Christopher Isherwood, Matt Smith, and the Joys of Being a Novelist

A few weekends ago I finally got around to seeing 'Christopher and His Kind,' a BBC bio-pic about Christopher Isherwood, staring Matt Smith in the title role. Now, I will admit that the main reason I wanted to watch was to see the Doctor playing gay (they portrayed him as a top, strange as that's how I pegged Auden). For those unaware, the English Christopher Isherwood went to Berlin in the early 1930s for, as he put it, "the boys". And he found them in spades. He went on to write two novels based on his time there, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin. Together, they would be turned into a stage play, I Am A Camera, and a little movie by the name Cabaret. Decades later, he wrote a nonfiction account of his time in Berlin, which the BBC used as the basis for the movie of the same name.

It is also a fascinating lesson in how to write a novel. Rarely has a writer written both a fictionalized story of their experiences as well as a non fiction one. Holding the two up together is wonderfully educational.



Aside from the wonderfulness that is Isherwood's language, I would definitely recommend the movie. I haven't found a legitimate means by which to find a copy here in the US, but due to copyright reasons I would ask you to not, whatever you do, go to YouTube and search 'Christopher and His Kind part 1'. That would really be a horrible way to watch the entire movie uncensored for free.

In any event, I had a revelation when watching this movie. Isherwood was somewhat of a lost intellectual, clearly smart and incisive but out of place in the quiet suburban life of his upper middle class family. His mother wanted him to go to medical school. What a waste that would have been. He was drawn to Berlin for the boys, but he left with two novels. His socially passive and observant nature lent itself naturally towards being a novelist. His spent his days paying the bills by teaching English, despite being quite poor at German. But he spend his nights writing down what he was observing in Weimar Berlin, the bright and beautiful swan song of a free society before the onslaught of the Nazis. Looking back from the perspective of history, one can truly say that Isherwood contributed far more to the world through his novels than through his English lessons. The idea that a boring day job is just that; writing is what one actually 'does'.  This central lesson is what inspired me to start writing this blog.

That and the boys. One also does the boys.