Table Of ContentMiddlebrow Queer
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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
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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 .
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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 .
