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HIGH GEAR/MARCH 1978

CAMERA'S ON ISHERWOOD

By George Brown

CHRISTOPHER AND HIS KIND, 1929-1939. By Christopher Isherwood. 339 pages. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. 1976. $10.00. In paperback: 340 pages. A Discus Book published by Avon Books. November, 1977. $2.75..

Christopher

Isherwood's

writing has always dealt with homosexuality: first obliquely, then thinly veiled, and finally directly. Until he published A SINGLE MAN in 1964, only homosexuals and the discerning knew that many of Mr. Isherwood's characters,

including the ever-present narrator, were homosexual, although in DOWN THERE ON A VISIT (1962) there wasn't much doubt; but even in that book the Christopher-narrator still woudin't bring himself completely out of the closet. A MEETING BY THE RIVER in 1967 dealt openly with homosexuality, but it wasn't until 1971 when he published KATHLEEN AND FRANK, "The. Autobiography of a Family", Isherwood's own family, that he actually expounded on his own homosexuality. The times demanded such an admission, and apparently Isherwood, then in his sixties with his reputation made as a major minor AngloAmerican writer, was eager to stand up and be counted.

Now he has given us the fascinating CHRISTOPHER AND HIS KIND in which he comments on his life and the people in it from 1929, when he first went to Berlin, to 1939, when he came to the United States to settle permanently. This fragment of autobiography, or literary memoir as Gore Vidal calls it, reveals a very honest man as he looks back on the Christopher he once was (he always refers to his past self as Christopher). He wants to analyze himself and to set the record straight; he wants to describe the models on which he based his characters through the years; and he wants the catharsis of self-revelation. He succeeds in producing a worthy book.

In 1929 Christopher was a quiet but determined rebel in his mid-twenties, drawn to Berlin, less than eleven years after World War I in which soldier father had died fighting Germans, because of the reports poet W.H. Auden had brought him of the boy bars in that city. Christopher remained in Berlin, with frequent but brief trips back to England until 1933 when Hitler came to power. He found a lot of sex, apparently of the commercial sort, and formed at least three erotic attachments. First there was Bubi (Baby), then Otto and last of all Heinz. This third relationship surpassed the mercenary, endured for some years as they wandered over much of Europe desperately trying to find an adopted

homeland for Heinz, and terminated only when the Nazis seized Heinz during his return to Germany a return which was calculated brief and necessary in order for Heinz to escape forever.

as

Isherwood has some flashaheads in this vital fragment of his life and in one he briefly and indirectly describes his meeting with Heinz, who was then married to a woman, when Isherwood returned to Germany in 1952 for the first time after World War II. This little flashahead makes us painfully aware of the mutability of life. Heinz, who had once been the great concern of Isherwood's life, probably next only to his writing, was now another person and so was Isherwood.

Isherwood writes that Berlin in the early 1930's was different from its rowdy swinging image and that his life there often was boring. The talented writer was fortunate financially. He had a wealthy uncle back in England, also a member of the third sex, who subsidized him during his Berlin days and while he later roamed about Europe; and there was his mother to turn to for additional financial help, even

though he rejected her and the England she represented. In those years Isherwood was a political creature of sorts, embracing Marxism. As a Marxist, he was more fellow traveler than doer; he needed a left wing cause to embrace. His pacificism, which began developing with the advent of World War II, undoubtedly was motivated by more genuine and logical convictions. Later, in the United States, Isherwood was to embrace religion, but not a traditional Western one; he became deeply involved in Vedanta, a version of Hinduism.

identify

Perhaps we Isherwood too much with Berlin of the early 1930's. But would he be as well known and as well read if John van Druten in the

early 1950's hadn't dramatized parts of GOODBYE TO BERLIN into "I Am A Camera" and Julie Harris hadn't played Sally Bowles so brilliantly? There followed the movie version in which Julie Harris repeated her role, but for some reason the film didn't receive full-scale promotion and release. Then Isherwood's consciousness was revived in the late 1960's with "Cabaret," the stage musical version of "I Am A Camera," with this consciousness continuing into the 1970's with the highly successful film version starring Liza Minnelli, Michael York and Joel Grey. He got a lot of mileage out of Sally Bowles. But this is not to indicate that Isherwood lacks brilliance. He always writes very well. He has drawn vivid portraits of Sally Bowles, Mr. Norris, the film director in PRATER VIOLET, and George, A SINGLE MAN, but he is best when he is writing about Christopher. He has great knack for describing others, but even when he does he is writing about Christopher's reaction to them, even if it is only his visual reaction. Isherwood is a camera, but all in all the camera is best when it is photographing itself. In KATHLEEN AND FRANK we see sharp portraits of his parents, but it is Christopher who emerges as the dominant character.

