Christopher Isherwood Inside Out
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- 14,99 €
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- 14,99 €
Descripción editorial
'A first-rate biography of the man, the writer and the lover' DAVID HOCKNEY
'Bucknell's research is impressive and her judgements astute' GUARDIAN
An engrossing new biography of the man whose writings about 1930s Berlin made him famous. From the editor of Isherwood’s diaries and letters.
Christopher Isherwood rejected the life he was born to and set out to make a different one. Heir to an English estate, he flunked out of university, moved to Berlin, was driven through Europe by the Nazis, and circled the globe before settling in Hollywood.
There he adopted a new religion and continued to form the friendships – including an astounding number of romantic and sexual ones – through which he discovered himself.
Using a wealth of unpublished material, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out tells how the traumas of his father’s death in World War I and his failure to protect his German lover from the Nazis were healed by his life as a monk in the 1940s, enabling him to commit unflinchingly to a sexually open relationship in the 1950s, and to come out as a ‘grand old man’ of the gay rights movement in the 1970s.
With this new biography, enriched by unlimited access to Isherwood’s partner Don Bachardy, Katherine Bucknell shows how Christopher Isherwood achieved a uniquely inspiring personal life. He effected lasting change in our culture, through both his literary works and the way he lived.
‘The best biography I’ve ever read . . . Every page is full of surprises’ EDMUND WHITE
'It’s hard to imagine a better qualified candidate for this task than Katherine Bucknell' THE TIMES
'A fast-paced story of an extraordinary life and a broadly illuminating history of vast cultural changes’ EDWARD MENDELSON
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bucknell (What You Will) brings scholarly acumen and bravura storytelling to her stunning biography of novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986). Bucknell notes that as a schoolboy growing up amid the conservative norms of early 1900s Britain, Isherwood "was afraid of his sexual feelings" toward other boys and viewed the punishment inflicted on Oscar Wilde for his "reckless defiance" as a cautionary tale. Widespread homophobia also shaped Isherwood's adulthood; his autobiographical novels only obliquely referenced his sexuality, and after he moved to Hollywood in 1939, he started practicing Vedanta, drawn to the faith's acceptance of gay individuals. Isherwood became more outspoken in his old age, writing explicitly about his sexuality in his 1976 memoir, Christopher and His Kind, and serving as a "father figure" to the burgeoning gay liberation movement. Bucknell's background as a novelist shows in her elegant lyricism, as when she writes that the eyes of Isherwood's longtime partner, Don Bachardy, "were hazel—clear green with brown flecks—changing in the light to reveal in quicksilver succession soulfulness, excitement, intrigue, defiance, hurt, laughter." The sharp analysis sheds light on how Isherwood's life influenced his work, pointing out, for instance, how the power plays between friends in the story "On Ruegen Island (Summer 1931)" dramatized Isherwood's "tortured relationship" with a German 17-year-old while living in Berlin in his 20s. This is a monumental achievement.
