Christopher and his kind

It’s not often that one can recommend a biography of a writer as long as this, particularly since Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank. But in this case there is no doubt: this is a book which simply must be read, a triumph which produces from years of dense research a marvellous, immense narrative. Its ultimately stupendous effect is down to the fact that Isherwood, whatever his failings and limitations, was simply there when it counted; old enough to understand the Great War, there at the Opernplatz when the Nazis burnt Heinrich Heine’s work, and there in San Francisco for the summer of love and the birth of personal liberation mythologies. Isherwood is not always admirable, not always intelligent, but his story is the story of the 20th century, and his life, in this supremely expert pair of hands, has a thunderous power.

The great thing about homosexuality is that it gets you out of the house. Isherwood said he ‘couldn’t relax sexually with a member of his own class or nation’. Without that, Christopher Bradshaw-Isherwood might have remained a low-achieving rentier, presiding over the sort of estate which the 20th century generally did for. With it, his life followed quite a different course.

The defining moment of that life, I think, was his meeting with W. H. Auden. Auden was the great intellectual impresario of his generation, apart from his own gigantic merits as a poet. In Isherwood’s case, they together undertook a ten-year on-off sexual relationship, in the course of which Auden persuaded Isherwood that it was his destiny to become ‘the novelist’ of the age.

What part brute sexual infatuation played in this conviction is all too easy to guess; Isherwood, in the partnership, was always the one who found men queuing up for his sexual favours, whereas Auden had to work quite hard to talk them into bed.