The Knitting Circle: Literature

Biography, work, bibliography, press cuttings.

Anglo-American writer.

Full name: Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood

Son of an army officer killed in World War I.

One of his preparatary school friends was W. H. Auden (who became a poet).

Christopher Isherwood went to school at Repton.

He then went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

He then studied medicine at King's College London (1928-29).

He gave up medicine to teach English in Germany (1930-33). He lived behind the Nollendorfplatz in Berlin. His novels Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin were based on his experience of post-slump, pre-Hitler Berlin. These became the basis, first of the play (1952) and film (1955) I Am a Camera, and then of the musical (1966) and film (1972) Cabaret.

While in Germany Christopher Isherwood had a boyfriend, Heinz, who was wanted by the police for draft evasion. He tried to get him out of the country by paying Gerald Hamilton (1888-1970) £1000 to smooth the way towards obtaining Mexican naturalisation for Heinz. Nothing came of it and Christopher Isherwood came to regard Gerald Hamilton as a rogue laced with poison. He is represented by Authur Norris in Mr Norris Changes Trains. Gerald Hamilton was also friends with Ferdinand, ex-King of Bulgaria who awarded him various decorations which he sold.

Erika Mann, the daughter of Thomas Mann, asked Christopher Isherwood to marry her so that she could obtain a British passport. He did not feel that he could do it, so he contacted W. H. Auden who did.

Christopher Isherwood travelled to China with W. H. Auden in 1938.

The character Hugh Weston in Christopher Isherwood's Lions and Shadows represents W. H. Auden.

In 1939 Christopher Isherwood emigrated to California to be a scriptwriter for MGM, and in 1946 he took US citizenship. In 1953 he started a relationship with the 18-year-old Don Bachardy who later became well known as a painter. They lived together until Christopher Isherwood died at the age of 82.

His later novels increasingly have homosexuality as a theme.

He became involved in the gay rights movement through the organisation One Inc.

He became interested in mysticism under the influence of fellow expatriate, Gerald Heard. He also became increasingly committed to the study of Hindu Vedanta and became a devoted disciple of the Vedantist Swami Prabhavananda.

Web site: http://www.theisherwoodcentury.com

Work

• All the Conspirators, 1928.

• The Memorial, 1932.

• Mr Norris Changes Trains, 1935. (Adapted for the radio by the BBC in 1984 with David March in the lead role.)

• The Dog beneath the skin, (a prose-verse play written with W. H Auden), 1935.

• The Ascent of F6, (a prose-verse play written with W. H Auden, and based in part on the legend of T. E. Lawrence), 1937.

• Sally Bowles, 1937. (The surname 'Bowles' was taken from his friend Paul Bowles.)

• On the Frontier, (a prose-verse play written with W. H Auden), 1938.

• Lions and Shadows, 1938.

• Goodbye to Berlin, 1939.

• Journey to a War, 1939.

• Translation of the Hindu epic poem, the Bhagavad Gita, (with Swami Prabhavananda), 1944.

• Translation of Baudelaire's Intimate Journals, 1947.

• I am a Camera, (a Broadway play), 1951.

• Prater Violet, 1945.

• The World in the Evening, 1954.

• Meeting by the River, 1967.

• Christopher and His Kind, (an autobiographical novel), 1963.

• A Single Man, 1964.

• Down There on a Visit, 1966.

  The short story Mr Lancaster is published in The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction.

• Kathleen and Frank, 1972.

• Living With the Backlash, (1979), an article in The New Gay Liberation Book.

• My Guru and Myself, 1980.

• Lost Years: A Memoir 1945-1951, edited by Katherine Bucknell, 2000, published by Chatto, 388 pages, ISBN 0 701 16931 1.

  • Go West, old man by Peter Ackroyd in The Times 2, 21st. June, 2000, page 17. "This 'reconstructed diary', to use his own phrase, illuminates his life in the six years after the Second World War; this was the period in which he fell in love with America in general and Californian boys in particular."

    "Yet, despite his many passages devoted to male porn. Isherwood remains a curious and memorable writer. He is a master of translucent prose, so that the events and people of these years seem to be described by a narrator as perceptive as he is unobtrusive."

  • Mad about the boys by Humphrey Carpenter in The Sunday Times Culture magazine, 25th. June, 2000, pages 35-36. "Twenty years ago, I had lunch with Christopher Isherwood. I had already spoken to him on the telephone, to ask him about the sexual side of his relationship with W H Auden, whose biography I was writing. In his then recently published autobiographical Christopher and His Kind, he had revealed that he and Auden, as well as collaborating in plays and travel books, had indulged in casual sex together whenever they had felt like it (which seemed to have been quite often)."

    "Christopher and His Kind was a key book in the gay liberation movement, pioneeringly candid in its revelations of Isherwood's homosexuality and the gay world he had inhabited all his adult life, yet wisely stopping short of intimate anatomical detail and boastful lists of sexual conquests. Lost Years - as well as dealing with a far less interesting period of Isherwood's life - falls constantly into both those errors."

    "Lost Years is peppered with tantalising non-reminiscences not just of Auden, but of Greta Garbo, Thomas Mann, and dozens more celebrities and intriguing characters who get trivial, passing mentions."

    "A particular disappointment is his failure to reveal much about Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. Isherwood had worked with Britten in the 1930s, and had seen a lot of him and Pears in America during the war, but when he attends the first Aldeburgh Festival in 1948, he has almost nothing worth saying about how Britten was changing as a composer and a human being."

