The trouble with Christopher

Peter Conrad

Christopher and his Kind Christopher Isherwood (Eyre Methuen e4.95) Isherwood has only ever had one subject: himself. The political reversals which drove him to live in the `entirely excellent vacuum' of America, as Wyndham Lewis called it, confirmed him in this aesthetic self-soliciting. But he has managed the small miracle of writing about himself with a. narcissism which is graceful, pitiless and detached. He has the art, encouraged by the oriental religion of which he became an adept in California, of slipping out of his body and his mental habits and appraising them as it they belonged to someone else. Even to himself, he is an opaque, unknowable object.

The latest of his self-inquisitions, Christopher and his Kind, is hardly an autobiography at all, since Isherwood objectifies his past self, the fraudulent and evasive ironist who wrote the Berlin books, in order to disown it. He cannot write an autobiography because he doesn't know himself well enough: even looking in the mirror, he shares the biographer's plight of having to penetrate a fugitive individuality different from himself, a creature lost in the past and protected by the dishonesty of his own recollections. The autobiographer assumes that he is the hero of his own life; but Isherwood writes in the hope of discovering whether he is, or whether, as David Copperfield says, `that station will be held by anyone else.'

There are a contentious set of candidates for the role of hero—the 'Herr Issyvoo' of the Berlin diaries, the 'William Bradshaw' (Isherwood's vestigial middle names) of Mr Norris Changes Trains, the artless, informal 'Christopher' of the new book. Isherwood, unable to choose between them, sets them against one another. In this book an indiscreet, confessional 'Christopher' works through the earlier memoirs composed by the respectable 'Isherwood,' exposing the conceit, hypocrisy and inaccuracy of his obsolete youthful persona. His is a self-love confident enough to afford the luxury of self-repudiation, and his is a self devious, complicated and endearing enough to be worthy of it.

Auden's literary development was also a protracted self-exploitation, but it had opposite consequences. Auden pickled and prematurely aged himself, riddling his face with the striations of one of his limestone landscapes and hampering himself with a set of fads and crotchets. He became a classic at the expense of his humanity; the man, superseded by the work, awaited his own extinction with impatience, for death

could only confirm his self-made immortality. Isherwood, however, has grown steadily younger. He writes about his past in order to cast it off. He still looks, though slightly wizened, an adolescent: those bright, glacial eyes and animated face contrast with the pockets of weary flesh which sagged from Auden's skull. Whereas Auden marginalised his genius, disabling himself with perverse theories and taming at last into a virtuoso doodler, Isherwood continues to recreate himself. He is not a dogmatist, a tyrannical theologian authorising, as Auden did, a single version of himself; as Christopher and his Kind reveals, he is fascinated by the ambiguity of his interior history, and is forever hazarding new guesses about it

The difference is the same as that between Auden's Anglicanism and Isherwood's Vedanta. The one fortifies the crusty self by ritualising its habits; the other offers blithe liberations from the snare of personal identity. Isherwood sheds selves effortlessly —the current book peels off the anodyne ironist of the Berlin stories and the moralising prig of van Druten's I Am a Camera— because his religion treats them as excrescences, flimsy half-embodiments of the spirit. Auden, however, could only free himself from past selves by public acts of recantation: hence his mutilations of early poems which he considered politically dishonest, or the excision of 'Spain' from his canon. Driven in on themselves, Auden and Isherwood have spent their literary lives in editorial interference with their early texts. Auden insisted that a poem was never finished, only abandoned, and punitively rewrote earlier works to adjust them to altered opinions; Isherwood in Christopher and his Kind dismissively rewrites Lions and Shadows.

Auden ended in a sad charade, enacting the role of Auden though no longer believing in it, behaving in private as if presenting a public account of himself to an interviewer, relying on the consolation of self-repetition. Isherwood has saved himself from this staleness and self-disgust by his disingenuous failure to find out the truth about himself. He disqualifies himself as an autobiographer because, as he claimed in Kathleen and Frank, he doesn't know enough about himself. He is the only narcissist ever to have used that disarming excuse, but given the elaborate prevarications mixing naïveté and cunning, which make up his literary identity, he is right.

