Wil Wheaton, Superman & righteous revisionism

In a 1978 interview, Christopher Isherwood reflected on his many personal, literary reflections. The impetus for the chat (with the editor of a pioneering newspaper called Gay Sunshine) was Isherwood’s then-recent autobiography Christopher and His Kind, in which he situates the context of the stories that made him famous (and that formed the nucleus of the hit Broadway show and movie Cabaret.) Given the extraordinary social changes between the 1939 publication of Goodbye to Berlin and this ’70s reminiscence, the interviewer inquires about Isherwood’s earlier, nondescript, “I am a camera” tone — one that doesn’t give away much about the sexuality of his narrator — and the more frank and open descriptions of European gay life accounted for in His Kind. “I’m often asked if I regret that I didn’t say outright in The Berlin Stories that I was homosexual,” Isherwood tells the interviewer. “Yes, I wish I had.”

So what’s a regretful writer to do? Paintings are often painted over, music is remixed and remade (paging Taylor Swift), and the Criterion closet is full of post-release “director’s cuts.” Writers, though, don’t often revisit and rewrite. There’s something about this printed word, all that cultural discourse about its fixity and finality. (Or, of course, there used to be; digital ephemerality, from lost links to bit rot, has chipped away at that norm.) Why can’t an author pull up stakes and start again, even decades after publication?

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