Throughout his life, Isherwood was greatly influenced by his friends—the people he cared about and admired. In his domestic life, this characteristic had intensified significance. He had sought persistently for a long-term companion, and it still seemed that his greatest chance of happiness was neither in a monastery nor alone travelling the world, but settled in a home with the right person. It had become clear by the start of the 1950s that Isherwood was not the Yeatsian artist “forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work”;25 on the contrary, everything about him as an artist and a man suggests an entirely different exemplum. For Isherwood, perfection of the work was impossible without perfection of the life; each depended upon and derived from the other. In The World in the Evening, Elizabeth Rydal, preparing for her death, expresses the wish to have struck a different balance between life and art:
One just lets one’s self be pushed this way and that. I’d like to have made my life so much more, well, intentional.
… I feel as if I’d put all my will into deciding what to call a character, or whether to use a semi-colon instead of a comma. In life itself, I’ve drifted.26
Such a recognition had not come too late to Isherwood. Falling in love with Bachardy triggered such a powerful sensation in him of the numinous richness of life that Isherwood was at first overawed by his own emotions. A passage in his diary, written April 20, 1953, suggests the way in which this overwhelming experience of love was to move him, over the longer term, away from fiction toward a new, much closer connection between his work and real life:
Coming back at 10:45 from supper at Jo and Ben [Masselink]’s, with talk about the war, This Is My Beloved, and Jay [de Laval] and the old Canyon—the nice smell of redwood as I lifted the garage door. And the feeling of impotence—or, what it really amounts to, lack of inclination to cope with a constructed, invented plot—the feeling, why not write what one experiences, from day to day? And then, as I slid my door back, this sinking-sick feeling of love for Don—somehow connected with the torn shorts—and the reality of that—so far more than all this tiresome fiction. Why invent—when Life is so prodigious?
Perhaps I’ll never write another novel, or anything invented—except, of course for money.
Excess of invention—partly forced upon him by the impossibility of writing openly as a homosexual, and partly the result of his own guilty uncertainty about who he was and how he should live—had fatally skewed the impulse of The World in the Evening; but his love for Bachardy, in which Isherwood felt utterly justified and convinced, was to bring about a renewed sense of involvement with life and restore his instinctive confidence in his own narrative voice. Isherwood evidently wished to make of his life a work of art, and to offer it up in complete detail as his subject matter. In part this was an impulse of self-preservation, even self-salvation, both for himself and for his talent, in the sense that writing, especially writing in his diary, preserved him from the dissipation and laziness to which he was susceptible and created order out of the chaos of his life. Moreover, in his diary Isherwood did not need to exert his will to decide what to call a character or even consider for long whether to use a comma or a semi-colon; instead, he applied his powers of analysis directly to his life. More and more as his career advanced, all his other writing would do the same thing. On January 12, 1954, mulling over his plans for the New Year, Isherwood once again expressed his determination to lead, as Elizabeth Rydal wished she had done, “a more intentional life.” Now this life was to include Don Bachardy, and in many ways to organize itself around him.
Bachardy was young and still only half-educated when he and Isherwood met, so that Isherwood could and did enormously shape Bachardy’s mature character. Bachardy was impressionable and eager to learn, and indeed he willingly modelled himself on Isherwood to such a degree that he even acquired Isherwood’s half-British and half-American accent when speaking. In the early years of their relationship Bachardy followed Isherwood’s intellectual guidance and acquired his taste and his very high standards. But Bachardy was also fiercely independent and rebellious—traits always attractive to Isherwood—and he was highly intelligent, sensitive to a fault, and extremely tenacious. On February 14, 1960, Isherwood mused in his diary:
What shall I write about Don, after seven years? Only this—and I’ve written it often before—he has mattered and does matter more than any of the others. Because he imposes himself more, demands more, cares more—about everything he does and encounters. He is so desperately alive.
