by Gregg Chadwick
"Isherwood’s early stories and poems were the first I read that spoke directly and personally to a teenage boy who was struggling to find his own voice, his own individuality as a writer as well as his own place in the world. I gobbled up his “Goodbye to Berlin” and “Mr. Norris Changes Trains” as though I had written them myself. Later combined as “The Berlin Stories”, they were clearly fiction only in name, novels that so intimately described personal experience that their main character was called, frankly, Christopher. As a writer, Isherwood saw himself as the hub of everything that happened around him and his work invited this young admirer, gave him permission to do the same."
Like Peter Clothier, I began reading Isherwood when I was in my late teens. I was at UCLA and became intrigued by Isherwood and Bachardy while looking at reproductions of David Hockney's 1968 portrait of the two of them.
On the occasion of a brilliant reading of Isherwood and Bachardy's letters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's MetLiveArts, actor Simon Callow said this about the portrait:
"When David first painted it, he and Christopher were beacons as gay men who were comfortably and unapologetically out at a time when that was very uncommon. It was the apparent effortlessness of it that made it so striking: their relationship was no big deal, they seemed to be saying. So this wonderful double portrait of a gay couple was, in its cool and unaggressive way, an affirmation of the normality of homosexuality, which was somehow even more radical than the already gathering voices of the militants. In a sense, Hockney and Isherwood and Bachardy were saying: 'Some people are gay. Get over it.' Like its 18th-century models, the portrait celebrates the quotidian: being gay doesn't have to be a drama."
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