Disguise-Language

Ionce​ witnessed Stephen Spender being evil in a London club. A mandarin of poetry, he seemed almost fluorescent with stories and vital resentments, twisting the stem of his glass as he offered opinions about Sergei Diaghilev and the Maharishi, with stop-offs at T.S. Eliot, Judy Garland and the queen mother. I had no time to roll my eyes because I was busy concentrating and trying not to laugh. I wanted to know if any empathy could be detected through the thicket of names. ‘A wonderful, dainty, very loving little novelist’, he said of his friend Christopher Isherwood. As with many of those who are dependent for their status on the high status of others – none more than Spender, who thought ‘continually of those who were truly great’ – there appeared to be a measure of disdain in the well-stirred cocktail of familiarity.

He had met the little novelist in the spring of 1928, and Isherwood later recalled Spender’s ‘scarlet poppy-face, wild frizzy hair and eyes the violent colour of bluebells’. Isherwood, in those days, considered Spender ‘the slave of his friends’, but it is an aspect of the wonderful storytelling in Katherine Bucknell’s biography that we only become incrementally aware of Spender’s duplicity, much as people do in life when they are subject to the progressive smears of others. Spender might have plumed all his life on his important friendship with Isherwood, but he was not a good friend to him, his competitive edge being rather more sharpened than blunted by experience. Though he enjoyed a spell as Auden and Isherwood’s ambassador in London, he resented Isherwood’s use of their Berlin years in his fiction, stories that challenged Spender’s sexual caginess. In the name-dropper’s way, it was his friends’ growing reputations that Spender found most invigorating, and the work was treated by him merely as a diplomatic passport to their affections (writers will generally forgive you anything if you say nice things about their writing). In real life, he appeared either to dislike or to envy the freedoms associated with Isherwood’s character. Spender’s ambition, in the end, flared with long-standing enmities masquerading as critical distinctions, and he betrayed Isherwood several times, in print and in deed.

It was Nabokov’s notion that the only biography of a writer that matters is the biography of their style, and Bucknell is better on this, in relation to Isherwood, than anybody has ever been – the editing of his diaries and letters has made her an authority. With this biography, we end up with an electrifying portrait of an entire period in British letters, yet the focus is where it should be, on the question of what made Isherwood the stylist he was. He was born in 1904 in a medieval manor house in Cheshire and his mind would all his life pullulate – like that of his mother’s cousin Robert Louis Stevenson – in a ‘nursery-sickroom atmosphere’. His father, a captain in the York and Lancasters, was killed at Ypres in May 1915. His maternal grandmother, Emily, was ‘a great psychosomatic virtuoso’. And his mother Kathleen’s ‘intense emotional needs were to crack through Isherwood’s youth like a bolt of lightning’. Like many emerging novelists, Isherwood appeared to be cast in a preternatural story. During meals at Marple Hall, his grandparents’ grand house, he was ‘trapped in a Jacobean dining chair staring at a tapestry of winter and a painting of a dead virgin queen’. His first sexual fantasy was of lying naked on a battlefield. Such are the images that can speed a young person into prose, living out the reality of a martyred mother and a dead father.

His first attempt at authorship was ‘The History of My Friends’, a tiny manuscript he dictated to his mother. It taught him, Bucknell writes, that ‘friendship could be a performance, acted out for the entertainment of others.’ What had started as a bid for popularity before an audience of dolls and teddies would grow into an all-consuming lust for attention. ‘In later years,’ Bucknell goes on,

Isherwood was to undergo an extreme and difficult inward revolution, throwing off his mother’s shyness and snobbery in order to embrace the so-called inferiors that she feared and did not understand – the servants, the life of the streets, the boys of the Berlin slums, and the barely clothed beachgoers of Santa Monica who knew each other by first name only without any title or rank … Auden ‘couldn’t understand my capacity for making friends with my inferiors’, Isherwood was to write in the 1970s. The theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, by contrast, admired in Isherwood ‘the classlessness that he shares with almost no other British writer of his generation. (I’ve seen him in cab-men’s pull-ups and grand mansions, with no change in manner or accent.)’

