'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.

LRB 3 June 2004 | PDF Download