Isherwood’s Singular Second Wind

By Dwight Garner, New York Times, November 30, 2010

THE SIXTIES
Diaries, Volume Two: 1960-1969
By Christopher Isherwood
Edited by Katherine Bucknell
756 pages. Harper/HarperCollins. $39.99.

 “I shall make a terrible old man, I fear,” the English-American novelist Christopher Isherwood confided to his diary during the summer of 1961. He was only 56, but his fading looks and fear of being alone terrified him.

Christopher Isherwood at home in Santa Monica, Calif., 1962.

Florence Homolka/Huntington Library

So did his fizzling masculinity. Decades before Viagra, Isherwood was “eating celery like crazy,” he wrote, “because someone said Kinsey discovered it was the only thing for potency.”

Anyone who gets very far into “The Sixties,” Isherwood’s second jumbo-size book of diaries (the first, covering 1939-60, was published in 1996), may begin to worry that Isherwood will be something of a terrible old man, or at least a dreary and dithering one, on the page as well as off it.

Too many entries in this volume detail his devotion to his Indian guru, Swami Prabhavananda. Too many are about gym visits or sunsets. (For many decades Isherwood lived in a house overlooking the beach in Santa Monica, Calif.) And too many are moonstruck valentines to his longtime partner, Don Bachardy, the American portrait artist. Mr. Bachardy was so much younger than Isherwood, three decades, that early photographs of them have a creepy vibe.

There are other reasons to worry about these diaries. By 1960 Isherwood’s best work seemed to be behind him. His semiautobiographical novel “Goodbye to Berlin,” upon which the plays “I Am a Camera” and “Cabaret” were based, had been published more than 20 years earlier. Once he arrived in America, his attention became divided between screenwriting and fiction.

Isherwood (1904-86) found a furious second wind in the mid-1960s, however. He wrote his masterpiece, “A Single Man,” a devastating novel about a depressed gay Englishman who teaches at a college in Southern California. (Last year the book was made into a movie by Tom Ford.)


And as these copious diaries make clear, Isherwood’s wits were very much intact. Patience with “The Sixties” is rewarded. The book becomes an intimate portrait of the life of a beautiful if neurotic mind, and it is streaked with gossip, flinty observations, great good humor and — despite Isherwood’s fundamental discretion — plenty of frank talk.

Full review at New York Times.