ISHERWOOD

Christopher Isherwood, left, and Don Bachardy.

Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood, conocido como Christopher Isherwood (Disley, Cheshire, Gran Bretaña, 26 de agosto de 1904 - Santa Mónica, Estados Unidos, 4 de enero de 1986) fue un escritor británico naturalizado estadounidense en 1946.
Nació en Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Cheshire en el noreste de Inglaterra; transcurriendo su infancia en los sitios donde su padre, coronel de la armada británica fue destacado. Al morir su padre en la Primera Guerra Mundial se estableció en Londres. Asistió a St. Edmund Scholl donde conoció a W. H. Auden y luego a Repton School donde trabó relación con Edward Upward y Stephen Spender (1909-1995), con quien pasaría luego tiempo en Alemania. Entre 1928-29 estudió medicina en King's College de Londres. Estudió en Cambridge aunque fue en Oxford donde formó parte del grupo de escritores radicales de la década de 1930.
De su amistad con W. H. Auden quedan algunas piezas dramáticas versificadas El perro bajo la piel (The Dog Beneath the Skin, 1935), El despegue del F6 (1936) y En la frontera (On the Frontier, 1938). En esos años vivió con el violinista André Mangeot, como secretario mientras escribía People One Ought to Know .
Abandonó su extracción aristocrática y se mudó a la desenfadada capital de la República de Weimar. Como profesor trabajó en Berlín, allí conoció a Gerald Hamilton, William Plomer, E. M. Forster que sería su mentor y a Jean Ross, que inspiraría el personaje de Sally Bowles en su relato Adiós a Berlín de 1939 (a su vez inspiración de la pieza teatral I am a camera y el musical y posterior film Cabaret).
Abandonó Berlin en 1933 por sus diferencias notables con el régimen nazi y el temor a la persecución. Antes había viajado con Auden por Europa, viviendo en Copenhagen y Sintra, y por China en 1938.
En enero de 1939 viajó con Auden a Estados Unidos donde decidieron establecerse, coincidentemente justo antes del estallido de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Luego algunos meses en Nueva York, se mudó a Hollywood, California.
En California conoció al místico e historiador Gerald Heard (1889-1971), fundador del monasterio de Trabuco Canyon, a través quien tomó contacto con el Swami Prabhavananda y la escuela Vedānta uniéndose a un grupo de aficionados a la filosofía india como Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Chris Wood, John Yale y el filósofo Jiddu Krishnamurti. Se convirtió en editor de publicaciones de la sociedad Vedanta de California del Sur entre 1943-45 permaneciendo en como consejero editorial hasta 1962.
Gracias a Huxley conoció a Igor Stravinsky y por casualidad en una librería a Ray Bradbury, a quien ayudaría con una elogiosa critica de las Crónicas marcianas.
Durante mucho tiempo hubo un reduccionismo respecto a su obra, dada su capacidad de sencillez y alegría en los textos. Igualmente se le reprochó durante su estancia en California cierto antimilitarismo que él combatíó enérgicamente. Ello se aprecia en frases como esta dicha en pleno inicio de la contienda de Estados Unidos con Japón:
"Si temo algo, temo la atmósfera de la guerra, el poder que esto da a todas las cosas; odio los periódicos, los políticos, los puritanos,... las solteronas despiadadas de mediana edad. Temo el modo que yo podría comportarme, si fuera expuesto a esta atmósfera".
Isherwood se naturalizó estadounidense en 1946, viajando a Sur América en 1947 con el fotógrafo William Caskey con quien vivía. A los 48 años conoció al joven pintor de 18 años Don Bachardy quien se convertirá en su compañero hasta su muerte en 1986. Asimismo fue profesor de literatura inglesa en Los Angeles State College - hoy Universidad de California - publicando en 1964 su mejor trabajo según la critica, A Single Man (dedicado al escritor Gore Vidal).
Establecido en Santa Mónica vivió el resto de sus días junto a Bachardy. Su vida inspiró la documental Chris And Don (2008). Falleció a los 81 años de cáncer de próstata.
Obra
Sus más notables novelas son El monumento (The Memorial, 1932) y Adiós a Berlín (Goodbye Berlin, 1939), obra que, junto a otros relatos, sirvió de base para el musical Cabaret llevado al cine en 1972. Publicó también una autobiografía, Leones y sombras (Lions and Shadows, 1938) y la biografía de sus padres, Kathleen y Frank (Kathleen and Frank, 1971). A destacar del resto de su obra la novela La violeta del Prater (Prater Violet, 1945), la miscelánea Exhumaciones (Exhumations, 1966) o su última novela Un hombre soltero (A Single Man, 1964). Tradujo a Charles Baudelaire y colaboró en la traducción del Bhagavad-gītā.

