Liberation: Diaries, Vol. 3: 1970-1983

by Christopher Isherwood, Edmund White (Preface), Katherine Bucknell (Editor)

Candid and revealing, the final volume of Christopher Isherwood's diaries brings together his thoughts on life, love, and death. Beginning in the period of his life when he wrote Kathleen and Frank , his first intensely personal book, Diaries 1970–1983 intimately and wittily records Isherwood's immersion in the 1970s art scene in Los Angeles, New York, and London—a world peopled by the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and David Hockney, as well as his Broadway writing career, which brought him in touch with John Huston, Merchant and Ivory, John Travolta, John Voight, Elton John, David Bowie, Joan Didion, and Armistead Maupin. With a preface by Edmund White, Liberation is a rich and engaging final memoir by one of the most celebrated writers of his generation.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Diary, LGBT, Queer

928 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2012

About the author

English-born American writer Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood portrayed Berlin in the early 1930s in his best known works, such as Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the basis for the musical Cabaret (1966). Isherwood was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist.

With W.H. Auden he wrote three plays— The Dog Beneath the Skin (1932), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938). Isherwood tells the story in his first autobiography, Lions and Shadows .

After Isherwood wrote joke answers on his second-year exams, Cambridge University in 1925 asked him to leave. He briefly attended medical school and progressed with his first two novels, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932). In 1930, he moved to Berlin, where he taught English, dabbled in Communism, and enthusiastically explored his homosexuality. His experiences provided the material for Mister Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1938), still his most famous book.

In Berlin in 1932, he also began an important relationship with Heinz Neddermeyer, a young German with whom he fled the Nazis in 1933. England refused entry to Neddermeyer on his second visit in 1934, and the pair moved restlessly about Europe until the Gestapo arrested Neddermeyer in May 1937 and then finally separated them.

In 1938, Isherwood sailed with Auden to China to write Journey to a War (1939), about the Sino-Japanese conflict. They returned to England and Isherwood went on to Hollywood to look for movie-writing work. He also became a disciple of the Ramakrishna monk, Swami Prabhavananda, head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. He decided not to take monastic vows, but he remained a Hindu for the rest of his life, serving, praying, and lecturing in the temple every week and writing a biography, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965).

In 1945, Isherwood published Prater Violet, fictionalizing his first movie writing job in London in 1933-1934. In Hollywood, he spent the start of the 1950s fighting his way free of a destructive five-year affair with an attractive and undisciplined American photographer, William Caskey. Caskey took the photographs for Isherwood’s travel book about South America, The Condor and The Cows (1947). Isherwood’s sixth novel, The World in the Evening (1954), written mostly during this period, was less successful than earlier ones.

In 1953, he fell in love with Don Bachardy, an eighteen-year-old college student born and raised in Los Angeles. They were to remain together until Isherwood’s death. In 1961, Isherwood and completed the final revisions to his new novel Down There on a Visit (1962). Their relationship nearly ended in 1963, and Isherwood moved out of their Santa Monica house. This dark period underpins Isherwood’s masterpiece A Single Man (1964).

Isherwood wrote another novel, A Meeting by the River (1967), about two brothers, but he gave up writing fiction and turned entirely to autobiography. In Kathleen and Frank (1971), he drew on the letters and diaries of his parents. In Christopher and His Kind (1976), he returned to the 1930s to tell, as a publicly avowed homosexual, the real story of his life in Berlin and his wanderings with Heinz Neddermeyer. The book made him a hero of gay liberation and a national celebrity all over again but now in his true, political and personal identity.

Reviews

[Clifton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A long trudge to get through, but well worth the effort and time. I've now read all of the thick volumes of Isherwood's Diaries. He has long been a supreme example (role model if you like) of the queer writer, as his 30-year+ relationship with the artist, Don Bachardy, is an example of a gay May-December relationship that worked. With all his flaws, Isherwood is also the very human example of a devoted spiritual man whose credo, "Religion is about nothing but love," I agree with whole-heartedly, though I consider myself more spiritual than religious. Bachardy is to be commended for bringing out these diaries virtually unexpurgated (and then, apparently, only to respect the privacy of living individuals). And the editing of Katherine Bucknell is virtually faultless.

No one is a saint here, except perhaps Isherwood's (and Bachardy's) beloved Swami Prabhavananda. Read about the evolution of Isherwood's book on Prabhavananda, "My Guru and His Disciple," as well as that of "Christopher and His Kind" and "Kathleen and Frank," in which he first comes out openly as gay--or, as he would say, queer. Then read these books and Isherwood's masterpiece, "A Single Man," essential reading for anyone interested in 20th-century literature.

