Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), born the heir to an Elizabethan estate near Manchester, rejected his patrimony, deliberately flunked out of Cambridge, and moved to Berlin where he could live freely as a homosexual.  There he began the novels that made his reputation, Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, the basis for the musical Cabaret. Hitler’s rise forced him to flee with his German boyfriend, who was pursued by the Gestapo and arrested in 1937.   

In 1939, Isherwood emigrated to the U.S. with the poet W.H. Auden, his theatrical collaborator and lifelong friend.  He settled in Hollywood and wrote for the movie studios.   He also became a Hindu, lived briefly as a monk, and made an acclaimed translation of the Bhagavad Gita with his guru.   

In 1953, he fell in love with Don Bachardy, a Los Angeles native thirty years his junior who was to become a portrait painter.  Their relationship, both openly gay and sexually open, lasted until Isherwood’s death.  This along with their artistic achievements, in particular Isherwood’s Santa Monica novel A Single Man and his 1930s memoir Christopher and His Kind, placed them at the heart of the gay liberation movement transforming Western culture.  Four volumes of Diaries, published posthumously, capped Isherwood’s portrait of a gay life in the twentieth century.   

Written by Katherine Bucknell, photo by Florence Homokla