Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  Isherwood and Bachardy could both be terribly jealous. “When I suffer, I suffer like a dumb animal,” Isherwood wrote in his diary. But extramarital sex was also an expression of larger dissatisfactions in their life. Bachardy’s painting was going badly—he was confident about his drawing but not his painting; he blamed his partner when he couldn’t work. And Isherwood’s writing was going badly, too. After the disappointment of Down There, he decided to disguise his experience in The Englishwoman, the story of an English war bride living unhappily in California and wanting to return to England. But the bit of secret autobiography—he didn’t know if he and Bachardy would stay together—wasn’t enough to bring the book to life. He felt himself floundering again.

  Like many quarreling couples, they remained each other’s best confidant, even when the problem being discussed was the listener. One day at the beach Isherwood complained to Bachardy that the new book was slipping away. Bachardy asked what he really wanted it to be about. Isherwood told him. “And in no time at all the blindingly simple truth was revealed that the book isn’t about the Englishwoman but about the Englishman—me,” Isherwood recorded in his diary. Bachardy suggested he give this woman’s problems to someone more like himself, a middle-aged gay man. Isherwood did not hesitate, despite his experience with Down There on a Visit. He immediately went back to his manuscript, retitled it The Englishman, and began again. Indirection hadn’t protected him on the last book: he might as well go all the way. He must tell the truth or be silent.

  He did not write as first-person “Chris” this time, but in the third person. Fifty-eight-year-old George (with no last name) is and isn’t Isherwood. He lives in the same house and neighborhood of Santa Monica where Isherwood and Bachardy lived. Like Isherwood, he occasionally teaches literature at a state college. But a huge difference is that George is alone. He is a gay man whose lover has recently died. It was both a painful fantasy for the author and a quiet act of revenge.

  Life with Bachardy remained difficult while Isherwood worked on the new book. The painter had two serious affairs at this time—one with a man named George. Isherwood’s fear of losing Bachardy enabled him to imagine the loneliness that drives the book. But it was Bachardy who suggested a new title: A Single Man.

  The lean, precise novel, broken into short, unnumbered chapters, follows a single day in the life of one individual. While Down There on a Visit covered twenty-five years, A Single Man doesn’t quite fill twenty-four hours. It’s written in present tense, the tense of screenplays, and begins in detached, distant strangeness, as if narrated by God. A consciousness comes to life, George comes into focus, then his middle-aged body and his snug little house. Then comes the memory of Jim, his deceased lover. Enough time has passed for death to register more as physical absence than as emotional pain.

  In his neighbors’ eyes, George is just a crabby old bachelor. But Isherwood quickly climbs behind that facade and gives us George’s thoughts, which are often the author’s thoughts, a headful of private satires about American life in 1962, short personal essays about freeways, college culture, computer punch cards, the recently ended Cuban missile crisis, the gym, the supermarket. A Single Man is like a smaller, more human version of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the ultimate day-in-the-life novel; George is Leopold Bloom in Los Angeles. His sexuality is only one part of his life, dispersed through a hundred other parts, yet it is a key part of George’s sense of being. The mere sight of two shirtless tennis players in tight white shorts can break through his melancholy and give life meaning for him.

  The hour-by-hour structure enables Isherwood to be loose and inclusive, but the book doesn’t feel shapeless. It addresses a lot through the grab bag of George’s thoughts. George’s anger with the heterosexual majority erupts in comic fantasies of vengeance on his drive to the college. His class in English literature is full of minorities: female, black, Asian, Jewish, elderly, and one gay boy. They discuss After Many a Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley. An older Jewish refugee asks if Huxley were anti-Semitic based on a line in the novel. George says no, Huxley was not anti-Semitic, then jumps ahead in an argument he’s been having with himself: George declares that minorities are different from each other and the liberal idea that all people are brothers and sisters under the skin is a lie.

  And I’ll tell you something else. A minority has its own kind of aggression. It absolutely dares the majority to hate it. It hates the majority—not without a cause, I grant you. It even hates the other minorities, because all minorities are in competition: each one proclaims that its sufferings are the worst and its wrongs are the blackest. And the more they all hate, and the more they’re all persecuted, the nastier they become. Do you think it makes people nastier to be loved? You know it doesn’t. Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who’re making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it. You’d suspect love. You’d think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.

  George knows firsthand how persecution makes a person angry and crazy. If oppression produced saints, we’d want everyone to be oppressed. And George sees homosexuals as a minority like blacks, Jews, and Asians—he is years ahead of his time in seeing the similarities and the conflicts. His students don’t know he is speaking of himself here; we wait for somebody to misunderstand and be offended. But in a cruel but believable twist, the class is nearly over, and they are too concerned about the bell to pay full attention.

  It’s a startling scene. James Baldwin never addressed the issue more directly and realistically. Isherwood does it through a character who cannot make himself fully understood. (But the author might not have made himself clear, either. Few critics have given this scene the attention it deserves. Only recently, when Isherwood’s journals began to appear and we learned about his obsession/fascination with Jews, did people talk about this scene, but as an example of anti-Semitism, not recognizing that George is talking about his own anger and nastiness as a gay man.)

