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Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood:Christopher Isherwood (left) and W.H. Auden (right), photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1939
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Christopher Isherwood (left) and W.H. Auden (right), photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1939
Christopher Isherwood:Bachardy pictured by Carl Van Vechten.
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Bachardy pictured by Carl Van Vechten.

Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood (August 26, 1904 – January 4, 1986) was an Anglo-American novelist.


Contents

Life and work

The son of landed gentry, he was born in the ancestral seat of his family, Wybersley Hall, High Lane, near Stockport in the northwest of England. His army officer father was killed in the First World War.

At school he met W. H. Auden, who became his lifelong friend. He later studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he met Stephen Spender, who was at Oxford University with Auden. Rejecting his upper-class background and attracted to males, he moved to Berlin, the capital of the young Weimar Republic, drawn by its deserved reputation for sexual freedom. There, he "fully indulged his taste for pretty youths. He went to Berlin in search of boys and found one called Heinz, who became his first great love."[1] Isherwood commented on the Berlin pederastic underground, and his own participation, in a note to the American publisher of Der Puppenjunge (The Hustler), "a classic boy-love novel set in the contemporary milieu of boy prostitutes in Berlin." "It gives a picture of the Berlin sexual underworld early in this century," wrote Isherwood, "which I know, from my own experience, to be authentic."[2]

He worked as a private tutor while writing the novel Mr. Norris Changes Trains and a series of short stories collected under the title Goodbye to Berlin. These provided the inspiration for the play I Am a Camera and for the subsequent musical Cabaret the film of the same name. A memorial plaque to Isherwood has been erected on the house in Schöneberg, Berlin where he lived. In September 1931 the poet William Plomer introduced him to E.M. Forster; they became close and Forster served as a mentor to the young writer.

Auden and Isherwood travelled first to China in 1938 and then emigrated to the United States in 1939. (The convenient timing of this move, coming just as Britain was about to be engulfed in the Second World War, placed them under a cloud and their reputations suffered for a time.) Isherwood settled in California, where he embraced Hinduism. Together with Swami Prabhavananda he produced several Hindu scriptural translations, Vedanta essays, the biography Ramakrishna and his Followers, novels, plays and screenplays, all imbued with themes and characters of Vedanta, karma, reincarnation and the Upanishadic quest.

Arriving in Hollywood in 1939, he first met Gerald Heard, the mystic-historian who founded his own monastery at Trabuco Canyon that was eventually gifted to the Vedanta Society. Through Heard, who was the first to discover Swami Prabhavananda and Vedanta, Isherwood joined an extraordinary band of mystic explorers that included Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Chris Wood, John Yale and J. Krishnamurti. Through Huxley, Isherwood befriended the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. A chance encounter in a Los Angeles bookstore with the fantasy writer Ray Bradbury led to a favorable review of The Martian Chronicles, which boosted Bradbury's career and helped to form a friendship between the two.

Isherwood became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1946. In 1952, at the age of forty eight, he fell in love with Don Bachardy, an eighteen year old portrait artist.[3] Their relationship was life-long, and has been described as pederastic in nature.[4] Isherwood died in Santa Monica, California.

Bibliography

Notes

  1. ^ "Hello to Berlin, boys and books", The Telegraph; Filed: 18/05/2004[1]
  2. ^ Hubert Kennedy, Mackay, John Henry in glbtq[2]
  3. ^ glbtq article
  4. ^ "One look at a photograph of Christopher Isherwood with his lover Don Bachardy ought to dispel the notion that ‘pederasty’ is purely an ancient paradigm." Rictor Norton, A Critique of Social Constructionism and Postmodern Queer Theory, "Intergenerational and Egalitarian Models," 1 June 2002 <http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/social19.htm>

Further reading

Categories


1904 births | 1986 deaths | Alumni of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge | English novelists | English short story writers | Gay writers | Pederasty | Naturalized citizens of the United States | People from Stockport | Converts to Hinduism | American Hindus

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