Christopher Isherwood

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Christopher Isherwood

(born Aug. 26, 1904, High Lane, Cheshire, Eng. — died Jan. 4, 1986, Santa Monica, Calif., U.S.) British-born U.S. writer. Educated at Cambridge University, he became close friends with W.H. Auden, with whom he traveled and collaborated on three verse dramas, including The Ascent of F6 (1936). He lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933; his two novels about this period, later published together as The Berlin Stories (1946), inspired the play I Am a Camera (1951; film, 1955) and the musical Cabaret (1966; film, 1972). A pacifist, he moved to southern California at the beginning of World War II, where he taught and wrote screenplays. His later fiction and memoirs reflect his homosexuality. A follower of Swami Prabhavananda, he wrote and translated works on Indian Vedanta.

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Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was a British-born American writer who worked in many genres, including fiction, drama, film, travel, and autobiography. He was especially esteemed for his stories about Berlin in the early 1930s.

The son of a career military officer, Christopher Isherwood was born in High Lane, Cheshire, England, on August 26, 1904. He attended the Repton School from 1919 to 1922 and Cambridge University from 1924 to 1925. His university year was significant because it was at Cambridge that he met Wystan Hugh Auden, with whom he later collaborated on several literary projects, and because it was there that he became a practicing homosexual, an orientation which played an important role in his personal and artistic life.

Leaving the university without a degree, Isherwood worked for a year as the secretary to French violinist Andre Mangeot and as a private tutor in London. In his spare hours he worked on his first novel, which was published as All the Conspirators in 1928.

Scenes of a Crumbling Germany

In 1929 he went to Germany to visit Auden, who was living there, and was attracted to life in the crumbling Weimar Republic, and particularly to the sexual freedom that existed. As he so succinctly put it in his 1976 book Christopher and His Kind 1929-1939, "Berlin meant Boys." He was not long in establishing a liaison with Berthold "Bubi" Szczesny, a bisexual ex-boxer, which lasted until Szczesny was forced to leave the country. Among the young men he met subsequently was one from the working class section of Berlin; he took a room with this boy's family for a time and so became familiar with day-to-day living among the urban proletariat.

At first his stay in Germany was financed through an allowance provided by his only wealthy relative, his uncle Henry Isherwood. His uncle was also homosexual and seemed happy to assist his nephew in the quest for companions. Eventually, however, Uncle Henry stopped his remittances, and Isherwood paid his way by tutoring in English; in this way he met Berliners from the upper classes.

All this provided background for his most successful work, The Last of Mr. Norris (1935), Sally Bowles (1937), and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), all collected under the title The Berlin Stories in 1945. In these novellas and short stories he presented an in-depth portrait of life in Germany's capital as the republican center collapsed, the Communists tried desperately to stem the rightist tide, and the Nazis came to power.

He began in "A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930)" with an almost offhand observation about Fráulein Hippi, a student whom the narrator is tutoring in English: "Like everyone else in Berlin, she refers continually to the political situation, but only briefly, with a conventional melancholy…. It is quite unreal to her." In "Sally Bowles," he mentioned the closing of two major banks and noted: "One alarmist headline stood out boldly, barred with blood-red ink: 'Everything Collapses'."

In "The Nowaks," about a working class family, he described their neighborhood in this way: "The entrance to the Wassertorstrasse was … a bit of old Berlin, daubed with hammers and sickles and Nazi crosses and plastered with tattered bills…." The political pressures are seen increasing in "The Landauers," about a well-to-do Jewish family: "One night in October 1930, about a month after the Elections, there was a big row on the Leipzigerstrasse. Gangs of Nazi toughs turned out to demonstrate against the Jews. They … smashed the windows of all the Jewish shops." Finally, in "A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-33)," the narrator observes: "Schleicher has resigned. Hitler has formed a cabinet…. Nobody thinks it can last until the spring."

The Berlin stories were picked up by playwright John van Druten, who was struck by a sentence in "A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930)": "I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive, recording not thinking." He wrote the play I Am a Camera, centering on Sally Bowles, of whom Alan Wilde wrote: "Sally's charm is her naíveté, … her total capacity for self-deception and self-contradiction, … her ability to accommodate herself to each new situation…." I Am a Camera in turn became the musical Cabaret (1967), with book by Joe Masteroff and lyrics by Fred Ebb, which was produced both on stage and in film.

