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Christopher Isherwood From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Christopher Isherwood

Born

Died

Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood 26 August 1904 Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Cheshire, UK 4 January 1986

Occupation Language Citizenship Alma mater

Partner

(aged 81) Santa Monica, California, US Novelist English British, American (naturalised) Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Heinz Neddermeyer (1932–37) Don Bachardy (1953–86)

Signature Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was an EnglishAmerican novelist.[1][2] His best-known works include The Berlin Stories (1935-39), two semiautobiographical novellas inspired by Isherwood's time in Weimar Republic Germany. These enhanced his postwar reputation when they were adapted first into the play I Am a Camera (1951), then the 1955 film of the same name, I Am a Camera (film); much later (1966) into the bravura stage musical Cabaret (musical) which was

acclaimed on Broadway, its unsparing stance being substantially sweetened for the film Cabaret (1972). His novel A Single Man was published in 1964.

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1 Early life and work 2 Life in the United States 3 Later recognition 4 Works o 4.1 Work on Vedanta and the West 5 Audio and video recordings 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links

Early life and work Isherwood was born in 1904 on his family's estate close to the Cheshire-Derbyshire border.[3] He was the elder son of Frank Bradshaw Isherwood, a professional soldier who fought in the Boer War, by his wife Kathleen (née Machell Smith), whose family were successful merchants.[4] Frank Isherwood was the son of John Henry Isherwood, head of the landed gentry family of Isherwood of Marple Hall and Wyberslegh Hall, Cheshire, and a descendant of the regicide John Bradshaw.[5] The Isherwood family estates came into their

possession on the marriage of Mary Bradshaw (of the family that had held them for centuries) to Nathaniel Isherwood, a felt-maker from Bolton, Lancashire, in the early 1700s.[6][7]

Repton School At Repton School in Derbyshire, Isherwood met his lifelong friend Edward Upward with whom he wrote the extravagant "Mortmere" stories, of which one was published during his lifetime, a few others appeared after his death, and others he summarised in Lions and Shadows. He deliberately failed his tripos and left Corpus Christi College, Cambridge without a degree in 1925. For the next few years he lived with violinist André Mangeot, worked as secretary to Mangeot's string quartet and studied medicine. During this time he wrote a book of nonsense poems, People One Ought to Know, with illustrations by Mangeot's eleven-year-old son, Sylvain. It was not published until 1982. In 1925 A.S.T. Fisher reintroduced him to W. H. Auden,[8][9][10] and Isherwood became Auden's

literary mentor and partner in an intermittent, casual liaison. Auden sent his poems to Isherwood for comment and approval. Through Auden, Isherwood met Stephen Spender, with whom he later spent much time in Germany. His first novel, All the Conspirators, appeared in 1928. It was an anti-heroic story, written in a pastiche of many modernist novelists, about a young man who is defeated by his mother. In 1928–29 Isherwood studied medicine at King's College London, but gave up his studies after six months to join Auden for a few weeks in Berlin. Rejecting his upper class background and embracing his attraction to men, he remained in Berlin, the capital of the young Weimar Republic, drawn by its reputation for sexual freedom. There, he "fully indulged his taste for pretty youths. He went to Berlin in search of boys and found one called Heinz, who became his first great love."[11] Commenting on John Henry Mackay's Der Puppenjunge (The Pansy), Isherwood wrote: "It gives a picture of the Berlin sexual underworld early in this century which I know, from my own experience, to be authentic."[12] In 1931 he met Jean Ross, the inspiration for his fictional character, Sally Bowles. He also met Gerald Hamilton, the inspiration for the fictional Mr Norris. In September 1931 the poet William Plomer introduced him to E. M. Forster. They

became close and Forster served as his mentor. Isherwood's second novel, The Memorial (1932), was another story of conflict between mother and son, based closely on his own family history. During one of his return trips to London he worked with the director Berthold Viertel on the film Little Friend, an experience that became the basis of his novel Prater Violet (1945). He worked as a private tutor in Berlin and elsewhere while writing the novel Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and a short novel called Goodbye to Berlin (1939), often published together in a collection called The Berlin Stories. These works provided the inspiration for the play I Am a Camera (1951), the 1955 film I Am a Camera (both starring Julie Harris), Yes/Buggles' song "Into The Lens/I Am A Camera" (1980), the Broadway musical Cabaret (1966) and the film (1972) of the same name. In 1932 he met and fell in love with a young German man named Heinz Neddermeyer.[13] After leaving Berlin in 1933, he and Heinz moved around Europe, and lived in Copenhagen, Sintra and elsewhere. Heinz was arrested as a draft-evader in 1937 following his brief return to Germany after he was ejected from Luxembourg as an "undesirable alien." Convicted of "reciprocal onanism",[14] he was sentenced to six months in prison, a year of state labour and two years of compulsory military service.[15] Isherwood

collaborated on three plays with Auden: The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1939). Isherwood wrote a lightly fictionalized autobiographical account of his childhood and youth, Lions and Shadows (1938), using the title of an abandoned novel. Auden and Isherwood traveled to China in 1938 to gather material for their book on the Sino-Japanese War called Journey to a War (1939). In 1939, Auden and Isherwood set sail for the United States on temporary visas, a controversial move, later regarded by some as a flight from danger on the eve of war in Europe.[16] Evelyn Waugh, in his novel Put Out More Flags (1942), included a caricature of Auden and Isherwood as "two despicable poets, Parsnip and Pimpernel", who flee to America to avoid World War Two.[17]

Life in the United States

Christopher Isherwood (left) and W. H. Auden (right), photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1939

