The Dead Poet Project Advances

One of the reasons I started this blog was to talk a little bit about the process of writing. Specifically, the fracking difficulty of it.

Seriously, I’ve been stymied by some aspects of my Dead Poet Project, as seen in a previous post.

Having called in reinforcements in the person of sometime collaborator, Dr. Freeman, I am happy to report that progress is being made. In fact, the good doctor and I have taken the next step in the research process by going to The Source.

(Now you Buffy fans might be thinking of The Source of All Evil, but really, is this a Buffy Blog? No. Thank you. Back to our regular programming.)

In this case, I mean one of the only primary sources left to ask questions about the relationship between Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden. Yes, it’s true. We interviewed The Widow, also know as Don Bachardy, an accomplished visual artist and writer.

Considering Dr. Freeman and I have known Bachardy for about ten years, this is not in itself a great feat. We’ve each interviewed him on numerous occasions. He’s provided help and support for our previous Isherwood projects.

And we’ve each been painted by him. A portrait of yours truly was even on display in an exhibit of Bachardy paintings in the fall of 2007, shortly after I moved to California.

The author, the painter, and the painting, October 2007.

Scholars of recently deceased writers will warn you about Reliance on the Widow. One famous poet, now also sadly deceased, even wrote as much to us about our first Isherwood project. We thought him catty.

Literary widows can have their own agenda, and sometimes this is hard to manage. Often, however, they see themselves as Keepers of the Flame. For some, that takes a lot of energy and time. And fanning.

So what makes this most recent conversation significant?

Mr. Bachardy was very forthcoming about the relationship between the DP and Isherwood. He was also informative about his own relationship with the DP and the DP’s longtime lover, Chester Kallman.

In the fifteen years or so since Isherwood died, Bachardy has done extraordinary work to keep Isherwood’s work available and to encourage scholarship on that work. He has made Isherwood’s papers available at the Huntington Library in San Marino. Through the creation of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, he has established a fund for scholars to visit the Huntington to view the archive.

The Japanese garden at the Huntington.

So, given all the caveats about Reliance on the Widow, without the good intentions and deeds of this particular widow, we would know much less about Isherwood than we do now. And that would be a shame.