From Publishers Weekly
Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood's consistently rebellious, fictional self-reinventions are put into perspective alongside his exhaustive, introspective diaries in this authoritative and lively life. Of the generation of English writers who defined the 1930s, Isherwood (1904–1986) alone came from landed gentry; he recast himself as a serious novelist, a left-wing playwright, a political journalist and a pacifist. Meticulously following the rootless Isherwood from Weimar Berlin to war-torn China, Parker delves incisively into his relationship with Stephen Spender and with Auden. Parker portrays the frequent collaboration with the latter (highly acclaimed, at the time) as more emotionally crucial to Auden than to Isherwood. Their split upon emigrating to America just before the outbreak of WWII gave Isherwood, who settled in Hollywood, far from Auden's New York, further opportunity for self-exploration and expression. While Isherwood's social circle encompassed other notable exiles, from Charlie Chaplin to Thomas Mann, Isherwood's literary output stalled until the Broadway success of an adaptation of his Berlin Stories as Cabaret. Isherwood's later memoirs, to which Parker attributes a role in the gay liberation movement, receive the same insightful critical attention from Parker (biographer of J. R. Ackerley) as Isherwood's early work. With the final installment of Isherwood's voluminous diaries yet to be published, Parker's biography, written with full access to his subject's papers, will likely remain definitive. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
English novelist and diarist Isherwood is not heavily read these days, but his books remain in print, and the press will make an occasional reference to his most famous book, Berlin Stories, upon which the play and movie versions of Cabaret were based. Discriminating readers, however, continue to find novels such as A Single Man and Prater Violet to be small masterpieces. Let us hope that the appearance of this definitive biography will spur more readers to turn to Isherwood's beautifully precise novels of English manners and, later, of homosexual relationships set amid traditional society. Charming and handsome, Isherwood traveled widely and ended up eschewing the country of his birth, choosing instead to live in California. With his personality and looks, he fashioned his life into a pageant of constant encounters with interesting people, and the major theme Parker develops here is how Isherwood turned people he met into "copy" for his fiction. The narrative is extremely detailed, but it presents all the more complete a picture. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“This is the major biography that Isherwood deserves–a thorough look at the details of his complex itinerary, geographical, artistic and spiritual. It is a lively, informed account of his milieu and the interweaving of his life with those of Auden and Spender and Upward. . . . Parker manages all this toing and froing with acrobatic aplomb, lending any given episode neither too much nor too little weight.”
–EDMUND WHITE, The Times Literary Supplement

From the Inside Flap
Here is the definitive biography of one of the most exciting, influential, and elusive authors of the twentieth century. Christopher Isherwood’s novels and short stories, including those that inspired the musical Cabaret, have always been assumed to be largely autobiographical.

Based in part on Isherwood’s private papers–unavailable until now–this fascinating book presents the real story of his life, a life that saw a relatively conventional boy become an acclaimed writer, mystic, and “grand old man” of the gay liberation movement. In the end, Isherwood: A Life portrays someone who misled as much as he revealed.

Born in 1904, the heir to a large country estate where his grandfather was squire, Isherwood had a youth filled with both privilege and loss. His father’s death in World War I devastated his mother and created a “hero-father” image that would haunt both Christopher and his unstable brother for the rest of their lives.

He began to acknowledge his homosexuality at his English boarding school and subsequently formed a definition of “self” based on subterfuge, performance, and escape. With his lifelong friends W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender he emerged as one of the leading literary figures of the 1930s.

From the bars, nightclubs, and slums of Weimar Germany–where Isherwood created The Berlin Stories and introduced the world to Sally Bowles–to homosexual communes in Greece and Portugal, to the film studios of London (the subject of his novel Prater Violet) and Hollywood, his destinations became arenas for his reinventions. Isherwood’s later years as an unofficial spiritual and sexual sage in Southern California only added to the abiding mystery of his life.

In addition to using Isherwood’s correspondence, unpublished diaries, and other previously unavailable sources in painting this clear and definitive portrait, Peter Parker has also unearthed the author’s telling early works, including parodies, school memoirs, and even part of a crucial lost novel.

Painstakingly researched and brilliantly written, Isherwood: A Life captures the fugitive reality of a man who has become a favorite artist and important symbol of an entire era in our life of letters. Published in the centennial of his birth, it will be read as long as Isherwood himself is.