Don Bachardy at nineteen (1954), photographed by Carl Van Vechten While living in Hollywood, California, Isherwood befriended Truman Capote, an up-and-coming young writer who would be influenced by Isherwood's Berlin Stories, most specifically in the traces of the story "Sally Bowles" that surface in Capote's famed novella, Breakfast at Tiffany's.[18] Isherwood also had a close friendship with the British writer Aldous Huxley, with whom he sometimes collaborated. Gerald Heard had introduced Huxley to Vedanta (Upanishad-centered philosophy) and meditation. Huxley became a Vedantist in the circle of Hindu Swami Prabhavananda, and introduced Isherwood to the Swami's Vedanta circle.[19] Isherwood became a convinced Vedantist himself and adopted Prabhavananda as his own guru, visiting the Swami every Wednesday for the next 35 years and collaborating with him on a translation of the Bhagavad Gita.[20] The process of conversion to

Vedanta was so intense that Isherwood was unable to write another novel between the years 19391945, while he immersed himself in study of the Vedas.[21] Isherwood also befriended Dodie Smith, a British novelist and playwright who had also moved to California, and who became one of the few people to whom Isherwood showed his work in progress.[22] Isherwood considered becoming an American citizen in 1945 but balked at taking an oath that included the statement that he would defend the country. The next year he applied for citizenship and answered questions honestly, saying he would accept non-combatant duties like loading ships with food. The fact that he had volunteered for service with the Medical Corps helped as well. At the naturalization ceremony, he found he was required to swear to defend the nation and decided to take the oath since he had already stated his objections and reservations. He became an American citizen on 8 November 1946.[23] He began living with the photographer William "Bill" Caskey. In 1947, the two traveled to South America. Isherwood wrote the prose and Caskey took the photographs for a 1949 book about their journey entitled The Condor and the Cows.

On Valentine's Day 1953, at the age of 48, he met teenaged Don Bachardy among a group of friends on the beach at Santa Monica. Reports of Bachardy's age at the time vary, but Bachardy later said, "At the time I was probably 16."[24] In fact, Bachardy was 18. Despite the age difference, this meeting began a partnership that, though interrupted by affairs and separations, continued until the end of Isherwood's life.[25] During the early months of their affair, Isherwood finished—and Bachardy typed—the novel on which he had worked for some years, The World in the Evening (1954). Isherwood also taught a course on modern English literature at Los Angeles State College (now California State University, Los Angeles) for several years during the 1950s and early 1960s. The 30-year age difference between Isherwood and Bachardy raised eyebrows at the time, with Bachardy, in his own words, "regarded as a sort of child prostitute,"[26] but the two became a wellknown and well-established couple in Southern Californian society with many Hollywood friends. Down There on a Visit, a novel published in 1962, comprised four related stories that overlap the period covered in his Berlin stories. In the opinion of many reviewers, Isherwood's finest achievement was his 1964 novel A Single Man, that depicted a

day in the life of George, a middle-aged, gay Englishman who is a professor at a Los Angeles university. During 1964 Isherwood collaborated with American writer Terry Southern on the screenplay for the Tony Richardson film adaptation of The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh's caustic satire on the American funeral industry. Isherwood and Bachardy lived together in Santa Monica for the rest of Isherwood's life. Bachardy became a successful artist with an independent reputation, and his portraits of the dying Isherwood became well known after Isherwood's death.[27] Isherwood died at age 81 in 1986 in Santa Monica, California. His body was donated to science at UCLA, and his ashes were later scattered at sea.[28]

Plaque, Nollendorfstraße 17. Christopher Isherwood lived here between March 1929 and January/February 1933.

Later recognition

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The house in the Schöneberg district of Berlin where Isherwood lived bears a memorial plaque to mark his stay there between 1929 and 1933. The 2008 film Chris & Don: A Love Story chronicled Isherwood and Bachardy's lifelong relationship. A Single Man was adapted into a film A Single Man in 2009. In 2010 Isherwood's autobiography, Christopher and His Kind, was adapted into a television film by the BBC, starring Matt Smith as Isherwood and directed by Geoffrey Sax.[29] It was broadcast in France and Germany on the Arte channel in February 2011, and in Britain on BBC 2 the following month.

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All the Conspirators (1928; new edition 1957 with new foreword) The Memorial (1932) Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935; U.S. edition titled The Last of Mr Norris) The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935, with W. H. Auden) The Ascent of F6 (1937, with W. H. Auden) Sally Bowles (1937; later included in Goodbye to Berlin)

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On the Frontier (1938, with W. H. Auden) Lions and Shadows (1938, autobiography) Goodbye to Berlin (1939) Journey to a War (1939, with W. H. Auden) Bhagavad Gita, The Song of God (1944, with Prabhavananda) Vedanta for Modern Man (1945) Prater Violet (1945) The Berlin Stories (1945; contains Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin; reissued as The Berlin of Sally Bowles, 1975) Vedanta for the Western World (Unwin Books, London, 1949, ed. and contributor) The Condor and the Cows (1949, SouthAmerican travel diary) What Vedanta Means to Me (1951, pamphlet) The World in the Evening (1954) Down There on a Visit (1962) An Approach to Vedanta (1963) A Single Man (1964) Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965) Exhumations (1966; journalism and stories) A Meeting by the River (1967) Essentials of Vedanta (1969) Kathleen and Frank (1971, about Isherwood's parents) Frankenstein: The True Story (1973, with Don Bachardy; based on their 1973 film script) Christopher and His Kind (1976, autobiography)

