ISHERWOOD: A Life Revealed
By Peter Parker. Random House. 815 pp. $39.95
Fiction writers, take heart: Christopher Isherwood's first novel sold fewer than 300 copies and was heavily remaindered. Even Goodbye to Berlin, which became the source of his greatest fame, sold decently in England but negligibly in his new homeland, the United States. Yet the centenary of his birth has occasioned this great thumping biography, which would have been even longer if not for the squint-inducing type. Isherwood may be gone, but he's not forgotten.
Isherwood (left) and Auden at Victoria Station, in January 1938
(From The Book)
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Isherwood is portrayed here as a curiously modern figure for someone who spent his childhood and early adulthood in upper-middle-class country houses and received a public school and Cambridge education that would not have been unfamiliar to Trollope. What made Isherwood modern was that he would have none of what his literary descendant Alan Hollinghurst in The Spell calls "the honored quaintness of being British." His father died in the Great War, and Isherwood regarded the P.G. Wodehouse world around him as a sham.
So Isherwood departed for Weimar Republic Berlin, which, for him, famously meant boys. Parker focuses on the rather louche world of hustler bars Isherwood frequented, but there was also an extensive gay cultural world thriving in the city. Although Isherwood was in and out of Berlin for only five years, leaving as Hitler was assuming power, this period of his life was indelibly stamped on his psyche. He spent another half decade (1933-38) in a fruitless effort to get permission for his German lover to immigrate to England (talk about a modern dilemma). His last years in England supply further contradictions. He was, with his friend the poet W.H. Auden a widely publicized lion of left-wing literary talent, squiring a seemingly endless succession of young and interesting lovers to luncheon, to theater and to bed. Yet he (and Auden) abandoned this high-profile existence to make a new life in America.
Thus began Act II. Auden settled in New York, but not Isherwood. In 1938 he boarded a Greyhound bus bound for Los Angeles. There he became almost a caricature left-coaster: writing scripts for Hollywood, becoming the acolyte of a Hindu Vedanta guru, sunning (and cruising) at the beach, alternately pursuing hedonism and asceticism. He produced a steady stream of books, most of them published to mixed reviews. If the two works that grew out of his Berlin experience -- published in the United States in one volume as Berlin Stories -- defined the first half of his life, then A Single Man (1964) summed up the man he had become: an openly gay university lecturer living in a Southern California canyon, grieving over the death of his lover, intrigued by his students, not at all resigned to his fate. As he wrote, "the Old, thank Goodness, are tough -- as they need to be." Hollywood made him a well-known figure again when Berlin Stories came to the screen (via earlier incarnations as a play and a stage musical) as "Cabaret," with Michael York playing the Isherwood-based role. As he had been a spokesperson for left-wing politics in England, so he became an outspoken proponent of gay rights. He himself, however, was not a single man. In 1953 he met 18-year-old Don Bachardy, 30 years his junior; although they remained a couple until Isherwood's death in 1984, their relationship was often tumultuous.
Given that Isherwood's writing is mostly fictionalized autobiography -- often with a main character named Christopher -- is there a need for a lengthy biography? From the standpoint of gay cultural history, the answer is clearly yes. Starting with the triumvirate of Isherwood, Auden and Stephen Spender -- who originally knew each other through public school and university -- Isherwood moved in interlocking gay artistic circles. At times, it seems that he knew everyone, including in England with E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, composer Benjamin Britten and many others. In New York, he became fast friends with ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein and his brother-in-law, the painter Paul Cadmus, and their circle. After World War II, Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams turn up in the narrative; later, a young David Hockney telephones Isherwood and introduces himself. Still later, novelist Armistead Maupin finds in Isherwood a role model and mentor -- conducting Isherwood's last interview. (Not that Isherwood restricted himself to friendships with other gay men; he was a lifelong friend of the English writer Edward Upland, and in Hollywood he improbably became close to the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, with whom he engaged in marathon drinking bouts.) But the era of militant gay activism that Isherwood came to represent is itself receding into history. Despite being part of a high-profile gay couple, he prided himself on being an outsider railing against the "heterosexual dictatorship." It's difficult to see him speaking for a movement whose goals now include state-sanctioned marriage. Will he be of any interest when his gay movement has become a footnote in a history book?
He may well be. Isherwood was also a philosophy professor at UCLA, and, at its core, his work taps deep into the English philosophical tradition -- perhaps, more accurately, into the part of the English philosophical tradition that made the most sense on American soil. The great act of self-invention that was the American Revolution was intellectually informed by the work of thinkers such as Bishop Berkeley and David Hume, who, in their own unobtrusive ways, raised startling questions about perception and identity. Hume questioned whether one could say that one was the same person today as yesterday; is it far-fetched to see in the memorable beginning of A Single Man, in which a consciousness comes into being piece by piece, some echo of Hume's radical speculations? Is the author who wrote of himself, "I am a camera," in some sense the heir of William Blake, who wondered what would be learned "if ever the doors of perception be cleansed"? If the answer to these questions is yes, there will be truths to unpack from Isherwood's beguiling fictions for ages to come.
It's odd, given the amount of material assembled in this book, that it is difficult to pin down Parker's view of his subject. Isherwood comes across primarily as the work of a dutiful disciple, for whom none of the master's deeds or words is too trivial to be omitted. It's not a hagiography since Parker doesn't omit Isherwood's failings -- including a hair-raising tendency to drive drunk that fortunately seems to have resulted only in damaged automobiles and property. But it also doesn't quite transform an empirical sand heap into an explanatory narrative. While students of Isherwood will welcome the wealth of information contained here, the general reader might regret that Parker didn't follow Isherwood's "iron question which I try to live by as a writer: Why are you telling me this?" •
Jim Marks is director of publications for the Lambda Literary Foundation.