Anglo-American novelist and playwright, best known for his stories about Berlin in the early 1930s. Isherwood's novels were based largely on his own life. Many of his famous literary friends appeared in his books under different names, including W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Virginia Woolf. "I am a camera with its shuter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed." (from Goodbye to Berlin, 1939). Christopher Isherwood was born in Disley, Chesire, as the son of an army officer, who was killed in World War I. The family had lived in the neighboring village of Marple since the sixteenth century, when, as successful farmers, they were able to buy 'The Hall' - an Elizabethan mansion - standing in a big waterlogged park. In his childhood Isherwood travelled around with his father's regiment. In 1914 he was sent to St. Edmund's preparatory school, where he made friends with the future poet, W.H. Auden. Later he wrote in LIONS AND SHADOWS (1938): "I had arrived at my public school thoroughly sick of masters and mistresses, having been emotionally messed about by them at my preparatory school, where the war years had given full licence to every sort of dishonest cant about loyalty, selfishness, patriotism, playing the game and dishonouring the dead." Isherwood studied at Repton School and in 1925 at Corpus Christi Cambridge, without taking a degree. After Cambridge he worked for a time as a secretary to André Mangeot, a French violinist, and earned also his living as a private tutor. From 1930 to 1933 he taught English in Germany. Isherwood's first novel, ALL THE CONSPIRATORS, appeared in 1928. It was followed by THE MEMORIAL in 1934, both exploring the English middle-class world in the 1920s.
"The audience took the fights dead seriously, shouting encouragements to the fighters, and even quarreling and betting amongst themselves or the results. Yet nearly all of them had been in the tent as long as I had, and stayed after I had left. The political moral is certainly depressing: these people could be made to believe in anybody and anything." (from Good-bye to Berlin, 1939). In the 1930 Isherwood wrote three prose-verse plays in collaboration with his old school friend W.H. Auden. Prolonged visits to Germany between 1929 and 1933 provided Isherwood with the material for his best-known fictional work, popularly entitled THE BERLIN STORIES, but in actuality a pair of loosely structured novels: MR NORRIS CHANGES TRAINS (1935) and GOODBYE TO BERLIN (1939). The depiction of the glittering and grotesque metropolis of Germany, its cafés, night-people, and vices, was based on his observations in the decadent Weimar Republic in pre-Hitler years. When the narrator, William Bradshaw, first meets Arthur Norris in Mr Norris Changes Trains, he notes that his eyes were "the eyes of a schoolboy surprised in the act of breaking one of the rules. Not that I had caught him, apparently, at anything excepts his own thoughts..." Other characters include Sally Bowles, the embodiment of carefree individualism. Goodbye to Berlin is considered among the most significant political novels of the 20th century. Later the stories inspired the world famous musical Cabaret. In 1938 Isherwood started with Auden a journey to China, and recorded in JOURNEY TO A WAR (1939) his experiences in the country ravaged by civil war and a Japanese invasion. With Auden he emigrated to the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1946.
Isherwood settled in 1939 in southern California, where worked as a teacher and wrote for Hollywood films. On the eve of the World War II, he turned into pacifism. During the war years in 1941-42 he worked at a Quaker hostel in Pennsylvania with refugees from Europe. In 1943 he became a follower of Swami Prabhavananda, producing several works on Indian Vedãnta in the following decades.
Isherwood's later books include PRATER VIOLET (1945), a story of filmmakers in prewar London. THE WORLD IN THE EVENING (1954) was a study of a young writer who attempts to understand the failure of his two marriages and his homosexual needs. "I was wearing my usual crazy costume, the symbol of my protest against this life I was leading: a white tuxedo jacket, with a crimson bow tie and carnation to match my moiré cummerbund. Elizabeth, if she could have seen me, would have said, "Darling, what on earth are you supposed to be? No - don't tell me. Let me guess..."" A SINGLE MAN presented a single day in the life of George, a lonely, middle-aged homosexual man, whose partner dies. Isherwood observes his character as if he were in an aquarium: "He crosses the front room, which he calls his study, and comes down the staircase. The stairs turn a corner; they are narrow and steep. You can touch both handrails with your elbows, and you have to bend your head, even if, like George, you are only five eight. This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely..." In the retrospective autobiography, set in the 1930s, CHRISTOPHER AND HIS KIND (1977), Isherwood examined his complex relationship with Auden - his friend had died a few years before the book was published. KATHLEEN AND FRANK (1971) was a double portrait of his parents, as seen through his mother's and father's letters.
With his guru Swami Prabhavananda Isherwood translated from the Sanskrit The Bhagavad-Gita and The Yoga Aphorism of Patanjali. Later he wrote a biography of Ramakrishna and his disciples (1965). In MY GURU AND HIS DISCIPLES (1980) Isherwood broke from the strictly chronological format to create a spiritual autobiography wherein the values of Vedanta Hinduism counter his life as a Hollywood scriptwriter.
