An endurance test for literary greats

Isherwood

A Life Revealed

Peter Parker

Random House: 704 pp., $39.95

*

Stephen Spender

A Literary Life

John Sutherland

Oxford University Press: 640 pp., $40

*

World Within World

Stephen Spender

Modern Library: 398 pp., $23.95

*

“Certain young men,” Evelyn Waugh once remarked, presumably not with total enthusiasm, “ganged up and captured the decade.” He was referring to the 1930s British literary circle that included Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender, along with their friends W.H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, John Lehmann and Rex Warner.

They were considered the writers to be discussed. Their work was regarded as exciting and new, and “everyone” read them. Aside from Auden, the two best known and most highly regarded were Isherwood (1904-86) for his prose and Spender (1909-95) for his poetry. The writers in this group may not have been that advanced in literary techniques -- nor did they sell that well -- but they caught the imagination of the time by the very fact of their youth and their grave concern for the world around them.

Published by T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber and by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at Hogarth Press, this glittering circle was seen as leftist in its politics, and in their work they depicted a modern, industrial landscape caught in the desperate straits to which the Depression had reduced the world (for this they were called the Pylon poets). And yet their moment in the spotlight also passed, as always happens, and they were replaced as they had replaced others. Only the reputation of the greatest among them, Auden, has remained undiminished.

The appearance of Peter Parker’s “Isherwood: A Life Revealed” and John Sutherland’s “Stephen Spender: A Literary Life” offers a chance to assess their lives and times and to suggest whether any of their work will endure.

Which of Isherwood’s books are most likely to survive? Or, to put it another way, what should someone new to him read first? “Goodbye to Berlin” is present in our culture via the musical “Cabaret,” but the magnificent stories in that collection, perhaps his greatest work, deserve to stand on their own for their sparseness and powerful depiction of a society on the verge of the Nazi takeover. And the story is well told again in “Christopher and His Kind,” with the implied homosexuality of the earlier work now made explicit. His first autobiography, “Lions and Shadows,” dealing with his early days, is as compelling as his brilliant short novel about the movies, “Prater Violet.” “A Single Man” is the most distinguished among his later novels, following a day in the life of a gay professor living in Los Angeles.

The survival of Spender’s work seems less assured than Isherwood’s, though he has at times been the source of a lyric or expression that has crept into public awareness. It was Ronald Reagan, in 1984, on the 40th anniversary of D-day, who paid tribute to its veterans with phrases borrowed from Spender’s poem “The Truly Great”:

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

If he is to be remembered, it will surely be for poems such as this one that established him, the New Yorker once said, as one of “the most important poets of the meaninglessness of war,” as well as for his critical writing and the autobiography “World Within World,” which has been reissued by Modern Library.

Reading about Isherwood’s and Spender’s lives in the two biographies, we discover that although we find out quite a bit about their times, it is their intense individualism that dominates these books. What emerges is their use of their own experiences as their raw material. The challenge they faced was how best to do that. Isherwood discovered himself at dead ends when he attempted not to write about himself. When he did yet again return to that subject, he was clear-eyed and could then encompass the outside world. For Spender, it was much more difficult; he tended to disappear into solipsism. Unlike Isherwood, for him indulgent and constant self-criticism did not produce self-knowledge.

Perhaps because Isherwood was the grandest-born of the ‘30s group -- a member of the Cheshire gentry -- it was for him that England represented the greatest suffocation. Auden and Isherwood came to the United States just before World War II and did not return. They were attacked in the British press and in Parliament, and even by friends in print, for having deserted their country in time of need. Both wished to be away from Britain’s entangling roots. But as a writer of prose, Isherwood may have hurt himself by fleeing not only European but East Coast sophistication and settling in Southern California.

Isherwood, Parker suggests, needed to live more than half his life at a considerable remove from England. (Once, when asked where he came from in England, he replied “Santa Monica.”) He followed the Hindu teachings of Vedanta and became, in effect, its publicist in four books and three translations. He made money as a screenwriter. He continued to write novels of varying quality, some excellent, drawing upon his American and Indian experiences, such as “A Meeting by the River.” And he became a homosexual hero. The enemy, his later work suggested, was not only English bourgeois society but more inclusively the entire heterosexual world. A place at the table was not for him; the heroic life was the one represented by Stonewall.

The beaches of Los Angeles were, or so at least he thought, a sexual utopia. After several serious affairs (as well as, he once estimated, about 400 brief flings) with young Americans, in 1953 he met Don Bachardy, who was with him for the rest of his life. With Isherwood’s encouragement, Bachardy became a powerful portraitist. It was not an easy or monogamous relationship. Bachardy enjoyed Isherwood’s famous friends but frequently lost his temper as he felt he was not taken seriously by them, a situation not helped by his looking even younger than he was. Parker’s book does not hide Isherwood’s defects, his heavy drinking and the unreflective anti-Semitism of his class.