    "The kindest thing one can say about Lost Years is to regard it as a dress-rehearsal for that later book. Only the passionate Isherwoodians should attend."

  • Blue remembered thrills by Ian Samsom in The Guardian: Saturday Review, 1st. July, 2000, page 9. "This shows Christopher Isherwood at his worst: solipsistic, trivial, self-obsessed, bitchy, manipulative, immature, self-indulgent, guilt-ridden, filthy-minded, stupid with drink, spiritually flushed and morally bankrupt. For six years, and for almost 300 pages, almost nothing seems to happen: Isherwood works on crappy film scripts in Hollywood during the day, goes to parties with celebrities at night, gets half drunk and has sex a lot. Sometimes he wrestles; he lies on the floor looking up at the ceiling; occasionally he pops in to see his guru. He drinks to 'blood brotherhood' with Montgomery Clift. There are orgies. Norman Mailer visits, and Marlon Brando gets to make sandwiches in Isherwood's kitchen. It is therefore a book both unreadable and unputdownable."

  • Tom, Dick and Christopher by Peter Conrad in The Observer Review, 2nd. July, 2000, pages 13. "In Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly mentioned 'the pram in the hall' as one of the obstacles to literary achievement." "Isherwood lost more than a few years in California. He also, as this sad and rather shaming book makes clear, mislaid his gift."

  • A nice piece of knitting by Mark Bostridge in The Independent on Sunday magazine, 9th. July, 2000, page 49. "For Isherwood, the years 1945 to 1951 had been a period of heavy drinking, and one for which he had kept only a scanty appointments list. The aim of Lost Years was twofold: to see if he could re-create the sequence of his life during those years, and to write explicitly about his homosexuality. He wrote in his sketch for the book: 'It might keep me amused, like knitting, but I should be getting on with something else as well'. In the event the memoir was to prove more absorbing than Isherwood had expected, and was to overshadow the film and television work he was engaged upon at the time. And although it has had to wait until now for publication, Lost Years did stimulate a highly significant shift in Isherwood's writing."

    "The 'knitting' together of Lost Years acted as a preliminary to the most successful book of Isherwood's later years, Christopher and His Kind (1977), his slice-of-life account of Berlin in the 1930s, in which he showed how his life as a homosexual was inseparable from his profession as a writer."

  • Andrew, Barry, Brad and Cliff by Robert Craft in The Times Literary Supplement, 18th. August, 2000, page 13. "Between August 1949 and September 1969, when the Stravinskys moved from California to New York, I saw Christopher Isherwood regularly, had an affectionate en famille relationship with him, and even dedicated a book to him. The Lost Years has made me aware that I knew him only as a writer and knew nothing at all about his private life. Not that his homosexuality was covert; his readers always understood that it was central to his work, though not openly acknowledged until the 1977 autobiography, Christopher and His Kind, which brought him recognition as a hero of the Gay Liberation movement. During the 1945-51 period, I rarely heard him allude to the sexual experiences that are the principal subject of the new book."

Bibliography

• Stephen Adams, (1980), "The Homosexual as Hero in contemporary fiction".

  Christopher Isherwood's representation of gay characters in his writing is discussed in detail.

• James J. Berg and Chris Freeman, (editors), (2000), "The Isherwood Century: Essays on the life and work of Christopher Isherwood", Madison: Wisconsin UP, 293 pages, ISBN 0 299 16700 3.

  IN BRIEF by Gregory Woods in The Times Literary Supplement, 16th. June, 2000, page 36. "Although it does contain some detail about his Berlin novels, this collection of essays concentrates on the years in America, which ended when Isherwood died in 1986. Not only, therefore, does 'the Isherwood century' lack its two greatest political conflicts, but it lasts less than fifty years. James J. Berg and Chris Freeman, the editors, describe Isherwood as 'the pivotal figure of his generation' without making any serious attempt to justify their downgrading of the more obvious candidate, W. H. Auden."

  "What emerges from a mixed bag of criticism and memoirs is a portrait of a rather awkward figure who, by compulsively keeping diaries and then turning them into fiction and autobiography, could do little with the present but turn it into an instant past. Isherwood once said to Edmund White, 'Write it down or it's lost'. Surely no autobiographical writer ever had so little regard for human memory."

• Joseph Bristow, (1999), " 'I am with You, Little Minority Sister': Isherwood's Queer Sixties", in "The Queer Sixties", edited by Patricia Juliana Smith

• Peter Burton, (1991) in Talking to . . . .

• Tom Cowan, (1996), Gay Men and Women Who Enriched the World.

• Brian Finney, (1979), "Christopher Isherwood: A Biography", New York: Oxford University Press.

• Winston Leyland, (editor), (1975), "Gay Sunshine Interviews", volume 1.

• Paul Robinson, (1999), "Gay Lives: Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette".

• Paul Elliott Russell, (1994), "The Gay 100".

• Claude J. Summers, (1980), "Christopher Isherwood", New York: Frederick J. Ungar.

Press cuttings

• Observing the 20th century 1950s: Back to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood in The Observer Life magazine, 19th. December, 1999, page 35. He recounts his return to Berlin on 23rd. March, 1952. "Only a very young and frivolous foreigner, I thought could have lived in such a place and found it amusing. Hadn't there been something youthfully heartless in my enjoyment of the spectacle of Berlin in the early Thirties, with its poverty, its political hatred and its despair? I felt very middle-aged now."

Biography, work, bibliography, press cuttings.

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Last altered 13th. July, 2003