Christopher Isherwood - The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy

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Lets put our faith in the Animals. They have survived the humans and will survive.

Inscribed by C.I. in a copy of Down There on a Visit that he gave D.B., February 14, 1963

From February 14, 1953 until January 4, 1986 the conversation between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy never stopped. When they were apart, they continued by letter, telegram, and telephone a dialogue of intimacy, depth, and urgent, tender concern. They first exchanged letters in February 1956 when Isherwood took the twenty-one-year-old Bachardy on a tour of Europe. On their way home via England, where the winter was harsh, Isherwood went alone to Cheshire to visit his mother and brother for a few days while Bachardy stayed behind in their London hotel because Isherwood wished to spare him the primitive accommodation and the cold at his mothers manor house, Wyberslegh Hall. This very first pair of letters shows how, in absence, they both reassessed their three-year-old relationship, valuing it the more for being separated. This first pair of letters also mentions the animal identities which expressed the instinctive, unbreakable bond that had already formed between them. I miss rides through London on old Dobbin, wrote Bachardy:

(especially in the snow yesterday) and think a lot about him, sleeping in a strange stable, eating cold oats out of an ill-fitting feedbag and having no cat fur to keep him warm. And dont let them put any frozen bits in his mouth. And tell him an anxious Tabby is at the mercy of the RSPCA and counting the days till his return.

In their most private interactions, Isherwood was a stubborn grey workhorse, Dobbin; Bachardy was a skittish, unpredictable white kitten usually called Kitty. Over the years, these pet personalities were to be elaborated upon and decorated by each of them with stories and events from literature and life, evolving as a camp that allowed Isherwood and Bachardy to masquerade and to play about the serious matters of love and commitment and thereby to reveal themselves more fully to one another. They generally spoke of the Animals in the third person, distancing themselves from the sentimentality in which their Animal identities allowed them to indulge. Although these grew more complex over time, one of the most important characteristics of the Animals remained their simplicity, their innocence of ulterior motive. The Animals embodied the instinctive lifethe submission to creaturely needs and to a humble, unforeseeable destiny.

The Animals are homosexuals and never would or could deny this. The Animals are thirty years apart in age, but nevertheless must be together. The Animals have busy social lives, many shared and separate friends, and even outside love affairs, yet some of their most contented waking hours are spent nestled together in the dark, watching films and munching junk food. The Animals have intensely cerebral artistic lives and enormous ambition, but their subverbal bond makes intellectual and professional activities seem merely worldly and unimportant. The Animals fight, sometimes savagely, run away from one another, suffer blinding pangs of loneliness, and yet always return to their basket, their silent world of warmth and comfort. They never accuse or absolve; they dont experience guilt or regret; they live in the present rather than the past or the future. Foolish or wise, their behavior is characteristic, ritualistic, unavoidable; they dont consider why they do what they do. They will always be together, and The Othersin general straight people, but also sometimes any outsidersenter their world for brief spells only and, however welcome or involved they may seem there, are always turned out again in the end.

When Isherwood died in 1986, his full set of tiny, white-jacketed Beatrix Potter story books still stood on his library book shelves. These had been among his favorite nursery reading, and the animal world portrayed in themin both narrative and watercolorsoffers a miniature comic universe in which character brings about both action and consequences, including suffering, but in which humor and compassion prevail over moral judgement.

In 1925, when he was twenty-one and working in London as secretary to the string quartet of Belgian violinist Andr Mangeot, Isherwood composed some poems to accompany sketches of animals, some dressed in human clothes, which were drawn by eleven-year-old Sylvain Mangeot, the beloved younger son of the household. The poems and pictures were published much later as People One Ought to Know (1982). They are clumsy compared to Beatrix Potter, but they offer an equally broad range of characters, delineated with resourceful and eccentric detail.

With his friend Gore Vidal, Isherwood shared another camp, borrowed from The Wind in the Willows; they called one another Mole (Isherwood) and Toad (Vidal), pointing up the fussy, self-important rivalry in their relationship, but also the natural dignity and heroism, the shared wish to be the best they could be, to show off for the world and one another, and to make one anothers lives more interesting than they might otherwise have been. Mole and Toad are courteous, noble, and gentlemanly as well as petty and striving. Of course, Isherwood and Vidal were also laughing at the smallness and unimportance of any two creatures anywhere anytimeapart from to one another.

The ability to create a world, a safe and separate milieu, was a great gift of Isherwoods. As a homosexual, he spent decades half-hidden below the surface of ordinary social activity. For many, such a buried life might have been lonely, painful, angry, colored by bitterness, guilt, even self-loathing. But Isherwood knew how to spread hay around his stable, put up bright wallpaper, and attract a good-looking and entertaining crowd. He drew Bachardy into his semi-secret realm, and they made their lives into the finest private party in town. On New Years Eve, 1960, Isherwood wrote in his diary:

Very good relations with Don, all this time. Yesterday eveningI forgot to recordwe did something we havent done in ages; danced together to records on the record player. A Beatrix Potter scenethe Animals Ball.

The second set of letters Isherwood and Bachardy exchanged were about a year and half after the first, in June 1957, when Bachardys spring semester at Chouinard Art Institute ended; he marked the start of his summer vacation by travelling alone to New York to stay with Lincoln Kirstein. In June 1958, Bachardy made a similar trip, travelling first to New Orleans to stay with his close friend, Marguerite Lamkin, a dialogue coach on the original production of Tennessee Williamss Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Isherwood remained behind, working, at the house they were then renting in Santa Monica. He enormously enjoyed the dramatic, closely observed report Bachardy sent him of the attempted suicide of Marguerites father. Throughout the IsherwoodBachardy letters, figures and events familiar from Isherwoods diaries are discussed by both correspondents with even greater candor than in the diaries; many others are mentioned here for the first time. Bachardy, the sexy, turbulent boy, proves to be a thoughtful, articulate, and highly analytical writer with as broad and penetrating an interest in human character as his mentor, and with a startlingly robust voice.