Entertainment
An Impressive Monument to Christopher Isherwood, Man of Letters (and Lovers)
Though it downplays unflattering details, Katherine Bucknell’s big biography hails the 20th-century writer as an early advocate for the “chosen family.”
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD INSIDE OUT, by Katherine Bucknell
Many writers’ graves are tourist attractions. Not Christopher Isherwood’s. Indeed, he doesn’t have one. Best remembered for his “Berlin Stories,” which became “I Am a Camera” which became “Cabaret” — and latterly for “A Single Man,” which the designer Tom Ford made into a movie — Isherwood, who died in 1986 at 81, signed away his corpse to science.
Now the director of his foundation, Katherine Bucknell, a novelist herself, has with great care erected a massive literary cenotaph entitled, with an apt echo of this summer’s most successful movie, “Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.” It joins Peter Parker’s equally gargantuan “Isherwood: A Life Revealed,” from 20 years ago: twin lions guarding fiercely the library of Isherwood’s own prodigious autofiction, letters and journals.
The biographers’ little-lion friend, their main Christopher whisperer, is Don Bachardy: the artist and Isherwood’s longtime partner, 30 years his junior and fondly known as Kitty. A landed-gentry Englishman who’d uprooted improbably to Los Angeles, Isherwood was Dobbin, after a toy horse he’d been given by his nanny as a child. They called themselves the Animals, their private domestic idyll the “basket.”
Dozens of other lovers pawed curiously at this basket — some even jumped in, for a time — but none unraveled or overturned it. The couple, who met when Bachardy was 18 and took a while to be accepted even in Isherwood’s bohemian circle, were the first subject of David Hockney’s celebrated double-portrait series.
Bucknell’s considerable sourcework — so much writing from all fronts, so many interviews from the golden age of newspapers, magazines, Cavett — is more than synthesis; it is photosynthesis. Her big blue book breathes and glistens. Her subject, who regularly meditated as a convert with Aldous Huxley to the Hindu philosophy Vedanta, is reincarnated.
And his reputation — somewhat tarnished after the publication of his diaries, which she edited, occasioned a harder look at his antisemitism and misogyny — gets a good spiffing. Isherwood is enshrined here as not just a Grand Old Man of gay liberation, minus the waving rainbow flag (nor did he write about AIDS), but a warrior of finding one’s tribe, or “chosen family.” Imagine the cage match with JD Vance.