He wasn’t quite a social novelist, except he was. He wanted opposing parts of society to work together in his books, and these novels offer places where public and private life are seen magically to coalesce. ‘I imagined a novel as a contraption – like a motor bicycle,’ he once wrote, ‘whose action depends upon the exactly co-ordinated working of all its inter-related parts; or like a conjuror’s table, fitted with mirrors, concealed pockets and trapdoors.’ Yet he was classless in the sense that he wanted his characters to be subject to the same moral conditions – you couldn’t say that of Evelyn Waugh – appearing and disappearing via the same mirrors and trapdoors. There are novelists who can only fully realise characters who are in some strong degree like themselves, characters they expect the reader will naturally approve of, or instantly believe in. But only bad novelists are editorialists for their own convictions. The reader is right to ask that even terrible characters be terrible in strictly human ways, and, in pursuit of that, that a decent novel can animate class differences without seeming to be a fan of them. This was instinctive for Isherwood, and works its way out in his books as dramatic empathy and a calm inclusivity of style. You can tell he would be a generous friend just by reading his sentences.

To be the best prose writer in England, Isherwood had to invest in the idea of life as a form of play and the writer as a kind of actor. At Cambridge, he and Edward Upward invented personae for themselves to inhabit, as well as a place, Mortmere, a sort of nursery habitation full of gothic fantasy, surreal antics and sexual innuendo. ‘Isherwood always found or invented someone or something to scrutinise and question his authenticity,’ Bucknell writes. ‘He was unsure of his identity, anxious and even guilty about his enthusiasms and pleasures, searching for a singular self.’ It can be a dangerous game, but investing in other selves, in less tribal ways of accessing your ‘authenticity’, may be a stylist’s chief prerogative. The heroes of prose fiction are not merely good at doing voices (as Dickens was, on the page and in the room), but are able to bury their personhood in ghostly acres of common ground. Isherwood called Cockney his ‘disguise-language’, and we find in his work a succession of visions that he was able to make human. Sally Bowles, in that sense, is everyone who ever felt the need to hide, everyone who felt the need to remake themselves in order to survive. Isherwood had a powerful family, but he wanted one he could manage himself, one he could steer, and that is what gives his famous friendships much of their collective power. Not all writers are like this, but some have the capacity to fall in love with a family as much as with a person, just as E.M. Forster did with the family of Bob Buckingham and Helen Schlegel does with the Wilcoxes in Howards End, thinking she has found a way of life to love, or a lost tribe to which she might belong.

Whatever the anxieties, a writer’s style will often enough be a homemade affair, a mesh of material discovered and material retrieved, before all of it is shaped by accident into literary principle. ‘Mr Norris Changes Trains is set in Germany,’ Bucknell writes, ‘but it smokes with the fires of home.’ Germany seems to have sharpened Isherwood’s strangely personal way of seeing. Whatever the reason (sex or local colour or the historical moment), it seemed finally to free him to become a character on the page. Enter ‘Isherwood’, or ‘Ishyvoo’, the man who sees brilliantly and is brilliantly seen, caught like everybody in the drama of history. We now take it for granted, in reporting, in film and in the novel – in the art world, indeed, where the artist may be nothing but a leviathan of mirrors – that the creator is the thing that sees itself at the same time as it sees the world, and is never less than the thing regarded.

‘I, a Camera.’ That is echt Isherwood: the camera that records itself. There are of course other writers of his period who were influenced by the cinema (Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, Scott Fitzgerald) but none of them quite allows the camera to examine its own processes, owning its own artifice. The famous passage comes in ‘A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930’, a section of Goodbye to Berlin: ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.’ The ‘thingness’ of Isherwood’s writing provides an object lesson – or a lesson in objects – to any serious student of fiction. ‘Everything in the room is like that: unnecessarily solid, abnormally heavy and dangerously sharp,’ he writes. ‘Here, at the writing table, I am confronted by a phalanx of metal objects – a pair of candlesticks shaped like entwined serpents, an ashtray from which emerges the head of a crocodile, a paperknife copied from a Florentine dagger, a brass dolphin holding on the end of its tail a small broken clock. What becomes of such things?’ The dolphin clock was real. Isherwood travelled to Berlin in 1952 to write a piece for the Observer about his old haunts, and spent hours with his former landlady, Fräulein Thurau. ‘As a memento of their reunion’, Bucknell tells us, she gave Isherwood ‘the brass dolphin clock that had stood on the writing table and which he had described in Goodbye to Berlin’. Bucknell quotes from his Observer piece:

‘During the war, the dolphin was hurled from the table by a bomb-blast and its green marble base slightly chipped; the tiny scratches are its only record of the passage of those violent years.’ He proposed to treasure it ‘for the rest of my life, as a souvenir of my dear friend and a symbol of that indestructible something in a place and an environment that resists all outward change’. The dolphin clock still sits on the table in his workroom in Santa Monica.

