In january 1939, a young English writer boarded a ship in Southampton bound for New York alongside his friend W. H. Auden, and never really went home again. Christopher Isherwood had spent the previous decade moving restlessly between Berlin, Portugal, Denmark, and Brussels, absorbing the gathering catastrophe of European fascism with the detached, watchful precision that would become his literary signature. But the decision to leave England permanently was not merely a practical one. It was an act of self-reinvention so complete that it amounted to a second life: the buttoned-up, public-school-formed Englishman gradually becoming something else entirely in California's sunlight, a Vedantist, a gay rights pioneer, a Hollywood screenwriter, and one of the most quietly radical literary autobiographers of the 20th century. When the boat pulled away from the dock, Isherwood later admitted, he felt not grief but relief. England, with its class codes and its suffocating expectations and its enforced silences around the things that mattered most to him, was receding. Whatever came next, he was going to live it on his own terms.
Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) is one of those writers whose fame rests on a paradox: he is best known for a line he never quite wrote. "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking" appears in Goodbye to Berlin, the loosely connected stories of Weimar-era Germany that would eventually be transformed, via stage and screen, into Cabaret, one of the most celebrated musicals of the 20th century. Yet Isherwood was anything but passive, and the cool, observational surface of his prose concealed a sensibility of considerable moral complexity and autobiographical courage. His Berlin writings caught a civilization at its most decadent and most dangerous with an immediacy that has never been surpassed, and his later American work, particularly the autobiographical novels A Single Man and Christopher and His Kind, pushed the literature of gay identity into territory it had never previously dared to occupy.
What makes Isherwood so rewarding and so elusive as a subject is the deliberate blurring, across his entire career, of the line between life and art. He wrote under his own name, populated his fiction with people from his actual life, and returned repeatedly to the same material from different angles and with different degrees of candor, as if the truth of his own experience were something that could only be approached obliquely and over time. The result is a body of work that functions simultaneously as fiction, memoir, and self-portrait, requiring readers to hold multiple versions of the same life in mind at once and to ask, at every turn, what is being revealed and what is being, with great artfulness, concealed. It is a body of work that rewards exactly the kind of sustained, forensic biographical attention it has not always received.
That attention arrives now in full measure with Katherine Bucknell, whose deep scholarly engagement with Isherwood's life and work has made her one of the foremost authorities on his writing. An editor of Isherwood's diaries and a biographer of rare precision and empathy, Bucknell brings to her subject both the archival command to navigate the vast private record he left behind and the literary sensitivity to read his published work against it with genuine insight. Her biography restores to Isherwood the full complexity of a figure too often reduced to his Berlin years or his famous opening line, revealing instead a writer whose long, shape-shifting career constitutes one of the most searching and courageous acts of literary self-examination in modern English letters. In this interview, she reflects on the life behind the camera, the silences in the prose, and why Christopher Isherwood, more than three decades after his death, still has the power to surprise.
Charles Carlini: Your work on Isherwood spans both his diaries and his biography—after such sustained and intimate engagement with his private record, do you feel you ever arrived at the "real" Christopher Isherwood, or did he remain, in some essential way, elusive?
Katherine Bucknell: I got to know him indirectly but surprisingly personally because I became close friends with Don Bachardy, his partner for 33 years. They met when Bachardy was young and unformed, so Bachardy acquired some of Isherwood’s accent and mannerisms, and he channelled Isherwood all the time in conversation. He still does.
But yes, Isherwood remained in some ways elusive, and that is something I accept about the human condition—that we all have hidden parts. He was acutely aware of this about himself, that some of him was hidden from himself. I believe he used himself as subject matter, not out of self-obsession, but out of a wish for self-understanding. When he writes about Christopher Isherwood, he is writing in a more general way about what it is to be a human being in a particular time and place and to have experiences and memories and sensations and losses. It was really intriguing to follow his path of self-discovery.
CC: Isherwood famously blurred the line between autobiography and fiction throughout his career. As a biographer working across both registers simultaneously, how did you navigate the tension between the life he actually lived and the life he chose to construct on the page?
KB: He left behind numerous documents that were contemporary to his experience—diaries, letters, datebooks, photographs, films. And others around him left behind similar materials and also paintings. So I had many opportunities to examine differences between what “happened”, in the most common sense idea of that, and what he made of it in his fiction. This was at the core of my interest as a biographer.