[Marti · Rating 4 out of 5]

What most people complain about in these diaries (ie. the inclusion of unimportant things like having contractors come to the house among other things), are what I like about them because you get a sense of what his life was really like. That and they capture the 1970's in general (things like the increasing popularity of the catchphrase "Have a Nice Day"), as well as Isherwood's increasing depression over the thought of his own death as the decade comes to a close. Not only does he sense it is impending (actually he lived until 1986); he has to watch all of his old friends die.

And yes, compared to his 1960's diaries, this is somewhat of a downer [although it doesn't become really pronounced until about 1977 or so]. Until that point, he is still living the bohemian celebrity life, writing screenplays, publishing books, and becoming a hero to a new generation of gay rights activists.

I wish I had started with the 1940's/1950's diaries (which were actually "reconstructed" during this period) but I cannot get them as an ebook...yet. However, I will try and read them at some point. Definitely recommended for those who want to relive the 1970's in obsessive compulsive detail.

[Lee Paris · Rating 5 out of 5]

After I finished reading The Sixties I wanted to press on and read the remaining diary entries with the last one dated July 4 1983. Some names from the previous decade have disappeared: old friends like Morgan Forster, Aldous Huxley and Charles Laughton have died but new friends like David Hockney make an appearance. In the personal sphere there is less turmoil. Don Bachardy is generally more contented: he is being taken more seriously as an artist and Dobbin (Chris) accepts Kitty's need for sexual partners outside their partnership. In one tragic-comic episode Chris is assaulted in their home by robbers. He escapes and knocks on Don's studio door only to be met by a naked Kitty with his friend Don Carr. "Don Carr was impressed by Dobbin's sangfroid; not having seen the old ham perform before." Chris also accepts the role of grand old man of the gay liberation movement and is more open with his public declarations. Sadly, the robust good health that Chris has enjoyed into his early 70s, with frequent visits to the gym, jogging and dips in the Pacific Ocean, is compromised by a series of aches and pains culminating in a cancer diagnosis. As with the other diary volumes, Katherine Bucknell has done a terrific labour of editing; the glossary with its many biographies is superb and the index is detailed and genuinely helpful.

[Richard Jespers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having now read Isherwood’s diaries, except for his Lost Years, which is a reconstruction of his life from 1945-1951, I feel, in a sense, that I’ve lived life alongside him. Yes, I believe I can say I’ve lived a parallel life of voyeurism as I’ve read all three diaries (2,681 pages), covering the greater part of his life, right up to his death in 1986.

I’ve more or less lived in his house with him, sometimes sharing his bed with some of the (apparently) sexiest men in the world, including his long-time companion, Don Bachardy. I’ve struggled through his writing, as he articulates what he fears are certain problems taking place in the manuscript he is working on at the time. I’ve been to every party he has, where he often, by his own admission, drinks too much—so much so, in fact, that he can’t remember exactly what has happened or whom he’s insulted. I’ve accompanied him every time he strolls along the beach in Santa Monica, California, where he lives, or squabbles with local residents or fusses over a neighbor’s nocturnally barking dog or rascally kids who have no respect for the private bridge that somehow sets their property apart from others. I am exposed to every opinionated thought he holds about other writers, artists, agents, actors, directors, composers or religious leader, and their work. Oh, yes, I’ve suffered through his anguish over not being able to participate in Hinduism as authentically as he wishes, almost daily writing something about his Swami or the monastery or his inability to meditate properly. I’ve sat on the toilet with him as he struggles with the indelicacies of an aging body. I’ve noted his weight, daily, as he records it in his diary and stews over how he can lose even more, while at the same time ingesting great quantities of empty calories found in drink and rich food. I sympathize yet am a bit impatient with his concern over his fading looks. Photos of his youth indicate a stunning gentleman, who, besides being smart, is handsome, and often wins over any body he indeed decides to win over. So as he ages, he must accept it, and does, with a certain reserved grace. In some ways he is an average person with sometimes extraordinary foibles. Though he is highly intelligent, his life seems tinged by racism and classism, perhaps a product of his time and birthright, however hard he otherwise tries to escape them. He drops out of Cambridge University after one year, yet it doesn’t seem to hurt his career. Maybe it only narrows him in some way, although god knows he travels the face of the earth enough to be capable of empathizing with a broad range of peoples.

