THE ISHERWOOD GENERATION
McCabe, Bernard
a phrase traditionally difhcult for preachers must be eliminated. In all of these supercilious judgments there is a snobbery, an elitism, which in the guise of kindness patronizes and...
...So politics were on everybody's doorstep, public commitment seemed unavoidable, and extremist positions beckoned...
...In 1939 Auden and Isherwood left England for America...
...To relive these ideological battlings, against a background of news from Moscow (of the purges) and from Spain (where their real battle was being fought, and where Caudwell and Cornford died) is to rehearse yet again the tragedy of twentieth century liberalism...
...The cruel history of the homosexual's treatment in England and in the United States, the earlier obligation to hide or disguise the truth, is relevant here, and perhaps also Isherwood's honorable role as a gay activist in the last few years...
...The matter is too important to be left to the technicians...
...As Matthew Arnold said of Shelley and his traveling household: "What a set...
...In all of these supercilious judgments there is a snobbery, an elitism, which in the guise of kindness patronizes and offends...
...Whereas Mr...
...This caused a big fuss in war-worried England, with some indignant talk of betrayal, Roy Campbell leaping to the attack, and Evelyn Waugh making a heavyhanded lunge at them as "Parsnip and Pimpernel" in Put Out More Flags, a dull moment in a bright novel...
...the willingness to publish wooden agitprop "literature" supplied from Russia (one appalling story I exhumed from a 1937 New Writing: P. Tchikvadze's "The Road to Affluence," glorifying collective farms), for example, or the unpleasant obsession with the "Truly Strong Man," a Leader who was somehow to relieve this generation of its guilt and Schadenfreude...
...Norris (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939...
...Both renounced all political activism...
...What is more puzzling, however, are the remakings that Isherwood himself has offered, not of the Berlin stories as such but of the persona that lies behind them...
...The postwar twenties, when they were all at Oxford or Cambridge--half-wishing they had been in the War and had proved themselves---was a period of shock, a shock recorded variously by their immediate elders in such works as Kangaroo, Journeys End, Goodbye To All That, Antic Hay, The Waste Land..In the twenties, too, Nietsche, Freud, and Marx, all subverters of the old order, had at last all made their mark in England...
...Dangerously close as they were to Isherwood's "Poshocracy" (accurately identified and pinned-down in his Lions and Shadows), some of them took pains to cultivate a working-class look...
...Campbell was a contentious and rather horrible man but he was a good satirist, and well known...
...That the Broadway and Hollywood remakings of the Berlin novels betray the originals is hardly surprising...
...Who in fact did write well...
...anti-fascist positions came naturally to rejectors of history's recent nightmareh though the shift from pacifism to militancy was a harsh one to make--and some form of Marxist analysis seemed the most fluent method of banishing monopoly capitalism, imperialism, armaments manufacturers and the ills they brought with them: colonialism, war, poverty...
...Well, yes, nothing more attractive than that...
...Above all, another Great War was on the way, and everybody knew it...
...THE ISHERWOOD GENERATION BERNARD McCABE Auden and the Edwardian children "What shall the self-conscious man do to be saved...
...than all the rest of them put together...
...abroad fascist takeovers in Italy and Germany, Stalinism in Russia...
...So in the thirties most young intellectuals found in their personal inheritance a "chaos of values" (Auden's words...
...Although for a while he saw the poet's duty to be the writing of "parables," he wrote them with uncertain seriousness (see, for example, his 1933 lyric "A Communist To Others...
...Isherwood introduces an uncharacteristic organ note in his new book to record the pairs' arrival in the New World in hopeful search of new lovers...
...It's no surprise to find that Terry Eagleton, a Marxist critic, in fact finds in Auden a classic example of bourgeois intellectual "bad faith," as Sartre defines it...
...The young critic Christopher Caudwell and the very young poet John Cornford insisted to the end that a writer's only hope lay in Communism and total identification with the workers...
...Isherwood, in California, for some time wrote very little...
...Then came the absurd Cabaret with Liza Minelli, a sort of Laugh-In tourist's version of wicked Berlin...
...a question very earnestly echoed again and again by the young writers who grouped themselves around him: Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and in his own way, Christopher Isherwood...
...The Isherwood types...
...asks Auden in 1934...
...No Roy Campbell, that Franco, loving self-appointed scourge of "MacSpaunday" as he collectively dubbed the poets on the Left...
...These were the central figures in what Samuel Hyncs calls The Auden Generation (Viking, $12.95...
