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WORK TITLE: Christopher Isherwood
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WEBSITE: https://katherinebucknell.com/
CITY: London
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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PERSONAL
Born 1957, in Saigon, Vietnam; married Bob Maguire; children: three.
EDUCATION:Princeton University, B.A., 1979; Oxford University, M.A.; Columbia University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, and scholar. Worcester College, Oxford, England, junior research fellow, 1986-88. Founder of W.H. Auden Society; director of Christopher Isherwood Foundation.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications.
SIDELIGHTS
Katherine Bucknell is a writer, editor, and scholar based in London, England. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, a master’s degree from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. From 1986 to 1988, she served as a junior research fellow at Worcester College at Oxford University. Bucknell became know as a scholar of the work of writers Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden. She is the founder of the W.H. Auden Society and served as the director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. Bucknell has served as editor of and wrote introductions for books by Auden and Isherwood. She has also published her own volumes of fiction and nonfiction.
As the title suggests, 2013’s The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, which Bucknell edited and for which she wrote the introduction, includes correspondence between Isherwood and Bachardy. The title refers to the terms of endearment the two men used for one another. The letters reveal their separate travels, friendships with celebrities, and affection for one another. Reviewing the book in Spectator, D.J. Taylor called it “invaluable” and suggested: “It is a fascinating sociological document while, like most exchanges between two people wrapped up in the tantalising subject of themselves and each other, lacking very much real interest in the wider world.” Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide critic, Matthew Hays, commented: “Isherwood fanatics (and I count myself among them) will want to read this book. The Animals evokes the mixed series of feelings one would have after rummaging through a large box of old letters from a very dear and complicated friend who’s no longer around: joy, sorrow, melancholy, delight, relief, and a tinge of disappointment.”
Bucknell’s biography of Isherwood, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, was released in 2024. In it, she follows Isherwood’s journey through his youth, his early days in the literary scene, his screenwriting stint, his spiritual journey, and his adult friendships. Bucknell also mentions his family relationships, romantic entanglements, and sexual identity. A Kirkus Reviews critic called the book “an engrossing, rigorously documented study of a 20th-century literary trailblazer.” Writing on the London Guardian website, Lara Feigel noted: “Bucknell’s research is deeply impressive and her judgments astute.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, September-October, 2014, Matthew Hays, “Animal Magnetism,” review of The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, p. 43.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2024, review of Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.
New Statesman, September 27, 2013, Olivia Laing, “Dearest Dobbin,” review of The Animals, p. 65.
Spectator, September 21, 2013, D.J. Taylor, “Darling Flufftail … Beloved Pinkpaws: The Correspondence Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy Is Good for Celebrity-Spotting but Too Cloyingly Self-absorbed to Be of Wider Interest,” review of The Animals, p. 32.
ONLINE
Katherine Bucknell website, https://katherinebucknell.com/ (July 11, 2024).
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (June 6, 2024), Lara Feigel, review of Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.
Katherine Bucknell, scholar and writer
Katherine Bucknell was born in Saigon in 1957 and grew up in Washington, D.C. She has degrees from Princeton, Oxford, and Columbia Universities and lives in London and Nantucket with her husband, Bob Maguire. They have three children.
She is a founder of The W.H. Auden Society and Director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. She has written and edited more than a dozen books, including several novels, and her essays on literature and other subjects have appeared in various collections. She contributes to journals, newspapers, T.V., radio, and film, and recently presented a podcast about Isherwood and his life partner Don Bachardy.
CV
Katherine Bucknell (b. 1957, Saigon) grew up in Washington, D.C. and was educated at Potomac School, Concord Academy and Princeton University (B.A. 1979, Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa). She holds an M.A. from Oxford University (Honours, First Class), where she was the first woman to take an undergraduate degree at Worcester College, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University (Orals and Dissertation with Distinction), where she was a Newcombe Fellow and a Whiting Fellow. She was a Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College from 1986 to 1988.
Dr. Bucknell edited W. H. Auden’s Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928 (1994; expanded paperback 2003), and she is co-editor with Nicholas Jenkins of three volumes of Auden Studies (The Map of All My Youth (1990); The Language of Learning and the Language of Love (1994); In Solitude, for Company (1995)). She is also a founder of The W.H. Auden Society and Executive Director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, where she initiated the L.A. Times-Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Isherwood-Bachardy Lectures at the Huntington Library, and the Don Bachardy Fellowship at the Royal Drawing School, London.
