I hate leaving town in April when spring's cavalcade progresses daily from one blooming extravagance to another, a scene not to be witnessed again for another year. The last three dark, dreary days made today's sunshine that much sweeter. In my neighbor's yard, the crabapple he had planted to replace the dogwood that kept dying year after year is blooming ahead of the other area apple trees. The air is heady with fecund smells.
Chris Isherwood long ago captured my imagination as a writer, a Vedanta disciple (of Swami Prabhavananda) and an openly gay man when most other queers were in the closet. In the 2007 Zeitgeist release, Chris & Don: A Love Story, he jokingly described his writing style to consist of "honesty, that and a few adjectives." His prose is unadorned reportage, like the documentary films that now seem to have come into their own on television if not in-mall theaters. In Goodbye to Berlin (1939), he wrote: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." His self-expurgated diary was the basis for the play, I Am a Camera, and the subsequent musical, Cabaret, that established him firmly on the American literary scene.
On the other hand, the story of his relationship with Don Bachardy is the stuff of the most elaborate fiction. Don was 16 to Chris's 48, a nubile, charming teenager when they met Valentine's Day 1953 on the gay beach in Santa Monica. Isherwood, like E.M. Forster, typified the English upper or middle class homosexual who gravitated towards men from the working class or who were foreign or both. He went to Berlin after his friend, W. H. Auden, in search of boys but being a writer he crafted from his experiences there something more palatable to his readers and the book became iconic of Germany as Nazism was just rising, leading inexorably to the worldwide conflagration whose consequences we still live today.
Chris and Don started making home movies from the start of their relationship and Chris & Don included footage from these making for an immediate and moving diorama of their times and, most affecting to me, how two men age and change (not in the essentials, more in appearance) over the course of 30 years, 50 years for Bachardy. Isherwood died at age 81 in 1986. Bachardy stopped doing anything else the last six months and spent day after day drawing and painting his lover with a brutal honesty that book buyers apparently didn't appreciate. The book of those paintings didn't sell but what an artistic and love-inspired feat! "He would have been proud of me," said Bachardy in the movie. "He would have expected me to be an artist [even as he died] for that's what an artist does and that what I did."
There are not many examples of long-term gay marriages in the public media. The movie is exceptional just in this way. To me however the movie is a stalwart nudge towards realizing what we all know to be true but don't believe will happen to us until maybe, but even then rarely, after the fact: aging and death. How short is a man's life though in the minute-by-minute experience of it life sometimes feels excruciatingly slow.
"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may," Robert Herrick (1591-1674) wrote. "This same flower that smiles today tomorrow will be dying."
The movie also reminded me of my attraction to California landscapes, its architecture that is like that of the Aegean islands but wealthier. Instead of tiny houses on a hillside facing a blue sea, California has huge estates fronting the Pacific Ocean and the Sierra Madre on the other side but in both the predominant color is white under intensely bright sunshine, the basic shapes squares and rectangles. Landscape is such a powerful influence on the imagination. We can dream up science-fiction sceneries and explode cinema in 3-D with breath-stopping special effects but nothing to my mind is more compelling than landscapes as we find it in the world around us. Dreams are fine but in literature it's how well we re-conjure the actual that determines the quality of craftsmanship. In life, too, I suspect the same holds true.
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