  We follow George through the rest of his day. He visits Doris, a woman dying of cancer in the hospital, who once had an affair with his dead lover, Jim. He sits with her, holding her hand, sorry he can’t hate her anymore. “As long as one precious drop of hate remained, George could still find something in her of Jim. For he hated Jim too, nearly as much as her, while they were away together in Mexico. That has been the bond between him and Doris. And now it is broken. And one more bit of Jim is lost to him forever.”

  He escapes the shadow of death to visit the gym, not a shiny industrial gym of our time but a shabby place where two other men and a twelve-year-old boy amiably lift weights together. He has dinner with his friend Charlotte, the Englishwoman of the original novel. They drink too much and talk about their lost partners—Charlotte’s husband left her for a younger woman—and compare memories of England. Afterward, instead of going home, George goes down to a bar by the ocean, where he finds Kenny Potter, a tall, skinny student from his literature class. Kenny has had a fight with his girlfriend. The two get drunk together and Kenny suggests they go back to George’s place. We—and George—think we know where this is going, especially when professor and student share a drunken nude swim in the ocean. But the novel takes a more interesting, devious twist before it ends with George at home in bed alone.

  George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret, my strength.

  And he falls asleep. The God-like narrator returns to ask and answer questions about the future, much like the Q. and A. chapter near the end of Ulysses. The narrator steps back further to compare individuals to rock pools of consciousness beside a vast ocean. Then the narrator closes by imagining George’s death. He might die in his sleep from a heart attack. The narrator gives a few clinical details.

  Then one by one the lights go out and there is total blackness. And if some part of the nonentity we
called George has indeed been absent at this moment of terminal shock, away out there on the deep waters, then it will return home to find itself homeless. For it can associate no longer with what lies here, unsnoring, on the bed. This is now cousin to the garbage in the container on the back porch. Both will have to be carted away and disposed of, before too long.

  The lessons of Vedanta, soul, and death are translated into the homeliest metaphor imaginable. It’s shocking in its matter-of-factness, and liberating, too.

  Isherwood gives the world a fully realized gay man and makes him ordinary by submerging his sexuality in the universal buzz of metaphysical being. And he makes homosexuality more acceptable by making George single. The narrator even bitterly jokes about the tactic: “Let us even go so far as to say that this kind of relationship can sometimes be almost beautiful—particularly if one of the parties is already dead, or, better yet, both.”

  This is also a novel about grief, yet it’s not overtly sad. George successfully navigates his sadness, even floats in it, with surprising serenity. Jim is everywhere in George’s consciousness. He died in a car wreck while visiting his family in Ohio, and George did not go out for the funeral. George tells acquaintances only that Jim has gone away, not that he’s dead. He saves that brutal fact for close friends. George’s seeming serenity looks like denial in our current age of therapy, but George carries Jim’s memory with a kind of grace that feels neither hysterical nor repressed.

  Isherwood’s American and British publishers accepted the novel without difficulty, although Simon and Schuster asked him to remove a sentence about George wiping off with a handkerchief after he masturbates. Isherwood sent the book to the New Yorker for possible serialization, but Roger Angell rejected it, claiming, “While I can believe this novel, I don’t find it particularly interesting.” The New Yorker was now publishing highly original nonfiction, but its fiction remained narrow and predictable.

  A Single Man was published in August 1964. The reviews were an amazing mix of progressive intelligence and old-fashioned bigotry. Alan Pryce-Jones in the New York Herald Tribune called it “a small masterpiece.” The incoherent review in the Los Angeles Times was headlined “Disjointed Limp Wrist Saga.” Both the Catholic Standard and Daily Worker disliked the novel, but Graham Greene in, of all places, the Catholic Herald, said it was one of the best books of the year. Other reviews made clear the world was changing but had a long way to go. The Nashville Tennessean observed of Isherwood, “By making his leading character a sex deviate, he has provided a sharp contrast with the normal man and yet he has been able to show that all people experience the same emotions and face similar crises, no matter how they differ in normality and perspective.” But in New York literary circles, little had changed. Elizabeth Hardwick in the New York Review of Books was so full of sneers and condescension (“Poor Corydon is now in California, driving the freeways with a daydreaming ardor, attacking the ants with Flit, and mourning among the hibiscus”) that it’s a surprise to come to the end of her review and learn she liked the book, sort of. (Hardwick praises Isherwood for understanding that gay life isn’t amusing but is a “trap.”) And everybody’s favorite homosexual expert, Stanley Kauffmann, wrote in the New Republic: “The book holds us because it runs parallel with the truth of our lives, but like any parallel it keeps a certain distance.” We wouldn’t want to get too close.

  Luckily the small but struggling gay media came through on this novel. Novelist James Colton (aka Joseph Hansen) wrote in ONE, “The most honest book ever written about a homosexual… about life, death, love, sex… it would be difficult to overpraise it.” Not many readers read ONE, but the paperback publisher quoted Colton on the jacket, perhaps the first time a gay magazine was used to promote a novel. Publishers were finally acknowledging there was a gay readership for their books.

