Isherwood Remembers Mama
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing ISHERWOOD REMEMBERS MAMA by PEARL K. BELL Some writers, no matter how long they may actually have lived, have a way of seeming fixed at a specific age. T.S. Eliot is always 40...
...Frank was killed in the bloody fighting at Ypres, and Kathleen stoically assumed the role of Holy Widow-Mother, as her son put it, that kept her going strong for the next 45 years...
...His father's family was considerably higher in the Victorian social scale????landed gentry, with a large and valuable estate in Cheshire that had been handed down through many generations of eldest sons...
...His wife, Emily, was an imperious beauty and professional martyr who could summon up formidable powers of illness whenever she sensed a threatening strain on the silver cord...
...As Isherwood points out, "Kathleen was careful to be exact about names, dates and even times of day, but she did much more than record happenings, she tried to evoke places and atmospheres, she wrote with a strong consciousness of personal and national drama, of herself and the England she was living in...
...and the unruffled comforts of solid furniture and multiple servants...
...the holiday trips to Oxford, the Continent, the Isle of Wight...
...he and Kathleen, after their marriage, moved into a nearby farmhouse that had been standing on the estate for over 300 years...
...This is a curiously negative kind of gratitude, though Isherwood obviously means the book to be an act of love...
...Frank's parents lived in the village manor house, Marple Hall, built in Elizabethan times...
...In addition, he said what it was he owed his great-aunt with characteristic clarity: ". . . to me she left ?,000...
...In violent succession he deliberately got himself sent down from Cambridge, began writing novels, took amusing jobs that led nowhere and paid nothing, went to live in Germany, and told Kathleen he was homosexual...
...at all times and in all ways...
...the lavish house parties...
...So it is something of a shock to find, on reading Isherwood's Kathleen and Frank: The Autobiography of a Family (Simon & Schuster, 510 pp., $10.00), that the charmingly footloose young Englishman who witnessed the rumbling of the Nazi Gotterdam-merung in 1930 is now 67, a naturalized Californian since 1947 and, like many writers in their aging years, one who feels the time has come to pay his long overdue debt to the world of his beginnings...
...and of letters from the voluminous correspondence between his parents, grandparents, uncles, brother, cousins, and family friends...
...He did write an autobiographical account of his schooling and early adulthood in 1938, Lions and Shadows, but it did not mention his family, and this is what concerns him now...
...I no longer want to be revenged on the past...
...This was no negative "counterforce," but the solid reliable sterling without which he could never have lived or written as he pleased...
...The debt Isherwood attempts to settle in this remarkably candid book is his realization that if not for his mother's obstinate opposition, he might well have become the respectable citizen she wanted him to be...
...Looking back on his career, one immediately wonders where the funds came from that provided young Christopher, before his novels and movie scripts brought in any kind of regular income, with the means for his vagabond life in Germany, Greece, the Canary Islands, and many other exotic places...
...For 12 years, most of the harsh realities of their time kept their distance from the Isherwoods, drawing near only when Frank's regiment was stationed for several years in Limerick, where they became aware of growing Irish nationalism and the threat of civil war...
...the death of Queen Victoria...
...It was she who made the snug home-womb uninhabitable...
...Only once does this book mention the allowance from an uncle "and what [Christopher] got from Kathleen...
...She saw her own life as History and its anniversaries as rites to be celebrated...
...Eliot is always 40 (born that old, as C. Day Lewis drily remarked, and not getting a day younger since), Dickens an unchanging 45, Tolstoy 80, Hardy 60, and Christopher Isherwood, the British expatriate Herr Issyvoo of Goodbye to Berlin, permanently 25 ("I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking...
...Developing into "a young man of the Freudian twenties," he renounced the lot: "the Flag, the Old School Tie, the Unknown Soldier, The Land That Bore You and the God of Battles...
...His reasons, however, sound too romantic, boyish, and "literary" to be altogether credible: "It is too late now????not merely because of the War but because the absurd boyhood dream of riches is over...
...Thanks to it, I was able to go to Cambridge????impossible otherwise, for I failed to win scholarships...
