Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (92 page)

Isherwood was born into what he called the English ‘poshocracy’, with a double-barrelled name (Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood), a family seat in Cheshire, money and a pedigree stretching back to the sixteenth century. His life’s work would be a serial severance of everything that connected him to Marple Hall, his family, his king and his country. He was helped when his father, a professional soldier, was killed in the First World War, when Christopher was eleven. His mother, Kathleen, became the focus of his youthful repudiations; something that caused her pain, and him little worry. Like Coriolanus, who banished Rome, Isherwood disowned his family. When in the 1940s he took out American citizenship, he stripped his name down to ‘Christopher Isherwood’. He would, one suspects, have been happy with ‘Christopher X’ or Spender’s ‘Xtopher’.

At Cambridge, he wilfully failed his exams and later walked out on the medical training into which the aspirations of his mother had forced him. If he couldn’t be a squire, Kathleen wanted her son to be at least a Harley Street physician. It was not at all what Isherwood wanted, any more than he wanted to live under England’s ‘heterosexual dictatorship’. Sexually democratic Berlin, where he expatriated himself in 1930, ‘meant boys’:
Strassenjunge
and
Puppenjunge
(street kids and rent boys) impoverished by the Depression, desperate to sell their bodies. Not gay but
pleite
– skint. Berlin also supplied the stimulus to become what W. H. Auden, the leader of their 1930s ‘gang’, dictated Christopher should be, ‘The Novelist of the Future’. In Weimar Germany, together with fellow ‘gangsters’ Auden and Spender, Isherwood embraced Homer Lane’s ‘doctrine of original virtue’, which held that ‘there is only one sin: disobedience to the inner law of our own nature’. Or, as the more ironic Rabelais put it, ‘vous fay ce que vouldras’. Isherwood always did.

Berlin represents the first, and most creative, phase of his fictional career with
Mr Norris Changes Trains
(1935) and
Goodbye to Berlin
(1939). The sharply etched, comic depictions of Herr Issyvoo, Mr Norris and – most memorably – Sally Bowles capture the comedy of Weimar Berlin at the point of its fall, as effectively, but more wittily, than even Brecht did in his
Threepenny Opera
. Less successful was Isherwood’s indulgently autobiographical novel,
Lions and Shadows
(1938), subtitled ‘An Education in the Twenties’. Unsurprisingly, Isherwood does England badly. It was, after all, not his kind’s country.

Nor was Germany, after the rise of Hitler and his black-uniformed, pathologically homophobic goons. In January 1939, Auden and Isherwood left together for America. On board the boat taking them from England, ‘Christopher heard himself say: “You know, it just doesn’t mean anything to me any more – the Popular Front, the party line, the anti-Fascist struggle. I suppose they’re OK but something’s wrong with me. I simply cannot swallow another mouthful.” To which Wystan replied:
“Neither can I”.’ In America, Auden would be ‘East Coast’, Isherwood – drawn magnetically by Hollywood – ‘West Coast’. The cactus thrives in southern California and so did Xtopher. In New York Auden turned to the Western religion of his fathers: in Los Angeles Isherwood went over to the Eastern mysticism of the tinseltown gurus. Vedanta gave him some release from the tyranny of being himself. ‘I am so utterly sick of being a person – Christopher Isherwood, or Isherwood, or even Chris,’ he had told John Lehmann, a few years earlier.

In America, both Auden and Isherwood outgrew the need for ‘boys’. Between purgative bouts of transcendentalism, Isherwood drank too much and never succeeded – beyond making a comfortable income – as a screenwriter. He was consistently misogynistic, sometimes anti-Semitic, always witty, rarely nice. Throughout life, and particularly in America, he was a force for enlightenment in sexual politics – it was where his frontline was. He wrote fiction of which the bundled sketches (the genre perfected in the Berlin stories) of
Down There on a Visit
(1962) shows his light touch to advantage. The best work of fiction from this second phase of Isherwood’s writing career – among a ton of tedious writing about Vedanta and some brilliantly bitchy autobiography – is
A Single Man
(1964). A novel about being gay in the 1960s, it is, among its other attractions, a classic Los Angeles story and was filmed to critical acclaim in 2010, directed glossily by Tom Ford.

Isherwood died very rich, leaving some $2 million. It was largely supplied by profitable, and grossly romanticised, adaptations on stage and film (notably
Cabaret
) of his Sally Bowles Berlin story.

It’s best they shouldn’t know about one.

Henry Yorke sprang from two classes of English life which traditionally have had little interest in reading novels and even less interest in writing the things: aristocrats and plutocratic factory owners. Yorke’s father was a wealthy industrialist; his mother came from noble stock. Vincent Yorke’s stock, in his Birmingham shop floor, was lavatory furnishings – among other unliterary necessities of life. A younger brother, Henry Yorke was less hearty than his siblings and much less so than his
father: a domestic tyrant who survived to a great age rendering his son’s later life ‘unmitigated hell’. Henry was born in Tewkesbury and serenely progressed from Eton to Oxford, joining there an elite (the ‘Brideshead Generation’) which would clubbably dominate literary London for decades. The Bridesheads loved university – in a sense they never left it – but despised university education. Swots rated scarcely higher than oiks in their register. Green disdained even the modest efforts required for a gentleman’s third, leaving Oxford degreeless. He had, however, finished an accomplished first novel,
Blindness
(1926), an allegory of the writing life for which Blind Man’s Buff would always be his favourite analogy. He had already chosen his inscrutable pen-name, ‘Henry Green’, having rejected the even less chromatic ‘Brown’.

Red was the actual colour of the year 1926 – and Green entered the real world at a time of cataclysmic upheaval. The General Strike shook old England – based as its structure was on old blood and old money – and factory owners were also in the firing line. Once the strikers’ hash was settled Green went to work on the shop floor of the Yorkes’ Farringdon factory in Birmingham. He was apolitical by nature, but the experience honed his uncannily sharp ear for class dialect: no novelist is more virtuosic with the phonemes of English life than Henry Green. One
hears
the texts – it’s a distinctive experience. Family destiny soon promoted Henry to senior managerial rank. He moved to London, where he would remain – as his
Who’s Who
entry proclaimed – an ‘industrialist’ until 1959. ‘The office routines of Henry Yorke,’ his biographer tells us, ‘were useful, even essential to the imaginative work of Henry Green’: the more so since his routines were highly remunerative, never onerous, and brought a chauffeur, butler and good cook with them. Yorke married Adelaide Biddulph, the well-off daughter of a banker, in 1929. He was thus doubly protected against the oncoming slump and able to nurture his finely crafted prose during the depths of the Depression. In their West End establishment the Yorkes employed five live-in servants. Servants were of great interest to him, as a novelist.

Over the next twenty years, the body of work on which Green’s reputation relies emerged. Their titles are highly characteristic and wholly inscrutable: e.g.
Living
(1929),
Loving
(1945),
Caught
(1943),
Back
(1946),
Party Going
(1939). What novel could not call itself ‘
Living
’? Green’s fiction surrenders its purposes grudgingly, and with fewer wasted words than even Elmore Leonard who is on record as saying that eloquence lies in ‘not saying anything – if that’. Green is, as John Ashbery aptly put it, ‘the Cordelia of modern novelists’. Her terse rejoinder to her father Lear, ‘Nothing’, could well have been borrowed as one of his titles. As his biographer records, ‘Green never wrote under his real name, wouldn’t let his publishers distribute biographical information about him, and disliked being photographed’ (except, occasionally,
from behind). He also disliked travel, which, as he enigmatically informed his closest friend, Anthony Powell, ‘interferes with my masturbation’. Or, one might add, his adulteries, which in later life were numerous and, despite his pathological secretiveness, much gossiped about in his circle.

