Isherwood: A Life
by Peter Parker
Picador £24, pp914
There needs to be a confluence of opportunities, many strong rivers of luck flowing together, to produce a literary biography as good as Peter Parker's Isherwood. Authorised lives have one set of disadvantages (self-censorship, mealiness of mouth), unauthorised ones another: restriction of sources, sensationalism. Parker's book is virtually free of blemishes in either category and comes close to combining the corresponding advantages - fullness, fearlessness.
Don Bachardy, Isherwood's lover of 30 years, trusted Parker with the task but signed away any right of veto or control. Bachardy has not endorsed the text, and the portrait of him is not exactly flattering, but he has not been abused. Neither Isherwood nor Bachardy set much store by notions of holding back - Bachardy, after all, did an unforgettable series of portraits of Isherwood dying. It would have been bizarre to choose a soft-pedalling biographer.
The ideal biographical subject would have led a long, full life and yet be survived by his oldest friend. This unlikely formula describes another aspect of Parker's luck: Isherwood was born in 1904 and died in 1986, but his biographer has been able to question Edward Upward (also a considerable writer) about the early years. They met in 1921.
Isherwood was an unsparing and also sometimes an unscrupulous diarist, who performed miracles of editing and embroidery when he transcribed for print. It is to his credit, though, that he did not destroy the originals, and Parker can take him posthumously to task. His diary provided a mother lode of material for Isherwood, a seam worked and reworked (when diaries were missing he 'reconstructed' them, whatever that means), but it also served other functions. It could as easily be the greenroom in which he prepared for roles as the analyst's couch on which he broke them down. It also acted as a sort of artificial kidney, a dialysis machine running on ink. The day's annoyances could be processed on the page, negative emotion harmlessly excreted - which accounts for the recurrent sourness.
Keeping a diary ran in the family. Isherwood's mother Kathleen, whom for many years he thought he hated, acquired the habit early and when she was widowed in 1915 her journal became her closest companion. Again, these diaries survive and can be used to supplement or correct Isherwood's versions of events. If Kathleen was being hateful when she sent money for purposes of which she did not approve, or lied to the authorities about the status of her son's young German boyfriend Heinz (claiming him as a friend of the family), then it's hard to imagine how love would have behaved. Her only crime was to be oriented towards the past - a natural enough direction for widowhood to face - while Christopher was impatient to live in the postwar world, and came in many people's minds to represent it.
Isherwood and Upward were joined in a loose fraternity of literary subversives by Auden and Spender. Members of a generation so mistrustful of literary forefathers (Forster scraping in as a benign uncle, Virginia Woolf as an overpowering aunt) had to pass the authority of the older brother around as best they could. Auden, though younger than Isherwood, was certainly the most sophisticated yet he submitted his poetry to Isherwood's judgment. Most criticism inside the group was incorporated rather than resented. Collaboration (between Upward and Isherwood on fantasy stories, Auden and Isherwood on plays and reportage) was bound to appeal to Isherwood, as Parker remarks, since it amounts to an abstract conspiracy. Conspiracy was more or less his model for relationships in general.
The elder-brother persona was crucial to Isherwood's sexual mythology. Foreplay took the form of horseplay, innocent wrestling leading on to arousal. That's not to say that sex was necessarily a matter of conspiring against the grown-ups, though it's not everyone who can boast that his sexuality was categorised as 'infantile' by Magnus Hirschfeld of Berlin's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Isherwood wasn't unique in tending to choose lovers who were not his social or intellectual equal, and the young can spring their own surprises. Bachardy, 18 when they met, didn't immediately show the force of personality he acquired over time.
Isherwood also had a real younger brother, Richard. Self-neglecting and obsessive-compulsive, Richard was a distorted image of what Christopher might have been - also gay, but without access to partners, also a diarist, without the benefits of an interesting life.
The turning point of Isherwood's life, and of his career as a writer, was his emigration to America with Auden in 1939. Parker recognises this by dividing his book into the two large halves of 'England Made Me' (a title borrowed from Graham Greene, a relation of Isherwood's) and 'Becoming An American'. For two of the most politically committed writers of their generation to jump ship from Europe was seen as a massive betrayal.
Isherwood's accounts of his motives varied, one suggestion being that he had been gripped by a visceral pacifism, which meant that he couldn't contemplate taking up arms against Hitler if he might thereby kill Heinz.
Auden stayed in New York, Isherwood moved to California. Always a film buff, he got work in Hollywood. One way to look at the move to America would be almost existentially, as a selective suicide, a way for Isherwood to kill off parts of his personality so that others might thrive. But the experiment almost proved fatal to his talent. 'My voice is changing, like a choirboy's,' he wrote to John Lehmann in 1940, but it was a long time before he could sing in the new register. The short novel Prater Violet (1945) is charming, but its concerns are European. Not until 1964 and A Single Man did Isherwood write a novel that turned his exile into art, with a book that can look along the shelf at the Berlin stories (that is, at Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin) without flinching.
A Single Man also successfully incorporated elements of the Hindu mysticism Isherwood had studied in California. As Parker points out with endearing dryness, there could be likelier converts to ascetic religion than 'a sceptical, sybaritic, chain-smoking, egotistical and morally confused homosexual atheist'. It seems particularly drastic, for a writer who was only able to approach ideas by an understanding of the people that held them, to take on the belief that personality is an illusion. Nevertheless it brought him peace as well as frustration. In 1939 he wrote to Lehmann that he was tired of 'strumming on that old harp, the ego, darling Me.' But it's a harp not easily unstrung.
Celibacy, for instance, was never really an option. Isherwood's sex life (as recalled in the 1970s) was inspirational to a generation of gay men, because in dark times he seemed capable of committed relationships and also of having a great deal of fun. He wasn't guilty or worthy. Readers of this book, though, will tire of the repetitive emotional terrain long before Isherwood does (some way into the Bachardy years) - the alternating spasms of neediness, jealousy and committophobia.
The great occupational hazard of the modern biographer is enlargement of the spleen. Parker seems immune to this distressing condition. His wit at Isherwood's expense never becomes destructive. He may feel mildly disillusioned by his subject at times, but not betrayed. He passes on a great deal of discreditable material - Isherwood was prickly, misogynistic, a hypochondriac and uncontrolled drinker - yet his own enthusiasm doesn't suffer. Isherwood's charm works even posthumously.
In any case, only one character flaw diminishes the writer rather than the individual - his mild anti-semitism. The reflex equation of Jewishness and money-grubbing is one thing, as much a sign of Isherwood's class and time as anything else. But when fictionalising Jewish people he knew for the Berlin stories, he edited out their involvement with politics, as if passivity - complicity with fate, even - was racially a more suitable characteristic.