https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/25/books/review/christopher-isherwood-inside-out-katherine-bucknell.html

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Nonfiction

An Impressive Monument to Christopher Isherwood, Man of Letters (and
Lovers)

Though it downplays unflattering details, Katherine Bucknell's big
biography hails the 20th-century writer as an early advocate for the
"chosen family."

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[27bucknell-review-bqpt-articleLarge]
Christopher Isherwood, at left, and his longtime partner, the artist
Don Bachardy, at right, on a Los Angeles beach in 1963. The writer
Gavin Lambert is between them.Credit...Christopher Isherwood Papers
at the Huntington
Alexandra Jacobs

By Alexandra Jacobs

Aug. 25, 2024
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CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD INSIDE OUT, by Katherine Bucknell

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Many writers' graves are tourist attractions. Not Christopher
Isherwood's. Indeed, he doesn't have one. Best remembered for his
"Berlin Stories," which became "I Am a Camera" which became "Cabaret"
-- and latterly for "A Single Man," which the designer Tom Ford made
into a movie -- Isherwood, who died in 1986 at 81, signed away his
corpse to science.

Now the director of his foundation, Katherine Bucknell, a novelist
herself, has with great care erected a massive literary cenotaph
entitled, with an apt echo of this summer's most successful movie,
"Christopher Isherwood Inside Out." It joins Peter Parker's equally
gargantuan "Isherwood: A Life Revealed," from 20 years ago: twin
lions guarding fiercely the library of Isherwood's own prodigious
autofiction, letters and journals.

The biographers' little-lion friend, their main Christopher
whisperer, is Don Bachardy: the artist and Isherwood's longtime
partner, 30 years his junior and fondly known as Kitty. A
landed-gentry Englishman who'd uprooted improbably to Los Angeles,
Isherwood was Dobbin, after a toy horse he'd been given by his nanny
as a child. They called themselves the Animals, their private
domestic idyll the "basket."

Dozens of other lovers pawed curiously at this basket -- some even
jumped in, for a time -- but none unraveled or overturned it. The
couple, who met when Bachardy was 18 and took a while to be accepted
even in Isherwood's bohemian circle, were the first subject of David
Hockney's celebrated double-portrait series.

Bucknell's considerable sourcework -- so much writing from all fronts,
so many interviews from the golden age of newspapers, magazines,
Cavett -- is more than synthesis; it is photosynthesis. Her big blue
book breathes and glistens. Her subject, who regularly meditated as a
convert with Aldous Huxley to the Hindu philosophy Vedanta, is
reincarnated.

And his reputation -- somewhat tarnished after the publication of his
diaries, which she edited, occasioned a harder look at his
antisemitism and misogyny -- gets a good spiffing. Isherwood is
enshrined here as not just a Grand Old Man of gay liberation, minus
the waving rainbow flag (nor did he write about AIDS), but a warrior
of finding one's tribe, or "chosen family." Imagine the cage match
with JD Vance.

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