Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, from the 2007 film “Chris and Don: A Love Story.”Credit...Michael ChildersBy Henry Giardina
Aug. 29, 2014
In 1956, Christopher Isherwood wrote from Cheshire, England, to his partner, the artist Don Bachardy. It is the first entry in a 14-year correspondence: a brief, eccentric document that mentions, in a short space, Alexander Korda’s memorial service, incest between two cats and Courbet’s “Diligence in the Snow.”
“I think about you all the time,” he writes in closing, “and about times I might have been kinder and more understanding, and I make many resolutions for the future — some of which I hope I’ll keep.”
Their relationship began on Valentine’s Day of 1953 and was in an important sense defined by its many periods of separation. The world of the letters lived inside the broader, coded world of midcentury homosexuality. Within it, Isherwood and Bachardy were able to express themselves through a more personal kind of code, in what would become the prolonged metaphor of the Animals. Bachardy was Kitty, and Isherwood was a horse called Dobbin. In this collection of the existing letters, edited and introduced by Katherine Bucknell, it never becomes quite clear why two grown men would want to write to each other in the guise of a horse and a cat. But if we don’t get a sense of how the Animals came to be, we do see how they endured through the years, and in such embarrassing variations as “Beloved Catkin,” “Angel Sweetcat,” “Dearest Raggledub” and “Worshiped Glossyhoof.”
It’s a far cry from the madness of kisses, but then it’s not exactly fair to judge: Isherwood’s love letters may be the only things he wrote without a broader readership in mind.
“The Animals” gives us a half-glimpse into the 33-year relationship that would end with Isherwood’s death in 1986. Most of the correspondence takes place in the 1960s, a fertile decade for two artists at almost diametrically opposed points in their careers. For the much younger Bachardy, they were years of doubt, existential crisis and extramural activity. For Isherwood they were professionally prolific, and saw the development of his Berlin stories into the musical “Cabaret”; the writing of “A Single Man,” “Down There on a Visit” and “A Meeting by the River”; and the research and development of “Kathleen and Frank,” his book about his parents. The years 1956-70 found the two often on separate coasts engaged in separate projects, usually at Bachardy’s instigation and in service of finding his own voice. When he received his first serious commission — to draw lobby portraits for the American production of “A Taste of Honey” in 1960 — he gained entry into the dazzling world of artists, entertainers and expats in which Isherwood was already something of an institution. This world was what they shared, and also, as Bachardy’s ambition and Isherwood’s anxiety make clear, what kept them so often apart.
The letters provide the best and worst of what we’ve come to expect from Isherwood’s diaries of the same period, offering the same cast of characters showcased in the same, usually unflattering light. Isherwood’s well-documented anti-Semitism, for instance, reaches its nadir in a bizarre remark about Lincoln Kirstein: “Every time he says I’m an American, I’m a Harvard boy, I’m a Bostonian,” he writes in 1965, “I think No you aren’t, you’re a Jew.” We get fresh portraits of Paul Bowles and Cecil Beaton (who, in a surreal moment, offers to take Bachardy to see “Mondo Cane”); E. M. Forster, who, according to Isherwood, “still thinks” of sex at age 88; and Frank O’Hara, whose erotic entourage provokes Bachardy’s disdain (“Their world is quite a tight circle made up of people who reinforce each other’s standards and beliefs”). Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero are dismissed by Bachardy as “pod-born replacements for real humans,” while Charles Laughton at one point loses visiting privileges at the house of Isherwood because he “sits and sits.”
But this is de rigueur for the Animals, for whom cruelty is often the better part of honesty. The stories they tell each other usually come at the expense of others, as the two lovers illustrate in writing what a mocking, ridiculous spectacle the world becomes when the loved one is missing from it. In 1958, Bachardy gives a lengthy report of the attempted suicide of the father of Marguerite Lamkin, a mutual friend. Isherwood responds by saying he enjoyed the report so much that he “quite forgot to feel sorry for anybody. Honestly, this is literature!” The letters feed on such reports from the frontier: In them, weight is fixated on, bisexuality disparaged (there’s no trusting Tony Richardson because of it), lives and deaths are constantly under review, and newspaper clippings of cats frequently enclosed.
“The Animals” is marketed as a collection of love letters, yet to define them in only this way might be putting too fine a point on it. The language is not forthrightly amorous and hardly ever beautiful, and the letters at times are dull and listlike. For what is ostensibly a private and intimate correspondence, it’s surprising how little of anything emotional, inconvenient, intimate — indeed private — comes across.
Though perhaps surprising isn’t the word. In fiction, a type of self-imposed distance is Isherwood’s forte — the trick of his genius. The letters present us with an aspect of Isherwood’s life that must have felt, at times, a bit further out of his control than he would have liked. Both men sought sex outside the relationship; for Isherwood this was more a concession to Bachardy’s needs than a desire to satisfy his own. When it comes to calling each other to account, the letters offer up a strange silence, at best a slight passive aggression on the older man’s part. “None of the Isherwoods feel things much,” he writes at one point, quoting his mother. When he later refers to himself — rather, to “Dobbin” — as “a thing that can’t feel,” one imagines it is wishful thinking. If truth is what these letters are in search of, it is often at the expense of feeling. At one point Isherwood suspects Bachardy of being “franker than I am. Is that because you can afford to be? Am I scared of you? Yes, in a way. But I really almost wish I could be more scared. How can I explain that?” In the world of “The Animals,” the charge of truthfulness could sometimes seem like an accusation.
Bucknell has been exhaustive in her quest to present us with the complete Isherwood, having brought forth all four volumes of his diaries in recent years, now capped off with the letters. But the complete person, when it comes to a writer who so famously wrote as if he had nothing to hide, is still very much a construct: Isherwood as created by Isherwood and determined by the expectations of his audience; in the case of the letters the most important audience of all, his life partner until death. If nothing else, “The Animals” gives us a stranger and at times more accessible point of entry. There is, after all, something nice about seeing the cleareyed Christopher Isherwood as yet another person whom love makes inscrutable and even a bit unbearable, a lover sending pictures of cats in the mail to the one other person who will understand their true significance.
THE ANIMALS
Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy
Edited by Katherine Bucknell
Illustrated. 481 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.
A correction was made on
Sept. 21, 2014:
A picture on Aug. 31 with a reviewof “The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy,” edited by Katherine Bucknell , carried an erroneous credit . The photograph of Isherwood and Bachardy is by Michael Childers , not from Zeitgeist Films.
