CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

The English author Christopher Isherwood provides us with a rare if not unique example of a communist become transcendentalist. For if, during the 1930s, he was partial to communism, particularly in its German manifestation, then the advent of Hitler and the coming of World War Two somewhat changed all that, not in the sense of his becoming pro-Nazi so much as by making Germany an unattractive place for a young British writer of his inclinations, both political and sexual, to remain in. As an active homosexual, Isherwood would have been doubly vulnerable to Nazi censure, and like a good many others of a like-persuasion he opted to leave, to abandon the Berlin of his youthful dreams and return home before things became too uncomfortable.

Whatever we may think of Isherwood's predilections, or of his motives for going to Germany in the first place, we must at least credit him with some kind of consistency. For communism and homosexuality are birds of a feather or, to put it less figuratively, two aspects of an anti-natural, anti-realist allegiance. Anyone who is both communist and homosexual to any significant extent is certainly well-integrated, whatever the general climate of moral opinion may happen to be. Whether Isherwood was both to any significant extent, however, must remain open to doubt, all the more so given his upper middle-class and Cambridge background.

Yet if he was more of a sympathetic spectator than a committed participator, he at any rate had some kind of engagé attitude to the progress of communism, an attitude virtually de rigueur in those momentous days after the frivolous lull of the self-indulgent Huxleyite 1920s. Even Mr. Norris Changes Trains, a novel at first stylistically reminiscent of Point Counter Point, leaves one in little doubt as to the author's political (not to mention sexual) proclivities, which were nurtured at Cambridge long before he ever abandoned chaste Albion for the decadent enticements of the Weimar Republic. Very unlikely, therefore, that the street battles between Communists and Nazis would have struck his youthful imagination as a microcosmic metaphor for the struggle between the Devil and God on levels, approximately, of the Antichrist and the Second Coming for the right to 'take on' the World in due course, a right to which only the victor could aspire, since the two spheres of influence must remain forever separate and independent, not subject to duplication - the antinatural and the supernatural having next-to-nothing in common.

Coming from a staunchly realistic, and hence democratic, background, Isherwood could only have been a spectator, though, as was noted, one with unequivocally communist sympathies - no doubt, ample testimony to his own upper middle-class decadence, which, partly taking the form of a predilection for communist materialism, was rife among the fashionable products of English public-school and university education at the time. How much Isherwood was simply following trends and how much he was genuinely left-wing must remain open to dispute, since unknown quantities to anyone writing from this distance. But, bearing in mind his subsequent conversion to transcendentalism, I would be inclined to grant more credence to the first supposition, which also takes into account his class background.

However that may be, Isherwood's subsequent departure for the United States in the company of Auden, shamefully conducted while Britain's fate hung in the balance, led to a change of emphasis, as well it might, as the young author sought and acquired the companionship of other British expatriates, including Huxley and Heard, and gradually drifted away from his communist past, leaving Auden in New York while he set-up home on the West Coast, where transcendentalism was fast becoming a growth industry thanks, in part, to the oriental connections and sympathies of various of his fellow-countrymen and, in part, to a growing demand for self-realization among the 'indigenous' population, a demand doubtless fostered, in some degree, by geographical factors not unconnected, despite the immense distance between the one side of the Pacific and the other, with the Far East, and this in spite of Mao or, perhaps - who knows? - by some subconscious desire to epatez les Communistes.

Paradoxical speculation aside, Isherwood soon became a devotee of oriental mysticism, with regular stints of transcendental meditation under the professional guidance of resident gurus. Thus his trajectory from communist materialism to Buddhist idealism took him from one extreme to another, from the Devil to God, with scant regard, seemingly, for the middle-ground.

Yet if America gave Isherwood a new ideological beginning and enabled him to write A Meeting by the River, probably his most perfect work, conceived in the unusual form of a one-sided exchange of letters in a way reminiscent of Rousseau, it doesn't seem to have provided him with a new sexuality or tempted him out of his old ways, which is all the more surprising in view of his evidently genuine commitment to transcendentalism; though one cannot be blamed for seeing in The World in the Evening, one of his most ambitious novels, a veiled attempt to disguise his true leanings behind a façade of masculine friendship, as though he were somehow uneasy about the relationship between homosexuality and transcendentalism, which is nothing less than a contradiction between the antinatural and the supernatural, the material and the ideal. Doubtless censorship considerations played their part, as to some extent they do with any author. But it seems ironic, all the same, that, despite his professed transcendentalism, Isherwood should still be a realist of sorts, stretched between divergent poles in fidelity to a strung-out liberal integrity. Not for me to suppose that he should be an out-and-out idealist, given his English upper middle-class background!

Indeed, it would appear that he and, to a lesser extent, Auden are to an upper middle-class background what Kerouac and Ginsberg subsequently became to a lower middle-class one ... paralleling, on their respective terms, this paradoxical homosexual/transcendental disparity. As is well known, Kerouac was slightly ashamed of his homosexual leanings, and if novels like On the Road and the Dharma Bums are any indication of his true sympathies, then we needn't be surprised! However, any form of sex is slightly shameful from a transcendental standpoint, and it is probable that many heterosexuals feel less than complacent about their fleshy indulgences on that account. Certainly, Isherwood seems to have made much moral progress since his years as a communist, even if, together with a majority of his liberal kind, he still professed to left-wing sympathies.

One thing he most certainly isn't ashamed of, however, is choosing not to draw any marked line between his novelistic and essayistic work, as though the two were complementary and part of a continuous spectrum of related ideas. Like a good many other authors, the Barthean distinction between 'artist' and 'writer' is still maintained, although 'the writer' is all the time gaining ground at 'the artist's' expense, as though in a bourgeois/petty-bourgeois tug-of-war which can only be resolved, in the future, by the unequivocal victory of the essayist over the novelist.

Needless to say, Isherwood is too much of a liberal, at heart, to be overly partial to 'the writer'; though, like others in his predicament, he will go as far as to accord the essayist, both in himself and in others, more respect than could ever be expected from an out-and-out novelist like, say, Evelyn Waugh or even Graham Greene, so that a kind of equalitarianism of the two genres and/or types of author is upheld. In Barthe's view, the age of 'the writer' has still to come, and we may believe that, in a certain sense, this is quite true. For liberal civilization, necessarily partial to 'the artist', has still not been overthrown by socialist barbarism [which, in 2004, looks increasingly unlikely!], and consequently, by establishment reckoning, 'the writer' per se is something of a Marxian outsider, hammering on the door of novelistic tradition but not yet capable of breaching it and, in rejecting everything bourgeois, having things all his own way.

The lowest-common-denominator of writerly prose could only be ubiquitous under a left-wing communist regime, and whether the West will ever suffer that must remain open to doubt. Certainly the Soviets, with their Socialist Realism, would have been less than enthusiastic about an overtly journalistic, essayistic, notational 'literature' symptomatic of a Marxist purism in proletarian materialism; though they would doubtless have encouraged the study of Marx and Lenin, with especial emphasis on the latter. For whilst a proletarian 'literature' of notational writing does and has long existed in the West, the growth of essayistic writing at the expense of novelistic art within the bourgeois camp could only have been regarded, from a Soviet point-of-view, as symptomatic of decadence and degeneration, a particle splitting from an atomic whole - appearance and essence going their separate ways.