Is the real Christopher as interesting as the one on paper? Probably. At least he must have a great talent for friendship. He seems to have found friends wherever he went. He states that eighty percent of his friends have been homosexual and that when he is away from homosexuals for a long period of time he feels stifled. In England he made friends with W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, and he was always meeting one or the other in Germany or some other place in Europe. He and Auden were special friends, and Isherwood says that their friendship was strengthened by their sexual relationship; yet apparently they never considered themselves lovers.

Isherwood dedicated A SINGLE MAN to Gore Vidal. Tennessee Williams mentioned him as friend in his MEMOIRS (1975) and in LETTERS FROM TENNESSEE WILLIAMS' TO DONALD WINHAM (1977); and Isherwood and Windham were friends. Ethel Barrymore in her MEMORIES (1955) mentioned her friendship with Isherwood and writer Gerald Heard (who was Isherwood's friend) as worthwhile. And in CHARLES LAUGHTON: AN INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY (1976) Charles Higham reveals that Laughton and his wife Elsa Lanchester regarded him highly. In England he wasn't close friends with W. Somerset Maugham and Virginia Woolf,' but apparently he

impressed them. He was on close terms with E.M. Forster.

In both Germany and England Isherwood was friends with Jean Ross, the model for Sally Bowles, and it was she who got him into film script writing in England, and from this initial venture eventually came the novella PRATER VIOLET, of iwhich Berthold Viertel was the model. When Isherwood went to California, he looked up Viertel and apparently through him secured script writing in Hollywood, work he has done spasmodically throughout the years. And Isherwood was friends, in various places, with Gerald Hamilton, the bizarre model for the bizarre Mr. Norris. The list of friends and friendly acquaintances continues into a long one.

Can it be said that Isherwood's friends are either famous or bizarre? Probably not entirely, for when he became friends with Tennessee Williams, the latter had not yet found success (yet according to Williams' MEMOIR and his recently published letters to Windham, he was already bizarre).

I saw Isherwood on the Dick Cavett Show at the time KATHLEEN AND FRANK was published, and although he avowed his homosexuality, he seemed shy and retiring, too much so for a talk show. I couldn't distinguish much of the low-key magnetism that surely is there; but then talk shows are artificial situations, entertaining as they can be. The December 17, 1975 issue of ADVOCATE reports him as charming an audience of young people during Gay Pride Week at Cal State Long Beach; and as a college lecturer he probably held the attention of his students.

When I was twenty-one years old and a student at UCLA, I once opened my door in a rooming house in Santa Monica Canyon to see Isherwood, who lived not far from the Canyon, standing there knocking on the door of his friend who lived in the apartment directly next to my room. He smiled in an engaging manner and said, "Hello." I was rather surprised at this hearty, although impartial, friendliness. I had seen him various times through. the window going to and from. our rooming house, and I was

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interested in him because I had just seen Julie Harris in "I Am a Camera" on the stage of the Biltmore Theatre in Los Angeles and had read part of GOODBYE TO BERLIN. From the play and from his writing and from glances through windows, I had pictured him as shy and elusive, more or less self-absorbed. At the time I was living a somewhat bohemian existence in Los Angeles, somewhat like Isherwood had lived in Berlin. It would have been interesting really to have met him, to have become acquainted with him and regret that I couldn't. I went to meetings of One, the first organized homosexual group in the nation, but I never saw Isherwood there. Although he lived a fairly open personal life, he wasn't, in 1952-53, interested in identifying, at least openly, with this newly formed organization dedicated to improving the lot of the homosexual. However, when Dr. Evelyn Hooker, noted research psychologist on homosexuality, came to speak at one of the meetings, she gave Isherwood's name as a shibboleth, she at the time being his landlady and friend (her husband, a UCLA professor, was co-landlord and co-friend). I feel sure she did this with Isherwood's permission.

Christopher Isherwood now lives in Santa Monica Canyon with artist Don Bachardy. His book ends beautifully as he describes his and Auden's arrival in the United States with Isherwood saying that they would find what they really came searching for: love, the ideal companion to accept them for what they were and not what they pretended to be. Isherwood adds that Auden was to find this soon but that he himself wasn't to find it for a long time because the person who would eventually bring this love into his life was then only four years old. Isherwood was then thirtyfour years old. He and Bachardy have now been together for about twenty-five years.

I hope that Isherwood is at work on a second volume of CHRISTOPHER AND HIS KIND, from 1939 onward. If it appears, I will rush to the book store for a copy.

sketches

Courtesy of Avon Books