Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (August 26, 1904 – January 4, 1986) was an
Anglo-American novelist.
Early life and work
Born at
Wyberslegh Hall,
High Lane,
Cheshire in the
North West England, Isherwood spent his childhood in various towns where his father, a
Lieutenant-Colonel in the
British Army, was stationed. After his father was killed in the
First World War, he settled with his mother in
London and at Wyberslegh.
Isherwood attended preparatory school
St. Edmund's,
Surrey, where he first met
W. H. Auden. At
Repton School he met his lifelong friend
Edward Upward, with whom he wrote the extravagant "Mortmere" stories, only one of which was published during his lifetime (a few others appeared after his death, and others were summarised in his
Lions and Shadows). He deliberately failed his
tripos and left
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge without a degree in 1925. For the next few years he lived with violinist André Mangeot, working as secretary to Mangeot's string quartet and studying medicine; during this time he wrote a book of nonsense poems,
People One Ought to Know (published 1982), with illustrations by Mangeot's eleven-year-old son, Sylvain.
In 1925 he was reintroduced to W. H. Auden, and became Auden's literary mentor and partner in an intermittent, casual liaison, as Auden sent his poems to Isherwood for comment and approval. Through Auden, Isherwood met
Stephen Spender, with whom he later spent much time in Germany. His first novel,
All the Conspirators, appeared in 1928; it is an anti-heroic story, written in a pastiche of many modernist novelists, about a young man who is defeated by his mother. In 1928-29 Isherwood studied medicine at
King's College London, but gave it up after six months to join Auden for a few weeks in Berlin.
Rejecting his upper-class background and attracted to males, he remained in Berlin, the capital of the young
Weimar Republic, drawn by its 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."
Isherwood commented on the Berlin sex underground, and his own participation in it, in a note to the American publisher of
John Henry Mackay's
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."
In 1931 he met Jean Ross, the inspiration of his fictional character Sally Bowles; he also met
Gerald Hamilton, the inspiration for the fictional Mr. Norris. 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. Isherwood's second novel,
The Memorial (1932), was another of his stories of conflict between mother and son, based closely on his own family history. During one of his returns to London he worked with the director
Berthold Viertel on the film
Little Friend, an experience that became the basis of his novel
Prater Violet (1945). He worked as a private tutor in Berlin and elsewhere while writing the novel
Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and a series of short stories collected under the title
Goodbye to Berlin (1939). These provided the inspiration for the play
I Am a Camera, the subsequent
musical Cabaret and the
film of the same name. A memorial plaque to Isherwood has been erected on the house in
Schöneberg, Berlin, where he lived.
During these years he moved around Europe, living in
Copenhagen,
Sintra and elsewhere, and collaborated on three plays with Auden,
The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935),
The Ascent of F6 (1936), and
On the Frontier (1939). Isherwood wrote a lightly fictionalized autobiographical account of his childhood and youth,
Lions and Shadows (1938), using the title of an abandoned novel. Auden and Isherwood travelled to China in 1938 to gather material for their book on the
Sino-Japanese War called
Journey to a War (1939).
Life in the U.S.
Having visited New York on their way back to the UK, Auden and Isherwood decided to emigrate to the United States in January 1939. (The timing of this move, coming just months before Britain was engulfed in the
Second World War, placed them under a cloud in the eyes of the "patriotic" crowd later engaged in the
total war against global
fascism.) After a few months with Auden in New York, Isherwood settled in
Hollywood,
California.
He met
Gerald Heard, the mystic-historian who founded his own monastery at
Trabuco Canyon that was eventually gifted to the
Vedanta Society of Southern California. 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 (Heard's lifelong friend), John Yale and
J. Krishnamurti. He embraced
Vedanta, and, together with Swami Prabhavananda, he produced several
Hindu scriptural translations, Vedanta essays, the biography
Ramakrishna and His Disciples, novels, plays and screenplays, all imbued with the themes and character of Vedanta and the
Upanishadic quest.
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 men.
Isherwood became a
naturalized citizen of the United States in 1946; he immediately became liable for
military service, but having already done volunteer work in 1941-42, at a
Quaker hostel for European refugees in
Pennsylvania, he had no difficulty establishing himself as a
conscientious objector. He began living with the photographer William (Bill) Caskey. In 1947 the two traveled to South America; Isherwood wrote the prose and Caskey provided the photographs for a 1949 book about their journey,
The Condor and the Cows.
On
Valentine's Day 1953, at the age of 48, he met teen-aged
Don Bachardy among a group of friends on the beach at
Santa Monica. Although one can find Bachardy's age at the time variously reported, in the biographical film
Chris & Don: A Love Story, Bachardy himself recalls that, "at the time I was, probably, 16." Despite the age difference, this meeting began a partnership that, though interrupted by affairs and separations, continued until the end of Isherwood's life. During the early months of their affair, Isherwood finished (and Bachardy typed) the novel he had been working on for some years,
The World in the Evening (1954). Isherwood also taught a creative-writing course at Los Angeles State College (now
California State University, Los Angeles) for several years during the 1950s and early '60s.
