I am a cactus 
John Sutherland
- Isherwood by Peter Parker
‘Xtopher,’ Stephen Spender wrote in April 1931, ‘is a cactus.’ Prickly, solitary, self-sufficient, hard to handle and difficult to love. How to get to grips with ‘Isherwood’ (as he has chosen to address him) was a problem for Peter Parker: something that perhaps explains the 12 years this usually brisk biographer has spent on his task. A main difficulty is that Isherwood (‘I am a camera’) is himself so intent a watcher of things that inspection bounces off him. Intent and also wary. ‘Wherever he was,’ Spender declared, ‘seemed to me to be the trenches’: dug in, on guard, bayonet fixed. Not easy to close with.
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John Sutherland’s Life of Stephen Spender was published in May 2004. Formerly of University College London, he teaches at Caltech in Pasadena.
Other articles by this contributor:
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A Dangerously Liquid World · Alcoholics Anonymous
Long live the codex · the future of books
Sad Professor · John Sutherland listens to REM
The Fight for Eyeballs · John Sutherland reports on the Drudge Report
Who owns John Sutherland? · intellectual property in the digital age
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