The Sixties: Diaries, 1960-1969

When Isherwood starts the new volume of his diary, it was 1960 and he was spending his 56th birthday with his partner, Don Bachardy, along with Hope Lange and Glenn Ford, whose hug Isherwood finds insincere. By the end, he's finished Down There on a Visit, written A Meeting at the River and A Single Man, pages of diaries, numerous screenplays, and books and articles for the Vedanta Society, home of his guru, all while convinced that he's slacking off. He's dined with Igor and Vera Stravinsky, Tony Richardson, Jennifer Jones, Truman Capote, and W.H. Auden, to name a few. He's started transcribing his parents' diaries and letters, visited Australia, Tahiti, India, New York, and England, repeatedly forsworn drinking and smoking, gone to the doctor and the gym, seen friends die, read an astonishing number of books, and worried about the Cuban missile crisis and the Negro problem. Like all diaries, his (usefully annotated by Katherine Bucknell) is best dipped into; it's gossipy, funny, wide-ranging, and revealing. Though Isherwood isn't always appealing—and is casually anti-Semitic throughout—he comes across as approachable, aware, and passionately interested. (Nov.)