His voice sounds like the infamous mother's in
Psycho, the product of
an uneasy truce between American and British accents; at about five feet tall,
the stand-on-end silver hair of his crewcut neatly defines his frenetic and
witty (Isherwood calls him "overenergetic") artist`s presence. And if you
dispel the creepy connotations involved with
Psycho, you ought to
believe the claim that Don Bachardy, who still occupies the home in Santa
Monica that he shared with Isherwood, had his audience in the palm of his hand
at BookPeople in early March. He brought an easy eloquence to his reading of
one week's worth of Isherwood's diary entries from February 1956, when
Bachardy, 21, and Isherwood, 51, returned briefly to England, Isherwood to his
family home Wysberslegh Hall, the 15th-century manor house where he was born,
and Bachardy to London, where he embarked upon writing a play. Bachardy's
choice of incident was telling because the entries show Isherwood missing
Bachardy, musing on upper-middle class English mores, and deploring the fact
that he was in "confinement" with his family for a week. Thus, through
Isherwood's paternal and romantic thoughts about Bachardy -- what he elsewhere
in the diary calls "this sinking-sick feeling of love for Don" -- the audience
was afforded the rare spectacle of watching Bachardy read observations never
really intended for publication on his own personality, written some 40 years
ago.
After reading, Bachardy answered the audience's questions, each one of which
seemed to provoke some story about the famous people Bachardy knows, and
Bachardy revels in telling a good story. Has Bachardy, for example, ever
experienced homophobia living in what would appear to be a rarefied artist's
milieu? Questions about Isherwood's friendship with Auden, and, thankfully,
questions about Bachardy himself, whether he actually wrote a play that week in
London and what it was about. These latter questions provided what was perhaps
the evening's finest recognition -- that Bachardy, though an eager chronicler
of Isherwood's life and a patient source of information about him, has plenty
of his own stories to tell. -- C.K.H.S.