She introduced The Mortmere Stories by Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward (1994) and the Vintage edition of Kathleen and Frank (2013), and she contributed essays about Isherwood to The Isherwood Century (2000), On Modern British Fiction (2002), and The Los Angeles Review of Books (2014).
She edited and introduced the Diaries of Christopher Isherwood in four volumes (1997-2012) and The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (2013). She presented and co-produced the letters as The Animals Podcast (2017) starring Simon Callow and Alan Cumming with an audio version of Isherwood and Bachardy’s play A Meeting by the River directed by Anthony Page and starring Dominic West and Kyle Soller with music by Edmund Jolliffe.
She is the author of the major biography Christopher Isherwood Inside Out (2024).
Dr. Bucknell has written reviews, comments, and features for the Times Literary Supplement, The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, British Vogue, Medium, and other publications, and she has advised for and appeared on radio, TV, and films, including Susanna White’s prize-winning documentary about Auden, Tell Me the Truth About Love (2000), Guido Santi and Tina Mascara’s documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story (2007), and Tina Mascara’s forthcoming The Portrait Artist.
An essay on the British architect John Pawson appeared in his Themes and Projects (2002).
She has published four novels: Canarino (2004), Leninsky Prospekt (2005), What You Will (2007), and +1 (2013). She has also created an audiobook The Flynn Guarneri (2023) read by Annabel Mullion and Simon Callow with music by Edmund Jolliffe.
She is a keen sportswoman, awarded seven varsity letters at Princeton (lacrosse and field hockey), a Blue (field hockey), Half Blue (lacrosse), and Summer VIIIs oar at Oxford; she still enjoys running, swimming, tennis, skiing, and surfing.
She is married to Bob Maguire, managing director at Carlyle International Energy Partners, with whom she has three children. The Maguires live in London and Nantucket.
QUOTED: "An engrossing, rigorously documented study of a 20th-century literary trailblazer."
Bucknell, Katherine CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD INSIDE OUT Farrar, Straus and Giroux (NonFiction None) $40.00 8, 27 ISBN: 9780374119362
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.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Bucknell, Katherine: CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD INSIDE OUT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795673784/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3a11782a. Accessed 25 June 2024.
QUOTED: "invaluable."
"It is a fascinating sociological document while, like most exchanges between two people wrapped up in the tantalising subject of themselves and each other, lacking very much real interest in the wider world."
The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy
edited by Katherine Bucknell
Chatto, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 481, ISBN 97870571241378
There is a fine old tradition of distinguished literary men addressing their loved ones by animal-world pet names. Evelyn Waugh saluted Laura Herbert, the woman who became his second wife, as 'Whiskers'. Philip Larkin's letters to his long-term girlfriend Monica Jones are full of Beatrix Potter-style references to the scrumptious carrots that his 'darling bun' will have unloaded on her plate at their next meeting should wicked Mr McGregor not get there first. Wanting to soften the blow of his sacking by the BBC Third Programme in the early 1950s, John Lehmann went off on holiday with an intimate known to posterity as 'the faun'. But none of this sentimentalising comes anywhere near in its effects to the torrent of effusiveness, personal mythologising and, it has to be said, downright archness uncorked by The Animals .
Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy met in California in February 1953 when Isherwood was in his mid-40s and Bachardy a stripling of 18. Their relationship endured--with intermissions--until Isherwood's death in 1986, and first turned epistolary in 1956 when Isherwood, thinking the privations of his mother's house in Cheshire too austere for an American tourist, left Barchardy behind in their London hotel. Later correspondence was prompted by Don's absences, sometimes abroad but on occasion in New York, furthering his career as a professional portraitist; the most interesting date from a period in the 1960s when, armed with his boyfriend's address book and a highly plausible manner, Don heads to London to study at the Slade while Christopher sits and frets in Santa Monica.
As for the nick-names adopted for these exchanges, Isherwood is 'old Dobbin', a sturdy and mostly indulgent carthorse, Barchardy 'Kitty', an affectionate but somewhat highly strung cat. Over the years these endearments undergo a certain amount of development ('Dear Longed-for Colt ... Dearest Catkin ... Darling Nag ... Darling Fur ... Beloved Velvet Rump') but the emotional patterning remains, and Katherine Bucknell, the duo's resourceful editor, is keen to stress its therapeutic value. Isherwood, she explains in the course of a sympathetic introduction, 'believed their animal personae had a mythic power that would keep the relationship alive' by creating 'a world, a safe and separate milieu' in which the two, however detached by distance or temporary fracture, could jointly luxuriate.
