Isherwood
by Peter Parker
914pp, Picador, £25
CW Bradshaw-Isherwood, Herr Issyvoo, Y Hsiao Wu, Chris Ish... the variants on the name spell out a history of escape. In his 50s Isherwood described himself as a "foreigner by temperament", and the greater part of his long life was lived outside England. The foreignness sharpened his wonderful gift for description, the intensely alive portrayal of character, what he called "the experience of the encounter". He will always be best known for his Berlin novels, in which a critical moment in history is caught in a series of such encounters, and in challengingly cool prose. By the late 1930s he and his close friend WH Auden were celebrities, with a particular style of provocation. In the famous photograph of them setting off for the Sino-Japanese War they look, as Peter Parker wittily says, as if they are setting off for a point-to-point. When they set off for America before the second world war, and didn't come back, their celebrity turned against them. There is a feeling that Isherwood, the more defiantly queer of the two, has never fully recovered.
He was someone who defined himself by opposition, in protracted revolt against his country, his class and his mother Kathleen in particular. Upsetting her was a driving principle of his pre-war life. Writing novels that gorgonised her and then giving her the typescripts to read was a specialised kind of cruelty. Abusing her but then milking her for large cash handouts for his teenage boyfriends was another. All the time mother and son were recording these travails in their parallel diaries, so we know what she was feeling. As Parker's absorbing biography goes on, one gains more and more sympathy for Kathleen, for her forbearance, flexibility and readiness to learn from experience, greater in each case than her son's; but the essential point is Isherwood's myth of their incompatibility.
Early on, his friend Edward Upward and he had defined "the other side" - the conventional, the oppressors, the past-fixated - against whom Isherwood felt "ecstasies of hate". Upward's feelings would take strict Marxist channels, but Isherwood himself had no aptitude for abstract ideas, and was, as Parker says, "the least political member" of his generation. He found the climate of leftism congenial; but when he set sail for America with Auden he admitted that he'd lost his sense of political commitment, and Auden said so had he. Anti-fascism had inevitably had its urgency to someone who was in Berlin in 1933 and lived through the Spanish civil war; but it was really only with Gay Lib in the 1960s and 1970s, of which Isherwood became a kind of literary guru, that the political fused convincingly for him with the personal.
That sense of the rightness of gayness, both in itself and as a form of opposition, is one of the invigorating strands of Parker's book. Isherwood's powerful sex drive seems never to have been hampered by doubts, fears or moral confusions. Indeed, sex may often have been a way of escaping from such things, a reassuring alternative reality. The slight peculiarity, which Parker keeps a level head about, was that his taste was for teenage boys - the primary lure of Berlin. Heinz Neddermeyer, whose attempts to escape conscription by long European wanderings with Isherwood form one of the book's most poignant episodes, was 16 when the 28-year-old Isherwood met him. "Vernon", whom Isherwood met on his first trip to the US and picked up with again on his permanent return, was just 17. Don Bachardy, the lover of the last three decades of his life, was 18 (but looked 15, Dodie Smith said) when he took up with Isherwood, 30 years his senior. Isherwood was stirred by the avuncular role, seduction mixed up with protection. Late in life he described sex as mostly wrestling, and he seems to have liked the transgressive move from rough-house to lovemaking, which perhaps went back to school days, and certainly to frolics with the essentially straight bar-boys of Berlin.
Was Isherwood a nice person? Auden loved him, and his verse depictions of him ("Your squat spruce body and enormous head", "your great grey eyes taking everything in, / And your nicely creased trousers") are among the tenderest notes in the book. Upward was his mentor and conspirator, the lifelong friend whose criticisms were always sought and allowed. But with other friends, such as Stephen Spender and John Lehmann, there was much mutual exasperation and mistrust. Dodie Smith, when she first met Isherwood in Hollywood, thought him "the nicest person imaginable, simply radiating goodness", but clearly rather changed her mind later on.
Many people fell under the spell of his smile and his trick of making them feel that they had his entire attention. I suspect he was funnier, and more fun to be with, than quite comes through the biographical record, where the evidence against him is cumulatively crushing: he was vain, cowardly, malicious, misogynistic, despotic... The huge mitigating factor is that all these judgments were endorsed a hundred times over by Isherwood himself. His diaries record recurrent struggles to understand the enigma of his own personality, his spiritual emptiness and addictiveness.
When he reaches America, the attempt to transcend his character limitations through the study of Vedanta (a system of Hindu philosophy) provides an extended dim comedy of misapplied energy. Though he clearly did attain new insights through prayer and meditation, the overall impression is one of fruitless mortification. As Parker says, chastity and self-discipline were never going to come easily to "a sceptical, sybaritic, chain-smoking, egotistical and morally confused homosexual atheist".
The important consequences for us, of course, are in his writing. His swami kept his famous disciple busy with translating devotional works, and one wonders if Isherwood didn't take refuge in such chores as a way of both concealing and excusing the literary drought of his Californian years. Futile Hollywood scriptwriting paid the bills while he struggled with disastrous novels like The World in the Evening and A Meeting by the River. He was never the kind of writer who has a terrific idea and then executes it; his books were accumulated piecemeal over time, with incessant changes of plan. The episodic Goodbye to Berlin is a triumph of this technique; but later on the gift and the certainty left him. We find him groping instead for "things he wants to say".
The one fierce success of these years is A Single Man (1964), the short account of a day in the life of an ageing gay university professor in southern California. Rightly, Parker thinks it "Isherwood's most profound and most skilfully written book". In the long narrative of a faltering career it marks the one moment when Isherwood seems to connect his new life with his old anger.
A long life densely annotated in the subject's own diaries, memoirs and novels naturally makes for a long book, but no one should imagine that Parker has simply put everything in. If you follow up his references to the published source materials you find yourself beguiled by material that didn't make the cut. Dinner with Brecht, arguing about Aldous Huxley "selling out"? Perhaps not strictly relevant. Getting drunk and disgracing himself with Charlie Chaplin? A dubious memory, and there are quite enough instances of drunken disgrace already. An orgy in which he performs with the tirelessness of a porn star? Dubious in another way, because from an ego-boosting "reconstructed" diary. The more one looks into the distorting mirrors in which Isherwood dramatised his own life, the more respect one feels for Parker's sceptical selectiveness.
There is another life story too, woven in with Isherwood's - that of his younger brother Richard, from the start dispraised in favour of the idolised Christopher. He too assumed a posture of revolt, though of a hopeless kind, running away from every school he was sent to, learning only to lie and evade. Gay, and sharing Christopher's taste for young boys, he was unable to imitate his brother's larger escape from family, class and country. Intelligent and sensitive, but unable to look after himself, he grew into "a sort of mad version of Christopher", filthy, racked by nervous spasms, a barely functional alcoholic. He lived on amid the thoroughly emblematic physical collapse of the family home. At the end of Kathleen's life, he shared her bed, and woke one morning to find her corpse beside him. To Christopher he must have seemed an awful symbol of the life left behind.
Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Line of Beauty is published by Picador.
