LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
PAST Out |
by Liz Highleyman |
Who was Christopher Isherwood?
British author Christopher Isherwood is widely considered a queer cultural icon, and his frank portrayals of homosexuality secured his position as one of the earliest literary voices of the gay liberation era. Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was born August 26, 1904, to a family of landed gentry in Cheshire, England. When he was about 10 years old and attending St. Edmund's boarding school in Surrey, his father was killed in World War I. Isherwood later recalled that he knew he was gay from an early age. His passion for writing also arose early, and he began keeping detailed diaries in 1917. Isherwood attended Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, but left without a degree in 1925. Soon after, he renewed his friendship with poet W.H. Auden, whom he had known at St. Edmund's. Following a brief stint at medical school in London, he accepted Auden's invitation to visit Berlin; the two men enjoyed a sexual friendship, though they were not romantically involved. Isherwood moved to Berlin in 1929, drawn by the heady atmosphere of liberation in the Weimar era preceding the Nazi rise to power. He worked as an English teacher, lived in the gay-friendly Nollendorfplatz neighborhood, and ardently partook of the city's social scene, "always fussing around with rough trade and so on," as he later recalled. By this time, Isherwood had published two novels, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932). But he gained greater acclaim for his semi-autobiographical short story collection, The Berlin Stories (1939), which inspired the 1951 play I Am a Camera, and later the Broadway musical and film Cabaret (1972), the latter of which starred Liza Minnelli as showgirl Sally Bowles, modeled after Isherwood's friend Jean Ross. Isherwood left Berlin in 1933, not long after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. For the remainder of the decade, the handsome young author traveled around Europe, making the acquaintance of literary lights such as E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Aldous Huxley. In 1938, Isherwood and Auden journeyed to China to report on the Sino-Japanese War. The following year, at the dawn of World War II, the two men both pacifistsemigrated to the United States, which led some of their countrymen to brand them cowards and traitors. "Am I afraid of being bombed? Of course. Everybody is," Isherwood wrote in his diary in January 1940. "I fear the atmosphere of the war, the power which it gives to all the things I hatethe newspapers, the politicians, the puritans, the scoutmasters, the middle-aged merciless spinsters.... I am afraid I should be reduced to a chattering enraged monkey, screaming back hate at their hate." Soon after arriving in the United States, Isherwood left New York City and embarked on a cross-country bus trip to Southern California. Influenced by fellow pacifists Huxley and philosopher Gerald Heard, Isherwood embraced Vedanta, a branch of Hinduism, and became a devotee of Swami Prabhavananda, with whom he produced several translations of Sanskrit scriptures. Isherwood resided for a few years at various Vedanta centers, but ultimately decided against becoming a monk. Over the next two decades, Isherwood worked as a movie screenwriter (largely adapting works by other authors) and participated in the local underground gay scene. His social circles included Hollywood luminaries such as Ava Gardner and Charlie Chaplin, artists such as Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, and fellow gay literary celebrities Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams. He continued to travel widely with various boyfriends, including William Caskey. In his late 40s, Isherwood began a relationship with Don Bachardy, then an 18-year-old student at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA); the couple bought a home and settled in Santa Monica. In the 1960s, Isherwood taught at Los Angeles State College, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and UCLA, while Bachardy attended art school and gained renown as a portrait painter. Later, Isherwood took to the college lecture circuit. Among his final works was a spiritual memoir, My Guru and His Disciple (1980). After more than six decades as a diarist, Isherwood logged his final journal entry in 1983; he died of prostate cancer on January 4, 1986. Over the course of his career, Isherwood's work became increasingly open in its depictions of homosexuality. The World in the Evening (1954) featured perhaps the first fictional depiction of a gay activist, who proclaims that he wants to "march down the street with a banner saying, 'We're queer because we're queer because we're queer." His 1964 novel, A Single Man, describes one day in the life of a lonely college professor who lost his lover in an automobile accident; author Edmund White called it "the founding text of modern gay fiction." Though Isherwood's work had always been semi-autobiographical, the advent of the gay liberation era in the 1970s allowed him to publish memoirs offering explicit details about his sexual exploits, most notably Christopher and His Kind (1976). Asked by an interviewer in 1974 what he thought of the tactics of the gay movement, he replied, "I think it's a necessary way of doing things. It's part of an enormous uncoordinated army that is advancing on various fronts toward recognition, toleration, and the acquisition of very simple rights." Liz Highleyman is a freelance writer and editor who has written widely on health, sexuality, and politics. She can be reached at PastOut@qsyndicate.com. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 16, No. 13 September 15, 2006 |