CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
by Jake Poller
Reaktion Books. 208 pages, $22.
THERE REALLY IS no point in trying to separate Christopher Isherwood’s writing from the details of his life. His prolific use of those details has led critics to classify his works as examples of “autofiction.” Acknowledging that autofiction has been used in different ways, Jake Poller, author of a new Isherwood biography, proffers this definition: “a genre in which the boundaries between autobiography and fiction are knowingly elided by the author … [or]texts classified as autobiographies that deploy fictional structures and techniques.” Poller points to Goodbye to Berlin, Prater Violet, and Down There on a Visit as prime examples of Isherwood’s autofiction. They’re all narrated by a fictional “Christopher Isherwood” and draw heavily from events of his own life, blurring the line between fiction and fact. Further obscuring the division, Isherwood wanted readers to treat his first real autobiography, Lions and Shadows, as fiction because he used made-up names for his friends and family and structured the book like a novel. Conversely he claimed that everything in Christopher and His Kind should be read as totally “frank and factual,” though he again used made-up names, employed techniques of the novel, and, according to Poller, “include[d]a suspicious amount of dialogue some four decades after the event.”
Poller’s biography of the Anglo-American writer is published by Reaktion Books as part of its “Critical Lives” series and is a short but tightly packed critical biography. Unlike previous Isherwood biographies, two of which the subject himself deemed “hopelessly dull” and “wretched,” this book devotes equal space to his life and work. The concise format of the series necessitated Poller leaving out a wealth of material (e.g., Isherwood’s friendship with luminaries such as Igor Stravinsky and Truman Capote, his short stories and poetry, the plays he wrote with W. H. Auden, his extensive travels). But he has produced a critically astute, informative, thoroughly enjoyable examination of the life and work of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
And what a life Isherwood lived! Born into England’s landed gentry, Isherwood railed endlessly against the upper class into which he’d been born. But, as Poller points out, he was quite comfortable with his similarly privileged classmates at Cambridge. Poller doesn’t mention it, but it seems pertinent that Isherwood relied on gifts of money from his Uncle Henry for much of his early life, signaling that he was still in some ways dependent upon that class. Along with his Cambridge friend, the poet Edward Upward (who coined the term “poshocracy” for the upper class), he created a series of mythical stories about the fantastical village of “Mortmere.” In French, “mortmere” is close to “death of mother,” suggesting Isherwood’s and Upward’s rancor toward the women who birthed them. Those stories viciously lampooned the gentry.
An uninspired, lackadaisical student, Isherwood knew he couldn’t pass Cambridge’s Tripos exam, so he intentionally flubbed the test, writing nonsensical answers and even critiquing the architecture of the hall where the exams were given instead of answering the questions. He was sent down, ending his Cambridge career “less with a triumphant bang than with a snigger.”
This kind of rebellion against “the combine,” another term for the poshocracy, would be a touchstone of Isherwood’s life. Although he studied briefly to be a physician, after quitting school he took a job as a secretary to the bohemian leader of a string quartet. Between the wars, he rebelled against his homeland’s anti-gay laws and attitudes, moving to Berlin because, as he writes in Christopher and His Kind, “For Christopher, Berlin meant boys.” In 1939, although he had flirted with communism at Cambridge and remained vociferously antifascist, he became a pacifist; along with Auden, he fled England and took up permanent residence in the United States. (The pair were vilified in the British press for “abandoning” their home country in war time.) He rebelled against Christianity, studying to become a monk in the Vedanta branch of Hinduism, but giving it up after three years to return to writing. He flouted convention by living openly as lovers with portrait artist Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior, though he never acknowledged his homosexuality in writing until 1971. Poller explores all these events and how Isherwood mined them for his fiction.
Poller is unafraid to detail the regrettable elements of Isherwood’s character, including his being an unrepentant misogynist and anti-Semite. Isherwood’s misogyny can easily be traced to his fraught relationship with his mother, but that’s no excuse for the vehemence of his disdain for all women. In a review of Dodie Smith’s novel A Tale of Two Families, he dismisses her writing as “smugly cunty” and says of women writers: “They know that there is nothing … outside of the furry rim of their cunts and their kitchens.” Nasty stuff, as unsettling as his blatant anti-Semitism, especially in the Diaries, where it runs rampant. He lived in Berlin through the period of Hitler’s rise to power and saw the horrific treatment of Jews at the hands of the Nazis, and he worked closely and socialized with Jewish artists during his Hollywood years. Considering that life experience, Isherwood’s anti-Semitism is as surprising as it is disgusting.
Honoring his promise to give equal space to Isherwood’s writing, Poller offers informed, insightful perspectives, particularly attentive to his use of various literary techniques. In addition to his lengthy discussion of Isherwood’s autofiction technique, he also discusses his use of “tea-tabling.” Poller quotes Edward Upward, who first discerned the technique in the work of E. M. Forster: “Forster’s technique is based on the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down until they sound like mothers’-meeting gossip. … In fact, there’s actually less emphasis laid on the big scenes than on the unimportant ones.” Events of this nature occur off-stage, out of sight; we learn about them only through others’ reactions to them. In Goodbye to Berlin, Sally’s abortion, the Nazis’ murderous rampages, Christopher’s and Max’s sexual relationship all occur off-stage; we learn about them from others. In A Single Man, the car crash that takes the narrator’s lover occurs not only off-stage but before the narrative opens. Tea-tabling softens the blow for even the poshest reader.
I can think of no writer besides Isherwood whose fictional work so deeply, so clearly mines his own life. Poller’s perceptive readings of Goodbye to Berlin, Prater Violet, Lions and Shadows, Christopher and His Kind, and the Diaries, and his understanding of their links to Isherwood’s life, make for a concise, informative, entertaining introduction to this essential writer.
Hank Trout has served as editor at a number of publications, most recently as senior editor for A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine.
