 | A WRITER'S WIT |  L. González |
MY BOOK WORLD
Bucknell, Katherine. Christopher Isherwood Inside Out. New York: Farrar, 2024.
In 2016, I Christopher Isherwood’s entire oeuvre. Why? I admired his work at every level: sophisticated and lyrical vocabulary; his sometimes quirky but lyrical syntax, the variety of genres he tackled, from fiction to nonfiction (history, biography), and play/screenplay writing. My reading included about 4,500 published pages of Isherwood’s journals, all edited by Bucknell. Now she has created an exquisite biography of the author.
Isherwood worked on the boundary of fiction and nonfiction. He kept diaries most of his adult life and drew on them for his published writing, creating narratives more vivid, more revealing, more entertaining than what he documented. He altered the truth in order to make the truth more compelling, and his subtle and mysterious reworking accounts, more than anything else, for the lasting appeal of his writing (5).
At first, I thought I would run into a lot of repetition, but I soon discovered that Bucknell’s scholarly work had thoroughly investigated Isherwood’s life from beginning to end—as a biographer should. From Isherwood’s point of view, for example, he only knew his father until the man was killed in WWI, when Isherwood was little more than eleven. Bucknell fills in those blanks for readers: lets us know what a sensitive man the father was and how, as long as he could, he nurtured Christopher’s artistic personality. The hole left in Isherwood’s life was one that would never be filled.
Christopher Isherwood was as openly gay as a man could be in his era (b. 1904). By his own accounting he went to bed with over 400 men (from Germany to the UK to the USA). He loved his sexual life. Even when he had a lover/partner, he often had trysts with other men. Yet “[h]e saw from the outset of his career 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” (9). I believe he succeeded. Within the glory of the Gay Liberation days of the 1970s, the man was in his sixties, yet he still continued to grow, and he was admired far and wide by younger gay men (my generation) for his pioneering life and work. He was in constant demand for teaching and speaking gigs, which he labored to keep, not only for the remuneration but for the communication it afforded him with others.
This tome is one of the most eloquent pieces of literary biography I’ve ever read. If readers wish to learn about one of the finest twentieth-century writers working in English prose, this book is a fine place to begin.
Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ford Madox Ford
WEDS: A Writer's Wit |Lucy Worsley
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Ronan Farrow
FRI: My Book World | Margaret Rutherford: An Autobiography as told to Gwen Robyns
In 2016, I Christopher Isherwood’s entire oeuvre. Why? I admired his work at every level: sophisticated and lyrical vocabulary; his sometimes quirky but lyrical syntax, the variety of genres he tackled, from fiction to nonfiction (history, biography), and play/screenplay writing. My reading included about 4,500 published pages of Isherwood’s journals, all edited by Bucknell. Now she has created an exquisite biography of the author.
Isherwood worked on the boundary of fiction and nonfiction. He kept diaries most of his adult life and drew on them for his published writing, creating narratives more vivid, more revealing, more entertaining than what he documented. He altered the truth in order to make the truth more compelling, and his subtle and mysterious reworking accounts, more than anything else, for the lasting appeal of his writing (5).
At first, I thought I would run into a lot of repetition, but I soon discovered that Bucknell’s scholarly work had thoroughly investigated Isherwood’s life from beginning to end—as a biographer should. From Isherwood’s point of view, for example, he only knew his father until the man was killed in WWI, when Isherwood was little more than eleven. Bucknell fills in those blanks for readers: lets us know what a sensitive man the father was and how, as long as he could, he nurtured Christopher’s artistic personality. The hole left in Isherwood’s life was one that would never be filled.
Christopher Isherwood was as openly gay as a man could be in his era (b. 1904). By his own accounting he went to bed with over 400 men (from Germany to the UK to the USA). He loved his sexual life. Even when he had a lover/partner, he often had trysts with other men. Yet “[h]e saw from the outset of his career 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” (9). I believe he succeeded. Within the glory of the Gay Liberation days of the 1970s, the man was in his sixties, yet he still continued to grow, and he was admired far and wide by younger gay men (my generation) for his pioneering life and work. He was in constant demand for teaching and speaking gigs, which he labored to keep, not only for the remuneration but for the communication it afforded him with others.
This tome is one of the most eloquent pieces of literary biography I’ve ever read. If readers wish to learn about one of the finest twentieth-century writers working in English prose, this book is a fine place to begin.
Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ford Madox Ford
WEDS: A Writer's Wit |Lucy Worsley
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Ronan Farrow
FRI: My Book World | Margaret Rutherford: An Autobiography as told to Gwen Robyns
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