He worked very hard to achieve the effect of reporting on life, but he was actually doing far more than that. There is always a literary background and intention in his work, too. I tried to read the books he was reading as he worked on his own books; these made a massive contribution to what he wrote and how he wrote it. His simple, lucid prose always carries a personal agenda and even a polemic.
First of all, you have the very high quality writing, never a cliché, always the exact word—this reflects the care of his observation and the power of his thinking. Also, you have his mastery of form, his ability to create a compelling, propulsive narrative. Then you have the selection of subject matter: how he introduces his reader to marginal, unacceptable characters and themes. Often, he does this with humor. He is determined that his reader will be entertained and lured in willingly. And by working on the reader aesthetically, he opens the mind, and subtly advances his quite unconventional and, back in his day, even shocking views on personal freedom, personal fulfilment, the possibility of happiness. For this centered on his sense of himself as a gay man.
CC: The Berlin years have so thoroughly defined Isherwood's public reputation that everything after them can seem like a footnote. Do you think that's a misreading of his career, and if so, which of his later works do you feel most deserves to be rescued from that shadow?
KB: Goodye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains are great and important novels, and they read well today and are incredibly timely amidst the rise, again, of autocracy. But they don’t sum up who Isherwood was as a human being or as a writer. So much of his own life was yet to happen after they were published. But once John Van Druten wrote the play, I Am a Camera, which is based on the “Sally Bowles” section of Goodbye to Berlin, a juggernaut was created. All these other talents piled in on the characters he had created and changed them forever. He said that Julie Harris, the first to play Sally Bowles, so fully inhabited the role that he could no longer remember his early impressions of Jean Ross. And that’s long before you get to the musical Cabaret and Liza Minnelli as a superstar on the cover of both Time and Newsweek in the build-up to the massive Academy Awards sweep in 1972.
He wanted to reinvent himself in the US, to take back his personality, even before I Am a Camera, and this was intensified by seeing himself portrayed on stage and in the movies. He was still growing and changing, but the character who had captured public attention in the stage and film adaptations wasn’t even allowed to be a fully out gay man. Producers wouldn’t go there in the 1950s, 60s, early 70s, and the Isherwood narrator in those Berlin stories didn’t have a sex life for similar reasons. It wasn’t legal to publish about gay sex in mainstream literature in the 1930s when he first wrote the books. So he had his work cut out for him in the second part of his career, and, yes, I think his later books deserve our full attention.
CC: A Single Man is now widely regarded as a landmark in gay literature, yet Isherwood wrote it in 1964, at considerable personal and professional risk. What do you think gave him the courage to write so directly about gay experience at a moment when most writers were still working in code?
KB: In a very specific sense, I think he was emboldened by the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case in the UK and the Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller) in the US. His friend E. M. Forster was a key witness in the Chatterley one, and Isherwood volunteered to testify for Henry Miller, though he wasn’t called. These novels featured explicit straight sex, and they were ruled not pornographic, so times were changing.
However, bear in mind that he had already published The World in the Evening in 1954 and Down There on a Visit in 1961, both clearly portraying homosexuals. The World in the Evening presents two upstanding, hardworking gay men in a successful long-term relationship—no illness, no tragedy is associated with their sexual preference—this was completely revolutionary at the time, and he manipulated his publishers quite cleverly to get some very soft but arguably explicit gay sex into the book. (He put in more than was necessary, so he could be seen to cut some out.) That was a much braver book to publish, and his publishers were far more anxious.
A Single Man is just so staggeringly beautiful that it looks like a landmark in hindsight. Maybe it took some warming up with the earlier books before he could write his masterpiece. And of course, although the character is not him, it is deeply personal. Perhaps his mother had to die in order for him to get right down to the nerve that way. But he’d been steadily on this project for a long time.
CC: Isherwood's move to California and his embrace of Vedanta philosophy represent one of the more startling transformations in 20th-century literary biography. How do you understand the relationship between his spiritual life and his literary work—did Vedanta deepen his writing, or did the two exist in a kind of productive tension?
KB: Certainly, there was tension, and it was productive as well as limiting. We see enrichment in his writing as early as Prater Violet, which he began while he was living in the Hollywood monastery, struggling to become a Vedanta monk during World War II. The novel never mentions Vedanta, but anyone aware of Isherwood’s life circumstances will understand the mystical imagery in the ending as portraying his decision to turn away from the extreme pathway of becoming a monk. In this novel, the narrator’s spiritual father proves to be Friedrich Bergmann, based on Berthold Viertel, who taught Isherwood how to write a movie script. And the novel is based on that first screenwriting experience. But it also portrays the movie set as a kind of shrine where the actions of life are performed symbolically, and this is a parallel to the Vedanta idea that life is an illusion—maya—and all our actions only symbolic.
