Knitting Circle Christopher Isherwood

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Biography,work,bibliography,press cuttings.

Christopher Isherwood
Born 26th. August, 1904, in Disley, Cheshire, England; died 4th. January, 1986.

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 wasW. 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 novelsMr Norris Changes TrainsandGoodbye to Berlinwere 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 inMr 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 ofThomas 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'sLions and Shadowsrepresents 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 organisationOne 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 withDavid Marchin 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 ofT. E. Lawrence), 1937.

  • Sally Bowles, 1937. (The surname 'Bowles' was taken from his friendPaul 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, theBhagavad Gita, (with Swami Prabhavananda), 1944.

  • Translation of Baudelaire'sIntimate 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 storyMr Lancasteris published inThe Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction.

  • Kathleen and Frank, 1972.

  • Living With the Backlash, (1979), an article inThe 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 manby Peter Ackroyd inThe Times 2, 21st. June, 2000, page 17. "e;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."e;

      "e;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."e;

    • Mad about the boysby Humphrey Carpenter inThe Sunday Times Culture magazine, 25th. June, 2000, pages 35-36. "e;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 withW 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)."e;

      "e;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."e;

      "e;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."e;

      "e;A particular disappointment is his failure to reveal much aboutBenjamin BrittenandPeter 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."e;

      "e;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."e;

    • Blue remembered thrillsby Ian Samsom inThe Guardian: Saturday Review, 1st. July, 2000, page 9. "e;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' withMontgomery 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."e;

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

    • A nice piece of knittingby Mark Bostridge inThe Independent on Sunday magazine, 9th. July, 2000, page 49. "e;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 ofLost Yearswas 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 Yearsdid stimulate a highly significant shift in Isherwood's writing."e;

      "e;The 'knitting' together ofLost Yearsacted 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."e;

    • Andrew, Barry, Brad and Cliffby Robert Craft inThe Times Literary Supplement, 18th. August, 2000, page 13. "e;Between August 1949 and September 1969, when the Stravinskys moved from California to New York, I saw Christopher Isherwood regularly, had an affectionateen famillerelationship with him, and even dedicated a book to him. TheLost Yearshas 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."e;

Bibliography

Press cuttings

  • Observing the 20th century 1950s: Back to Berlinby Christopher Isherwood inThe Observer Life magazine, 19th. December, 1999, page 35. He recounts his return to Berlin on 23rd. March, 1952. "e;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."e;

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