Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, page 1
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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Photos
Copyright Page
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For the Animals and the Others
Sri Krishna:
You and I, Arjuna,
Have lived many lives.
I remember them all:
You do not remember.
Bhagavad Gita IV,
“Renunciation Through Knowledge”
Prologue
THE SS CHAMPLAIN AND THE SS AMERICAN TRADER
Christopher Isherwood was looking for a permanent loving union as he steamed across the North Atlantic toward America in January 1939. “Off the coast of Newfoundland,” he wrote in his diary, “we ran into a blizzard. The ship entered New York harbour looking like a wedding cake.”
A fair-haired American rent boy waited for him on the pier, “pinched and scarlet with the cold.”1 An English dancer waited for him back in London, hoping, after a tearful farewell in a taxi, to be sent a ticket to join Isherwood in New York. Another young Englishman was completing his undergraduate degree at Cambridge University, dejected that Isherwood had ended their romance just a few months before. In Germany, a young man of twenty-three was serving a sentence of hard labor for illegal sexual acts and draft evasion after a five-year love affair with Isherwood spent partly on the run from the Gestapo. Accompanying Isherwood aboard the Champlain was an old friend, a poet, who had fallen unrequitedly in love with him back in 1926.
There had been and would be more—many more—boys, as he romantically called them. Younger boys who needed protection; taller boys who offered it; boys with whom Isherwood felt mentally or physically matched and energetically rivalrous. He charmed them all; his charisma was legendary. Something stopped him from caring. In his 1945 novel, the overlooked gem Prater Violet, he was to write in the voice of the narrator based on himself:
Love, at the moment, was J. […] After J, there would be K., and L., and M., right down the alphabet. […] J. isn’t really what I want. J. has only the value of being now. J. will pass, the need will remain. The need to get back into the dark, into the bed, into the warm naked embrace, where J. is no more J. than K., L., or M.
Such a need—impervious to the individual personality of the beloved—was fed in Isherwood by fears that had haunted him since childhood. Fears that had been intensified by the death of his father in World War I and by the consequent shattering of his childhood world—the decline of his father’s landed family, the hopeless grief of his mother, the developmental backwardness of his younger brother, the forced parting from his German boyfriend, his growing certainty of the coming of World War II. Isherwood summarized these fears in a passage of internal monologue in Prater Violet that conveys, as fiction, his intense and continuous feeling of imminent annihilation, of the approaching end of his world and himself:
Death, the desired, the feared. The longed-for sleep. The terror of the coming of sleep. Death. War. The vast sleeping city, doomed for the bombs. The roar of oncoming engines. The gunfire. The screams. The houses shattered. Death universal. My own death. Death of the seen and known and tasted and tangible world. Death with its army of fears. Not the acknowledged fears, the fears that are advertised. More dreadful than those: the private fears of childhood. Fear of the height of the high-dive, fear of the farmer’s dog and the vicar’s pony, fear of cupboards, fear of the dark passage, fear of splitting your finger-nail with a chisel. And behind them, most unspeakably terrible of all, the arch-fear: the fear of being afraid.2
Isherwood had been on the run from fear ever since he could remember. He ran from his schoolmates in childhood. He ran from Cambridge University and a proposed academic career. He ran from Hitler’s Berlin. In 1939, at the height of the fame he shared with his lifelong friend, the poet W.H. Auden, he ran west, from New York to Hollywood, where he found work writing for the movie studios and where he unexpectedly—and to some implausibly—embraced pacifism and a new religion, Vedanta. Vedanta was personified for him in a surrogate father, a Hindu guru, who offered unconditional personal love and trained him in devotional techniques that helped control his debilitating anxiety.
Isherwood was seeking a new way of life. As he and Auden had both recognized, their writing had failed to prevent the rise of fascism and could not change the world; Isherwood resolved to change himself. As the hopes of the thirties expired and old orders and conventions collapsed around him, he turned inward, to self-examination. In the near term, this would bring accusations of escapism; in the long term, it would place him in the vanguard of a new civil society which was to prize, with evolving vocabulary and emphasis, self-understanding, self-realization, non-attachment, consciousness-raising, civil rights, equal opportunity, social justice, mindfulness, wokeness.
For more than two years during World War II, February 1943 to August 1945, Isherwood lived as a monk in the Vedanta monastery in Hollywood and considered taking preliminary vows. He managed six months of chastity before reverting to a life of spiritually illuminated promiscuity, running again—through countless new love affairs. The most important of these was a serious though ultimately self-destructive six-year relationship with a charming and belligerent Irish-Catholic-Cherokee alcoholic from Kentucky, Bill Caskey.
