Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out by Katherine Bucknell

Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out 

By Katherine Bucknell

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024

It’s surely no mistake and an accurate prediction that Katherine Bucknell’s Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out opens with images of running, of motion. Before she settles down to 800 pages of mispriced meals, missed trains, messy emotions, and maudlin mysticism, Bucknell evokes flurries of hurrying. Isherwood, she opens, had been “on the run from fear” for his entire life:

He ran from his schoolmates in childhood. He ran from Cambridge University and a proposed academic career. He ran from Hitler’s Berlin. In 1939, at the height of the fame he shared with his lifelong friend the poet WH Auden, he ran west, from New York to Hollywood, where he found work writing for the movie studios and where he unexpectedly – and to some implausibly – embraced pacifism and a new religion, Vedanta. 

Bucknell is the Director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Founder of the WH Auden Society, an editor of several big volumes of Isherwood’s diaries and letters, and a confidante of Isherwood’s longtime partner Don Bachardy, who “opened his life to me without reserve, sharing everything he knows about Christopher Isherwood and insisting on absolute candor about their relationship.” Her book has 80 pages of close-typed Endnotes (inexcusably, the book has no bibliography), many of which are paragraph-long discussions of the sources being cited. In other words, Bucknell is in a more authoritative position on the subject of Christopher Isherwood and his times than either Peter Parker, whose biography of the writer appeared 20 years ago, or Jonathan Fryer, 20 years before that. She is thorough, scrupulous, energetic, and, thanks to Bachardy, marvelously informed about all the backstage details. 

She writes about Bachardy that “he was later to say that his real education came from Isherwood, who nurtured his curiosity and his intensely discriminating sensibility by exposing him to books, movies, plays, music, and artworks, and to the people who made such things.” Isherwood, she claims, never had a more receptive young friend than Bachardy,, although the book extensively illustrates how many other young friends there were. “There had been and would be more – many more – boys, as he romantically called them,” Bucknell writes. “Younger boys who needed protection; taller boys who offered it; boys with whom Isherwood felt mentally or physically matched and energetically rivalrous.”

“He charmed them all; his charisma was legendary,” she goes on, before adding the cautionary counterbalance that fills her book: “Something stopped him from caring.” 

Hovering above all these boys like some sort of dough-faced chain-smoking holiday balloon is of course the figure of Auden. Readers who know only the skewering Evelyn Waugh gives the pair in Put Out More Flags, as Parsnip and Pimpernel, two poets “who had recently fled to New York,” will naturally have that picture incredibly broadened and deepened as Bucknell explores what was certainly the central creative relationship of Isherwood’s life (although, defensive over Waugh’s savaging, Bucknell points out that “Few knew at the time that Auden and Isherwood had neither ‘fled’ nor ‘run away’ but had planned the move in advance” – but wait, didn’t she start her book by saying Isherwood “fled from Hitler’s Berlin”?). Almost all the other people in Isherwood’s life, Bachardy could charm or chat up or seduce, but he quickly realized there was more nuance to the man he described as “shy, British, intricately sensitive Wystan.” 

Isherwood, Bucknell writes, was the kind of survivor his father, who died in the First World War, had failed to be. “However guilty he felt or had been made to feel about this, about his personality, about his sexuality, he also possessed a lifelong conviction of his inner goodness,” she writes. “His right to survive, his sense that he was worthy, was rooted in his literary imagination and bound up from adolescence with his evolving identity as a writer.” This echoes the inevitability of how central books and writing, not boys and infatuations, are to Inside Out. This can also present problems, since Isherwood wrote thousands and thousands of pages about himself, and virtually all of that writing isn’t quite what it seems. “Even the apparent simplicity of his prose (and his personal manner) is itself ambiguous,” Peter Ackroyd observed, “since it conceals dramatization, subterfuge and canny obliquity – all of which act as modes both of self-preservation and self-enhancement.” 

This is what makes Isherwood’s perhaps seminal book, Christopher and His Kind, what Ackroyd calls “a studiously opaque volume,” although it contains one of the funniest lines this funny writer ever wrote, when at one point he warns “There is some mild bitchery here and in the next paragraph” (as a crusty old Boston critic once quipped, “Darling, the whole thing is so catty it practically shares a writing credit with the MSPCA”). The greatest challenge of Bucknell’s big book is also its greatest triumph: it’s at its strongest when dealing with the heart and the origins of the literature underpinning the life. 

“Time spent with Christopher Isherwood changes us for the better,” Bucknell flatly states, and although Isherwood himself might have blushed to read such a claim (while inching forward and listening intently for more along the same lines), scarcely anybody from his life would have denied it. Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out is certainly the most commanding life of this figure ever to appear, but it’s a pleasingly layered performance. Despite its length, count on reading it twice. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News