Queer Times

Christopher Isherwood's Modernity

Jamie M. Carr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135520717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Thisbook maps Christopher Isherwood's intellectual and aesthetic reflections from the late 1930s through the late 1970s. Drawing on the queer theory of Eve Sedgwick and the ethical theory of Michel Foucault, Carr illuminates Isherwood's post-war development of a queer ethos through his focus on the aesthetic, social, and historical politics of the 1930s in his novels Prater Violet (1945), The World in the Evening (1954), and Down There on a Visit (1962), and in his memoir, Christopher and His Kind: 1929–1939 (1976).

Chapter One

The World in the Evening Isherwood, Pacifism, and the Cultural Politics of the 1930s and Beyond

As Isherwood and Auden set sail for America in January 1939, Isherwood decided that he could no longer “swallow another mouthful” of “the Popular Front, the party line, the anti-Fascist struggle”; he and Auden both felt that “they had been playing parts, repeating slogans created for them by others,” as Isherwood recounts in Christopher and His Kind (333). Isherwood rejected antifascism in part because this left-wing political movement involved an acceptance of militarism that conflicted with his pacifism. This turn to pacifism on the eve of war was largely motivated by his sexuality; once “Heinz [Nieddermeyer] was about to become an unwilling part of the Nazi military machine,” Isherwood realized that he could not fight this “enemy” “because every man in that Army could be somebody’s Heinz” (335–36). Many consequently understood Isherwood’s pacifism as a retreat from politics, an understanding that subsequently informs readings of his postwar work.

Few respected or understood Isherwood’s turn to pacifism and his and Auden’s departure from Europe when another world war loomed on the horizon. Pacifism, once in fashion in the 1920s and early 1930s—when one war was over and the next might still be prevented—was, by 1939, an untenable position by most people’s standards. One’s war-revulsion, the majority propounded, should be directed instead against Fascist nations. Pacifism was perceived to be a neutral and, what is more, a particularly passive stance. Literary critic Valentine Cunningham discusses the widespread opposition to “neutrality” in his essay “Neutral?: 1930s Writers and Taking Sides,” which begins with the following telling statement:

The pressure to “take sides” in the 1930s was evidently terrific. Discussing the newly created New Writing in the Criterion Frank Chapman, for one, talks plaintively of the “increasing anxiety among writers … to find something firm to cling to in the chaos of contemporary life; the determination to be on one side or other of the fence, not sitting on it as a mark for both parties. To join no party seems, now, a sign of weak-mindedness.” (45)

Cunningham’s choice of placing a question mark after “neutral” in his title signifies in relation to Chapman’s use of the word “weakmindedness” in 1937. To claim neutrality in a period dominated by the terror of Fascist regimes was, in effect, to align one’s self, in the eyes of the public, with such regimes. Neutrality as a refusal to take sides (understood as acceptance of fascism) was thus regarded as “weakmindedness.” This charge similarly invoked popular associations in the 1930s (that are in some ways still present today) between fascism and pathology (of which one signification is homosexuality), between pacifism and cowardice, or between pacifism and homosexuality (where it is understood as passivity).

Such charges were certainly leveled against Isherwood and were redoubled when he came to articulate his pacifism by way of the spiritual philosophy of Vedanta, a “practice of the philosophy which is taught in the Vedas, the most ancient of the Hindu scriptures” (My Guru 33). In his Introduction to a collection of essays he edited on Vedanta, Vedanta for the Western World (1946), Isherwood acknowledges that both spirituality and pacifism are widely regarded as inaction, passive, and apolitical. Addressing resistance he sees to a spiritually-informed reflection on the politics and crises of the present, he comments: “There is no time, we say. We are in the midst of whatever we are doing. Action is begetting action. To pause, to philosophize, seems feeble, cowardly, and even downright wicked” (3). Such a comment conveys his concern for time and his concern for self-reflection. But it also conveys his understanding that pacifism is broadly perceived in the terms outlined above: as neutral (and therefore “wicked”), as cowardice, as “weak-mindedness” (that is, “feeble”).

