Isherwood’s return in the 1950s in The World in the Evening to the rise of fascism and the early war years suggests a genealogy between varying disciplinary and institutional practices of social oppression. His effort to compose a reader to resist the totalizing thought implicit in such practices moved him toward a rethinking of sexual, gender, and narrative politics, a project that intensifies in focus throughout the 1950s, informing his third postwar novel to invoke the 1930s, Down There on a Visit (1962). In a letter to John Lehmann concerning the mixed reception of this new novel, Isherwood conveys something of his reflections on the politics of reading and of subjectivity:

That reviewers of Isherwood’s book found it to be about sexuality, and, given their “puritan horror,” particularly “homosexuality,” attests to the naturalization of attitudes toward homo/heterosexual definition by mid-century. Isherwood’s reviewers were reacting to what they perceived as a “homosexual” novel, supposedly written for and about that identity category. In contradistinction

to this reading, Isherwood perceives Down There on a Visit to be about “the way certain personalities wriggle out of all the categories people try to put them into,” alluding to an effort to compose an anti-identitarian aesthetic in relation to sexuality (102).