...Hynes reads everything these writers wrote with great care and honesty, making coherent sense out of a mass of complex material...
...Although at the time he made few overt political commitments, and although he participated hardly at all in the public debates about art and politics, Isherwood got more actually said about the social, political, psychological, and moral disease of England and Europe in his autobiographical novel, Lions and Shadows (1937) and in his two small masterpieces, The Last oJ Mr...
...How much longer are we to be patient...
...That is Virginia Woolfs very persuasive and dismissive view: The thirties were a hard time for young upper-class writers...
...Reconciling poetry and revolution was difficult...
...In 1942, announcing his Vedantism and Pacifism, Isherwood wrote that in Europe he had been "an atheist, a liberal, a supporter of the Popular Front and an advocate of armed resistance to Fascism...
...Yet it's still,impossible not to be interested in this latest version,of~ Isherwood in the thirties--the writing is as lively and limpid as ever, in fact disturbingly so...
...They also found chaos in the world about them: at home poverty and depressed wages, millions out of BERNARD MCCABE teaches in the English Department of Tu/ts University in Massachusetts...
...And there is no attempt to examine what Catholicism meant to these two writers, or the range of their political views from Right to Left...
...Each is outrageous, unscrupulous, even treacherous...
...Waugh is there, but none of his thirties fiction: Scoop, Black Mischief, ,4 Handful o...
...Frankness largely means that his homosexuality, partially or indirectly revealed in earlier versions, is now openly acknowledged or, rather, fully recorded and celebrated...
...His verse-play, Dog Beneath the Skin (1935) was praised simultaneously in the Daily Worker and the fascist Mosley's Action...
...He really means, "What shall the artist do to be saved...
...In Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood builds these paradoxes around himself...
...His subtitle is Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s, so his study goes beyond the Auden group and suggests a general inclusiveness...
...The religious educators and ecclesiastical bureaucrats who have put the seal of approval on this translation have preferred smarmy pap to the rhythms of Jesus...
...In the opening pages we are told that he and Auden went off to Berlin for a quite specific purpose: "Berlin meant Boys...
...Wystan," he-tells us: at one point, "once told me, almost admiringly, thfit I was the cruelest and most unscrupulous person :that hehad ever met...
...Isherwood, a direct heir of the symbolists (his first novel All The Conspirators 1930, gives the clue) was a master of what Rilke found in C6zanne--"unlimited objectivity...
...Spender and company first agreed, but then found more honesty in accepting a divided self...
...Isherwood's book tells an extraordinary story of desperate attachments, loves and hates, squabbles and fights, ecstasies and agonies and betrayals, and he and his assorted lovers, male prostitutes, fellow artists and hangers-on wander spasmodically about a Europe on the edge of the new catastrophe...
...To keep their self-respect in revolutionary timesm"to be saved"-they must produce poems (everyone save Isherwood was a poet) that could also be acceptable as modes of political action...
...The American bishops should take this translation, condemn it and ban it from the churches...
...What a world...
...In retrospect, much of Auden's Marxist period seems to have been no more than a variant on the intellectual games he played so cleverly in his thirties' poetry...
...There has been no improvement...
...The Berlin novels were rightly admired in the thirties as brilliant and complex portraits of a world on the edge of new disaster...
...In New York, Auden soon wrote two memorable poems, In Memoriam: W. B. Yeats, and September 1, 1939...
...Norris, Sally Bowles, and the Berlin bar-boy Otto---are sketched in in some detail...
...Finally, and most puzzlingly, Hynes ignores Homage to Catalonia, probably Orwell's best book, and surely a key work on one of Hynes's key topics: British liberal humanism confronting political absolutism...
...But here are some reservations...
...Our children are being robbed of a precious English heritage and are being denied a true translation of the Word of God...
...Isherwood's cousin Graham Greene is represented only by an "entertainment" of his, This Gun for Hire, and the early It's a Battlel~eld...
...games with the idea of School, with Icelandic myths, with Freud...
...The students of biblical languages and ancient manuscripts who have contributed to our modem plight have evidently never listened to English...
...But there was a sinister side to their enthusiasms...
...Auden in cloth cap and moleskin breeches, working at dropping his aitches, must have been a pleasantly comicsight (see Cyril Connolly's amusing Where Engels Fears to Tread, 1937...
...The result is diverting, and undoubtedly is gossip of a high order--all the Auden Generation is there--but hardly the masterpiece that Gore Vidal's recent loud cries have announced...
...He also resumed communion with the Anglican Church...
