A Singular Man

Jim Berg reviews Katherine Bucknell’s “Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.”

By Jim BergAugust 27, 2024

• Biography & Autobiography

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD was one of the most significant writers of the 20th century. Born in England during the Edwardian era, he died in 1986 in Santa Monica, having gone from being a chronicler of the interwar generation and an observer of the rise of the Nazis to the éminence grise of gay American literature. He is best known for two novels and a memoir: Goodbye to Berlin (1939), an episodic chronicle of the Weimar era that provided the material for the Broadway and film musical Cabaret (1966); A Single Man (1964), his great novel of Los Angeles and middle age, which was adapted for film in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind (1976), a memoir covering the same period as Goodbye to Berlin.

Now, on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of Isherwood’s birth on August 26, 1904, Katherine Bucknell has released her new book Christopher Isherwood Inside Out. At over 850 pages, it’s the kind of book that will certainly be described as “monumental” for the sheer volume of information the author has packed into it. Its length, however, is something of a caution for fans of Isherwood, who was a master of economic prose and short books.

Isherwood had the classic British upper-class upbringing. His father, Frank, the second son of downwardly mobile gentry, joined the military and was killed in World War I, leaving Christopher to take care of his mother, Kathleen, and younger brother, Richard. His father took on the quasi-mythic status of a fallen hero, the keeper of whose myth was Kathleen. Isherwood’s relationship with his mother provided much of the impetus for his rebellion against England, the cult of the past, and what he later called the “heterosexual dictatorship.”

Isherwood lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933. He had already published his first novel, All the Conspirators (1928), at the age of 24. A second novel, The Memorial (1932), featured a thinly disguised version of his own family dealing with the aftermath of the Great War. Two books set in Berlin followed: Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin. Around this time, W. Somerset Maugham told Virginia Woolf that Isherwood “h[eld] the future of the English novel in his hands.”

When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Isherwood left Germany. He spent several years trying to keep his lover, Heinz Neddermeyer, out of the German army, and when Neddermeyer was refused entry into England, Isherwood turned even more against his homeland. He emigrated to the United States in January 1939 and made his way west, attracted by the images of the US that he had seen in the movies. He had decided he was a pacifist and wanted to connect with the anti-war writers Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, both of whom were living in Los Angeles.

The 1960s proved a professionally fruitful period for Isherwood with the publication of A Single Man and two other novels. He turned to memoir in the late ’60s after a series of lectures at California colleges gave him the spark to write more openly about his early life. He came out as gay for the first time in print in a 1971 biography of his parents, entitled Kathleen and Frank. That book was followed by Christopher and His Kind. His final book-length memoir, My Guru and His Disciple (1980), treats his conversion to Vedanta Hinduism in the early 1940s under the guidance of Swami Prabhavananda. Isherwood died in his Santa Monica home on January 4, 1986.

After Isherwood’s death, the Huntington Library acquired the author’s papers from his partner of more than 30 years, Don Bachardy, who used some of the funds from the sale to establish the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. The archive includes diaries and letters, as well as drafts of published and unpublished novels and short stories. Bucknell had unfettered access to the material in the Huntington and elsewhere, including unpublished material that remains off-limits to other scholars.

As a result, Bucknell probably knows more about Christopher Isherwood than anyone else on the planet. And by God, she’s going to tell you everything she thinks you need to know. She feels that her status as an American makes her “perhaps” inclined to show more of Isherwood’s American life than previous biographers have done. This is good. She also tells us that she is currently “settled in London” and thus “eager to show […] the continuity between Isherwood’s English and American selves.” This is also good.

The most recent previous biography, Peter Parker’s Isherwood: A Life Revealed, was published in 2004 and has been recognized as monumental and definitive. Bachardy had authorized Parker’s work and then withheld an endorsement of it when he read the finished product. (As Bachardy once said to me, “Peter did not love Chris.”) As with many English critics, Parker was dismissive of Isherwood’s American life and work, and he seemed to endorse the charge that Isherwood had “abandoned” England in its time of need. Since Christopher Isherwood Inside Out is appearing two decades later than Parker’s book, I had hoped it would offer something of a corrective. If Parker’s aim was to depict Isherwood as a bit of a prick, then Bucknell’s seems to be to show him as a sex-driven, alcoholic, neurotic mess. Even if that wasn’t her goal, that is what she has accomplished.

One of the dangers of a comprehensive biography is that the sheer volume of information can make for a slow, sometimes dull read. This book might have been twice as good if it were half as long. Isherwood’s early life is covered as a case study in Freudianism. Young Christopher feels responsible for the care of his mother and brother, which makes him sickly and anxious. These symptoms of neurosis never go away. At 14, he comes to believe that it will please Kathleen if he gets circumcised. This information is necessary, apparently, because Bucknell later connects the procedure to Isherwood’s periods of impotence in middle age—also seemingly essential information.

While Bucknell clearly situates herself in relation to England and the United States, she seems unaware of how her identity as a straight woman might affect her telling of Isherwood’s life. She recounts when Isherwood came out, “in explicit physical terms,” to his mother in 1930. “He had wanted […] to come out to her and to be recognized without euphemism. The years of frustration made him savage. She wept.” Someone who has never come out might not grasp the emotional implication of those “years of frustration” or the issues that can arise between a gay man and his mother. Bucknell seems to be voyeuristically fascinated by Isherwood’s sex life, but she is also unable to avoid moralizing about it. Recounting his experience in a Hindu monastery in the 1940s, she writes that Isherwood “managed six months of chastity before reverting to a life of spiritually illuminated promiscuity, running again—through countless new love affairs.”