...Without Kathleen's counter-pressure and the rage it inspired in him, he might still have wavered and lapsed...
...Barrett of Wimpole Street...
...When, after this same uncle's death during the War, Isherwood inherited the Marple estates, he handsomely turned the entire legacy over to his younger brother...
...She provided "the counterforce which gave him strength...
...The final ritual act of rebellion against his mother was Christopher's naturalization as an American citizen, "thus separating himself from Mother and Motherland at one stroke...
...the beginnings of the suffragette movement????All these Kathleen diligently set down in her diary, which she regarded as something greater than a personal chronicle...
...Forster published a biography of his great-aunt Marianne Thornton that, like Kathleen and Frank, was also the history of a family told mainly through letters and domestic documents...
...This ?,000 has been the financial salvation of my life...
...Though Frank was a gifted painter and musician, this dutiful Victorian son chose the Army for a career...
...It was a role that brought her into prolonged and drastic conflict with Christopher, and only now, in his 60s, can he evaluate the battle with the necessary detachment from anger and guilt...
...Kathleen and Frank is a loosely????too loosely????Assembled narrative consisting in large part of excerpts from the diary that Isherwood's mother, Kathleen, kept from the age of 24 until shortly before her death in 1960, at 91...
...In return for their daughter's selfless devotion, her parents provided her with an ample leisurely life rich in dilettantish pursuits and pleasures????theater, painting, travel, books...
...Marianne Thornton, too, lived beyond her 90th birthday, and her life is a fascinating reflection of England in the 19th century, yet Forster makes her seem a far more complex and intriguing person than Kathleen Isherwood...
...When Frank met Kathleen in 1895, he was a lieutenant in the York and Lancaster Regiment...
...But this . . . was because she simply didn't believe that a relationship without a woman in it could be serious...
...The fears about Frank when he was fighting in South Africa...
...for she and no one else made my career as a writer possible, and her love, in a most tangible sense, followed me beyond the grave...
...Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's father, Frederick did his neurotic, thundering best to keep his daughter at home in the perpetual innocence of spinsterhood...
...But of course Forster was a far greater novelist than Isherwood, and perhaps a more generous and clear-sighted man...
...her ailments were roles into which she threw herself with abandon...
...After Cambridge I was able to travel for a couple of years, and traveling inclined me to write...
...By contrast, Isherwood's settlement of his obligation seems rather grudging, artful, and emotionally indecisive...
...In 1956, E.M...
...At this last bombshell "she didn't seem at all upset...
...This deeply rooted existence was enormously important to Kathleen, who was such a passionate devotee of the past throughout her life that Christopher came to hate it "because it threatened to swallow his future...
...the self-searching anxieties and recriminations during the long and tense engagement...
...But in 1915 the happy, romantic Edwardian idyll was abruptly destroyed...
...They did not marry until eight years later, delayed not only by Kathleen's father but by the Boer War and by their own seemingly interminable hesitations...
...Christopher hated and rejected this oppressive demand...
...What is troublesome about his long-delayed declaration of thanks is the fact that it takes so little notice of money...
...Unfortunately, her diary makes far more tedious reading than Isherwood seems to realize...
...As Kathleen saw it, Frank's death put Christopher "under an obligation to be worthy of . . . his Hero-Father...
...Her sudden prostrations and equally sudden recoveries were the bewilderment of her doctors...
...About a third of the book is Isherwood's own commentary on the family's history as far back as the 17th century, when his ancestor John Bradshaw the Regicide signed his name to the death warrant of Charles I. Isherwood provides a meticulously detailed yet often monotonous portrait of everyday life among the British upper-middle and landed classes in the heyday of the Empire, from the last years of Victoria's reign through the golden Edwardian era that died at the outbreak of World War I. Kathleen's father, Frederick, was a well-to-do wine merchant and a Victorian domestic tyrant along the lines of Mr...
...I am thankful . . . to Marianne Thornton...
...She was no imaginary invalid, but a great psychosomatic virtuoso who could produce high fevers, large swellings and mysterious rashes within the hour...
Vol. 55 • January 1972 • No. 2