...Auden's call for "New styles of architecture, a change of heart" never led him beyond his middle-class sensibility...
...Commonweal: 685...
...Dropping One's Aitches The Auden Generation were aH upper middle-class, public school, Oxford or Cambridge people, full of witty high-speed allusions, private jokes and the assurance of their class...
...So there he is...
...Dust...
...These books, apparently so "simply" written, are of the same world as PruIrock, say, or Ulysses...
...He was a prophet for the group, an explorer: "Wystan lone flyer, birdman, my bully boy," sang Day Lewis in New Country...
...But in my view Christopher Isherwood was the most important writer of them all in the political thirties, really a novelist's more than a poet's decade...
...Hynes points out several occasions where Auden sounds dangerously fascist...
...The group's inclination, as disinherited liberals, was to the Left...
...For seven years the Lectionary of the Confraternity has been in existence and held sway...
...The book records various meannesses and irresponsibilities of his own...
...With distance we have also come 28 October 1977:684 to admire how it was all done, how Isherwood the observer-character is at the same time in and beyond the scene, a marvelously balanced presence intervening in the subtlest ways to suggest a way of looking at what is being reported...
...it is also full of grins and giggles--- two preferred Isherwood words...
...The boys in question were poor, unemployed, working-class men, as often as not hetereosexual by inclination but willing to sell their bodies to these monied young leftists who "needed a workingclass foreigner" in order to relax sexually...
...They had been Edwardian children, born just too late to participate in the First World War, th~ great catastrophe that shook the liberal rationalist tradition of Spender's background as much as it shook the Christian orthodox tradition of Auden and Isherwood...
...We ourselves are being impoverished, cut off from our churchly and literary inheritance, and subjected to mealy-mouthed clich6s in place of the pure milk of the Gospels...
...Unfortunately what has happened in Christopher and His Kind is a shift from the exterior objects of Isherwood's attention to an absorbed interest in Isherwood himself...
...work...
...For a decade the church in the United States has put up with inferior English in the translation of the Bible in the Mass...
...his book will always be useful as far as it goes...
...Efficacy on the Left was claimed most effectively by the Communist Party, and all the Auden Generation became at one time or another party-members or felCommonweal: 683 low-travelers...
...Of course no one can do everything, but his exclusions gape and yawn...
...They have defaulted...
...no mention of Brighton Rock or The Power and the Glory--a thirties political novel if there ever was one...
...The effect is curiously empty...
...John Van Druten's adaptation, I Am a Camera--a great boxoffice success for Julie Harris on stage and screen-smoothed and sweetened Isherwood's comic but grim tales...
...Could one say the same of Isherwood...
...So when Stephen Spender in 1934 speaks of striving "to relate the public passion to my private life," the public passion is politics and his private life is his life as a lyric poet, Lyrics and politics don't easily mix...
...In such an atmosphere these writers needed to see their art as something more than art...
...But politics became the subject of their verse and the counterclaims of art and political action the subject of their critical debate...
...Trapped by their education, pinned down by their capital, they remained on top o] their leaning tower, and their state of mind as we see it reflected in their poems and plays and novels is full of discord and bitterness, full of confusion and compromise...
...The truly devious eraployees, the truly unjust stewards are those who have substituted their own twiddle-twaddle for the language of the Lord or of Luke...
...each is wonderfully resourceful charming and endlessly entertaining...
...A colonial situation," Isherwood remarks later...
...Norris, for example, manipulates a fine balance between observer and observed, this book is only a re-telling-"as frank and factual as I can make it"---of Isherwood's personal life in the thirties...
...They should start afresh to seek the sound and sense of the Bible and have its words truthfully translated into English...
...Topicality or expediency both sharpened and limited their work...
...Auden, of course, often...
...Yet virtually nothing of those serious earlier preoccupations is remembered or thought worth recording in Christopher and His Kind...
...Nothing of conservative contemporaries like Anthony Powell and Henry Green, both very good novelists, better writers in fact than some of Auden's group, and little or no working-class literature...
...But his recent books about the period, absorbing as they are, seem by contrast unsatisfactory...
...Then he surprised some people by becoming a Vedentist and a Quaker...
...The real life r for the Berlin stories' most arresting characters--Mr...
...The latest of these is Christopher and His Kind (Farrar, Straus, $10...
...The publications they wrote for, New Verse, New.Signatures, and especially John Lehmann's New Writing, quite strikingly reflect this bias...
Vol. 104 • October 1977 • No. 22
