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PARTISAN REVIEW
gent and often provoked me to reconsider books I had remembered as
not worth rereading.
The account of the younger Isherwood is largely based on his
recent
Kathleen and Frank
and
Christopher and his Kind,
together
with the earlier
Lions and Shadows.
Here again, then, are Isherwood's
school days; we breathe again the atmosphere of that strange upper–
class hothouse. Here is the early friendship with Auden, the eccentric
schoolmasters, the rebellion against the ethos of the public school (in
the British sense, of course)-all grist to the mill of Cyril Connolly's
"Theory of Permanent Adolescence." George Orwell, Connolly's
fellow-Etonian, laughed at the Theory, but I must say that the
rereading of Auden and Isherwood largely confirms it. Then there is
Cambridge, Edward Upward, the campaign against the Poshocracy,
the "Mortmere" game with its surrealistic fantasies, the famous "Test"
(for strength and manhood). We are given the impression that the
young Christopher was more a secret romantic about the "Test" than
Upward. In the background to all this is the psychological struggle
between Isherwood and his mother. He formed the belief that his
"choice" of homosexuality was in some way a rebellion against her.
Finney does not go into the general implications of this, but sociolo–
gists of protest might find it significant that Isherwood's revolt was
against both the Christian and the military traditions of his family.
The Church and the Army, male-dominated hierarchies, have been
traditionally hostile to homosexuality, perhaps because it breaks down
barriers of rank and status and so undermines discipline.
Isherwood began to emerge as a writer by discovering, through
Upward, the possibilities in his adored E.M. Forster's "tea-table"
technique-the deliberate playing down of the violent and spectacular
element in Forster's stories. And there were other, more technically
"modernist" influences in Isherwood's early novels. At the same time
he renewed his association with Auden, now an arcane, cryptic poet
under the influence of T.S. Eliot. His literary career began with the
decision of Edward Garnett, an unrivalled talent-spotter, to advise
Jonathan Cape to publish
A II the Conspirators-that
odd period piece,
Isherwood's
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
"My Generation–
right or wrong!" as he himself summarized it in 1958. His fiasco in the
Tripos (final examination) at Cambridge was followed by his aban–
donment of his medical studies in London and departure for Berlin in
1929, his head full of the psychoanalytic theories of Homer Lane, got
from a follower of Lane's, John Layard-Auden's "loony Layard."
From now on the legend begins. By the end of the 1930s it was usual to
