Middlebrow queer: Christopher Isherwood in America PDF
Preview Middlebrow queer: Christopher Isherwood in America
Middlebrow Queer This page intentionally left blank Middlebrow Queer Christopher Isherwood in America d d d Jaime Harker University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Material from Christopher Isherwood’s archives copyright 1940, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1965, 1967, 1972, 1974, 1975, 1976, 2009, 2013 by Don Bachardy. Interview with Don Bachardy copyright 2013 by Don Bachardy. Printed by permis- sion of The Wylie Agency LLC. Quotations from letters owned by Gore Vidal are reprinted by permission of the Estate of Gore Vidal. Passages from W. H. Auden letters are reprinted by permission of the Estate of W. H. Auden. Passages from Stephen Spender letters are reprinted with permission of the Estate of Stephen Spender. Passages from Glenway Wescott letters are reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc. Passages from John Rechy letters are reprinted with permission of John Rechy. Passages of Dodie Smith letters are reprinted by permission of the Estate of Dodie Smith. Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this book. If any proper acknowledgment has not been included here, we encourage copyright holders to notify the publisher. Selections of chapter 1 were first published as “ ‘Look Baby, I Know You’: Gay Fiction and the Cold War Era,” American Literary History 22, no. 1 (2010): 191–206. Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harker, Jaime. Middlebrow queer : Christopher Isherwood in America / Jaime Harker. Includes bibliographical references and index. iSBN 978-0-8166-7913-3 (hc : alk. paper) — iSBN 978-0-8166-7914-0 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Isherwood, Christopher, 1904–1986—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Homosexuality in literature. 3. Gay culture in literature. 4. Homosexuality and literature—United States—History—20th century. 5. Literature and society—United States—History—20th century. 6. Gay men—Identity. I. Title. PR6017.S5Z675 2013 823'.912—dc23 2012038000 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Christopher and His Readers ix 1. Isherwood’s American Incarnation and the Gay Protest Novel 1 2. “Too Queer to Be Quaker”: Gay Protest and Camp 25 3. “Fagtrash”: Pulp Paperbacks and Cold War Queer Readers 45 4. Sixties Literature and the Ascension of Camp Middlebrow 71 5. “A Delicious Purgatory”: Sex and “Salvation” 89 6. Secret Agents and Gay Identity: Cold War Queerness 111 7. Spiritual Trash: Hindus, Homos, and Gay Pulp 135 8. Christopher Isherwood, Gay Liberation, and the Question of Style 163 Notes 181 Bibliography 193 Index 201 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments The Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, the New York Public Library (main branch and the Lincoln Center), the Brit- ish Library, the Boston University Archive, and the Huntington Library generously granted access to their collections. The University of Mississippi supported the research and writ- ing of this book through summer research grants and a sabbatical. The University of Minnesota Press provided both enthusiasm and feedback, and made this a better book. I thank colleagues and friends for their contributions to this book, with apologies to anyone I may have inadvertently forgot- ten: Erin Smith, Theresa Starkey, Kacy Tillman, Jill Anderson, Pip Gordon, Robert Caserio, John Howard, Wayne Gunn, Sue Hod- son, Ivo Kamps, Doug Armato, Danielle Kasprzak, and especially Alida Moore. Special thanks to Don Bachardy for his generosity. . vii . This page intentionally left blank d iNtroductioN d Christopher and His Readers HriStopHer iSHerwood’S Christopher and his Kind C (1976) begins with queer bravado. Explaining why he really went to Berlin in the 1930s—in a word, boys—Isherwood frames his homosexuality defiantly: “Girls are what the state and the church and the law and the press and the medical profession en- dorse, and command me to desire. My mother endorses them, too. She is silently brutishly willing me to get married and breed grandchildren for her. Her will is the will of Nearly Everybody, and in their will is my death. My will is to live according to my na- ture, and to find a place where I can be what I am . . . But I’ll admit this—even if my nature were like theirs, I should still have to fight them, in one way or another. If boys didn’t exist, I should have to invent them” (12). Isherwood’s memoir embraced the defiant spirit of gay liberation and inspired a younger generation of gay men. He became a link to a hidden history of gay men and a rebel- lious rebuke to the pre-Stonewall closet. Gay publications rushed to interview him and claim him as an honorary grandfather of gay rights.1 Armistead Maupin’s comment about Isherwood suggests his role in gay liberation literary circles: “No other figure in my life made me feel more connected to a past I had never known and a future I had yet to realize.”2 Isherwood used gay liberation rhetoric repeatedly during the 1970s and 1980s, and Isherwood scholarship, a small but robust body of work, has followed his lead, interpreting him as a pio- neer of gay rights and of what we now call queer modernism. This mode of inquiry has been particularly illuminating for a writer whose political and literary interests intersect with key moments in twentieth-century history and aesthetics. Isherwood was in- terested in evolving theories of gay identity, staying at Magnus . ix .
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