Isherwood & co.

AdamSmith · October 25, 2013

Don Bachardy interview: 'I was just waiting to be told who I was' Don Bachardy talks about his love for Christopher Isherwood, and how he kept on painting him after he died

Men of letters: Don Bachardy with a painting of his partner Christpher Isherwood Photo: Getty

By John Walsh

7:00AM BST 22 Oct 2013

The American artist Don Bachardy and the British writer Christopher Isherwood were an item for more than 30 years. Despite the gap in their ages – Bachardy was 18 when they met, Isherwood 48 – and the fact that few gay couples lived openly as couples in America in those times, they became the most solidly enduring arty-literary relationship in Sixties and Seventies California, parted only by the death of Isherwood in 1986.

When circumstances made them live apart in the Sixties, they wrote copious letters to each other, full of gossip, name-dropping, sighs of loneliness and fond endearments. Many critics of the collected missives, which have just been published, were intrigued (or amused, or dismayed) to discover the slushily anthropomorphic names they called each other: Don was “Kitty” or “Pussy” or “Angel Kitten”; Christopher was “Dobbin” or “Dub” or “Angelhorse” or “VelvetMuzzle”.

When we met in London’s Holland Park, I asked Bachardy about “the Basket”, a kind of Platonic haven for which the animals, the skittish Kitty and the stolid Dobbin, ache when they’re apart. It’s mentioned several times, but never described. What did it signify?

“The Basket was essentially our house in Santa Monica,” said Bachardy, “and of course the real basket was the bed we always slept in together – not only slept together, but very closely, with arms around each other. I always thought that was very animal-like. We believed we communicated with each other in the night, and the animals carried on their adventures in the night hours.”

Now 79, spry and agile in a simple T-shirt and box-fresh trainers, Bachardy talks a blue streak, with his head bowed in concentration. Then, abruptly, his sentences end and he raises his head to scrutinise you. His piercing gaze has been trained on hundreds of portrait sitters (“Aldous Huxley’s colouring was wonderful – his face all pinks and greys and silver, with the wonderful opaqueness of his eyes, like clouds in different shades of grey”) and made them quake.

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As a child he taught himself to draw by copying portraits of movie actors. “I thought I could bring something special to their photographs,” he says. “I don’t think any drawing done

Half a lifetime later, he encountered movie actors again, and drew them again – but by this time, his eye had grown sharp.

“So many people have said, 'Do I look like that to you?’ They’ve never seen what they look like when they’ve been sitting still for three hours. Something deep comes out, something very different and shocking. Fred Astaire sat for me once. He looked startling when his face was un-animated. He looked almost scary, like Boris Karloff. He was very deflated by the result. He offered to sit for a second portrait and of course I said yes – but the result was every bit as grim as the first.”

Isherwood always encouraged his young lover to write, but suggested he should also follow his talent for drawing. “He’d observed couples who lived together and practised the same art, and thought they were inviting rivalry and competition. He said if I did something creatively different from what he did, we’d have a better chance of staying together.”

A remarkable symbiosis grew between them. Isherwood was first to suggest that Bachardy try drawing from life, and became his first sitter – and his most prolific.

In turn, when writing a book, Isherwood would ask Bachardy’s advice about physical descriptions of characters. Both men used each other as sounding-boards of authenticity. “Often,” said Bachardy, “I felt that he was in some way forming me, creating in me his idea of a companion, and I was responding to that. I was just waiting to be told who I was and what about me was of use to another person.”

The end was astonishing. In the last six months of his life, Isherwood was Bachardy’s only sitter. “I cancelled all others, and worked on many drawings a day. It was an amazing experience for me, just working with him day after day, it was the intensest way I could be with him, nothing could be more intense than looking at somebody in the way I look at them while I’m drawing them. After he was dead, I did 11 drawings, and was about to do a 12th, but his doctor arrived. I was so relieved not to have to do the 12th, because by then the corpse hardly looked like him.”

Wasn’t there something a bit … heartless, drawing somebody while they die? Bachardy smiled. “I must be heartless, because I can do it. The focus I use when I’m working is relentless, and when I get into it, I can’t be taken out. Sometimes I see those drawings now and I can hardly bear them. I think, 'How did I manage to do that without breaking up?’