Despite her goal of comprehensiveness, there are two unfortunate aspects of Isherwood’s personality that Bucknell ignores: his misogyny and his antisemitism. Each is abundantly present in his diaries and fiction, which she says she uses “for what they reveal about Isherwood himself.” Bucknell notes that the author had a few close friendships with women, especially those who would accept his sexuality, but she ignores his animosity toward women in general. In A Single Man, George is devastated by his lover’s death and rushes to his friend Charlotte for comfort. The next day he feels “only disgust” and says, “I betrayed you, Jim; I betrayed our life together; I made you into a sob story for a skirt.” Isherwood’s misogyny has been identified repeatedly: in 1970 by Carolyn Heilbrun (and again in her essay for my 2000 anthology The Isherwood Century) and in 2004 by Parker.

The same goes for his antisemitism. In his 2012 preface to Liberation, Isherwood’s diaries of the 1970s (edited by Bucknell), Edmund White showed that the man who had written so perceptively about the rise of the Nazis was not immune to the antisemitism of his times. The depiction of Jews in Goodbye to Berlin gives the appearance of solidarity, yet Sally Bowles’s description of a lover as “a dirty old Jew” shows a casual acceptance of such terminology. In Bucknell’s view, Isherwood’s “own feelings about Jews were shaped by his disappointment that, in his era, the persecution of homosexuals was not equally recognized.” Some discussion of Isherwood’s “feelings about Jews” would have been helpful before this, but there is none. It is not the job of a biographer to blame her subject for his repellent attitudes but rather to name the issues and explore the relevant context and contradictions. After all, Isherwood was a card-carrying member of the ACLU who described himself as an “individualistic old liberal,” yet he nonetheless harbored some objectionable views. Bucknell’s “comprehensive” approach is at once full of information and lacking in insight.

Bucknell was trained as a literary scholar, and the strength of this book is her discussion of the derivation, composition, meanings, and immediate reception of Isherwood’s fiction. She might have written a fine critical biography. Instead, other than a cryptic statement in the prologue, Bucknell gives no accounting of Isherwood’s enduring popularity or importance. Scholars from around the world have examined Isherwood’s life and work from a dozen different perspectives since the 1970s, yet Bucknell’s bibliography is made up almost entirely of primary sources, encompassing letters, memoirs, and the biographies of contemporaries. We hear the opinions of E. M. Forster, Cyril Connolly, and Edmund Wilson but are left to wonder if their judgments were shared or challenged in the last 60 years. The only subsequent analysis is provided by Bucknell herself—indeed, many of her citations reference her own work. She has thus chosen to ignore a half century of relevant Isherwood scholarship.

Isherwood’s matter-of-fact portrayal of the protagonist in A Single Man, for example, had a huge influence on generations of gay male writers (such as White and Armistead Maupin). Moreover, his technique in Christopher and His Kind, blending semi-autobiographical fiction with a documentary approach to the past, changed memoir as a form and has contributed to the development of creative nonfiction. Bucknell’s is a curiously unscholarly approach. The reader is left wondering why Isherwood matters.

Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, detailed as it is, seems constrained by the fact that Bachardy is still living. Bucknell has worked closely with him for 20 years and is obviously fond of him. She credits him with “absolute candor,” describing him throughout the book as being often volatile and emotional, unhappy and vindictive. She gives the impression of impartiality. Yet I can’t find a fact, memory, or opinion advanced by Bachardy that she does not accept fully and uncritically. He is an important source, certainly, but is he as reliable as Bucknell has taken him (or needs him) to be? Isherwood himself did not rely on memory alone—his diary-keeping was his method of recording his experiences. “Write it down, or it’s lost,” he told fellow writers. The scholar’s trained skepticism of the subject’s surviving partner is missing (or suppressed) in this biography.

Bucknell’s only attempt to explain Isherwood’s enduring appeal is vague at best: “Isherwood worked on the boundary of fiction and nonfiction. […] He altered the truth in order to make the truth more compelling, and his subtle and mysterious reworking accounts, more than anything else, for the lasting appeal of his writing.” Whatever Bucknell might mean by that, I would suggest other reasons.

Isherwood’s final years are glossed over in the last half dozen pages. We are told that he stopped writing in the early 1980s and that “he never wrote about AIDS, first reported in California in 1981.” Bucknell knows that Isherwood spoke about AIDS in an interview with Maupin in 1983 because she quotes the interview in other places. Yet she doesn’t seem to have interviewed Maupin, even though he knew Isherwood and Bachardy since the late 1970s. It’s worth noting, since she brought the topic up, what the grand old gay man of letters said of people with AIDS: “They’re told by their relatives that […] it’s God’s will and all that kind of thing. […] You know, fuck God’s will. God’s will must be circumvented, if that’s what it is.”

Christopher Isherwood spoke to generations of readers and writers throughout his long life and his impressive body of work. In the latter half of his career, his writing resonated particularly with gay male readers. This is why he’s remembered and why he’s still read. And it is why he deserves a better biography.