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My Guru and His Disciple (1980) October (1980, with Don Bachardy) The Mortmere Stories (with Edward Upward) (1994) Where Joy Resides: An Isherwood Reader (1989; Don Bachardy and James P. White, eds.) Diaries: 1939–1960, Katherine Bucknell, ed. (1996) Jacob's Hands: A Fable (1997) originally cowritten with Aldous Huxley Lost Years: A Memoir 1945–1951, Katherine Bucknell, ed. (2000) Lions and Shadows (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) Kathleen and Christopher, Lisa Colletta, ed. (Letters to his mother, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press], 2005) Isherwood on Writing (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969 Katherine Bucknell, ed. 2010 Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983 Katherine Bucknell, ed. 2012 The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, Edited by Katherine Bucknell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)

Translations:

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Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals (1930; revised edition 1947) The Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita (with Swami Prabhavananda, 1944) Shankara's Crest-Jewel of Discrimination (with Swami Prabhavananda, 1947) How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali (with Swami Prabhavananda, 1953)

Work on Vedanta and the West Vedanta and the West was the official publication of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. It offered essays by many of the leading intellectuals of the time and had contributions from Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Alan Watts, J. Krishnamurti, W. Somerset Maugham, and many others. Isherwood was Managing Editor from 1943 until 1945. Together with Huxley and Heard, he served on the Editorial Advisory Board from 1951 until 1962. Isherwood wrote the following articles that appeared in Vedanta and the West: 

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Vivekananda and Sarah Bernhardt – 1943 On Translating the Gita – 1944 Hypothesis and

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The Marriage of Ramakrishna – 1960 The Coming of the Bhariravi – 1960

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Belief – 1944 The Gita and War – 1944 What is Vedanta? – 1944 Ramakrishna and Vivekananda – 1945 The Problem of the Religious Novel – 1946 Religion Without Prayers – 1946 Foreword to a Man of Boys – 1950 An Introduction – 1951 What Vedanta Means to Me – 1951 Who Is Ramakrishna? – 1957 Ramakrishna and the Future – 1958 The Home of Ramakrishna – 1958 Ramakrishna: A First Chapter –

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Some Visitors to Dakshineswar – 1960 Tota Puri – 1960 The Writer and Vedanta – 1961 Mathur – 1961 Sarada and Chandra – 1962 Keshab Sen – 1962 The Coming of the Disciples – 1962 Introduction to Vivekananda – 1962 Naren – 1963 The Training of Naren – 1963 An Approach to Vedanta – 1963 The Young Monks – 1963 Some Great Devotees – 1963 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna – 1963 The Last Year –

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1959 The Birth of Ramakrishna – 1959 The Boyhood of Ramakrishna – 1959 How Ramakrishna Came to Dakshineswar – 1959 Early Days at Dakshineswar – 1959 The Vision of Kali – 1960

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1964 The Story Continues – 1964 Letters of Swami Vivekananda – 1968 Essentials of Vedanta – 1969

In 1948 several articles from Vedanta and the West were issued in book form as Vedanta for the Western World. Isherwood edited the selection and provided an introduction and three articles ("Hypothesis and Belief," "Vivekananda and Sarah Bernhardt," "The Gita and War"). Other contributors included Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Swami Prabhavananda, Swami Vivekananda et al.

7 Things You Never Knew About Christopher Isherwood By Chris Freeman    

Co-authored by James J. Berg

The American Isherwood (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) Christopher Isherwood (1904-86) was an AngloAmerican writer whose novels, memoirs, plays, and diaries span the 20th century, from his modernist beginnings in the late 1920s to his pathbreaking memoirs of the 1970s. 1. Isherwood’s best known work is not quite his own.

The latest revival of the musical Cabaret recently closed on Broadway and is headed out on the road. Having seen the likes of Sienna Miller and Emma Stone as the iconic Sally Bowles, this musical drama first appeared on stage in 1966 with a book Joe Masteroff, music by John Kander, and lyrics by Fred Ebb. Cabaret is based on the stage play, I Am a Camera by John Van Druten, which was based on “stories by Christopher Isherwood, “ including “Sally Bowles” and “Berlin Diary” from Isherwood’s 1938 novel, Goodbye to Berlin. Cabaret ran for nearly three years. It was made into a groundbreaking film by Bob Fosse in 1972 and swept the Academy Awards even though it was up against The Godfather. Perhaps the big winner was Liza Minnelli for Best Actress. Upon seeing the stage play for the first time, Isherwood reportedly said, “I don’t recognize my own child.” But it sure paid the bills over the years, and he was happy with all of those Oscars. 2. Isherwood one-upped the government by not marrying his long-time partner. Reader, he adopted him. In the 1970s, Isherwood and his partner, the artist Don Bachardy, were probably the most photographed gay couple in the world. Every new and established photographer who came to Los Angeles wanted a picture. And they posed. David Hockney painted them sitting side by side in the

arm chairs in their living room. The thirty-year difference in their ages (Bachardy was 18 and Isherwood 49 when they met in 1953) was scandalous to some. Their friend, the pioneering psychologist Evelyn Hooker, whose research led to the American Psychological Association removing homosexuality as a pathology from the DSM, was sufficiently scandalized that she asked them to move out from her garden apartment because of the appearance of impropriety. Since they could not legally marry, in order to leave Don the house they shared and the royalties from his works, they arranged in the late 1970s for Chris to adopt Don.

Filmmakers Guido Santi and Tina Mascara made the documentary Chris & Don: A Love Story, which was released in 2007 by Zeitgeist. Their essay about making the film, called “Labor of Love,” appears in The American Isherwood. 3. Isherwood moved to the United States with his best friend since childhood, the poet W. H. Auden. They both became American citizens. Isherwood and Auden landed in New York City in January 1939: Auden took to New York, and New York took to him. Not so for Isherwood. While Auden was all interiors and darkness, Isherwood was outdoors and light. Isherwood took a Greyhound bus to California in the spring and settled in Los Angeles for good, looking for work in screenwriting and for a place to call home. Like many before and after him, Isherwood reinvented himself in LA—as an American, as a writer, and as an out gay man.