There follows a terrific exercise in high-camp call and response. Old Dobbin doesn't sleep so well, missing his tiny cat, Isherwood coyly insists, only to be told by return of post that Kitty 'longs so to be back in my basket ... It seems like ages since I left my horse.' Naturally there occasional hints of anxiety ('Dobbin is only happy if Kitty finds consolation --ONLY NOT TOO MUCH') and the clouds of romantic glory are sometimes swept aside by Bucknell's revelations about the various people each is having affairs with while the other's back is turned, but the transparent sincerity of the tone has the vital effect of halting the reader's instinctive response--to laugh out loud--in its tracks.
Well, nearly always ('His dear letter and his precious story has just arrived, both smelling so deliciously of HORSE that Kitty's nostrils are in a state of nervous excitement.') Predictably, the social and indeed intellectual worlds on offer here, whether in the Californian pine woods or the dining-rooms of upper-bohemian London, are a version of that age-old high-class homosexual admixture of sleaze and sensibility in which the choicest observations about art and literature are brought down to earth by bitchiness and rats-in-a-sack sex lives. Less predictably, of the two correspondents pressing their observations on us, by far the more interesting is Bachardy.
Perhaps, in the end, this disparity is simply a question of milieu. Certainly Isherwood, back in California, has his swami (the interest in oriental religion is kept up throughout) and his dinners with such Hollywood notables as Danny Kaye and Marlon Brando. Barchardy, on the other hand, has the relish of the young thruster setting about his career, combines wide-eyed celebrity-spotting ('Sybil and Richard Burton have let me have their house in Hampstead') with shrewd accounts of meeting the English painter Keith Vaughan, drawing a drunken Henry Green and attending upon the ramshackle court of James Baldwin, while offering wayside vignettes and comments on Isherwood's works in progress that you suspect his mentor was very glad to have.
There is, for example, a jaw-dropping account of his stay with a friend named Marguerite Lamkin in darkest Louisiana on the evening her father tries to kill himself ('Don, something terrible has happened.') As the night wears on and the old man, gravely injured by a gunshot wound to the temple, is taken away to hospital, Marguerite begins to immerse herself in the drama, remarking at one point of Susie, the family's servant, that 'You know she found a piece of skull on the floor.' Isherwood, on receipt of this five-page tour de force , notes that he 'enjoyed it so much that I quite forgot to feel sorry for anybody'.
No point in pretending that these despatches from a long-distance gay relationship will be to everybody's taste, or even that the homosexuality has anything to do with it--archness is archness, whatever one's sexual inclination--but there is an amusing game to be played in seeing if you can identify the very large number of famous and glamorous (and sometimes less famous and less glamorous) people mentioned only by their Christian names without reference to Bucknell's herculean footnotes. I patted myself on the back for recognising 'Cuthbert' (the writer T.C. Worsley, author of Flannelled Fool ) but came a serious cropper over Isherwood's mention of a 'dinner with Evelyn'. Evelyn Waugh? No, an American psychologist and psychotherapist named Evelyn Hooker. As for 'Tito', described as having developed 'really quite crazy persecution delusions', my money was Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia until Bucknell got in with a Mexican actor called Tito Renaldo, 'intermittently a monk at the Vedanta Society'.
The Animals , an invaluable pendant to Katherine Bucknell's four-volume edition of Isherwood's Diaries , comes to a close in April 1970 ('Darling Flufftail ... Beloved Pinkpaws ... Worshipped Plumed Steed') with the stage version of Cabaret improving the finances and the film treatment in prospect. It is a fascinating sociological document while, like most exchanges between two people wrapped up in the tantalising subject of themselves and each other, lacking very much real interest in the wider world. To give one small but salient example of this tendency to self-absorption, I never did find out whether poor Mr Lamkin lived or died.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Taylor, D.J. "Darling Flufftail ... beloved Pinkpaws: the correspondence between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is good for celebrity-spotting but too cloyingly self-absorbed to be of wider interest, says D. J. Taylor." Spectator, vol. 322, no. 9656, 21 Sept. 2013, pp. 32+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A343464401/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8a00a7b2. Accessed 25 June 2024.