The more than 30-year age difference between Isherwood and Bachardy raised eyebrows at the time, with Bachardy (as he recalled) "regarded as a sort of child prostitute", but the two became a well-known and well-established couple in Southern Californian society, with many Hollywood friends.
Down There on a Visit, a novel published in 1962, comprises four related stories that overlap the period covered in his Berlin stories. In the opinion of many reviewers, Isherwood's finest achievement was his 1964 novel
A Single Man. During 1964 Isherwood collaborated with American writer
Terry Southern on the screenplay for the
Tony Richardson film adaptation of
The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh's caustic satire on the American funeral industry.
Isherwood and Bachardy lived together in Santa Monica for the rest of Isherwood's life. Bachardy became a successful draughtsman with an independent reputation, and his portraits of the dying Isherwood became well-known after Isherwood's death. At the age of 81, Isherwood died in 1986 at
Santa Monica, California from
prostate cancer. Their lifelong relationship is chronicled in the film
Chris & Don: A Love Story.
Work on Vedanta and the West
Vedanta and the West was the official publication of the
Vedanta Society of Southern California. It offered essays by many of the leading intellectuals of the time and had contributions from
Aldous Huxley,
Gerald Heard,
Alan Watts,
J. Krishnamurti,
W. Somerset Maugham, and many others.
Isherwood was Managing Editor from 1943 until 1945. Together with Huxley and Heard, he was on the Editorial Advisory Board from 1951 until 1962.
The following are articles published in
Vedanta and the West written by Isherwood:
- On Translating the Gita - 1944
- Hypothesis and Belief - 1944
- The Problem of the Religious Novel - 1946
- Religion Without Prayers - 1946
- Foreword to a Man of God - 1950
- What Vedanta Means to Me - 1951
- Who Is Ramakrishna? - 1957
- Ramakrishna and the Future - 1958
- The Home of Ramakrishna - 1958
- Ramakrishna: A First Chapter - 1959
- The Birth of Ramakrishna - 1959
- The Boyhood of Ramakrishna - 1959
- How Ramakrishna Came to Dakshineswar - 1959
- Early Days at Dakshineswar - 1959
- The Vision of Kali - 1960
- The Marriage of Ramakrishna - 1960
- The Coming of the Bhariravi - 1960
- Some Visitors to Dakshineswar - 1960
- The Writer and Vedanta - 1961
- Sarada and Chandra - 1962
- The Coming of the Disciples - 1962
- Introduction to Vivekananda - 1962
- The Training of Naren - 1963
- An Approach to Vedanta - 1963
- Some Great Devotees - 1963
- The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna - 1963
- The Story Continues - 1964
- Letters of Swami Vivekananda - 1968
- Essentials of Vedanta - 1969
List of works
- All the Conspirators (1928; new edn. 1957 with new foreword)
- Sally Bowles (1937; later included in Goodbye to Berlin)
- Lions and Shadows (1938, autobiography)
- The Condor and the Cows (1949, South-American travel diary)
- What Vedanta Means to Me (1951, pamphlet)
- An Approach to Vedanta (1963)
- Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965)
- Exhumations (1966; journalism and stories)
- A Meeting by the River (1967)
- Essentials of Vedanta (1969)
- Kathleen and Frank (1971, about his parents)
- Frankenstein: The True Story (1973, with Don Bachardy; based on their 1973 filmscript)
- Christopher and His Kind (1976, autobiography)
- My Guru and His Disciple (1980)
- October (1980, with Don Bachardy)
- Where Joy Resides: An Isherwood Reader (1989; selections ed. by Don Bachardy and James P. White)
- A Meeting by the River. (New edition) Minneapolis: , 1999.
- The Memorial. (New edition) Minneapolis: , 1999.
- Lions and Shadows. Minneapolis: , 2000.
- Christopher and His Kind. (New edition) Minneapolis: , 2001.
- My Guru and His Disciple. (New edition) Minneapolis: , 2001.
- A Single Man. (New edition) Minneapolis: , 2001.
- The Condor and the Cows. (New edition with foreword by Jeffrey Meyers) Minneapolis: , 2003.
- Where Joy Resides. (New edition with introduction by Gore Vidal) Minneapolis: , 2003.
- Kathleen and Christopher, ed. by Lisa Colletta. (Letters to his mother) Minneapolis: , 2005.
- Isherwood on Writing. Minneapolis: , 2007.
Translations:- The Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita (with Swami Prabhavananda, 1944)
- Shankara's Crest-Jewel of Discrimination (with Swami Prabhavananda, 1947)
- How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali (with Swami Prabhavananda, 1953)
