IN HIS MEMOIR Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood describes his relationship with E. M. Forster, who was 25 years his senior. When they met in 1932, Isherwood felt that “Forster was the only living writer whom he would have described as his master.” Less than a year later, Forster allowed him to read the manuscript of Maurice, which was already twenty years in the making. It would become the open secret of 20th-century British literature. Isherwood compared it to the other works by Forster and found it to be “both inferior and superior to them: inferior as an artwork, superior because of its purer passion, its franker declaration of its author’s faith. This moved Christopher tremendously on first reading.” Forster never published the book, but he left it in Isherwood’s care, who had it published in 1971, a year after Forster’s death.
So Forster may well have written the first great gay novel, but it came a bit late in the game. As a young writer, Isherwood included homosexuality in his work rather obscurely. Regarding The Berlin Stories, for example, Isherwood told Winston Leyland in 1971, “I’m often asked if I regret that I didn’t say outright … that I was homosexual. Yes, I wish I had. … To have made him a homosexual, in those days, would have been to feature him as someone too eccentric. It would have made a star out of a supporting actor. … But I must also frankly say that I would have been embarrassed, then, to create a homosexual character and give him my own name.” Of course, Isherwood corrected this in Christopher and His Kind, his 1970s retelling of the Berlin years, in which he bluntly declared, “To Christopher, Berlin meant boys.”
In the 1950s, Isherwood published a rather uneven novel called The World in the Evening, in which he created perhaps the first militant gay character, Bob Wood. Bob, who lives openly with his lover, Charles Kennedy, is fed up with politeness and hiding; he tells the protagonist, Stephen Monk, “Maybe we’re just too damned tactful. People just ignore us, most of the time, and we let them. We encourage them to. So this whole business never gets discussed, and the laws never get changed. … Jesus, I’d like to take them and rub their noses in it.” Isherwood had been peripherally involved with the Mattachine Society in L.A. in the late 1940s and early ’50s, so he was beginning to meet people like Bob and Charles in the early Homophile movement. He also became friendly with Evelyn Hooker, the psychologist whose work led to the removal of homosexuality as a pathology from the DSM.
The closest Isherwood came to writing a gay “relationship novel” is his 1964 masterpiece, A Single Man. Notably, though, this 
is a novel about the loss of a partner, a story of grief, longing, and recovery. What gave rise to it was a hypothetical question: what if Don Bachardy, Isherwood’s lover for a decade, left him? The two men lived apart a good deal of the time in the early 1960s and very nearly broke up. So the novel, surely one of the first gay novels to cover a full-fledged relationship, however obliquely, is Isherwood’s attempt to use fiction to help him come to terms with what felt almost like an inevitability.
In Isherwood’s voluminous diaries and in the recently published letters between Isherwood and Bachardy (The Animals, edited by Katherine Bucknell, 2013), we have an autobiographical record of more than a million words of one of the most fascinating, unusual gay love stories of the 20th century.
What follows is my slightly revised review of Isherwood’s 1960s diaries from the March-April 2010 issue, including a new passage, in italics, at the end. These diaries have been very helpful in situating the evolution of A Single Man. — CF
AMID THIS SURFEIT of words and pages, there is much of interest about Isherwood’s life and career in his diaries from the 1960s: his observations about his times; his interest in how a writer works (or doesn’t), how a relationship persists and grows (and struggles), and how a person ages; his fears of his own decrepitude as he watched so many of his friends suffer and die. It is unsettling, in fact, to spend a few hours immersed, say, in 1965, and to come out of the book disoriented about what day of the week it is. Isherwood’s writing is that vivid; his reality is that well conveyed.
In the spring of 1961, for example, Isherwood is in England for an extended stay, visiting his lover Don Bachardy, who’s at art school at Slade in London. The story of this legendary relationship, so well depicted in the 2008 film Chris and Don: A Love Story, is pervasive in the volume, of course. A diary entry for April 28th gives an important insight into Isherwood’s feelings about his native land: “There is much that is lovable here but thank God it is not my home. Never do I cease to give thanks that I left it.” A few weeks later, these thoughts continue: “I realize now, on this trip, that my longing to be away from England has really nothing to do with a mother complex or any other facile psychoanalytic explanation. No, here is something that stifles and confines me. I wish I could define it. Maybe the island is just too damned small. I feel unfree, cramped.” The trip also reveals tension in Isherwood’s longstanding relationships with E. M. Forster, Joe Ackerley, and especially W. H. Auden. Having failed to do much work with Auden and his lover Chester Kallman—they were working half-heartedly on a musical adaptation of Isherwood’s Berlin writings—Isherwood notes on the day of their parting that “there was a feeling of haste and constraint and I don’t think this was at all a satisfactory ending.”