  Isherwood left for India as soon as he completed the book. He was there for two months with his guru, Prabhavananda, researching a biography, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, and giving talks in Calcutta and surrounding towns. But he felt trapped and dishonest in his role as a spokesman. “As long as I quite unashamedly get drunk, have promiscuous sex, and write books like A Single Man, I simply cannot appear before people as a sort of lay monk. Whenever I do, my life becomes divided and untruthful—or rather, the only truth left is my drunkenness, my sex, and my art.” He decided it was time to break with Vedanta.

  When he returned to Los Angeles, he discovered Bachardy’s most recent affair was over. He made his peace with Bachardy, and with himself as well. As always he wrote about it in his diary:

  When Don isn’t here, my life simply isn’t very interesting. He creates disturbance, anxiety, tension, and sometimes jealousy and rage; but never for a moment do I feel our relationship is unimportant. Let me just recognize this fact, and not bother making good resolutions. He will behave badly; I shall behave badly. That’s par for the course.

  They continued to see other men—Bachardy more than Isherwood, but Isherwood was hardly monogamous. They continued to get frustrated about their work and blame each other and forgive each other and resume working. They sustained their life together.

  Cabaret finally opened in New York in November 1966 to rave reviews. Lotte Lenya played the landlady. Isherwood refused to see the show but sent Bachardy, who disliked it and reported back that Isherwood would hate it. Hal Prince and Joe Masteroff had added a moralistic love story where the Isherwood character, now American, tries and fails to save Sally Bowles from her decadent lifestyle with marriage. Kander and Ebb had suggested Sally be played by Liza Minnelli—the star of their last show, Flora the Red Menace—but Prince killed the idea, saying she was much too strong a performer. From the start, people insisted that Sally be mediocre—if she were any good she’d be singing in a nicer club. Even Isherwood repeated this line when Minnelli was later cast in the movie. I’ve never understood it myself. Who wants to see a musical about a singer who can’t sing? And do we really believe the world is so fair and just that people with talent inevitably rise to the top?

  For all its faults, Cabaret helped to keep Isherwood’s name alive until the world had changed enough that it was ready for the real Isherwood. A novel is such a small thing, but A Single Man has endured, like an early mammal surrounded by dinosaurs.

  9. The Whole World Is Watching

  Isherwood dedicated A Single Man to Gore Vidal. Vidal was honored and later dedicated his most notorious novel to Isherwood. But in the meantime he paid his friend the higher compliment of competing with him. Shortly after A Single Man appeared, Vidal went back to his old novel, The City and the Pillar, and revised and reissued it, as if to establish his position as the first chronicler of American gay life. The new City and the Pillar was published in 1965, a year after A Single Man. It included an afterword where Vidal explained why he wrote the novel and offered his strongest statement to date about sexuality:

  I decided to examine the homosexual underworld (which I knew rather less well than I pretended), and in the process show the “naturalness” of homosexual relations, as well as making the point that there was no such thing as a homosexual. Despite the current usage, the word is an adjective describing a sexual action, not a noun describing a recognizable type. All human beings are bisexual.

  Declaring the categories null and void was an ingenious move. It suggested a whole new approach to sexual tolerance, and it put Vidal himself above the name-calling of the mid-Sixties. He couldn’t be called a homosexual: there was no such animal. Yet the position left him standing outside when the ground shifted in the next decade.

  Gore Vidal remained a man of many hats and enormous energy. He wrote plays and screenplays; he appeared on television; he ran for Congress. He was also making a name for himself as a major essayist. His early pieces were occasional prose on topics that happened to interest him, exercises in excess intellect. But he wrote more regularly and his essays became more accomplished. The form played to his strengths: his wit, his curiosity, his know
ledge, and his ego. His editor, Jason Epstein, later said that Vidal “had too much ego to be a writer of fiction because he couldn’t subordinate himself to other people…. It was always him wearing different costumes.” The essays are Vidal playing Vidal, and he did it beautifully. He had a fluent first-person voice and a wide range of interests: literature, history, culture, and politics. He became a regular contributor to the Nation and Esquire and, after 1964, the New York Review of Books.

  But what Vidal most wanted to do was write fiction. He had two works in progress on his desk: his novel about ancient Rome and a novel about Washington, D.C. But fiction requires time, and Vidal needed to make money. He bought himself some time when he adapted his political play, The Best Man, for the screen in 1963. Tired of Edgewater and New York, he and Howard Austen moved to Rome for six months. There Vidal finished Julian, his best novel to date.

  The last pagan emperor, known to Christians as Julian the Apostate, is the subject of four fascinating chapters in Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Expanding on the first-person examples of I, Claudius by Robert Graves and Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, Vidal told the tale through multiple narrators, a device that enabled him to use pieces of the voice developed in his essays. He was better at telling than showing anyway, and first-person narrative is all telling—storytelling. The book came out in 1964 to excellent reviews and was a surprise best seller.