Arts and Letters

Christopher Isherwood's life as a writer fell into two halves: the English/German and the American/Californian. In the first half he wrote the Berlin Stories, which made him famous. In one of these, "Sally Bowles"—a story which was to undergo several transformations in theatre and film—he created a character who was so close to the "real life original"—a vivacious, amusing, lovable young English actress called Jean Ross who was on the make in the Berlin of the 1930s—that in the minds of many who knew her, Sally Bowles simply replaced Jean Ross. The same thing happened with Gerald Hamilton, the "real life original" for Mr. Norris of Mr. Norris Changes Trains. In the 1950s, Gerald Hamilton, who knew how to exploit the situation, was much taken up by members of a younger English generation of writers, who were delighted to find in him a scoundrelly amusing character who always lived up to Isherwood's fictitious Mr. Norris.

Isherwood's writing was profoundly autobiographical. But it leaves the reader wondering whether it is the autobiography of the "real life" Isherwood or of the persona—called "Ishyvoo," "Chris" or whatever—Isherwood invented for himself—or, indeed, perhaps of both the real and the fictitious combined. In a much quoted passage of one of the Berlin stories, Isherwood states: "I am a camera": meaning that he is a detached passive observer, like some metaphorical camera lens, at the center of the world of his Berlin characters, observing them dispassionately. This, of course, is misleading. It would be truer, perhaps, to say that he was part-creator and part-recorder of his own person.

Although Christopher was perfectly clear in his mind that no character in fiction which is based on some real person can be identical with that person, he evidently felt that there were real situations behind his Berlin stories which could be misrepresented and real persons who could be treated justly or unjustly. In the mid-1970s, forty years after he had left Berlin, in Christopher and His Kind he measured the fiction of the Berlin stories against standards of historic truth as he later came to see it. He asked himself, for example, whether in his portrayal of Mr. Norris he had not glossed over features which were really wicked in Gerald Hamilton, and whether in that of Bernhard Landauer he had not been perceptive of qualities in Wilfrid Israel (the "real life original" for Bernhard Landauer) which, after Hitler came to power, showed him to be a heroic anti-Nazi.

Christopher also reproached himself in Christopher and His Kind for not having made it clear in the Berlin stories that Ishyvoo/Christopher's real motive for going to Berlin was boys. He seemed to feel that not to have stated this clearly at the beginning of the book put him in a false relationship with the people who were the original "real life" models for his characters.

The reader has a feeling here that Christopher is being too hard on himself, especially since his reason for going to Berlin is perfectly clear to anyone fairly sophisticated.

Christopher's first novel was called All the Conspirators, a title which does not throw much light on the contents of that particular work, but a good deal on other novels by him. Goodbye to Berlin and Down There on a Visit portray characters drawn from real life models, grouped around a central narrator who is a slightly fictionalized version of Christopher himself. All, or nearly all, these characters, including the Christopher one, are engaged in a conspiracy against conventional standards of morality. They are, from the point of view of the society from which they derive, louche, and the narrator, Christopher, brings their loucheness into the light of his own consciousness. Through his homosexuality he shares the disapproval of society for them, with them. One can see then why it is extremely important for him that he should admit what, in the eyes of the surrounding society, is guilt. Consciousness, in the context of his fiction and his life-material, becomes conscience, and to have a good conscience DEMANDS OF THE NARRATOR TOTAL TRUTH.

In his revisionist attitude towards his early work, Christopher was, I have suggested, too hard on the Ishyvoo of the Berlin stories, whose homosexuality is really self-evident. He is also too hard in another more important respect—in making the young Christopher's interest in the young Berliners sound entirely promiscuous. His statement about this in Christopher and His Kind does have the attraction of magnetic truth. However, it reveals only part of this truth which is, surely, that Christopher went to Berlin as an early stage of a journey which was his lifelong search for a friend younger than himself whom he would entirely love. The Ishyvoo character is neither a camera nor a young man who is simply promiscuous. He is a voyager with a goal, which isn't love, even though the early stages of the voyage take him to promiscuous places.

The American/Californian Isherwood differs from the English/German Isherwood, in that the goal of the search becomes extended. Christopher continues the search for the friend—whom, in real life, he indeed meets. He is the artist Don Bachardy. But on another level—that of his Vedantism, and of his becoming the disciple of the Swami Prabhavananda, his goal, in his life as in his writing, becomes that of detachment from the world of achievements and desire.

In My Guru and His Disciple, Christopher admits that, while accepting Vedantism, he is incapable not only of non-attachment, but of even wishing to be capable of it. Perhaps during the last months of his long illness, when he was dying, his love for Don Bachardy became merged in his love for the Swami. In thinking about Christopher at the end of his life I have the sense of miraculous transformation. I think that while he was with Don all those months, he was also with the Swami.

It might seem that Vedantism—as Christopher understood it—represented a complete change in his attitude to life from that which he had when he was in Berlin—that it was a California phenomenon. Thinking the matter over, I do not really believe this. For—as I have tried to show here—I think that the consciousness of the narrator in the Berlin stories absorbs the phases and stages of a spiritual as well as a worldly development of his characters. In becoming part of his consciousness when he was in Berlin, he carries the real life originals forward in his conscience half a century later. That is the significance of his concern for them in Christopher and His Kind.

I first met Christopher in 1929 and I last saw him in 1985. I met him frequently during the intervening years with the exception only of the five years of the war. Of all my friends I should say that he was the one who saw me the most realistically. He was the most encouraging and affirmative in his criticism of my poetry. He was the most amusing of all my companions and the most scathingly perceptive and also the most forgiving and affectionate. Of his literary works the high points of his achievement are, to my mind, Prater Violet, A Single Man, and the portrait of the Swami Prabhavananda in My Guru and His Disciple. He would himself undoubtedly have regarded the greatest achievement of his life as his relationship with Don Bachardy, whose portraits of Christopher—especially the remarkable series of drawings which Bachardy did of him at the end of his life—are an achievement paralleling Christopher's own self-portrayals.

Christopher kept journals throughout his life. Unfortunately he destroyed those of the early thirties, but I have little doubt that the eight or so volumes beginning in 1938 and to be published posthumously will provide him with a new reputation equaling that of the work published in his lifetime.