This award-winning biography unravels the ways in which Christopher Isherwood's autobiographically-based fiction connects with his own life and experiences.
Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Biography (1979)
It argues that some of his later novels are just as powerful as the Berlin novels which made him famous. Using interviews with Isherwood and others and citing from Isherwood's unpublished letters at the time, Finney shows how the events in Isherwood's life became transformed into his fiction. Interspersed chapters offer informed critical analysis of all his major work up to 1978. This biography won the James Tait Black Memorial Award for non-fiction in 1979. It was also chosen by Philip Toynbee as one of his best three books of the year in the Observer.
Though he has been writing books for five decades, Isherwood is best-known for his books on Berlin in the ’30s (on which Cabaret and I Am A Camera were based), and critics have tended to treat him solely as a writer of that era.
In this full critical biography, Brian Finney maintains that a number of his later works, including Down There on a Visit, A Single Man, and Christopher and His Kind, are as good as his Berlin books. But the nature of Isherwood’s fiction almost dictates a biographical rather than a purely critical book, for almost all his novels draw heavily on his life. In this volume, written with the benefit of unrestricted access to Isherwood’s private archives, letters, and manuscripts, a portrait emerges of Isherwood as an exile who has written and lived in search of meaning, and a writer whose works reflect many of his personal idées fixes as well as the tumultuous times through which he has lived. W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Stravinsky–the people Isherwood regarded as his friends and natural allies–are lively supporting characters in the book. Auden and Isherwood collaborated on three plays and they often traveled together. E M. Forster was Isherwood’s literary mentor, while Huxley introduced Isherwood to his spiritual mentor, the Swami Prabhavananda. Huxley and Isherwood regularly had vegetarian picnics in Southern California, often attended by the MGM stars with whom Isherwood worked as a screenplay writer.
Finney discusses Isherwood’s radical politics in the ’30s in England and his recent militant position on homosexuality. He also offers thorough critiques of Isherwood’s works, devoting full chapters to individual novels such as Goodbye to Berlin, Prater Violet, A Single Man, and Kathleen and Frank.