In “Hypothesis and Belief,” one of his essays in Vedanta for the Western World, Isherwood addresses critics, friends among them, who early censured his turn to Vedanta. “If a member of the so-called intellectual class joins a religious group or openly subscribes to its teaching,” writes a defiant Isherwood, “he will have to prepare himself for a good deal of criticism” (36). Isherwood was well aware of the criticism leveled at him for leaving England and for becoming a pacifist at a moment when war was imminent. “It will be suggested to the convert, with a greater or lesser degree of politeness,” he continues, “that he has ‘sold out,’ betrayed the cause of Reason, retreated in cowardice from ‘the realities of Life’” (36; emphases added). These comments constitute less a defense than they do a critique of the Orientalizing attitudes of his British “contemporaries.” Does “convert” refer to one’s pacifism or to one’s spirituality? Is it pacifism or is it homosexuality that is cowardly and passive? Which constitutes a “retreat” and “betrayal of Reason”—homosexuality, pacifism, or “Eastern” spirituality? Or, is it potentially each of the above? Isherwood’s statement points to, that is, an intersection in discourses surrounding homosexuality, pacifism, and Eastern ethics. Each is understood to be a deception of a Western identified notion of “Reason,” of progress toward Kantian Enlightenment “maturity” with its developmental assumptions about subjectivity—despite Kant’s own argument that the use of reason will lead to peace. In his 1795 philosophical treatise Perpetual Peace, Kant posits that, “reason absolutely condemns war as a legal recourse and makes a state of peace a direct duty” (18). That Isherwood comes to his own political philosophy of peace upon realizing the limits of Leftism is worth analyzing.

Isherwood composes his political philosophy through Vedanta, a unique composition of spirituality taught him by the Indian Swami Prabhavananda and, in a more popularized version, by the British expatriates Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. Vedanta provides Isherwood with a way to critique accepted and interrelated constructions of pacifism, “homosexuality,” and spirituality as treasonous, cowardly, and passive. In this project, he engages contemporary thought, to “grasp the points where change is possible.” He is particularly drawn, then, to Vedanta’s lack of discourses of sin in relation to sexuality, its elaboration of pacifism outside of moral imperatives, and its philosophical renunciation of the ego.

It might be said, then, and rightly so, that Isherwood, albeit in ways different from his critics, as I show, nevertheless Orientalizes Vedanta. Edward Said’s discussion of this Western discursive and disciplinary practice is central here. A product of imperialism and colonization, anthropology, trade, travel writing, and historiography, the post-Enlightenment “institution” of Orientalism was a way of “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 3). Orientalism established and maintained European hegemony as “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (3). European identity, in other words, claimed itself “a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures,” which were held to be primitive, premodern, to exhibit “backwardness” (7). For many in Isherwood’s generation and those preceding him, Orientalism was “a created body of theory and practice” that permitted the “Westerner” ostensible knowledge and authority over non-Westerners (6). It constituted a system culturally, politically, economically, and intellectually.

In their criticisms of Isherwood’s pacifism and practice of Vedanta, many of Isherwood’s British detractors and friends subscribe to a theory of Eastern “backwardness,” and Isherwood often, at first, reproduces such subjectifying attitudes himself. He complains, “the Swami is too Indian for me,” yet notes “the very Indianness of Vedanta was helpful to [him]” (My Guru 49). Isherwood holds himself to be “anti-imperialistic,” yet feels “still an heir to Britain’s guilt in her dealings with India” (36). He wishes to reject Vedanta’s “religious beliefs,” yet accept the pacifism practiced by Heard, finally realizing “that the two were completely interdependent” (10). Isherwood ultimately respects Vedanta, practicing it in his own life and writing on it often, the effects of which are uniquely his own. As he attempts “to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world” (Said 12; emphasis added), Isherwood produces ways of thinking and writing that allow him to reflect on uses of politics, power, and aesthetics. It permits us to reflect on a politics of time vis-à-vis the relationships his critics and Isherwood draw—however differently—between pacifism, homosexuality, and Eastern spirituality.

