Liberation (4 page)

 

[Swami] says of Belur Math, “They are waiting for me to die”; in other words, they won't send him an assistant because, after he is dead, they can send one who'll do exactly what they want. And what do they want? Apparently to do away with nuns in the U.S. Swami takes all this quite calmly, seems to find it mildly amusing. But now he says he will seriously consider training some of the monks to give lectures. He remembers that Vivekananda said once that Vedanta societies should be run by Americans.
³²

 

Five years later, Swami made clear to Isherwood that he was consciously holding on to life until someone he trusted was sent to replace him:

 

. . . Swami had another spiritual experience. . . .This time it was a vision during sleep. He was feeding Holy Mother and he began to weep. “I could have wept myself to death,” he said. “When the doctor examined me, he said ‘You have had a shock.' It was like a heart attack. . . .When I wish to die, I can die. Whenever I wish. But I don't want to die yet—not until this place is saved.”
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His love of Swami and his respect for the circumstances in which Swami was performing his life's mission had guided Isherwood when he decided not to write in
Ramakrishna and His Disciples
about Ramakrishna's cross-dressing,
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an episode which fascinated and inspired him and which was easily misunderstood. And even after Swami's death, when he used passages from his diary in
My Guru and His Disciple
, he altered details that might distress members of Swami's congregation or expose the Hollywood Vedanta Society to criticism or misunderstanding at the Math. For example, his description of the 1963 departure of a group from Hollywood for the
sannyas
ceremony at the Math of two American monks, Prema and Krishna, and for the simultaneous centenary celebrations for Vivekananda, reads like this in his diary:

 

It is no annihilating condemnation of the devotees—about fifty of whom had come to the airport to see us off—to say that they would have felt somehow fulfilled if our plane had burst into flames on take-off, before their eyes. They had built up such an emotional pressure that no other kind of orgasm could have quite relieved it. The parting was like a funeral which is so boring and hammy and dragged out that you are glad to be one of the corpses. Anything rather than have to go home with the other mourners afterwards!

Swami wouldn't leave until Franklin [Knight] arrived; he had to park the car which brought the boys from Trabuco. The fact that it was he who arrived last seemed to dramatize his role as The Guilty One, and his farewell from Swami was a sort of public act of forgiveness. He was terribly embarrassed, with all of us watching—especially all those [women] who knew what he did.

So we got into the plane at last and it took off. Swami said, “To think that all this is Brahman and nobody realizes it!” I sat squeezed between him and Krishna; the Japan Air Line seats are as close together as ever. Despite my holy environment, I couldn't help dwelling on the delicious doings on the couch, yesterday afternoon. I didn't even feel ashamed that I was doing so. It was beautiful.
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In
My Guru and His Disciple
, Isherwood condensed the passage for good literary reasons, but in dropping sentences which might have caused offence—Franklin Knight reportedly behaved inappropriately toward a woman outside the congregation—he also muted its vigor and its hyperbolic wit, losing the potent atmosphere and the comedy of the original. He even changed the sensual and sentimental convictions of the last three sentences into a relatively hollow pseudo-political statement:

 

December 18–10. About fifty people came to the airport to see us off. The parting was like a funeral which is so boring and hammy that you are glad to be one of the corpses. Anything rather than have to go home with the other mourners afterwards!

We got onto the plane at last and it took off. Swami said, “To think that all this is Brahman and nobody realizes it!” I sat squeezed between him and George; the Japan Air Lines seats are as tight-packed as ever. Despite my holy environment, I couldn't help dwelling on yesterday afternoon's delicious sex adventure. I even did so rather defiantly.
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He made no such concessions in writing
Christopher and His Kind
; even though he wrote it half a decade earlier, he didn't have to. He met Swami only in 1939, so he was free to be as candid as he liked about his life before that. And by the time he completed his final draft in May 1976, Swami Swahananda was already taking over from Prabhavananda at the Hollywood Vedanta Society. Prabhavananda died in July 1976, and
Christopher and His Kind
was published in the U.S. in November and the following March 1977 in the U.K. Swami was never to know that the book carried Isherwood into the heart of the gay political movement. The publicity was massive, both for and against it, the tours exhausting, and Isherwood's sense of fulfillment very great. Just before Christmas 1976, Isherwood wrote:

