By Owen Richardson
BIOGRAPHY
Christopher Isherwood Inside Out
Katherine Bucknell
Hamish Hamilton $79.99
Katherine Bucknell has edited the three hefty volumes of Christopher Isherwood’s wonderful diaries, a collection of letters between Isherwood and his longtime companion, Don Bachardy, and an unfinished memoir, The Lost Years. Now she has written an equally hefty, smoothly told, empathetic biography. Impressive in itself, it also works as something of a corrective to Peter Parker’s 2003 Isherwood: A Life.
Christopher Isherwood found an escape from class, and what he would one day call the heterosexual dictatorship, in Berlin.Credit: Getty Images
Bachardy helped Parker, but Parker noted that he didn’t endorse the final product, and it was not hard to see why. Besides being witty and ironic, Parker could be snarky and judgmental: he seemed to have set himself against Isherwood’s notorious charm, social and literary as well as sexual, and made a point of not being seduced.
Going by the acknowledgements page, Bachardy has seen no need to distance himself from Bucknell. In contrast to Parker’s scepticism, Bucknell is earnest and identifies more closely with Isherwood and Isherwood’s point of view. Some of the faults reproved by Parker go unmentioned by Bucknell: Isherwood’s casual antisemitism, for instance, of a fairly mild and period kind, but worth remarking in someone who worked so hard to reject the assumptions of his class and nationality, and, one might also say, someone who saw close up in 1930s Berlin what the less genteel forms of antisemitism looked like.
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Born in 1904, Isherwood was part of that generation of Englishman marked by not participating in the First World War, and grief at the loss of those who did. His father died in France in 1917, and one way to read Isherwood’s life is as the search for father-substitutes, as acknowledged in Prater Violet, his fictionalised portrait of his friend, the emigre film director Berthold Viertel. And then there was the obsession with courage and valour, the sense, as Isherwood put it in his early memoir Lions and Shadows, that – for men, at least – there was a test that needed to be passed.
The test, and the flight. In late Weimar Berlin and its boy bars he found an escape from class, and what he would one day call the heterosexual dictatorship (he would also one day come to see that his relationships with those working-class German youths was a form of exploitation). More than that, he found the subject matter and characters that would bring him fame in Goodbye to Berlin and its later adaptations for stage and screen. By the end of the 1930s he was being talked about as the future of the English novel.
Yet for all that he represented youth in revolt against the Old Gang, in one respect he was just as Victorian as what he despised: critics then and now marked his writing as having a Dickensian vitality and luxuriance of character, though without the sentimentality. (The detachment, the pose of being a camera, was brand “Modern”.) Sally Bowles and Mr Norris and Otto Nowak from the Berlin books, Friedrich Bergmann from Prater Violet, even George from A Single Man: it is no wonder his books make such good films (even if he thought Lisa Minnelli “all wrong” for Sally Bowles in Cabaret).
Isherwood (left) and W.H. Auden travelled to China in 1938 and eventually left England for US on the eve of the Second World War.Credit: Corbis via Getty Images
It was the possibility of having to kill one of his German lovers that made him a pacifist, and with his friend W.H. Auden he left doomed Europe on the eve of the Second World War and became an American citizen. Many in England never forgave him. But even if the move to America was perceived as cowardice, the risk of opprobrium was also a version of the Test: “I must honour those who fight of their own free will, he said to himself. And I must try to imitate their courage by following my path as a pacifist, wherever it takes me.”
That was not the last risk Isherwood was to take with his reputation. If literary London disapproved of his pacifism, it sniggered mercilessly at his adoption of Vedanta, a variant on Advaita Hinduism, which Isherwood discovered once he moved to Hollywood in search of work.
Liza Minnelli, as Sally Bowles, in a scene from the film Cabaret, which was based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin books. Credit: Getty
Nowadays, though, there is more awareness of the elements of racism involved in hostility to non-Judeo-Christian religious traditions. (It was a racism Isherwood himself was not free from: there were aspects of Vedanta he found “too Indian”.) And it is not as though Isherwood was alone in the search for discipline and transcendence. In reaction to modernity and the shocks thereof, other writers of the time found themselves reconciling with Christianity: Eliot and Auden became Anglo-Catholics, while Waugh and Greene converted to Roman Catholicism.
Isherwood, though, was repelled by talk of God and the social paraphernalia of Christianity: “I needed a brand new vocabulary and here it was, with a set of philosophical terms exact in meaning, unemotive, untainted by disgusting old associations with clergymen’s sermons, schoolmasters’ pep talks, politicians’ patriotic speeches.”
Like Berlin and boys, like America, Vedanta was a rejection of class and country, mother and motherland. Yet it was a flight that was also a return: Swami Prabhavananda of the Hollywood Vedanta Centre was the last and most enduring of Isherwood’s father-substitutes, not too indulgent, not too strict.
The leniency was important. Isherwood had no interest in sainthood. He continued to live in the world, and in a very worldly corner of it, whether parties at Charlie Chaplin’s house or orgies on Santa Monica beach. In fact it seems that the biggest benefit Vedanta may have had for Isherwood was helping him negotiate his relationship with Bachardy, the talented young artist he met in 1953 and stayed with through many – what we would now call polyamorous – ups and downs until the end of his life.
Isherwood lived long enough to become a figurehead of gay liberation, his 1976 memoir Christopher and his Kind serialised in the gay press and – a good sign – sniffily reviewed by straights who squirmed at his new-found frankness. While he didn’t think of himself as any kind of campaigner, he didn’t mind being idolised by the younger gay generation.
Helped along by Cabaret and Liza Minnelli, or indeed by the abiding fascination of the period, the Berlin stories continue to find new readers, while Tom Ford’s 2012 A Single Man, with its career-redefining performance by Colin Firth, and the excellent 2011 BBC adaptation of Christopher and His Kind, with Matt Smith, have kept before the public eye queer Isherwood, the precursor and trail-blazer. In the books, the Isherwood charm is all still there, still seductive, with those classic personalities and the elegance and astringency of the prose.
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