These qualities of intense engagement and commitment were more important to Isherwood than any others. His existence and Bachardy’s existence became thoroughly intertwined, and they shared one another’s projects and concerns so intimately, and with such a strong emphasis upon self-reflection and self-examination, that the project of living and working together became in itself a kind of artistic undertaking. It was not long before Bachardy, too, began to keep a diary. Sometimes when they travelled, he kept Isherwood’s pocket datebook for him (in which Isherwood made brief notations of appointments and events and listed people he met), and he was able to imitate Isherwood so skillfully that he seemed to be writing in Isherwood’s own hand and style. Later, as a portrait painter, Bachardy recorded experience in a different medium, but his portraits, too—always completed in one sitting—are a kind of diary of his personal encounters with others. Their shared life, as Isherwood describes it in his diaries, clearly has iconic significance as a model of homosexual love and companionship, and it is also perhaps one of the most replete and persuasive accounts extant of the beauty and difficulty of sustaining a long-term bond between two people.
By 1954, Isherwood’s ability to work seemed rejuvenated. January saw the beginning of a major movie-writing job, MGM’s Diane, starring Lana Turner. This provided plenty of money to establish a home with Bachardy, and in February they moved into a little house together. Meanwhile, Isherwood had begun planning several writing projects of his own. On January 12 he first noted in his diary his intention to write a book about Ramakrishna, and he began to plan an anthology, Great English Short Stories. More importantly, he mentioned again the stories about Basil Fry and Francis Turville-Petre that he had been considering since the 1930s, and which he would during the next few years at last begin to write in earnest for Down There on a Visit. The World in the Evening was published in June 1954 and flopped with the critics; Isherwood was hardly surprised. Nonetheless, when in August he turned fifty, his sense of confidence in himself as a writer was perhaps somewhat damaged, even though he had many ideas already clearly established for new work.
I Am a Camera had closed in 1952, but now plans went ahead for a film, and because he took so much pleasure in showing the world to Bachardy and Bachardy to the world, Isherwood seems to have had renewed enthusiasm for travel and socializing. The two spent much of November in Key West watching the filming of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo, and then in December they drove to Mexico with close friends, Ben and Jo Masselink. Once again, travel seems to have been a relief and a release to Isherwood. In Mexico, he made a point, as on other trips, of writing more regularly in his diary. He also had an important inspiration about his future work. On December 16, he recorded:
Very faintly, since yesterday or the day before—yes, it was at Álamos—I glimpsed an idea for a novel. Something quite unlike me—Kafkaesque—about a journey. A journey which is meticulously described and yet unreal: the reality being the relationships between the characters. Maybe they are all dead—as, in a sense, the characters are in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Also, I see elements in it of The Day’s Journey, my projected film.
The Kafkaesque journey proved to be far more in keeping with Isherwood’s personality as a writer than he himself seemed to recognize, and it became the governing conception for Down There on a Visit, for which Isherwood had already gathered most of the material in his diaries and on which his thoughts now began to evolve fairly rapidly. The projected film, The Day�
�s Journey—mentioned here for the first time—was to metamorphose into the later book, A Single Man. It is highly significant that Isherwood first thought of A Single Man as a film, for the novel reads somewhat like a screenplay—especially in the dialogue—and it is almost exactly the right length to be one. If The World in the Evening seemed to have absorbed the cheap melodramatic side of film writing to which Isherwood had exposed himself in Hollywood—and some of his old friends implied that writing for the studios had spoiled his style—A Single Man offers evidence that his writing was not ruined by studio work, but greatly enhanced. The writing in A Single Man is worthy of comparison with the lyrical prose of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, yet the book synthesizes the style of English literary Modernism with the most important genre of contemporary American culture—the film script.
