Christopher and His Kind (1976)

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.

Most of all, we see Isherwood come into his gay identity.  Not just being gay but consciously aligning himself with a subculture and holding to their ideals.  He begins his journey as an individual looking to enjoy himself, fall in love, and get a taste of everything Berlin’s underground has to offer; he concludes it profoundly changed, recognizing himself as part of a community and actively working against its marginalization.  The memoir is so frank and vulnerable.  It highlights moments when he hid himself out of fear and his shame at not being bolder.  It details his awakening into the possibility of true love and his deeply personal outrage that his love is regarded as less authentic than other people’s.  It chronicles his growing political awareness and his realization that all of his allegiances are filtered through his existence as a homosexual, that he can’t hold with any party that fails to recognize his validity as a human being.  Reading the book, you can help but feel that this is a subject Isherwood kept quiet about for a long time, and he’s finally breaking his silence.