With a sort of natural authority rooted in his gentry background, Isherwood remained a powerful literary figure and, in his way, a prophet of homosexual liberation. So too Spender could not escape his own roots: In fact, he resembled his father, much as he may have disliked him. He was aware of this in his poem “The Ambitious Son”:

Old man, with hair made of newspaper cutting....

O Father, to a grave of fame I faithfully follow!

Harold Spender was a journalist and very much a public figure. Stephen was in rebellion against him, most successfully in his splendid lyrical poems of the 1930s. But as his life went forward he became more and more a public man of letters. He spent far too much of his time writing prose, generally quite good but largely ephemeral. And when in later years he found time to work on his primary task as a poet, his gift had diminished. Like Isherwood, he knew that his subject was himself. But unlike Isherwood, he attempted to universalize himself and hence tended to lose his focus. Auden had famously dedicated “The Orators” to him in 1932:

Private faces in public places

Are wiser and nicer

Than public faces in private places.

Spender is disarming about his defects, continually wishing them away, it would seem, through admitting their existence. During World War II, he felt that the Blitz was personally directed at him: When a bomb exploded across the road, for example, the ceiling of his living room collapsed. When he told Auden about this, Auden remarked, as Spender recorded: “What an old solipsist you are!” I commented on this story years ago in a review of Spender’s fine collection “The Thirties and After.” He wrote to me a characteristically self-deprecating letter: “It is rather difficult being a writer if you are a solipsist, for various reasons. One is that one gets bored with the ego & the self -- and tries to avoid the pronoun ‘I.’ ”

In the course of his long life, Spender may have reversed Auden’s dedication. Certainly in this authorized biography the public face is in private places. As with Isherwood, there is the problem that Spender has written so much about himself, most effectively and tellingly on his early years in “World Within World.” Bravely for the time, more than 50 years ago, he didn’t hide his homosexuality and the pleasures he shared with Isherwood in Germany. As we are told in this book, he reported to Isherwood about his first heterosexual affair, with Muriel Gardiner in Vienna while he was still deeply involved with his lover Tony Hyndman: “I find boys much more attractive ... but actually, I find the actual sex act with women more terrible, more disgusting, and, in fact, more everything. To me it is much more of an experience, I think, and that is all there is to it.”

Spender moved on to his unsatisfactory marriage with Inez and then his blissful marriage with Natasha, the mother of his two children. He becomes more and more of a public figure, and the biography becomes a rather tedious chronicle of his gadding about the world attending conferences and spending considerable periods of time teaching at American universities to support his family, as well as editing the literary journal Horizon, which he co-founded, and Encounter, which ended badly when it was revealed to have been funded by the CIA. We are informed about his life in London with the great and the good, and at his vacation home in Provence. He welcomed his quiet and profitable time in America and the opportunity it gave him to write. He was sympathetic to the young, one of his more attractive traits, as in “The Year of the Young Rebels.”

Sutherland tells us of his great friendship with the writer Reynolds Price but also that it wasn’t a sexual one. Nothing is said explicitly about his closeness with the young American scientist Bryan Obst, who was such an important figure in his life. Whether these relations were physical or not, his friendships with young men, mostly American, were very important to him.

As he wrote to Price about Obst: “I feel I ought not to love Bryan and yet his extraordinary gentleness, perceptiveness, and intelligence really make it impossible not to.” Yet these friendships are barely discussed; neither is the significance of what they meant to him as a writer and as a person, the heart of what a literary biography should be.

One central purpose of any biography of a writer is to allow us to better understand the writings. To a considerable degree that happens in both Parker’s and Sutherland’s books, but the job could have been done at shorter length. Parker, in particular, has done a formidable task of research in writing about a man who chronicled his own life so exhaustively.

Often, however, in the reading of these books, one asks, was it necessary to share quite so much with the reader? Interesting as it is in Parker’s to have several paragraphs of biography as a new person enters the story, all of them may not be needed -- although it is preferable to Sutherland’s habit of mentioning a new name with virtually no identification while others are briefly reintroduced.

The year now ending marks the 100th anniversary of Isherwood’s birth on Aug. 26. Both biographies provide much that is useful in understanding their subjects’ work (more satisfactorily in the case of Isherwood) and much about the context that their lives provided for their writings. Time will tell if their writing endures, for it isn’t clear how well these massive books have helped the cause. Illuminating in parts, exhaustive in their details, Parker’s and Sutherland’s biographies might be seen as worthy memorials to two of the last century’s most important writers. One hopes they will not be seen as tombstones. *