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Christopher Isherwood pioneered what is now known as ‘autofiction’ long before it acquired that label. His best known work, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), which later inspired the musical Cabaret, was based on the diaries he kept while living in the Weimar Republic in his twenties. He’d already used the material before in Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), a brilliant black comedy thriller that deserves to be read alongside more supposedly serious works of modernism. Forty years later, he reworked the experiences yet again in Christopher and His Kind (1977), in which he finally made explicit, for the new gay liberation era, what had been suppressed in the earlier works: his homosexuality, which had previously been outlawed.
Isherwood was already composing autofiction aged six, dictating his first work to his mother
Although Isherwood emigrated to America in early 1939, and spent the second half of his life in California, he could never quite say goodbye to Berlin. Nor could he give up exploring the ambiguous boundaries between memoir and fiction, a habit that was inculcated early. Born in 1904 into the decaying English gentry, he was already composing autofiction aged six, dictating his first work, The History of my Friends, to his mother, herself an inveterate diarist. Although he so identified with her in childhood that he dressed up in her clothes, he later experienced her as a suffocating presence who needed to be ejected, along with the entire English establishment. But he would carry on in the same literary vein throughout his long and prolific career, transforming his personal acquaintance into ‘characters’ in book after book, from his literary confrères W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender in Lions and Shadows (1938) to his parents in Kathleen and Frank (1971).
Most famously, he transformed Jean Ross, the rebellious, young, upper-middle-class Englishwoman he befriended in Berlin, into the subsequently iconic Sally Bowles, though his version has none of the slick glamour of Liza Minelli in the 1972 film. Ross’s daughter later complained that her mother had been unfairly caricatured. The real Ross – who later became a war correspondent and a lifelong committed communist – had more gumption. (She was also enough of a mover and shaker to secure Isherwood his first screenwriting gig, an experience he went on to cannibalise to brilliant effect in his 1945 autobiographical novel Prater Violet.)
Unlike Minelli, the Sally Bowles of Goodbye to Berlin is not choreographed into hyper-professionalism by Ken Fosse. Her nightclub performance is embarrassingly amateurish, its unsettling charisma deriving instead from her desperado disinhibition. She’s a contradictory character: a combination of naivety and bravado; of self-deception and vulnerable verve; of entitlement and disempowerment; of alienation, attitude and authenticity. Isherwood may not give a full and fair account of Ross, but he uses the character to tell us more – about the fatalistic atmosphere in Weimar that Hitler exploited; about class and sex; and also, perhaps, about himself.
Goodbye to Berlin’s most famous line, ‘I am a camera’, has Isherwood adopting a pose of passive detachment. But it’s worth remembering that he went on to extend the photographic metaphor to acknowledge the imaginative shaping and selection that went into his seemingly objective reportage: ‘Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.’ As Katherine Bucknell suggests in this new life: ‘His alterations get closer to the truth than mere documentation ever could.’
In the early Berlin stories, the personal suppressions and hidden ironies involved seem to provide an undertow of creative tension that ultimately adds to, rather than detracts from, their superb quality as works of literature. Curiously, Isherwood later couched the supposedly more open confessionalism of Christopher and His Kind in the third person, creating an odd sense of dislocation by referring to himself as ‘Christopher’ rather than ‘I’ throughout.
Perhaps his autofictive mode was always driven by a complicated, ironised sense of his own self as simultaneous observer and observed. Backstage, in real life, the experience may have been more messy and painful than the consummate control of his best prose suggests. It was perhaps the yogic emphasis on the dissolution of the ego that led him to convert to Hindu mysticism under the guidance of a celebrated swami shortly after arriving in California. Cabaret audiences might be surprised to hear that his translation of the Vedas remains perhaps his bestseller, though he balked at becoming a monk due to the celibacy requirement.
In California he also met Don Bachardy, who became his life’s partner, despite their eye-popping age difference of 30 years. He had scoffed at Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears for their seemingly bourgeois ‘marriage’, but he ended up, despite periods of angst and infidelity, in a relationship of long-term domestic intimacy that eventually saw the two become a celebrated gay couple, subject of a dual portrait by their friend David Hockney. It’s perhaps a testimony to their bond that Bachardy never became a ‘character’ in his partner’s work.
The fact that Isherwood was so often his own autobiographer makes him a problematic subject for biography. As the editor of his voluminous diaries, Bucknell has devoted her career to his memory. Complementing Peter Parker’s excellent 2004 life, this empathetic, exhaustively documented account is also testimony to the author’s friendship with Bachardy, now 90. Running to more than 800 pages, it offers a level of immersive detail that is out of synch with the current trend for pithier lives, though the minutiae are often intriguing. Who knew, for example, that circumcision was a requirement for entry into the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) at Repton in around 1918, a painful operation to have in adolescence, described by Isherwood’s doting mother as ‘the Event’? This book will be of value to scholars for years to come. It also reminds us of Isherwood’s genius in crystallising what he called his ‘shapeless blob of potential material’ into art.
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