Anglo-American author, Christopher William
Bradshaw-Isherwood was born in Cheshire, England, in August, 1904, to Kathleen
Machell-Smith and Frank Bradshaw-Isherwood. Frank Isherwood was in the British
military and was required to move his family several times, much to Kathleen's
displeasure. She sent Christopher to St. Edmund's boarding school for a proper education
in 1914. There he met W. H. Auden, who was to become a life-long friend and
co-author of several books and plays. The death of Isherwood's father on May 8,
1915, during a battle in France deeply affected him, not only in his
perspective of his father and how he would relate to his mother, but in his
attitude towards the military and war itself.
Isherwood met Edward Upward, a life-long friend
and influence, in 1919 at Repton, a prestigious public school, and later joined
him at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1923. In 1925, Isherwood was asked
to withdraw from the university and so he took a job in London as a part-time
secretary to a string quartet and began to write novels. The influence of E. M.
Forster encouraged Isherwood to write and publish his first novel, All the
Conspirators (1928).
Throughout Isherwood's life, he knew and worked
with many people who influenced him and whom he influenced. He was known by the
Bloomsbury group, and Hogarth Press published three of his books, The Memorial:
Portrait of a Family (1932), Lions and Shadows (1938), and Goodbye to Berlin
(1939). John Lehmann, a poet and an editor for the press, became a life-long
friend to Isherwood and they supported each other in their work and in their
personal lives.
Isherwood traveled to Berlin in 1929 to escape
the social and sexual inhibitions that he felt in England. He then decided to
live there and worked on his second novel The Memorial (1932), and what was to
become one of his best known works, the Berlin Stories (1945). These stories
offer an insight into the pre-Hitler era of Germany and were later developed
into the musical Cabaret.
Isherwood lived in Berlin from 1930 to 1933.
Trying to avoid the restraints that Hitler was enforcing on Germany, Isherwood
and Heinz, his lover, traveled around Europe looking for a place to settle
until 1937 when Heinz was forced to return to Germany to serve in the army.
This affected Isherwood deeply. Losing the freedoms he had felt in Germany, and
knowing that England could not offer better social conditions than before his
departure in 1929, he and W. H. Auden began traveling in the Orient in 1938.
During their travels they wrote, Journey to a War (1939). They went to the
United States before returning to England. In 1939, the conditions in Europe
were looking more as though war was inevitable, and Isherwood did not want to
be a part of this, so he and Auden returned to the United States and decided to
become American citizens. In New York, Isherwood did not find the haven he had
hoped for and moved to California at the invitation of Gerald Heard. From
October 1941, until July 1942, Isherwood lived in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and
taught English to German refugees through the Society of Friends, a Quaker
organization. Isherwood received his immigration papers and was a conscientious
objector to the war, however, the age was lowered and he never had to serve his
new country.
Isherwood's later books include Prater Violet
(1945), a story of filmmakers in prewar London. The World in the Evening (1954)
was a study of a young writer who attempts to understand the failure of his two
marriages and his homosexual needs.
A Single Man (1965) presented a single day in
the life of George, a lonely, middle-aged homosexual man, whose partner has
died in a car accident. In the retrospective autobiography, set in the 1930s,
Christopher and His Kind (1977), Isherwood examined his complex relationship
with Auden – his friend had died a few years before the book was published.
Kathleen and Frank (1971) was a double portrait of his parents, as seen through
his mother's and father's letters.
Isherwood's homosexuality had a major influence
on his art. His interest in certain psychological predicaments and in recurring
character types and themes, especially such mythopoeic types as the Truly Weak
Man, the Truly Strong Man, and the Evil Mother, and such obsessions as war, The
Test, the struggle toward maturity, and the search for a father, may all be
directly or indirectly related to his homosexuality.
Certainly, Isherwood's fascination with the
antiheroic hero, his rebellion against bourgeois respectability, his empathy
with the alienated and the excluded, and his ironic perspective are all
intertwined with his awareness of himself as a homosexual.
Moreover, homosexuality, even when suppressed
or disguised for legal or artistic reasons, is a crucial presence in the
novels, an indispensable aspect of the myth of the outsider that Isherwood
cultivated so assiduously. Isherwood sees the homosexual as a faithful mirror of
the human condition and a symbol both of individuality and of the variousness
of human possibilities.
Isherwood returned to California and worked
intermittently in motion picture studios in Hollywood for over 30 years. Due to
this involvement, Isherwood met and worked with a variety of writers and other
people who worked in the Hollywood community such as Tennessee Williams, Aldous
Huxley, Kenneth Anger, Truman Capote, and Charles Laughton.
Living in Los Angeles, Isherwood became
involved with Swami Prabhavanda, a Hindu monk who was head of the Vedanta
Society of Southern California. This had a major impact on his life, providing
a spiritual foundation that supported his social beliefs as well as his sexual
identity. Isherwood had determined during his years in Berlin that freedom was
more than what the left-wing was preaching at that time, and that the
homophobia that prevailed in this movement was one of the obvious indications
that this freedom was to be limited to a select few. By the 1970s, Isherwood had
began to publicly discuss how homophobia was one aspect of the hate that must
be overcome to reach a level of peace in the world.
Don Bachardy and Isherwood met in 1953 and
became lovers in 1954. They worked together on number of motion pictures, television
scripts, and on dramatizations of Shaw's story The Adventures of the Black Girl
in Her Search for God (1969) and A Meeting by the River (1967). Isherwood and
Bachardy remained lovers until Isherwood died from cancer in 1986.
More forthrightly than any other major writer
of his generation, Isherwood embraced the contemporary gay liberation movement.
That allegiance was altogether appropriate, for his novels--all written before
the Stonewall riots that traditionally date the beginning of the movement--incorporate
gay liberation perspectives, especially the need for solidarity among
homosexuals and the recognition of homosexuals as an aggrieved minority.
Isherwood's greatest achievement, however, is
in creating gay characters-preeminently George in A Single Man-whose
homosexuality is a simple given, an integral part of the wholeness of
personality, and in placing those characters in situations and contexts where
their homosexuality functions as an emblem of their common humanity.
by Sylwia Chlebowska
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