“Are You Really a Man?”: British Masculinity, War, and the “Passive”-Ist

Isherwood’s second novel, The Memorial, published in 1932, explores “the effect of the idea of ‘War’ on my generation,” a generation “suffering, more or less subconsciously, from a feeling of shame that we hadn’t been old enough to take part in the [first] European war” (Lions and Shadows 296, 74). In his 1938 autobiography Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties, from which this description is taken, Isherwood exposes these feelings of shame as related to masculinity and expresses them in general psychological terms (which he later abandons): “Like most of my generation,” he reflects, “I was obsessed by a complex of terrors and longings connected with the idea of ‘War.’ ‘War,’ in this purely neurotic sense, meant The Test. The test of your courage, of your maturity, of your sexual prowess: ‘Are you really a Man?’” (76; emphases added). Manliness is measured in temporal terms linked to maturity, virility, courage, “fitness,” and the fulfillment of one’s duty, as a man, to fight. But given his preoccupation with “the Test” throughout Lions and Shadows, it becomes clear that this production of masculinity, the idea of what it means to be a man, is precisely that—a production, and not only in times of war, for Lions and Shadows tells the story of an education in the 1920s. What most critics agree, then, to be a myth of Isherwood’s making—that of “the Test”—was not a myth at all but a social fact.¹

Despite his awareness of the pervasive cultural construction of the “idea of war” in England and its relation to British masculinity, Isherwood subjects himself to “the Test.” Commissioned “to write a travel book about the East,” with the “choice of itinerary … left to [their] own discretion,” and influenced by their English public school educations, specifically by years of history and literature courses that glorified war and the masculine qualities of courage, daring, and militarism, Isherwood along with Auden, chose to journey to China at the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War (Isherwood, Journey 6). The novelist and poet subsequently romanticized the image of themselves as war correspondents that they likened to soldiers—“It is sometimes necessary for [the journalist] to go into danger,” declares Auden about his and Isherwood’s “duty”; or, as Isherwood writes, “We were adult, if amateur, war correspondents entering upon the scene of our duties. But, for the moment, I could experience only an irresponsible, schoolboyish feeling of excitement” (102, 19). Such “schoolboyish” romanticization of adult, manly duty and of war continues throughout most of this travel book, Journey to a War (1938), as illustrated, for example, by Isherwood’s use of a sentimental metaphor to describe war: passing a Japanese gunboat on a trip from Hongkong to Canton Isherwood declares, “That is what War is: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand” (19). When he gives speeches rallying the Chinese to fight for victory, he renders such victory symbolic: “‘You must win this war,’ I boomed, ‘to save China, to save Japan, to save Europe’” (186). The idea of war, to Isherwood, is just that—an idea and more likely an ideal. War is symbolic, abstract—an unfriendly encounter, a justified means to save humanity, and, a test of one’s “manhood” (and it is so both for the soldier as well as for the journalist). Isherwood and Auden thus fulfill their duties as so-called brave, adventurous young men going into battle, the ultimate proof of masculinity, patriotism, and the “civilized” (those who would save humanity).

By the end of the travel-diary and certainly by the end of their trip, however, Isherwood comes to inhabit a more critical attitude toward war. At a dinner with “four Japanese civilians” he and Auden are provoked to outrage by the irony of the Japanese who claim that they “really love the Chinese. That is the nice thing about this war,” a Japanese consular official tells them; “There is no bitterness. We in Japan feel absolutely no bitterness towards the Chinese People” (Journey 234). And “why should they feel bitter?” Isherwood and Auden retort; “Had they ever had their towns burnt and their women raped? Had they ever been bombed?” (234). Isherwood feels intensely the hypocrisy of such a claim by one of the makers of war—that one loves whom one is fighting. This moment marks a decisive turn in the narrative. No longer do the “civilized” British war correspondents attend teas, dinners, and other social events with Chinese and British officials. Instead, Isherwood ends the travelogue with a new focus, an acute awareness of what war is: the imposition of power over another, murder, rape, destroyed industries and lost jobs, refugees, poverty, “under-nourishment and epidemics,” and soldiers returning home without limbs. “War starts with principle,” Isherwood comes later to understand, “but it ends with people” (An Approach 8).

