Christopher And His Kind
by Christopher Isherwood
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Book Summary Information
Author: Christopher IsherwoodEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-09-18
ISBN: 0816638632
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Book Reviews of Christopher And His Kind
Book Review: There is only one sin: disobedience to the inner law of our own nature
Summary: 2 Stars
C. Isherwood's autobiography contains comments on his own books (with inside information on the models he used for his protagonists) and on brief encounters with well-known public figures (Magnus Hirschfeld, Conrad Veidt, Erika and Klaus Mann, Therese Giehse, E.M. Forster, the Lehmann family). But, his book turns mostly around his friends, W.H. Auden, S. Spender, `Francis') and the voyages he makes with them, or alone.
General evaluation
All in all, it is not more than a superficial and sometimes boring personal agenda written within the two world wars about the German political situation (`Yesterday, Hitler denounced the Treaty of Locarno and sent troops into the Rhine Zone. We went to the Casino and gambled for a couple of hours.') and about the Berlin gay scene with very rare intimate outbursts.
The gay scene (aggression)
(There was) `aggression against those who had never had syphilis. He appeared to feel that it was their self-righteousness and cowardice which had prevented them from having it, and that they therefore ought to have it, for the good of their soul ... he even imagined himself tricking such people into going to bed with infected partners.'
Berlin, its gay scene
Amid `the brew seethed with unemployment, malnutrition, stock-market panic, hatred of the Versailles Treaty... On September 20, the Nazis won 107 seats.' `To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys... Male prostitutes coming to the bars to get money.'
Personal outbursts
`Why do I prefer boys? Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move. And boys can be romantic. I can put them into my myth ... My will is to live according to my nature, and to find a place where I can be what I am.'
`Christopher was suffering from an inhibition, then not unusual among upper-class homosexuals; he couldn't relax sexually with a member of his own class or nation. He needed a working-class foreigner.'
Overall mentality (the players)
`You know, it just doesn't mean anything to me any more - the Popular Front, the party line, the anti-Fascist struggle.' `They had been playing parts, repeating slogans created for them by others.'
`1938, Christopher declared that England had helped betray the Czechs. He meant it. Yet his dead-secret, basic reaction was: What do I care for the Czechs? What does it matter if we are traitors? A war has been postponed - and a war postponed is a war which may never happen.'
This book is only for insiders and Christopher Isherwood fans.
Summary of Christopher And His Kind
Originally published in 1976, Christopher and His Kind covers the most memorable ten years in the writer's life-from 1929, when Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to 1939, when he arrived in America. His friends and colleagues during this time included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and E. M. Forster, as well as colorful figures he met in Germany and later fictionalized in his two Berlin novels-who appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret.What most impressed the first readers of this memoir, however, was the candor with which he describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggles to save his companion, a German man named Heinz, from the Nazis. An engrossing and dramatic story and a fascinating glimpse into a little-known world, Christopher and His Kind remains one of Isherwood's greatest achievements.
A major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) is the author of Down There on a Visit, Lions and Shadows, A Meeting by the River, The Memorial, Prater Violet, A Single Man, and The World in the Evening, all available from the University of Minnesota Press.
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