About the Author
PETER PARKER is the author of The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos and a biography of J. R. Ackerley. He is the editor of A Reader’s Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel and A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers. He is an associate editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and writes about books and gardening for a wide variety of publications. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and lives in London’s East End.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE

In the first days of 1986, christopher isherwood lay dying at his home in Southern California. He had not said much for several weeks, and he was drifting in and out of consciousness. He occasionally cried out for his mother or for his old nanny. Traveling forward into the unknown, he was also traveling backward through loops of memory, across thousands of miles, to where he started out on the long journey that was about to end. The world, and Isherwood’s circumstances, had changed almost beyond recognition since 1904, but despite adopting many roles over the years, despite shedding both names and nationality, Isherwood had always known that the past was inescapable. It lay in hiding, as it always had, ready to leap out and reclaim him.

Isherwood’s relationship with the past was complicated. He respected—or feared—it enough to give the word a capital initial, more often than not, when he wrote it down, a tribute he also accorded his mother. For Isherwood “the Past” and “my Mother” were almost the same thing. This was partly because his mother had a characteristically English reverence for anything that happened in earlier times, in particular before the First World War. She also had a genuine and well-informed interest in old buildings, paintings and furniture, but this antiquarianism struck her son as having more to do with psychology than scholarship. For Kathleen Isherwood, the past represented a place to which she could escape, the place where she had been most happy; for Christopher Isherwood, the past was a treacherous bog into which you would be sucked down and suffocated. He once said that by going to live in America, he was “separating himself from Mother and Motherland at one stroke.” Much of his life, and the many journeys he made, can be seen as a series of attempts to put as great a distance as he could between himself and the person he imagined his family and society wanted him to be.

Before emigrating to America in 1939, Isherwood tried to settle his account with the past. Like Robert Graves before him, he waved goodbye to all that in a fictionalized autobiography. Lions and Shadows opens with an account of the author in the Sixth Form of his unnamed public school. Years later, Isherwood complained that what he disliked about conventional autobiographies was that “the author says (in effect) ‘before I tell you about me I shall tell you about them’ and so the parents are forever separated from the child who is doing the telling—when, actually, the opposite is true, the parents are now only alive within the child and as a part of him.” In fact, Isherwood’s mother was very much alive when he published Lions and Shadows, but she is ruthlessly excised from the narrative, as is his younger brother, and his father, who was killed in the First World War. The book contains several vague references to “my family,” but the reader has no idea of its individual components. In order to scratch his parents and brother from the record, Isherwood also had to avoid much mention of his childhood. It is as if he wished to present himself as arriving in the world fully formed, having already attained the age of reason.

This attempt at parthenogenesis is characteristic of Isherwood’s approach to public self-presentation. More even than most writers, Isherwood liked to imagine himself his own creation, and he was quite prepared to rewrite history in order to improve on the facts for aesthetic or personal reasons. He did so with every appearance of candor, for he was a consummate actor both on the page and in person. His boyish appearance, which persisted well into middle age, and his clear blue eyes were not only seductive but suggested a frankness and openness of character. He possessed a great deal of charm, which he often used strategically but which also became at times something he switched on almost without noticing. His writing frequently beguiles—and even misleads—the reader in much the same way.

Isherwood’s distrust of the past did not of course prevent him from making use of it in his work. Few writers have relied as much upon their own lives as Isherwood did in order to write books. Almost everything he wrote, even his occasional book reviewing, contains an autobiographical strand. Toward the end of his career, having exhausted the possibilities of using his own life to generate fiction, Isherwood turned to more or less “straight” autobiography, although in both Kathleen and Frank and Christopher and His Kind, he referred to his younger self in the third person, as if writing about a separate character whose connection with the narrator was at best tenuous. After toying in novels with fictional characters called “William Bradshaw” (his own middle names) and “Christopher Isherwood,” who are to all intents and purposes self-portraits, he ends up writing books that supposedly present his life undisguised and unadorned. On the opening page of Christopher and His Kind, he refers—rather as if it had very little to do with him—to “a book called Lions and Shadows, published in 1938, which describes Christopher Isherwood’s life between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four.” In that book, he continues: “The Author conceals important facts about himself. He over-dramatizes many episodes and gives his characters fictitious names.” Having dispensed with this rival chronicler of his life, Isherwood states: “The book I am now going to write will be as frank and factual as I can make it, especially as far as I myself am concerned.” Once again, the reader is led into believing that everything that follows is “true,” but in this book, as in the books about his parents and his guru—as indeed in Lions and Shadows—facts are concealed, episodes are over-dramatized and real people are given fictitious names. There were perfectly honorable, non-literary reasons for some of this, largely to do with protecting people’s identity or privacy, but Isherwood was still intent on molding his life, finding patterns and, increasingly, proselytizing.

