Many writers’ graves are tourist attractions. Not Christopher Isherwood’s. Indeed, he doesn’t have one. Best remembered for his “Berlin Stories,” which became “I Am a Camera” which became “Cabaret” — and latterly for “A Single Man,” which the designer Tom Ford made into a movie — Isherwood, who died in 1986 at 81, signed away his corpse to science.
Now the director of his foundation, Katherine Bucknell, a novelist herself, has with great care erected a massive literary cenotaph entitled, with an apt echo of this summer’s most successful movie, “Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.” It joins Peter Parker’s equally gargantuan “Isherwood: A Life Revealed,” from 20 years ago: twin lions guarding fiercely the library of Isherwood’s own prodigious autofiction, letters and journals.
The biographers’ little-lion friend, their main Christopher whisperer, is Don Bachardy: the artist and Isherwood’s longtime partner, 30 years his junior and fondly known as Kitty. A landed-gentry Englishman who’d uprooted improbably to Los Angeles, Isherwood was Dobbin, after a toy horse he’d been given by his nanny as a child. They called themselves the Animals, their private domestic idyll the “basket.”
Dozens of other lovers pawed curiously at this basket — some even jumped in, for a time — but none unraveled or overturned it. The couple, who met when Bachardy was 18 and took a while to be accepted even in Isherwood’s bohemian circle, were the first subject of David Hockney’s celebrated double-portrait series.
Bucknell’s considerable sourcework — so much writing from all fronts, so many interviews from the golden age of newspapers, magazines, Cavett — is more than synthesis; it is photosynthesis. Her big blue book breathes and glistens. Her subject, who regularly meditated as a convert with Aldous Huxley to the Hindu philosophy Vedanta, is reincarnated.
And his reputation — somewhat tarnished after the publication of his diaries, which she edited, occasioned a harder look at his antisemitism and misogyny — gets a good spiffing. Isherwood is enshrined here as not just a Grand Old Man of gay liberation, minus the waving rainbow flag (nor did he write about AIDS), but a warrior of finding one’s tribe, or “chosen family.” Imagine the cage match with JD Vance.
Flickering and unfixed, Isherwood identified with Robert Musil’s “Man Without Qualities” and cannot be extricated from his luminous associations. Graham Greene was a cousin. W.H. Auden, whom he met at boarding school, a longtime bestie; so was the arts impresario Lincoln Kirstein. Mentors included E.M. Forster and W. Somerset Maugham; drinking buddies Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinsky, who recalled how “on Christopher’s first visit to my home, he fell asleep when someone started to play a recording of my music.”
Agatha Christie named Miss Marple after an Isherwood family property, and though women were generally low on his priority list Isherwood “enjoyed touching” Marilyn Monroe at parties. Was he horse, after all, or chameleon?
Isherwood was born in 1904 amid fading Downton Abbeyish splendor, saddled with the middle names William and Bradshaw, which he’d later repurpose for a nom de plume. His father, an army man who painted watercolors and ran recreationally, died in the trenches of World War I.
Christopher would come to feel stultified by his doting, past-obsessed mother, working out some of these issues in a 1971 family memoir named for his parents, “Kathleen and Frank.” He had a deeply troubled younger brother, Richard, who once upended a dinner table “Real Housewives”-style, yelling, “You’re all prigs! All of you!”; and a gadabout guncle, Henry, from whom he would “sometimes get a goodnight kiss that was too warm and searching for any nephew, even one’s favorite.”
Isherwood was an excellent student but often sickly; he feared ghosts and snakes and had a recurrent fantasy about being nursed. He had a barbaric-sounding adolescent circumcision that may have contributed to intermittent impotence in adulthood. At Cambridge he socialized wildly, joining among other clubs the Young Visiters, named for the hilarious novel supposedly written by 9-year-old Daisy Ashford, and flunked his exams on purpose, rejecting the safe academic life Kathleen had planned for one of adventure, though also pacifism. “What revolution can I promote but a revolution inside myself?” he asked.
“He was,” Bucknell writes, “a renegade from all forms of institutional life,” gravitating to the twin hedonisms of Weimar Germany, then Hollywood, where he worked on mostly forgettable if lucrative scripts. He disliked New York, finding it “a cruel hard town,” and might be the only person in recorded history who turned down an invitation to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball.
In its minute chronicle of Isherwood’s days and nights, the ups and downs and roundabouts of his every love affair and “sex friend,” “Inside Out” traces how queerness, around since forever, emerged from the shameful shadows into the light — and how loyal a foot soldier Isherwood was to this cause.
But as a guardian of his eternal flame, Bucknell does tiptoe around some of the less noble aspects of the life, with hedging sentences like “certainly his own feelings about Jews were shaped by his disappointment that, in his era, the persecution of homosexuals was not equally recognized.” There’s more precision about his D.U.I.s.
The long stretches sans any gals can feel unsettling, though there are plenty of Kens tussling on the beach. (Watch out for Tynan and his spear!) Sometimes it seems like Isherwood’s only female writer pal is Dodie Smith, the author of the superb “I Capture the Castle.” He’s slow to fully acknowledge Virginia Woolf, who cut him an early career break and heavily influenced his own work.
Though his mother helped him write “The History of My Friends,” a personally foundational text, “he did not collaborate with women later on,” Bucknell admits, “and sometimes his friendships with women foundered because he allowed himself to be loved, bossed and managed up to a point and then dismissed any woman who invaded his emotional life too closely or who failed to understand his sexuality.”
Bucknell will not be shucked so easily. Stone by stone, she’s built up a gritty, gorgeous monument to a curiously indelible 20th-century figure.
The post An Impressive Monument to Christopher Isherwood, Man of Letters (and Lovers) appeared first on New York Times.