Verse of the Day (W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, on a Long-Kept Secret)

“At last the secret is out,
as it always must come in the end,
the delicious story is ripe to tell
to tell to the intimate friend;
over the tea-cups and into the square
the tongues has its desire;
still waters run deep, my dear,
there's never smoke without fire.”— English-born American poet, critic and playwright W. H. Auden (1907-1973) and Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, and diarist Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts (1936)
 
Well, in the case of The Person Formerly Known as Prince Andrew, Duke of York, that would be secrets, plural. And they are probably not all out, but so many have emerged about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein that he has been stripped of his royal title and, as of last week, arrested on “suspicion of misconduct while in office.”
 
Before his (since terminated) marriage, this ex-royal enjoyed something of a reputation on Fleet Street of what might be called in the British Isles “a bit of a lad.” But nothing prepared the country for the firestorm surrounding e-mails and photos released from the Epstein files that further undermined Andrew’s disastrous attempt at damage control a few years ago.
 
Like Mark Twain, I have long believed that “the kingly office…is no more entitled to respect than the flag of a pirate.” But these days, I think that the British are doing far more to hold to account those in the highest positions of their country than we are here in the United States.
 
And that goes for the fellow here who would like to hold all power, with nobody to second-guess him. All his talk about the Epstein revelations having “exonerated” him only leaves most of us exasperated. If he’s really innocent, why not release the remaining 3 million documents?
 
(The image of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor that accompanies this post was extracted from a photo of him with Juan Manuel Santos, President, Republic of Colombia. It was taken on Nov. 9, 2017, on the presentation of the Chatham House Prize, and was made available by Chatham House. Since then, Andrew’s title, along with his smile, has disappeared.)

This Day in Literary History (Death of Christopher Isherwood, ‘Cabaret’ Chronicler)

Jan. 4, 1986—Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, and diarist Christopher Isherwood died of prostate cancer at age 81 in Santa Monica, CA.

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.”

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, on Unprecedented Events)

“Always the following wind of history

Of others' wisdom makes a buoyant air

Till we come suddenly on pockets where

Is nothing loud but us; where voices seem

Abrupt, untrained, competing with no lie

Our fathers shouted once.”—English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973) (in photograph) and English novelist-memoirist Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts (1936)

Quote of the Day (Christopher Isherwood, on a ‘Clever and Unscrupulous Liar’)

“It is indeed tragic to see how, even in these days, a clever and unscrupulous liar can deceive millions.”— “Mr. Norris”—himself a “clever and unscrupulous liar,” commenting on the far more dangerous one who took over Germany in 1933, in Christopher Isherwood, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935)

Christopher Isherwood’s novel is not just a study in a louche, corrupt con man, but also of how the society that makes his kind possible also endangers the prospects of democracy. I’m afraid that this year, as in no other in my lifetime (and that includes Richard Nixon’s twists and turns amid Watergate and his impeachment crisis), we are witnessing a similar frail democracy thrashing about. Let’s hope it doesn’t lead to what transpired in 1930s Germany.

This Day in Music History (“Silent Night” Played for First Time)

December 25, 1818—One of the most glorious of Christmas carols, “Stille Nacht” (“Silent Night”), was sung for the first time at St. Nicholas Church in Obendorf, Austria. The lyrics were written by the assistant pastor of the church, Fr. Joseph Mohr, who had taken them to choir director Franz Gruber (pictured), who composed the music the night before.

Countless myths have encrusted the creation and reception of this song, as recounted by Bill Egan. One wishes there was somewhat more documentation on this—the song, after all, was not composed in the time of Shakespeare, when records were kept and preserved indifferently—but then again, I suppose we are lucky to know even what we do about it.

Mohr and Gruber were not, after all, Mozart, Beethoven, or Josef or Michael Haydn, who were all variously believed to be the composers in the first half-century or so after it was created. They had nothing elaborate with which to work—just Mohr’s guitar and the voices of the choir. They never became rich off of a song that people began singing and playing the world over within their own lifetimes. They were simply officials at a village church, with a job to do.

For those of us who work and wonder at the products of our minds, the two men represent a welcome reminder that even ordinary people can create the most extraordinary works.

It’s hard to believe, but the story of these simple, pious men figured in the life of a writer far more famous and far more complicated: Christopher Isherwood, friend of W.H. Auden and author of the “Berlin Stories” that inspired Cabaret. The Weimar Era decadence depicted in that musical certainly described that period in the life of the writer, who early on rejected not only the Anglican faith into which he was baptized but also Christianity and the message of Jesus as a whole.

Throughout his late 40s into his 60s, Isherwood supplemented income from novels with scripts for film and television. None of the latter, oddly enough for someone whose novels burst with colorful detail and insinuating dialogue (for an example, see Mr. Norris Changes Trains), turned out to be particularly memorable.

Except, perhaps, in one small instance, for one small boy: me.

At age eight or nine, I watched one Christmas, on network TV, an hour-long primetime special on how “Silent Night” was composed. From a distance of 40 years, I can’t recall many details about it, aside from the fact that it was a biopic about Franz Gruber.

But a few years ago, while reading the long but often fascinating biography of Isherwood by Peter Parker, I noticed that it mentioned one of his later credits as an expatriate writer-for-hire in Hollywood: a 1968 network special, The Legend of "Silent Night". This must have been the same one I saw. It was shown on TV exactly 150 years to the day when the song was first performed.

At first glance, this struck me as the most incongruous pairing of a religious skeptic and a religious themed script this side of Gore Vidal coming aboard to work on the epic Ben-Hur. It could only have been a job, no more.

On second thought, however, I wondered. True, Isherwood never re-embraced the faith of his childhood. But after he came to the United States with Auden, he experienced a search for meaning that led him to convert to Hinduism, a spiritual journey he chronicled in My Guru and His Disciple. (The “guru” of the title was Swami Prabhavanda.)

That experience, I think, gave him an entrée, a point of sympathy between himself and Gruber, that would not have been possible otherwise—for Isherwood eventually came to translate several Hindu texts into English, including Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God. He had now become intimately familiar with the struggle that the creative artist faces in explaining to others not similarly gifted nor religiously inclined how the deity he embraces has altered his life.

I did not find any tape of this 1968 special in the catalog of the Paley Center for Media. Too bad: the credits (including Isherwood’s) meant little or nothing to me at the time, but nowadays any such array of talent, no matter how seemingly modest the project, would have to be regarded as all-star: narration by Kirk Douglas, music by Alex North (the scores for A Streetcar Named Desire and Spartacus), directed by Daniel Mann (Come Back, Little Sheba), teleplay by Isherwood and Harry Rasky, based on “The Story of Silent Night” by Paul Gallico, and starring James Mason as Gruber.

The Paul Gallico source material raises an interesting question. The sportswriter-turned-popular-novelist retailed a story that had little if any relation to fact: i.e., that “Silent Night” was originally performed with a guitar because the vital parts of the organ at St. Nicholas had been eaten away by mice! A great anecdote, certainly lending itself to the kind of dramatic detail Isherwood would have relished. Did the Hindu convert put this detail in his script?

I don’t know, but it’s certainly worth finding out—something that would be easier to do if those in Hollywood wake up to the interesting creative property they undoubtedly have buried in some vault.