Again, he and Auden adopted opposite but congruent stratagems of self-revelation. Auden's notorious defensiveness, prohibiting a biography and requesting his friends to burn his letters, was a teasing enticement to

publicity. No one is more conspicuouslY public than those who, like Garbo or Howard Hughes, are obsessive about their privacy. The letters he asked his friends to burn were in any case not intimate communications but first drafts of essays or poems. Conversely, Isherwood's lacerating frankness about his sexual truancies is as evasive and oblique as Auden's reticence was a coy technique of self-dramatisation. As Isherwood admits, we are never less honest with ourselves than when writing our diaries. Thus he has written the autobiography of his books, and of his body— its nauseous excitements, its sexual grips, its claps, quinsies and hairy patches are all anatomised in Christopher and his Kind but not the autobiography of himself. Even the device of writing about himself in the third person is a formula not for detachment but for adroit question-begging: old Isherwood confronts young Christopher as a stranger, an obtuse, quizzical object with impulses and intentions the novelist can't understand or regulate. Hence the concentration in this book on the sexual activities of the promiscuous Christopher: the body takes on a will of its own and becomes a character, but the record of its erotic spasms and seductive machinations tells as little about the owner as would a painstaking inventory of his dinner menus. Isherwood and Auden needed no subject but themselves, for each is an alternate ego of the other. As a pair of self-exploiters, theY battened conveniently on one another. Isherwood passed into Auden's myth of spiritual combat: in a poem of 1931, Auden turned Isherwood's current lover Otto into a prize won from the drab imprisonment of hell by Christopher's year of devotion; On the Frontier treats Isherwood's difficulties with the runaway Heinz, from whom he was separated by political frontiers. The neW book additionally discloses that Isherwood vetoed Auden's proposal to make a ballad from the pitiful history of Heinz : remembering 'Miss Gee,' he was sure Auden would briskly versify tragedy into farce. Auden, correspondingly, is conscripted to Isherwood's myths. These are political rather than theological: dramas of ironic conspiracy, not holy wars like Auden's. Throughout Christopher and his Kind, he and Auden are united against the ominous crowds of Others, and their membership of a secret society of aggression is sealed by their intermittent, chummy sexual ma' macies. But though inseparable they arc antagonistic: Isherwood casts Auden as.an inefficient romantic, an introverted magician producing poems from secret recesses like conjuring tricks, not a wry unforgiving camera-eye trained on an external realitY. Their friendship partitions the literary world. Poetry with its sacerdotal trickery Is allotted to Auden ; Isherwood takes over the shabbier, contingent realm of novelistic prose. Auden's language is ceremonious, Isherwood's bluntly direct. Auden loved speaking German because of the laborious artificiality of the idiom; Isherwood found

the language useful because his poor command of it forced him to be crossly explicit When making sexual propositions in Berlin, and this freed him from the inhibitions which English taboo words enforced.

