The hippie Edwardian

Christopher Isherwood led a life of contrasts: he chronicled Thirties Berlin, fell under the spell of a swami and eventually became 'the gay movement's favourite uncle'. Paul Willetts assesses a magisterial new biography

For even the most revered writers, death tends to herald an abrupt dip in literary prestige. Christopher Isherwood's stock was, however, declining long before then. Unable to sustain the exacting standards that he set during the Thirties, his subsequent books failed to justify the lofty expectations of leading critics. By the time he succumbed to prostate cancer just over 18 years ago, Isherwood was less prominent as a writer than as an eternally boyish figurehead of the so-called gay liberation movement that had emerged in the Sixties and Seventies.

The posthumous publication of a hefty volume of his edited diaries could have arrested this trend, but these turned out to be disappointingly bereft of the comic brio that lent Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains, his best-known novels, such widespread appeal. Far from levelling the downward trajectory of his reputation, the diaries contributed to the process of marginalisation which has, all too often, led to his work being exiled to the "Gay and Lesbian Interest" sections of bookshops. Peter Parker's mammoth biography, Isherwood (Picador £25), seeks to restore him to the mainstream.

By producing such a gargantuan volume, published to coincide with the centenary of its subject's birth, Parker is clearly intent on asserting Isherwood's cultural importance. The book's daunting girth is indicative of a desire to create the authoritative account of a fascinating, peripatetic life, which has generated two previous biographies. Neither of these, for all their merits, bears comparison with Parker's more comprehensive and densely researched version. That said, no biography, however compendious, can be truly definitive. Biographies will always remain acts of interpretation, coloured by the personality and outlook of their creators.

As the author of a well-received life of JR Ackerley, another gay literary figure with a penchant for autobiographical writing, Parker has the necessary credentials for the project. His epic labours have yielded a plethora of material from which he has constructed a scholarly, readable, and dryly humorous book, chronicling Isherwood's strange journey from fusty Edwardian England to post-hippie California. Unfortunately, its eye-popping length and consequent attention to detail will deter those who are not already Isherwood loyalists.

Like so many other literary biographies, it opens with a protracted preamble outlining the antecedents and background that shaped its subject. Though Isherwood grew up with an avowed hatred of "the dead weight of the past", he could not, of course, escape from its influence. Born Christopher Bradshaw-Isherwood, he came from a wealthy family who owned two country houses in Cheshire. His paternal uncle had inherited one of these while his father had been consigned to a reluctant, nomadic career in the army. Following the conventional upper-middle-class pattern, Isherwood was cosseted by a beloved nanny until he was old enough to be sent away to prep school. At St Edmunds, a small, typically uncomfortable establishment in Surrey, he first encountered the future poet WH Auden, whom Parker introduces with novelistic relish as "a grubby, unprepossessing little boy, with a dead white complexion, untidy tow-coloured hair, blunt-fingered, ink-stained hands and an habitual, myopic scowl". Not long afterwards, Isherwood's kindly father was killed in the First World War, death transforming him into a heroic figure, venerated by his grieving widow. Isherwood, whose flattering self-image was maintained by routine distortions of reality, later depicted himself as being sceptical about his father's metamorphosis into a personification of heroism. But Parker is able to demonstrate Isherwood's youthful acceptance of this militaristic myth.

From prep school, Isherwood moved on to public school and then Cambridge University, where he rebelled against what he saw as his mother's "snobbish and constricting" hopes for him by deliberately failing his final exams. Instead of pursuing the type of career generally favoured by someone from his class, he took took his own path, working for a classical music quartet. In his spare time, he pressed ahead with his debut novel: the EM Forster-influenced, characteristically autobiographical All the Conspirators. This featured a scathing caricature of his long-suffering and supportive mother, whom he had come to regard as an embodiment of everything he despised. Staunchly conservative though she was, what most alarmed her were her elder son's literary ambitions rather than his homosexuality. Always alert to the conspicuous gaps between the truth and Isherwood's supposedly candid recreations of it, Parker handles the troubled relationship between mother and son with even-handed skill. As he points out, they "had a great deal more in common than [Isherwood] cared to admit." Not only did his mother share his waspish sense of humour, but she also had a compulsion to document her life through diary-keeping.

