I really enjoy Christopher Isherwood’s books and have always been curious to know more about him. Though most of his novels are loosely based on incidents in his own life, they are of course fictionalised. But it turns out that in 1976 Isherwood published Christopher and His Kind 1929–1939 – a memoir that revisits that 10-year period in his life and retells it as a, well, tell-all.

The period of 1929–1939 is when Isherwood lived mostly in continental Europe – after his childhood and early years in England, before his emigration to the USA where he remained until his death. He spent the first four years of this decade in Berlin – a time famously memorialised in his novel Goodbye to Berlin, which formed the basis of the play I Am A Camera and later the musical Cabaret. While living in Berlin he wrote and saw the publication of The Memorial, which was his second novel but the first to achieve some success.

Isherwood was gay and out to his friends and family for pretty much his whole life. He socialised with fellow queer intellectuals and lived openly with his partners. But he didn’t write about this aspect of his life publicly until the 1970s. Understandably, as California – where he had settled – did not decriminalise homosexuality until 1975.

Christopher and His Kind is gossipy and confessional, with some interesting quirks. For one, Isherwood describes his younger self in the third person, as though this is just another novel with a main character called Christopher. Which would maybe make sense if this was a straightforward narrative otherwise. But Isherwood’s future self injects commentary and later memories using first-person “I”. He also repeatedly compares this telling of events to the versions in his novels (and subsequent plays and films). Which is informative, if a little overly defensive at times of his past self’s decisions.

Isherwood’s life was even more eventful and fascinating than I expected. One of his best friends, who inspired his move to Berlin in 1929 and his move to America in 1939, was W H Auden. Who is referred to as Wystan (which is indeed what the W stands for) throughout Christopher and His Kind. And he features in this memoir a lot.

When Isherwood first moved to Berlin he rented a room from the sister of Dr Magnus Hirschfield, in a building adjoined to his famous Institute for Sexual Science. One of the quirks of living there was that he could have lunch in the canteen of the Institute, eating and conversing with the staff and the patients. Isherwood’s language about Hirschfield’s trans patients is certainly dated but this clearly opened up young Christopher’s world and gave him access to the heart of Berlin’s queer scene.

In recent years Hirschfield’s Institute has come back into the public discourse as a symbol of how Fascist hate historically began with attacks on trans and gay people. In 1933 the Nazis raided and closed down the Institute, destroying decades of research both in situ and outside in the street. Though Isherwood had long since moved to a different neighbourhood of Berlin, he heard about the public burning of the Hirschfield archives and went to see it in person. His comment on this is brief and deeply moving: “Christopher, who was present in the crowd, said ‘Shame!’; but not loudly.”

Isherwood was 25 when he moved to Berlin, and his youth is evident in his infidelities as well as his eagerness to be admired as a great novelist. But even in his 20s he recognised the growing danger of living in Berlin under Nazi rule, so in 1933 he fled with his German boyfriend Heinz. They went initially to Greece for several months before going to the UK, where Heinz was denied entry by a border agent who clocked his sexuality. The pair spent two years moving from country to country before deciding the constant shadow following them was worse than Heinz going back to Germany to fight in the war.

“In Holland and in Belgium, Christopher and Heinz had lived surrounded by the tribe of the Emigration and had felt themselves part of it. (‘We’ve elected you an honorary Jew,’ a refugee had once told Christopher, as a joking compliment.) When refugees gathered together, there was much wit but no joy. Hitler always seemed invisibly present, just out of earshot; it was more like a conspiracy than a party. Here in Portugal, their hosts were mostly English, Scots or Irish – refugees from nothing except the North European climate and the higher cost of living elsewhere. They were a gossipy, inquisitive, hospitable bunch of individualists, always on the lookout for new ears into which to whisper their elderly scandals.”

In the 1930s Isherwood worked on three plays with Auden, including The Ascent of F6. Though a big success at the time, this play has been largely forgotten aside from the poem that it features: “Funeral blues” (or “Stop all the clocks”). In 1938 Auden and Isherwood travelled to China together to cover the Sino-Japanese war, the outcome of having been commissioned to write a travel book (indeed, the trip led to their book Journey to a War).

Isherwood had watched multiple writer friends go to Spain to cover its civil war but had not felt any draw to go there himself. He describes his and Auden’s decision to take up this opportunity in almost-callous language: “China had now become one of the world’s most decisive backgrounds. And unlike Spain it wasn’t already crowded with star literary observers. (How could one compete with Hemingway and Malraux?) ‘We’ll have a war all of our very own,’ said Wystan.”

I came away from this memoir with the impression that Isherwood liked to be at the centre of things, to be seen and talked about. He spends a fair amount of the book justifying his younger self and the decisions he’d made. Is this a product of self-hate, accusations people had openly levelled at him, or paranoia about what people might have accused him of behind his back? Certainly the time and places where he lived, the people he mixed (and slept) with, will have led to nasty things being said of him, I’m sure. And I can certainly sympathise with his reasons for leaving the UK.

“Christopher…didn’t think of England as his family…and in rejecting Heinz, it had rejected him too. (Not until after the Second War, when England had ceased to be imperial and become a minor power with a cosmopolitan population, did Christopher begin to love it, for the first time in his life. It had turned into the kind of country he had always wanted it to be.) Besides, Christopher had moved, or been moved, around so much already that another change of country would have far less emotional significance for him than it would have.”

After he moved to America, Isherwood’s life became less eventful. He befriended Truman Capote and Dodie Smith, travelled around South America, then in 1952 met the man he would spend the rest of his life with, Don Bachardy.

There are certainly aspects of Isherwood’s life that are less attractive. Both Heinz and Don were teenagers when he met and started dated them. And though I absolutely empathise with Isherwood’s pacifism, and his feeling that the Second World War wasn’t quite as black and white as it was painted, the way in which he sent Heinz off to fight but then never fought himself does feel…uncomfortable.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir and will continue to work my way through Isherwood’s literary output.

Published 1976 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Source: gift from family.