24

Christopher Isherwood Meets William Burroughs

Christopher Isherwood has flown overnight from Los Angeles and is in town for four days to promote Christopher And His Kind (Farrar Straus & Giroux $10). When I meet him at the Algonquin at 6 pm, he has not slept for 24 hours but shows no sign of strain. At 72, he appears fit and trim, looks younger than his years and seems buoyant about the attention Christopher And His Kind is receiving. He is here with his friend of the last twenty years, the artist Don Bachardy. Both wear casual ties, jackets, slacks, buckle shoes, and bracelets. Before walking out into the street to get a cab, Christopher puts on a double-breasted tan military-style raincoat and as the taxi pulls away in the direction of the Bowery, he begins the conversation by noticing my Qantas flight bag. I ask him if he’s ever been to Australia.

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD: Several years ago. Tony Richardson was making that ill-fated Ned Kelly picture with Mick Jagger. We had an awful lot of fun. The journey down was wonderful. We flew to Tahiti, and then we went over to Bora Bora, and then we went to Western Samoa, then we had a sort of peep at Auckland, and finally got to Australia. And, of course, they were shooting out in the back country which – although it’s not very far from Canberra – might just as well have been the proper outback. It’s so empty there when you get outside. We were working on another project, so we made an excuse to make it into a business trip.

BACHARDY: Well, it actually was a business trip because he wanted the script right away.

BOCKRIS: Was that the Frankenstein film?

BACHARDY: No, it was a script of I Claudius that he was going to make. It was only prevented by his not being able to raise the money. He wanted Mick Jagger to play Caligula. And, actually, I think, after Ned Kelly, he and Jagger had a falling out, so it was then very difficult to raise money. He wanted Nichol Williams to play the part of Claudius. Apparently this new one that he’s just finished Joseph Andrews is ah … I hear nothing but good things about it. Even he is pleased. And he’s the first one to talk his own work down.

ISHERWOOD: Oh we’re great admirers of several pictures of his, even ones that haven’t done very well, like Mademoiselle. Did you ever see that? It was quite extraordinary.

BACHARDY: It’s one of the films he made with Jeanne Moreau.

ISHERWOOD: I worked on The Loved One several years ago with him. As a whole it was a mess, but it had very amusing things in it. Some by Waugh and some just completely invented from elsewhere. It sort of rambled about all over the place.

BOCKRIS: It’s rare that people make good movies out of really good books though, isn’t it?

ISHERWOOD: Yes, I think it is. I happened not to like that particular Waugh nearly as much as some of the others. It doesn’t hold up very well. There’s a lot of plain old rather boring kind of anti-Americanism, anti-Californiaism. But we had the most awful amount of fun making it.

The cab pulls over on the deserted Bowery. It’s very cold outside.

BOCKRIS: This is it right here. (Cab stops in front of the locked iron gate of William Burroughs’ headquarters, referred to by himself and his entourage as ‘The Bunker’). A foreboding entrance, but this is it. We can all hop out. (Pays cab) Give me twenty cents! Let’s see … thanks a lot.

CAB DRIVER: THANK YOU.

BOCKRIS: (On street) Now. It’s rather hard to get in here sometimes, it depends on whether the gate’s open or not. Ah … the gate’s not open. We have to go across to this bar here and telephone. Hope you don’t mind …

BACHARDY: And he comes down and …

BOCKRIS: He comes down and unlocks the gate, yeah; it’s not too frightening.

BACHARDY: Is that because it’s a bad part of town?

BOCKRIS: Well, I mean, I don’t think that’s the reason actually that they have it locked. It’s just that it’s a big building and they lock the gate. He doesn’t personally lock it.

We walk across the street to a bar half a block away. Icy wind. People wrapped in blankets leer out of doorways.

BOCKRIS: Now this bar’s perfectly safe, perfectly safe. (Open door, go into bar, loud noises of laughing, shouting, breaking glass, screams.) I’m going to run to the back! (Christopher and Don run very close behind. Voices from various conversations appear on tape: “That’s my two dollars” etc.) Is there a telephone in the bar?

BARTENDER: Nope.

BOCKRIS: (Surprised) There’s not a telephone in the bar?

BARTENDER: No. There’s one right there across the street.