At last, in the spring of 1953, Isherwood fell in love with a boy who was in some ways just like all the other boys, and in other ways, completely different. Don Bachardy, Isherwood eventually wrote in his diary, “has mattered and does matter more than any of the others. Because he imposes himself more, demands more, cares more—about everything he does and encounters. He is so desperately alive.”3 With Bachardy, who became a portrait painter, Isherwood was to live the life he had long imagined—physical and domestic intimacy, shared games and disciplines, daydreaming and art. As the years unfolded, Bachardy’s passionate vitality was to carry them off Isherwood’s life script with reckless and invigorating genius and to make real, despite betrayals and separations, the storyteller’s cliché of happily ever after.
* * *
A DAY BEHIND the French liner SS Champlain that carried Isherwood across the Atlantic in 1939 steamed another boat, the SS American Trader. In boxes in the hold of the American Trader were 550 sets of printed pages for Goodbye to Berlin, the collection of fictionalized diary passages and stories based on Isherwood’s real-life experiences in Berlin from 1929 to 1933 when Hitler was rising to power. Leonard and Virginia Woolf were about to publish the book at the Hogarth Press and Bennett Cerf at Random House had bought the printed pages to bind in his own cover for the U.S. market. The pieces had already appeared individually in the U.K., mostly in the magazine New Writing, attracting widespread praise.
When reviews of Goodbye to Berlin began appearing in March, the British papers were almost uniformly positive about Isherwood’s portrait of the Berlin that had vanished six years earlier. In the U.S., recognition took until May, when the leading literary journalist Edmund Wilson published a knockout review in the New Republic. Wilson called Isherwood “a master” of social observation whose eye was free “from national or social bias.” He compared the “transparency” of Isherwood’s prose to Pushkin’s—“You seem to look right through Isherwood and to see what he sees.” Moreover, Wilson recognized Isherwood’s discipline in keeping his writing “accurate, lucid and cool” in the mounting historical crisis. The novel “never gives way to sentimentality or melodrama,” Wilson wrote. “To have done this is in itself to have scored a kind of victory at a moment when such victories count even more than they always do.”4
Goodbye to Berlin secured Isherwood’s fame. It trademarked his view of the city in ways that made it impossible for him ever to say goodbye, really, to Berlin. Berlin followed him across the Atlantic in the pages of his book and made him the center of continuing public attention that shaped his life both from the inside and from the outside. In 1951, one of the stories, “Sally Bowles,” was adapted for the stage and became a hit Broadway play, I Am a Camera. In 1955, the play became a film. In 1966, it was transformed again into Cabaret, one of the most successful musicals of all time. In 1972, Cabaret was adapted for the screen, launching Liza Minnelli to superstardom as Sally Bowles, the sexual renegade and would-be showbiz star created by Isherwood. More than half a century later, Cabaret is still being staged somewhere in the world every day.
Isherwood had also made himself into a character in his Berlin stories. This character—named by him Chris, Christoph, Isherwood, Herr Issyvoo—reappeared on stage and screen with new names invented by adapters—Clifford Bradshaw, Brian Roberts. None of these characters was really Isherwood, partly for literary reasons and partly because Isherwood was a gay man writing at a time when his sexuality made him an outlaw. As an outlaw, he had t
In the 1930s, his writing about Berlin, with its concern for the destiny of the workers and the poor as well as its enthusiasm for the sexually freewheeling night life, set up an expectation among his readers that Isherwood was a leader of the literary left. This expectation was greatly enhanced by the leftist plays and a travel book about China on which he collaborated with Auden. When the two emigrated together to the U.S., their followers, friends, fans and foes, felt abandoned and even betrayed. As World War II began, voices of the Left piled in with voices of the Right to attack them both as cowards for leaving their country in wartime, notwithstanding the fact that they made their departure eight months before the war started and that Isherwood had already lived abroad for most of the 1930s.
Much of Isherwood’s writing aims to explain in one way or another to those he left behind why he could not stay and live among them. Why he had to run. Much of it presents the better life he sought for himself. For he always sought a better life and a better self. His spiritual journey, a journey that began with healing through devotional acts and personal love, lasted his whole adult life, and it channeled but did not quench his restlessness. His habit of harsh and public self-criticism, part of his process of change, often provided ammunition for his critics whether or not they ever subjected themselves to the same scrutiny.
Isherwood also always sought a new and larger audience, eventually this meant an American audience. For this, he worked to transform his writing as well as himself. The novel he came to consider his worst, The World in the Evening (1954), is in some ways his most revealing since it exposes his struggles over a period of eight years to analyse and reformulate his English literary self in a new American one; writing the novel, he retook some of the very first steps he had taken as a young writer, in order, mid-career and mid-century, to find his way as if from the beginning. His next novel, Down There on a Visit (1962), returns to stories and drafts abandoned in the 1930s in order to reexamine the whole idea of the self and the metamorphosing personality that found its only real home in California and in mysticism.