Isherwood had many spiritual fathers, and his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, is arguably the most important one. It was partly to protect Prabhavananda’s public reputation that Isherwood never named him in the fiction or memoirs until My Guru and His Disciple, his last book. But Prabhavananda’s presence is evident in all of them. Sarah Pennington in The World in the Evening shares his initials, S.P., and some of his key qualities. “Paul” in Down There on a Visit is about religious conversion, but introduces only the character Augustus Parr, based on Gerald Heard. Isherwood’s last novel, A Meeting by the River, is about the religious vocation and what happens to those who choose not to follow it. It has a key swami figure, but this figure has already died, and is not really Prabhavananda. Readers of A Single Man will recall the image of the rock pools, which are separate entities when the tide is out and united when the tide is in—a wonderful metaphor for the yoking of Atman and Brahman.
So Vedanta is everywhere in Isherwood’s work, but as with gay themes, obvious to those already familiar with the code and hidden from those who are unfamiliar. Certainly, you don’t need to be a Vedantist to enjoy the later fiction, though you may become a Vedantist unwittingly.
CC: He was surrounded throughout his life by some of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century—Auden, Forster, Huxley, Garbo, and, later, Don Bachardy. To what extent do you think Isherwood's identity was shaped by his relationships, and is there one figure in that constellation whose influence on him you think has been underestimated?
KB: He sometimes felt that he himself didn’t exist if there was no one else in the room, and he certainly extended his own personality through empathy and identification with other people. This is a theme in a lot of his fiction: the process of attraction, identification, and assimilation of others.
Auden worried about Isherwood’s capacity to socialize with people he considered to be his inferiors. But Isherwood didn’t consider anyone to be his inferior, and he was terrifically interested in personalities from all walks of life and all social strata, intellectual and ignorant, gifted and grifter. He simply could not get enough of observing the range of humanity, and of course, he wanted to write about many of them.
You list famous friends. He was tremendously attracted to stars because they challenged him and also because he wanted to be able to look under the hood. How did they achieve their fame? Was it deserved? Did they possess something authentically special, some genius?
I think the three most important people in his life were his mother, Kathleen Bradshaw Isherwood, Swami Prabhavananda, and Don Bachardy. But it would be hard to tell Isherwood’s story without mentioning Auden and Forster and Spender and Lehmann, and then you get to the Americans, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams. Later on, David Hockney. He had a gift for friendship; he could quickly become intimate with almost anyone.
CC: The diaries you edited reveal an Isherwood considerably more anxious, self-critical, and morally conflicted than the cool, ironic narrator of the fiction. Which version felt more true to the man, and do you think the gap between them was something he was conscious of managing?
KB: He was a practiced public performer, starting in childhood when he put on Shakespeare plays, magic shows, and wanted to be an actor. Sometimes he describes himself as an exhibitionist. He had great self-possession in front of an audience and could generally achieve whatever effect he liked. In later years, he and Bachardy sometimes played at scoring his performances. He always liked to see what he could do better, and he liked the attention, up to a point. Laughter was essential.
But in private, as you say, he was anxious, self-critical, morally conflicted, and also compulsive—workaholic, smoker, drinker, addicted to sex. He knew perfectly well that he was all these things. One of the reasons I admire him so much is that he took himself on, critiquing and trying to improve. His was an examined life, of the sort Socrates had in mind when he said something like “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Those diaries, at least twice a week and sometimes more often, were recording and reflecting on his behaviour! Of course, recording and reflecting on others, too. Imagine trying to become a monk! He was perfectly serious in his attempt, and perfectly clear, in the end, that he needed a home life and also a spiritual life, not just one or the other.
CC: Isherwood left England and never returned in any meaningful sense. How much do you think exile—chosen, deliberate, and irreversible—shaped both his literary sensibility and his ability to write about gay identity with the directness that his English contemporaries could rarely manage?
KB: Funnily enough, he did return after World War II and found England much more to his liking. In particular, the theater and art world seemed to him very rich compared to Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s. He made a point of visiting England again and again once he was no longer a citizen.