BOCKRIS: Oh, okay, fine, thank you. Little mistake there. (We thread back out of the bar stepping over a maze of broken glass, sawdust, blood and spittle and come out into street.)

ISHERWOOD: (Gleefully) It’s so Eugene O’Neill it’s not true.

BOCKRIS: (Running across street) Can we make this? I think we can. Just! (Christopher is dodging cabs beside me.) Right, here we go again. (Open door into second bar. Repeat of above atmosphere. Voices drift in and out of the tape: “You and me are gonna meet tomorrow, you better believe it! When your friend ain’t around. I’ve had enough of your shit! All your goddam friends!”) This is part of seeing William Burroughs though, isn’t it? (VOICE: “You’re just a Puerto Rican Irish punk.” VOICE: “Now wait a minute …”) (On phone) Hi! James. We’re down on the corner here … righto … (hang up) Okay, they’re coming down (walk out into street). Is it worse to be a drug addict or an alcoholic do you think?

ISHERWOOD: God, I don’t know, ah … I never tried either.

BOCKRIS: You do see more alcoholics in the world, generally, in these kind of areas, completely broken up, which means, I suppose, that either drug addicts just die or else they don’t get in such bad shape.

ISHERWOOD: I’ve drunk rather a lot during my life, but I never came anywhere near to being an alcoholic. I don’t know why, I guess it’s just …

BOCKRIS: Here we are. James! (Burroughs’ secretary James Grauerholz appears behind the iron door with a key.)

GRAUERHOLZ: How do you do?

VOICE IN STREET: Ah shut up!

BOCKRIS: (Stepping aside) Don Bachardy, James Grauerholz. Christopher Isherwood, James …

GRAUERHOLZ: It’s a little bitter out there.

BOCKRIS: It’s getting really cold and it’s going to get colder. (Walk up a flight of stone steps) I’ll lead the way (walking into William Burroughs’ spacious apartment). I love this white floor. Isn’t it spacious? Hi Bill, nice to see you.

BURROUGHS: Nice to see you.

BOCKRIS: Christopher Isherwood, William Burroughs, Don Bachardy … (shake hands, nod, smile)

BURROUGHS: Why don’t you take off your coats gentlemen. (All put coats in Bill’s room next to his pajamas which are lying neatly folded on his bed, come back into living room and sit around large conference table that Burroughs has in the kitchen section of his apartment, in a series of office style orange armchairs.)

GRAUERHOLZ: Can I get you a drink?

EVERYBODY: YES!

ISHERWOOD: (Looking around) This is a marvelous place.

BURROUGHS: There are no windows. On the other hand there’s no noise. This whole building was a YMCA. This used to be the locker room. The man upstairs has the gymnasium and downstairs is the swimming pool. It’s a furniture shop now.

BOCKRIS: Where are sort of the mass bathrooms and things like that? Are there big rows of urinals?

BURROUGHS: Well there are two urinals right in there (pointing toward bathroom). That’s possibly all they had.

BOCKRIS: This is a real flying visit for you, you’re just in for three days?

ISHERWOOD: Yes, we have to go back on Saturday. It’s terrible.

BOCKRIS: Do you always come to New York when you have a book out?

ISHERWOOD: No, not really. I forget. Well, I did last time, that’s right, but, no, they were just very good in that sort of way, they really get behind all that. (Turning to Burroughs) I’m going through a phase of being very pleased with Farrar Straus and Giroux, they seem to be interested in a really kind of behind you in your corner way.

BOCKRIS: Roger Straus has a great reputation for giving great parties. Did you see Christopher’s new book?

BURROUGHS: No, I haven’t seen it.

BOCKRIS: Oh, I should show you a copy. I have a copy here. It’s a very beautiful book. (Go into bedroom where book is in flight bag.)

ISHERWOOD: People like it. I found the cover a little too elegant. The cover’s a sort of pearl grey and it’s got a drawing … well you’ll see it.

BURROUGHS: Did they let you have anything to do with the cover?

ISHERWOOD: Well, yeah, in a way. They asked me.

(Re-enter from bedroom, give Burroughs a copy of Christopher Isherwood’s new book which is a fascinating revisionist memoir of his early years in Berlin, collaboration with Auden, trip to China, etc, ending with his arrival in America in 1939.)