QUOTED: "Isherwood fanatics (and I count myself among them) will want to read this book. The Animals evokes the mixed series of feelings one would have after rummaging through a large box of old letters from a very dear and complicated friend who's no longer around: joy, sorrow, melancholy, delight, relief, and a tinge of disappointment."
The Animals: Love Letters
Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy
Edited by Katherine Bucknell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.481 pages, $30.
THIS EXTENSIVE COLLECTION of the letters between Christopher Isherwood and his longtime partner Dan Bachardy feels like a perfect companion volume to the excellent 2007 documentary Chris & Don: A Love Story, which told the story of the couple's life together. Isherwood, of course, is the author who witnessed and chronicled in his Berlin Diaries both the sexual liberation of Berlin in the 1920s and the rise of fascism in the '30s.
The two men met on a California beach when Isherwood was 49 and Bachardy was 18, and, against all odds, they stayed together for over thirty years, until Isherwood's death in 1986. What makes their longevity as a couple remarkable is that most of their romance took place during an especially conservative and sexually repressed era. What's more, many people looked askance at their considerable age difference.
As this volume clearly indicates, they paid little attention to the latter objection. Isherwood's literary celebrity meant that he had an endless supply of accomplished, celebrated friends, people like Tennessee Williams, Shelley Winters, Chita Rivera, Roddy McDowall, and Andy Warhol, who come up throughout the letters. I think my favorite bit of epistolary name-dropping comes when Gore Vidal makes an appearance. In November of 1961, Isherwood writes: "Gore here for a short visit, assured me we shall visit Jackie and Jack and you shall draw them. He loves the Kennedys as much as ever and stays frequently at the White House. The word going around now is NO WAR, but the bomb-shelter racket flourishes.... [He] is terrified of fascism in this country."
The title of the book comes from the running theme of their letters: the couple had pet names for each other, Isherwood being a gentle horse and Bachardy a fluffy cat. Depending on the reader's mood, this will be received as either touching or cloying. They weren't using these pet names as an elaborate code, as they lived quite openly as a gay couple; these were simply terms of endearment. However, given that they write about affairs they're having outside of the relationship, after a while the childlike names began to evoke strange images in my head, like Beatrix Potteresque animals locked in a dungeon while wearing S/M gear. Their lives, together and apart, were anything but the stuff of kiddy lit.
One gets a strong sense of their wonderful sense of humor. Isherwood's legendary bitchiness often shines through: at one point he refers to Southern California as a "joke in bad taste." If there is a big surprise, it would be that even a writer of Isherwood's status dealt with anxieties about money and how to sustain himself with an income. Also, the teaching he did at Los Angeles State College sounds at times like an unwelcome chore.
If this volume has a happy ending--and it does indeed feel like one--it's because the letters end in 1970. That's when Isherwood and Bachardy were finally able to coordinate their lives so they could live together, which ended the need for letter-writing. And that feels like a truly happy thing, because about one fifth of their letters are pronouncements about the agony of being apart--lengthy, gushing tracts given over to poignant, long-distance longing. In February 1965, Bachardy writes: "Kitty is so lonely and sad without his Dear, now. He dreamt about him all last night and I think probably cried out for him several times but there was no one to hear him. Kitty misses him so."
Also hanging over the book, it must be sadly noted, is the anti-Semitism for which Isherwood has become known since his death. This comes up in the letters, too, where there are a few disparaging remarks about Jews. That the man who so carefully and accurately depicted the Nazis' rise in pre-World War II Berlin held bigoted views is truly disturbing. But Isherwood fanatics (and I count myself among them) will want to read this book. The Animals evokes the mixed series of feelings one would have after rummaging through a large box of old letters from a very dear and complicated friend who's no longer around: joy, sorrow, melancholy, delight, relief, and a tinge of disappointment.
Matthew Hays teaches film studies at Concordia Univ., Montreal.
Hays, Matthew
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide
http://glreview.org
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The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy
Edited by Katherine Bucknell
Chatto & Windus, 528pp, [pounds sterling]25
In 1952, the then 48-year-old Christopher Isherwood met a beautiful teenage boy on the beach in Santa Monica. None of his friends thought the liaison would last but it proved unexpectedly durable. Despite a 30-year age gap and affairs on both sides, the two men remained emphatically together until Isherwood's death in 1986-a relationship considerably longer-lasting than most Hollywood marriages.
