Thousands of Broadway playgoers and even more movie and TV fans may have seen the Cabaret without associating it with Isherwood, whose Berlin Stories (1930) inspired the musical about decadent Weimar Germany.
The latter came from the first
decade of his writing career, when as part of the “Auden Circle” of modernist
British and Irish writers, he became associated with left-wing politics and was
hailed as “the hope of English fiction” by critic Cyril Connolly.
After
emigrating to America with W.H. Auden as Britain was on the brink of war in
1939—a move denounced as cowardice in the face of the Nazi threat by the pair’s
critics—Isherwood moved his career and lifestyle in entirely new
directions—including, for that atheist, a conversion to Hinduism (and even a
brief time as a monk in the 1940s) and three decades of what he cheerfully
admitted was hackwork as a Hollywood screenwriter.
Most
significantly, following his decision to publicly acknowledge his own sexual
orientation in 1971, he emerged as a godfather figure to gay authors, including the likes of Truman Capote, Edmund White, Armistead Maupin, Patricia
Highsmith, and Gore Vidal.
Did
Isherwood deserve Vidal’s praise in a December 1976 New York Review of Books
assessment as “the best prose writer in English”? I’m inclined to see that
as exaggeration—or, more charitably, an expression of Vidal’s gratitude for
championing his work early in his career. Even so, Isherwood is an
important writer and his work contains considerable merit.
The
clarity, even transparency, of his prose masked how complex his artistic vision
could be, just as his much-discussed wit and charm often obscured his
complicated personality.
Perhaps
the most famous line in all of his work, from Berlin Stories—“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not
thinking”—encourages a sense of his objectivity. That is crucial because, as an
early practitioner of metafiction, Isherwood frequently created a persona explicitly named “Christopher
Isherwood.”
Conversely,
his memoirs, which readers would normally view as more reality-based than his
fiction, employed composite characters, chronicled events out of sequence,
or reshaped them differently from the actual
occurrences as recorded in his diaries.
Isherwood’s
style is uncluttered, concise and graceful, adding to the believability of both
his fiction and nonfiction. Whether in bohemian Berlin of the interwar period
or the European emigres and New Age devotees of Southern California’s postwar
era, his nonjudgmental “eye” takes in all it sees.
Though influential and helpful to many people, Isherwood was not always admirable. Interviews and documentary evidence from his extensive diaries led biographers Peter Parker and Katherine Bucknell to conclude that he could also be drunken, neurotic, promiscuous (an estimated 400 lovers by age 44), and even antisemitic.
(He told a listener that "Hitler killed 600,000 homosexuals." When this young Jewish producer responded that "Hitler killed 6 million Jews," Isherwood said acidly, "What are you? In real estate?")
I find
Isherwood’s relationship to Hollywood particularly fascinating. His movie and
TV assignments often involved subjects he surely did not find congenial (for
example, as I mentioned in this post from 17 years ago about “Silent
Night” composer Franz Gruber).
But what Hollywood chronicler Tom Dardis called “Some Time in the Sun” for famous novelists-turned-screenwriters like F. Scott Fitzgerald not only gave Isherwood a lifestyle far more comfortable than he had enjoyed in Britain but also fueled his creativity.
Prater Violet (1945), for example, is still
considered one of the best fictional representations of the Hollywood “dream
factory.”
When it
came time to adapt Cabaret from stage to screen, director Bob
Fosse made an unexpectedly felicitous decision, by casting Michael
York—practically a dead ringer for the young Isherwood—in the role of the
author’s alter ego “Brian.”
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