Isherwood of course became fluent in German and got acquainted, as did Auden, with the expressionist drama of such important figures as Ernst Toller, Georg Kaiser, and Bertolt Brecht. This led the two British artists to collaborate on three expressionist plays: The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1937), and A Melodrama in Three Acts: On the Frontier (1938), of which the first two are generally considered the more successful.

Move to the United States

Isherwood and Auden travelled to China in 1938 and in 1939 worked together on Journey to a War. In that same year, the year World War II began, both came to America, a move which made them anathema to many Britons. Indeed, even three years later in Put Out More Flags novelist Evelyn Waugh, christening them Parsnip and Pimpernell, commented, "What I don't see is how these two can claim to be contemporary if they run away from the biggest event in contemporary history."

During World War II Isherwood wrote scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Brothers, and 20th Century Fox film studios; worked for a year in a refugee center in Haverford, Pennsylvania; and became a resident student of the Vedanta Society of Southern California and co-editor of the group's magazine Vedanta and the West.

He became increasingly involved in the Vedantist religion, editing the volumes Vedanta for the Western World in 1945 and Vedanta for Modern Man in 1951 and writing An Approach to Vedanta in 1963, Ramakrishna and His Disciples in 1965, and Essentials of Vedanta in 1969. He explained its basic tenets in the 1963 work as follows: "We have two selves - an apparent, outer self and an invisible, inner self. The apparent self claims to be an individual and as such, other than all other individuals…. The real self is unchanging and immortal."

Isherwood did not confine himself solely to religious writings, however. He authored such novels as Prater Violet (1945), The World in the Evening (1954), A Single Man (1964), and A Meeting by the River (1967), which he dramatized in 1972. He also wrote the travel book The Condor and the Cows (1949), autobiographical volumes, and the collection of stories, articles, and poems titled Exhumations (1966). Additionally, he taught at Los Angeles State University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of California at Los Angeles and wrote film scripts.

Isherwood's status in modern literature was best summarized by G. K. Hall: "Christopher Isherwood has always been a problem for the critics. An obviously talented writer, he has refused to exploit his artistry for either commercial success or literary status…. Isherwood was adjudged a 'promising writer' - a designation that he has not been able to outrun even to this day. It is still a clicheé of Isherwood criticism to say that he never fulfilled his early promise….In any case, five decades of Isherwood criticism present a history of sharply divided opinion."

Isherwood, who became an American citizen in 1946, lived and worked in southern California until his death from cancer January 4, 1986.

Biography

British author and screenwriter Christopher Isherwood began his writing career while enrolled at Cambridge University writing two novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial. In 1929, he moved to Berlin during the decadent period between the wars. His experiences there inspired him to write the autobiographical Berlin Stories, many of which featured his friend, cabaret singer Sally Bowles. These tales were later adapted into the 1952 play I Am a Camera which after being made into a British film in 1955 evolved into the Broadway musical Cabaret, an Oscar-winning film in 1972. Isherwood, accompanied by his associate and collaborator W.H. Auden moved to the U.S. in 1939 where Isherwood continued writing novels such as Prater Violet and A Single Man. He also began writing screenplays including Rage in Heaven, Diane and The Sailor from Gibraltar. He collaborated on the writing of the television movie Frankenstein: the True Story. In 1977, Isherwood's fascinating life was profiled in Christopher Isherwood: Over There on a Visit Later Isherwood would frequently give lectures on the college circuit. He made a cameo appearance in the film Rich and Famous (1981). ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Wikipedia: Christopher Isherwood

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

Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (August 26, 1904 – January 4, 1986) was an Anglo-American novelist.

1 Early life and work
2 Life in the U.S.
3 Work on Vedanta and the West
4 List of works
5 Notes
6 Further reading
7 External links

Early life and work

Born at Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Cheshire in the North West England, Isherwood spent his childhood in various towns where his father, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army, was stationed. After his father was killed in the First World War, he settled with his mother in London and at Wyberslegh.

Isherwood attended preparatory school St. Edmund's, Surrey, where he first met W. H. Auden. At Repton School he met his lifelong friend Edward Upward, with whom he wrote the extravagant "Mortmere" stories, only one of which was published during his lifetime (a few others appeared after his death, and others were summarised in his 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, working as secretary to Mangeot's string quartet and studying medicine; during this time he wrote a book of nonsense poems, People One Ought to Know (published 1982), with illustrations by Mangeot's eleven-year-old son, Sylvain.

In 1925 he was reintroduced to W. H. Auden, and became Auden's literary mentor and partner in an intermittent, casual liaison, as 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 is 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 it up after six months to join Auden for a few weeks in Berlin.

Rejecting his upper-class background and attracted to males, 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."^[1] Isherwood commented on the Berlin sex underground, and his own participation in it, in a note to the American publisher of John Henry Mackay's Der Puppenjunge (The Hustler), "a classic boy-love novel set in the contemporary milieu of boy prostitutes in Berlin." "It gives a picture of the Berlin sexual underworld early in this century," wrote Isherwood, "which I know, from my own experience, to be authentic."^[2]

In 1931 he met Jean Ross, the inspiration of 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 a mentor to the young writer. Isherwood's second novel, The Memorial (1932), was another of his stories of conflict between mother and son, based closely on his own family history. During one of his returns 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 series of short stories collected under the title Goodbye to Berlin (1939). These provided the inspiration for the play I Am a Camera, the subsequent musical Cabaret and the film of the same name. A memorial plaque to Isherwood has been erected on the house in Schöneberg, Berlin, where he lived.

During these years he moved around Europe, living in Copenhagen, Sintra and elsewhere, and 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 travelled to China in 1938 to gather material for their book on the Sino-Japanese War called Journey to a War (1939).

Life in the U.S.

Having visited New York on their way back to the UK, Auden and Isherwood decided to emigrate to the United States in January 1939. (The timing of this move, coming just months before Britain was engulfed in the Second World War, placed them under a cloud in the eyes of those later engaged in the total war against global fascism.) After a few months with Auden in New York, Isherwood settled in Hollywood, California.

He met Gerald Heard, the mystic-historian who founded his own monastery at Trabuco Canyon that was eventually gifted to the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Through Heard, who was the first to discover Swami Prabhavananda and Vedanta, Isherwood joined an extraordinary band of mystic explorers that included Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell^{[citation needed]}, Chris Wood (Heard's lifelong friend), John Yale and J. Krishnamurti. He embraced Vedanta, and, together with Swami Prabhavananda, he produced several Hindu scriptural translations, Vedanta essays, the biography Ramakrishna and His Disciples, novels, plays and screenplays, all imbued with the themes and character of Vedanta and the Upanishadic quest.

Through Huxley, Isherwood befriended the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. A chance encounter in a Los Angeles bookstore with the fantasy writer Ray Bradbury led to a favorable review of The Martian Chronicles, which boosted Bradbury's career and helped to form a friendship between the two men.

Bachardy at nineteen (?), photographed by Carl Van Vechten.

Isherwood became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1946; he immediately became liable for military service, but having already done volunteer work in 1941-42, at a Quaker hostel for European refugees in Pennsylvania, he had no difficulty establishing himself as a conscientious objector. He began living with the photographer William (Bill) Caskey. In 1947 the two traveled to South America; Isherwood wrote the prose and Caskey provided the photographs for a 1949 book about their journey, The Condor and the Cows.

On Valentine's Day 1953, at the age of 48, he met teen-aged Don Bachardy among a group of friends on the beach at Santa Monica. Although one can find Bachardy's age at the time variously reported, in the biographical film Chris & Don: A Love Story, Bachardy himself recalls that, "at the time I was, probably, 16." Despite the age difference, this meeting began a partnership that, though interrupted by affairs and separations, continued until the end of Isherwood's life.^[3] During the early months of their affair, Isherwood finished (and Bachardy typed) the novel he had been working on for some years, The World in the Evening (1954). Isherwood also taught a creative-writing course at Los Angeles State College (now California State University, Los Angeles) for several years during the 1950s and early '60s.

The more than 30-year age difference between Isherwood and Bachardy raised eyebrows at the time, with Bachardy (as he recalled) "regarded as a sort of child prostitute",^[4] but the two became a well-known and well-established couple in Southern Californian society, with many Hollywood friends.

Down There on a Visit, a novel published in 1962, comprises 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. 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 draughtsman with an independent reputation, and his portraits of the dying Isherwood became well-known after Isherwood's death. At the age of 81, Isherwood died in 1986 at Santa Monica, California from prostate cancer. Their lifelong relationship is chronicled in the film Chris & Don: A Love Story.

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 was on the Editorial Advisory Board from 1951 until 1962.

The following are articles published in Vedanta and the West written by Isherwood:

Vivekananda and Sarah Bernhardt - 1943
On Translating the Gita - 1944
Hypothesis and 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 God - 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 - 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
The Marriage of Ramakrishna - 1960
The Coming of the Bhariravi - 1960
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 - 1964
The Story Continues - 1964
Letters of Swami Vivekananda - 1968
Essentials of Vedanta - 1969

List of works

All the Conspirators (1928; new edn. 1957 with new foreword)
The Memorial (1932)
Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935; US edn. 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)
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)
Prater Violet (1945)
The Berlin Stories (1945; contains Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin; reissued as The Berlin of Sally Bowles, 1975)
The Condor and the Cows (1949, South-American 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 his parents)
Frankenstein: The True Story (1973, with Don Bachardy; based on their 1973 filmscript)
Christopher and His Kind (1976, autobiography)
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; selections ed. by Don Bachardy and James P. White)
Diaries: 1939-1960, ed. by Katherine Bucknell (1996)
Jacob's Hands: A Fable (1997) originally co-written with Aldous Huxley
A Meeting by the River. (New edition) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Down There on a Visit. (New edition) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
The Memorial. (New edition) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
The World in the Evening. (New edition) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Lost Years: A Memoir 1945-1951, ed. by Katherine Bucknell (2000)
Lions and Shadows. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Christopher and His Kind. (New edition) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
My Guru and His Disciple. (New edition) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Prater Violet. (New edition) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
A Single Man. (New edition) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
The Condor and the Cows. (New edition with foreword by Jeffrey Meyers) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Where Joy Resides. (New edition with introduction by Gore Vidal) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Kathleen and Christopher, ed. by Lisa Colletta. (Letters to his mother) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Isherwood on Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Translations:

Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals (1930; rev. edn. 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)

Notes

^ "Hello to Berlin, boys and books", The Telegraph; Filed: 18/05/2004. [1]
^ Hubert Kennedy, Mackay, John Henry in glbtq.com
^ Peter Parker, Isherwood, 2004.
^ "The First Couple: Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood," by Armistead Maupin, The Village Voice, Volume 30, Number 16, 2 July 1985. [2]

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Christopher Isherwood

Isherwood Exhibit at the Huntington
The Paris Review Interview
LitWeb.net: Christopher Isherwood Biography
Christopher Isherwood Foundation
Christopher Isherwood Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
Where Joy Resides An Isherwood Reader

Persondata
NAME	Isherwood, Christopher
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Isherwood, Christopher William Bradshaw (full name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Novelist, short story writer
DATE OF BIRTH	26 August 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH	Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Greater Manchester, England
DATE OF DEATH	4 January 1986
PLACE OF DEATH	Santa Monica, California, United States

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1939	Goodbye to Berlin. Published in the same year that Isherwood immigrates to the United States (he would become a naturalized citizen in 1946), this collection of autobiographical sketches of Berlin life in the years immediately preceding Hitler's coming to power would be adapted by John Van Druten as I Am a Camera (1951), which in turn became the basis for the musical Cabaret (1966).
1954	The World in the Evening. The first of Isherwood's books with an American setting shows the struggles faced by a homosexual in a homophobic society. A popular success but a critical failure, the book marks a decline in Isherwood's reputation but would later be recognized as an important precursor work for the gay liberation movement.
1964	A Single Man. Isherwood's novel, considered by many his masterpiece, treats a day in the life of an expatriate British professor in Los Angeles in the 1960s, mourning the death of his longtime lover.
1976	Christopher and His Kind. Isherwood's autobiography deals frankly with the writer's homosexual experiences between 1929 and 1939, from his arrival in Berlin to his immigration to the United States. The book helps fuel the American gay liberation movement of the period.