Isherwood A Life Revealed

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 respectedor fearedit 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 tellingwhen, 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 cParker, Peter is the author of 'Isherwood A Life Revealed', published 2004 under ISBN 9781400062492 and ISBN 1400062497.