A ten-day trip to Weimar Berlin gave Isherwood Sally Bowles and his life's subject
In March 1929 Christopher Isherwood joined W. H. Auden in Berlin, drawn by the city's sexual freedom. The short visit changed everything. He moved there that November, filled diaries with the city sliding toward Hitler, and turned them into Goodbye to Berlin, the book behind the musical Cabaret.
Isherwood was born on 26 August 1904 on his family's Cheshire estate near Stockport. His father Frank, a professional soldier educated at Cambridge and Sandhurst, had fought against the Boers and later died fighting in the First World War. Through his mother Kathleen he was linked to the Greene King brewing family, making him a third cousin of Graham Greene, and his ancestors included John Bradshaw, the Puritan judge who signed Charles I's death warrant.
At prep school in Surrey he met Auden, and at Repton he and Edward Upward invented an imaginary village called Mortmere. He won a history scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, but filled a second-year exam paper with jokes and limericks and left without a degree in 1925. He tutored privately, worked as secretary to a string quartet, published his first novel All the Conspirators in 1928 and spent six months studying medicine at King's College London. Reunited with Auden, he met Stephen Spender, and the circle was hailed as the most exciting new literary group of 1930s England, with Isherwood cast as its novelist.
Berlin gave him both freedom and material. He began an affair with a young German man met in a bar, and at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science he felt he had found his people. There he finished The Memorial, about the First World War's toll on his family's generation, and mined his diary for Mr. Norris Changes Trains in 1935. Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1939, portrays poverty, unemployment and attacks on Jews and communists beneath a glittering nightlife. It includes Sally Bowles, his most famous character, modelled on Jean Ross, an Englishwoman with whom he briefly shared a flat.
He later became an American writer as well as an English one. His 1964 novel A Single Man was filmed by Tom Ford in 2009, and his 1976 memoir Christopher and His Kind placed him at the centre of the gay liberation movement. He died on 4 January 1986.
Source: Christopher Isherwood