As I near the end of this document, I become a bit bored with his obsessions, particularly with death, since he knows he is going to experience a slow decline from prostate cancer (one of his biggest fears). At the same time, he is able to view his life in a larger context—he’s kept such copious records of it—and make some rather stoic and pithy statements. “I’m not in a good state. Death fears—that’s to say, pangs of foreboding—recur often. They seem to be part of a quite normal physical condition; the pangs of a dying animal, thrilling with dread of the unknown” (686). He writes these words on October 23, 1983, a little over two years before he dies. In spite of the struggle of his last years—all chronicled in this tome—he often lives with a joie de vivre that most of us only hope to experience a few times ever. As I often do, I’ve listed some nuggets from this, the final installment of Christopher Isherwood’s diaries.

The following comes under the category of gossip, interesting only because of its noted victims: “The usual pronouncement that Truman Capote is a ‘birdbrain.’ Gore [Vidal] has finished a novel called Two Sisters in which he admits that he and Jack Kerouac went to bed together—or was that in an article? (Gore told me about so many articles he’s written and talks he has given that my memory spins.) Anyhow, Gore now regrets that he didn’t describe the act itself; how they got very drunk and Kerouac said, ‘Why don’t we take a shower?’ and then tried to go down on him but did it very badly, and then they belly rubbed. Next day, Kerouac claimed he remembered nothing; but later, in a bar, yelled out, ‘I’ve blown Gore Vidal!’” (11).

“Howard is an American, Jewish New Yorker, with possibly some Negro in him” (63). Speaks for itself.

On writing: “I have kept this diary doggedly, day by day, because I believe a continuous record, no matter how full of trivialities, will always gradually reveal something of the subconscious mind behind it. I’ve never regretted keeping a diary yet. There are always a few nuggets of literary value under all that sand” (65).

On aging: “Partly, of course, this rattles me because I’m getting old; I feel I can’t keep up with it all. Why do things have to change so fast? It no longer seems exhilarating that they do. For instance, I mind enormously that they finally are going to put up this monster apartment building at the end of the street, two twenty-floor towers. And yet, why not? Why shouldn’t we have to move? We’ve been here ten years, already” (81).

On Cabaret: “Scammell told us he has read the script of the Cabaret film (because for part of Chris) and ‘Chris’ (now called Brian) is queer, that’s to say he can’t make love to Sally at first and then later he can then Sally does it with a mature but very attractive baron and Chris is jealous and makes a scene about it with Sally, and Sally exclaims, ‘Oh, fuck the Baron!” (meaning that he’s unimportant) and Chris replies coyly, ‘I do.’ That’s the kind of thing which offends my dignity as a homosexual. The queer is just an impotent heterosexual” (127).

Aging: “Oh, I am such a compulsive old thing, jogging down the road to the beach, sitting for a moment only on the sand alert for dogs (lest they should pee on my towel), then into the ocean, alert for surfers (lest they should collide with me) then to take a shower on the beach (hurrying lest someone else should get there first) then hobbling uphill over the gravel and wiping off the sand from my feet on the lawn of the corner house (hastily, lest they should look out and tell me not to). My secret life isn’t a bit like Walter Mitty’s—it’s mostly ratlike scurrying to secure myself some tiny advantage” (182).

Anecdote: “John Gielgud told us this story about Mae West. She was asked, ‘Do you ever smoke after you’ve had sex?’ She answered, ‘I never looked.’” (235).

On keeping a journal: “Have been dipping into my old journals of the early sixties; a mistake. Now I feel sad as shit, but must admit things are much better nowadays, at least from my point of view. Is it really good to keep a journal? I loathe doing it at the time and I get depressed when I read it. But it’s such a marvellous treasure trove. I have vowed to make an entry a day throughout July, so I’ll stick to this, but I protest, I protest” (249).

Gossip: “Roddy [McDowall, actor] has a weird hobby, he makes candles. He brought us one, or rather a sort of wax embryo containing three wicks and many lumps of colored wax embedded in wax. Without my glasses, I took it for some sort of fruit dessert and was about to put it in the icebox” (263).

On Cabaret: “Yesterday, I saw Cabaret for the second time and liked it much better than before. I still don’t think it adds up to anything much, but Michael York this time seemed not only adorable and beautiful but a really sensitive and subtle actor. Liza Minnelli I liked less, however; thought her clumsy and utterly wrong for the part, though touching sometimes, in a boyish good-sport way” (289).

