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Even if you downplay the unflattering details, Katherine Bucknell’s wonderful biography salutes the twentieth century as one of the earliest proponents of the “chosen family. “
By Alexandra Jacobs
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CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD REVERSED, via Katherine Bucknell
Many of the writers’ graves are tourist attractions. Not Christopher Isherwood’s. In fact, he doesn’t have any. We especially highlight his “Berlin Stories”, which became “I Am a Camera”, which later became “Cabaret” – and more recently “A Single Man”, which cartoonist Tom Ford made into a film – Isherwood, deceased in 1986 in At the age of 81, he entrusted his corpse to science.
Today, the director of his foundation, Katherine Bucknell, also a novelist, has erected a huge literary cenotaph entitled, echoing this summer’s most successful film, “Christopher Isherwood Inside Out. “It joins Peter Parker’s equally gigantic “Isherwood: A Life Revealed. “” from 20 years ago: two lions fiercely guarding the library of Isherwood’s prodigious autofictions, letters and diaries.
The biographers’ lion boyfriend, their whispering leader Christopher, is Don Bachardy: Isherwood’s longtime artist and partner, 30 years his junior, and affectionately known as Kitty. An Englishman of the landed gentry who had improbably uprooted himself to Los Angeles, Isherwood Dobbin, named after a toy horse that his nanny had given him as a child. They called themselves the Animals and their personal domestic idyll the “basket. “
Curiously, dozens of other lovers touched the basket (some even jumped in it for a while), but none of them untangled it or knocked it over. The couple, who met when Bachardy was 18 and took time to gain acceptance even in Isherwood’s bohemian circle, were the first. Subject of David Hockney’s outstanding series of double portraits.
Bucknell’s abundant paintings (so much written on all fronts, so many interviews from the golden age of newspapers, magazines, Cavett) are more than a synthesis; This is photosynthesis. His big blue book breathes and shines. His subject, who meditated until he converted with Aldous Huxley to the Hindu philosophy Vedanta, is reincarnated.
And her reputation, tarnished after the publication of her diaries, which she edited herself, led to a harsher look at her anti-Semitism and misogyny, is getting a big boost. Isherwood is enshrined here not only as a great homosexual liberation man, without the rainbow flag (nor did he write about AIDS), but also as a warrior seeking to locate his tribe or his “chosen family. “Imagine the cage fitted with J. D. Vance.
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