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Deciding to revisit the past, which had already supplied much of the material for his novels, he started work on what amounted to a non-fiction trilogy: Kathleen and Frank, about his parents and his early childhood; Christopher and His Kind, about his peripatetic life during the 1930s; and My Guru and His Disciple, about his relationship with Swami Prabhavananda. A fourth volume, about his time in California, was falteringly started but never completed, and these diaries often find him thinking aloud about his books.
He was also collaborating with Bachardy on a number of plays and film scripts. As Bucknell notes, the fact that many of these projects failed to find producers or backers, or fared badly when they did (their stage adaptation of A Meeting by the River being a notable Broadway flop) was less important than Isherwood’s pleasure in the act of creative collaboration with Bachardy. In addition, Isherwood’s accounts of crass producers, inept directors and inadequate actors provide the diarist with a good deal of scarifying and entertaining material.
Barbellion was a naturalist and what his brother wrote about him might equally apply to Isherwood:
Barbellion was intensely interested in himself, but he was also intensely interested in other people. He regarded himself, quite naturally, as he regarded the creatures he dissected in the laboratory, as a specimen to be examined and classified; and he did this work with the detailed skill and truthful approach of a scientific examiner.
Diaries do indeed record fluctuating moods and opinions, mistaken first impressions, hasty judgments. While this may reflect most people’s experience of life, in print these fleeting reflections attain a sort of permanence. Bachardy nevertheless decided that anything Isherwood had written should be allowed to stand, libel laws permitting. While some material here has been altered or removed ‘to protect the privacy of individuals still living’ (a rash of ellipsis tends to break out around David Hockney’s appearances, for example), people such as the photographer described as ‘a silly pretentious cunt’ and the actor dismissed as a ‘loathsome slob-Jew’ are afforded no such protection. (Incidentally, Edmund White’s description of Isherwood in the volume’s distinctly odd preface as ‘seriously anti-Semitic’ ought to have been challenged. To define Isherwood’s anti-Semitism more accurately as casual is not to excuse it, but he was hardly the Dowager Lady Birdwood.)
Alongside sharp and often very funny assessments of those Isherwood knew, the diaries also record a wealth of domestic detail, trivial in itself but giving a richly textured sense of what is was like to live in California during this period of social change. Gradual acceptance of Christopher and his kind is recorded alongside rearguard action by the likes of Anita Bryant and Senator John Briggs. There is also a marvellous and marvelling account of an extended trip to England in 1970, where the stuffiness and repression Isherwood felt had characterised the land of his birth appears to have been swept away by a new generation. (He is predictably aghast at miniskirts, but likes the ‘kissy’ young men.)
When Isherwood made his famous declaration in Goodbye to Berlin that he was ‘a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking’, he was in fact describing himself as an observer, not as a writer. People forget that the paragraph continues: ‘Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.’ That was the hard part, the writing and shaping — though Isherwood did it with such skill and lightness of touch that at its best his prose still seems fresh and in the moment, the way a photograph can.
These diaries have a different sort of immediacy, dashed down rather than worked over. ‘What is Life really about?’ Isherwood asked in an earlier volume. A similar question is posed by Virginia Woolf, a writer he greatly admired, in To the Lighthouse, and the reply might stand as an epigraph to this final volume: ‘The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.’
Because you read about book review
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