Isherwood’s tardy interest in family history was largely solipsistic. His antecedents were interesting insofar as Christopher Isherwood was the end result. His approach to them was archaeological rather than strictly genealogical, discovering his family within himself. Consequently, generations of respectable forebears are ignored and only those whose characters seemed in some way to have contributed to Isherwood’s own personal mythology make their appearances in Kathleen and Frank. How far these characters are full and true portraits of historical figures is open to doubt. When Isherwood began work on the book, his brother Richard suggested that he was inclined to focus on those aspects of their father that made him seem most like the sort of man Isherwood wanted him to be. Thereafter Isherwood had to be on guard against a tendency to remake his father in his own image. He also needed to reconcile the woman who emerges from the diaries she kept throughout her long life with the Mother he had created, or at any rate “over-dramatized,” in order to represent everything he wanted to reject. Isherwood’s notions about his parents were evident in the title he originally gave Kathleen and Frank, a title bestowed on the work even before it was in progress, before he had done any research at all: Hero-Father, Demon-Mother.

Isherwood’s family background was important not only because he made use of it in his fiction but also because it gave him something tangible against which to rebel. Of the writers who came to be associated with the 1930s, Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood was socially by far the grandest. W. H. Auden, Edward Upward, C. Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender had all been born into the British bourgeoisie, the sons of doctors, clergymen and journalists. Isherwood’s father may have been a professional soldier, but he came from a family of landed gentry which had a “seat” in Cheshire and was able to trace its origins back into the sixteenth century. “The landowning classes” against whom writers of the Left spent much of their time inveighing were incarnated in almost cartoon fashion by Isherwood’s own grandfather, John Henry Bradshaw-Isherwood, Justice of the Peace and squire of Marple. It was Kathleen Isherwood’s almost mystical reverence for Marple Hall and the traditions it represented, rather than a passion for social equality, that made the young Isherwood want to see the place reduced to rubble. For Isherwood the political was always, from the very outset, personal.

The landed gentry is a section of upper-middle-class English society whose lineage is elaborately set out between the red covers of a stout volume popularly known as Burke. The weight of the past, about which Isherwood so often complained, was not in fact as heavy for his family as for others recorded in this book. In the 1952 edition of Burke’s Landed Gentry, Isherwood’s ancestors come under the heading “Bradshaw-Isherwood of Marple,” but are listed alphabetically under “I” for plain Isherwood, as if there were some doubt as to the authenticity of this double-barreled name. Indeed, it is the Bradshaws who are traceable back beyond the sixteenth century, not the Isherwoods. The Bradshaws may have been gentry, but they did not become landed until 1606 when a certain Henry Bradshawe, who had lived as a tenant at Marple Hall and Wyberslegh Hall in Cheshire, bought both properties from his landlord. The Isherwoods did not enter the picture for another 170 or so years, when Henry’s great-great-granddaughter Mary married en secondes noces Nathaniel Isherwood of Bolton-le-Moors in neighboring Lancashire. Nathaniel Isherwood was certainly not gentry, coming as he did from a prosperous family of felt manufacturers and therefore “in trade.” It was Mary and Nathaniel’s second son, Thomas, who assumed the name Bradshawe-Isherwood upon becoming head of the family when his elder brother died, and this name persisted until the twentieth century, by which time the redundant final “e” of “Bradshawe” had been quietly dropped.