The Animals: Love Letters between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, edited by Katherine Bucknell (Chatto, RRP £25), is available to order from Telegraph Books for £23 plus £1.35p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10387989/Don-Bachardy-interview-I-was-just-waiting-to-be-told-who-I-was.html

AdamSmith · October 25, 2013

Christopher Isherwood: The peculiar odyssey of a great literary outsider Ahead of a BBC Two biopic, Peter Parker explains the lasting appeal of novelist Christopher Isherwood.

Doctor Who actor Matt Smith portrays Christopher Isherwood in Christopher and His Kind, a BBC Two biopic of the novelist. Photo: BBC

By Peter Parker

6:07PM GMT 17 Mar 2011

On November 29, 1929 Christopher Isherwood packed two suitcases and a rucksack and set off for Berlin on a one-way ticket. “To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys”, he later wrote, and by going to live there he was rejecting both his upper-middle-class background and the social values to which his mother, widowed in the First World War, was still clinging. This ferocious family quarrel had been dramatised in his highly accomplished but heavily remaindered first novel, All the Conspirators, published in 1928.

In Berlin he would work on a second novel, The Memorial, which further explored the gulf between the generations caused by the war and was admired by EM Forster among others. It was, however, the novels he wrote about Berlin, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), that made his reputation as one of the leading writers of his generation, providing an indelible tragic-comic portrait of a city teetering on the brink of catastrophe as Hitler gained in popular support.

While Isherwood was attracted to Berlin by the ready availability of homosexual partners there, he always had a keen journalist’s instinct for being in the right place at the right time. “Here was the seething brew of history in the making,” he wrote, “a brew which would test the truth of all the political theories, just as actual cooking tests the cookery books. The Berlin brew seethed with unemployment, malnutrition, stock market panic, hatred of the Versailles Treaty and other potent ingredients.”

Isherwood’s Berlin novels portray this history-in-the-making at street level, showing how ordinary people were affected. Isherwood’s sharp eye for physical detail and human oddity means that his characters are never merely representative of their class or condition, but leap off the page and live on in the memory. And in the feckless cabaret singer Sally Bowles (on whose story the stage musical Cabaret was later based) he created one of literature’s immortals.

Isherwood’s lasting attraction as a writer, apart from the unfading crispness and sheer readability of his prose, is that he encompassed a century. Although born into the Edwardian age in 1904, he still seems strikingly modern. He may have effectively left England in 1929, but he took his Englishness with him, becoming, as he put it, “a permanent foreigner”. He recognised that being an outsider wherever he went, both nationally and sexually, gave him an invaluable perspective as a writer.

Having fled Berlin in May 1933, he spent the next few years trailing around Europe with his young German lover Heinz Neddermeyer in search of a country in which they could settle without being harried by immigration officials and the Nazi authorities. Heinz was eventually imprisoned for draft evasion and sexual offences, after which Isherwood travelled to China as a somewhat improbable war reporter with his friend WH Auden. The two emigrated to America in 1939 and Isherwood settled in California. He worked with leading directors in Hollywood, became the disciple of a Hindu guru long before hippies followed in The Beatles’ footsteps to India, and ended up a figurehead of the Gay Liberation movement. He died in 1986.

Every step along the way is recorded in the books he wrote, so that reading Isherwood gives one a real sense of what it was like to live through the 20th century, a century characterised by wars, the clash of ideologies, widespread deracination and massive social change.

A new perspective is promised by Kevin Elyot’s adaptation for BBC Two of Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood’s memoir of his life in the 1930s, published in 1977. Taking advantage of the new freedoms resulting from gay liberation, Isherwood not only placed his homosexual experiences back at the centre of his Berlin life in this book, but went on to describe his further travels throughout what Auden described as “a low dishonest decade”. As in Goodbye to Berlin, this is a personal story played out against and driven by history. The familiar refugee experience is given a novel twist, however, for it is sexuality rather than race that forces Isherwood to seek another homeland. The book ends hopefully with him setting sail for America, like many European émigrés; and it is here that a whole new chapter of his life and work will open.

‘Christopher and His Kind’ is on BBC Two on Saturday 19 March at 9.30pm. Peter Parker is the author of ‘Isherwood: a Life Revealed’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8388504/Christopher-Isherwood-The-peculiar-odyssey-of-a-great-literary-outsider.html