Like many couples, they communicated in a private language, a sort of nursery camp in which they were cast as the "Animals", sometimes beleaguered by the human world (the "Others") and sometimes resplendent in their difference. The Animals were evidently well established by the time written communication began, on a trip to London in the winter of 1956. They make their inaugural appearance not in the first, rather shy letter from Isherwood but in Bachardy's reply. "I miss rides through London on old Dobbin," he writes, "and think a lot about him, sleeping in a strange stable, eating cold oats out of an ill-fitting feed bag and having no cat fur to keep him warm ... And tell him an anxious Tabby is at the mercy of the RSPCA and counting the days till his return."
In this pleasurable and increasingly powerful masque, Bachardy is Kitty, a small, well-bred white kitten, while Isherwood is Dobbin, Dub, Drub or Plug, a weary, reliable old horse (sometimes a stallion, sometimes a loyal mare). Gags about riding and furry parts aside, it's a mode for the establishment and continuance of intimacy, rather than any especially outspoken sexual desire.
When the Animals are separated (most often because Bachardy, a gifted and increasingly adept portrait artist, is in London or New York pursuing commissions), they long to be reunited in their dear dilapidated "basket". "It seems so wrong and unnecessary for the Animals to be apart," Bachardy declares in one homesick missive. "Nobody understands about them really."
There's plenty going on outside the basket. The letters run intermittently through to 1970, after which there was no separation long enough to require epistolary infill. During that period, Isherwood wrote Down There on a Visit (1962), his late masterpiece A Single Man (1964) and A Meeting by the River (1967); he also worked on film scripts and saw his novel Goodbye to Berlin (1939) transformed for the stage and screen into I Am a Camera and the lucrative Cabaret. Bachardy, meanwhile, schmoozed and sketched on both sides of the Atlantic, producing portraits of an impressive array of artists, aristocrats and writers, among them Francis Bacon, Roman Polanski, Andy Warhol, Frank O'Hara and Tennessee Williams.
Although work is a regular topic of conversation (particularly Bachardy's sometimes anguished attempts to find his metier), the keynote here is gossip. On Auden at 59, Isherwood notes, "Wystan can never possibly look older," while Bachardy memorably describes Vanessa Redgrave as a "pod-born replacement for real humans". Observations on the love lives of the beau monde are traded back and forth like cigarette cards (a pearl for the susceptible: Vivien Leigh's private number in the 1960s was Sloane 1955).
Gossip is a leveller but one of the oddities of this capacious book is how similar the two voices sound, considering the vast gulf in age and experience, background and nationality. The struggle to bridge these gaps forms the great underlying drama of the letters. Dobbin is Kitty's mentor and teacher, someone to mimic but also to rebel against, escape and defy, while Kitty is a prodigal whose return will always be an occasion for joy. Isherwood, who had been a serial connoisseur of boys in his youth, wisely gave Bachardy his freedom, allowing him to roam romantically and providing instead the absolute security of home.
In Iris, the critic John Bayley wrote of how he and his first wife, Iris Murdoch, communicated from the start in an infantile babble, a private language that nourished them through the decades, well into her descent into dementia. Virginia Woolf, too, had a penchant for writing in the persona of animals. "I often feel," Isherwood wrote of his contribution to this canon, "that the Animals are far more than just a nursery joke or a cuteness ... They express a kind of freedom and truth which we otherwise wouldn't have."
At times, the constant references to tiny kittens threatens to contradict him. Yet it becomes increasingly apparent that the Animals sustained the pair through their early travails and that as such they served as the glue for one of the few publicly gay relationships of the period. As Isherwood put it, writing one Christmas Eve from a monastery near Kolkata: "Away from you, I can't talk, I don't feel this is my language or my world." One might think he was talking about the culture shock of India but for the next plaintive sentence: "I want to talk Cat-Horse again."
Olivia Laing's latest book is "The Trip to Echo Spring" (Canongate, [pounds sterling]20)
Laing, Olivia
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
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Laing, Olivia. "Dearest Dobbin." New Statesman, vol. 142, no. 5177, 27 Sept. 2013, p. 65. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A346928404/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2ae787cd. Accessed 25 June 2024.
QUOTED: "Bucknell’s research is deeply impressive and her judgments astute."
