GLR November-December 2025

A Writer Whose Life and Work Were One

T HERE REALLY IS no point in trying to separate Christopher Ish erwood’s writing from the details of his life. His prolific use of those details has led critics to classify his works as examples of “autofiction.” Acknowledg ing that autofiction has been used in differ ent ways, Jake Poller, author of a new

by Reaktion Books as part of its “Critical Lives” series and is a short but tightly packed critical biography. Unlike previous Isher wood biographies, two of which the subject himself deemed “hopelessly dull” and “wretched,” this book devotes equal space to his life and work. The concise format of the series necessitated Poller leaving out a

H ANK T ROUT

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD by Jake Poller Reak ti on Books. 208 pages, $22.

wealth of material (e.g., Isherwood’s friendship with luminaries such as Igor Stravinsky and Truman Capote, his short stories and poetry, the plays he wrote with W. H. Auden, his extensive trav els). But he has produced a critically astute, informative, thor oughly enjoyable examination of the life and work of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. And what a life Isherwood lived! Born into England’s landed gentry, Isherwood railed endlessly against the upper class into which he’d been born. But, as Poller points out, he was quite comfortable with his similarly privileged classmates at Cam bridge. Poller doesn’t mention it, but it seems pertinent that Ish erwood relied on gifts of money from his Uncle Henry for much of his early life, signaling that he was still in some ways de pendent upon that class. Along with his Cambridge friend, the poet Edward Upward (who coined the term “poshocracy” for the upper class), he created a series of mythical stories about the fan tastical village of “Mortmere.” In French, “mortmere” is close to “death of mother,” suggesting Isherwood’s and Upward’s rancor toward the women who birthed them. Those stories viciously lampooned the gentry. An uninspired, lackadaisical student, Isherwood knew he couldn’t pass Cambridge’s Tripos exam, so he intentionally flubbed the test, writing nonsensical answers and even critiquing the architecture of the hall where the exams were given instead of answering the questions. He was sent down, ending his Cam bridge career “less with a triumphant bang than with a snigger.” This kind of rebellion against “the combine,” another term for the poshocracy, would be a touchstone of Isherwood’s life. Although he studied briefly to be a physician, after quitting school he took a job as a secretary to the bohemian leader of a string quartet. Between the wars, he rebelled against his home land’s anti-gay laws and attitudes, moving to Berlin because, as he writes in Christopher and His Kind , “For Christopher, Berlin meant boys.” In 1939, although he had flirted with communism at Cambridge and remained vociferously antifascist, he became a pacifist; along with Auden, he fled England and took up per manent residence in the United States. (The pair were vilified in the British press for “abandoning” their home country in war time.) He rebelled against Christianity, studying to become a monk in the Vedanta branch of Hinduism, but giving it up after three years to return to writing. He flouted convention by living openly as lovers with portrait artist Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior, though he never acknowledged his homosexuality in writing until 1971. Poller explores all these events and how Ish erwood mined them for his fiction. Poller is unafraid to detail the regrettable elements of Isher

Isherwood biography, proffers this definition: “a genre in which the boundaries between autobiography and fiction are knowingly elided by the author … [or] texts classified as autobiographies that deploy fictional structures and techniques.” Poller points to Goodbye to Berlin , Prater Violet , and Down There on a Visit as prime examples of Isherwood’s autofiction. They’re all narrated by a fictional “Christopher Isherwood” and draw heavily from events of his own life, blurring the line between fiction and fact. Further obscuring the division, Isherwood wanted readers to treat his first real autobiography, Lions and Shadows , as fiction be cause he used made-up names for his friends and family and structured the book like a novel. Conversely he claimed that everything in Christopher and His Kind should be read as totally “frank and factual,” though he again used made-up names, em ployed techniques of the novel, and, according to Poller, “in clude[d] a suspicious amount of dialogue some four decades after the event.” Poller’s biography of the Anglo-American writer is published

Christopher Isherwood in 1938.

Hank Trout has served as editor at a number of publications, most re cently as senior editor for A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine . 34

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