I am a cactus

John Sutherland

  • Isherwood by Peter Parker
    Picador, 914 pp, £25.00, May 2004, ISBN 0 330 48699 3

‘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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