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Isherwood, circa 1932
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"Oh source of my inspiration, teach me to extend toward all living that fascinated, unsentimental, loving and all-pardoning interest which I feel for the characters I create. May I become identified with all humanity, as I identify myself with these imaginary persons. May my life become my art and my art my life."
Christopher Isherwood, a writer's prayer from his Diaries (July 1940)
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood, considered one of the best prose writers of the twentieth century. "I am a camera . . ." he wrote at the beginning of his most famous work Goodbye to Berlin which was adapted into a play, then a musical and finally the Oscar-winning film Cabaret.
Following publication of his first novel in 1928, Isherwood moved to Berlin where he collaborated on a number of verse plays with English poet WH Auden. They returned to England in 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany, travelled together to China and in 1939 settled in the United States – Auden in New York and Isherwood in Santa Monica, California.
Becoming an American citizen in 1946, Isherwood continued to write novels as well as film scripts for Hollywood. But upon meeting Aldous Huxley he became interested in eastern philosophy and joined the Vedanta Society of Los Angeles. He worked on translations of several Hindu classics, including the Bhagavad-Gita. In 1980 he wrote about his spiritual journey in My Guru and His Disciple.
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Isherwood, right, and friend Heinz Neddermeyer circa 1934
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Most of Isherwood's work is autobiographical, even his novels. "When you come down to it," he said in a 1981 interview, "we find that most of the greatest novelists were, in fact, being at least three-quarters autobiographical. Proust didn't come out of thin air; Tolstoy wrote about experiences he really had; Hemingway went around saying one should never write about something one hadn't experienced . . . It seems to me that everything one does must be autobiographical in a certain sense. Your fingerprints are always recognisable all over it in one way or another."
When Isherwood published his memoir Christopher and His Kind in 1976, the gay liberation movement in America was in full swing and he was an avid supporter. The book was much more frank about his sexual experiences during his years in Berlin than his earlier work. "You start writing fiction related to your own life," he explained. "And then you find that while the fiction is perfectly valid on its own level, it's still worthwhile to say what really happened and then kind of philosophise over that. And then, of course, the question arises: what was it that made it necessary to have the fiction?"
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Detail from Portrait of Christopher Isherwood, July 12 1979, by Don Bachardy
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When EM Forster died in 1970 he left Isherwood the rights to his novel Maurice, which was published the following year. Isherwood used the funds to support other writers in their work. After his death in 1986 a foundation was established to continue that support. In 1999 Isherwood's papers were given to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, by his lifelong partner Don Bachardy, a gifted artist who has done many Isherwood portraits. The library is celebrating the centenary of his birth with the exhibition Christopher Isherwood: A Writer and His World.
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