Christopher Isherwood Biography

Christopher Isherwood

(Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood; High Lane, Cheshire, 1904-Santa Monica, California, 1986) American nationalized British narrator and playwright.Born into a wealthy family-he was the son of a British army officer-he received careful academic training from his earliest childhood, first at the Repton School and later at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University.

Thanks to this select education, he also developed from an early age his innate inclination towards the study of the humanities and literary creation, and before he turned thirty he had already made himself known as a writer through of some early narratives of undoubted interest, such as those entitled All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932).

Christopher Isherwood

I insert, from then on, in the main intellectual and artistic forums of England in the thirties (in which he participated both in his capacity as a writer and in his capacity as professor and journalist), shared a solid relationship of friendship with another of the great revelations of English letters of the time, the poet and playwright from York WH Auden, with whom he came to compose several plays written in verse, such as those entitled The dog beneath the skin (The dog under the skin, 1935), The ascent of F6 (The rise of F6, 1936) and On the frontier (On the frontier, 1938).In all of them, Chistopher and Auden made clear their interest in the most radical proposals of German art after the First World War, and, as far as their theatrical concerns are concerned, their admiration for one of the best exponents of these new aesthetic tendencies, Bertolt Brecht.

Installed in Berlin between 1933 and 1936 (where he shared a house with Auden and met another former colleague from university classrooms, the poet and critic Stephen Spender), he had the opportunity to attend as a witness privileged to the rise of Nazism, a circumstance that contributed powerfully to the forging in his ideology of a firm political commitment that, in his repudiation of all the forms of totalitarianism that were taking over Europe, united him at that time with many other English authors of his generation (among them, the aforementioned Auden, who in 1936 took an active part in the Spanish Civil War alongside the Republican army).

The theme of Nazism also took hold of the literary production of Christopher Isherwood, who reflected its ravages in the fictionalized autobiography Lions and shadows (Lions and shadows, 1938) and in some brilliant novels like Mr.Norris changes train (Mr.Norris changes trains, 1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (Goodbye to Berlin, 1939).

The first of these narrations describes the corruption of Berlin-a city that had become, in those years, the central thematic axis of his work-through the degradation of a character; the second, which uses the technique of reporting to reflect interwar Berlin, gave rise years later to one of the cinematographic films that have dealt with the phenomenon of Nazism with the greatest rigor and originality: Cabaret , by American filmmaker Bob Fosse, played by Liza Minelli, Michael York, Helmut Criem and Marisa Berenson.

But the success of this Isherwood novel (starring the young Englishwoman Sally Bowles, cabaret in a sordid Berlin nightclub) had already generated, long before the premiere of the aforementioned Fosse film, other curious adaptations, such as John van Druten's play I Am a Camera (1951), of which an immediate film version entitled I am a camera (1955) was made, shot by South African director Henry Cornelius.In 1968, the North Americans Kander and Ebb presented with remarkable success the musical entitled Cabaret , directly inspired by the original narration of Isherwood and shortly afterwards became the immediate basis for the script of the homonymous film that he rescued from the I forget that great novel that was Goodbye to Berlin , more than thirty years after its first edition.

The same year that he went to press this narrative, Christopher Isherwood also published a book of trips entitled Journey to a War (1939), written in collaboration with his then inseparable Auden and focused on the long journey that both authors had made through distant and mysterious China.A few months before the appearance of this volume (specifically, in January of that year 1939), before the imminent outbreak of World War II, the two British writers had emigrated to the United States of America, where they were to acquire nationality American in 1946.

Deeply affected by the cruelty of the war, Christopher Isherwood experienced a deep self-absorption that, in his literary production, was manifested above all in his increasingly marked tendency to autobiography, well evident in some such intense narratives such as A Single Man (A Single Man, 1964)-in which he reflects the loneliness of a homosexual who stops to analyze his own existence-and A Meeting by the River (1967)-where he proposes recollection and contemplation as a model of life, after having converted to Hinduism thanks to the reading of the works of the Calcutta philosopher Narendranath Datta-.

Along the same intimate line, we must frame his splendid autobiographical recreation of the 1930s, published in 1976 under the title Christopher and his kind, 1934-1939 (Christopher and his people, 1934-1939).Other notable works of this second stage of his narrative production are those entitled Prater violet (The Violet of the Prater, 1945), The World in the Evening (The world at sunset, 1954), Down There on Visit (1962), Kathleen and Frank (1971) and My Guru and his disciple (My guru and his disciple , 1980).