It was Christopher Isherwood’s sometime lover, the poet WH Auden, who dismissed the biographer’s art with “A shilling life will give you all the facts”, adding a vicious parody of the life-writer’s obsessions: abusive father; broken home; youthful struggles; deeds of greatness; and so on. As it happens, it became Isherwood’s gentle riposte to this sarcastic summary to offer the example of a brilliant career devoted to worldly affections, empathy, and gay sex: a romantic Modernist’s self-dramatisation of the Bloomsbury credo “Only connect.”
Furthermore, although there are plenty of Isherwood “facts” (classic writer on Thirties Berlin; inspiration for Cabaret, wunderkind gay novelist), these are often rather beside the point. It’s what Isherwood embodies in himself (gaiety, wit, tolerance and humanity) and also in his writing (a limpid style of clarity, strength, simplicity and candour) that matters.
For this idiosyncratic life, Katherine Bucknell is the perfect biographer. She is an Isherwood scholar who has devoted some 30 years to editing three volumes of Isherwood’s Diaries (1939-1983); also The Animals, his letters to his lover Don Bachardy, and an edition of Lost Years, another memoir of 1945-51. Why – you might ask – would she want to revisit such a well-documented career so meticulously curated by its own subject? Moreover, what’s left to say? Long before his death in January 1986, Isherwood – with crystal, and often comic, brilliance – had already had the last word. Or had he?