey for good and met a new boyfriend. Don Bachardy was eighteen but looked much younger. “Christopher has with him the youngest boy ever,” wrote magazine editor Leo Lehrman in his diary when the two visited New York. “ ‘Twelve!’ says Lincoln [Kirstein] with that wonder and delight at the naughtiness of the world.” Isherwood was following his old pattern: he fell in love with a teenager, but stayed in love as the young man grew older. Bachardy sometimes reminded Isherwood of Neddermeyer, but he saw that Bachardy was brighter and more independent, which Isherwood preferred. His life settled down enough for him to finally finish The World in the Evening after working on it for seven years. The novel was published in 1954 to mostly bad reviews.

  And it is a mess, a loose, talky jumble. The narrator, Stephen Monk, does not hold it together the way that “Christopher” holds together the other books. He is straight and married (with a gay affair in his past) and spends most of the novel stranded in bed with a broken hip. He talks endlessly about himself without becoming fully convincing. Yet this failed novel contains two remarkable things. The first is a playful discussion of camp sensibility written ten years before Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.” The other is the presence of that untragic gay couple, Charles and Bob. Charles is a doctor; Bob is an artist serving in the navy. They visit Stephen only now and then, like guest stars on a TV show. But what a refreshing surprise for the modern reader: two gay lovers who aren’t doomed, who care and worry and joke about each other like a real couple, who even argue like a real couple.

  Reviewers didn’t know what to make of them. Isherwood’s own editor found Bob “much too hearty.” Angus Wilson, gay himself and author of the bitchy Hemlock and After, complained that Isherwood confused “ ‘goodness’ and ‘cosiness.’ ” Yet gay readers were delighted by the portrayal. Isherwood wrote a friend, “I have received lots and lots of fan-mail of the type you can guess…. Actually, it’s heart breaking, the sense you get of all these island existences, dotted like stars and nebulae, all over the great black middle west.” A young English poet, Thom Gunn, praised the book in a review for London Magazine and shortly afterward met Isherwood while passing through Los Angeles. Isherwood naturally put the twenty-five-year-old admirer into his diary: “He has pockmarks and a vertically lined face like a convict’s, and his nose and chin are both too big—yet he’s quite attractive, with his bright brown eyes. He likes America, especially California. I warm to all Britishers who do that.”

  Gunn, too, wrote about this first meeting, but many years later. He was quite taken with Isherwood: “He was tanned and youthful-looking, the famous bright eyes alert and observant; he perfectly adapted himself to the listener; his conversation was enthusiastic, live
ly, funny; and I said to myself, this is the way I want to age.”

  Gunn eventually settled in California as well, but he chose San Francisco as his home.

  Gore Vidal came to work at MGM a few weeks after Gunn’s visit. The two novelists immediately reconnected. Isherwood enjoyed the younger man’s wisecracks and energy; Vidal admired his elder’s intellect and dry wit. Isherwood had just finished rewrites on Diane, a sixteenth-century costume drama starring Lana Turner as Diane de Poitiers. (“Lana can do it,” he told Vidal with a straight face.) Next he wrote a screenplay about the Buddha, The Wayfarer. Hollywood in the 1950s didn’t know what they or their audiences wanted anymore. After Vidal finished A Catered Affair, his contract was extended for him to write a script about the trial of Alfred Dreyfus. Neither the Buddha nor the Dreyfus movie was ever made.

  We don’t know if the two talked about Isherwood’s City and the Pillar letter or if they discussed the difficulties of writing about gay life. Isherwood was having enormous trouble with his fiction that summer. He really was, as he told Vidal, feeling like “a hack.” After the failure of World in the Evening, he wanted to return to telling stories in his own voice, as with Goodbye to Berlin and Prater Violet, the gem-like short novel he had published in 1945. But stories told in his own voice would inevitably draw on his own experience, and the experience that now mattered to him most was love. He feared he couldn’t write about that and still be published.

