Something compelled Christopher Isherwood to set the record straight. Or, rather, to wade through all the suggested straightness (none of which I assumed, but that's the benefit of distance, Cabaret, an English degree, and a working knowledge of biography) in previous stories and banish it once and for all. ("I am doing what Henry James would have done, if he had had the guts.") It's easy to understand this in the context of gay liberation, but it's even more interesting to look at it as an author meticulously revealing all his tricks. Reading Truman Capote, or Armistead Maupin, or any number of other writers, you often have to stop and ask yourself, "So who is this supposed to be, exactly?" In Christopher and His Kind Isherwood does all the work for us. Or does he? We'll never know. Perhaps, after all, all this truth-telling is just the outlines of another "Christopher." Or not, if what Isherwood says is true, all the Christophers were ultimately the same man, and "the evasiveness is in the Narrator's nature, not in his name."Where to begin reviewing a book I've already read before in three different iterations? As Isherwood crosses and recrosses the ground he covered in Berlin Stories, Lions and Shadows, and Down There on a Visit, he discusses and muses on the fates of primary, supporting, and tertiary characters alike.Most poignantly, the fictionalization of Wilfrid Israel, who becomes Bernhard Landauer:The story of Bernhard Landauer ends with the news of Bernhard's death. "Isherwood" overhears two men talking about it at a restaurant in Prague, in the spring of 1933, just after he himself has left Germany for good. One of them has just read in a newspaper that Bernhard has died of heart failure and both take it for granted that he has really been killed by the Nazis.The killing of Bernhard was merely a dramatic necessity.Wilfrid Israel's story is ten times richer, more interesting, and more dynamic. The seven pages Isherwood devotes to it here are reason enough for the book to exist. The only "dramatic necessity" I see, is the necessity to prevent Israel's story from completely taking over the book.And: I wish I could remember what impression Jean Ross--the real-life original of Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin--made on Christopher when they first met. But I can't. Art has transfigured life and other people's art has transfigured Christopher's art. What remains with me from those early years is almost entirely Sally. Beside her, like a reproachful elder sister, stands the figure of Jean as I knew her much later.And:At school, Christopher had fallen in love with many boys and been yearningly romantic about them. At college he had at last managed to get into bed with one. This was due entirely to the initiative of his partner, who, when Christopher became scared and started to raise objections, locked the door, and sat down firmly on Christopher's lap. I am still grateful to him. I hope he is alive and may happen to read these lines.Ah, yes. The "Christopher felt X, as I recall" mode. Instead of finding it irritating, I was charmed. Throughout, Isherwood is more a historian then a memoir writer. He goes back over his diaries (those he didn't burn), his correspondence, and the correspondence of friends and relatives. He cites meticulously. And yet...there is so much he leaves unexplained.More than anything, it's a book about writing. Even more than David Mitchell's character waiting room, I appreciated the following assessment of the writing of what would eventually become Berlin Stories:Confronted by all his characters and their stories, Christopher was like an official who is called upon to deal with a crowd of immigrants and their belongings. They wait, absolutely passive, to be told where they are to live and what their jobs will be. The official regards them with growing dismay. He had imagined that he could cope with them all, somehow or other. Now he is beginning to realize that he can't.In setting the record straight, Isherwood comes across as endearing, conceited, oblivious, insightful, cruel, vulnerable, and (he would be thrilled to learn) lost as ever. These are the traits that have appeared in each version of the narrator. These traits, above all, are the truth. I was thrilled to read about Isherwood's friendship with E. M. Forster, because I am drawn to their writing for the same reason: they are unsparingly fond of all of their characters, it seems, and they are at their best when they are describing the most mundane exchanges. Christopher's mother Kathleen is a prime example. We see her several times through his eyes, always in the context of hearth and home and convention, and as his understanding of her grows ours does too.And there are his friends, the awesome Edward Upward, whose fictional counterpart I found so endearing in Lions and Shadows, and Stephen Spender, the reason for this moment of hilarious grace:Stephen was back in London, suffering from a tapeworm which he had picked up in Spain. The problem, in removing a tapeworm, is to get rid of its head... Sometimes the head can't be found in the stool so the doctor doesn't know if it has been lost or is still inside the patient. Christopher bought a particularly repulsive postcard photograph of the head of Goebbels and sent it to Stephen, inscribed: "Can this be it?!!"Above all, I am left with an overwhelming desire to read this story a fourth time. Not, I hasten to point out, as narrated by Isherwood, "Christopher," Christopher, or any of the others. No, I want to read this all over again from Auden's perspective. This is no Hemingway-Fitzgerald bathroom measurement contest. This is a lifelong friendship of multiple layers and nuances. It was sad, sad as dying, to leave these loved ones behind. But neither Wystan nor Christopher wanted to admit that this was in any sense a death or that they were the objects of a wake. As the boat train pulled out of the station and they need wave no longer, Christopher felt a quick upsurge of relief. He and Wystan exchanged grins, schoolboy grins which took them back to the earliest days of their friendship. "Well," said Christopher, "we're off again." "Goody," said Wystan.
