Volume 23, Number 20 · December 9, 1976
Art, Sex and Isherwood
By Gore Vidal
Christopher and His Kind: 1929-1939
by Christopher Isherwood
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 339 pp., $10.00
In 1954 I had lunch with Christopher Isherwood at MGM. He told me that he had just written a film for Lana Turner. The subject? Diane de Poitiers. When I laughed, he shook his head. 'Lana can do it,' he said grimly. Later, as we walked about the lot and I told him that I hoped to get a job as a writer at the studio since I could no longer live on my royalties as a novelist (and would not teach), Christopher gave me as melancholy a look as those bright—even harsh—blue eyes can affect. 'Don't,' he said with great intensity, posing against the train beneath whose wheels Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina made her last dive, 'become a hack like me.' But we both knew that this was play-acting. Like his friend Aldous Huxley (like William Faulkner and many others), he has been able to write to order for movies while never ceasing to do his own work in his own way. Those whom Hollywood destroyed were never worth saving. Not only has Isherwood written successfully for the camera, he has been, notoriously, in his true art, the camera.
Review, 4678 words
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