Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986)
There are times on this plane of consciousness when nothing seems merely coincidental; when everything seems divinely connected, wondrously interrelated and fraught with significance, if we could only stop long enough to pay attention and figure it out. Take my trip last weekend to the Vedanta Society Temple (see the previous entry, below), where years earlier Gerald Heard took Christopher Isherwood to meet Swami Prabhavananda -- a meeting which subsequently evolved into "My Guru and His Disciple." My visit seems to have coincided with a resurgence of interest in Isherwood and the release of a film "Chris and Don: A Love Story" about Isherwood's life with the artist Don Bachardy. In turn, the film (as films do) has triggered memories and recollections of people who once knew the famous couple. My friend the writer Roman Hans has just recounted (yesterday and today) an important meeting he had as a teenager with Chris.
Part One. Sacred and Profane
I met Chris and Don in New York in '81 or '82 at a book signing at Three Lives Bookstore when the store was still on Seventh Avenue. "October" written by Isherwood, with drawings by Bachardy had been published by Twelvetrees Press in Los Angeles in 1981, and the two of them inscribed a copy to me and Skip.
I don't remember the early 80s terribly well, but I do remember that Skip and I were living then just down and around the corner from Three Lives, on Sheridan Square. Of course, at that point Swami Prabhavananda (1893-1976) was dead, Gerald Heard (1889-1971) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) were both long dead, but I didn't know who they were and wouldn't until years later. I don't think anyone we knew had died yet.
At that point, although life was something of a blur for me, it was a relatively pleasant drug-and-alcohol-fueled blur. I was living with Skip, a man I adored, admired, occasionally feared and deeply loved, in a tiny, crowded -- some might say 'tenement' but we said 'charming' -- apartment in the West Village, crammed to the ceiling with books. I had an interesting -- some might say 'too interesting, too exciting' -- life, and I would not crash and burn for another five years. And what a five years they would be. By 1986 when Christopher Isherwood died of prostate cancer, Skip and I would both quit our jobs and leave New York, Skip would be sick, by which point friends and colleagues and acquaintances would all seem to be getting sick and dying, I would be committed to a locked psychiatric ward, and Skip would be dead the following year.
And everything after that, you might say, changed.
So how do you sum up a life? How do you describe a relationship? A film like "Chris and Don" addresses these questions and prompts us to ask the same, and not only about the lives and relationship revealed (or not revealed) in the film, but about our own lives, our own relationships. Of course we may have less to go on, by comparison. In some cases we may have very little, maybe not much more than a book inscription when it comes down to physical evidence. Maybe less. But we can still ask.
My mother only met Skip twice, briefly and admittedly when neither of them was at their best. But shortly before she died, a couple years after Skip died, she said what was probably one of the nicest things she ever said to me.
"I have lost a child and I have lost a husband," she reminded me. Which she had -- my older sister and my dad -- and sometimes it seemed like her favorite game to play besides "I've Got a Secret" was "Can You Top This?" which she would always win, because just like Joan Crawford said to Christina, she was older and she could, and life was not necessarily fair.
"But I want you to know," my mother continued on this occasion, "that I have never lost someone who meant to me what Skip meant to you. And I wanted you to know that I am sorry for your loss."
See, first of all, she wasn't trying to win this round of one-upmanship, not this time. And she wasn't trying to pretend she understood, or make my life with Skip into something conventional, something she could easily comprehend or place in some conventional context. "I just want you to be happy," she used to say in the old days, until I pointed out that what she thought would bring me happiness (marriage, children) was not in the cards for me and not what I wanted anyway. So this time, she was acknowledging that she didn't understand, which was her way of honoring my life and my experience and my desires and my path. And I appreciated that, more than if she had said, "I know what you went through," or "I know just how you felt." Whether she really did or didn't isn't the point. Sometimes it's okay to be told you're unique, that you aren't like anyone else. And sometimes it's okay to tell someone you don't understand, but you're holding a place open in your heart for where that understanding ought to be.
"What draws singular lives together in the first place,"
as the poet Auden (who had a relationship with Isherwood too, don't forget), wrote, and then goes on to name some possibilities --
"loneliness, lust, ambition, or mere convenience,"
"is obvious, why they drop
or murder one another
clear enough; how they create, though, a common world
between them, like Bombelli's
impossible yet useful numbers, no one
has yet explained."
