Volume 27, Number 13 · August 14, 1980
Issyvoo's Conversion
By Stephen Spender
My Guru and His Disciple
by Christopher Isherwood
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 338 pp., $12.95
Christopher Isherwood has often been accused of egotism in his work. Yet in the sense in which the word is usually employed this seems to me to miss the point. The self-solidification of the true egotist acts as a wall between him and people. The strident ego sings only its own tune, blocks out the sounds of the others. The Isherwood ego is not of this kind. As he himself describes it in My Guru and His Disciple, it is an acute self-consciousness which makes even his most disinterested actions seem mockery to him. His ego is also an instrument of sensibility through which the people the novelist observes become transformed into characters in his fiction. The special thing about Isherwood is that he seems to find it so difficult to invent situations in which characters behave without that instrument of the self observing—Isherwood, Christopher, Herr Issyvoo—being palpably present. A novel in which he attempted to dispose completely of the ego character at the center of the action, The World in the Evening, he regards as a failure.
Review, 4091 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |