Christopher Isherwood was constantly pulled between the camp and the heroic. As a schoolchild, he went from military drills, emulating his soldier father, to doing square dances with his mother in her dresses. As a young man, he escaped upper-class England for 1930s Berlin with its drag acts and cabarets, but moved to the slums, wanting to join the workers he saw as the real heroes. Just before the war, he gave up politics and went to Hollywood, embracing the glamorous but rackety world of screenwriting. But he still needed the kind of challenge that he capitalised in his writing as the Test. He found a Hindu guru, Swami Prabhavananda, and tried out celibacy in his monastery just when he was finally within reach of the best gay scene he had ever encountered.
Katherine Bucknell’s Isherwood isn’t as camp as his previous biographer Peter Parker’s but he is preoccupied by heroism throughout. The editor of his voluminous diaries, she is interested above all in his inner life: in how he negotiated being the son of a fallen war hero and of an anxiously loving mother who turned to him for the intimate conversations she was missing. Isherwood, for Bucknell, is a writer who seems to become ill at every turn to avoid being overcome by anxiety (the “arch-fear” of “being afraid”), whose love of boys is both a transgression and a source of pleasure, who’s always in danger both of excessive passivity and wilfulness, and who’s always attempting precisely the heroism he has determined to reject.