I should confess up front that I have never read The Berlin Stories, nor have I even seen Cabaret. Blasphemer! The ultimate bad gay! ...but I do like Isherwood? Or at any rate I loved A Single Man (novel & film!). I was a bit baffled to see so many reviews here note that reading about the writing of The Berlin Stories was tedious, because I actually found Isherwood's reflective, sometimes nostalgic relationship to his own earlier writing endlessly fascinating, particularly in the sense of his comments about self-censoring and the ways in which he felt his sight about the situations he was narrating appears so limited in hindsight. More interesting was Isherwood's hazy delineation between the writing-I and "Christopher," as he frequently referred to his past self/selves. Recently I read Edmund White's "City Boy," where he has no interest in a kind of metatextual consideration of identity--memoir writing should be founded on fact and authenticity to White's mind; on the other hand, Isherwood/"I"/"Christopher" seems almost to eroticize his relationship with his past, and clearly believes that there can't be an objective relationship between the self and the world that the self experiences, because we are not transparent to ourselves, and our understanding of our social being necessitates far too many subjective filters. Despite White's protestations, I found Isherwood's notion of memoir writing far more truthful and nuanced.All that said, the memoir is also incredibly fun to read. It covers his major Berlin years--basically, from when he went there at the end of the 20s until he decided to sail for America at the end of the 30s. We see his love affairs, his novel-writing, his "slumming," his experience with the Hirschfield Institute. There's a great deal of his passionate friendship with Auden, and Stephen Spender and the Woolfs and Thomas Mann and his daughter all wriggle in and out of the narrative here. Obvs the rise of European fascism (well, mainly Hitler) casts a broad shadow over Isherwood's time in Germany. There's a terror to this tale that recalls V Woolf's journals and letters--also, Between the Acts, her final novel and the one most anxious about the oncoming War. Isherwood is a quite exciting prose writer, too: even in mundane sections, nothing seems to drag, as he's constantly tossing a witticism or a strange anecdote or a viciously honest comment on himself in. This was my first of a journey into the "gay memoir" (well, gay male memoir--for whatever reason, I have, like, a pretty solid history with lesbian fiction, but almost none with the tradition of My People??), and I couldn't be more glad to have it as the initial touchstone, though I imagine using it as my yardstick may be a bit overreaching. We shall see...
What do You think about Christopher And His Kind (2001)?
Things I appreciate and enjoy about Christopher and His Kind:- Getting to hear about the people behind the characters- Discussion of the choices he made in structuring his novels- Real-ish life in Berlin- Technique of separating “Christopher” the young man from “I,” the writer of this memoir- Little medical details – like getting treated for chlamydia before penicillin was invented- His landlady really did call him “Herr Issyvoo”- Christopher arranging the marriage of convenience between Thomas Mann’s daugher and W.H. Auden- W.H. Auden wrote a poem to his anal fissure- Ishwerwood’s discussion, too long to quote in full, of the moment when he and Auden realized that neither of them really held the communist convictions they’d claimed. Isherwood felt a “conflict of emotions.” He didn’t want to fight the Nazis because his own lover was now a Nazi soldier. “Every man in that Army could be somebody’s Heinz and I have no right to play favorites.” And his devotion to leftist causes was undermined by their homophobia. “As a homosexual, he had been wavering between embarrassment and defiance. He became embarrassed when he felt that he was making a selfish demand for his individual rights at a time when only group action mattered. He became defiant when he made the treatment of the homosexual a test by which every political party and government must be judged. His challenge to each one of them was: ‘All right, we’ve heard your liberty speech. Does that include us or doesn’t it?’” - He had similar feelings about leaving England. He was criticized for taking off for the United States just before the war came to his own country, but he felt that England had rejected him and he felt no special loyalty. Things I did not like:- Casual racism- His fraught relationship with his mother- His fixation on boys, as opposed to menThings that are interesting but I don’t know if I can say I enjoy them:- Class, class, class- Literary gossip- Isherwood destroyed his Berlin diaries after writing the stories, in one of those “done with the past” moods that people regret. So his memoir of that time is a little short on detail, with a bit too much speculation, and he actually quotes the Berlin novels at times. (Time after time, the moral of the story is: “Don’t destroy your diaries!”)Here are some quotations I found noteworthy:“After Edward’s visit, Christopher became increasingly aware of the kind of world he was living in. Here was the seething brew of history in the making – a brew which would test the truth of all the political theories, just as actual cooking tests the cookery books. The Berlin brew seethed with unemployment, malnutrition, stock-market panic hatred of the Versailles Treaty, and other potent ingredients. On September 20, a new one was added; in the Reichstag elections, the Nazis won 107 seats as against their previous 12, and became for the first time a major political party.”About a short story called “Sunday” by his communist friend Edward Upward: “What made ‘Sunday’ so intensely exciting to Christopher was Edward’s declaration that ‘history’ – the force of revolutionary change – is at work everywhere, even in the dullest, stuffiest, most reactionary of settings, such as this seaside resort. Edward’s message was: ‘Politics begins at home.’ You don’t have to hover nervously on the outskirts of some publicized foreign battleground, like Berlin. Just ask the way to a certain café in your own town. Behind it, you will find a small club where Communist meetings are held. Go inside. That is the first step which the downtrodden employee, the discontented schoolmaster, must take, if he wants to become one of those with whom history has gone to live.” From a 1932 letter Christopher wrote to a fellow writer and friend who had visited him in Berlin: “The afternoon is sad brilliant autumn sunshine, the sort of afternoon we might have chosen for a walk in Grunewald, the sort of afternoon on which Virginia Woolf looks out of her window and suddenly decides to write a novel about the hopeless love of a Pekingese dog for a very beautiful maidenhair fern.”His boyfriend, Heinz, comes to England to be with him after the Nazis take over. But he’s detained at the passport and customs inspection office. A “small, bright-eyed, smiling” man asks them pointed and smug questions about Heinz’s occupation, why he has so much money to support himself if he’s a working-class Hausdiener, why a letter Christopher wrote to Heinz makes him sound like he’s his sweetheart. So Heinz is turned away. And afterwards, W.H. Auden, a close friend of Isherwood and fellow homosexual who was present for the whole thing, says: “As soon as I saw that bright-eyed little rat, I knew we were done for. He understood the whole situation at a glance – because he’s one of us.”“In his two novels about Berlin, Christopher tried to make not only the bizarre seem humdrum but the humdrum seem bizarre—that is, exciting. He wanted his readers to find excitement in Berlin's drab streets and shabby crowds, in the poverty and dullness of the overgrown Prussian provincial town which had become Germany's pseudo-capital. Forty years later, I can claim that that excitement has been created—largely by all those others who have reinterpreted Christopher's material: actresses and actors, directors and writers. Christopher was saying, in effect: ‘Read about us and marvel! You did not live in our time—be sorry!’ And now there are young people who agree with him. ‘How I wish I could have been with you there!’ they write. This is flattering but also ironic; for most of them could no more have shared Christopher's life in Berlin than they could have lived with a hermit in the desert. Not because of any austerities Christopher endured. Because of the boredom.”(“Read about us and marvel” isn’t his; it’s a callback to a much earlier part of the memoir, in which Auden and Isherwood go on holiday and Auden writes in a guestbook a quotation from Ilya Ehrenburg’s poem about the Russian Revolution.)
—Eavan
In this memoir of 1930s Berlin Isherwood reflects on the writing of "The Berlin Stories," shifting back and forth between his real-life friends and events and the fictional characters and events they inspired. It sounds tiresome but it really works, and is even comprehensible to someone who hasn't read "The Berlin Stories." Because Nabokov lived, worked and set almost all of his Russian novels in 1920-30s Berlin, I'm accustomed to thinking of the city as his ground, but Isherwood made his own world of it, too.The cover of this edition is rather lame, a Herbert List photograph of a scrawny teen in tighty-whities, standing contrappasto in knee-deep water. Now, I realize that publishers cannot issue a book by a gay writer without a homoerotic cover image, but come on: Herbert List has better pictures...and there's always August Sander if you want great images of German society at the time.
—Eric
Fascinating companion volume to Lions and Shadows, that picks up the story when Isherwood arrives in Berlin in 1929, covering the next decade, and ending with the beginning of yet another voyage of discovery, this time to the US. Written in the 1970s, I think, this is not as immediate or as affecting as Lions and Shadows, but is an engrossing account of a writer's transformation.Isherwood is a master of anecdote and description, and a lot of real-life characters like Forster, Spender and Auden really shine in his writing. There is a lot of humour in this, and some heartbreaking moments as well. Isherwood gives a fascinating insight into the political and economic tensions of the time, which reflect a word as fractious and divided as it remains to this very day.If you have seen and liked the BBC movie version with Matt Smith as Isherwood, I urge you to read the book as well, as the adaptation inevitably glosses over much of the material, particularly the relationship with Heinz.Admittedly this does get a bit heavy-going, particularly if you have not read all of Isherwood's main novels -- as I have not. Isherwood quotes extensively from them, and there is a lot of discussion about characters and the writerly process. Still, an important book and well worth reading.
—Gerhard
