Christopher and His Kind (2001)

An excellent memoir of a single decade decade in a very talented writers life 1929 thru 1939. The truth behind the people of "The Berlin Stories" ( )

4.5. My favourite Isherwood so far ( )

The 70s book that allowed Isherwood to be completely open about his homosexuality. He is candid, but never graphic in this his recounting of his travels in England and Germany in the 30s. We are granted a rare glimpse into his very literary world where we meet some of his famous and infamous (Sally Bowles' character ala Cabaret). ( )

Isherwood, writing in the 70s, reviews his life in the 30s, his homosexuality and his efforts to save his German lover from the Nazi war machine. I had read about Heinz in other books about Isherwood, but I had not realized that he survived the war. Extremely lucky. The relationship led to Isherwood's determination to become a conscientious objector, since he realized he would not kill his lover for being a German soldier and he had no right to be selective and consent to kill someone else's "Heinz". Also contains much about his relationship with W. H. Auden, whom he had known since boyhood, and his "matchmaking" between Erika Mann and Auden. Mann was a lesbian, but needed to marry a British subject before the Nazis deprived her of her German citizenship.

My favorite memoirs are the ones in which the writer is able to distinguish himself in the present from the character he is writing about in his past. The best example I’ve found of this is Christopher Isherwood’s terrific Christopher and His Kind, a memoir of the famous English novelist’s indolent youth in Berlin between 1929 and 1939. This decade covers the period in Isherwood’s life when he was making his name as a novelist and playwright, meeting the eccentric and bohemian characters he immortalized in his Berlin Stories (later transformed into I am a Camera and Caberet), and indulging in the vibrant life of a gay sex tourist, all as the shadow of Nazism was falling over his adopted home.

Isherwood’s memoir is written with a frankness that is brisk and refreshing even now, where it must have been positively scandalous on its publication in 1976. The great tension between the experiences of young Christopher (Isherwood writes him in the third person) and the greater knowledge of the narrator (written in the first person) makes an otherwise delightful expat narrative into a brilliant examination of memory, maturity and regret. ( )