Review
Christopher Isherwood Inside Out by Katherine Bucknell review – courage and camp
The Anglo-American novelist’s angsty inner life is under the spotlight in this impressively researched biography
Lara Feigel
Thu 6 Jun 2024 06.00 EDT
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Christopher Isherwood was constantly pulled between the camp and the heroic. As a schoolchild, he went from military drills, emulating his soldier father, to doing square dances with his mother in her dresses. As a young man, he escaped upper-class England for 1930s Berlin with its drag acts and cabarets, but moved to the slums, wanting to join the workers he saw as the real heroes. Just before the war, he gave up politics and went to Hollywood, embracing the glamorous but rackety world of screenwriting. But he still needed the kind of challenge that he capitalised in his writing as the Test. He found a Hindu guru, Swami Prabhavananda, and tried out celibacy in his monastery just when he was finally within reach of the best gay scene he had ever encountered.
Katherine Bucknell’s Isherwood isn’t as camp as his previous biographer Peter Parker’s but he is preoccupied by heroism throughout. The editor of his voluminous diaries, she is interested above all in his inner life: in how he negotiated being the son of a fallen war hero and of an anxiously loving mother who turned to him for the intimate conversations she was missing. Isherwood, for Bucknell, is a writer who seems to become ill at every turn to avoid being overcome by anxiety (the “arch-fear” of “being afraid”), whose love of boys is both a transgression and a source of pleasure, who’s always in danger both of excessive passivity and wilfulness, and who’s always attempting precisely the heroism he has determined to reject.
He tried out celibacy in a monastery just when he was finally within reach of the best gay scene he had ever encountered
Bucknell is right to put his psychology at the heart of his work, where there’s always an Isherwood figure, observing himself observing the world around him, as in the Berlin stories that made his reputation and sustain it now, especially in the form of Cabaret. With his mixture of camera-like objectivity and engrossed self-observation, he created a style that allowed him to capture the frenzied energy of 1930s Germany, where freedom and creativity collided fatally with authoritarianism, without losing sight of the oppressive Britain he had grown up in. His experiments border on what we would now call autofiction, but they have an engagement with the political context that feels broader than this category suggests.
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The move to America might have provided an ideal canvas on which to combine the sweep of history with personal myth, but the American dream has a way of letting people down. Isherwood loved America precisely because he didn’t belong and because no one else quite did either: “I feel free here. I’m on my own. My life will be what I make of it.” He tried to write a novel about an addict saint and another about homosexuality, theorising camp a decade before Susan Sontag by distinguishing between Low Camp (“a swishy little boy with peroxided hair … pretending to be Marlene Dietrich”) and High Camp (“you’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of artifice and elegance”). His most successful work was probably A Single Man, a portrait of a middle-aged, gay college professor. Bucknell calls it the “masterpiece of his maturity”, which is excessive praise. It combines a commitment to arch style with a curiosity about how matters of courage and daredevilry play out in a curtailed world. But his dependence on Mrs Dalloway indicates a tiredness in the novelist as well as the protagonist.
I’m still unsure if we need another expansive portrait of Isherwood. Bucknell’s research is deeply impressive and her judgments astute, but there are so many minor characters and small shifts of allegiance that it’s hard to keep track of the larger arguments. For the generations less familiar with him, a biography of this kind isn’t the best way to bring the work alive.
Perhaps it’s a book to flick through, savouring the images. There’s Isherwood dancing with his mother, and there are the cars, which Bucknell revels in alongside Isherwood: his partner Don Bachardy’s wine-red Corvair, Isherwood’s black Volkswagen. They crashed them both. They skipped red lights, they parked illegally, and Isherwood continually drove drunk, falling asleep at the wheel. What was he doing? Was he revelling in his own louche camp, or heroically racing against death, outpacing his fears? The all-American pleasure in driving is dramatised in the brilliant early scene in A Single Man in which the protagonist travels across LA to his office, confident as he slips into high gear that this is “no mad chariot race” but “a river, sweeping in full flood toward its outlet with a soothing power”. But A Single Man has a fatal car accident at its core and Isherwood himself knew how foolhardy he was. He couldn’t give up on heroism, even as he became a figurehead for the gay liberation movement and declared on TV that the real heroes acknowledged their cowardice. Perhaps Bucknell’s achievement is to make so destructive a man determinedly appealing.
Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living With D.H. Lawrence (Bloomsbury)