GRAUERHOLZ: I read an excerpt from this in Christopher Street.

ISHERWOOD: Oh that’s right yes. I think we have the beginning of the book in there and there’s also a bit in Blueboy. We did an absolute onslaught on the gay press because, after all, that’s where our readers are. You must never forget that if one in every hundred gays bought a book of yours, you’d have absolutely smashing sales. You’d have about a hundred thousand copies.

BURROUGHS: I see that your South American book The Condor and The Cow isn’t mentioned here.

ISHERWOOD: You read it?

BURROUGHS: Oh, indeed I did, because I went to all the same places.

ISHERWOOD: Oh, really? How exciting?

BURROUGHS: Yes.

ISHERWOOD: It might be over the page.

BURROUGHS: There were some great photos. Oh yes, here it is. Travel Books, yes indeed, sorry. Great photos. You knew, you knew Baron Wolfner, wasn’t he a character in Mr Norris? (Mr. Norris Changes Trains, Isherwood’s third novel that made him famous overnight in the early Thirties.)

ISHERWOOD: Yes, Von Pregnitz he’s called.

BURROUGHS: Right, Von Pregnitz.

ISHERWOOD: Wolfner wasn’t at all pleased. There was an insinuation that he thought I was attractive. This was when I was very young, of course. I did it really for purely dramatic reasons, I wasn’t really …

GRAUERHOLZ: That’s really a revelation because William has told me various tales about Baron Wolfner. You knew him, didn’t you see him in Yugoslavia, is that the same period?

BURROUGHS: Knew him around Budapest.

ISHERWOOD: Well, please tell me because I heard that he was a sort of extreme sado-masochistic voyeur, that he liked to see people being beaten up. I don’t really know, this may be terribly libelous. I mean by beaten up, really beaten up.

BURROUGHS: I think so yeah. But he had …

ISHERWOOD: Sort of gang …

BURROUGHS: Well, he had this sort of English public school veneer.

ISHERWOOD: He had a monocle screwed into his face, no ribbon, no security …

BURROUGHS: He died in London, I think …

ISHERWOOD: Oh really?

BURROUGHS: Yes, he escaped …

ISHERWOOD: Did he have a name was he sometimes called Yanchi?

BURROUGHS: Yanchi.

ISHERWOOD: Yanchi.

BOCKRIS: Sort of a nickname or something?

ISHERWOOD: Well, I suppose it was a diminutive, um …

BURROUGHS: It was simply his first name.

ISHERWOOD: Oh was it? I didn’t know Yanchi was a first name.

BOCKRIS: The South American book of yours is the only one out of print isn’t it?

ISHERWOOD: They’re all out of print.

BOCKRIS: No they’re not. No they’re not.

ISHERWOOD: It’s got to the point now where that’s going to be a Spring offensive.

BURROUGHS: Very good.

BOCKRIS: But your books are all in print in England, perhaps that’s what I mean.

ISHERWOOD: Oh yes, in England they are in paperback. But it got to a point here where there was almost nothing whatever except the New Directions Berlin books and they were unobtainable because New Directions has awful distribution. But now Farrar Straus are going to bring some out in their paperback series. Well, I made that rather a condition in a way, because I got tired of getting letters from people saying how can I get a copy of A Single Man, and I’m sure probably libraries have them stolen, so they are absolutely unobtainable. And that was one of the reasons I left Simon & Schuster.

BOCKRIS: Are you doing a second volume of this up until the present time?

ISHERWOOD: Oh, well, it would be much more than one volume. I have an awful lot of diaries. As soon as I came to this country I really started keeping diaries quite a bit and I suppose there are about three books that would come out. But actually I’m very interested at the moment in writing about our guru who just died, this Hindu monk, and I think I might write that first.

BOCKRIS: Is someone knocking?

BURROUGHS: Yes. Yes.

BOCKRIS: I’ll get it.

BURROUGHS: I think it’s a very beautiful …

ISHERWOOD: Hum?

BURROUGHS: I think it’s a very well set-up book, really very well set-up.

ISHERWOOD: Oh good, I’m glad. Don did two drawings for the back and the one that they used we both feel now is too noble and the other one is just sort of a mad old man with one eye – it looks very funny at night – which we’re going to have on the British edition.

BURROUGHS: Will it have a different title?