The Berlin musical project brings me to another, quite interesting aspect of the diaries as history. We know how a lot of this 
turned out, so beholding it in its conception is often fascinating. Even as this musical collaboration with Auden and Kallman founders, we know that Cabaret is yet to come. We know that the Berlin material contains the makings of one of the most successful musicals (and film adaptations) of all time, and we know that Isherwood will have little (or nothing, really) to do with it. Seeing, also, that Isherwood’s screenplay is rejected, especially after all the work he did on it in the late 1960s, helps explain why he could never find anything positive to say about the show that made him as rich and famous as he’d ever been.
What is perhaps most curious about The Sixties is that it is almost reticent, even silent, on many major events of that tumultuous decade. Of course, a diary is a personal record, not a history. Nonetheless, history intervenes. So the Cuban Missile Crisis appears in the early years (and in A Single Man), and Isherwood’s close friend Aldous Huxley dies the same day JFK is assassinated. The entry for November 30 opens: “Such a strong disinclination to write anything about Black Friday the 22nd. But I ought to. To remind myself.” Listening to the radio for the accounts of the day, Isherwood writes: “Just disgusted horror … there was the feeling—journalistic as it may sound to say this—that some sort of nationwide evil was functioning. It was something we had all done with our hate. Aldous seemed an anticlimax.” The entry for that day ends, “Life goes on, or stops. If it goes on, it will change for me.”
Many hallmarks of the 1960s are visible throughout the diary. There’s a funny experience of attending Timothy Leary’s “show” at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in early 1967: “What was so false and pernicious in Leary’s appeal was its complete irresponsibility. He wasn’t really offering any reliable spiritual help to the young, only inciting them to vaguely rebellious action—and inciting them without really involving himself with them.” The assassination of Martin Luther King gets little notice. The death of Judy Garland and the Stonewall riots go unremarked. The Manson murders get some attention. Here again, knowing how things turned out comes into play. On August 12, 1968, we read that “Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s wife, came to see Don about having her portrait drawn by him.” A year later, on August 20, 1969, we get this: “Leslie Caron told me on the phone that the murder of Sharon Tate and the others in Benedict Canyon, followed by the two other murders at Silver Lake and Marina del Rey, created a tremendous panic.”
Having survived a decade of painful growth, separation, and struggle, Isherwood and Bachardy ended the summer of 1969 with a trip to the South Pacific. They flew to Tahiti, notes Isherwood, on “the perfect night to depart—right after the moon rape. (Oh, how sad it was to look up at the poor violated thing and know that it was now littered with American junk and the footprints of the trespassers!).”
The index entry for Don Bachardy is four columns long, so to say that he is on almost every page is just about right. Isherwood records the vicissitudes of long-term relationships. While they had particular challenges—their thirty-year age difference, Isherwood’s fame and success, Bachardy’s artistic development and self-determination—they also clearly loved each other deeply and abidingly. In April 1962, as Don needs more independence, he decides that he wants his own studio space—at their garage. Isherwood slyly records their conversation: “When I ask [why not in Santa Monica], he says jokingly that he wants to keep an eye on me. And I suspect that this isn’t entirely a joke. He is afraid of leaving me too much alone. He doesn’t want my independence.”
A particularly low point in the relationship comes in February 1963: “What I am miserable about is the feeling that Don is gradually slipping away from me. To go to New York with him at this time, especially in order to ‘celebrate’ our anniversary, seems grimly farcical. I don’t feel I have the heart for it. Also, to make matters worse, I have been reading through all these diaries and feel absolutely toxic with their unhappiness.”
This “unhappiness” is what Isherwood tried to work out in A Single Man. An indicator of how successfully the fictional “what if” helped resolved the conflicts in the relationship is the fact that Bachardy supplied the title for the book. Isherwood notes, “In bed, on Monday night, Don was silent for a long while. I thought he had fallen asleep. Then he asked, ‘How about “A Single Man” for a title?’ I knew instantly and have had no doubt since that this is the absolute ideal title for the novelette.”George’s love for Jim haunts him, but he also knows that his own life has to continue. One can see the gravitational pull, the vicissitudes of everyday life in the novel: a gay relationship novel, one of the first of its kind.
Chris Freeman, a regular contributor to the GLR, teaches English and gender studies at USC. With James Berg, he has edited three books on Isherwood, including the forthcoming The American Isherwood.
Discussion1 Comment
I suppose there are as many gay authors to whom I could pay homeage to each for bringing me closer to the truth that lay in my own fiction and the telling of my own story.