In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’. This is probably true. The second half of his career, after his departure to the USA in 1939, was disappointing. There were two good novellas, Prater Violet (1945) and A Single Man (1964), and a book of linked stories, Down There on a Visit (1962), which was good in parts, but his attempt at a major novel, The World in the Evening (1954) was a sad flop. There were autobiographical books of some charm and more interest, and an inferior last novel, A Meeting by the River (1967).
So something went wrong for the writer, described in the Thirties by Somerset Maugham as the young man who had ‘the future of the English novel in his hands’. The conventional explanations are probably correct: California was bad for him, as also for Aldous Huxley. Work for the film studios was demanding and unrewarding , except of course in financial terms. His commitment to Eastern mysticism and his Swami Prabhavananda, who sounds a frightful bore and also rather silly (his two ‘great objects of admiration’ were Greta Garbo and the Duke of Windsor) did him no good as a writer.
Removing to the USA, he lost his vital subject matter, and never found a replacement.(The best parts of Down There on a Visit hark back to the Twenties and Thirties.) This might have mattered less if he had been a different sort of novelist, less reliant on personal experience. He was, to quote Hensher again, ‘always a writer who could describe nothing successfully if it did not impinge on him’. He was never as objective as he pretended with the famous claim to be only a camera, though his plain, matter-of-fact style effectively disguised this for a time.
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David L Nilsson
February 7th, 2009 5:03pmMassie does not mention the most striking aspect of "The Memorial"-- the scrambled time-scheme, so that we first see characters as older than when we re-encounter them. Isherwood explains why he did this in his fictionalised memoir "Lions and Shadows", another most enjoyable and amusing work.
"All the Conspirators" is a refreshingly detached and astringent version of the usual frustrated-artist/rebel first novel. And pace Massie, "Down There on a Visit", though not unmarred by Isherwood's latter-day Californian camp tone of voice, is a splendid return to form. Seemingly fragmentary, it somehow builds into a unity more convincing than the scraps of "Goodbye to Berlin".
The last time I read "The World in the Evening", I found it more interesting and worthwhile than generations of critics lazily quoting its original notices have acknowledged.
Isherwood was not the equal of his true literary guru, Maugham; but he shares with him the gift for writing about things that continue to matter by means of multum in parvo, in courteously limpid, wonderfully fluent, cunningly colloquial-seeming prose.
He is never pompous or obscure. No wonder the lit crit lads neglect Maugham and Isherwood: not enough word puzzles to generate PhD theses.
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Bill Corr
February 7th, 2009 2:46pmSnobbery and discreetly unmentioned racism, while frowned on in some supposedly-enlightened circles, are potent talismen* against being suckered by some Oriental or semi-Oriental fraud or other.
The Swami Prabhavananda who so enchanted Aldous Huxley, like the assorted Maharishis, plump-little-Indian-boy-wonders or Osho the Bhagwan, or Gurdjieff or The Mother in Pondicherry or the Russki who was the guru of FDR's supersmart-but-gullible Vice-President, Henry Wallace, may or not have been out-and-out charlatans and frauds - and one thinks of the Maharishi's carnal desire for Cynthia Lennon and the Bhagwan's collection of gleaming Rolls-Royces - but the people who are suckered by them certainly end up looking very silly indeed.
Evelyn Waugh referred to Aldous Huxley's "yogibogi" silliness with appropriate contemptuous disdain, but - on the other hand - converts to these kinds of loopy cults seldom desire to blow themselves, and others, to bits on public transport, do they?
* talismen: plural of talisman
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