Isherwood in Transit

The publication of Isherwood in Transit, edited by James J. Berg and Chris Freeman, was occasioned by a conference held at the Huntington Library that marked the opening of Isherwood's papers there. Berg and Freeman have long studied Isherwood's corpus, and a previous volume of theirs (a sort of companion/predecessor to the current one) considered Isherwood, who spent more than half of his life in California, in The American Isherwood. Here, the author so often associated in the popular imagination with Weimar Berlin is presented as a traveler, a wanderer, a seeker, and someone motivated in various ways: personally, politically, spiritually.If the very name “Isherwood” conjures images of the 1930s in that doomed city, it is because of two of his works, an early one, The Berlin Stories (BS), and a later one, Christopher and His Kind (as well as adaptations of BS, John van Druten's play I am a Camera and of course Bob Fosse's film that reworked the stage musical Cabaret). The earlier of Isherwood's works in question, BS, had been noted, as Lois Cucullu points out, for its sexlessness, an omission Isherwood corrected, with some gusto, in Christopher and His Kind (68). The omission of sex in BS is not surprising, because, for Isherwood, sex was gay sex, and a book of gay sex would not have been published at the time. The omission of sex in BS, though, conceals Isherwood's primary motive for traveling to Berlin in the first place. Though the specter of the political landscape of that doomed metropolis haunts his readers (or Cabaret's audiences), Isherwood by no means traveled to the Continent to serve as a social or political observer. As several of the contributors to the volume note, citing Christopher and His Kind, “For Christopher, Berlin meant boys” (2).And so it did. Queer sex is itself political, so even this personal motive of Isherwood's was bound up in larger social questions, as Cucullo further points out in chapter 5, “A Queer Progress: Christopher Isherwood, Sexual Exceptionalism, and Berlin in the Thirties.” Although “Berlin and its unemployed males serve as imperial spoils for the privileged Isherwood and his friends to plunder, literarily and sexually,” she writes, he came “to regret his cavalier manner and sexual exceptionalism” (71). Isherwood's physical journey to Berlin, and the physical pleasures he sought there, nurtured him, yet also contributed to an ethical awakening that postdated his sexual one. He would follow a similar path, and pattern, in the years to come: a personal and physical journey would result in intellectual and ethical growth, a progress traced by Sarah S. Hodson in her introductory chapter, “Christopher Isherwood and the California Dream.” Likewise, Jamie Harker, in a fascinating chapter, “Pacific Rimming: Queer Expatriatism and Transpacific Los Angeles,” discusses Isherwood's “grand tour” of Asia in 1957 with Don Bachardy in terms of the physical (even carnal) and intellectual journey during which Isherwood was “so eager to read Berlin into Tokyo” in part to move beyond and critique the kind of colonialist sexual practices men around him were enacting, much as he himself had done as a young man (127).Isherwood's personal moves, motivated choices to visit Berlin and Asia and to settle in California, are separated more as a matter of degree than kind from Isherwood's specifically politically motivated travels. Chief among those, no doubt, was the heartbreaking, and increasingly desperate, attempts he made to find a safe refuge for his young German lover, Heinz Neddermeyer. Carola M. Kaplan reads the Waldemar section of Isherwood's novel Down There on a Visit as a transposition of his “actual plight in the years leading up to World War II, as he frantically attempted to rescue [Heinz] from extradition and conscription” (148). Other chapters in the collection (Robert L. Caserio's “The World in the Evening: Character in Transit” and Calvin W. Keogh's “Grumbling in Eldorado: A Single Man in the American Utopia”) also provide sociopolitical close readings of Isherwood novels.Probably the least well understood category of Isherwood's life and writings, his spiritual interests, were, over the last half of his life, deep and sincere but by no means of a mainstream variety. A trio of chapters by Bidhan Chandra Roy, Victor Marsh, and Jamie Carr address Isherwood's commitment to Vedanta. Carr, considering Isherwood's “conversion,” in part, through a lens of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, points out that after the traumatic years of search for safe refuge for Heinz, and seeing that search fail, “Isherwood is at the point of what James would identify as crisis, exhaustion” (225). If the experience with Heinz planted the seed for Isherwood's spiritual search, it came to fruition under the guidance of his guru, Swami Prabhavananda.All the chapters in Isherwood in Transit illuminate aspects of these personal, political, and spiritual movements of the author, with perhaps the exception being Edmund White's chapter 12, “Becoming Gay in the 1960s.” There, White tells a story more of his own progress, one that might have fit into his The Beautiful Room is Empty, in relation to reading Isherwood. In doing so, White's chapter reveals Isherwood's place in the gay genealogy of the twentieth (and reaching back to the late nineteenth) century. An Isherwood reader is probably familiar with his relationship with Forster, Edward Upward, and especially Auden, relationships explored fruitfully in chapters here by Xenobe Purvis, Katharine Stevenson, and editors Berg and Freeman, respectively. And through Forster, as Wendy Moffat points out in her chapter, Isherwood participated in a “temporal transition to the moment when the ‘pioneer heroes’ of gay history lived openly, like the Victorian sexual guru Edward Carpenter and his working-class partner George Merrill” (51). “Becoming Gay in the 1960s” brings to our attention even larger networks of queer connections, including Glenway Wescott and Kinsey, whom Isherwood introduced to Tennessee Williams and various members of the Mattachine Society. All of these relations, in turn, contributed to the emerging gay culture in the United States that White himself would soon fully enter into and chronicle as Isherwood had done before him.The strengths of Isherwood in Transit are certainly in the tracings of those personal, political, spiritual, and even genealogical connections. Readers will not find, should they be concerned to look for it, an overall development of a “queer transit theory.” (Though Moffat, Cucullu, and Harker's fine chapters “do theory” in their own way.) Perhaps this is as it should be, as Isherwood himself once wrote to Upward “theories have never been in my line.” It is interesting that travel itself—despite how much of it he did—was not quite in Isherwood's “line” either. Isherwood's “nervous traveler self,” as Lisa Colletta puts it, finally finds a home above that cliff in California, there with the sun, and the sea, and with his beloved Don. “[I]f Berlin was his transgression,” Barrie Jean Borich writes of Isherwood in her lyrical chapter “Three Quite Different People, “then California is his liberation” (187). For decades, readers have followed Isherwood as he entered into and created his own queer worlds, from Schöneberg to Santa Monica, as he met Sally Bowles/Jean Ross, lost Heinz, found Don, embraced and then celebrated in unforgettable writings his sexuality. The chapters that comprise Isherwood in Transit serve as guides that provide new ideas and fresh perspectives on that long journey, each chapter, in its way, as Isherwood so long ago wrote, a “camera with its shutter open.”

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