 

San Francisco was drastic and New York even more so. Both were reassuring, because I found I could hold my own in the rat race. Indeed, I often surprised myself and Don because I was so quick on the uptake during interviews. . . . But I couldn't possibly have gotten through the New York trip without Don, who was sustaining me throughout. I have
never
known him to be more marvellous and angelic.

Perhaps the most moving experience was going down to the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in the village and signing copies of my book, with a line of people, mostly quite young, stretching all the way down Christopher Street and around the corner. I had such a feeling that this is my tribe and I loved them.
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Isherwood was a national celebrity after all, not as Herr Issyvoo, the narrative device distorted by Broadway and the movies into a popular bisexual mannequin, but in his own right, as the homosexual writer he had gradually brought into the open during his years in California. Even his rivalrous friend Gore Vidal acknowledged his fame, with the half-mocking line, “They're beginning to believe that Christopher Street was named after you.”
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Isherwood's hard-won happiness with Bachardy was also celebrated, and it was to become a model of gay partnership among his ever expanding gay following—admired, envied, gossiped about, emulated. He went on reporting what he could about it in his diaries, and eventually Bachardy was to take over and continue the task, in his own diaries and above all in his paintings, producing perhaps his finest portraits ever during the last months of Isherwood's life. When Isherwood was too ill to do anything else, he could still sit for Bachardy, and he wanted to. So Bachardy painted him every day, on what proved to be his deathbed. He collected many of the portraits in a book,
Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood
(1990), including nudes with their swags of given-out flesh and, over and over again, the haunted face of a creature stunned by the approach of the long-expected reality, the pain and darkness. The eyes question, even plead for mercy, but the spare, black acrylic lines—as if the brush itself were wearing mourning—are irrefutable. In late 1985, Bachardy began to notice that Isherwood seemed too ill to care about or comment on their shared project and he stopped showing him the daily results; whereupon Isherwood, with pictures drying on the floor around their bed on which he lay, said, “I like the ones of him dying.”
³⁹
Even after Isherwood died on January 4, 1986, Bachardy went on painting the beloved body, getting to grips with life and death, just as Isherwood had endeavoured to do through his relationship with Swami and in his diary through so many preceding years. Bachardy concludes in his introduction to the
Last Drawings
, “I was able to identify with him to such an extent that . . . [i]t began to seem as if dying was something which we were doing together.”
⁴⁰
Thus, the two longtime transgressors went together over the most awful threshold and made it into a work of art, illuminating their vigil, exposing every detail.

 

Swami was an outpost of the Ramakrishna Order, working to fulfil the order's mission in a foreign culture, and relying on intermittent communication with colleagues in India whose day-to-day experiences moved them each moment along a separate trajectory, further and further from mutual understanding. Isherwood understood this because he was in the same situation with old friends and colleagues in England, with whom the finer filaments of intellectual and emotional harmony had long been severed. Even with Auden, once his closest friend, there were huge gaps. Brooding on their lives after Auden's death, he wrote:

 

