Christopher Isherwood: “The World Seems So Fresh”

Photographers Unknown,, The World Seems So Fresh

“A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence.

I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.” 

— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

Christopher Isherwood was a novelist, screen-writer, and playwright who used his expeiences as a gay man for the theme of some of his  writings. Isherwood was born into a privileged lifestyle near Manchester in the north of England in 1904. He developed strong friendships during his boarding school years, later collaborating with school friend Wystan Auden to write three plays : “The Dog Beneath the Skin” in 1935, the 1936 “The Asceent of F6”, and “On the Frontier” in 1938.

Asked to leave Cambridge University in 1925, Isherwood took part-time jobs, briefly attended medical school, and progressed with his first two novels, “All the Conspirators” published in 1928 and “The Memorial” published in 1932. He moved to Berlin in 1929, where he taught English and explored his homosexuality. 

Isherwood ’s  experiences and developed friendships with Gerald Hamilton and Jean Ross provided material for his 1935 “Mr. Norris Changes Trains” and his 1939 “Goodbye to Berlin”. These were later published together as “The Berlin Stories”, which established Isherwood’s reputation as an important writer and inspired the 1951 play “I Am a Camera” and the 1966 musical “Cabaret”. 

While living in Berlin, Isherwood often returned to London where he took his first movie-script job, working with Viennese director Berthold Viertel on the 1934 film “Little Friend”. He also worked on his book“Lions and Shadows”, published in 1938, a fictionalized  autobiography of his education, both in and out of school in the 1920s. Traveling in January of 1938, Isherwood, accompanied by Wystan Auden, journeyed to China to write his 1939 “Journey to a War” about the Sino-Japanese conflict. 

Isherwood and Auden emigrated to the United States in January of 1939, Auden to Manhattan and Isherwood to Hollywood, where he met and became friends with Truman Capote and British novelist and playwright Dodie Smith. On November 6, 1946, Christopher Isherwood became an American citizen. While living in California with photographer William Caskey, he and Caskey traveled in 1947 to South America, after which they published the 1949 “The Condor and the Crows”, with prose by Isherwood and photographs by Caskey. 

On Valentine’s Day in 1953, at the age of forty-eight, Isherwood met eighteen-year old Don Bachardy on the beach at Santa Monica. Despite the age difference, this meeting began a partnership that, though interrupted by affairs and separations, continued until the end of Isherwood’s life. During this period they were together, Isherwood, with Bachardy typing, finished his 1954 novel “The World in the Evening” and taught modern English literature at (now) California State University, Los Angeles. The two became a well-known and well-established couple in California society with many Hollywood friends.

Isherwood was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981, and died of the disease on the 4th of January, 1986, at his Santa Monica home, aged 81. His body was donated to medical science and his ashes later scattered at sea.

Note: Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel “A Single Man” is considered by many to be his finest achievement. The story depicts a day in the life of George, a middle-aged gay Englishman who is a professor at a Los Angeles University. In the novel, the professor, unable to cope with the sudden death of his partner Jim, encounters different people who give him insight into the possibilities of being alive and human in the world. The novel was adapted into the drama film “A Single Man”, in 2009, directed by fashion designer Tom Ford, and starring Colin Firth who, for his role in the film, was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award.

Notes: An interesting, more extensive article on the life of Christopher Isherwood can be found at The Isherwood Foundation located at: https://www.isherwoodfoundation.org/biography.html

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Christopher Isherwood (left) and Don Bachardy”,  late 1970s.

Bottom Insert Photo: George Platt Lynes, “Christopher Isherwood”, 1935, Heliogravure, Private Collection