Richard Canning
CALIFORNIA DREAMING
The Sixties: Diaries, Volume Two - 1960-69
By Christopher Isherwood Edited and introduced by Katherine Bucknell (Chatto & Windus 756pp £30)
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'I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.' Anyone familiar with the declaration by the narrator of Christopher Isherwood's most enduring work of fiction, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), will be surprised by how uncinematic, indeed incomprehensive, his diary entries can be. There's a lot of thinking, and nothing like the gestures towards abandoning subjectivity and self-consciousness that Isherwood crafted into his novels, not least the one masterpiece penned during the period covered by this second collection - A Single Man (1964).
As in the first volume of diaries, published in 1996, Isherwood comes across as, by turns, rebarbative, loving, insecure, opinionated, self-critical, self-destructive, reticent, controlling and grand. His sing-song voice - caught in the 2007 documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story - is hard to square with these entries, which are rarely light-hearted.
What they are, however, is a huge relief after this book's thousand-page predecessor. Although the years which that book covered - 1939 to 1960 - brought large changes for Isherwood (the controversial flight to America at the outset of war; his developmental interest in Vedantism; most vitally, his meeting the nineteen-year-old Don Bachardy, who, thirty-four years his junior, became the love of his life), they were equally characterised by violent mood swings and heavy drinking. In the diaries, if not also in life, the dominant notes were bitterness and self-pity. Surely the chief reason for the relative calm, generosity and self-acceptance Isherwood shows in The Sixties was his realisation (more gradual than one might think) that Bachardy was not only his 'significant other' but also his lodestar, muse and - notwithstanding Bachardy's palpable insecurities on the matter - intellectual and artistic equal.
Creatively, Isherwood oscillated between industriousness and blockage. Still, with A Single Man, he managed - in a different context and a distinct way - the trick he had achieved with the Berlin stories: the dramatic distillation of a decade's personal experience into a porous narrative, the poignancy of which lay in how much remained unsaid. Isherwood achieved this the second time around without taking the 'long route' which had impeded him with the German material: the writing out in epic form of all that was on his mind (the unpublished manuscript The Lost). A Single Man sprang directly from Isherwood's Californian life, yet, by subtle twists, recounted a fully imagined life - that of George, an Englishman transplanted to California, mourning the loss of his lover. Its author, as it happens, was mourning the apparent break-up of his relationship with Bachardy; the shift in context and causation, however, is beautifully realised.
Isherwood's two other novels in this decade, Down There on a Visit (1962) and A Meeting by the River (1967), each have their achievements. Neither is as unsatisfying as his only significant output from the Fifties, The World in the Evening (1954). Still, they don't quite support Isherwood's own self-estimate, made here against an imaginary 'English snoothood', as 'the - greatest? best? no - just most interesting - writer alive today'. By the time he prepared Exhumations (1966), a collection of journalism and stories, Isherwood had lost interest in the novel per se. His three last important works were all fictionalised autobiographies, including the classic Christopher and His Kind (1976).
To me, the least compelling aspect of the diaries relates to Isherwood's spiritual struggles. As Katherine Bucknell, the editor, points out, he had two enduring loves: Bachardy, and his Indian guru Swami Prabhavananda. Perversely, perhaps, Isherwood poured all his sagacity and self-awareness into the first relationship. Though his spiritual concerns were many and genuine, he remained, as Bucknell concedes, fundamentally spiritually 'dry', relishing the practical duties of an amanuensis to the Swami more than the sacrifices sought of him in pursuit of spiritual growth. Just as he saw himself as a father with Bachardy, at one point reproaching himself for being 'like a parent who fears to show his pride', Isherwood happily, if resignedly, stuck to the role of spiritual neophyte. As prominent as reflections on matters of the soul are Isherwood's notes concerning gym routines and - a constant - fluctuations in his weight.
The cast introduced across these pages could only have been conjured up by Isherwood, and underline the peculiarly hybrid Californian Christopher he constructed. There are portraits here of Igor Stravinsky, Truman Capote, Francis Bacon, E M Forster, David Hockney, Aldous Huxley, Tony Richardson, Angus Wilson, Cecil Beaton, Joe Ackerley, Vanessa Redgrave, Gore Vidal, William Somerset Maugham, John Osborne, Leslie Caron, Gavin Lambert, Mick Jagger, Tennessee Williams, the 'lean and vigorous' Thom Gunn, 'a boy named Andy Warhol', Wayne Sleep, even aspiring young actor Don Johnson. There is the gay novelist and rent boy John Rechy who, in 1960, dressed 'exactly like a Pershing Square hustler, shirt open to the navel with sleeves rolled to the armpits, skintight jeans, a Christopher medal. He is rather charming.' Relations with both Stephen Spender and W H Auden, interestingly, prove rather spiky. But Isherwood was an extremely loyal friend to two men in their years of decline: the actor Charles Laughton, and, after Laughton's death in 1962, the historian and philosopher Gerald Heard. Politics - in this purportedly highly politicised decade - stays very much in the background. Hitchens goes so far as to claim, perhaps with serious ambivalence, that Isherwood 'felt practically nothing' after Martin Luther King's murder. He never signed a petition against Vietnam, always abjuring any effort at coerced mass political movement.
These diary entries were not intended for publication - or even, incidentally, for Bachardy's eyes, though Isherwood imagines his partner reading them on his death. His lover frets over their contents but Isherwood instructs him, half-jokingly, to 'burn them'. The long-term impact of their publication on Isherwood's reputation remains uncertain. However, the smoothing of the younger Isherwood's spikiness and occasional malice here bodes well for the remaining volumes, which will take us to a month short of the author's death in 1986. Though her introduction once or twice risks taking Isherwood's side too readily - in respect of his views about women, and references to 'Jewboys' - Katherine Bucknell continues to prove an ideal editor. We are told all we need, and nothing we don't. Nothing is repeated, and references to living persons feel both substantive and discreet. The Sixties counts as a model accomplishment of the professional and scrupulous handling of an important literary manuscript.
Richard Canning's most recent book is Brief Lives: E M Forster (Hesperus, 2009).