  Perhaps I’ll never write another novel, or anything invented, except, of course, for money.

  Write, live what happens; Life is too sacred for invention—though we may lie about it sometimes, to heighten it.

  Oh, if I could have the wisdom to spend these last twenty years in some better way—not messing with this crap.

  Vidal, on the other hand, was not thinking about fiction at all. He was busy with screenplays and with adapting Visit to a Small Planet for Broadway. But he enjoyed working with invented stories—he preferred it, in fact.

  Howard Austen came out for a long visit, and he and Vidal saw a lot of Isherwood and Bachardy. They preferred the gentle Bachardy to the unpredictable Caskey. Isherwood liked Austen and took to calling him “Tinker” in his diary—Vidal’s nickname for him, short for Tinkerbelle. Isherwood assumed Vidal and Austen were exactly like him and Bachardy, despite Vidal’s dismissive talk regarding love.

  But as the months passed, toes were stepped on. Vidal gave Isherwood his new novel to read, Messiah; Isherwood didn’t know how to tell Vidal that he found it dull and couldn’t finish it. Vidal pestered Isherwood with endless questions about his diary keeping, telling him about Anaïs Nin’s diaries and his fear of how she was portraying him. Isherwood wrote about it in his diary: “I believe he really thinks about ‘posterity’ and its verdict—just like a nineteenth century writer! And I don’t know whether to admire this or feel touched by it, or just regard him as a conceited idiot.” But it’s hard to imagine Isherwood didn’t have similar concerns himself, despite the selfless ideals of Vedanta. The chief topics in his diary at this time were life with Bachardy (there were quarrels and sulks as well as happiness), the mescaline he had procured through his friend Aldous Huxley (he was looking for the best moment to take it), and his fears that he was writing only for money and would never do good work again. He was in a very fragile mood that fall.

  Two days ago, for example, I was quite blue…. I walked around some movie sets with Gore, who looked at the books to see if any were by him. Being with Gore really depresses me, unless I’m feeling absolutely up to the mark, because Gore really exudes despair and cynical misery and a grudge against society which is really based on his own lack of talent and creative joy.

  But as Vidal’s biographer points out, Vidal was in good spirits that year; Isherwood was projecting his own bad mood here. He needed to get away from Hollywood, which he intended to do with a long trip to Europe.

  He and Bachardy attended a preview of Diane in October before they left. (“General opinion—it’s too long, Lana’s a bore.”) They were away for five months. In Tangiers they did hashish with Paul Bowles, which bonded the couple closer together after Bachardy went into a panic and Isherwood tenderly looked after him. In France they visited elderly Somerset Maugham, who cattily told Bachardy, “You must remember, Don—anything that’s very beautiful only lasts a very short time.” In England Isherwood made a kind of peace with his homeland and his mother, and he finally did his mescaline—in London, of all places, on a cold day in February. (Westminster Abbey “was very funny—a charmingly absurd little antique shop, full of ridiculous statues…. No God there. No life at all—”) But the most important development was that he had a new idea for a novel, a modern-day version of Dante’s Inferno set in Mexico. It would be told by another first-person narrator, a straight man named William, and include people Isherwood had known over the years. He had a good title: Down There on a Visit.

  It’s often said that writers sometimes need to go around the block a few times to get where they’re going. Isherwood was still circling his destination.

  By the time he and Bachardy returned to California, Vidal was back at Edgewater on the Hudson, working on another TV play and pressing his producer to stage Visit to a Small Planet on Broadway. The two writers stayed in touch by mail. They remained respectful, admiring friends in the years ahead, despite the occasional exasperation.

  One subject that Isherwood and Vidal did not agree on was Truman Capote. Isherwood didn’t always like Capote’s writing, but he adored the man. He remained friendly with him to the end. “There was one wonderful thing about Truman,” began Isherwood at Capote’s memorial service. “He could always make me laugh.” And he laughed for a moment, then sat down again.

