All of life was a play for Christopher Isherwood; sometimes he was the lead actor, sometimes a clear-eyed observer in the stalls. In person he was a born performer—charming and gregarious and adaptable; as a writer he delighted in playing one of his personae off against another, drawing most of his books from his life but presenting himself now as “Christopher,” then as “Herr Issyvoo.” After he fled his entitled life in England, as Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood, for 47 years in the U.S., he rejoiced in the fact that L.A. seemed a movable stage set, a mirage.
His belief that everything was masquerade was deepened, of course, by his life in Hollywood, where he cheerfully cranked out scripts for decades to support his subtle and pellucid books. But it also derived from the Vedanta school of Hinduism that he embraced for over 40 years, in which a wandering monk was said to clap at regular life “as though the whole universe were an enormous theatrical performance.”
The fascination—the fun—in Isherwood is that even while he was living in a Vedanta monastery, he was stealing out to take walks with Greta Garbo, and to enjoy trysts on the beach with an endless series of young men. He accused himself constantly of hypocrisy even as the swami to whom he remained unswervingly devoted thought he had the makings of a saint.
Katherine Bucknell, who has edited four huge volumes of Isherwood’s diaries and a collection of his letters, knows the man as no other scholar ever will. She tracks down every book he read and links an image of a rock pool in his writing to such images in Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Cyril Connolly. Best of all, perhaps, as an American long settled in London, she knows well the boarding-school-and-Oxford world that Isherwood was rebelling against as well as the open, forward-looking America he so gratefully embraced.
For lovers of bold-type names, this book is a feast. In one typical paragraph, Isherwood is dining with Charlie Chaplin, Montgomery Clift, and Thomas Mann. When he went to London, he took over Richard Burton’s house. Among musicians alone, he knew Igor Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten, and David Bowie, and his sunny nature could endear him even to such tough-minded Hollywood moguls as David O. Selznick and Sam Goldwyn. It’s easy to forget now that in 1973 the movie based on his stories from Berlin, Cabaret, won eight Oscars while The Godfather claimed only three.
The fascination—the fun—in Christopher Isherwood is that even while he was living in a Vedanta monastery, he was stealing out to take walks with Greta Garbo.
What complicated his life was that he was always in search of “snugness” and adventure all at once; he longed to go wild, yet to remain detached enough to write it all up. Somehow he found this balance over 33 tumultuous years with his much younger life partner, the artist Don Bachardy. Drawing on her conversations with Bachardy—and on Isherwood’s unsparing diaries—Bucknell traces every tremor in their open relationship: they could never be entirely separate, though on one page alone Bachardy is sleeping with, first, Tony Richardson, and then Tennessee Williams, while Isherwood is in bed with the novelist and hustler John Rechy.
This all remains riveting in part because Isherwood was not just a camera but a tape recorder. He was well aware that his friends saw him as “part despot, part diplomat”; he could get on with almost anyone without ever relinquishing his writer’s steely will. Besides, his life was never short of rich material: the man on Hollywood Boulevard who published one of Isherwood’s anthologies of Vedanta writing sold porn under the counter, while Isherwood’s housekeeper in the Vedanta monastery was a formidable Englishwoman who went on to marry the ninth Earl of Sandwich.
It can be daunting to try to keep up with a “historian of the self” who spent 60 years giving us different versions of his life. But Bucknell is indefatigable, leading us expertly through every detail of his early years in England, his time in Weimar Germany, his travels everywhere from China to Western Samoa. Beneath the carnival of his social life, she never loses sight of the fact that even his spiky friend Gore Vidal named Isherwood “the best prose writer in English.”
Living at the heart of the floating world of gay artists in the 20th century, Isherwood was determined to show that gays could be as happy and comfortably nested as anyone. As late as 1967, Bucknell reminds us, a CBS News survey found that two in every three Americans “look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort or fear” and most of them favored legal punishment even for homosexual acts performed in private between consenting adults. When Isherwood became a calm and wise spokesman for gay liberation, a book-tour stop in San Diego was canceled, in 1976, for fear that he might mention his sexual preferences.
I met Isherwood occasionally in the 1970s, and as I read this authoritative account of his life, I kept thinking of another writer I knew in L.A. who, for all his sexual and emotional complications, also received unconditional love from his Asian spiritual teacher for 40 years. Leonard Cohen has in recent years become a hero to many for his honesty, his clarity, his wisdom about his own follies. I only hope that this deeply informed biography will remind us all that Isherwood is no less worthy of respect—and of warm affection.
Pico Iyer is a Columnist for Air Mail and the author of many books, including The Half Known Life, which came out last year, and Aflame, which will publish in January