Anecdote: “The evening ended delightfully with a sort of victory party given by J. J. Mitchell’s handsome and nice friend Ron Holland, at a restaurant called Ma Bell’s, where they have telephones on all the tables which you can use for free, anywhere in the New York area. Ron told a story about a boy he picked up at a gym he goes to. He brought the boy to this restaurant and told him he could call anybody he liked. The boy was delighted. He called his mother and started telling her what a wonderful place he was in. Then his face fell. He turned to Ron and said apologetically ‘I’ve go to split—she says my father’s dying’” (307-8).

Prejudice: “My relations with Patrick weren’t as pleasant as usual, I’m sorry to say. Maybe all his talk about settling down in France irritated me, after a few drinks, for I launched into one of my tiresome cantankerous Francophobe tirades. Also I declared that, as a writer, I needed all my life to master the English language—implying that Patrick and the rest never had and never would—and that I therefore had no time to waste in dabbling in foreign tongues. Patrick rightly found this statement pretentious. It was also rude to Eric, who speaks at least three languages fluently” (335) . I don’t get why Isherwood is being so “honest” here. Is it for his or our benefit?

“This afternoon Julian Jebb is due to arrive here with his assistant, Rosemary Bowen Jones, and we are to be in the grip of the BBC for a week. Am at present sulking about this, wishing to Christ I’d never agreed to it, even wishing I’d agreed to go to Berlin because maybe once I was there I’d have remembered something interesting. Now it seems to me that Berlin was one of the least important episodes in my life, which is nonsense of course—but it does bring home to me that my life in those days was a pretty shabby little affair in comparison with what I have had since” (409). Ironic, isn’t it, that Isherwood’s Berlin life is “shabby,” but his writing notable, but later an LA life is great, but his writing not as lively.

Isherwood pinpoints the problem of an older writer finding fresh content. It hits him hard, I think. “I keep plugging at the book. At present, not joyfully. I feel it is somehow flat—that I’m failing to give it the sparkle of life. One thing that keeps bugging me is that I have covered so much of the material in my fiction and what’s left for me to write is just—leftovers” (471).

“No use apologizing to myself for the huge gap [between entries]. The truth is I am slowing down; I simply cannot get through all the jobs I set myself to do. And so I develop a masochistic attitude toward myself as my own taskmaster” (473). Yeah, it sort of works when you’re in your thirties, but not so much later on.

“On March 17, Mort Sahl, on his T.V. show called ‘Both Sides,’ made antihomosexual remarks, against which Cici Huston, who was one of his guests, violently protested. Here are four of Sahl’s remarks (addressed to Cici and some other women): ‘They despise you because you have the real thing,’ ‘They dominate classical music,’ ‘Do you know a poor faggot?’ ‘They’re your enemy.’” Odd that Isherwood sees this as prejudice but NOT his own anti-Semitism or racist comments .

“Instead he went to bed and left Jack to cope with us, Zizi Jeanmaire, her daughter Valentine, Ustinov’s daughter Pavla, Nellie Carroll and Miguel. He failed to make us jell and nobody raised a finger to help him except Don and me. I can’t help it, I do so dislike Frogs” (534). This remark is typical of the British hatred for the French, or perhaps it is a typical “islander’s” small prejudices against everybody!

On aging: “A really interesting and horribly depressing talk, last night on T.V., about the approaching oil famine within thirty years and consequent plans for transmitting solar energy via satellites, etc. I got such a sense of a future which I don’t want to, and anyway, can’t live on into. At the same time, I quite realize that my aversion is merely romantic; I hate to part with the notion of space as something awesome, of the moon as a shining mysterious orb, etc., and contemplate a time when the earth will be surrounded by a sort of backyard full of skyjunk” (541).

On writing: “Today I reached page 203, which is almost certainly much more than two-thirds of this draft. I still haven’t the least idea what is caught in the net. It is still entirely possible that the question, ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ won’t be adequately answered. But, in all my long experience, I have never been able to find anything better than this fumbling way of getting down to the nerve” (545).

On writing: “The writer of any kind of autobiographical book is in deadly danger whenever he is trying to get from point A to point B in a hurry—when, that’s to say, he isn’t interested in what he’s immediately writing. Somehow or other, one must make such bridge passages interesting. There are many of them in my narrative, and that is really what’s worrying me” (582).

