Customer Reviews

Isherwood: A Life Revealed

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Peter Parker's earnest, exhaustive and rather conventional biography fails to recognise the forest for the trees. Isherwood did, in fact, "find a home", both geographically and spiritually, although you might not recognise that from Parker, who indicated in an interview for The Telegraph that he didn't "judge" his subject.
The tone of some sections makes that claim a little hard to swallow but he has saved his worst finger-wagging for a crass putdown of Isherwood's guru, Swami Prabhavananda, whom he characterises as sly and manipulative, playing up to Isherwood's vanity in order to borrow some of the writer's cachet for Vedanta Society publications and good P.R. Parker even tries to mount a prosecution against the guru as not really being tolerant towards homosexuals at all, with Isherwood getting "special treatment", before finally beating a lame retreat into a disclaimer that Isherwood had "not been duped in any way". ( Parker is mouthing Denny Fouts, whom Isherwood called "the sourest of all critics").

Should we blame Parker for his cultural myopia? Even Isherwood's dear friend, W.H. Auden, regarded his religion as "Heathen mumbo jumbo" , but unlike Parker, did not fail to recognise the guru's bona fides ("Your Swami's quite obviously a Saint, of course.") Parker's churlish putdown of Swami Prabhavananda is sheer perversity and does him and his book little credit.


Isherwood presciently foreshadowed some of the neo-colonialist prejudice his spirituality might evoke In "An Approach to Vedanta" and elsewhere, David Robb picks up on the point in relation to the suspicion surrounding the reception of Aldous Huxley's turn towards spirituality. Robb identifies "an ingrained British contempt for subject native races." specifically in relation to Huxley's adoption of Gandhi's principles of nonviolence. Parker doesn't recognize this in his own attitude.

It's high time the Brits realised that they have had Isherwood suspended in aspic for far too long. Prof. John Sutherland, reviewing this biography for the London Review of Books, refers to Isherwood's "late life conversion to transcendentalism". As Isherwood met the guru in 1939 (when he was in his mid-thirties), and continued in the relationship for almost four decades, there's no way this could be construed as" late life". Reviews of the Parker biog. have flushed out many of these old canards lurking in the underbrush.

To Parker's credit, the second, very productive period of Isherwood's life IS given due weight. His judgments of the literary texts are fairly predictable, but he is unable to understand why Isherwood found "My Guru and His Disciple" (1980) as among his best work. Even Stephen Spender agrred on that (and he wasn't an uncritical friend, after all.)

When it comes to trying to evaluate the benefits to Isherwood from his 40 year practice of Vedanta, Parker is really out of his depth; his neo-Christian blinkers narrow his vision to the point where he can't even see what he is looking at. This is a shame. It seems also that he has avoided talking with many of the people still alive today who knew Isherwood during this time, to test his own prejudices, and that, too, is a failing in this portrait.

To give it its due, the 12 years' work Parker put into this biography does show. It will become the standard reference book on Isherwood for dates, places, people and events. But it will take a better biographer than Parker to capture all of the dimensions of this fascinating precursor of many (post-modern) trends. At 800 pages, he should have got it right (apparently he sliced 15% out of the final edit), but you have to ask why Isherwood's partner, Don Bachardy, was so bitterly disappointed with the outcome. I still feel the Berg and Freeman collections, and Katherine Bucknell, the editor of the diaries, give much more real insight into the man than this collection of facts has managed to do.

For me, this is the first biography of Isherwood that spells out the contradictions of this complex and fascinating personality and views them not as episodic pieces but as a whole life. Finally, I was able to see that the Hollywood and Vedanta years were not some unfortunate detour that Isherwood took, but an inevitable journey in a quest for authenticity and examination of truth -- real and perceived. This personal revelation is probably more a result of the life choices Isherwood made than anything Parker illuminates here, still I appreciated the fact that Parker HAS opinions, especially about the intrinsic value of Isherwood's work and I can agree or disagree with his assessments. I have walked away from this biography with a new appreciation of Isherwood's amazing talent and his profound integrity as an artist. The wild, the debauched, the dull, blissful, the banal and petty -- Isherwood captured it all, distilled it into his art and we are all the richer for it.

I've read a good amount of Isherwood in my day and enjoyed his various stories/novellas combined to make his Berlin Stories. These I had read quite a view years ago and was seeking a more in depth look at the life of Christopher Isherwood.

Peter Parker does a nice job of portraying the author, and the book really takes off in the Berlin years. He was there to enjoy Weimar Berlin in all its glory, and the resulting literary product would represent the strongest writing of his career. And therein lies the problem. A biographer is responsible for the whole arc of the subject's life, but what to do when after the peak, the creative tension and imagination all falls along the wayside? To put it more succinctly, and as W. Somerset Maugham quipped during a drinking session with Herr Isherwood, ". . . if it hadn't been for Berlin, where would you be now?"

A huge portion of the book basically entails Christopher Isherwood's constant traveling and cruising for young boys, and it does get tired after a while. It also serves to highlight the underlying problem: superficiality in character.

I read the English edition of this biography a few months ago and enjoyed it. I think that once you have read this book, you really don't need to read another biography of Isherwood.

However, I kept thinking as I read this book, that has there ever been a life more recycled for literary purposes than Isherwood?

I am a fan of Isherwood and am glad to own this book.