Isherwood, wish you would

Thank you to the few close friends and family who joined the first discussion about The Berlin Stories. My hope is to create a sense of community and cohesion for folks, to read more books, and books that speak to this particular age in which we are enmired.

It feels like both a constructive and arcane activity during this time and an important way to understand that we have been here before, that art as literature lingers. It's indulgent and speaks to the dichotomy of introvert and extrovert. Wondering if it's the introvert who is really seeking the reassurance or the extrovert; in this case, I know I will be compelled to finish a novel if I have others relying on me. And Isherwood.

I have always wanted to read Isherwood's The Berlin Stories. Made up of two novellas about ex-pat life in Germany, these works are distilled into what becomes the first movie that scared me out of my wits Cabaret. I can't imagine it was in a theater and why would it have been on TV in those days, but somehow I saw Cabaret at an impressionable age. I did not understand it at all but the Emcee was a visceral and lasting memory of evil incarnate. I did not understand why. Trauma stuff. When I learned later about Nazis, I remember that Joel Grey image like a totem evoked in my mind through association. I did not understand why. My older brother was in Cabaret in high school. Seven years older than me, I must have been ten or eleven. By then, I understood the Nazi part, however much a ten year old understands Nazis or anyone does. But I saw the swastika surface in that sinking sensation the play produces and vividly remember the ape suit scene. Later in life as a somewhat louche man in New York my someday-to-be-and-still-is wife and I saw the Studio 54 performance of Cabaret starring Alan Cumming. I hated Broadway or Broadway-adjacent theater at the time, but this felt like Brecht. And you were immersed in it. Someday I'd read Isherwood.

But I wanted to be sure that whenever I read The Berlin Stories, I had the time space to think liberally about them and allow them to sauté, onioned and oily. I was worried they'd have a priggish demure and be too societal. I was worried that they would be flaccid. They were, and the two novellas bore little to no relationship to the horrific musical that carried that little ur-devil character that was coming in the night for my Jewish soul. I was not sure how to fathom the question of the authorial voice Isherwood takes on. I want to learn more. But this was just the time for me to Isherwood finally.

My mom's folks were two pretty extraordinary humans. She was English born in India. Her dad was part of running a brewery and a lot of family was there. We have a painting that won a prize from like a Viceroy or something, real Raj stuff. Horrible, if mundane. They were bureaucrats and ran small businesses as part of one of the most extraordinary assertions of empire in history with the British occupation of India. As a little girl my grandmother saw a lot fo sanskrit and would study some as well at Oxford. I have this fantasy that it is one of the things over which she and Christopher bonded, I imagine.

Like the Emcee evinces goblins for me, I have this strange implanted memory of Isherwood and my grandmother. It is unsubstantiated. And the sad thing is that it is one of those things that maybe no one alive could attest to; not even anyone in my family because when I said on a group video call during pandemic, "Hey, what was Granny's relationship with Christopher Isherwood?" All I saw in the little boxes was blank expressions.

Alas, this must have been a story shared on my one young trip to California I took. Granny must have told me about Isherwood. She had this way of speaking up to you, or well, at least to me. I felt a bond evoked in this typing that exceeds my own understanding. It's complicated and there's more due for other stories. She and her husband moved in interesting circles. Yes, he had drinks in Rome with Elizabeth Taylor, because he was working on a film. She was dear friends with the late filmmaker Jean Renoir's widow Dido Renoir. And a very close friend of my grandmother's in the circle of sanskrit was a Dr. Evelyn Hooker. I met Dr. Hooker twice. She was big and impressive, wide wristed and horselike head that held a face of such compassion as to seem to be a sorceress. She made homosexuality no longer a disease in the science books. She did that work through spending time with, studying and learning form Christopher Isherwood and others. Isherwood helped to usher in a thread of the hippy era that had a veneration for the pure teaching of Buddha and sanskrit texts. And I think he stayed with my grandmother at some point as he was settling in Santa Monica. I wanted to some day be great like my grandmother and I wanted to understand why Isherwood matters.