To Louise Bourgeois, the word souvenir meant the remnants of one’s deepest past, the building materials of memory. ‘You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks,’ she said.

Early Isherwood shuttles stylistically between Germany and England, ‘experiencing personally’, as Bucknell writes, ‘the doppelgänger fate of the two warlike empires’. Sharp and waspish, his prose turns storytelling into a melody of manners and mysteries, a brazier of new opportunities and new heroism. In some ways, he is an English Hemingway, conjuring ‘the sexy, witty atmosphere of Weimar’. Sally Bowles (over familiar now from the Bob Fosse jazzster in the musical Cabaret) is, in the original, a poor little English girl, the daughter of a Lancashire mill-owner who speaks of her ‘mummy’. She adores everything. Her German is ‘all her own’. Sally is too much, of course, but in her kimono and with her cigarette holder and green nail varnish, she is a little like everybody who tries too hard. More than anything else, she is a lonely person in a foreign city, forced to make something of the night. Isherwood had an eye and a lot of language for people who swear by their own sense of publicity, and he understood the impulses that might lead a girl to Hollywood. Before Holly Golightly or any fictional character of that sort, he invented the type. For Sally Bowles, he drew influence from Balzac, from Louise Brooks and from a dozen girls he knew. But she was also, as Bucknell tells us,

Isherwood’s own boy-girl alter ego, his female double, enthusiastically sleeping her way to nowhere. Casting his alter ego as a girl had the advantage of neutralising his own sexual transgressions since any bad girl was, in the 1930s, far more shocking than any bad boy. As a woman, Sally is far more ‘lost’ than the Isherwood character, and the Isherwood character can even masquerade as her protector.

In a way,​ Isherwood was pre-acclimatised to American unreality. ‘He holds the future of the English novel in his hands,’ Somerset Maugham had said, but the man who turned up in Los Angeles in May 1939 was less in love with his own potential than he was in thrall to California’s potent mix of youth and constant sunshine. He and Auden would be heavily criticised (in a piece by Cyril Connolly in Horizon, which Connolly edited and to which Spender contributed) for seeking hedonistic freedoms in the US while the bombs fell at home, but it’s probably a mistake, overall, to look to creative writers for moral perspicacity, regardless of what they said about Spain. ‘I feel as if we’d arisen from the tomb,’ Isherwood wrote to his mother, ‘full of energy and gaiety.’ He felt the future of English culture was in America, but writers might say anything in the bid for material. All the same, Isherwood at his desk would make up in literary endeavour for what he lacked in patriotism.

‘The simplicity of Mr Isherwood’s style,’ Diana Trilling wrote, ‘is a reflection neither of condescension nor assertion. It is the style of a free and generous intelligence, most happily balanced between self-tolerance and tolerance of others.’ The Trillings, it must be said, were always on the lookout for a tasteful little moralist to include in their intellectual suppers, but she was right about Isherwood, realising that his manipulations of selfhood were crucial to the contemporary scene.

‘Mr Isherwood?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Mr Christopher Isherwood?’

‘That’s me.’

‘You know, we’ve been trying to contact you ever since yesterday afternoon.’

The voice at the other end of the wire was a bit reproachful.

‘I was out.’

‘You were out?’ (Not altogether convinced.)

‘Yes.’

‘Oh … I see …’ (A pause, to consider this. Then, suddenly suspicious.) ‘That’s funny though … Your number was always engaged. All the time.’

‘Who are you?’ I asked, my tone getting an edge on it.

‘Imperial Bulldog.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Imperial Bulldog Pictures. I’m speaking for Mr Chatsworth.’

That’s the opening to Prater Violet, his novel about the film industry. It couldn’t be cleaner, more self-referential, more knowing or more minxy. In relation to Hollywood, Thomas Mann (from his perch at Pacific Palisades) had pronounced Isherwood ‘starry-eyed’, but Isherwood had learned more than Mann about gay sexual deportment. Carrying the Weimar spirit with him, writing with vitality, irony and humour, Isherwood deserves credit for volumnising the gay liberation spirit, and he married it, in his life and in his work, to a Socratic vision of California, where old hands and young men, sex and drinking, might reach for a new notion of enlightenment. He had many boyfriends, but what he was looking for was a ‘comfortable, predictable, quiet daily life’, the conditions for happiness and work, and he found them in the not uncomplicated figure of the artist Don Bachardy, who gets more than a fair shout in Bucknell’s story.

