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By the time I was in my mid-teens I wanted to be Christopher Isherwood.
He was a successful, published writer, a play called, "I Am A Camera",
based on his Berlin stories, was a hit on Broadway starring Julie
Harris and then became a hit movie. It would be just a few years later
that it would be turned into a musical called "Cabaret" that has played,
and is still playing, all over the world including a super revival on
Broadway. he had rich, well known men as lovers and would meet the love
of his life who was 16 when I was 17 and Christopher was 48. The man had
it all and was an exceptional writer.
This is the twenty-fifth post in a
series highlighting the best gay and lesbian authors from the 20th
century (with a few before and after that period) who have recorded in
fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay people telling what life is,
and was, during an important time of history
Twenty plus years after his death the works of Isherwood, and he himself, are as popular as ever. Is
there anyone who hasn't seen the show or movie of "Cabaret? Last year
there was a very admired documentary called, "Chris & Don: A Love
Story" and just last there was an Oscar nominated actor in a film made
of his book, "A Single Man."
| Christopher Isherwood | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood 26 August 1904 Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, CheshireNorth West England in |
| Died | 4 January 1986 (aged 81) Santa Monica, California, USA |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | English, American |
Born at Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Cheshire in 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, 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 he was reintroduced to W. H. Auden and 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-middle-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." Commenting on John Henry Mackay's Der Puppenjunge (The Hustler), 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."
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 TrainsGoodbye 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), the Broadway musical Cabaret (1966)
and the film (1972) of
the same name. (1935)
and a short novel called
After leaving Berlin in 1933, he moved around Europe, and lived in Copenhagen, Sintra, and elsewhere. He 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 ShadowsSino-Japanese War called Journey to a War (1939). (1938), using the title of an abandoned novel. Auden
and Isherwood traveled to China in 1938 to gather material for their book on the
Life in the United
States
After visiting New York on their way back to Britain, Auden and Isherwood
decided in January 1939 to emigrate to the United States. Their emigration
happened just months before Britain entered the Second World War, and
exposed them to charges that they lacked patriotism and commitment to the war
effort. 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 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.
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 November 8, 1946.
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, 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. Reports of Bachardy's age at the time vary, but Bachardy later said
"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. 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 more than 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", 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, 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 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 in Santa
Monica, California from prostate cancer. His body was donated to
medical science, specifically to the UCLA Medical
School
Later recognition
Plaque, Nollendorfstraße 17. Christopher Isherwood
lived here between March 1929 and January/February 1933.
The house in the Schöneberg district of Berlin where Isherwood
lived bears a plaque memorializing his stay there between 1929 and 1933.
The 2008 film Chris
& Don: A Love Story chronicled Isherwood and Bachardy's lifelong
relationship.[9]
A Single Man was adapted into a film of the same name in 2009.[10]
List of works
- 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)
- 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 Isherwood's 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; Don Bachardy and James
P. White, eds.) - Diaries: 1939–1960, Katherine Bucknell, ed. (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, Katherine Bucknell, ed. (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, Lisa Colletta, ed. (Letters to his mother,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press], 2005) - Isherwood on Writing University of Minnesota Press, 2007)
This is from some of the road company out of NY.Will get more info on this.