Liberation (3 page)

Well, to Don's amazement and to my much smaller amazement but huge joy and relief, Nick loved the watercolors and was altogether impressed by Don's versatility and said that he wants to give Don a show in which the whole front room of the gallery is full of watercolors with a few drawings in the back room. And, when we met Nick again, yesterday evening, at the opening of a show of Charles Hill's work, Nick told Don that he had nearly called him that afternoon, because “I can't get your painting out of my mind.”
¹³

 

Only two of the paintings sold, yet Bachardy considers the exhibition was his successful public launch as a painter.
¹⁴

Bachardy's growing self-confidence added to Isherwood's contentment. In December 1972, Isherwood describes their life together as “my idea of the ‘earthly paradise.'”
¹⁵
He longed to write about the mysterious beauty of their relationship. In March 1971, he had begun a notebook about himself and Bachardy in their secret animal identities—Bachardy as the vulnerable and irresistible “Kitty” with unpredictable claws, Isherwood as the stubborn workhorse “Dobbin”—but he felt that any such project about their attachment was impossible:

 

I shall never, as long as we are together, be able to fully feel or describe to myself all that our love means; it is much much too close to me. Don tells me from time to time that I should write about it, but how? Even my attempt to keep a diary of the Animals has failed. I can't see any of this objectively. Any more than I can really grasp what Swami means and has meant to me, in an entirely dfferent way.
¹⁶

 

The following summer he observed, “the objection is, as always, that I feel it is a kind of sacrilege to write about the Animals at all, except privately.”
¹⁷

Only in his diaries was he able to record scraps of detail about himself and Bachardy. On Christmas Eve 1973, driving to a Palm Springs house party hosted by John Schlesinger, they talked at length of the form into which their relationship was settling and of Bachardy's present attitude toward various aspects of his life. Isherwood's account of their conversation implies they no longer had sex with one another and that, by mutual agreement, Bachardy looked for that with others:

 

I asked how he feels about his meditation and he said that it is now definitely part of his life but that he doesn't at all share my reliance on Swami as a guru. “If anybody's my guru, you are.” Well, that's okay, as long as he merely believes in my belief in Swami. Then I asked him about sex. He said that he doesn't mind our not having sex together any more; he agreed with me that our relationship is still very physical. The difficulty is that what he now wants is a sex object, not a big relationship, because he's got that with me. But no attractive boy wants to be a sex object; he wants to be a big relationship. I suppose I knew all this, kind of. But it was good to talk about it. Our long drives in the car are now almost our only opportunities to have real talks. As Don himself says, he is obsessed by time and always feels in a hurry, unless he is actually getting on with doing something. He says that there are now quite often moments, while he is drawing, when he feels that this is the one thing he really wants to do and experiences a great joy that he is actually doing it. But, even during the drawing, he says that he also feels harassed because he isn't drawing as quickly and economically as he could wish.
¹⁸

 

They still slept together, and Bachardy recalls that this kept them physically close. Sex had dwindled only because it no longer seemed necessary. In fact, they did have sex on several occasions after this conversation, “as an instinctive means of reassuring ourselves that it was still plausible, that nothing had basically changed between us.”
¹⁹
But the passionate sexual jealousy and conflicts of the 1960s were behind them, and other aspects of their relationship had become relatively more important. They identified more and more closely with one another until, as Isherwood wrote in 1975, “we are no longer entirely separate people.”
²⁰
Isherwood twice records in the diary that they could not tell their speaking voices apart, for instance, when they were revising their script of
A Meeting by the River
, “A weird discovery we have both made: since using the tape recorder to record our discussions of the play, we have both realized that we cannot be certain which of our voices is which!”
²¹

 

