Oh,
Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin. He gave
us the stories first, Mr. Norris Changes
Trains and Goodbye to Berlin,
fictional tales born out of his real pre-war experiences in Germany. In time, those stories became plays (I Am a Camera) and musicals (Cabaret) and film adaptations of plays
and musicals. And finally, in Christopher and His Kind, he wrote the
real story.
In
reading Isherwood’s memoir, I was surprised to find so many differences between
it and The Berlin Stories. I’d been under the impression that the book
spent much of its time sorting out the fact and fiction from the stories,
offering up anecdotes of the real people who inspired the characters and
putting Isherwood’s sexuality back into the narrative. Part of this is down to Christopher and His Kind’s TV movie adaptation, which I saw prior
to reading and which does mainly
divide its time between Berlin
antecedents and Isherwood’s romantic history.
However, stories about Gerald Hamilton (Mr. Norris,) Jean Ross (Sally
Bowles,) and their contemporaries only make up a portion of the book. There’s so much more to it than that.
First,
Isherwood devotes a lot of attention to The
Berlin Stories itself, discussing his writing process, his discarded
drafts, and his reasoning for specific inclusions, changes, and deletions. He gives the same treatment to other works he
wrote during the years covered by the book and generally provides a fine,
interesting portrait of the writer at work.
We meet other writers of the day, those Isherwood socialized with,
admired, spurned, collaborated with, and was mentored by. He includes plenty of correspondence between
himself and other writers, letters and telegrams about his work and assorted
other subjects.
Like
the Berlin anecdotes, though, our look at Isherwood’s career isn’t the main
thrust of the book. At its heart, it’s
about Isherwood’s homosexuality and his social, mental, and emotional journey
in coming to view himself as a member of a tribe. We see the connections he excised from The Berlin Stories, and he gives us both
his justifications (narrative focus, audience relatability, legal issues) and
his true reasons (fear of exposing himself as gay) for making his narrator
avatar entirely sexless. We go into
detail about the men he loved, especially his years-long relationship with a
young working-class Berliner and Isherwood’s efforts to help him escape
Germany. He visits Magnus Hirschfeld’s
Institute for Sexual Research, reads E.M. Forster’s Maurice, and struggles with his mother’s perception of his life.
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