Isherwood (con't from page 20)

parties, practiced his Vedanta, usually allied himself with a sexual partner or a sexual friend, and hobnobbed with famous people. He has the rare distinction of fleeing from the ultra-elusive Greta Garbo, with him and his housemate hiding under a table when her unannounced visits became cumbersome. And he has the dubious distinction, while in a highly intoxicated state, of peeing on Charlie Chaplin's sofa.

Christopher also, through the years, associated with writer Thomas Mann and his family, writer Aldous Huxley, writer Gerald Heard, sexologist Dr. Evelyn Hooker, and screenwriter Salka Viertel (present mother-in law of Deborah Kerr); who held something of a salon in Santa Monica Canyon composed mostly of intellectual European emigres. Christopher's life is full of famous names, but he also had friends who weren't celebrities, such as sometime architect Jim Charlton.

At the age of forty-eight Christopher began an alliance with eighteen-year-old Don Bachardy. Over a quarter of a century later they are still logether, and the reader has the eeling that Christopher brought up Bachardy well. He went to colege, became an artist, and later collaborated with Christopher on he television film, "Frankentein: the True Story," and the Iramatization of Christopher's lovel, "A Meting by the River" which on Broadway this past March closed after two weeks of

previews).

Christopher often felt like a father to some of the boys with whom he had alliances. Sometimes, particularly in friendships it appears, he saw himself as an older concerned brother to younger men,as with the comparatively young Tennessee Williams; and he was instramental in helping with John Rechy get his first novel, "City of Night," published.

Now seventy-four years old, Christopher is something of a gay cult figure. In his early fiction he included homosexuality, but he was adept at veiling it--at least his own participation in it. But in his private life he was never in the closet, leading a discreetly open homosexual life. In his later years he taught college classes, usually on a short-term of guest basis, and surely his students accepted him as homosexual.

Regarding Chrisopher's recent commitment to the gay cause, Fryer writes, "Being such an evidently civilized, witty and unqueenly speaker, he became a popular spokesman for the cause."

So here Fryer presents a man, a major minor writer (and a major minor can be more significant than a minor major) who has led a fuli and productive life. Here is a man of apparent inner steel who has shaped his own life rather than let circumstances dictate to him. The indication is that his writing will endure, and literary gays are proud to call him brother.

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