Isherwood

Goodbye To Berlin is what came off the shelves next. I'd read the other Isherwoods near it but never this which, I dare say, is his best-known and probably best book. I was already the better informed for reading the first page, it being where Thom Gunn took his To Isherwood Dying from. If MacNeice presaged war from England in his Autumn Journal, Isherwood is somewhat earlier in Germany doing the same.

Not much of it sounds made up even if Sally Bowles was really called Jean Ross. Making it semi-fictional would risk devaluing it but he says it's not 'purely autobiographical' in his preface and my edition classifies it as Fiction/Literature. Fiction and autobiography can intersect sometimes, though. In this case his cast of characters don't seem to need much additional help to be memorable. Isherwood's writing is as dapper as he always appears in pictures. Since I can't remember anything about the other books I have of his upstairs, I'd be better off re-reading them rather than buying others.

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Further fallout from the Gunn biography leads me to think that his life and work represented the process by which liberal becomes libertarian. It was perhaps always implicit in both. Liberal involves a concern for others whereas the libertarian is primarily concerned with themselves. Gunn's early work was self-absorbed and his awakening, through Touch, to the presence of others, while overcoming his solipsism, is more exploitative than caring. 

The libertarian acknowledges as few limits on their own freedom as they possibly can and only really grants others release from them in order to enjoy them themselves. Nobody is against freedom but in Boris Johnsonian terms it is a panacea that brings inherent dangers with it. If everyone were allowed ultimate freedom, anarchy would ensue and nobody would benefit in the end.

Gunn's promiscuity and drug use were, for the most part, his own business and he successfully went beyond social barriers in pursuit of his hedonistic aims. If it did no harm to others then so be it but it's not heroic. It's not an example everyone could follow and even for him one suspects his fulfilment was artificial and he might have known as much. I will still accord him some heroic status for his poems, though, the best of which were as good as anybody's from his generation and the later C20th. As with Larkin, as with George Orwell and as with so many others, we need to separate out the writing from who wrote it, the dancer from the dance and not reject one because we don't necessarily like the other.