  Capote had been busy since Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948. He wrote more short stories and another novel, The Grass Harp, but he avoided anything overtly gay after the storm over Other Voices. He returned to ghost stories and fairy tales; the new work was well-crafted, well-written and well-received (The Grass Harp was actually praised for steering clear of homosexuality), but emotionally thin. Yet, like Vidal, Capote found that fiction didn’t pay the bills. Traveling in Europe, he stumbled into movie work, rewriting the dreary Indiscretions of an American Wife for David Selznick in Rome and the wonderfully goofy Beat the Devil for John Huston on the Amalfi coast (where Vidal would later live). He turned The Grass Harp into a play, hoping to have some of the same success that Carson McCullers achieved when she adapted The Member of the Wedding to the stage. Walter Kerr compared Capote’s play to an album full of dried flowers: “The flowers have been pressed into attractive patterns, but they are quite dead.” The play closed after thirty-six performances. The same producer then paid Capote to turn “House of Flowers,” a fairy tale/ghost story set in a bordello in Haiti, into a musical. With songs by Harold Arlen, direction by Peter Brook, and a cast that included Pearl Bailey and Diahann Carroll, House of Flowers opened in December 1954 to raves for Arlen’s songs and bad reviews for Capote’s book. The show lasted five months.

  Capote’s romantic life went through a major change as well. After amicably parting with Newton Arvin, he fell in love with Jack Dunphy, an ex-dancer and ex-husband of musical comedy star Joan McCracken (who later married Bob Fosse). The thirty-four-year-old redhead was now writing novels. The still-boyish Capote pursued, wooed, and won the older man. Dunphy was an unsociable, often prickly fellow who preferred to stay home while Capote grew more fiercely sociable, already befriending the high society wives he called “the swans.” Dunphy wrote plays as well as novels, but never had a quarter of the success of his partner. The two men spent much time apart, yet Dunphy was the base that Capote always returned to.

  Only now did Capote discover journalism. And it changed his career completely.

  He accepted an offer to write about the 1955 tour of Porgy and Bess in the Soviet Union for the New Yorker. His experience in theater made him a natural for backstage stories. More important, real life was
good for his prose. His beautiful sentences could turn precious and pretty without strong emotion to anchor them; reality kept his invention focused. Later published as a book, The Muses Are Heard is a drily funny account of a black American opera company visiting Leningrad during the Cold War. Capote’s amused eye is color blind and he casts it on everyone: performers, bureaucrats, spies, fellow journalists, and a drunken Russian who can’t stop singing “St. Louis Woman.” Capote next wrote his notorious 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando, “The Duke in His Domain,” the extended account of a long evening in Kyoto with the frustrated, self-absorbed star of A Streetcar Named Desire. People still argue over how much Capote remembered and how much he invented for his journalism, done in an age before portable tape recorders. But when Brando complained about the profile, he never accused Capote of making anything up, only of tricking him into talking about his love and sorrow for his mother. But those are the very passages where Brando stops sounding like an actor and becomes likable and human.

  Capote had not completely given up fiction but worked intermittently on a short novel about a young woman in New York during World War II. He returned to it after his Russia book, using the first-person voice of his journalism to make himself a character in the story. He said little about his life except that he was a writer. The piece became a fictional memoir of his neighbor, Holiday (Holly) Golightly, a funny, smart-mouthed, independent girl of questionable means who hangs out at El Morocco and the Stork Club. Capote called it Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Donald Windham, who was a good friend of Capote as well as of Tennessee Williams, had hoped to use the title himself for a book about encounters between servicemen and civilians. He didn’t mind losing it too much, since he couldn’t finish his book and he had taken the title from Lincoln Kirstein. Kirstein liked to tell a story of how he picked up a Marine one night and offered to take the man someplace fancy for breakfast. The only fancy place the Marine knew in New York was Tiffany’s.