ISHERWOOD: No, no. No, no. (Allen Ginsberg’s secretary Richard Elovich arrives.)

BURROUGHS: Ah Richard! Would you like a drink?

ELOVICH: A beer.

GRAUERHOLZ: Then we probably ought to head out.

BOCKRIS: Right. Is it very near here where we’re going? (We’ve been invited to dinner at a nearby loft.)

BURROUGHS: Well, it’s sort of betwixt and between, almost too near to take a cab and too far to walk. I don’t mind walking really. It’s about eight blocks or something.

BOCKRIS: Well Christopher enjoyed going into those bars across the street, didn’t you?

ISHERWOOD: Oh, yeah, it was fantastic. I had been there ages ago. It was just so incredibly classic. I mean it was just so absolutely The Iceman Cometh, and then they were having fights in both bars. One fight seemed very serious, coming up in the absolutely classic fashion, very dangerous … But I was, I felt hardly dressed for it, if you know what I mean. I once got stuck absolutely in the midst of Harlem because the taxi driver lost the way and I was dressed up to go to The Institute of Arts and Letters, so I had a sort of something in my hand. I think it was a briefcase, and I said to myself, because I had to go into a bar to phone, I said “You’re a Doctor!” and I rushed in in the way I imagine a doctor getting very quickly through to the hospital because his patient … and sort of “don’t bother me!” They didn’t like it at all. Oh it’s a terrible feeling. At least I imagined it was a terrible feeling, but you can’t possibly tell unless something happens to you … We’ve been in Morocco quite …

BURROUGHS: Oh, really, where?

ISHERWOOD: Well, we went to see Gavin Lambert, who was plowing cachia, and then he took us around on a bit of a tour. We went to Shawan and Fez and Marrakesh, and then out to the coast where we saw Paul Bowles.

BURROUGHS: Oh, how was Paul?

ISHERWOOD: He was in a very good mood, very sort of benign, and also Mrabet was there. And, it amuses me – I don’t know why it was quite so funny – but there was a young man, quite a young guy, who was sort of obviously just learning the ropes, the sort of Tangier ropes, and he had a pipe, a kif pipe, which he was very proud of and he brought this thing out with great circumstance. You know, he wanted to draw attention to it, and then he said to me – and I suddenly thought it was just like a Victorian scene in a drawing room – he said to me “Do you mind if I smoke?” And I said – just like a Victorian lady – I said “Not at all, I love the smell of it.” And then, of course, the poor boy could not get the pipe to light. It was thoroughly embarrassing. And sort of he was trying to be very salty with his … and the damn thing simply wouldn’t work.

BOCKRIS: I had no idea Sally Bowles was named after Paul Bowles until I read it in this book. I never thought of it. It’s so obvious if you think of it.

ISHERWOOD: Well, I mean, it’s just that I hardly knew him, I just thought he was very cute. He was twenty. I just sort of picked around for a name and it was going around in my head, you know, and what would go with Bowles, oh Sally Bowles, that’s it! But Paul said in his autobiography that I was superior. I suppose I was, what, about 26 – and he was 20.

BOCKRIS: Where did you meet him?

ISHERWOOD: In Berlin.

BURROUGHS: My first visit to Berlin was not long ago, two months …

ISHERWOOD: (Very intrigued) How did it seem to you?

BURROUGHS: Well I’d never seen it before and I went there for a reading with Allen Ginsberg and Susan Sontag, and I went and saw the Wall. The area between the East and the West is populated by thousands of rabbits.

ISHERWOOD: Don’t the guards shoot them?

BURROUGHS: It would be very improper.

ISHERWOOD: Does it seem menacing now?

BURROUGHS: Well you could see that it could be menacing (chuckling) if you did the wrong thing.

ISHERWOOD: But they don’t mind tourists coming and gaping?

BURROUGHS: No, no. Tourists come and gape and they have sort of platforms where they can go up and see the Wall.

ISHERWOOD: But do people come through still or they don’t?

BURROUGHS: I just don’t know. I guess someone did. Allen went over to see some poet who was in bad graces with the Communist Party. And we also saw Beckett. Beckett was living in the Academy building.

ISHERWOOD: Oh, really?

BURROUGHS: Yes, in the Tiergarten. He gave us an audience for about twenty minutes.