Climatically, they apportion nature between themselves. Auden writes indoors With the curtains drawn against the day, Isherwood outdoors stripped to the waist. Auden's preferred landscapes are mountainous and rainy, Isherwood's glaringly sunny and sandy. The poet isolates himself in hermetic cells or on inaccessible heights (New York suited Auden because it was a Man-made version of the Alps), the novelist exposes himself to the brutal brilliance of the day. The poet has a charmed obscurantism, the novelist a stringent realism. In their collaborations, 'Wystan's speciality was to be the "woozy" and mine the "straight bits.' On their Chinese journey, the poet affects a costume of calculated sloppiness, Which is the badge of his trade as a visionary mendicant : a woollen cap with a baggy topcoat and carpet-slippers. The novelist however adopts the uniform of the anonymous observers: wearing a beret, turtleneck sweater and riding boots, 'Christopher was In masquerade as a war correspondent.' Psychologically, there is a sinister comPlementarity between them : Auden is the weepy masochist, Isherwood the cold and unscrupulous sadist. Auden is correspondi,ngly apologetic about his homosexuality, Judging himself by the standards of his religion and acquiescing gloomily in his self-confessed sinfulness; Isherwood, however, is sexually impudent, unrepentant and aggressive. There is a comparable difference between their political defections. Auden renounces radical politics once he is aware that the violent masculine engineering of Change s is inconsistent with the maternal sranctitY of his religion; Isherwood turns ..roln the hope of institutional reform to the demand for individual freedom, and rejects revolution because Stalin had resumed the Persecution of homosexuals. Auden invokes his mother's pious propriety as a universal rule of conduct ; Isherwood exerts himself to sPite and scandalise his long-suffering Mother. Auden considers England to be the °PPressive extension of his family; for Isherwood it is merely the impersonal encamp01. ent of the Others. In leaving it for America, .Auden is running away from home: he !oyes his family but can't live with them. Isherwood is a vagrant for whom travel is :)ot an escape from home but a quest for a _olerable home: when first arriving in ‘-'ermany he told a customs official he was searching for a homeland and hoped he °light find it in Berlin. e For both, travel is a privileged act of self ?(Ploration : open-handed publishers subsWisetheir extravagances as they play at Participating in foreign wars. Their journeys of self-dramatisation contrast troublingly With the harried flight of Heinz from country .0 country until the Nazis reclaim him. He is the victim of history, not its literary Profiteer, a refugee, not an expatriate mak

ing a career, as Isherwood did, from his foreignness. Isherwood impersonates an alien but is actually a moping extraterritorial Childe Harold, with the money and the confidence to declare himself a citizen of the world; Heinz is an alien, undesirable and discarded, appealing unsuccessfully to the mercy of a world which does not want him as its citizen. Isherwood's travel is an abstract and fanciful interrogation of alternatives, Heinz's a desperate flight which is too real to be mythologised. Heinz, in a sense the hero of the book, is the hapless raw material of existence which the artist contemplates but which he cannot save from its ignominious and painful fate: Isherwood is a survivor, which neither the sodden, distracted Auden nor the hunted Heinz could manage to be.

Christopher and his Kind ends as Isherwood and Auden transfer the quest for a homeland from sleazy, corrupted Germany to wholesome, welcoming America. The change involves a revision of fantasy: after the leathery denizens of the Berlin bars, and the exquisite slippery attendants in the Shanghai bath-houses, they now resolve to be infatuated by the Whitmanesque Amencan Boy, 'human-smelling, muscular, hairy, earthy.' Obliging America provides them with the likeness of their fantasy, as the courageously sentimental last paragraph of Christopher and his Kind predicts. But America not only serves as a genial pander; it also requires Auden and Isherwood to localise their fantasies, and thus shocks them into maturity by dividing them. The pair who in Europe had been inseparable as conspirators and collaborators were automatically parted by vast, vacuous America. Auden ensconced himself in the geometrical chaos of New York, which he turned into the city of existential anxiety and vigorous modernity; Isherwood advanced to the Pacific coast, where he found the hedonistic celebration of the body transvalued into an oriental renunciation of physical cares.

Auden's America is prophetically envisaged by the Sphinx, which he and Isherwood saw on their way to China, malignly gazing 'for eyec towards shrill America.' Isherwood's America is sentimentally evoked by the film-maker Viertel (Bergmann in Prater Violet): he describes the suburban exoticism of Santa Monica Canyon to Christopher who is intrigued by the image of the place, in which, forty years later, he finds himself living. Auden took up residence in a psychic hell, Isherwood in a dazed, sensual heaven.

Christopher and his Kind leaves them together, poised on the deck of their ship as it enters New York harbour in a blizzard. Unnerved by the challenge of the apocalyptic city, they are detached from their past and unable to imagine their future. That futute is to be the subject, presumably, of Isherwood's next book, which no doubt will proceed by elegantly unpicking Christopher and his Kind and decrying its cowardly halftruths—but it is fortunate that none of his readers need share Isherwood's ironic contempt for his own work.