Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood: The Camera That Implicated Itself

Crossing the Channel at Dover in 1934, Isherwood recorded in his diary that he was in flight from the law. He meant it literally. Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 made sex between men a crime in Britain until 1967, and the scholar Ben Robbins has argued that Isherwood's long absence from England was exile rather than expatriation — a departure under legal pressure, not a free choice. The novelist who gave the twentieth century Sally Bowles and the phrase "I am a camera" spent much of his life outside the country whose language he wrote.

A Dead Father and Wyberslegh Hall

Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was born on 26 August 1904 at High Lane, Cheshire. His father, Francis Edward Bradshaw Isherwood — Frank — was a professional soldier in the York and Lancaster Regiment, killed at Ypres in May 1915 when Christopher was ten. His mother, Kathleen, née Machell Smith, was a wine merchant's daughter connected to the Greene brewing family. Behind them stood a genealogy the novelist would use and resent: John Henry Isherwood, squire of Marple and Wyberslegh Halls, and the Puritan judge John Bradshaw, who signed Charles I's death warrant. The father's death produced *The Memorial* (1932), on what the war did to a family and a generation.

Sabotaging Cambridge

He met W. H. Auden at St Edmund's School, Hindhead, in 1914, and Edward Upward at Repton in 1918; with Upward he invented the imaginary village of Mortmere, a private world that served as a writing apprenticeship. At Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, he held a history scholarship and then destroyed it deliberately, filling his second-year examination papers with jokes and limericks. He was asked to leave without a degree in 1925. In October 1928 he enrolled as a medical student at King's College London and lasted six months. The same year he published *All the Conspirators*, a novel about children at war with their parents.

Berlin

He arrived in Berlin in March 1929 intending to stay ten days and remained until 1933. His own explanation was blunt: "To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys." He drank at the Cosy Corner, a gay bar in Kreuzberg, in a city where Paragraph 175 criminalised homosexual acts but enforcement had slackened. When the Nazis took power he destroyed his Berlin diaries, fearing police seizure — an act of self-censorship that shaped everything he later wrote about those years, since he had to reconstruct them.

*Mr Norris Changes Trains* (1935) grew out of his friendship with Gerald Hamilton. *Goodbye to Berlin* (1939) assembled the portrait of the dying republic, including the novella "Sally Bowles" (1937), drawn from Jean Ross, with whom he had briefly shared a flat. Combined in America as *The Berlin Stories* (1945), they became John van Druten's play *I Am a Camera* (1951), then *Cabaret* (1966), then the 1972 film that made Liza Minnelli a star. Throughout, Isherwood used aliases and disguised his queer characters to get past censorship — a compromise he spent forty years undoing.

Heinz

The relationship that defined the decade began in 1932: Isherwood was 27, Heinz Neddermeyer 16 or 17. They fled Germany together in May 1933 and spent years in transit — Greece, the Canary Islands, Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, Sintra — because no country would keep them. England refused Neddermeyer entry in January 1934; in May 1937 he was expelled to Germany, arrested by the Gestapo for draft evasion and homosexuality, and sentenced to three and a half years' hard labour. Isherwood's diaries blame the "British heterosexual dictatorship" for his inability to protect him. The episode also made him a pacifist, by a logic he stated exactly: "I wouldn't kill Heinz. Therefore I have no right to kill anybody."

The Auden Years

With Auden he wrote three plays — *The Dog Beneath the Skin* (1935), *The Ascent of F6* (1936), *On the Frontier* (1938) — and in January 1938 travelled to China to report the Sino-Japanese war, producing *Journey to a War* (1939). Within the group around Auden and Stephen Spender, Isherwood was the designated novelist.

America and the Silence

He decided to emigrate in January 1939 and settled in Hollywood, befriending Truman Capote and Dodie Smith. Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley introduced him to Swami Prabhavananda and the Vedanta Society of Southern California; Isherwood took initiation and briefly lived as a monk. Between 1939 and 1945 he published no novels at all. What he produced instead was religious: a co-translation of the *Bhagavad Gita — The Song of God* (1944), managing editorship of *Vedanta and the West* (1943–45), forty articles, fifty-three temple lectures between 1950 and 1978, and thirty-five years of scripture translation. He registered as a conscientious objector and worked at a Quaker hostel in Pennsylvania resettling European Jewish refugees, became a U.S. citizen on 8 November 1946, and dropped "William Bradshaw" from his legal name.

Bachardy

In October 1952 he met Don Bachardy on the beach at Santa Monica. Bachardy was 18; Isherwood was 48. The thirty-year gap scandalised people and the partnership lasted until his death, through affairs and separations. Bachardy typed the manuscript of *The World in the Evening* (1954) and became a formidable portraitist; David Hockney's 1968 double portrait of the two men in their Santa Monica house sold at auction in 2025 for $44.3 million. Isherwood taught modern English literature at Los Angeles State College and wrote for the screen, from *Little Friend* (1934) with Berthold Viertel to *The Loved One* (1964) with Terry Southern. *Down There on a Visit* came in 1962, and in 1964 *A Single Man*: one day in the life of George, a middle-aged gay English professor in Los Angeles, and by consensus his finest book.

Why Christopher Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on a technical invention: a first-person narrator who carries the author's own name and is never allowed the safety of detachment. The camera in the famous formulation is passive, but Isherwood's real innovation was the opposite — a watcher continuously implicated in what he watches, whose evasions and appetites are part of the evidence. That instrument made *Goodbye to Berlin* the definitive record of a society sliding into fascism as observed by someone with no moral high ground, and it made *A Single Man* possible: an ordinary interior day granted the full seriousness of literature at a moment when gay life was still legally criminal in much of the West. *Christopher and His Kind* (1976) then turned the method on his own earlier concealments and carried him into the heart of Gay Liberation.

The honest counter-case is substantial. The output is thin and overwhelmingly autobiographical — closer to curated experience than to invention — and for six years, at the height of his powers, he wrote no fiction whatever. Much of the fame of the Berlin books belongs to *Cabaret* rather than to him. Even the most cited tribute is barbed: Susan Sontag credited *The World in the Evening* as effectively the only place camp had reached print before her essay, but called it "a lazy two-page sketch." The sources record no major literary prize in his lifetime; the only award bearing his name, the *Los Angeles Times* Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, was created in 2016. His genius is one of angle and nerve, not of range.

Legacy

Diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981, he died at home in Santa Monica on 4 January 1986, aged 81; his body went to UCLA and his ashes were scattered at sea. Bachardy's drawings of him dying became famous in their own right. The Huntington Library holds the world's largest collection of his papers — diaries, notebooks, photograph albums, drafts of *Christopher and His Kind* — and Katherine Bucknell has edited the diaries into print. The adaptations keep arriving: *Chris & Don* (2008), Tom Ford's *A Single Man* (2009), the BBC's *Christopher and His Kind* (2010).