Kathleen and Christopher: Christopher Isherwood's Letters to His Mother (review)

Readers of Christopher Isherwood have long been familiar with the events of his life in the 1930s, a decade that resurfaces in much of his autobiographical fiction and memoirs. The recent publication of letters from Isherwood to his mother, however, invites us to reconsider what has come to be expected. "One of the few records we have of Isherwood's life at this time that isn't filtered through the lens of time and memory" (x), observes Lisa Colletta, the letters serve to remind us of the grave uncertainties that plagued Isherwood and so many others in that politically volatile decade. What is more, they illuminate his effort to hold on to some semblance of security and measure of life when, as he puts it, "the powers of hell are in the ascendant" (57): namely, his writing and his relationships with others, particularly—and perhaps surprisingly—with his mother.

Colletta's introduction successfully highlights the significance of this collection: it problematizes the generally accepted view of Isherwood's antagonistic relationship with Kathleen. As Colletta rightly claims, the letters "reveal a different, more affectionate relationship that complicates his idea of himself as the 'anti-son'" (viii). Isherwood's early work is often read in terms of this rebellion. Later work, particularly his 1954 novel The World in the Evening, is then understood to reveal a search for a mother figure, to exemplify a "mother fixation," or to represent an "ideal mother" however "uni-dimensional."¹ Not only might Kathleen and Christopher complicate both biographical and critical readings of Isherwood as Colletta suggests (letter after letter opens with "My darling Mummy"), but it contributes as well to Isherwood's own project of rewriting his relationship with Kathleen, a project that evolves from his autobiography of the 1920s, Lions and Shadows (1938), to the "autobiography" of his parents Kathleen and Frank (1971), to his late memoir Christopher and His Kind: 1929–1939 (1976). Kathleen and Christopher adds to the palimpsest created by these earlier volumes—which Isherwood would likely have appreciated.

Indeed, the letters allow readers to perceive the interweaving of lives between mother and son as Isherwood urges us to do at the close of Kathleen and Frank. A letter from October 1939, after Isherwood's departure from England to America, thus compels reconsideration: "I look at the sea, which is lonely and wet, now that the sun is setting, and I think of you, too, looking at the sea" (154). Their relationship is not distanced by geography, time, age, or culture. Rather, Isherwood and Kathleen are "fellow traveler[s]" (154). There is a familiarity in reading this letter, for its phrases and atmosphere later materialize in relation to the protagonists of Prater Violet (1945). Here, in 1933, the fictional "Christopher Isherwood" and the Austrian Jewish exiled artist Friedrich Bergmann are, too, "fellow-traveler[s]," sharing a journey at "that hour of the night at which man's ego almost sleeps," connected, despite outward difference, by their humanity.² The letters suggest to us new ways in which Kathleen, like the politics of the 1930s, might be woven into the textuality of Isherwood's life and writing.

It is perhaps in contrast to this characteristic of Isherwood's work—blurring life and art—that Colletta seeks to locate "the value of these letters," which, she claims, "lay in the fact that he did not write them to dramatize himself or a plot" (x). She goes on to remark, however, that the letters "become little dramas" (xi), written by both "Isherwood the actor and Isherwood the recorder of immediate experience" (xii). Though Colletta does not resolve these conflicting claims of whether the letters reveal or conceal aspects of Isherwood's "self" or life—he "is not as frank about himself or others" as elsewhere, she notes—she does point to their further importance as an account that "brings to life the confusion, hopes, and fears of the era" (xi).

Though "readers...