But into the Animals' “golden age,” as Bachardy once called it,
²²
death was creeping. Isherwood was a year older than Bachardy's father. Fit and boyish as he was, his very body revealed the future bearing down on both of them; time together was short. Bachardy had the greater darkness to face, and he saw it clearly. Life with an old man, followed by the death of the old man. He says that he tried not to think about it.
²³
Bachardy was more restless and more impatient than Isherwood by temperament, and whatever natural anxiety he possessed about the passage of time must have been exacerbated by living as he had done since youth, with a man thirty years his senior. If, as he told Isherwood during the drive to Palm Springs, the activity of drawing or painting lifted Bachardy out of time and freed him, at least a little, from this obsessive anxiety, nevertheless, his perception of what was to come is painfully evident in his work. He says that people praise his portraits generously as long as they are of somebody else. When they see their own faces emerge under his hand, they are often silent because they are shocked at how starkly the portraits reveal their advancing age.
²⁴

But of course, Isherwood also felt the passage of time, and in his diary he frequently mentions the poignancy this cast over his contentment: “the joy of waking with [Don] in the basket—the painful but joyful tenderness—painful only because I am always so aware that it can't last forever or even for very long, Kitty and Old Drub will have to say goodbye.”
²⁵
He knew that he was growing increasingly dependent on Bachardy, who drove him more and more often in the car and performed an ever greater share of domestic and social chores, and, as always, he recognized how difficult their situation was for Bachardy:

 

Some of the inner rage he feels against me is because of the fact that I am going to leave him. He feels that this is a trick which I shall play on him—have, indeed, already played, by involving us so with each other. Any sign I show of illness, even of fatigue, makes him intensely nervous; he behaves as if it were a kind of bitchery on my part.
²⁶

 

And Isherwood's own friends were dying. Laughton in 1962 and Huxley in 1963 died before their time. Anyway, they were much older than Isherwood. So were Forster and Gerald Hamilton who died in 1970, and Stravinsky and Gerald Heard who died in 1971. But 1973 took contemporaries and friends of his youth—William Plomer; Jean Ross, who was the real-life original of Sally Bowles; and Auden, his closest English friend, whom he followed to Berlin in 1929, with whom he collaborated on three plays during the 1930s, and with whom he emigrated to America in January 1939:

 

Wystan died yesterday—or anyhow sometime during the night of September 28–29. . . .This is still so uncanny. I believe it, I guess, but it seems utterly against nature. Not because I thought Wystan was so tough as all that. He seemed to have been ruining his health for years. And then, whatever he may have said, he was awfully lonely—isolated is what I mean—he made a wall around himself, for most people, by his behavior and his prejudices and demands. Perhaps he deeply wanted to go. His death seems uncanny to me because he was one of the guarantees that
I
won't die—at least not yet. I think most of us, if we live long enough, have such guarantee figures. On the other hand, the fact that he has gone first makes the prospect of death easier to face. He has shown me the way. . . .

An odd thing: That night he died—or rather, in the afternoon here, which might have been the exact time of his death in Vienna—I started a sore throat, the first I've had in a long long while, and it got so bad during
our
nighttime that I couldn't swallow. And today, despite doses of penicillin, I still have a fever and headache and feel lousy. This makes me glad. I like to believe that he sent me a message which got through to me.
²⁷

 

Did the message admonish Isherwood, like sore throats triggered by encounters with Auden in the 1920s, to be true to his inner nature, and to tell the truth in his writing? In his early auto biography
Lions and Shadows
, Isherwood writes of the Auden character, Hugh Weston, “I caught a bad cold every time we met: indeed the mere sight of a postcard announcing his arrival would be sufficient to send up my temperature and inflame my tonsils.”
²⁸
Isherwood was now struggling to get started with the book that was to become
Christopher and His Kind
. Auden's death not only warned him that he had better hurry, it also freed him to handle the material without anxiety that he might bruise Auden's feelings or invade his well-guarded privacy. In his lifetime, Auden never publicly acknowledged he was a homosexual, and he told friends he wanted no biography. Isherwood was among the few who could tell Auden's story—or his own story for that matter—and he knew this. As he wrote in his diary when
Christopher and His Kind
was nearly finished: “I am writing little bits about Wystan in my book. . . . I can't help feeling, wishes or no wishes, it is better if those who knew Wystan write now, instead of leaving it to those who didn't know him, a generation or two later.”
²⁹

