Category: The Dish

When he first started reading The Animals, the recently published love letters of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, Matthew Gallaway rolled his eyes at the couple’s pet names for each other – Isherwood was a variation on “horse” and Bachardy “kitten.” But he eventually saw something deeper was at work:

Isherwood and Bachardy were living openly in a society that was hostile to their relationship on several fronts — besides being gay, Isherwood was also more than 30 years older than Bachardy, who was only 18 when they met — and so they needed to create an imaginary world, one that (in [editor Katherine] Bucknell’s words) was “safe” and “entertaining” to the two men, when so many others in their situation succumbed to bitterness and self-loathing.

The animal device also allowed them to address issues of infidelity or — since they weren’t really cheating — “sexual freedom” that might otherwise have pulled them apart.

With Isherwood’s blessing, Bachardy spent many months away from their home in Santa Monica — in London, in New York, in continental Europe — in order to develop his artistic career and to see the world; Isherwood understood that to constrain the much-younger Bachardy would almost certainly have resulted in a breakup. That said, Isherwood was also not shy about inviting others he found attractive into his bed. Both men enjoyed many different lovers during the course of their relationship, but the letters are never graphic. The language they used helped them to navigate waters that are always dangerous, even — or especially — where both parties are being honest, and we see how it can perhaps soften the blow to Isherwood when Bachardy refers to other men as “bowls of cream” he may or may not reject during the course of his travels. To witness a couple, under this twee façade, balancing such obligations of commitment and desire feels very contemporary and somehow important, given how the conformity of marriage so often means that such things — even in the gay world — are still discussed in disapproving whispers, if at all.

In an earlier review of the book, Olivia Laing noticed the letters also contain all the gossip you’d expect from a prominent Hollywood couple who knew just about everyone worth knowing:

Although work is a regular topic of conversation (particularly Bachardy’s sometimes anguished attempts to find his métier), the keynote here is gossip. On Auden at 59, Isherwood notes, “Wystan can never possibly look older,” while Bachardy memorably describes Vanessa Redgrave as a “pod-born replacement for real humans”. Observations on the love lives of the beau monde are traded back and forth like cigarette cards (a pearl for the susceptible: Vivien Leigh’s private number in the 1960s was Sloane 1955).

Gossip is a leveller but one of the oddities of this capacious book is how similar the two voices sound, considering the vast gulf in age and experience, background and nationality. The struggle to bridge these gaps forms the great underlying drama of the letters.

And it turns out Bachardy holds his own as a man of letters when compared to his novelist partner:

One of the best surprises of the collection is what an excellent writer Bachardy is — wry, sharp and funny. In one letter, he describes the aftermath of an attempted suicide of a friend’s father, who left blood splattered on the carpet. Isherwood replies, “Your letter, with the truly horrendous diary excerpt, just arrived. I enjoyed it so much I quite forgot to feel sorry for anybody. Honestly, this is literature! The things you put in! Like Marguerite saying, ‘She’ll never get it out of the carpet!'”

Watch a video of Bachardy reading some of the letters here.

(Video: Trailer for the 2007 documentary Chris & Don)

Daniel Johnson traveled to Oxford to profile Geoffrey Hill, the university’s Professor of Poetry, describing him as a man born out of time:

By the time Hill came on the scene … the landscape had been transformed: the line between poetry and prose had been blurred, the laws of prosody had been suspended and poets were marginalised by or subsumed into other art forms, such as popular music. Poems too became primarily vehicles of self-expression. Like everybody else, poets had to compete for attention and celebrity. As schools no longer taught their pupils poetry by heart, the handful of verses that retained public affection acquired the status of secular icons. New poetry seldom achieves such recognition, for the very good reason that is rarely memorised or indeed memorable. Poets instead strove to reinvent their functions: as performance art for highbrows, icing on the secular wedding cake, or therapy for the deserted, the desolated and the dumped.

Against this, Hill champions a poetry of ideas:

“It is public knowledge that the newest generation of poets is encouraged to think of poems as Facebook or Twitter texts — or now, I suppose, much more recently, as selfies.” The mention of such an improbable neologism from such a source elicited an embarrassed titter from the audience, as if Hill had caught his academic peers indulging a secret vice.

“The poem as selfie is the aesthetic criterion of contemporary verse,” he continued. “And, as you know, in my malign way I want to put myself in opposition to this view. That is to say, the poem should not be a spasmodic issue from the adolescent or even the octogenarian psyche, requiring no further form or validation.” Hill came back to the theme in his vindication of [Gerard Manley] Hopkins, whose sonnets did not, he expostulated, deserve the condescension of posterity: “I do not think that they are Hopkins’s selfies.”

