![]() ![]() "Ah yes," said Bachardy when we met last week in the London home of Katherine Bucknell, the editor of Isherwood's diaries, the second volume of which, The Sixties, is published this month. Bachardy still lives in the house, jutting out towards the ocean into Santa Monica canyon, that they acquired exactly 51 years ago. Despite the improbability of the union, they stayed together – after a long period of tantrums, trial separations and retaliatory sexual bouts with third parties, all part of a power struggle between two very self-willed men – until Isherwood's death in 1986. A decade later, Isherwood calculated that his bedmates and casual lays numbered "somewhere in the four hundreds", but in 1952 he met his archetypal American Boy, Don Bachardy. ![]() When he and Auden emigrated to America in 1939, the pederastic search resumed. The troops of likely lads he sampled were all candidates for the role of "The German Boy, the representative of his race" he wanted, literally, to embrace "the mystery-magic of foreignness". ![]() Isherwood capitalised the plural noun because his quest was allegorical. "To Christopher," he admitted, "Berlin meant Boys." Actually, there was another motive, about which Isherwood came clean much later in an autobiography written in the third person. I n 1929 Christopher Isherwood followed his crony WH Auden to Berlin, supposedly to consult a psychotherapist who mocked morality and licensed self-indulgence. ![]()
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