It was the possibility of having to kill one of his German lovers that made him a pacifist, and with his friend W.H. Auden he left doomed Europe on the eve of the Second World War and became an American citizen. Many in England never forgave him. But even if the move to America was perceived as cowardice, the risk of opprobrium was also a version of the Test: “I must honour those who fight of their own free will, he said to himself. And I must try to imitate their courage by following my path as a pacifist, wherever it takes me.”
That was not the last risk Isherwood was to take with his reputation. If literary London disapproved of his pacifism, it sniggered mercilessly at his adoption of Vedanta, a variant on Advaita Hinduism, which Isherwood discovered once he moved to Hollywood in search of work.
Liza Minnelli, as Sally Bowles, in a scene from the film Cabaret, which was based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin books. Credit: Getty
Nowadays, though, there is more awareness of the elements of racism involved in hostility to non-Judeo-Christian religious traditions. (It was a racism Isherwood himself was not free from: there were aspects of Vedanta he found “too Indian”.) And it is not as though Isherwood was alone in the search for discipline and transcendence. In reaction to modernity and the shocks thereof, other writers of the time found themselves reconciling with Christianity: Eliot and Auden became Anglo-Catholics, while Waugh and Greene converted to Roman Catholicism.
Isherwood, though, was repelled by talk of God and the social paraphernalia of Christianity: “I needed a brand new vocabulary and here it was, with a set of philosophical terms exact in meaning, unemotive, untainted by disgusting old associations with clergymen’s sermons, schoolmasters’ pep talks, politicians’ patriotic speeches.”
Like Berlin and boys, like America, Vedanta was a rejection of class and country, mother and motherland. Yet it was a flight that was also a return: Swami Prabhavananda of the Hollywood Vedanta Centre was the last and most enduring of Isherwood’s father-substitutes, not too indulgent, not too strict.
The leniency was important. Isherwood had no interest in sainthood. He continued to live in the world, and in a very worldly corner of it, whether parties at Charlie Chaplin’s house or orgies on Santa Monica beach. In fact it seems that the biggest benefit Vedanta may have had for Isherwood was helping him negotiate his relationship with Bachardy, the talented young artist he met in 1953 and stayed with through many – what we would now call polyamorous – ups and downs until the end of his life.
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Isherwood lived long enough to become a figurehead of gay liberation, his 1976 memoir Christopher and his Kind serialised in the gay press and – a good sign – sniffily reviewed by straights who squirmed at his new-found frankness. While he didn’t think of himself as any kind of campaigner, he didn’t mind being idolised by the younger gay generation.
Helped along by Cabaret and Liza Minnelli, or indeed by the abiding fascination of the period, the Berlin stories continue to find new readers, while Tom Ford’s 2012 A Single Man, with its career-redefining performance by Colin Firth, and the excellent 2011 BBC adaptation of Christopher and His Kind, with Matt Smith, have kept before the public eye queer Isherwood, the precursor and trail-blazer. In the books, the Isherwood charm is all still there, still seductive, with those classic personalities and the elegance and astringency of the prose.