It did not suit Isherwood’s purposes to describe himself as coming from the landed gentry. In Lions and Shadows he writes of himself at the age of sixteen: “I was an upper-middle-class Puritan, cautious, a bit stingy, with a stake in the land.” The particular bit of land in which Isherwood had a stake was Marple Hall, although this information is strategically omitted from the book. In fact Marple Hall was to play a vital role in Isherwood’s life, not only as somewhere he spent much of his childhood, but also as the symbol of everything about England he wanted to escape. A large estate on the Cheshire-Derbyshire border, Marple Hall consisted of an Elizabethan mansion and some twenty farms. Built of local sandstone in 1658, but incorporating the remains of an earlier timber-framed dwelling, the house itself was more imposing than beautiful. The most striking thing about it was its setting, for as one approached it along a drive through parkland, it seemed set in a hollow. At the back of the house, however, there was a terrace, beyond which the ground fell away sharply to the River Goyt, so that from the other side of the water it seemed to stand on an impressive sandstone bluff. The Hall had been enlarged toward the end of the eighteenth century: one half of the house had the original seventeenth-century pointed gables and long, mullioned windows, while the other had Dutch gables and tall sashes. The entrance porch, with simple Ionic columns topped by a wooden balustrade, was placed at the point where Elizabethan met Queen Anne, and any discrepancy in architectural style was disguised beneath the ivy that swarmed over the façade. A somewhat romantic and inaccurate picture of the house was to be found in John Leigh’s Lays and Legends of Cheshire:

High on a craggy steep there stands,

Near Marple’s fertile vale,

An ancient ivy-covered house

That overlooks the dale.

And lofty woods of elm and oak

That ancient house enclose,

And on those walls a neighbouring yew

Its sombre shadow throws.

A many gabled house it is

With antique turrets crowned

And many a quaint device, designed

In carvings rude is found.

The turrets in fact belonged to the stable-block, a highly decorative building which had an ornate, squat, step-gabled clock tower set over the entrance to the cobbled yard.

The interior of the Hall was rather more harmonious than the exterior, with dark, color-washed walls hung with Elizabethan and Jacobean family portraits, and plain white plaster ceilings. Most of the furnishings were very much of the period and of good quality without being particularly distinguished—just the sort of thing one might expect in the home of a north-of-England squire. There were, however, a couple of very well preserved early-eighteenth-century tapestries depicting classical subjects, which came from the Gobelin factory and were signed by de la Croix and de Blond, tapissiers royaux to Louis XIV. The low-ceilinged hall, with its flagstone floor, was something of a showpiece, with the obligatory array of weaponry, complete suits of armor, stags’ heads and stained glass, hooded porters’ chairs, a longcase clock, and Jacobean chests upon which stood Chinese vases and pewter trenchers. A fine oak staircase, with elaborate urns on the newel posts and a tapestry-hung half-landing, rose out of the hall to the first floor. The dining room was furnished with heavy oak chairs of the seventeenth century, typical of the region, and there was a handsome library with glass-fronted bookcases, paneling and a fireplace, all in the Gothic revival style. The drawing room had Gothic windows and contained a highly decorative pink marble fireplace, its mantelpiece supported by caryatids, brought back from his travels in Italy by Isherwood’s Uncle Henry. Also on the ground floor were the paneled Oak Parlour and, at the back of the house, a conservatory.

For visitors, who paid a shilling to be shown round the house, the most historically interesting room was the Bradshaw Room, dominated by a large four-poster bed. Round the top of the tester ran a motto: “A MAN WITHOUT MERCY OF MERCY SHALL MISS BUT HE SHALL HAVE MERCY THAT MERCYFULL IS.” It was in this bed, contemplating this homily, that John Bradshawe, the family’s most distinguished, or notorious, forebear, supposedly slept. Lord President of the High Court of Justice, “Bradshawe the Regicide” presided over the trial of Charles I, pronounced the verdict, refused to allow the condemned man to speak, and put his florid but firm signature on the monarch’s death warrant. Bradshawe’s great-niece, Mary, eventually inherited the Marple Hall estate, and it was she who married Nathaniel Isherwood the felt-maker. Mary’s son, also Nathaniel, married a local heiress, Elizabeth Brabins of nearby Brabins (or Brabyns) Hall, who was always known as Moll and was to feature alarmingly in the lives of Christopher Isherwood and his brother Richard. The younger Nathaniel died without issue and it was his parents’ second son, the philoprogenitive Thomas, who continued the family line, marrying twice and fathering seventeen children. His heir, John, was Isherwood’s great-great-grandfather.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Here is the definitive biography of one of the most exciting, influential, and elusive authors of the twentieth century. Christopher Isherwood's novels and short stories, including those that inspired the musical Cabaret, have always been assumed to be largely autobiographical. Based in part on Isherwood's private papers - unavailable until now - this book presents the real story of his life, a life that saw a relatively conventional boy become an acclaimed writer, mystic, and "grand old man" of the gay liberation movement. In the end, Isherwood: A Life Revealed portrays someone who misled as much as he divulged." "Born in England in 1904, the heir to a large country estate where his grandfather was squire, Isherwood had a youth filled with both privilege and loss. His father's death in World War I devastated his mother and created a "hero-father" image that would haunt both Christopher and his unstable brother for the rest of their lives. Isherwood began to acknowledge his homosexuality at boarding school and subsequently formed a definition of "self" based on subterfuge, performance, and escape. With his lifelong friends W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender he emerged as one of the leading literary figures of the 1930s." In addition to using Isherwood's correspondence, unpublished diaries, and other previously unavailable sources in painting this clear and definitive portrait, Peter Parker has also unearthed the author's telling early works, including parodies, school memoirs, and even part of a crucial lost novel. Isherwood: A Life captures the fugitive reality of a man who has become a favorite artist and important symbol of an entire era in our life of letters. Published in the centennial of his birth, it will be read as long as Isherwood himself is.

