Advert
Supported by
Non-fiction
Even if you downplay the unflattering details, Katherine Bucknell’s wonderful biography salutes the twentieth century as one of the earliest proponents of the “chosen family. “
By Alexandra Jacobs
When you purchase an independently reviewed eBook on our site, we earn an associate commission.
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD REVERSED, via Katherine Bucknell
Many of the writers’ graves are tourist attractions. Not Christopher’s Isherwood. De fact, it doesn’t have any. We especially highlight his “Berlin Stories”, which became “I Am a Camera”, which later became “Cabaret” – and more recently in “A Single Man”, which the cartoonist Tom Ford made into a film – Isherwood, who died in 1986 at the age of 81, entrusted his corpse to science.
Today, the director of his foundation, Katherine Bucknell, also a novelist, has erected a massive literary cenotaph titled, which echoes this summer’s biggest hit movie, “Christopher Isherwood Inside Out. ” It joins Peter Parker’s equally gargantuan “Isherwood: A Life Revealed” from 20 years ago: dual lions fiercely guarding the library of Isherwood’s prodigious autofictions, letters and diaries.
The biographers’ lion groom, their chief whisperer, Christopher, is Don Bachardy: Isherwood’s artist and long-time partner, 30 years his junior and affectionately known as Kitty. An English landed gentry who had improbably uprooted himself in Los Angeles, Isherwood Dobbin, named after a toy horse his nanny had given him as a child. They called themselves the Animals, their personal domestic idyll the “basket. “
Interestingly, dozens of other lovers touched the basket (some even jumped inside it for a while), but none unraveled or knocked it over. The couple, who met when Bachardy was 18 and took time to gain acceptance even in Isherwood’s bohemian circle, were the first. Subject of David Hockney’s outstanding series of double portraits.
Bucknell’s abundant paintings (so much written on all fronts, so many interviews from the golden age of newspapers, magazines, Cavett) are more than a synthesis; This is photosynthesis. His big blue book breathes and shines. His subject, who meditated until he converted with Aldous Huxley to the Hindu philosophy Vedanta, is reincarnated.
And her reputation, tarnished after the publication of her diaries, which she edited, led to a tougher look at her anti-Semitism and misogyny, is getting a big boost. Isherwood is enshrined here not only as a great man of homosexual liberation, without the rainbow flag (nor did he write about AIDS), but also as a warrior seeking to locate his tribe or his “chosen family. ” . Imagine the cage wedged in with JD Vance.
We are having retrieving the content of the article.
Allow JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience as we determine access. If you’re in player mode, log out and log in to your Times account or subscribe to the full Times.
Thank you for your patience while we determine access.
Are you already a subscriber? Login.
Do you want all the Times? Subscribe.
Advert