About a month after Auden's death, Isherwood saw that
Christopher and His Kind
must above all explain why he himself left England—to find somewhere that he could live as a homosexual. To his countrymen, to the press, Isherwood's departure in 1939 had long been seen as the turning point in his career and the decision on which both he and Auden had been publicly and harshly judged as war shirkers. But their emigration began years earlier, and it was a departure in their friendship just as much as it was a departure from their native land:

 

. . . I want to have this book start with our departure for America. But I have now realized that I can only put our departure in perspective if I begin with Germany—why I went there—“to find my sexual homeland”—and go on to tell about my wanderings with Heinz and his arrest and the complicated resentment which grew up out of it, against Kathleen and England, Kathleen
as
England. . . . I feel that it must start with my going to Berlin— not with my first trip out there to see Wystan, or with my visit to Wystan in the Harz Mountains that summer, but with my real emigration sometime later in the year. . . .
³⁰

 

The book had to be a personal statement that he was a homosexual, and it had to show how this fact had shaped his life—how he had had to go abroad alone to Berlin to explore his sexuality freely, how once he had found a boy he loved, British immigration officials had denied the boy entry back into England and thereby forced Isherwood to go abroad to live with him until Hitler's rise made even their itinerant life impossible. Reluctant as he was to join any group, Isherwood accepted gay liberation as his own cause. But he was slow to engage with it because he feared to attract attention to himself as a member of Swami Prabhavananda's congregation. In the summer of 1970, he was invited to address the National Students Gay Liberation Conference, and he wrote in his diary:

 

I feel quite strongly tempted to accept this invitation (as indeed I've often wanted in the past to accept others like it). I highly enjoy the role of “the rebels' only uncle” (not that I would be, this time—for there are scores of others—and Ginsberg their chief ) and, all vanity aside, I do feel unreservedly
with
them, which is more than I can say for ninety percent of the movements I support. But something prevents me from accepting. Oddly enough, it all boils down to not embarrassing Swami by making a spectacle of myself which would shock his congregation and the women of Vedanta Place! I can admit this because I am perfectly certain there's no other motive. I am far too sly and worldly-wise to suppose that I'd be injuring my own “reputation” by doing this. Quite the reverse; this is probably the last opportunity I'll ever have of becoming, with very little effort, a “national celebrity.” And I hope I'm not such a crawling hypocrite as to pretend I wouldn't quite enjoy that, even at my age!
³¹

 

For Swami, there was more at risk than awkward feelings. The Vedanta Society of Southern California was his life work; he was growing older, and it was unclear how the society would continue after he died. Nobody around him possessed his subtle understanding of how to make Vedanta accessible and plausible for Westerners. His separate insights about the personal character and temperament of each of his followers allowed him to recognize and love them as individuals; he applied no strict set of rules day to day, yet he never deviated from his own assured spiritual path. Many who tried to help him had far less patience and far less flexibility of mind. A few were against him. Some objected to the fact that he allowed the nuns to keep house alongside the monks in Hollywood. In India, women joined a separate order, the Sarada Math, but in Southern California, two institutions were implausible because the few hundred devotees were not enough to populate them. Vedanta took root in Southern California through the generosity of women, and there were generally more women than men in the congregation. Swami recognized that the order could not succeed in contemporary Californian culture unless it offered the same spiritual opportunities to women as to men. Only a few of his colleagues and superiors at Belur Math had been to the U.S., and most had not spent long there; they relied on his reports. But anything which might suggest to them that his style of leadership was giving rise to sexual impropriety threatened all that he had achieved. In 1970, Isherwood recorded: