Christopher Isherwood

Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was a British-born novelist who became an American citizen in 1946 and whose Berlin fiction — written in the 1930s about the last years of the Weimar Republic — established him as one of the most important English-language writers of the twentieth century. He was also, particularly in his later years, an openly gay writer whose candour about his sexuality was decades ahead of its time.

Early Life and Auden

Isherwood was born in Cheshire into an upper-middle-class English family. He attended Repton School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (where he deliberately failed his exams). His most important early relationship was with the poet W.H. Auden, whom he met at school and with whom he collaborated on three verse plays — The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938) — that were among the most celebrated theatrical works of the 1930s.

The Berlin Stories

Isherwood lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933, drawn by the city’s sexual freedom (he was openly homosexual, which was less dangerous in Weimar Berlin than in England) and its bohemian culture. His experiences produced two novels that are among the most vivid portraits of any city in any literature.

Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935, published in the US as The Last of Mr Norris) is a comic novel about a charming, disreputable con man navigating the political chaos of Berlin in the early 1930s. Goodbye to Berlin (1939) is a series of linked stories narrated by “Christopher Isherwood” — a character who famously declares, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

The stories include the unforgettable portrait of Sally Bowles — a young English would-be actress and singer living in Berlin, sexually adventurous, artistically talentless, and magnificently alive — who became one of the most famous characters in twentieth-century fiction. John van Druten adapted the stories into the play I Am a Camera (1951), which was in turn adapted into the musical Cabaret (1966) and the landmark Bob Fosse film (1972).

”I Am a Camera”

Isherwood’s famous declaration has been endlessly discussed. It is partly a manifesto of documentary realism — the writer as passive observer — and partly an evasion, since the narrator’s homosexuality is carefully concealed in the Berlin Stories (Sally Bowles’s function, among other things, is to provide a heterosexual smokescreen). Isherwood later acknowledged this evasion and wrote about his Berlin years with full candour in Christopher and His Kind (1976).

A Single Man (1964)

Isherwood’s finest novel — and arguably the greatest gay novel in the English language — follows a single day in the life of George, a middle-aged English professor in Los Angeles mourning the death of his partner Jim. The novel is a masterpiece of compressed, precise, emotionally devastating prose that captures grief, loneliness, desire, and the effort of carrying on with ordinary life when the person who gave life meaning is gone.

Tom Ford adapted the novel into a critically acclaimed film (2009) starring Colin Firth, whose performance earned an Academy Award nomination.

Vedanta and Later Life

Isherwood settled in California in 1939, became an American citizen, and became deeply involved with Vedanta Hinduism through his relationship with Swami Prabhavananda. He co-translated the Bhagavad Gita (1944) and wrote extensively about Vedanta philosophy. His novel A Meeting by the River (1967) draws on this spiritual engagement.

Christopher and His Kind (1976) is a memoir that revisits the Berlin years with complete honesty about his homosexuality — a landmark work of gay autobiography.

Isherwood, Auden, and the Emigrant Question

When Isherwood and Auden sailed for America in January 1939, the departure was viewed as a betrayal by much of literary England. The two most celebrated young writers of the 1930s — the decade of political engagement, anti-fascist commitment, and the Spanish Civil War — were abandoning Europe on the eve of its greatest crisis. Cyril Connolly attacked them. Evelyn Waugh parodied Isherwood as the “Dogskin” coward in Put Out More Flags. Questions were raised in Parliament.

Isherwood never apologised. He believed — with some justice — that his pacifism was more honest than the rhetorical leftism of writers who had never been near a firing line. And the emigration was artistically liberating: freed from the English class system and the closet, he was able to write with a directness that the Berlin Stories, for all their brilliance, had carefully avoided. The journey from “I am a camera” — the passive, concealed observer — to the raw emotional honesty of A Single Man is the journey from England to California, from concealment to candour.

Legacy

Isherwood’s reputation rests on three works: the Berlin Stories, A Single Man, and Christopher and His Kind. Together they constitute one of the most important bodies of work in twentieth-century English fiction — a literature of observation, displacement, and the courage to be honest about who one is. His influence on later gay writers — Edmund White, Alan Hollinghurst, Andrew Sean Greer — is direct and acknowledged. The Berlin Stories, through their adaptation into Cabaret, became one of the few works of literary fiction to reshape popular culture entirely.

Collecting Isherwood

Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935, Hogarth Press) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939, Hogarth Press) in first editions are the primary collectibles — scarce and valuable ($1,000–$5,000). A Single Man (1964, Simon & Schuster) in first edition is also sought. Isherwood’s books were generally printed in modest quantities.