Isherwood’s wide smile indicates how much he loved going on new adventures with his fellowtraveler, W.H. Auden. 4. Isherwood was multicultural before multicultural was cool. Before “multiculturalism” became an educational buzzword in the 1980s, it was a key theme in Isherwood’s A Single Man. The novel, which many consider his best, is based loosely on his experience teaching at Cal State L.A. While some of Isherwood’s terminology may seem dated, his depiction of minorities in the novel is, ultimately, progressive. Isherwood’s treatment of the realities of a 1960s multicultural, multiethnic campus is that it is not a problem to be solved but a matter of fact.

(Note: you won’t find a multicultural LA in Tom Ford’s adaptation of A Single Man.)

Colin Firth as the pensive George in the reissue of the paperback by the University of Minnesota Press. 5. Isherwood was responsible for getting E. M. Forster’s gay novel, Maurice, published in the United States in 1971. Then he gave away the royalties.

When E. M. Forster died in 1970, he left behind a much revised manuscript for the novel Maurice, an unapologetically romantic story that he insisted have a happy ending for its gay couple. Forster allowed his close friends to read the manuscript. Isherwood read it for the first time in 1933, twenty years after it was written, and found it beautiful and revolutionary. Forster hesitated to publish it (if he could get someone to publish it) for fear of embarrassment to his married policeman boyfriend and to his mother, who lived on into her 90s. Forster entrusted Isherwood with the manuscript with instructions to have it published in the United States after his death. Isherwood transferred the advance and all future royalties to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York to establish the E. M. Forster Award, which to this day supports British writers visiting the United States. Past winners include Nick Hornby and Jeannette Winterson.

The gay filmmaking team of Merchant-Ivory made a successful adaptation of Maurice in 1987, starring a young Hugh Grant, an uptight James Wilby, and a naked Rupert Graves.. 6. Isherwood helped popularize yoga (and Hinduism) in the United States. Long before the Beatles discovered Eastern religions, Isherwood became a disciple of the Hindu monk, Swami Prabhavananda, the leader of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. He was introduced to the Swami in 1940 by his friends Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. Isherwood studied Hindu philosophy, translated sacred texts, and practiced meditation and yoga from 1940 until his death in 1986. He also reviewed books and wrote articles for the Society’s newsletter, Vedanta for the Western World. His short story, “The Wishing Tree,” is considered a model of the parable form and a key to understanding the Hindu idea of karma.

Philosopher Gerald Heard and Isherwood at Swami’s feet in the 1940s. 7. Isherwood found a new audience, especially gay readers, through the pulp publishing of the 1950s. Pulp novels became popular after the Second World War, and readers in small towns all over the country could pick up titles like Satan Was a Lesbian and Sister for Sale for less than a dollar. Legitimate, and even literary, writers also found an audience in that format, and several of Isherwood’s novels were successful—lurid covers may have

helped sell The World in the Evening and Goodbye to Berlin. Once gay readers around the world found these books, they wrote to the author and frequently received a welcome response. Correspondence with readers became a regular part of Isherwood’s routine. He read their poetry and novels, he gave them feedback, and he encouraged their confidences. Sometimes the confidences were accompanied by photographs or fanciful drawings and tales of sexual (mis)adventures.

A typical teasing pulp cover from the 1950s. James J. Berg (College of the Desert) and Chris Freeman (University of Southern California) are the editors of the Lambda Award-winning anthology The Isherwood Century and, most recently, The American Isherwood. On May 14th, Freeman and author Christopher Bram and other guests will host an event at 7pm at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division at the NYC LGBT Center at 208 W. 13th Street, Room 210, NY, NY 10001. The event is free and open to the public. Follow Chris Freeman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/drchrisisfree

December 19, 2013

The Myths of Christopher Isherwood Edward Mendelson Bettmann/Corbis

Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden in London on their departure for China, 1938

Liberation: Diaries, Volume Three: 1970–1983 by Christopher Isherwood, edited and with an introduction by Katherine Bucknell, and a preface by Edmund White Harper, 875 pp., $39.99

1. Most of Christopher Isherwood’s novels are autobiogr aphical. Many are nar- rated by someone named either Chris- topher Isherwood or William Bradshaw. Despite this, Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood—the name he was given at birth in 1904—was in some ways the least egocentric of novelists. The narrator who shares his name seems almost invisible, merely a hole in the air. All the other characters, who reveal their secrets to him while asking nothing in return, are physically real and emotionally larger than life. The rogue and double agent Mr. Norris in Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935), the bohemian chanteuse Sally Bowles in

Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the titanic film director Friedrich Bergmann in Prater Violet (1945), the dissolute archaeologist Ambrose and male courtesan Paul in Down There on a Visit (1962), and, in Isherwood’s fictionalized memoir Lions and Shadows (1938), the eccentric Hugh Weston, modeled on W.H. Auden, are all flamboyantly themselves, while “Christopher Isherwood” scarcely exists at all. In his nonfictional memoirs, Isherwood writes about himself as if he were not a single person but a disconnected sequence of persons. In Kathleen and Frank (1971) and Christopher and His Kind (1976) he writes about his present-day self in the first person, as “I,” and his younger self in the third person, as “Christopher.” Even his present self is less an individual than a generic member of a collective tribe—the gay tribe of

Christopher and His Kind —or the replaceable occupant of a social role, as he describes himself in the title My Guru and His Disciple (1980). To an editor who met him infrequently, he seemed a different person each time. He reported to a friend in 1939, “I am so utterly sick of being a person.” He was already, in private, convinced that he wasn’t one. “As a person , I really don’t exist,” he told his diary in 1938: That is one of the reasons why I can’t believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My “character” is 1 of 7

A simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversa tion a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my “feelings” are dictated by purely physical, exte

rnal stimuli. In 1939, after leaving England for America, he took up Vedanta, a religion he had never heard of earlier. Journalists and friends imagined that he h ad experienced a conversion to new values and a new sense of himself. In fact, he had adopted a rel igion that, unlike the cradle-Christianity he was reared in, confirmed what he already believed, that his personality was an illusion from which he must escape. Introducing a collection titled Vedanta for the Western World (1945), he envisioned “all the teachers and prophets” telling him: “Christopher Isherwood i s only an appearance.... He has no essential reality.” A few years before his death in 1986 he t old an interviewer that he still thought as he did in 1938: “I have no sense of myself as a person exactl y, just as a lot of reactions to things.” Single Man (1964) was the first of his novels in which he mad e no secret of his homosexuality, and the book launched his public transformation int o someone whom younger readers valued as a “gay icon” and a “role model.” Icons and role mod els are inherently generic; the more personal

and idiosyncratic someone seems, the less other peo ple can project on him an iconic, idealized version of themselves. Isherwood the gay icon provo ked simple and intense reactions, both for and against, of a kind that Isherwood the man never pro mpted. Two book titles, The Isherwood Century (2000) and Middlebrow Queer (2013) , suggest the opposing extremes of his reputation. Much as he enjoyed iconic status—“my biggest emotion al thrill” on a speaking tour “was my reception at the Gay Academic Union meeting”— he neve r confused his generic image with his private self. “I’d enjoy posing as one of the Grand Old Men of the movement,” he wrote in his diary. What gave him the most pleasure was not personal ad ulation but the collective response of one group to another: The kind of love which young people feel for old fi gurehead people like me is perfectly healthy, beautiful indeed, not in the least silly and woe un to young people who are incapable of feeling it.... But

it is so important for the old figureheads not to take this love personally; to understand that it is simply an effect of the interaction betw een age groups—to understand this makes it more beautiful, not less. Yet his pleasure was mixed with his sense that an i con’s “warmest supporters are the ones who do the most...to make you look ridiculous.” During his lifetime, A Single Man was the only book in which Isherwood portrayed him self as a fully formed individual, not as a repertoire of reactions or a member of a tribe. His fictional representati ve, George—like his author, an English expatriate teachi ng at a college in Southern California—has the titanic feelings and appetites that, in his other b ooks, were reserved for everyone else: I am alive , he says to himself, I am alive! And life-energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. Early in the book George thinks of himself as belon ging to the homosexual “minority,” angrily at

odds with the heterosexual majority, competing with other minorities for recognition of its sufferings . Later, the book unobtrusively transforms George fro m a partisan of one minority into an Everyman 2 of 7 who shares with everyone else his membership in “th e ranks of that marvelous minority, The Living.” The price George pays for being himself is loneline ss. He is a single man, not merely because his lover, Jim, has died the day before, but because th e novel is built on two of Isherwood’s deepest beliefs, which he never fully articulated. One was his belief that he could enjoy any kind of relationship only by denying or suppressing his per sonality and either becoming a member of a tribe or filling a generic role. (He role-played, he said , “to reassure myself that I wasn’t alone! ”) The other was his belief that he could, in fact, exist as an individual person, with an individual’s compl ex motives and contradictory feelings, but only secret ly and in solitude. He portrays himself in his diaries as a unique pers on, but during his lifetime he kept this portrait

secret, even from his companion of thirty years, Do n Bachardy, though he assumed that Bachardy would read and publish the diaries after his death. He was willing to let other people see who he was, but only when he was no longer there to be seen. Unlike the insubstantial narrators of his novels an d memoirs, the Isherwood of his diaries is emphatically tangible. Like Montaigne, he records b odily realities—physical discomforts, the consistency of his stools, his favored sexual posit ion, his weight—in the same pages in which he thinks about society and art. The three posthumousl y published volumes of his diaries are more vivid, memorable, and complex than almost everything in hi s novels and memoirs. In his last novel, A Meeting by the River (1967), Isherwood divided himself into two brother s whose diaries and letters narrate the story. One brother withdraws from the world to become a Hindu monk; the other returns to the world of emotional b etrayals, public success, and sexual appetite. At the same time that Isherwood was simplifying himsel f into two cartoon figures who endure mirror-image doubts before settling back into their two-dimensional selves, he was portraying in his

diary the tangled and unresolvable impulses of his single, solitary self.

2. Isherwood was born into the English landed gentry, heir to two ancient houses in Cheshire. When he finally inherited, he was living in America, and si gned over the estate to his younger brother. He was eleven when his father, who enjoyed painting and so ldiering, was killed in World War I. Isherwood spent much of his early life battling his mother, only intermittently aware that what he called his “puritanical nature” was a copy of hers. “I was an upper-middle-class Puritan, cautious, a bit stingy, with a stake in the land,” he wrote in a memoir. “At bottom, I’m stuffy and cautious,” he told his diary. “Snooty I must be,” he told a frien d. At Cambridge he was too proud to accept anything less than the first-class degree that he h ad neglected to work hard enough to achieve, so he deliberately failed his exams by answering one ques tion in sonnets and another with a textual analysis of the question itself. His first two novels indicted his mother for the mi series of his whole generation. All the Conspirators (1928) reports its characters’ thoughts in a style derived from James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but,

unlike both his models, Isherwood was less interest ed in individual lives than in collective, tribal identities. In a preface to a later reissue, he obs erved that he had given inner lives only to the you nger characters, even the contemptible ones; the older c haracters are merely surfaces: 3 of 7

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Our youthful author is so emotionally involved in “ the great war between the old and young” [a phrase from Shelley’s The Cenci ] that he keeps forgetting his lesser loyalties and antagonisms. His motto is: My Generation—right or wrong! His tribal enemies included his readers, from whom he concealed crucial events by describing them only in oblique retrospective comments. “I now dete ct a great deal of repressed aggression in this kind of obscurity,” he wrote later. His second nove l, The Memorial (1932), was less aggressive, but still written more in Virginia Woolf’s style than h is own.

