CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
INSIDE OUT
by Katherine Bucknell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
864 pages, $45.
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD was born 120 years ago on his family’s estate in northern England, but the life he lived and the books he wrote speak with a powerful voice to the experience of queer people in 21st-century America. His life story is all about the need to be one’s authentic self and to resist forces that would deny that need, and it is told with impressive skill by Katherine Bucknell in her major new biography, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.
Isherwood’s early life resembles a Masterpiece Theatre period drama. He was raised with a nanny and sent to boarding schools. His father, a colonel in the British army, was killed early in World War I. His doting mother, sensitive to class distinctions and devoted to the Church of England, hoped her son would marry and have an academic career after he completed studies at Cambridge. However, early on Isherwood rebelled against the world into which he was born. After two years at Cambridge, where he spent most of his time writing stories, he deliberately failed his exams and withdrew. His first novel, All the Conspirators, was published in 1928, when he was 24. The next year, he left England for Berlin, where
Daniel A. Burr, a frequent contributor to this magazine, lives in Covington, Kentucky.
