Isherwood: A Life Revealed (U.S. Edition)
by Peter Parker
Random House, 832 pages,  $39.95
Isherwood: A Life (U.K. Edition)
by Peter Parker, Picador Press, 914 pages, £25

(Note from the reviewer: The page references I quote are from the British edition. The page length is different; according to Parker (via e-mail from the publisher) he hasn't altered the text apart from changing to American spellings, correcting some typos and a minor fact change; the difference in length is accounted for by a change in typeface.)

"it is not Home that one cries for
but one's home-self"

Few literary lives are as well documented as that of British expatriate writer Christopher Isherwood. His works–even when cast as fiction–are largely autobiographical and, if the information provided there were insufficient to get a sense of what this life was about, there are the diaries, the correspondence, published interviews, and no less than four works of straight autobiography, interpreting and re-storying the life by Isherwood himself. There have been several previous biographies, including one or two which are quite good, but nothing on the scale of Peter Parker's 800+ page opus, which was 12 years in the preparation. 

Parker was able to draw on the diaries of Isherwood's mother, Kathleen, whose reputation he is intent on recuperating from what he regards as unfair treatment from her favorite son. (The eccentric brother Richard, who grew up in Christopher's shadow, emerges, too, as he had never done before.) Parker also received cooperation from Isherwood's life partner of 30 years, the artist Don Bachardy, who gave him access to heretofore unavailable sources, but who is apparently not happy with the final result. An extensive collection of the correspondence, manuscripts and other papers are now in the Huntington Library in California and other repositories, and in addition to these resources, Parker was able to tap correspondence from figures such as W.H. Auden and Sir Stephen Spender, to provide the rich and exhaustive detail which is the hallmark of this huge book.  The biographer traces the travels, the personalities, the lovers, as well as the genesis and development of all the texts, in massive detail, but finally even an attentive reader is left with the gnawing feeling that Parker may have missed the forest for the trees.

Parker's appraisal of Isherwood is entirely conventional and, in some significant ways, feeds into prejudices about the writer, whose significance as a precursor of many developments - literary, social, political, and spiritual - is still being measured.

Until recently, appraisals of the work have underplayed the importance of his mature period, with the prevailing view being that the poor chap's writing was in decline after the famous Berlin Stories. What was happening, of course, was that after de-camping to California, abandoning Europe on the brink of war to assume the pacifist position, Isherwood, the atheist, had "got religion," or more to the point, a guru in the Advaita Vedanta tradition. Sadly, critical reviews of Isherwood's life and work have been affected over decades by what was regarded as his "betrayal" of the Motherland on the eve of war. (This has always been more true in Britain than the U.S.) However, it is his spiritual life and writing which are even more likely to be overlooked, even disrespected, by commentators, even today.

With certain emblematic figures there is an entrenched cultural investment in certain modes of assessing them. In a sense, a culture can become over-invested in that construction and resistant to any other way of reading them. The two strongest investments in relation to Isherwood have been in the images of: the raucous, Weimar Republic bad boy, who went to Berlin to chase boys (and almost inadvertently captured the Zeitgeist of Berlin in the critical period of the Nazis' rise to power); and the eternal youth, the puer aeternus archetype from psychoanalysis, the Peter Pan construct of the little boy who never grew up.

Later on, with the flowering of gay writing, comes that major identification of Isherwood as a prominent cultural figure during the revolution of gay liberation, happily homosexual and living unapologetically out, with a much younger partner.

That comfort with his own sexuality and with his own vocation as a writer was not won without struggle, and was preceded by a series of dislocations (both psychological and geographical) which put existential pressure on his ontology. Isherwood emigrated to the U.S. on the eve of WW II after the bitter disillusionment of having his lover of five years, Heinz Neddermeyer, conscripted by the German army. The U.K. had denied him entry on "moral grounds." Isherwood's sense of self was in free fall even as his literary star was at its zenith:

"the more I think about myself, the more persuaded I am that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why–as much as I'm tempted to try–I can't believe in any orthodox religion. I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My 'character' is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my 'feelings' are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli…" (Diary entry, 20 Aug 1938.)

Isherwood likened himself to a character in a Robert Musil novel: "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaft," as a man without a character or without qualities. A disastrous trip to China as a war correspondent with W.H. Auden had led to the book Journey to a War, which led The Daily Worker to deride its authors as "too preoccupied with their own psychological plight to be anything but helplessly lost in the struggle of modern China." He realized that his leftist politics were no longer credible to himself and owned the accusation that they'd been "playing at being war correspondents," at being Englishmen, and being poets." Parker portrays the crisis unflinchingly and, to his credit, gives the second half of the life equal weight with the first, unlike many of his (British) predecessors.

For both men, America represented fresh horizons. Not finding solace in New York, Isherwood moved on to Los Angeles, where he wanted to meet up with Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, hoping to find some solid intellectual support for his newly discovered pacifism. Both men were involved with an Indian Swami, and after some preparation Heard introduced Isherwood to the man whose influence was to alter the course of the rest of his life.

The last of his four major autobiographies is My Guru and His Disciple (1980), which documents his longest lasting relationship: the one maintained, not with a lover, but with his spiritual adviser, a Swami in the Ramakrishna Order and the head of the Vedanta Society in Southern California, one Swami Prabhavananda, who became his guru in 1939, when Isherwood was in his mid-thirties. The relationship continued for almost 40 years.

