"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking," is one of the most celebrated opening lines in a 20th-century novel, but it's also a mission statement by its author explaining his writing's origins.
The author is Christopher Isherwood and the novel is "Goodbye Berlin," the basis for the musical "Cabaret," about an English writer living in Berlin during the rise of Hitler, as he befriends the insouciant promiscuous singer Sally Bowles. This acclaimed writer is the subject of the new magisterial biography, "Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out," authored by novelist Katherine Bucknell.
Bucknell is also the editor of diaries by Christopher Isherwood and "The Animals," a volume of letters between Isherwood and his long-time partner, Don Bachardy. With the exception of Bachardy, it's safe to say Bucknell, a straight married woman with children, probably knows more about Isherwood than anyone alive.
Isherwood has been the subject of several previous biographies, particularly gay British journalist Peter Parker's definitive biography, "Christopher Isherwood: A Life Revealed," published in Isherwood's centenary.
Bucknell argues she wants to address Isherwood's inner world, which no one has done previously, use Isherwood's mother's diaries to glean information about his childhood, and as an American wants to show more of Isherwood's American life and work than earlier biographers have done.
She claims unlimited access to Bachardy, enhanced her intimate understanding of Isherwood. The question becomes whether these justifications are sufficient rationale for this 850-page treatise. The answer is a qualified yes.
Perceptions
The above camera quote captures Isherwood's perceptive ability to record the places, peoples, and events he experienced as an observing narrator revealing little about himself. Bucknell is adept at showing how Isherwood used his personal life as fodder for his novels, especially childhood events.
He gives his characters, often on the margins, new names but they are based on his friends, colleagues, family, sexual partners, and acquaintances. Isherwood is now considered one of the first autofiction writers, blurring the line between fact and fiction, so readers may question what's real. Isherwood was bent on sharing all his truths even the unpalatable ones.
Born in 1904 in Edwardian England with a privileged upbringing, his childhood was marred by the death of his artist/professional soldier father, who died in the trenches of World War I. His suffocating mother groomed him to replace his father. An excellent student, but often sickly (he suffered a botched circumcision at age 14) with illness often serving as an antidote to anxiety, hee applied himself at Cambridge. Rebelling against his mother's plans for his academic career, he deliberately flunked his exams.
Brief liberty
With his close friend gay poet W.H. Auden, he traveled to Weimar Germany to escape repressive Britain and indulge in Berlin's libertine nightlife, abandoning himself to the boys. He rented an apartment attached to gay Dr Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science. When he witnessed the Nazi book burning of Hirschfeld's papers and other authors he prized, he knew it was time to leave Germany in 1933.
Returning to England he felt trapped, just as "Goodbye to Berlin" made him famous. Desperate to change his life again and seek liberation, he escaped with Auden to the U.S. in 1939. "I feel free here. I'm on my own. My life will be what I make of it."
Finding New York cold, he settled in Los Angles and began his screenwriting career after declaring himself a conscientious objector during World War II. He had a spiritual conversion to Vedanta, guided by his guru/father figure, Swami Prabhavananda, who was tolerant of his homosexuality. He began a lifelong quest to find enlightenment via meditation. Isherwood entered a monastery and was celibate for six months, but frustrated, reverted to a life of spiritually illuminated promiscuity.
Animal attractions
Isherwood had several lovers, many one-time pickups, but others lasted a few years. He wanted a committed long-term relationship and he found it in 18-year-old student Bachardy when they met on the beach in 1952, a 30-year age gap. They called themselves the Animals with Isherwood nicknamed Dobbin, after a toy horse his nanny gave him as a child.
Isherwood not only tolerated but encouraged Bachardy to have sex with other men, even as they lived together. Isherwood also had many sexual liaisons. Yet there were times Isherwood found this painful and became jealous when Bachardy became infatuated with a guy for months. There was conflict but Isherwood pushed Bachardy to develop his artistic talents and he became a noted portrait painter.
As Bucknell implies, one can view Isherwood's life as a gradual embracing of his homosexuality and eventual coming out. Bucknell asserts, "He saw from the outset of his career that he must make homosexuality attractive to mainstream audiences if he was to change their view of it, and he worked to do this in all his writing in different ways."
Revolutionary
He knew while attending a private boarding school that he loved boys, but "afraid of any sexual feelings," after the Oscar Wilde debacle less than twenty years earlier, he remained chaste. But Germany freed him and with support from his guru, he accepted his worthiness as a gay man.
Isherwood, according to Bucknell, "imagined a world in which he might be able to live differently, and that through his work, he helped usher that world into being."
His masterpiece, "A Single Man," published in 1964, (despite tepid reviews, but now ranked a gay classic) taking place in one day, concerns a closeted college professor George, mourning the death of his lover in a car accident and out of grief is planning to kill himself. Although he never mentions the word homosexual, readers knew it was a same-sex relationship, revolutionary five years before Stonewall, especially because George is angry about his treatment by the heterosexual world.
Isherwood was seen as the forefather of gay liberation, though he didn't formally come out until his 1971 biography of his parents, "Kathleen and Frank," and his 1976 memoir, "Christopher and His Kind," in which he revisits the 1930s recounting the real gay story in his Berlin stories, instead of camouflaging the main character's sexuality.
Bucknell is superb in critically analyzing Isherwood's writings. She reveals Isherwood's charisma and charm, as well as his gift for friendship, which included Tennessee Williams, Lincoln Kirstein, E.M. Forster, Graham Greene (a cousin), Benjamin Britten, David Hockney (who painted a famous double portrait of Isherwood/Bachardy) as well as many Hollywood actors and directors.
Bucknell softens some of Isherwood's flaws, such as his misogyny and antisemitism. "Certainly his own feelings about Jews were shaped by his disappointment that, in his era, the persecution of homosexuals was not equally recognized." Also, Isherwood was an alcoholic, resulting in numerous D.U.I.s.
Bucknell drowns the reader in minutia, almost knowing too much about Isherwood and wanting to tell you everything about him, so it might overwhelm readers unfamiliar with Isherwood. Using archives and interviews, this biography is lucidly well-written and psychologically astute, but Isherwood remains an enigma, a contradictory, disagreeable, but enlightening nonconformist.
Readers might wonder was "Isherwood just a character created by a character named Christopher Isherwood?" But such authorial fluidity is the precise reason Isherwood would've have been very pleased with this brilliant though exhausting interpretation of his life.
'Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out' by Katherine Bucknell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $45.
us.macmillan.com
www.katherinebucknell.com
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