Three years later, writing Mr. Norris Changes Trains , he found the transparent, colloquial style that he used for the rest of his life. It is made up of simple declarative sentences, varied by an occasion al subordinate clause, typically appended to the end o f a paragraph like an afterthought: After lunch, Arthur [Norris] lay down to rest. I to ok his trunks in a taxi to the Lehrter Station and deposited them in the cloakroom. Arthur was anx ious to avoid a lengthy ceremony of departure from the house. The tall detective was on duty now. He watched the loading of the taxi with interest, but made no move to follow. Isherwood used this style when narrating a story an d describing his characters, but switched to a more elaborate, metaphoric style when setting a sce ne, as in the opening of Goodbye to Berlin : From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cel lar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, di rty plaster frontages embossed with scroll-work and heraldic devices. The whole distric t is like this: street leading into street of

houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with th e tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class. The next paragraph begins with the famous sentence in which he declared himself not quite a person: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive , recording, not thinking.” The transparent and poetic variants of his style correspond to the two writers he most revered, Chekhov and Virginia Woolf. The casual tone of Isherwood’s stories about Berlin —its resident Communists, Nazis, and bourgeois, and visitors such as Mr. Norris and Sally Bowles— led critics to treat him as more noteworthy for promise than achievement. He “holds the future of t he English novel in his hands,” Somerset Maugham said. Cyril Connolly called him “our most p romising novelist.” He was celebrated for a light and tolerant comic touch, but as he insisted in his diaries, his comic style made a serious poin t. The frivolities in the foreground never fully conce aled the suicides and political murders in the background. Anyone with the safety and leisure requ ired to write—or read—these stories was

someone who turned away from the disaster. t school Isherwood had met Auden, who was three yea rs his junior; they became close friends when they met again after Isherwood left Cambridge. In the 1930s they collaborated on three plays for the left-wing London-based Group Theatre— The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938)—and a travel book about the Japanese invasio n of China, Journey to a War (1939). Their collaboration linked Isherwood to Au den’s burgeoning reputation as a political poet, but their plays were failures bec ause the two authors thought in opposite ways about politics and persons. 4 of 7 The published text of Dogskin (the authors’ shorthand title) ends with a scene w ritten by Isherwood

in which the hero triumphs by affirming his collect ive identity. He tells his reactionary village neighbors: “You are units in an immense army.... I am going to be a unit in the army of the other side....We are all of us completely unimportant.” When the play was staged, Auden replaced this with a scene in which the hero is killed after urgi ng his neighbors to renounce their passive existenc e as “units in an immense army,” and to become indivi duals who can choose for themselves: “I can only show you what you are doing and so force you t o choose. For choice is what you are all afraid of.” In January 1939 Auden and Isherwood sailed to New Y ork, where Auden thrived while Isherwood, feeling lost and directionless, traveled west to fi nd in Hollywood both hack screenwriting work and the Vedanta temple. Auden never lost his sense of E nglishness; Isherwood, more than any other expatriate writer, transformed himself into an Amer ican, though it took him twenty years to adapt his prose to American vocabulary and rhythms—twice as lo

ng as he expected when he said in 1943, “I’ll be working on that problem for the next ten y ears—to evolve an individual Anglo-American idiom.” In the first novel he wrote in America, Prater Violet (1945), he avoided that stylistic problem by setting the book in London in 1933–1934, while the Nazis consolidate power offstage. It is effectively the third volume of a trilogy that began with his t wo books set in Berlin. He next wrote a forgettable travel book about South America, The Condor and the Cows (1949), and what he described accurately as “my worst novel, The World in the Evening ” (1954). Isherwood was bored by writing these two books but fascinated by writing his diaries—and by rewriting earlier diaries and destroying the origin als. In his diaries, and in his published work afte r around 1960, he made himself American by taking str ength from two widespread American myths that seemed to confirm beliefs that he had held pri vately and secretly when in England. One of these myths held that one can only become on

eself by insisting on being alone, unencumbered by entangling alliances and obligation s. This was an idea shared by writers as various as Mark Twain—Huck Finn lights out for the territory to avoid being adopted and civilized—and Henry James, whose heroes and heroines choose the l onely integrity of honor over the corrupting compromises of love. The second myth, a corollary of the first, held tha t the only relations worth having with other people were not the corrupting individual relations betwee n Huck Finn and Aunt Sally, or between Lambert Strether and Maria Gostrey in James’s The Ambassadors , but those in which individual selves dissolve into something anonymous and collective. T his myth is beautiful and moving in Walt Whitman; less so in twentieth-century fantasies, sh ared ambivalently by Isherwood, about every American’s supposed need to find a collective ethni c or sexual “identity.” In public, and among groups of friends, Isherwood k ept affirming his tribal identity as a gay man. “He always used the collective ‘we,’” David Hockney

