GLR November-December 2024

C HRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD was born 120 years ago on his family’s estate in northern Eng land, but the life he lived and the books he wrote speak with a powerful voice to the experience of queer people in 21st-century America. His life story is all about the need to be one’s authentic self and to resist forces that would deny that need, and it is told with impressive skill by Katherine Bucknell in her major new biography, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out . Isherwood’s early life resembles a Masterpiece Theatre pe riod drama. He was raised with a nanny and sent to boarding schools. His father, a colonel in the British army, was killed early in World War I. His doting mother, sensitive to class dis tinctions and devoted to the Church of England, hoped her son would marry and have an academic career after he completed studies at Cambridge. However, early on Isherwood rebelled against the world into which he was born. After two years at Cambridge, where he spent most of his time writing stories, he deliberately failed his exams and withdrew. His first novel, All the Conspirators , was published in 1928, when he was 24. The next year, he left England for Berlin, where he would remain until 1933. The young Isherwood took on what he would later refer to as the “Others”: the British Empire, Cambridge, Anglicanism, social class, marriage, sex roles. The hidden source of his re bellion was his homosexuality. Under the tutelage of his friend W. H. Auden, Isherwood embraced his sexuality in Berlin, The famous, outrageous, and politically well-connected Tal lulah Bankhead was also infatuated with Holiday. Nicknaming her “Banksy,” the singer occasionally stayed in Bankhead’s apartment in New York City and at her country house: “At the Strand, when Tallulah visited Billie in her dressing room after the show, they often ended up on the sofa in a compromising po sition, and Tallulah enjoyed leaving the door to the hallway open enough for anyone passing by to spot them.” Twice Bankhead attempted to intervene in the federal government’s pursuit of Holiday by appealing directly to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. However, she also unceremoniously ended their relationship in fear of further exposure during an already scan dalous court case involving Bankhead’s housekeeper. She makes no mention of Billie in her autobiography. Throughout Bitter Crop , Alexander imagines what Billie Holiday’s private thoughts and emotions might have been. Ex Daniel A. Burr, a frequent contributor to this magazine, lives in Cov ington, Kentucky. 32 the poet Elizabeth Bishop. The affair was ended by one of Louise’s cousins, John Hammond, the influential music pro ducer who had “discovered” Holiday, to protect the Crane fam ilyname.

where he had a series of affairs with young, working-class men. This was his first pivot toward authenticity. The next would come in 1939, when he and Auden left England for America on the eve of World War II. By then Isherwood was a pacifist. His first great love, a young man named Heinze, was now a soldier in the German army, and Isherwood knew he could never take up arms against him or any other man. Once the war began, he and Auden were widely denounced in Eng land for abandoning their country. There would be two more pivots. Five months after arriving in New York, Isherwood set out for California, where he would support himself by writing for movie studios. In Hollywood, English friends introduced Isherwood, who considered himself an atheist, to Swami Prabhavananda, a Hindu monk who ran the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Becoming an acolyte of the Swami’s teachings, Isherwood would follow a lifelong quest involving meditation and spiritual discipline to help him see beyond the illusion of this world and find enlight enment about life’s ultimate meaning. Through Swami, both his guru and a father figure, Isherwood came to believe in his in herent worthiness as a gay man. Many fellow writers and re viewers of his books were either skeptical of his embrace of Vedanta or never understood it. The final, most important pivot came in 1953, when he began a relationship with Don Bachardy, an eighteen-year-old college student thirty years his junior. While the relationship lasted until Isherwood’s death, it was fraught with conflict stemming from their age difference, Isherwood’s growing celebrity, Bachardy’s struggle to establish his career as an artist, and the many sexual liaisons that both had with other men. This narrative decision notwithstanding, Alexander has writ ten a brisk, absorbing book, adding atmosphere and detail to his account of Holiday’s day-to-day life and performances. He sel dom fails to mention her sense of style, describing what she wore and how she looked on stage. At the first Monterey Jazz Festival in 1958, for example, she appeared wearing “a chic evening gown featuring a star pattern, oversized dangling ear rings, and a snug-fitting mink stole. Her hair, though not slicked back, was pulled into her customary ponytail.” This close at tention to detail does seem fitting, however, for such a legendary artist, who was able to turn popular songs into vivid and endur ing scenes from her own life. ample: “Fighting through the anxiety that often seized her be fore she went on stage, she glanced around her modest dressing room. She had been in better, to be sure, but she had also been in worse.” This may be an off-putting technique for some read ers, and I think he definitely goes too far with these interior con structions late in the book when he has Holiday’s friend and frequent collaborator, jazz great Lester “Prez” Young, speak from beyond the grave.

A Singular Man

D ANIEL A. B URR

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD INSIDEOUT by Katherine Bucknell Farrar, Straus and Giroux 864 pages, $45.

TheG & LR