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Isherwood plays a starring role in gay reality
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Lord knows why designer Tom Ford, a member of one of the world's most externally directed professions, wanted to make a movie of Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel A Single Man. The story of a middle-aged gay man grieving for his lover of 16 years, it's one of the most interior stories around. The fun is all in the character's thoughts, his discursive observations, his wit, his unexpected kindness.
In short, the contents of his head. Which is not the sort of thing that normally films well.
I will leave to it the official critics of this illustrious newspaper to tell you whether this strategy was successful. For me, it was both too static and too sad to capture the spirit of the novel, which is altogether more jaunty. My only hope is that the film sends you back to Isherwood himself, both the books and the man.
More than any other writer of the past century, he embodied and extolled the expansive possibilities of gay life.
Born in Edwardian England in 1904, Isherwood found fame and sexual maturity in 1930s Berlin, emigrated to the States in 1939, settled in California, spent a couple of years in a Hindu monastery (where his guru thought he had the makings of a saint), found lucrative work in the film industry, discovered his life's love and wrote some of his most important works, including A Single Man, one of the first modern novels to treat gays as just plain folks.
Isherwood didn't officially come out until the 1970s but he depicted gay or proto-gay characters as early as the 1930s, especially in the fabled Berlin stories, some of which formed the basis for the musical Cabaret.
In short, Isherwood's entire life was a rebuke to convention and any expectation of what gay life might be. A man of immense industry, appetites and charm, he could be bitchy, but never malicious and, with rare exceptions – notably his long-suffering mother – he seems to have been kind and accepting.
If you're new to Isherwood, I would suggest you start with A Single Man, which is short, elegant and filled with great lines about cruising, marriage, straights and consumerism.
Or, possibly, Christopher and His Kind, which reworks his sexy Berlin years from the more enlightened point of view of the 1970s. It's funny, charming and full of aggressive gay pride.
Down There on a Visit is more complicated – it's really four stories in one – but also more satisfying perhaps because it aspires to greater, if more elusive, truths about spirit and belonging. The hero of the last section, Paul, is a hustler turned wannabe saint.
My favourite Isherwood book may be Vol. 1 of his diaries (Vol. 2 has yet to be published). Long, detailed and chock full of incident, it's alive with the rush and tug of friendship. He describes dozens of friends and acquaintances – Igor Stravinsky, Gerald Heard, Somerset Maugham, Gore Vidal, E.M. Forster, Lincoln Kirstein, W.H. Auden – and, of course, several lovers, including Don Bachardy, the man who would stay with him for the rest of his life.
Indeed, the Diaries are perhaps the best all-round account of a long-term gay relationship, a salutary lesson in the necessity of endurance and compromise. One day Bachardy is a "nuisance," the next he's well nigh a saint.
Some of Isherwood's story is dated. He comes from a time when affluent gay men invariably "married" younger and down (outside their class), and from a time, too, when marriage was still a rite of the "others." But his sexual and emotional struggles are timeless. Lucky for us, he shared them for all to see.
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