remembered; “we must do this, we must do that.” In private, in his diaries, he expressed out rage at injustices against his tribe, and at other collective injustices, but he wrote and thought as someone who felt alone in crowded rooms, someone who said “I” but not “you.” In the diaries, even Don Bachardy seems to exist as an individual person mostly when he is away from Isher wood; in their relations with each other, the two are transformed into impersonal roles, figures in a nimal masks: Isherwood is “Dobbin,” Bachardy is 5 of 7 “Kitty,” who goes “mousing” when pursuing sex away from home. These names are less embarrassing on the page than one might expect. Ish erwood, in his role as Dobbin, writes at one point that he “was so bored he could have neighed w ith anguish.” Isherwood asks himself: “Who are you—who writes all this?... What am I, I wonder?... Don is real, but I take him for granted.” A recurring theme in h is diaries—sometimes guardedly visible in his novels and memoirs—is Isherwood’s habit of treating others as roles or useful objects, not as

persons. In A Single Man , George comes to accept his lover’s death: “Jim is in the past, now. He is of no use to George any more.” Isherwood noted in his diary that Auden, though he admired A Single Man , “was shocked when George thinks that he will ‘make a new Jim.’” Isher wood misremembered what he wrote—in the novel George resolves to “find another Jim,” not “m ake” one—but he remembered what he meant. “Jim” was a role that could be filled by anyone wit h the required bodily and mental attributes. Isherwood explains to himself in his diary that Aud en “refuses to believe that this is my own attitude toward human beings.” Like Isherwood, Auden had tur ned to religion in his first years in America, but Auden’s Christian belief that he was obliged to love his neighbor as himself took as its starting point the value and dignity of the self whose whole existence Isherwood’s Vedanta denied. A few years after A Single Man , Isherwood obliquely acknowledged the effect on an other person of

being made to play a role that someone else wants h im to fulfill. He and Bachardy collaborated on a screenplay, Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), in which Frankenstein’s creature is beauti ful when first created, then turns ugly as the process of cr eation starts “reversing itself.” The psychological point is that the person who is made to play the ro le of a beloved Jim never entirely loses his individuality, and thereby makes himself ugly to hi s creator by refusing to dissolve into his creator’ s fantasy about him.

3. Liberation: Diaries, Volume Three: 1970–1983 is Isherwood’s most complex and engaging self-portrait, a posthumous triumph of the real per son whose existence he doubted. He owes much of his triumph to Katherine Bucknell’s extraordinar y tact and skill as editor. As in Diaries, Volume One: 1939–1960 (1996), The Sixties: Diaries, Volume Two: 1960–1969 (2010), and Lost Years: A Memoir, 1945–1951

(2000), Bucknell provides a sympathetic introducti on, compact annotations, and an extensive “glossary” with biographical informati on about nearly a thousand people, many of them unknown to Wikipedia. Bucknell’s notes highlight, among much else, Isherw ood’s indifference to celebrity after years working in Hollywood. He visits the famous and noto rious, but he also writes: “We visited Dorothy Miller who was adorable.... She is so full of inward j oy that her complaints seem purely camp.” I assumed while reading this that he was writing abou t a film star; the glossary informed me that she had worked for Isherwood as a cleaner and cook. Everything about Isherwood’s life is more nuanced i n his diaries than in his books. He writes of his humility before his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, and another swami: Don’t these two dear saints realize that it is the very height of pride for the proud man to have a few people before whom he humbles himself—as much as to say, behold, even I, in all my 6 of 7

greatness, am bowing down!? That is exactly what T. E. Lawrence used to do. His religion has less to do with escaping himself t han with revering another self: “My religion is wha t I glimpse of Swami’s experience of religion.” Some of the prose equals his published best. After dinner with a friend and the friend’s boring compan ion: “It was like a meal with Frankenstein and the Creature: out of politeness to Frankenstein, you ha d to let the Creature ramble on and on, lest you should seem to suggest that Frankenstein had made a mess of him.” He is glad to feel “a member of the tribe” when spe aking in public, and rages intermittently against the heterosexual “Others.” Away from the public eye , he feels impatient with tribes and groups: “Oh dear, why do we have to go around in these tribes? I would so much rather be alone with any single one of them and communicate .” He is annoyed by anyone who behaves like a stere otypical group member, and is just as impatient with the members o

f his tribe when they act like “silly faggots” as he is with women who act tribally and stereotypical ly “cunty.” But he dislikes Jews merely for being Jews, no matter how they act. A central theme of Peter Parker’s clear-eyed and in dispensable biography Isherwood: A Life Revealed (2004) is Isherwood’s habit of reshaping facts whe n reporting them in letters, diaries, and memoirs, even when he claims to tell the truth abou t matters he had airbrushed earlier. “I keep wanting to rearrange and alter the facts,” Isherwoo d writes in his diary, “so as to relate them more dramatically to my reactions.” His transparent styl e makes his diaries read like vivid, objective reporting, but Parker notes how unreliable they can be, even about such easily verifiable facts as the plot of Cabaret , the film based on the Berlin stories. Isherwood sometimes reports what seem to be facts, then reveals that he invented them, for example in an anecdote about his landlord, Norman Prounting , during a stay in London: It turns out that Rory Cameron was the driver of th e car which wrecked and so severely injured

Norman Prouting, years ago, on the Riviera. Like th e other passengers, all rich people, he apparently neglected Norman completely while he was going through the subsequent operations—Norman still limps slightly—and never offe red to help him with money. The next sentence exposes part or all of the story as Isherwood’s fantasia on a simple gesture that could have meant almost anything: “At least that’s what I infer, because of Norman’s reaction when I mentioned Rory’s name to him last night; he froze u p solid.” Isherwood’s passive camera-lens style was the product of a shaping and insistent will. In 1983, three years before he died of cancer, Ishe rwood stopped writing his first-person diaries. As he declined, Bachardy sat all day drawing portraits of him, leaving them on the floor as he finished them. A few weeks before the end, Isherwood roused himself to look at them and said, “I like the ones of him dying.” © 1963-2013 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Magazine Web Edition > March 1986 > Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood 1904-1986; Vedantist Writer/Seeker, An Inner Man of Wit, Warmth and Depth