One of the generic traits of biography is that the most engaging passages inevitably parallel the most colourful and dramatic periods of the protagonist's life. In that respect, Parker's book is no exception. The decision, taken by Isherwood, to visit Auden in Berlin during the spring of 1929 presages just such a passage. Their immersion in the poverty-stricken world of working-class Berliners has often been seen as a gesture of left-wing commitment, but Parker wittily observes that "the nearest either of them got to solidarity with the workers was sleeping with them." For Isherwood and Auden, the city's principal attraction was its notorious gay bars, clubs, and cafés, with which Isherwood would be forever associated. As well as presenting a vivid evocation of this louche backdrop, Parker supplies lively cameos of Jean Ross and Gerald Hamilton, on whom two of Isherwood's most brilliant and anarchic characters, namely Sally Bowles and Arthur Norris, were modelled. In a felicitous turn of phrase that wouldn't look out of place in an Isherwood novel, Parker describes how the shady Gerald Hamilton's hands were "kept immaculately manicured, as if to dispel rumours that in financial and other matters they were usually far from clean".

While Isherwood was in Berlin, he got into the first in a series of long-term sexual relationships with teenage boys. Anxious to prevent his lover from being conscripted into the expanding German army, Isherwood dragged him round pre-war Europe. But the boy was eventually captured. With his lover languishing in gaol, Isherwood's nascent pacifism prompted him to decamp to America. Thanks to Mr Norris Changes Trains, Goodbye To Berlin, and a number of collaborations with Auden, assessments of which are dovetailed into Parker's narrative with unobtrusive dexterity, Isherwood had become one of Britain's most celebrated young writers. As a public figure, he was widely criticised for what was considered an act of cowardice and betrayal.

His move to America represented a watershed in his life and career. Finding New York oppressive, he soon gravitated to California where he settled in Santa Monica Canyon, an easy-going, bohemian enclave of Los Angeles. During those early years, he supported himself by working as a Hollywood screenwriter, mainly on routine assignments, few of which made it into production. Unlike such fellow emigrés as Bertolt Brecht, who equated screenwriting with prostitution, Isherwood "was, on the whole, a happy hooker". In the meantime, his pacifism inspired his involvement with a wily Hindu mystic whose influence pervaded the remainder of his life, much of it spent shuttling between incongruous film and religious commitments.

No longer would Isherwood have to rely on his writing to discern meaning in his experiences. That task was, to some extent, usurped by his new-found religion. Though his faith may have helped his psychological well-being, it proved disastrous to him as a novelist, encouraging him to produce fiction "with spiritual dimensions", fiction to which he was ill-suited. The majority of his later novels were, as Parker concedes, disappointing to say the least. Of these, only the neglected Down There on A Visit succeeds in matching its predecessors. Try as he might to create characters and plots that were wholly invented, their development buttressed by abstract ideas, his real strengths lay in hard-edged and frequently hard-hearted descriptive prose, straddling the boundary between fiction and reportage.

Parker's obvious passion and empathy for his subject don't blind him to Isherwood's manifest faults as a person. These include casual anti-semitism, vanity, ruthlessness, cruelty, and an unsavoury passion for pubescent boys. Small wonder, then, that Don Bachardy, Isherwood's surviving partner, disapproves of this portrayal of the man once viewed as "the gay movement's favourite uncle", a role consolidated by David Hockney's famous sequence of pictures of him. Yet Isherwood is no gleeful exercise in biographical debunking. It is, instead, a complex and fair-minded portrait of a brilliant, if disagreeable man, the quality of whose writing ranged from the sublime to the mediocre.

IoS readers can order a copy of 'Isherwood' for £22.50 (free p&p) by calling Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897, or posting your order to: Independent Books Direct, PO Box 60, Helston TR13 0TP