All yesterday and again this morning I have been looking through Wystan's letters and manuscripts—that tiny writing which I find I can, almost incredibly, decipher. He is so much in my thoughts. I seem to see the whole of his life, and it is so honest, so full of love and so dedicated, all of a piece. What surprises me is the unhesitating way he declared, to the BBC interviewers, that he came to the U.S. not intending to return to England. Unless my memory deceives me altogether, he was very doubtful what he should do when the war broke out. He loved me very much and I behaved rather badly to him, a lot of the time. Again and again, in the later letters, he begs me to come and spend some time alone with him. Why didn't I? Because I was involved with some lover or film job or whatnot. Maybe this is why he said—perhaps with more bitterness than I realized—that he couldn't understand my capacity for making friends with my inferiors!
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Auden first decided to settle in New York when he and Isherwood visited there in July 1938, and he had told his brother as early as August 1938 that he intended to move to America permanently and to become a citizen.
⁴²
The outbreak of World War II tempted him to change his mind, but he did not.
⁴³
Isherwood judged both his and Auden's youthful behavior strictly, and also their subsequent rationalizations about it. In one of his diary entries, he records a sudden insight about himself: that once he had settled in southern California, he had deliberately tried to cut off any possibility of returning to England by sending home an offensive letter which he knew would be made public:

 

. . . the letter I wrote to Gerald Hamilton in 1939, attacking the war propaganda made by Erika and Klaus Mann and others, was really a device, to get myself regarded as an enemy in England and therefore make it impossible for me to “repent” and return. That was why I chose Gerald Hamilton to send my letter to—I knew he would broadcast it.
⁴⁴

 

Isherwood's observation is tidy with hindsight, but it is no self-reinvention. The letter had been rash and defiant, and he knew Hamilton was indiscreet. It was quoted in the
Daily Express
in November 1939, launching the worst of the public criticism of his and of Auden's decision to remain in America after the war started.

As Isherwood dug into the motives for his past actions and became increasingly candid about his generation, former friends in England seemed to understand him less and less. Some admired him for coming out as a homosexual, but they were bewildered and critical when he came out with other truths. In 1973, he asked John Lehmann not to publish their correspondence because when he reread his letters to Lehmann, Isherwood found that they said only what he had presumed Lehmann had wanted to hear at the time: “They are dull, mechanical, false. Don was horrified by their insincerity when he read them—he hadn't believed that even old Dobbin could be capable of such falseness.”
⁴⁵
He stood by the long-established friendship, but when Lehmann pressed for an explanation, Isherwood was evasive:

 

Once started, I might have found myself cutting much deeper and telling John
why
my letters to him during the war were so false—namely because I knew he wasn't on my side, I knew he didn't believe I was serious about Vedanta or pacifism and I knew he would disapprove, on principle, of any book I wrote while I was living in America. I was false because I didn't want to admit how deeply I resented his fatherly tone of forgiveness of my betrayal of him and England—“England” being, in fact, his magazine. . . .The stupid thing is that I'm fond of him in a way, and that I've often defended him, even. I think, as everybody in London thinks, that he's an ass and that he has almost no talent. But I am fond of him, which is more than most people are.
⁴⁶

 

In fact, it had been many years since Lehmann and others had understood who Isherwod was or what he believed. Although some of Isherwood's most beautiful writing in his diaries is about his childhood home in the north of England and about his visits there to his brother Richard, and although he chronicled the London social scene with energy whenever he visited, he never felt comfortable in England for any length of time. When he had returned to live there with Bachardy in 1961, he wrote:

 

I realize now, on this trip, that my longing to be away from England had really nothing to do with a mother complex or any other facile psychoanalytical explanation. No, here is something that stifles and confines me. I wish I could define it. Maybe the island is just too damned small. I feel unfree, cramped. I long for California.
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He preferred California and its beaches even to Manhattan. The casualness and undress of Californian life freed him from any preconceptions about identity or social class—minimal clothes revealed little about status; names were pared away to a syllable or two and titles dropped; speech was relaxed towards a uniform drawl. The British theater critic Ken Tynan, who had known Isherwood since 1956 in London and who settled in Los Angeles for a time during the 1970s, remarked in his diary on “the classlessness that [Isherwood] shares with almost no other British writer of his generation. (I've seen him in cabmen's pull-ups and grand mansions, with no change of manner or accent.)”
⁴⁸
Like Whitman or Kerouac, Isherwood had a promiscuous curiosity about his fellow men, and he knew he could find out more about them if he met them on an equal footing.