During the war, Green was one of the ‘progressive novelists’ Waugh was snide about who joined the London Fire Service, brandishing their piddling ‘syringes’ against the Dornier and Heinkel aircraft. The author of the
Sword of Honour
trilogy was, of course, a commando. During the Blitz, Green – who resolutely remained ‘in the ranks’ – actually came under more fire than many frontline troops. His views on the service, as reflected in
Caught
, are, however, characteristically jaundiced. In the course of that war (an event he found excessively boring), Green composed what is agreed to be his finest work,
Loving
– a narrative centred on English servants in a large house, the ‘Castle’, during wartime in neutral Ireland, with its central character a senior footman, who is angling for a vacant butlership. Meanwhile, somewhere else, millions are dying. But what do the Normandy Landings matter, when a butlership is at issue?

In a 1958
Paris Review
interview, with his unlikely admirer, the pornographer Terry Southern, Green recalled getting the idea for
Loving
from a manservant in the fire service during the war, who had asked an ancient butler ‘what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: “Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.” I saw the book in a flash.’ That radioactive word was, one suspects, inserted as a little jab at the author of
Candy
.

Green was a confirmed alcoholic by his forties. He effectively stopped writing in the early 1950s and was expensively retired from the family firm at the end of the decade to welter in drink until his death. Green’s narrative technique is an acquired taste: but all agree on its uniqueness. He admired modernists like Kafka and Joyce, he informed Southern, but they were ‘like cats which have licked the plate clean. You’ve got to dream up another dish if you’re to be a writer.’ In life, as in art, indirection was his (mis)guiding principle. ‘Most of us walk crabwise to meals and everything else,’ he declared. ‘The oblique approach in middle age is the safest thing.’

Often when I wake at night I am homesick for my cell in the death-house in Seville and, strangely enough, I feel that I have never been so free as I was then.

As a general rule, the fuller the life, the less the fiction. It is astonishing that in a career as packed with excitement as Arthur Koestler’s, he was able to take time off to write even one novel. Had he chosen, he could have written that novel in any of the five languages which were, at different times, his ‘first’. He could also, over the course of his life, have called half a dozen countries home (the fictional setting he preferred was ‘Neutralia’ – a version of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.) And no novelist has come closer to death in life more often.

Koestler served – or, at least, enrolled – in the French Foreign Legion (P. C. Wren never did) and wielded a shovel with the British Army Pioneer Corps, latrine-digging. He also served time in several jails – once under the threat of imminent execution. He shared a poison potion with Walter Benjamin in readiness for the expected Nazi invasion in France. Benjamin, unfortunately, was obliged to swallow his. Koestler and Camus, the two most filmstar-handsome intellectuals of their time, chased skirt together. One of his innumerable conquests was Simone de Beauvoir, then the consort of J. P. Sartre (not handsome). ‘He kept pushing and pushing until I said “yes” to shut him up,’ de Beauvoir tartly recalled: ‘I really detested him, that arrogant fool.’ Like others who prated about ethics, Cyril Connolly recalled, ‘you couldn’t leave your wife alone with him for a minute’. The list of women who claimed, plausibly, to have been ravished by Koestler is impressive. They included his friend Michael Foot’s wife, Jill Craigie. Koestler was living proof of the proverb ‘he who has a Hungarian friend needs no enemy’. None the less, this monstrously unstable, incorrigibly selfish man wrote a novel which, arguably, if it did not change history, changed the way the West saw its recent history. He should have won the Nobel Prize – twice at least. He never did.

Koestler’s father, Henrik, was a textile importer in Budapest, a self-made, highly intelligent man. His mother was Austrian, of patrician Viennese descent. The family was Jewish by blood, secular in practice, and well off. Arthur was the only child. German was spoken at home; Hungarian outside, in a city rich in its Jewish-European culture. Henrik’s business collapsed during the First World War, and the family moved to Vienna – Arthur’s life was never to be settled again. He picked up education in various schools, demonstrating himself to be fearsomely precocious and combative. In his teens he studied engineering in Vienna, but never graduated. He could not see the point of exams: they assumed someone who knew more than him.