Forty-five years ago, on a sultry July afternoon, 35year old Christopher Isherwood met and embraced Ramakrishna Vedanta in downtown Hollywood, California. Aldous Huxley, writer extraordinaire and ardent explorer of Hindu interior consciousness, had just introduced Isherwood to his

gum, Swami Prabhavananda, founder of the Hollywood Ramakrishna Mission Vedanta Society. For Isherwood, by then one of England's hottest young novelists, the encounter turned his psyche and life inside out. Suddenly a whole layer of his mind, a monkish love of Being previously only hinted at, came welling up on the wave of Vedanta philosophy and Swami's artless, God-centered personality. Isherwood's beloved writing, his Hollywood screenplay job, his world seemed tissue thin, a prism of maya that obscured the Reality of Brahman. Like Huxley, he began hungrily meditating, became a vegetarian and underwent a "conversion" to the Ramakrishna sect of Hinduism. He wrote at the time, "I'm tired of strumming on that old harp, the Ego, darling Me," and later reflected, "I couldn't write a line at that time." Swami Prabhavananda prodded and cajoled Isherwood back into writing - the two of them, both short with boyish grins and faces, like matching East and West bookends, often collaborating. The result was a rich feast of Hindu scriptural translations, Vedanta essays, a biography of Sri Ramakrishna and novels, plays and screenplays, all imbued with themes and characters of Vedanta, karma, reincarnation and the Upanishadic quest. Swami Prabhavananda died on July 4th, 1976, when Isherwood was traveling abroad, abruptly

severing their earthly friendship and guru/disciple ties. On January 4th, 1986, Christopher Isherwood died of cancer at his Santa Monica, California, home. He was 81. Again echoing Huxley in death, he requested no memorial or service, just a simple cremation. Two years ago Isherwood completed his final book, My Guru and His Disciple, a moving testimony to Swami Prabhavananda and an insightful look back at his own spiritual quest. It was a fitting endeavor for his deep winter years, the time when Hindu men traditionally seek the Self of themselves. If Christopher Isherwood had been born in Calcutta, Bengal in the 1850's he may have joined Sri Ramakrishna's coterie of bright, young disciples. In the karmic matrix of things though, he was born in August, 1904, at Wyberslegh, England, the eldest son of middle-class nobility. Against his will he was confirmed into the Anglican Church, which he loathed, regretting that he had let himself be swayed. As a young man there was little inkling of his deep spirituality and pacifism. He traveled widely, wrote incessantly, adopting E.M. Forester as a writing mentor. His homosexuality, never hidden, nudged him into writing gripping portrayals of gay individuals who were also spiritual seekers. By the time he was 30,

he was critically acclaimed for his novels set in pre-World War II Berlin, on which the hugely successful 1976 film, "Cabaret" would be based. The novels were intensely human, prophetic as far as the war was concerned and established him as a forceful dialogue-and-scene writer. Hollywood wanted him, he needed the money and his innate pacifism drove him from Europe's impending Armageddon. Arriving in Hollywood in 1939, his first two months were spent with George Heard, a fiftyish Irishman, mystic-historian who meditated 6-hours a day and founded his own monastery at Trubaco Canyon. It was eventually gifted to the Vedanta Society. Heard was the first to discover Swami Prabhavananda and Vedanta. He had introduced Huxley to the swami. Through Heard, Isherwood joined an extraordinary band of mystic explorers which included Huxley, Bertrand Russel, Chris Wood, John Yale and ex-Theosophist messiah Krishnamurti. Every Tuesday the group would enjoy a vegetarian picnic under olive trees at a faddish Hollywood open market. Through Huxley, Isherwood befriended the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky who recalled that when Isherwood first met him at his home, he fell asleep while listening to a record of Stravinsky's music. Stravinsky said that's when his affection for Isherwood began.

He worked in Hollywood's film factories, a writer for hire, a means of making money. He said of it, "The studio, is just an office I visit in the daytime, a spectacular example of the world of maya, one might say." His love, though, was meditation and talking with Swami (every Wednesday for 35 years he would drive to the Vedanta center to talk with Prabhavananda). These musings became the fodder of his many essays for the Society's "Vedanta in the West" magazine. During this time he abdicated his inherited family estate in favor of his younger brother. In 1943, Isherwood settled into the Vedanta Society monastery to work with Swami on a translation of the Bhagavad Gita. During these secluded months, he seriously considered undertaking the rigorous 12-year training of the Ramakrishna swamis. His final decision was to continue his "writing dharma." But his subsequent books manifestly carried overtones of monastic life and perspective - the last name of one novel's central character is Monk. He often spent periods of seclusion at the Vedanta monastery. In between other novels, Isherwood worked on the biography, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, over a period of six years. It began as a labor of gratitude to Swami Prabhavananda, but with monitoring from the Ramakrishna swamis and the constraints of having to write sanctimoniously, it became in

the end, "a labor of sheer will power." He privately wished that he "could have sucked some of the sanctity out of it and dimmed the light." He really wanted to write about the Hindu quest with his usual gritty texture of reality. He finally got that opportunity with his early 70's novel, A Meeting by the River, a story of two brothers, one worldly, one contemplative who becomes a Hindu swami, and their relationship with an elder swami who eventually dies. Isherwood Grafted the book into a play, which was successfully staged, and a screenplay that almost but never made it to film. Robert Adjemian, a Ramakrishna monk, said of him, "He had a certain inner quality, was warm, solid, a sensitive man with many friends." Article copyright Himalayan Academy.