Christopher Isherwood Inside Out

Starred review from June 1, 2024
A penetrating exploration of the life and work of the acclaimed novelist, memoirist, and pioneering figure in gay culture. While Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) may be best known for Goodbye to Berlin, which drew on his experiences in Weimar-era Berlin and inspired the musical Cabaret, this new biography by Bucknell, director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, astutely highlights the considerable merits of his other novels and candid autobiographical works. The author renders a sweeping portrait of Isherwood's remarkable life journey, during which he forged indelible connections with many of the era's preeminent literary and artistic figures. Early on, Isherwood moved within an influential circle of writers that included W.H. Auden, E.M. Forster, and Steven Spender. In 1939, he moved to Hollywood and pursued screenwriting, while also initiating a spiritual conversion to Vedanta under the guidance of Indian monk Swami Prabhavananda. Over the ensuing years, his vast circle expanded, bringing in Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and David Hockney, among others. Bucknell dedicates perhaps too many pages to Isherwood's early years, privileged upbringing, Cambridge education, and elements of his complex family dynamics (including his father's death in World War II and his suffocating relationship with his mother), but this detailed exploration lays the foundation for her explorations of her subject's later writing and the complexities that shaped his intimate relationships, particularly his romances with various men at different stages of his life, most enduringly with artist Don Bachardy. Throughout, Bucknell urgently draws attention to Isherwood's courageous life as an openly gay man and his vital role in advancing gay liberation through his writing: "He saw from his career's outset 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." An engrossing, rigorously documented study of a 20th-century literary trailblazer.

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Starred review from June 1, 2024
Bucknell edited four volumes of Isherwood's diaries as well as a collection of letters between him and his partner, Don Bachardy, making her the ideal writer to portray this multilayered writer. This absorbing biography burrows deeply into each stage of Isherwood's continuous intellectual and spiritual evolutions. Bucknell closely examines his bourgeois English childhood, marked by family tragedies, and his famous lifelong friendships with poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender and their interwoven influences on each other's work as well as Isherwood's successive literary triumphs. A steadfast diarist, Isherwood chronicled his youthful queer self-discovery in 1930s Berlin, where he wrote what became The Berlin Stories, the source for the musical, Cabaret. Isherwood immigrated to Hollywood, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1946. An erudite and spiritual pilgrim, he was so influenced by Swami Prabhavananda he nearly became a Vedanta monk. His relationship with Bachardy, a much younger man, was a transcendent connection that endured through difficult years. A mostly self-taught artist, Bachardy was key to Isherwood's literary developments, suggesting the title of his exceptional novel, A Single Man. Isherwood questioned everything in life, ardently examining himself, and Bucknell's marvelously knowledgeable portrait reveals the full dimensions of his richly contemplative life.

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Starred review from June 17, 2024
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.