HIGH GEAR/FEBRUARY 1977

Page 20

AN IMPORTANT GAY AUTHOR

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Wed. Feb. 23 & Sun. Feb. 27 at 10 P.M.

By Mitchell Menigu

(Christopher Isherwood. Christopher and His Kind 19291939 New York; Farrar Straus Giroux, 1976, $10.)

In Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood reviews the life he led and the literary works that resulted from his life from the time he went to Berlin at the age of twenty-five in 1929 until he immigrated to the United States ten years later. The title suggests much about the method and concerns of the book. Isherwood looks back at Christopher, the young man he was then, with the benefit of understanding gained from subsequent experience and under the handicap of having to remember events that took place more than thirty-five years ago; the result is that Christopher becomes a character at some distance from the writer who recalls him. The people Christopher meets categorized as His Kind homosexual or artistic or leftist anti-fascist or the others.

are

This memoir is fascinating on several levels. One is Isherwood's comments on how he used the substance of his life as the material for his artistic output. Particularly interesting are his remarks on the transformation of his experience that first drew attention as the collection of stories, Goodbye to Berlin; then dramatized by John Van Druten, as the play I Am A Camera; which was transformed later into the Broadway musical, Cabaret; which in time underwent changes when it was adapted into the famous film.

Isherwood pays particular. attention to the variations in these versions on his own character, but he also reveals much about the origins of Sally Bowles and the other friends he fictionalized in the stories. With regard to Isherwood, the artist, the book also offers useful material about his friendships with such important contemporaries of his as W.H. Auden; Stephen Spender; E.M. Forster; John Lehmann and his sisters, the actress, Beatrix and the writer, Rosamund; and Benjamin Britten, the recently deceased composer.

Although less so than some of his friends, Isherwood has always been politically conscious. The political background that he was able to portray vividly was a positive feature that added depth to his earlier works. Here again his ability to indicate the turmoil, particularly in Germany, Spain and China, but also throughout the rest of the world on the verge of cataclysm, constitutes one of the values of his latest work. Without stating it, Isherwood demonstrates the idea that being non-political is a logical impossibility because the political climate can affect people's lives in unexpected ways. The idea is presented most vividly in Christopher's continuing difficulties throughout the last years. covered by the book in maintaining his relationship with his German lover, Heinz, whom Britain would not accept nor Germany release from her claim that a military duty had to be fulfilled.

Perhaps the most important impetus leading to the writing of Christopher and His Kind was Isherwood's conviction that the record must be set straight as far as his homosexuality, goes. At the very beginning, referring to an earlier memoir, Lions and Shadows, he says, "The actor conceals important facts about himself." Indicating the difference between the two books, he adds, "The book I am now going to write will be as frank and factual as I can make it, especially as far as I myself am concerned." He reveals that a primary motive for his going to Berlin was to experience the city's infamous boy bars, hoping to find there the satisfaction that had always escaped him.

Having mentioned a series of early sexual experiences, "none entirely satisfying," Isherwood explains: "This was because Christopher was suffering from an inhibition, then not unusual among upper class homosexuals; he couldn't relax sexually with a member of his own class or nation. He needed a working-class foreigner." In relationships of increasing

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