Books by Christopher Isherwood

Some people rebel against their upbringing and write great books because of it. Christopher Isherwood is one such author.

Isherwood was born into a family many of us would probably envy: upper-class gentry, with two well-educated parents. His father, Frank, was a soldier who was killed in World War I when Christopher was 10, and his mother, Kathleen, was the daughter of a prosperous wine merchant. In his writing, Isherwood referred to his father as “Frank the Hero-Father,” a nod to his complicated feelings about him and about war.

Kathleen kept diaries filled with artful photographs of herself and drawings that showed her love of interior design. Mother and son were both lifelong diarists, recording events, thoughts, and feelings. Isherwood became well educated, too, but follow the genteel Victorian life he did not; that was what he called the “heterosexual dictatorship.” Boarding school meant being away from his parents, wearing a uniform, and having little privacy. He didn’t take Cambridge University seriously either, writing jokes and limericks on his history exam to sabotage his family’s academic expectations.

Life in early 20th-century England was anything but free of stodgy rules, family tradition, and polite society. So he traveled. He traveled to get away, to see the world he knew existed beyond his family’s estate, and to find himself. And he did—and he wrote prolifically.

Isherwood was often described as physically diminutive. His writing is anything but; its influence reaches far beyond the page.

One major example is the 1966 musical Cabaret, which was based on Isherwood’s omnibus The Berlin Stories, especially Goodbye to Berlin. It depicts the transition from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany, with the Great Depression as the bridge. In the 1972 film version, Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles, with her blend of joy and despair, captures the nuances of an openly gay community facing the encroaching “heterosexual dictatorship” of Hitler. The film is the version I know, and watching actors on VHS is a different experience from seeing them perform onstage. Diehard fans often watch the film first and then seek out the stage show. I’m not against plays; it’s just that I’d rather read a book, which is also much more convenient.

To be fair, Isherwood was also a playwright and screenwriter.

There’s a great irony shared by Cabaret and Isherwood’s life, too. In the film, Baron Maximilian von Heune leaves for Argentina. Isherwood himself visited Argentina after World War II, when he was commissioned to write a travel book.

Argentina was a safe haven for Nazis after the war. Imagine escaping the Nazis only to visit a country that harbored them.

Like many of his gay friends, Isherwood left Germany as the Nazis rose to power, and his German partner, Heinz, later faced arrest for evading the draft. Isherwood eventually emigrated to the United States with his friend W. H. Auden and settled in California, where he found Hollywood, a gay community, and Vedanta Hinduism. He published his novel A Single Man in 1964. The story of an ordinary middle-aged gay man in mourning was a lesson in humanity five years before the Stonewall riots in New York City.

Isherwood’s books grow out of meaningful historical contexts, themes, and places, and in them he wrote as an understated observer of human relationships and unique perspectives. His sharp wit and honest realism come with no all-knowing narrator and no tidy explanations for motivations and outcomes. His detached, episodic style leaves the open-eyed reader with open endings—and open interpretation. His prose is musical and concise, his descriptions refreshing and shaped by modernism. Reading Isherwood is the next-best thing to watching a play or even a documentary, only with the quality of a lucid dream. Many liken his style to a camera shutter. I do, too, except that his camera comes with empathy.

Books by Christopher Isherwood

All the Conspirators
The Memorial
Mr Norris Changes Trains
“Sally Bowles”
Goodbye to Berlin
Journey to a War
Vedanta for the Western World
Prater Violet
The Berlin Stories
Vedanta for Modern Man
The World in the Evening
Down There on a Visit
An Approach to Vedanta
A Single Man
A Meeting by the River
Essentials of Vedanta
Frankenstein: The True Story
The Mortmere Stories
“Jacob’s Hands: A Fable”

Audiobooks by Christopher Isherwood

Christopher and His Kind
A Single Man
The Berlin Stories
Prater Violet
Jacob’s Hands

Biographies, Letters, and Diaries

Lions and Shadows (1938)
Kathleen and Frank (1971)
Christopher and His Kind (1976)
My Guru and His Disciple (1980)
October (1980, with Don Bachardy)
Diaries: 1939–1960
Lost Years: A Memoir 1945–1951
Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965)
Kathleen and Christopher (2005)
Isherwood on Writing (2007)
The Sixties: Diaries:1960–1969
Liberation: Diaries:1970–1983
The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (2014)

Quotes by Christopher Isherwood

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Some day, all of this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”
“One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.”
“If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.”
“The prefect evening…lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy…Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other’s presence.”
“What’s so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn’t any difference between people —well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends?”
“You see, Kenny, there are some things you don’t even know you know, until you’re asked.”
“The past is just something that’s over.”
“Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination.”
“What it sees there isn’t so much a face as the expression of a predicament.”
“No one ever hates without a cause.”
“We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.”
“I’m like a book you have to read. A book can’t read itself to you. It doesn’t even know what it’s about.”
“…I have had an unpleasant feeling, such as one has in a dream, that I myself do not exist.”
“Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.”
“We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.”
“Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.”
“I doubt if ever once accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.”
“I often feel that worse than the most fiendish Nazis were those Germans who went along with the persecution of the Jews not because they really disliked them but because it was the thing.”
“A sea only drowns its lovers.”
“California is a tragic country – like Palestine, like every Promised Land.”
“Like a long train which stops at every dingy little station, the winter dragged slowly past.”