ISHERWOOD: I always imagined Beckett was somewhere always living in France.

BURROUGHS: Well he was just there to direct his play. John Calder, my publisher, was there and he said, well, he would see us all briefly. All, by all I mean Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, Fred Jordan, Professor Hollerer and your reporter. An audience.

BACHARDY: Has he been directing his plays for a long time?

BURROUGHS: Yes, yes, indeed, he always directs his plays. He feels he’s the only one competent to do it. According to John Calder, he’s really a brilliant director. I’ve never seen what he’s directed.

GRAUERHOLZ: I was curious to know whether you’ve been doing anything in the movie business recently?

ISHERWOOD: I was commissioned to adapt Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel The Beautiful and the Damned and it came out awfully well, we felt, and we really preserved the book. The dialogue was between 70–80% Fitzgerald, and everybody liked it, and then, suddenly, there was a change up in the higher office and they decided no more Fitzgerald. A bad bet! He’s done for! Or something.

BOCKRIS: But, you know, Gatsby made money. They made money before it came out, from selling rights.

BURROUGHS: I cannot believe that they made money on that film.

BOCKRIS: Well, I can understand your attitude, but I read in Time Magazine that just through selling all sorts of rights they broke even. Is The Last Tycoon also a flop?

ISHERWOOD: It was better than we expected.

BOCKRIS: Did you basically enjoy it?

ISHERWOOD: Well, I, I, I mean, I was a bit bored with a lot of it.

BURROUGHS: It’s always been my contention that the best movies based on books are made from bad books. Treasure of The Sierra Madre: great film, the book … Marathon Man’s a great film and the book is … Because you don’t have anything in the way. You just have to say (demonstrating with his hands) “Well, here’s the idea,” and you can handle it anyway you want, you don’t have to defend the classics. I always thought Fitzgerald is not for the movies. That dialogue is wooden, the plot is nothing. It’s all in the prose that can’t be gotten onto the screen – like the last three pages of this great English prose. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not a movie.

ISHERWOOD: Oh absolutely yes. I think it’s unmakeable.

BURROUGHS: And then I can think of any number of bad or second-rate novels that would make great films.

BOCKRIS: The only book of yours that’s been done as a movie is Goodbye to Berlin, right?

ISHERWOOD: Yes, I mean that really was, I don’t know, there are other things that could have been done, I think, like A Single Man might …

BOCKRIS: But you had two movies out of that book and a couple of Broadway shows?

ISHERWOOD: Yes.

BACHARDY: All that remains is a TV series.

ISHERWOOD: Have they ever filmed any of your books?

BURROUGHS: No.

BOCKRIS: Aren’t they considering Junky? Isn’t that on the boards?

BURROUGHS: Oh no, it’s not on the boards at all.

BOCKRIS: You know Penguin is re-publishing Junky this February. They’re doing it in the original version. The version that was published in ’53 was heavily censored …

As the conversation breaks up James Grauerholz suggests we move on to dinner: “Shall we go?” Christopher and Don go into the bathroom. We all mill around getting our coats on and generally arranging ourselves. A lot of shouting back and forth.

BOCKRIS: Are they in the urinals? (Going into urinals with tape recorder.) Is this an inspection of the urinals here?

ISHERWOOD: Yes.

BOCKRIS: This is an unusual bathroom isn’t it? It’s nice, roomy. (Coming back into living room.) This is a great typewriter too. What kind of typewriter do you have?

BURROUGHS: Oh it’s just an old Olympia.

BOCKRIS: It’s one of the best typewriters ever made. I have one of these myself … (All walk downstairs and into the street. A stirring icy wind is blowing down the Bowery.)

BURROUGHS: I’m sort of partial to walking. I think by the time we got a cab … it’s easier this way. (To Isherwood) The way to walk is just lean forward like this (Burroughs leans into the wind).

I knew Robert Mapplethorpe before he was famous. He was one of the most fascinating people to talk to among my generation. That’s why I taped this piece on the way to the airport with him. Along with Hell/Sontag, The Captain’s Cocktail Party and the Isherwood/Burroughs, it best evokes those far away, halcyon days in the Seventies when life still seemed infinitely rich with opportunity, creativity and joy. This whole book is about heroes. Robert was one of my biggest heroes.