The underlying reason for Hill’s rejection of poetry as pure self-expression is that he sees such narcissism as beneath the dignity of his calling. He preaches, rather, what he has practised ever since his youth: a poetry of ideas. It is this determination to place ideas at the heart of his work that sets him apart from even his most celebrated contemporaries.

In a Paris Review interview over a decade ago, Hill defended “difficult” art in similar terms:

We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right—not an obligation—to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification.

The Junky author defied the red-blue divide:

[T]he young Burroughs’ hatred of the New Deal liberals who held power in North America didn’t keep him from embracing the anti-feudal, anti-imperial liberals he encountered in South America. In Colombia he even gave his gun to a guerrilla boy. “Always a pushover for a just cause and a pretty face,” he wrote to [Allen] Ginsberg in 1953. “Wouldn’t surprise me if I end up with the Liberal guerrillas.”

In later years, conversely, he still didn’t have much praise for the federal government. In The Job—Daniel Odier’s book of interviews with Burroughs, published in various forms between 1969 and 1974—the novelist denounced the income tax (“These laws benefit those who are already rich”) and allowed what began as a rant about money to evolve into an attack on inflation. (“Money is like junk. A dose that fixes you on Monday won’t fix you on Friday. We are being swept with vertiginous speed into a worldwide inflation comparable to what happened in Germany after World War I.”) When Odier inquired about the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy, Burroughs began his answer with the sort of conspiracy theory you might expect from a hip ’60s liberal—”It seems likely that the assassination was arranged by the far right”—but then veered in a different direction, declaring that “the arrangers are now taking this opportunity to pass anti-gun laws, and disarm the nation for the fascist takeover.” On the rare occasion that Burroughs did manage to say something nice about the feds, he still couched his comments in libertarian language. In 1982, when Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine asked him how he felt about the space program, he replied that it was “practically the only expenditure I don’t begrudge the government.”

Turns out he marched to the beat of a very different drummer:

Jack Black was a former hobo and burglar whose memoir You Can’t Win engrossed the teenaged Burroughs, leaving a lasting impact on both his outlook and his literary voice. … It was Black’s description of an underground code—and his scattered references to the beggars and outlaws who embraced that code as an extended “Johnson Family”—that gave Burroughs’ rebellious streak an ideological framework. A Johnson “just minds his own business of staying alive and thinks that what other people do is other people’s business,” Burroughs wrote in his 1985 book The Adding Machine. “Yes, this world would be a pretty easy and pleasant place to live in if everybody could just mind his own business and let others do the same. But a wise old black faggot said to me years ago: ‘Some people are shits, darling.'” In 1988, penning a preface for a reprint of Black’s book, Burroughs offered this account of the world’s core conflict: “A basic split between shits and Johnsons has emerged.”

Previous Dish on Burroughs here, here, and here.

(Image of Burroughs at his 70th birthday party via Wikimedia Commons)

Noah Berlatsky wants more of it:

I don’t think feminism is only about women’s empowerment – or, at least, there have been other feminisms, too. Specifically, feminism often takes the form of critique, especially of misogyny. This is often defined as the hatred of women, but in her book Whipping Girl, Julia Serano provides a broader definition. She says that misogyny is the “tendency to dismiss and deride femaleness and femininity.” In part, this involves deriding and devaluing women, but it also means devaluing any expression of femininity, no matter the gender of the person in question.

For example, misogyny means that people see bosses or those with hugely successful careers as being more important than those who stay home and care for their kids, because caring for kids is seen as feminine. Empowerment feminism tends to argue that women should be able to do anything that men can do. But there have also been versions of feminism that argue that what men do isn’t necessarily so great; that maybe, instead of leaning in to be the man, we should try to see if we can get to a place where no one has to be the man at all.

So one thing feminism is about, and has been about, is questioning what it is to be a man, which obviously affects men pretty directly. Women are the main victims of misogyny, because women are inescapably associated with femininity. But other people can suffer, too. Gay men, for example, are stereotypically seen as feminine, weak, frivolous, and helpless: “A pansy has no iron in his bones,” to quote the author Raymond Chandler in one of his more misogynistic and homophobic moments. Similarly, femininity is often seen as fake or inauthentic—a trope that is especially damaging for trans women and men, whose gender identities are often seen as unmanly, false, fake, or performed.