Isherwood worked on the boundary of fiction and nonfiction. He kept diaries most of his adult life and drew on them for his published writing, creating narratives more vivid, more revealing, more entertaining than what he documented. He altered the truth in order to make the truth more compelling, and his subtle and mysterious reworking accounts, more than anything else, for the lasting appeal of his writing. Arguably, many of his alterations get closer to the truth than mere documentation ever could; still, he put his reader on notice that fiction was at work. He combined many threads to spin his simple, seemingly light narrative line, and this gave his delicate work extraordinary strength and potency. Applying his literary skills to what he observed happening around him allowed him to intimate the flow of historical and cultural change beneath the surface of day-to-day events.
In this biography, I highlight connections between Isherwood’s real-life experiences and his writing. I take you inside his imagination, where time is malleable and identity is changeable. I tell what happened to Isherwood and what Isherwood made from what happened to him. “What happened” includes the events of the imagination and the spirit—books he read, movies he saw, music he heard, rituals he practiced, fears, dreams or visions he had—as well as love affairs, toothaches, house fires, deaths of near ones, early fame, bad reviews. The differences between actual events, in so far as I can objectively establish them, and what Isherwood wrote about them may sometimes appear slight, but these differences reveal Isherwood’s artistic intentions and his underlying political and spiritual agenda. They show Isherwood to be fruitfully conversing, both overtly and obliquely, with his literary forebears and contemporaries. They tend, also, to unmask a man who seemed to be hidden behind many masks—christened Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood, published under the name Christopher Isherwood, fictionalised in his work as William Bradshaw as well as the various versions of Christopher Isherwood, known to his British friends by countless nicknames, and eventually to his American friends as, simply, Chris. They also show that Isherwood changed and grew through the practice of writing. The narratives he published began as private adventures in his imagination. He drafted and redrafted his work, traveling routes that sometimes had no outlet, retracing his steps, trying again, until he made his way into new country. His surviving drafts and workbooks offer glimpses of these secret adventures. Even false starts expanded his interior life, revealing how he continued to evolve through his work, often with a collaborator, into his eighties. (In this book, I use “Christopher” for his childhood and fictional selves and “Isherwood” from the time he arrived at Cambridge at nineteen. He referred to himself in the third person in much of his work, indicating his detachment and the constant changing of the self over time.)
His mother’s diaries, crammed with detail about his infancy and childhood, allow us to recognize how early and how deeply Isherwood began absorbing the experiences that were to shape his writing. The personalities and relationships among the adults in his childhood world—marital difficulties, sibling rivalries, tensions among servants and neighbors—washed over him constantly and shaped his psychological bedrock. They erupt again and again in his mature writing along with richly resounding echoes of his earliest fears and earliest friendships. When he wrote about Germany in the 1930s, Isherwood was also writing symbolically or covertly about Britain and all that he experienced during the years his imagination was forming. His first reading, his first trips to the theater and movies, his playing, his religious education, like his circle of family and friends, have outsize importance in his adult work and way of life. He often dismissed his mother and the past she treasured, but they make a meaningful contribution to every book he wrote. He found his narrative voice through her, and he often took women writers as his literary models and spoke through his women characters. The acts of self-criticism which engendered his lifelong process of personal growth began as criticisms of his mother and then of the parts of himself which once identified with her.
Perhaps because I am an American, I am eager to show you more of Isherwood’s American life and work than earlier biographies have done. I commend those biographies to you; I build on them. None so far has addressed Isherwood’s inner world, and his life project of coming to understand his own feelings. Perhaps because I am settled in London, I am also eager to show you the continuity between Isherwood’s English and American selves, and his unexpected resuscitation in maturity of some of the best aspects of his boyhood and youth. The life he made for himself in California shared a surprising amount with his childhood world crushed by history, albeit with crucial differences. Moreover, the liberal atmosphere of Weimar bloomed again in southern California as the New Age experiments of the 1940s—to which so many European refugees were party—gave way to the counterculture of the 1960s and the open rebellion of civil rights movements for all minority groups.
I have spent several decades editing Isherwood’s diaries and studying his writing. The books he left unpublished and unwritten at his death—in particular the million-plus words of his American diaries—tip the scales toward his adopted country. I focus new attention on his California life, in which he supported himself by writing for the movies and worshipped as a Hindu at the Hollywood Vedanta Society, because this is the life Isherwood chose when he was already famous and for which he gave up his public position in England and the approval of his circle there. Isherwood and Auden with their close friends Stephen Spender and Edward Upward and a wider circle including Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice changed English literature so boldly and completely in the 1930s that they became identified as a movement, even though some of them hardly knew each other and they were seldom all together in the same place. It is less recognized that Isherwood later had a varied and significant influence on American cultural life, especially in the cosmopolitan and anti-Establishment milieu that grew out of the dislocations and relocations of World War II and the jet-set excitement of the 1960s, and in particular through his close friendships with Aldous Huxley, Lincoln Kirstein, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Tony Richardson, and David Hockney.