It's the ongoing research into Vedanta theory and practice–which did so much to answer Isherwood's existential angst–that Parker doesn't really grasp. He is reported as saying, in an interview for The Telegraph, that he did "try to avoid wagging [his] finger over any of Isherwood's behavior" that he "perhaps personally wouldn't approve of." What biographer could pass up the details of a life as frankly sexual as Isherwood's? So, in this regard he is fairly circumspect, maintaining a neutral tone. Yet the book is not entirely free of finger-wagging. A close read shows that his disapproval is not limited to the sexuality. He fails to show the same restraint in his portrait of Swami Prabhavananda, whom he presents as sly, manipulative and cunning, playing up to Isherwood's vanity in order to borrow his skills and cachet as a writer to work on publications for the Vedanta Society. Parker also tries to mount a case that the Swami was in fact hostile to homosexuals, and was only prepared to give Isherwood exceptional, "special treatment" in order to be able to take advantage of the writer's public recognition in order to benefit the Vedanta Society. 

Parker provides no original evidence for his charges and fails to mention the source for this portrayal. It came from Denny Fouts, who was the basis for the character Paul in the last section of "Down There on a Visit." It is Fouts, "the sourest of all critics," who "refuses to be impressed when I tell him about Swami's tolerance and open-mindedness," Isherwood wrote in his diary in July, 1944. 

We must ask what other evidence has Parker collected to support his charge. As Isherwood used the diary entry again, almost unchanged, in the 1980 publication (after decades more exposure to the guru's wiles) we can assume that Isherwood hadn't changed his own position. Rather than giving the guru credit for his support, Parker wants to put him down. But having aired his charges, Parker then tries to wriggle out of the mess with a preposterous disclaimer: "None of this is to suggest that Isherwood had been duped in any way."

Many reviewers of the earlier British edition (May 2004) have lamely followed Parker's line. We detect the embedded seeds of colonialism in the critical construction of Isherwood in relation to his guru. There's a myopic condescension towards the value systems and practices of the spiritual traditions of other cultures at work here that has remained unchallenged. Isherwood foreshadowed this possibility in the own account of his conversion, An Approach to Vedanta (1963). Looking back more than twenty years, he describes his own attitude, self-deprecatingly taking on some of the prejudices and suspicions he had obviously faced when the subject came up among people in his own circle. Remembering that he had been an atheist, he nonetheless writes:   

"I think these objections were rooted in twofold prejudice. Whether I liked it or not, I had been brought up in the Christian tradition; anything outside that tradition repelled me as being unnecessarily alien. Also, as a member, whether I liked it or not, of the British upper class, I had somewhere deep inside me a built-in contempt for the culture of 'native', 'subject' races.  If my subconscious had been allowed to speak that clearly, it would have said: 'I quite admit that you have the truth, but does it have to come to me wearing a turban? Can't I be an Anglo-Saxon Vedantist?'" (Approach to Vedanta, 34-5)

I am not alone in recognizing the neo-colonial prejudice towards spiritual traditions from "subject" races. David Robb picks up on the point in relation to the suspicion surrounding the reception of Aldous Huxley's turn towards spirituality; specifically, Huxley's adoption of Gandhi's principles of nonviolence:

"Although Englishmen were well aware of Gandhi and his movement, the acceptance of his principles was effectively impeded by an ingrained British contempt for subject native races." ("English Expatriates and Spiritual Consciousness in Modern America." American Studies, 26. Fall 1985, 45-60.)

Robb cites the same reference from Isherwood, in a footnote to his article, but doesn't pick up on Isherwood's ironic usage, placing himself in the dock. 

Parker's study falls right into this ethnocentric trap. Can we blame him? Isherwood's dear friend and sometimes lover, W.H. Auden, regarded it all as "Heathen mumbo jumbo," but not even Auden failed to recognize the Swami's bona fides. Isherwood visited Auden in New York in 1951, when the play "I Am a Camera," which had been adapted by John van Druten from the Berlin Stories, was in rehearsals:

"We talked a great deal about Wystan's Christian beliefs without getting into any arguments. And I showed him entries in my diary describing my life at the Vedanta Center. He shook his head over them, regretfully: "All this heathen mumbo jumbo—I'm sorry my dear, but it just won't do." Then, in the abrupt, dismissive tone which he used when making an unwilling admission, he added: 'Your Swami's quite obviously a Saint, of course.'" (My Guru and His Disciple, p. 204)

For all the historical information provided in the exhaustive biography–the meetings with the guru, the various translation projects, the trip to the mother ashram in Calcutta, etc.–which Parker provides, there is too little sense of how precious this area was to Isherwood. He does not acknowledge why Isherwood could be so pleased with My Guru and His Disciple. While he gleefully quotes Stephen Spender's critiques of Isherwood at other points, he fails to mention that Spender regarded this as Isherwood's best book. Parker's own opinion of the text is condescending and more dismissive than of most of the other books. He finds it lacking in rage and comedy, and dislikes it for a "sweet reasonableness that simply cloys." He fails to demonstrate that he has the experience or the sensibility to evaluate the book, or the relationship.

For readers of White Crane, who might expect a better appraisal of the place which Vedanta spirituality played in his life, this attempt is long on facts but short on understanding. Isherwood was an original; Parker simply isn't. Perhaps he spent too long on this subject, for his tone is often sour and pedantic.

Isherwood's heroic project—that of recuperating a spiritual identity without renouncing his sexuality—deserves recognition. When he realized he couldn't sustain the renunciate lifestyle of the monastery, after almost two years, Isherwood made a choice to leave the Center. I suspect that many commentators still labor under unexamined neo-Christian, even neo-Platonist, conceptions of the spiritual life, in which the life of the body and the life of spirit are diametrically imposed. In the discourse of Advaita Vedanta, such dualities cannot survive. Isherwood continued his spiritual practices for decades after leaving the Center on North Ivar Avenue and was fortunate indeed to find such a compassionate exponent of the tradition in the person of his Swami. In this regard, Parker's lack of insight (and respect) weakens his book considerably.