Isherwood’s job on Diane carried over into 1955, and he also began a new MGM script for a film about Buddha called The Wayfarer, which he finished that September. In March 1955 Ted Bachardy had another nervous breakdown, which once again deeply shook Don Bachardy. Isherwood felt a growing responsibility for Don, which he held as solemn as his commitment to his spiritual life, to his art, to the project of living in the right way. All were now bound up together in a unity as inevitable as his own eventual death. On August 8, 1955, Isherwood wrote in his diary:
In the night, quite often now, I wake—not with the horrors, but calmly and lucidly. Then I know certain things clearly—it’s almost as if they belonged to another order of reality: that I shall die one day—that much of my life has been wasted—that the life of the spirit is the only valid occupation—that I really care for Don and that I have, as it were, adopted him, much as I adopted Heinz, but more completely. In the daytime, these facts are obscured, by studio noise and as-if behavior, and insane resentments and mental and physical slumping. Also I know that all occupations, even Art, are symbolic, and all are valid, so long as they represent right-livelihood.
Bachardy had turned twenty-one that May, and Isherwood took him abroad for the first time. They left California—and Bachardy’s place in college—at the end of the year for a sort of grand tour through Africa, Europe, and England. In Tangier Paul Bowles gave them hashish, an experience they found terrifying. Bachardy, haunted by his brother’s schizophrenia, feared he had gone insane. Nonetheless, a few months later in London, on February 24, 1956, Isherwood tried mescaline for the first time. He approached the undertaking with ritualistic gravity, for he had been told by Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley that mescaline could induce mystical experiences. Moreover, he had felt teasingly challenged by their refusal to give him any of the drug on the grounds that he wasn’t strong enough to cope with its powers over the long term. Swami had always derided using drugs to achieve mystical insights, admonishing that drugs could only alienate the spiritual aspirant from God. Not surprisingly, Isherwood ended nearer the Swami’s view than Heard’s or Huxley’s, though his diary account of his first experiment with mescaline suggests how closely he modelled his approach on Heard’s and Huxley’s. Like Huxley in The Doors of Perception, Isherwood pseudo-scientifically records times of day, and food and drink taken, and he tests the degree of change in his perceptual capacities by looking at reproductions of paintings in books, just as Huxley tells he did.
Although Isherwood was occasionally to try mescaline again, he found it essentially unimportant. It had no spiritual effect whatsoever, and it was of no use in his writing. In contrast to Huxley’s rather dry, cerebral, scientific sensibility, Isherwood had a vivid and weird imagination. This is apparent right from childhood, when, for instance, he twice thought he saw ghosts in Marple Hall, and from the days of his friendship with Edward Upward, when together they invented the macabre world of Mortmere. On his recent trip to Mexico, this vein of Isherwood’s imagination had opened again quite easily as he began to plan what he called the Kafkaesque story about a trip to a place that was, and was not, quite normal. He had no need of the drug-induced vision of mescaline or even hashish; he had enough imagination of his own. He recognized this himself when, after completing the novel, he actually removed an episode based on his hashish experience in Tangier; this episode wasn’t central to the book, and he only published it much later in Exhumations as a separate short story, “A Visit to Anselm Oakes.”
In February 1956, in England with Don Bachardy, Isherwood decided to call his Kafkaesque Mexican novel The Lost. Thus, both in conception and content, it was to be closely linked to his work of the 1930s. Indeed, the theme reached back even further than the 1930s, to Isherwood’s adolescent friendship with Edward Upward and their Mortmereish obsession with doom. In The Spiral Ascent Upward recalls how one evening at a dance the pair of friends suddenly recognized that what gripped them about the dancers they were watching, and indeed about all the eccentric characters that had aroused their interest during their holiday in the Isle of Wight, was the fact that they were doomed. At this, Richard Marple, the Isherwood character in Upward’s novel, exclaims: “Our duty is to live among the doomed and in our poetry we must record and celebrate what they are.”27 This, it seems, was the birth of Isherwood’s epic ambition to portray a bankrupt epoch.
