goodbye to berlin 1939 by christopher isherwood

Forster, who used the exoticism of far-off places and customs as a stand-in for homoeroticism, Isherwood saw that gayness was his sensibility. He also felt a lust which was largely narcissistic.” Unlike Virginia Woolf, who grappled with her sexuality behind the fluttering curtain of her sensibility, or E.

He felt curiosity and the fun of playing a new game. He was surprised and amused to find how easily he could relate his usual holds and movements to this unusual partner. Here, from “Christopher and His Kind,” a highly entertaining and erotically charged memoir published when he was in his seventies, is a description of his only sexual encounter with a woman: “She was five or six years older than, easygoing, stylish, humorous. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” Isherwood’s best critics, Gore Vidal and Elizabeth Hardwick, have characterized his work as journalistic and objective, and indeed his writing can be read as a series of dispatches from the gay front. “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking,” he wrote, famously, at the beginning of “Goodbye to Berlin.” “Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. “Isherwood” was the apparatus behind which the author took refuge.

He cared about “Christopher Isherwood,” the alter ego that he created both for his fiction and for his nonfiction.

But, for a novelist, he didn’t especially care about invention. Isherwood was a prolific novelist, memoirist, journalist, and dramatist-he published thirty-three books and wrote a number of screenplays and works for the theatre. But, as Peter Parker implies in his major-and healthily skeptical-biography, “Isherwood: A Life Revealed” (Random House $39.95), none of this would have mattered much to Isherwood except as a reflective surface on which his own fairly fixed desires and anxieties could play.

Norris Changes Trains” (1935), “Sally Bowles” (1937), and “Goodbye to Berlin” (1939)-is his best-known work, and it’s not hard to imagine him delighting in recording certain aspects of the present-day city (its openly gay mayor the chic scruffiness of Prenzlauer Berg, an area of the former East Berlin that was unknown to Westerners until the Wall came down). Of course, those five years continue to color the emotional climate of a city where one can still see the traces of the disaster that followed-the bullet marks and shrapnel lodged in the sides of gray marble office buildings-and where the most discussed cultural event of the season is “Der Untergang” (“The Downfall”), a film detailing Hitler’s last days in the bunker. At least, that’s the way it’s pronounced-with reverence, with love-in the gay quarters of Berlin, where the English writer Christopher Isherwood (1904-86), who lived there, off and on, between 19, became a figure in the demimonde. The name sounds like a kiss followed by a sigh.

Goodbye to berlin 1939 by christopher isherwood