How could one write about gay life for the mainstream public in Cold
War America? Many midcentury gay American writers, hampered by external
and internal censors, never managed to do it. But Christopher Isherwood
did, and what makes his accomplishment more remarkable is that while he
was negotiating his identity as a gay writer, he was reinventing himself
as an American one. Jaime Harker shows that Isherwood refashioned
himself as an American writer following his emigration from England by
immersing himself in the gay reading, writing, and publishing
communities in Cold War America.
Drawing extensively on
Isherwood's archives, including manuscript drafts and unpublished
correspondence with readers, publishers, and other writers, "Middlebrow
Queer" demonstrates how Isherwood mainstreamed gay content for
heterosexual readers in his postwar novels while also covertly writing
for gay audiences and encouraging a symbiotic relationship between
writer and reader. The result--in such novels as "The World in the
Evening, Down There on a Visit, A Single Man, "and" A Meeting by the
River"--was a complex, layered form of writing that Harker calls
"middlebrow camp," a mode that extended the boundaries of both gay and
middlebrow fiction.
Weaving together biography, history, and
literary criticism, "Middlebrow Queer" traces the continuous evolution
of Isherwood's simultaneously queer and American postwar authorial
identity. In doing so, the book illuminates many aspects of Cold War
America's gay print cultures, from gay protest novels to "out" pulp
fiction.