For his new version of The Lost (eventually published as Down There on a Visit), he drew inspiration not only from Kafka, but also from Dante’s Inferno, comparing his “lost” characters to the damned. At first he planned to describe a group of expatriate Americans, marginalized from the mainstream of their culture and living outside or, as the map shows, physically underneath it, down south in Mexico. Gradually he moved closer to his own experiences of the 1930s and 1940s, drawing material from his diaries rather than inventing it, just as he had first begun to recognize he should do during the early months of his relationship with Don Bachardy. Yet while he was inventing less, his technique became more subtle and more directed. And his ambition for the book stretched out through a longer period of history, so that it would record the moral condition not merely of one group of people at a given moment in time, but of several people and groups of people in Europe and America during the first half of the century. He decided to tell the story through a revised version of the narrative persona that had served him so well during the 1930s and early 1940s, rather than trying, as he had in The World in the Evening, to invent a convincing character who could both embody the psychology necessary to convey the emotional truths in which Isherwood was interested, and also conform, at least superficially, to external heterosexual literary convention. Thus, he was once again free to concentrate on his true subject matter, and he pared this down until he produced four emblematic vignettes based on four episodes in his life and held together by his original conception of the narrator’s journey among the lost, whose condition he shares in and examines without ever giving himself over to their fate.
While he was in England that winter, 1956, Isherwood stayed with his mother and brother at Wyberslegh again and visited Marple—now fallen, through neglect, into irretrievable ruin. In mid-March, before returning to California, he, somewhat symbolically, made a start on writing the novel which would eventually become Down There on a Visit. Then, back at home, he and Bachardy bought a house of their own for the first time, as if seeing the last of Marple had somehow prepared Isherwood to become a property owner elsewhere. Just as they were moving into their new house on Sycamore Road in May, all of Isherwood’s ambitions and plans were heavily waylaid as first Bachardy and then he himself came down with hepatitis. This marked the beginning, for Isherwood, of a long period of chronic ill health, tiredness, and depression. Nevertheless, he began work in earnest on his biography of Ramakrishna, in which he tells the story of the mystical genius from his own point of view, as a sceptic who questions the possibility of visionary and supernatural experience. He freighted the book heavily with quotidian detail, attempting, characteristically, to approach as near as possible to the borderline between ordinary reality and the transcendent. The power and intensity of love that emanated from the disciples who gathe
red around Ramakrishna in his lifetime clearly fascinated Isherwood, and he focused in the book on describing the individual relationships between Ramakrishna and each of his main followers in order to establish how Ramakrishna’s own charisma passed through a series of, for Isherwood, comprehensible and verifiable human relationships out into the world—from guru to disciple, guru to disciple. The analogies to the historical Jesus are made clear in the book in a variety of ways, not least of which is Isherwood’s decision to tell the story in the style of the King James version of the Bible. This major biography was to take nearly a decade, interspersed with many other pieces of work, and although Isherwood often found it tedious, it is clear it was important to him. Isherwood’s belief in Ramakrishna’s status as an avatar does not stand or fall on the strength of whether the apparently miraculous events of Ramakrishna’s life are literally true, but on the strength of the individual convictions of those who believed before Isherwood, and who established their belief on the basis of a personal relationship, just as Isherwood had done in his own familiar and credible relationship with Swami.
That summer, Bachardy made a step toward recognizing and beginning to cultivate his talent as a draughtsman when he enrolled in art school. Not long afterwards, despite his own and his critics’ mixed feelings about Diane (released earlier that year), Isherwood undertook another major film script during September 1956, Jean-Christophe, also set in France. Jean-Christophe—written for Twentieth Century-Fox—was never made, possibly because it promised to be too expensive; still, Isherwood was well paid for his work, which lasted until the following June, 1957. During this same period, he had more problems with his health. He discovered a tumor on the side of his belly in February 1957, and although it was removed almost instantly and proved benign, it brought him abruptly up against the fact that he would die, and that he could die soon. He became even more determined to press on quickly with his work, but his anxiety and depression persisted, and it seemed that he had never really recovered from the hepatitis. The impotence which he had first mentioned in his diary in 1949 became more persistent. He refers to it several times during 1956 and 1957, and it made him anxious about his relationship with Bachardy, even though the little he records in his diary suggests that Bachardy was far less worried by the impotence than Isherwood. Isherwood tended to put the difficulty down to middle age, tiredness, and loss of libido partly resulting from the hepatitis; he consulted an endocrinologist and seemed satisfied that her vitamin and hormone treatments helped him.
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