Speaking very poetically of his local geography, yet it seems to be a metaphor for his writing, his life: “I think the sun has now definitely set beyond the headland, into the sea, but can’t be certain because of how-lying clouds, I creep on with the Swami book [My Guru and His Disciple]. My old head is so thick and stupid it’s brutal. I fight my way on, sentence by sentence, and always a cold scornful remnant of reason waits for the next morning, when it looks through the latest page and says, idiot, can’t you see that the sentence ought to be the other way around, and that that adjective is utterly wrong? Are you really so senile? And it’s right—I do see it” (588).

Anecdote: “On New Year’s Eve, Don painted Rick Sandford because it was his birthday. Rick asked me, ‘How long was it after you met Don that you and he had sex?’ I said: ‘We had sex and then we met.’” (681).

As I finish reading the last few pages of this diary and absorb the editor’s statement about Isherwood’s death, I weep a little. Yes, after 2,700 pages of three diaries, I feel in a sense that I have lost a friend. I know, that is so sentimental as to be crap, the sort of thing Isherwood loathes, yet I can’t help it. And he started it! I don’t believe he would have written the diaries and left them to us if he hadn’t wished for us to know him, the good and the bad. And know him I do, at least a little.

[Bob Schnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last of Christopher Isherwood's diaries is quite a read. Of course, it ends when he does. Instead of feeling sad I felt appreciative of his thoughts on getting older and being at peace with approaching the end. Of course there are also many tales of celebrity filled dinners, art openings and parties. Isherwood was very active in the gay rights movement and his local Hindu temple, two things that didn't always go well together. On the negative side, he whines a bit about minor inconveniences and his Antisemitism gets worse with age. Still, I found it to be a fascinating read.

[Greg]

I just bought a copy. This looks amazing, a trove of insight into the 1960s and '70s.

[Miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liberation é o terceiro e último volume dos diários de Christopher Isherwood, um total de quase três mil páginas, cobrindo o período que vai de 1939, o ano em que CI chegou aos Estados Unidos, e 1983, três anos antes da sua morte, aos 82 anos de idade. Fica-me a faltar o livro Lost Years, que cobre um período de meia dúzia de anos, ali na passagem dos anos 40 para os 50. Li o primeiro volume em 2001 e o segundo em 2012. Foi uma aventura fascinante acompanhar assim a vida de um escritor de que gosto imenso, e que me tornou se calhar mais “amigo” do homem do que propriamente mais admirador do escritor, que já era e continuo a ser.

Este derradeiro volume dos diários devolve-nos o processo de envelhecimento de Isherwood, marcado por duas lutas ferozes: uma pela aceitação da morte, de acordo com os ensinamentos da sua religião e do seu swami; a outra, de não conformação com a degradação própria da senilidade, e que Isherwood compreendeu apenas poder ser travada através do seu compromisso com a literatura e com a escrita. Nas páginas finais do livro, quando a vida do autor era já marcada pela doença e pelas dificuldades e padecimentos próprios da idade, Isherwood continuava a ter ideias e projectos de novos livros, e a recriminar-se por ceder àquilo que chamava a preguiça da velhice, em vez de se sentar a trabalhar, para utilizar a sua própria expressão.

Liberation permite-nos ainda acompanhar o processo de escrita de alguns dos livros fundamentais do autor, nomeadamente de Christopher And His Kind e de My Guru And His Disciple, bem como a sua actividade como ícone do movimento gay, não só porque era, à época, das raras figuras públicas assumidas, como tinha uma relação afectiva estável que era vivida de forma aberta e sem subterfúgios.

Para além disso, há sempre doses razoáveis de gossip; Isherwood conviveu - e dormiu, no sentido bíblico do termo - com alguns dos maiores vultos da cultura, da música como das artes plásticas, do ballet (tinha uma especial predilecção por jovens bailarinos, fortes e bonitos) como do cinema (muitos aspirantes a actores passaram pela sua casa, para além das maiores estrelas de Hollywood), além, claro, de alguns dos grandes escritores do século (Auden e Forster foram seus amigos pessoais durante toda a vida).

Mais o que mais impressiona neste diários, é uma franqueza implacável que começa sempre pelo olhar dirigido a si próprio (e à qual apenas escapa, com bonomia, Don Bachardy, e apenas neste terceiro volume), uma escrita sempre perfeita e elegante, e, finalmente, uma das mais intensas e comoventes histórias de amor.

