Everywhere man: sexually, spiritually, and politically, Christopher Isherwood lived his life to the limits--a gay hero for our time.

Isherwood: A Life Revealed

* Peter Parker * Random House * $39.95

"Chisolm was never more than a minor diversion, and Isherwood was still seeing Derek Neame.... He was also still having sex with Tony Hyndman 'whenever the opportunity offered itself.'"

Many kinds of readers will want a copy of Isherwood: A Life Revealed, Peter Parker's massive, exhaustively detailed biography of one of the key literary figures of the last century. But for the book's gay readers, the passage quoted above goes to show that Parker, the out biographer of J.R. Ackerley, was the perfect man for the job: With Isherwood, if you've got the boyfriends right, then pretty much everything else will fall into place.

Born in England 100 years ago this past August, Christopher Isherwood made his fame with his tales of bohemian Berlin in the '30s. But as Parker shows, the stories that served as the basis of the iconic musical Cabaret were just one small part of Isherwood's journey.

The pre-Berlin Isherwood--along with his great friend, sometime collaborator, and frequent bedmate W.H. Auden--was such a literary light that when the pair left England for the United States just as World War II was getting under way, friends as well as foes felt betrayed. But they were being true to their respective selves. Auden settled and thrived in New York City. Isherwood took off for Los Angeles, the better to study Vedanta--the Hindu religious philosophy that came to be as central to his life as his sexuality--as well as writing for the movies, falling in and out of love (and many beds), turning his wild self into someone spiritually steady, and recording it all in his diaries.

Having been granted access to Isherwood's entire archive, Parker shows us a man who seemed to have everything going for him yet felt such inner chaos that a full-scale search for the meaning of lee was the only answer.

Isherwood became the inspiration for Somerset Maugham's classic novel of spiritual quest, The Razor's Edge. He also inspired E.M. Forster, who entrusted Isherwood with the manuscript of Maurice for its posthumous publication. It couldn't have been in better hands, for by that point Isherwood's gayness had come to full literary fruition with his masterpiece, A Single Man, and Isherwood himself had become an elder to the gay liberation movement--a role he accepted gladly.

Yet for all this, Parker's book deals more with Isherwood the Englishman than Isherwood the American--a sore point with Isherwood's surviving partner, Don Bachardy, who feels the book slights the achievements of later years and regards Isherwood "the same old way" that British critics have before.

It's precisely because he refused to calcify--always refining himself as well as his thoughts--that Isherwood remains central to a new generation of readers. Those who know Isherwood only as the creator of Sally Bowles will be surprised to discover the canny observer of Berlin, the randy L.A. party boy, and the settled citizen who found true love at last with Bachardy. It's this settled Isherwood who speaks to gays and lesbians today, declaring his right to love and--adventurous to the end--taking on the world and writing it down.

Ehrenstein is the author of Open Secret: Gay Hollywood, 1928-2000.