LGBT Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing books that have made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any book that touches on LGBT themes is welcome in this series. LGBT Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a Kosmail to Chrislove.
I’ve put words to all kinds of paper for most of my life; lined paper, unlined paper, construction paper, the back of store receipts and envelopes, etc. The act of writing has always been both an emptying the mind and an emotional catharsis (and not simply for the typical Aristotelian “cathartic” emotions of pity and fear). I’ve always felt that written records had a sort of...grandeur (?) to them. I’ve always been fascinated by them.
I began keeping my own personal journals as a result of a class assignment that I received in my 11th grade English class. I no longer have those journals (I think that I threw them out!) but I do recall the rough trajectory of those journals from the most humdrum matters at school and home to my most personal and intimate thoughts. At some point, those journals ceased to be merely a class assignment or even an extra credit assignment (I didn’t need the extra credit in my English class); I simply could not stop writing in them.
My teacher, Mr. D., would occasionally write his own commentary and feedback in those journals. I did not mind that at all; in fact, I was grateful for it because I’ve always considered myself to be rather clumsy as far as what I say out of my mouth; somehow, whatever I was saying was always being misconstrued or even (as storytelling can occasionally be) exaggerated. (That preference for the written word-my own written words- over spoken language-my own spoken language- survives to this day.)
Those journals were also where I first acknowledged that I was having sex with one of my classmates. This classmate also happened to be one of the most popular persons in my high school class; I happened to be one of the most unpopular so much of “the drama” of those early journals of mine was an attempt to reconcile why this person was even attracted to (or simply horny for) me.
(Which also means that Mr. D., I think, was the first person that I told that I was gay...I began to tell selected other people that I was gay as a result of those journals).
Later, while living in Washington D.C., in the late 1980’s, I loved hanging out at Kramerwords/Afterwords and a gay bookstore right down the street from K/A. At one of those locations I ran across The Journals of Andre Gide (I think that I ran across the Gide journals in the gay bookstore because I knew that if the author was in the bookstore, that he was gay). What I found most remarkable at the time, though, was that anyone’s personal journals/diaries were even a public record.
Later during that time I lived in D.C., I also read Ned Rorem’s The Paris Diary & The New York Diary 1951-1961. Rorem’s diaries made an immediate impression on me for two primary reasons. One, he wrote rather candidly about his life as a gay man (a subject which Gide’s journals barely mentioned). Two, Rorem also wrote rather candidly of his struggles with alcoholism; I vaguely knew at that time that I, too, had my struggles with alcoholic drinking even if I didn’t know a damn thing that I could do about it (nor did I want to).
Of course, Rorem’s incessant gossip about everyone that he knew and what he knew of them doing was also a bonus.
When I first ran across Volume 1 of the diaries of Christopher Isherwood in the late 1990’s, I did not know all that much about the author. I knew that he had written The Berlin Stories; two novels that were mildly autobiographical that were set in late Weimar Berlin. I knew that one of those stories, Goodbye to Berlin, was the basis of the musical and film Cabaret. And I knew, of course, of his long-time relationship with artist Don Bachardy (the 30 year age difference between Isherwood and Bachardy was quite a scandal, of course).
I’d tried to read The Berlin Stories once, didn’t particularly care for it, and placed it on my bookshelf to gather dust by that time.
So when I first opened the Isherwood tome that day in a Lakeview Border’s bookstore in Chicago, I wasn’t quite sure what I expected.
Some of the very chatty gossip that I remembered from my reading of Rorem over a decade before.
Occasional literary musings and accounts of the events of the day.
All of the fabulous Hollywood cocktail parties and a who’s who of the Hollywood establishment of that time.
Maybe even a few of the outrageously sexy stories of random pickups anywhere at anytime that I’d read in Joe Orton’s diaries (which I believe I had read by then).
And...sure, there’s a bit of all that in Isherwood’s diaries.
But then, there are observations like this:
July 23, 1943- ...On the beach, I noticed a very handsome blond young man, lounging on the sand talking to some girls, in an attitude of such imperious elegance that it was downright funny. As I came up from the ocean after swimming, the girls were getting into a car and the by was just rising to his feet. He braced one leg, brown and muscular, and stood up—and then I saw that other leg hung quite useless, quite tiny, withered and crooked as a scythe. And now the boy’’s face looked entirely different. I was nicer, kinder and more mature, and there were lines of pain across the mouth.
Or this:
June 5, 1958- ...Who are you—who writes this? Why do you want to write? Is it a compulsion? Or an alibi-to disprove the charge of what crime? What am I, I wonder? God seems very real but very remote. Daily life seems very remote but very near. Don is real, but I take him for granted. I ought to be far, far more interested in him. I don’t mean-for his sake; for mine. Through him I could understand a lot.
Oh Lord, help me to understand where I am going. Take me up high and show me my life.
Definitely the touch of an established writer and, perhaps, even the results of light editing.
But Isherwood’s humanity, the self-doubt, the self-questioning, the growing and continuing to grow as a writer and a human being; this is a man that knows that, in spite of all his success (and by the beginning of Volume 1 of The Diaries in 1939, Isherwood was already quite successful), not only has he not “arrived” anywhere.
I can’t even imagine reading anything like this in, say, Gore Vidal ( I suspect that GV’s diaries were ever published, we’d read even more self-descriptions of his patrician beauty than we already read in his essays and memoirs) or Joe Orton (who, alas, didn’t live long enough to approach this type of introspection).
The name-dropping can be a bit much (although I don’t find it to be anywhere near as ostentatious as, say, Andy Warhol in his journals).
And while Swami Prabhavananda, in a sense, is the dropping of another famous name in Isherwood’s Hollywood circles, he took the teachings and suggestions of the Swami quite seriously. Many of Isherwood’s entries (especially the earlier ones) consists of his talks with the Swami and his notes based on those talks.
Oftentimes, the publishing of journals and/or diaries of prominent men reveals a bit of a monster beneath the veneer of public persona and fame (e.g. the diaries of H.L. Mencken).
What I hope to continue to reveal in these studies is that, for LGBT folk (we who have only until very recently had the public persona of being “monsters” by “normal society) the writing of diaries and journals were (and are, perhaps) one of the primary ways that we can acknowledge that we are, indeed, in fact, as fully human as anyone.
IMO, diaries and journals are, perhaps, as important a literary genre for LGBT folk as autobiographies are for African Americans (and other POC, for that matter)...and for many of the same reasons.
Christopher Isherwood’s diaries are one of the broadest and most detailed records of one man’s painstaking effort to assert his own humanity.
And it is one of the finest records of LGBT humanity, as well.
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