[Jeff Howells · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to Christopher Isherwood in a roundabout way. I studied Weimar Culture at Uni and have long held a fancination with that era. This led me to the musical Cabaret and that led me to Isherwood's Berlin novels and from there his diaries. I read the first two volumes on travelling back and forth from a holiday in Scotland and enjoyed them a lot. This final volume takes him from 1970 to 1983 and is just as entertaining as the earlier volumes. I have to say, generally, I tend to prefer reading about the author than reading the work and Isherwood had an interesting life taking in Indian Mysticism (long before the hippies of the sixties), Gay Liberation and Hollywood. Hardly a day goes by without him and his partner (Don Bacardy - Kitten to Isherwood's Dobbin) entertaining or being entertained by the great and the good of America. Its also interesting in documenting the aging process and how relationship change as a result (Bacardy was about 30 years younger and there's wasn't what could be called a monogamous relationship). The only unsettling thing about the book is the casual anti -semitism shown by Isherwood (a product of his time?) which doesn't sit too well considering he had experienced prejudice himself for being gay. Overall I would recommend all 3 vollumes and although it is a significant undertaking to read all 3, they are worth it.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was daunted by the size of this book when I picked it up at the library, but it was engrossing to read. There were many individuals who I knew of, and was pleased to see what books Isherwood had been reading and what movies he had watched during this period. This description of what was happening at the time was a good context for the daily routine. It is amazing to me how much they went out and entertained and seemingly were surrounded by others. Sometimes it was tiring just to read about everything Isherwood and Bacardy did. The book was mostly filled with love, and that came through.

[Damian Rees · Rating 4 out of 5]

an interesting read but very dense. like the other volumes some illustrations or photos would have been welcome. great to have these though and they appear well edited.

[Kirsten · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the book but I was also a friend and am mentioned in the book so, I guess, I am partial.

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know what it is, but I found it very difficult to put this down, even though it is a great fat hardback (I'd anticipated dipping into it between other things).

[Andrew Marshall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading the diary is like going back stage and understanding the writer. It is interesting to discover how central the diary was to his creative life and at the same time the first draft for understanding himself. The introductions from Edmund White and his editor Katherine Bucknell are excellent for explaining some of his literary techniques and who his heroes were (and what he learnt from them). It is also useful to see how he doubted himself as he wrote one of his classic books - Christopher and His Kind. Isherwood's prose might seem effortless but that's because he is continually rewriting, getting opinions from his partner (and other writers) and searching for the right adjective.

I loved the way the stary names - Bowie, Warhol, Hockney etc - mix up against the everyday ones. The most touching element is the relationship with Don Bachardy - thirty years his junior - what makes it tick (the importance of not being possessive), truly believing and nurturing each other's talent and finding shared projects (in their case writing screen plays together).

Sometimes the book was a bit of a chore to read. There are descriptions of many meals out and endless worry about earthquakes. I would have liked a better understanding of what his faith in Hinduism meant to him (here it feels full of gossip from the Vedanata Centre) but perhaps I need to read My Guru and His Disciple to understand that more. My greatest regret is that the diary ends a couple of years before he died of cancer - so there is only a small section where he reflects on mortality (beyond his faith's constant exhortation to meditate on your death).

However, I was left being grateful for spending so much time with someone who was brave at a time when most gay men were still hiding. I hope some of it rubs off on me.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-written, thought-filled reflections from Isherwood's late life. He's un-self-conscious, maybe too much so given his prejudicial tendencies. It makes a good description of the life of an aging gay man in a long-term relationship in a friendlyish place (LA/Hollywood) at a less friendly historical time.

[Esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

As fascinating as ever. Good snippets on Hockney, Celia, E.M Forster, Tony Richardson, Spender etc . The 1970s LA scene, plays, movies and the development of Don’s art. Their relationship is so touching to read about.

[Gaydon Phillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

A long book. I found myself skipping bits, to get to what interested me most.

[David Guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have now read all three volumes of Christopher Isherwood's diaries, a monumental task. Years ago a friend told me they would be great when they finally came out, and if not great they are at least quite good.

Isherwood is one of the few really good writers who took diaries seriously. He engaged in Vedantic practice, read a lot of good books, talked about his writing projects, knew all kinds of literary and movie people. The gossip alone is pretty interesting, along with his frank opinions on a host of matters.

In this volume he is particularly concerned with getting older, and with being a burden for his much younger companion, Don Bachardy. It sounds as if he eventually may have been a bit of a burden. But he lived a good and productive life. I recommend all three volumes (total of nearly 2200 pages)