Where joy resides; a Christopher Isherwood reader, edited by Don Bachardy and James P. White, with an introduction by Gore Vidal

by Don Bachardy

Where Joy A Christopher Isherwood Reader is a wide-ranging collection of fiction and nonfiction, this is the perfect introduction to the author's writings...

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Donald Jess "Don" Bachardy (born May 18, 1934) is an American portrait artist. He resides in Santa Monica, California. Bachardy was the life partner of writer Christopher Isherwood.

Born in Los Angeles, California, Bachardy studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and the Slade School of Art in London. His first one-man exhibition was held in October 1961 at the Redfern Gallery in London. He met the writer Christopher Isherwood on Valentine's Day 1953, when he was 18 and Isherwood was 48. They remained together until Isherwood's death in 1986. A number of paperback editions of Isherwood's novels feature Bachardy's pencil portraits of the author. A film about their relationship, titled Chris & Don: A Love Story, was released in 2008.


Six books of his work have been published. His life and works are also documented in Terry Sanders' film The Eyes of Don Bachardy. He collaborated with Isherwood on Frankenstein: The True Story (1973). His book Stars in My Eyes (2000), about celebrated people whom he had painted, became a number one best-seller in Los Angeles. Bachardy's most haunting and eloquent published collection, "Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood" in 1990 contains the dying and deceased Isherwood for the last time in his eyes.

One of Bachardy's most notable works is the official gubernatorial portrait of Jerry Brown that hangs in the California State Capitol Museum.

Works

Frankenstein: The True Story. 1973 (with Christopher Isherwood)
October / O. Methuen, London 1983 (with Christopher Isherwood), ISBN 0-413-50040-3
One Hundred Drawings. Twelvetrees Press, Los Angeles 1983
70 x 1 Drawings. Illuminati, 1983
Drawings of the male nude. Twelvetrees Press, Pasadena 1985, ISBN 0-942642-18-X
Christopher Isherwood: Last drawings. Faber and Faber, London/Boston 1990, ISBN 0-571-14075-0 (mit John Russell, Stephen Spender)
Short cuts: the screenplay. Capra Press, Santa Barbara 1993 (with Robert Altmann, Frank Barhydt), ISBN 0-88496-378-0
The Portrait. Imprenta Glorias, 1997
Stars In My Eyes. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2000, ISBN 0-299-16730-5
The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, edited by Katherine Bucknell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2014. ISBN 9780374105174
BibliographyEdit

Peter Parker, Isherwood: A Life (2004)
Daniel Curzon: Remembering Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. In: Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly. Volume 6 (2004), Issue 1
The film, Chris & Don: A Love Story (2008)[3]
Lee Prosser: Isherwood, Bowles, Vedanta, Wicca, and Me, (2001), ISBN 0-595-20284-5

Reviews

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice . . . For to miss the joy is to miss all." (From The Lantern Bearers by Robert Louis Stevenson as quoted by Christopher Isherwood in his commonplace book.

The quotation from Stevenson is placed as the epigraph to this selection of works by Isherwood. It is a selection that spans his lifetime as a writer from the early days in Berlin to the last days in Hollywood. In making the selections Don Bachardy and James P. White appropriately include the short novel A Single Man as the final selection. This is fitting because it is both the finest of Isherwood's novels and that one whose style and content delineate an ending to life and art in such a beautiful way. The other selections in the book include fictional, biographical, critical and spiritual writings that help the reader gain a picture of Isherwood's life from his own artistic creations. The result suggests how he imagined a world of love and freedom in an era when that life was hidden in ways that are difficult to comprehend in the twenty-first century. His friend Gore Vidal, to whom Isherwood dedicated A Single Man, states in his introduction: "throughout Christopher's life and work - and he made the two the same - he never ceased to attempt the impossible: to say exactly what a thing was and how it struck him in such a way that the reader might grasp it as he himself did, writer and reader as one in the ultimate collusive act of understanding."
This selection of his works captures that "collusive act" and presents it to readers everywhere.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prater Violet is the most entertaining. Single Man may be the “best” in literary terms. A good selection of work.

[Anya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goodbye to Berlin- 5/5
Prater Violet- 4/5
Exhumations- 2/5
Down There on a Visit- 5/5
Kathleen and Frank- 4/5
Lions and Shadows- 4/5
My Guru and His Disciple -3/5
A Single Man- 5/5

[carl theaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got it to read more on the 'Cabaret' angle. Isherwood was quite the man
about town in London and later LA. Good experience to read this author
for a context of the times and insights to his literary clique.

[Krista]

I re-read this one about once a month. Lovely anthology of outstanding writing.