But yes, exile chosen, deliberate, irreversible was just his cup of tea. He bounced himself out of Cambridge because he felt suffocated there, and more generally, he felt suffocated by England, by his family background, his private education, the traditions of empire, army, church. He was related to many people in what was then a much smaller social milieu, and they all seemed to know what he was up to all the time.
As a young man, this felt terribly inhibiting to his sexual and amatory inclinations. He later said he could relax only with a working-class foreigner; he felt liberated in Berlin when he arrived in 1929. This was to change over time. He learned that he wanted a home, a cosy domestic life. In California, he found what he called his sexual homeland, but with Bachardy, he lived this comfortable life in semi-secrecy, very much an outsider in procreating, Californian suburbia. The outsider was fundamentally the identity that best suited him. He liked the friction; it energized him.
CC: Christopher and His Kind, written in his seventies, went back over the Berlin years with a candor about his sexuality that the original works had carefully avoided. What do you think that act of retrospective honesty cost him, and what do you think it gave him?
KB: He discovered that he had fictionalized his past so thoroughly that it was now, in fact, lost to him. But he did a lot of research. He called back letters from friends and looked over the few diaries that he had not burned in earlier years.
I would say that it gave him much more than it cost him. He was hard on his younger self, critiquing his self-absorption, his sex tourism, lack of real understanding of the poverty of the street boys, and also his political naïveté. Perhaps he was a little too hard on himself, but that is characteristic.
What he unearthed about the wider situation, for instance, Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science and the campaign to reform the German penal code, was virtually unknown to his audience in the 1970s, and it helped mark out the longer trajectory of a gay liberation movement underway in Europe before it was crushed by the Nazis. This was incredibly important for the movement in the 1970s, and the book made him a hero of gay liberation.
The risk was the reward. He put his own personal truths right at the center of the story, and his candor was widely inspiring to other gays, encouraging them to come out and so forth.
The stories he told about his personal friendships—there is a great deal of emotional processing in them all. Auden’s death in 1973 was a trigger for the book, yet he was very careful what he wrote about Auden because he loved him and because he knew Auden didn’t want a biography. Still, he felt those who had known Auden should get writing before latecomers did it and got things wrong.
The really painful theme was Heinz Neddermeyer. Theirs is a love story, two people on the run from the Nazis, desperately seeking a safe place to live. His own homeland, England, refused entry to Neddermeyer on moral grounds, and so they moved from country to country all over Europe until eventually Neddermeyer was arrested in Trier, where he briefly re-entered Germany to obtain yet another emergency visa for elsewhere. So Isherwood, having encouraged his lover to leave Berlin with him in 1933, found he could not protect him. This was a painful failure for him and, of course, far more painful for Neddermeyer, who spent 6 months in prison, did 2 years of hard labor, then served in the Nazi army. He was captured by the Americans at the end of the war and escaped back to Berlin. Incredible. Isherwood visited him there in 1951, met his wife and son, and saw him again in England at the beginning of the 1960s.
But Neddermeyer—now married to a woman, father of a son—was horrified by Christopher and His Kind and did not want it published in Germany. Isherwood acceded without complaint, but he was deeply hurt. Don Bachardy told me this.
CC: Biographers inevitably develop complicated feelings about their subjects over years of close engagement. After everything you have discovered about Isherwood—the courage, the evasions, the contradictions, the breakthroughs—how do you finally feel about him, and is there anything he did or failed to do that you find genuinely difficult to forgive?
KB: What am I, a straight married woman, doing spending all this time with a gay man? Well, it has been the most educational, liberating, and inspiring journey for me. Don Bachardy has become a close friend, as I’ve already mentioned, but I only ever saw Christopher Isherwood once in real life, at a poetry reading, and I did not speak to him.
Of course, I am anxious about the responsibility of telling his story when he did it so well himself. But maybe there are new ways to shape the narrative, from the outside, and new readers I can reach. The culture changes all the time.
Toward his younger self, I sometimes adopted a maternal attitude, simply because I have children of my own. And oddly enough, we do have things in common. I lost my father at a young age. I left America to live in England, the reverse of his journey, which has given me some understanding of life as an outsider.
I go on admiring him more and more all the time, and I have never gotten tired of him or his work. The failures and flaws are part of the attraction, for as he himself often said and wrote, we are people, not angels, and he never stopped trying to improve himself and to find the best possible pathway.
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