BOOKS
625
were pillaged by everyone. And then their ideas spread. Today they're
being chewed over in the most widely varying circles without anyone
ever thinking where they came from. " We must pay attention to
Chatterer's hope equally with his despair.
Even my friend Tatjana, loyal Party member though she believed
herself
to
be, had been infected by these ideas, as her Theory of Mistakes
demonstrated. Everyone in the Soviet Union has a
doppelganger
who
knows the works of Schizophrenic by hear t.
h
hardly seems an overstatement to call
The Yawning Heights
the
most important book of this decade. The job of the next decade will be
to
pillage it thoroughly and from its rocky truths to get some new
foundations laid.
JAY MARTIN
TWO LIVES
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY. By Brian
Finney.
Faber
&
Faber.
THE 305 AND AFTER: POETRY, POLITICS, PEOPLE, 19305-19705.
By Stephen Spender.
Random House.
Christopher Isherwood 's books are so autobiographical-it
is many years since he gave up trying
to
be a novelist- that there seems
no point in writing a life of him un less the biographer takes a radically
different view of the material. And Brian Finney hardly does this , for,
as he explains, he has had Isherwood's help and cooperation in
preparing his book, and his approach throughout is entirely sympa–
thetic
to
his subject. He occasionally corrects the facts, taking note of
Isherwood 's dictum that "the rea l truth to the writer is not the same as
what actuall y happens
to
him. He only uses his experiences
to
create a
myth which corresponds
to
his inner reality. " Yet sometimes we feel
that the b iographer has not dug very deeply. Nor does he offer
to
supplement Isherwood by a fu ll er, or different, account of the other
people in the story. The hero (or anti-hero?) remains the one distinctly
outlined figure. But the book is clearly and unpretentiously written,
and the critiques of Isherwood's work which intersperse it are intelli-
