Christopher Isherwood Inside Out
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A stunningly intimate exploration of the writer and gay cultural icon and of his lifelong search for authenticity.
The story of Christopher Isherwood’s life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner of thirty years, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait.
Isherwood began his career depicting the psychological wreckage of World War I. While living in Berlin, he began to write his reputation-making fiction and (with W. H. Auden) plays inspired by the city’s nightlife, its artistic underbelly, its fevered politics. When Hitler took power, he fled with his German boyfriend, who was pursued and arrested by the Gestapo. Isherwood left Europe and found work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, where he became the disciple of a Hindu monk, Swami Prabhavananda. Together they translated the Bhagavad Gita.
Isherwood shed his family ghosts and became a chief instigator of the cultural shift that made gay liberation possible. Every step of the journey served his writing; one of our greatest diarists, he recorded his experiences and transformed them in fiction and memoir. Katherine Bucknell charts the quest of the restless, penetrating, blackly comic mind through books, films, foreign lands, love affairs, and collaborations toward self-understanding and happiness. Here is Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.
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.