["The Common Life," in About The House, W.H. Auden]
Of course, Skip and I never had to try and pretend we were father and son, like Chris and Don did. There wasn't a thirty year age difference between us. We were the same age in fact. But that's another issue entirely. That's for another time.
Part One. Sacred and Profane
I met Chris and Don in New York in '81 or '82 at a book signing at Three Lives Bookstore when the store was still on Seventh Avenue. "October" written by Isherwood, with drawings by Bachardy had been published by Twelvetrees Press in Los Angeles in 1981, and the two of them inscribed a copy to me and Skip.
I don't remember the early 80s terribly well, but I do remember that Skip and I were living then just down and around the corner from Three Lives, on Sheridan Square. Of course, at that point Swami Prabhavananda (1893-1976) was dead, Gerald Heard (1889-1971) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) were both long dead, but I didn't know who they were and wouldn't until years later. I don't think anyone we knew had died yet.
At that point, although life was something of a blur for me, it was a relatively pleasant drug-and-alcohol-fueled blur. I was living with Skip, a man I adored, admired, occasionally feared and deeply loved, in a tiny, crowded -- some might say 'tenement' but we said 'charming' -- apartment in the West Village, crammed to the ceiling with books. I had an interesting -- some might say 'too interesting, too exciting' -- life, and I would not crash and burn for another five years. And what a five years they would be. By 1986 when Christopher Isherwood died of prostate cancer, Skip and I would both quit our jobs and leave New York, Skip would be sick, by which point friends and colleagues and acquaintances would all seem to be getting sick and dying, I would be committed to a locked psychiatric ward, and Skip would be dead the following year.
And everything after that, you might say, changed.
So how do you sum up a life? How do you describe a relationship? A film like "Chris and Don" addresses these questions and prompts us to ask the same, and not only about the lives and relationship revealed (or not revealed) in the film, but about our own lives, our own relationships. Of course we may have less to go on, by comparison. In some cases we may have very little, maybe not much more than a book inscription when it comes down to physical evidence. Maybe less. But we can still ask.
My mother only met Skip twice, briefly and admittedly when neither of them was at their best. But shortly before she died, a couple years after Skip died, she said what was probably one of the nicest things she ever said to me.
"I have lost a child and I have lost a husband," she reminded me. Which she had -- my older sister and my dad -- and sometimes it seemed like her favorite game to play besides "I've Got a Secret" was "Can You Top This?" which she would always win, because just like Joan Crawford said to Christina, she was older and she could, and life was not necessarily fair.
"But I want you to know," my mother continued on this occasion, "that I have never lost someone who meant to me what Skip meant to you. And I wanted you to know that I am sorry for your loss."
See, first of all, she wasn't trying to win this round of one-upmanship, not this time. And she wasn't trying to pretend she understood, or make my life with Skip into something conventional, something she could easily comprehend or place in some conventional context. "I just want you to be happy," she used to say in the old days, until I pointed out that what she thought would bring me happiness (marriage, children) was not in the cards for me and not what I wanted anyway. So this time, she was acknowledging that she didn't understand, which was her way of honoring my life and my experience and my desires and my path. And I appreciated that, more than if she had said, "I know what you went through," or "I know just how you felt." Whether she really did or didn't isn't the point. Sometimes it's okay to be told you're unique, that you aren't like anyone else. And sometimes it's okay to tell someone you don't understand, but you're holding a place open in your heart for where that understanding ought to be.
"What draws singular lives together in the first place,"
as the poet Auden (who had a relationship with Isherwood too, don't forget), wrote, and then goes on to name some possibilities --
"loneliness, lust, ambition, or mere convenience,"
"is obvious, why they drop
or murder one another
clear enough; how they create, though, a common world
between them, like Bombelli's
impossible yet useful numbers, no one
has yet explained."
["The Common Life," in About The House, W.H. Auden]
Of course, Skip and I never had to try and pretend we were father and son, like Chris and Don did. There wasn't a thirty year age difference between us. We were the same age in fact. But that's another issue entirely. That's for another time.
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