This realization was reinforced by Isherwood’s reflection on the previous half of a decade spent trying to protect the man he loved from conscription in the Nazi army. Heinz had been arrested and was “about to become an unwilling part of the Nazi military machine.” Isherwood subsequently realizes that he could not fight in a war against this army, however loathsome. He later explains his determination in terms of sexuality: “Once I have refused to press that button [to blow up the Nazi army] because of Heinz,” he explains in Christopher and His Kind, “I can never press it. Because every man in that Army could be somebody’s Heinz and I have no right to play favorites” (336). Isherwood refuses “to deny his homosexuality” in his consideration of whether or not he could participate in war, therein intimately linking sexuality to pacifism (336). His disillusionment with a romanticized notion of war heralded by both the Left as well as the Right and his realization that he would not be able to fight the Nazi Army because Heinz was now forced to wear its uniform was compounded by his recognition that the political programs of that decade whether Fascist or Communist, persecuted, to different degrees, homosexuals.

But if the “idea of war” was linked to the production of British masculinity as maturity, courage, and sexual prowess, then those who opposed war were often figured as lacking those very qualities. The figure of “the homosexual” was often exemplar of this “lack” of masculinity (discursively constructed as it was as a non-fully-developed subjectivity), and owing in part to attitudes toward and images of the antiwar stance and practice of conscientious objection by many in the Bloomsbury group during The Great War. Critics of Bloomsbury often represented the pacifist as a homosexual aesthete.² Evelyn Waugh portrays such a figure in his 1942 novel Put Out More Flags. Set in the opening days of the second war against Germany, Waugh’s novel is a satire of the upper class for their superficial concerns in the face of a war against Fascism. Ambrose Silk, the only character in the novel to oppose the war, however, is, as Alan Sinfield points out in “Queers, Treachery and the Literary Establishment,” “the stereotype of the effete literary intellectual, as it had come down from the 1890s, through Bloomsbury; this figure has to be exiled so that Waugh’s other upper-class characters can reorient themselves toward the war,” can fulfill, that is (though Sinfield doesn’t say it), their role as men (60). Though Waugh demonstrates some sympathy for this Jewish homosexual character who has endured ridicule and persecution in England and whose former German (and Brown Shirt) lover, Hans, is now in a concentration camp, Waugh reproduces the association between pacifism and what he refers to as the “pansy” and “old queen” of the novel (to say nothing of Ambrose’s love of a fascist) (Waugh 46).³

Isherwood and Auden found themselves in the pages of Waugh’s novel as the infamous Parsnip and Pimpernell. “The great Parsnip-Pimpernell controversy,” as one character comments, is “how these two can claim to be contemporary if they run away from the biggest event in contemporary history… . ‘It’s just sheer escapism’” (Waugh 43; emphasis in original). Waugh’s use of the word contemporary here is striking. It challenges whether Isherwood and Auden’s work can be considered relevant to the present moment. More strikingly, it perhaps raises the question of whether they “[belong] to the same time” as such artists as Waugh, as those who have not betrayed the cause of Reason (OED, III: 813).⁴

Isherwood and Auden’s departure to America was largely held in the late 1930s to be an act of cowardice or escape. As their friend John Lehmann remarks in his memoir on Isherwood: “the long-dreaded war broke out, and soon after the outbreak the persecution of Christopher and Wystan [Hugh Auden] as deserters and cowards” (Christopher Isherwood 54; emphasis added).⁵ Despite Auden’s later support of the war, he held to his Christian pacifist values in 1939 and was, alongside Isherwood, excoriated in the public eye.⁶ Both were criticized in the British government, for instance, where “House of Commons Major Sir Jocelyn Lucas set the ball rolling by asking the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour whether steps had been taken, or would be taken, to summon British cit...