Isherwood liked getting ‘down to the nerve’, as he appreciated Francis Bacon saying in the 1950s. Earlier novelists he admired, such as Forster, couldn’t offer any lessons in how to live as a gay writer in the second half of the 20th century. This was something Isherwood had to invent on the hoof. ‘This place is a jungle, a wilderness,’ he wrote of his new home, ‘it isn’t venerable and traditional and mentally cosy, like King’s College. One can only live here by being strong and standing alone. And how does one get to be strong and stand alone? By opening the heart to the source of all strength and all love and not-aloneness.’ In the conditions he both adopted and created with Bachardy, he forged the thing he had decided was most necessary to his talent, an ‘Anglo-American style’. Forster suggested that it was only in a novel that we can know people perfectly, but Isherwood injects growth hormones into that theory, allowing for an intimacy between the world of observable facts and the mysteries of the period. In The World in the Evening, the story of an aimless lover trying to find himself in America, we come to see that queer sensibility could be a way of understanding modern culture. Homosexuality, as Bucknell puts it, ‘is not only about sex’, a truth we can now take for granted. We find it in Isherwood’s sentences and in the quiet places of his paragraphs, a more complete idea of love.

He was rickety with imperfections, of course. He never really understood bisexuals, for instance, and was in that class who like to range themselves against those whose struggles are different from one’s own. ‘Goodness,’ for Isherwood, ‘was telling the truth,’ but while he swore loyalty to his swami, he didn’t follow Vedanta’s demand for chastity, ruthlessly repressing that particular truth. Giving yourself up to an ecstasy of self-belief can be a hazardous hobby for novelists. Isherwood walked the walk, but he sometimes over-talked the talk, and this made his necessary silences (with the FBI for instance, to which he denied his sexuality) seem like betrayals. They’re not, of course, but he gave in to the belief that the multitudes he contained were his alone, when in fact he was as contradictory in his own way as other people were in theirs. He co-operated with the House Un-American Activities Committee in a way that did him no credit.

Isherwood was ‘not quite as overwhelmed by bliss as he claimed’, the writer Gavin Lambert later commented. ‘Otherwise … why did he get drunk so often?’ And why was he so given to hypochondria, paranoia, sobbing, rivalry and religiosity? Bucknell provides a feast of answers, giving subtle animation to the hoopla of Isherwood’s existence while offering a permanent uplift to our sense of what matters in his work. For me, the strange beauty of his talent was dependent, as such things often are, on the complexities of his distress, yet what wins out in Isherwood is a great spirit of survival. His best novel, A Single Man, concerns a cultured Englishman, George, an academic at San Tomas State College in California. George’s lover has died and he is reaching for his next move. He must make a life out of believing life is not over, which is hard if you’re feeling lost. The novel is an ode to persistence, revealing that the future is never dead. ‘Life-energy,’ George perceives of himself,

surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in a body – even this old beat-up carcase – that still has warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh! The scowling youths on the corner see him as a dodderer, no doubt, or at best as a potential score … He wants to rejoice in his own body; the tough, triumphant old body of a survivor. The body that has outlived Jim.

Nobody really believes that beauty can rescue the world, but there will always be writers whose main talent is to imagine it could. Walking across the campus, George sees two young men playing tennis with their tops off. He continues to discuss with a student the argument between Leavis and Snow about two cultures, but for the reader, a delicious moral pointillism blesses the scene, as two cultures of a different sort play out: one in which the young tennis players are ignorable, and a second culture, beloved of Isherwood, in which good energy is always holy. ‘From his heart,’ George ‘thanks these young animals for their beauty. And they will never know what they have done to make this moment marvellous to him, and life itself less hateful.’ This novel seems to me a great boost to the normalisation of things previously unsaid, including the normalisation of gay chauvinisms. He dedicated it to Gore Vidal, and wrote to him, Bucknell tells us, implying that this was the kind of novel they’d been trying to write since 1947, ‘a beautiful work of art that was also a powerful piece of propaganda presenting a well-adjusted homosexual to a mainstream audience’.

Isherwood was aware, when writing his book about his parents, that he had made a myth of himself, ‘created out of the materials of experience’, and it seems elegant of his best biographer not only to identify his problems but to celebrate his solutions. ‘In what voice should he speak about the past to the generations of the future?’ she asks, and that – for Isherwood, trying to bring together an audience in his mind made up of old Apostles, friends, theatre people and beach boys – was the central mystery for him as he flowered into old age. ‘I believe that my Mother and Father are not only alive inside me but becoming more alive,’ he wrote. As much as any novelist I can think of, he was always in the middle of youth, trying to filter its bold vitality through the light of his sentences.