From 1959 to 1962 Isherwood taught as a guest professor at Los Angeles State College and the University of California at Santa Barbara. In 1965-66 he taught at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1975 he won the Brandeis Medal for Fiction. With his explicitly autobiographical works Isherwood become in the 1970s a leading spokesman for gay rights. He was one of the first internationally known figures to admit that he was homosexual. Isherwood died in Santa Monica, on January 4, 1986.
For further reading: Conversations With Christopher Isherwood, ed. by James J. Berg, et al (2001); Christopher Isherwood by S. Wade (1991); Christopher Isherwood: Last Drawings by D. Bachardy (1990); Isherwood's Fiction by L.M. Schwerdt (1989); Christopher Isherwood by J. Lehmann (1987); Christopher Isherwood by C.J. Summers (1980); Christopher Isherwood by B. Finney (1979); Christopher Isherwood: A Reference Guide by R.W. Funk (1979); The Auden Generation by S.Hynes (1979); Interview with Christopher Isherwood by H.H. Broun (1977); Biography of Christopher Isherwood by J.A. Fryer (1977); The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol 5: 1936-1941 (1977); Christopher Isherwood by F. King (1976); Christopher Isherwood by C.G. Heilbrun (1970) - See also: Marguarite Duras
Selected works:
ALL THE CONSPIRATORS, 1928
translator: THE INTIMATE JOURNALS OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, 1930
THE MEMORIAL, 1932
THE DANCE OF DEATH, 1933 (with W.H. Auden)
MR NORRIS CHANGES TRAINS / THE LAST OF MR. NORRIS, 1935
THE ASCENT OF F6, 1936 (with W.H. Auden)
SALLY BOWLES, 1937
translator: A PENNY FOR THE POOR, 1937 (by Bertolt Brecht)
LIONS AND SHADOWS, 1938
JOURNEY TO A WAR, 1939 (with W.H. Auden)
GOODBYE TO BERLIN, 1939 - Cabaret (suom. Paavo Lehtonen, 1976) - Bob Fosse's film Cabaret (1972), starring Liza Minnelli, was based on this book, which on turn inspired Fred Ebb-John Kanders' Broadway musical from John van Druten's play I am a Camera, filmed in 1955. Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles was in her first singing role. She won a Best Actress Oscar, British Academy of Film and Television Arts award, and Golden Globe for Best Actress. However, John Simon in the New Leader (March 20, 1972) was not happy with her performance: "The film's irredeemable disaster is its Sally Bowles: changing her into an American was bad enough; into Liza Minnelli, catastrophe... Plain, ludicrously rather than pathetically plain is what Miss Minnelli is. That turnipy nose overhanging a forward-gaping mouth and hastily retreating chin, that bulbous cranium with eyes as big (and as inexpressive) as saucers."
translator: THE SONG OF THE GOD: THE BHAGAVAD-GITA, 1944 (with Swami Prabhavananda)
ed.: VEDANTA FOR THE WESTERN WORLD, 1944
PRATER VIOLET, 1945 - Praterin orvokki (suom. Paavo Lehtonen, 1983)
translator: SHANKARA'SCREST-JEWEL OF DISCRIMINATION, 1947 (with Swami Prabhavananda)
THE CONDOR AND THE COWS, 1949
film script: The Great Sinner, 1949, with Ladislav Fodor, dir. by Robert Siodmark, starring Gregory Peck, Walter Huston, Ava Gardner, story based loosely on Dostoyevsky's novel The Gambler
ed.: VEDANTA FOR MODERN WORLD, 1951
transl.: HOW TO KNOW GOD, 1953 (with Swami Prabhavananda)
THE WORLD IN THE EVENING, 1954
ed.: GREAT ENGLISH SHORT STORIES, 1957
DOWN THERE ON A VISIT, 1962
APPROACH TO VEDANTA, 1963
A SINGLE MAN, 1964
RAMAKRISHNA AND HIS DISCIPLES, 1965
film script with Terry Southern: The Loved One (1965), dir. by Tony Richardson, starring Robert Morse, Jonathan Winters, Anjanette Comer, Rod Steiger, Dana Andrews, Milton Berle, James Coburn, based on Evelyn Waugh's book
EXHUMATIONS, 1966
A MEETING BY THE RIVER, 1967
ESSENTIAL OF VEDANTA, 1969
KATHLEEN AND FRANK, 1971
FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY, 1973 (with Don Bachardy)
CHRISTOPHER AND HIS KIND, 1977
MY GURU AND HIS DISCIPLE, 1980
PEOPLE OUGHT TO KNOW, 1982 (with S. Mangeot)
THE WISHING TREE, 1987
WHERE JOY RESIDES, 1989
DIARIES: VOLUME ONE, 1996
LOST YEARS: A MEMOIR, 1945-1951, 2000 (ed. by Katherine Brucknell)