Christopher Isherwood: Autobiography as Mask

Abstract

When W. H. Auden dedicated The Orators to Stephen Spender he did so with the elliptical comment that “Private faces in public places/Are wiser and nicer/Than public faces in private places.”¹ Auden was then, in 1932, beginning to become a very public figure, and literary history has been dubiously kind in designating writers of the Thirties as “The Auden Generation,” abetted, as literary history so often is, by the autobiographical writings of every member of the so-called “Auden Group” — except Auden himself. Auden understood instinctively and viscerally what privacy meant and, despite the constant exposure of his public face, kept his private face private. But, since his death in 1973, there have been several biographies and, as always, Auden has played a part in the numerous biographies of his cohorts, a shadowy figure in everyone else’s carpet.