Christopher
Isherwood
born Aug. 26, 1904, High Lane, Cheshire,
Eng.
died Jan. 4, 1986, Santa Monica, Calif.,
U.S.
Anglo-American novelist and playwright best
known for his novels about Berlin in the
early 1930s.
After working as a secretary and a private
tutor, Isherwood gained a measure of coterie
recognition with his first two novels, All
the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial
(1932). During the 1930s he collaborated
with his friend W.H. Auden on three verse
dramas, including The Ascent of F6 (1936).
But it had been in 1929 that he found the
theme that was to make him widely known.
Between 1929 and 1933 he lived in Berlin,
gaining an outsider’s view of the
simultaneous decay of the Weimar Republic
and the rise of Nazism. His novels Mr.
Norris Changes Trains (1935; The Last of Mr.
Norris) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), which
were later published together as The Berlin
Stories, established his reputation as an
important writer and inspired the play I Am
a Camera (1951; film 1955) and the musical
Cabaret (1966; film 1972). These books are
detached but humorous studies of dubious
characters leading seedy expatriate lives in
the German capital. In 1938 Isherwood
published Lions and Shadows, an amusing and
sensitive account of his early life and
friendships while a student at the
University of Cambridge.
The coming of World War II saw not merely
a change of outlook in Isherwood’s writing
but also a permanent change of domicile. He
immigrated to the United States in 1939 and
settled in southern California, where he
taught and wrote for Hollywood films. He was
naturalized in 1946. It was also in 1939
that Isherwood turned to pacifism and the
self-abnegation of Indian Vedānta, becoming
a follower of Swami Prabhavananda. In the
following decades, Isherwood produced
several works on Vedānta and translations
with Prabhavananda, including one of the
Bhagavadgītā.
Isherwood’s postwar novels continued to
demonstrate his personal style of fictional
autobiography. A Single Man (1964), a brief
but highly regarded novel, presents a single
day in the life of a lonely, middle-aged
homosexual. His avowedly autobiographical
works include a self-revealing memoir of his
parents, Kathleen and Frank (1971); a
retrospective biography of himself in the
1930s, Christopher and His Kind (1977); and
a study of his relationship with
Prabhavananda and Vedānta, My Guru and His
Disciple (1980).
From 1953 on, Isherwood lived with a
companion, Don Bachardy, a painter and
portraitist, and both later became involved
in homosexual-rights causes.
