Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood

Christopher and His Kind

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (February 10, 2015)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374535221
• ISBN-13: 978-0374535223

• File Size: 870 KB
• Print Length: 352 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press; Reprint edition (November 19, 2013)
• Sold by: Macmillan
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00F8FXF0E
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled 
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Christopher and His Kind is an autobiography. It’s intended to be read as such, but it is more than that! Isherwood writes his story as an observer rather than a diarist. One gets the sense that someone else writes the book and that Isherwood is simply the main character. Of course anyone who has read Christopher Isherwood’s other books will recognize his voice.

The most famous, or should I say notorious, years of Isherwood’s life are those he spent in Germany (mainly Berlin). Berlin in the buoyant years just after WWI and before WWII was a hothouse homosexuality where boys grew into men like mushrooms, almost overnight. Some were gay, some were bi, and others were straight and almost all had one thing in common. They were on the make for money. The fact that this young Englishman could travel to Germany, find lodging, buy food, frequent nightclubs, all with no visible means of support other than his writing, meant that he at least had some financial underpinning. To the boys and men of that time, with little or no skills other than sexual, Isherwood was a field worth plowing.

Isherwood is urged to travel to Berlin by his friend WH Auden. It is an invitation that will mark the end of his English identity and mark him as a perpetual ‘foreigner’ — a citizen of the world rather than of a single country. One can only marvel at his bravado. In Berlin, young men drift in and out of Isherwood’s life (as young men are so often wont to do). Isherwood discusses them all, and here is where I feel I must offer a caveat. Most of Isherwood’s close friends, and some of his lovers, both serious and casual, find their way into his professional writing, and he alters their names. Fred will become Jack, and so on. The reader  while reading Christopher and His Kind must either have a catalogue memory, or be willing to keep a scoreboard. As I neared the end of the book, I likened it to the famous Abbot and Costello comedy skit, Who’s on First. That said, Christopher and His Kind is a fascinating look at a time and place lost in all but sepia colored photographs and grainy films. And that is why I recommend it.