FROM THE CRITICS

Brooke Allen - The New York Times

Peter Parker, the author of a fine biography of another British homosexual icon, J. R. Ackerley, has covered Isherwood's life with daunting thoroughness.

Publishers Weekly

Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood's consistently rebellious, fictional self-reinventions are put into perspective alongside his exhaustive, introspective diaries in this authoritative and lively life. Of the generation of English writers who defined the 1930s, Isherwood (1904-1986) alone came from landed gentry; he recast himself as a serious novelist, a left-wing playwright, a political journalist and a pacifist. Meticulously following the rootless Isherwood from Weimar Berlin to war-torn China, Parker delves incisively into his relationship with Stephen Spender and with Auden. Parker portrays the frequent collaboration with the latter (highly acclaimed, at the time) as more emotionally crucial to Auden than to Isherwood. Their split upon emigrating to America just before the outbreak of WWII gave Isherwood, who settled in Hollywood, far from Auden's New York, further opportunity for self-exploration and expression. While Isherwood's social circle encompassed other notable exiles, from Charlie Chaplin to Thomas Mann, Isherwood's literary output stalled until the Broadway success of an adaptation of his Berlin Stories as Cabaret. Isherwood's later memoirs, to which Parker attributes a role in the gay liberation movement, receive the same insightful critical attention from Parker (biographer of J. R. Ackerley) as Isherwood's early work. With the final installment of Isherwood's voluminous diaries yet to be published, Parker's biography, written with full access to his subject's papers, will likely remain definitive. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW. Agent, Emma Sweeney at Harold Ober Assoc. (On sale Dec. 7) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A life of writer/memoirist Isherwood that emulates its subject's detachment but hardly his conciseness. Best known for Berlin Stories, the basis for the Broadway play I Am a Camera and for the even more successful musical Cabaret, Isherwood (1904-86) deserves recognition for a wider body of work, argues Parker, a British historian and biographer (The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos, not reviewed). Scion of landed gentry and son of a soldier killed in WWI, Isherwood, in early adulthood, embraced left-wing politics, pacifism, atheism, and homosexuality. In the 1930s, he achieved fame as arguably England's most promising novelist and as collaborator with ex-schoolmate and sometime lover W.H. Auden on the plays The Dog Beneath the Skin and The Ascent of F6. His life later included a controversial move to America, with Auden, in 1939; a surprising conversion to Hinduism and brief commitment as a monk in the 1940s; thirty years as a Hollywood screenwriter; and lionization as "favorite uncle" to the post-Stonewall generation of gay authors that included Armistead Maupin and Edmund White. Access to Isherwood's longtime companion Don Bechardy and friend Stephen Spender, as well as to the novelist's astonishing collection of diaries and letters, enables Parker to pull back the curtain on a writer who on the surface was utterly candid. Charming, witty, and generous, Isherwood could also be narcissistic, bossy, drunken, and, most shockingly, anti-Semitic. Parker points to memoirs, further, that not only altered details but also faked or censored diary entries. Unfortunately, although he has bravely plunged into the forest of Isherwood documentation, Parker sometimes loses his waythrough sheer inclusiveness, citing his subject's every quarrel and patch-up with his widowed mother, troubled brother, and lovers (an estimated 400 by age 44). Way too much information on the love life, but an essential resource for coming to terms with a key figure in the Auden circle. (16-page photo insert, not seen)Agent: Emma Sweeney/Harold Ober Associates

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