»Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin years«

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Good evening. My name is Stefan Evangelista, and I am one of the curators of the exhibition, "Happy in Berlin: English Writers in the 1920s and 1930s." Today, I am delighted to introduce to you Catherine Bucknell. Catherine is the editor of Christopher Isherwood's diaries, and she is currently writing a biography of Isherwood, simply titled "Chris." Catherine, can you tell us who Christopher Isherwood is to you?

Yes, hello. Um, Christopher Isherwood, uh, is an English writer who was born near Manchester in the beginning of the 20th century. Uh, his father was an army officer. He came from a rather upper-middle-class family. He was heir to an estate outside Manchester. Uh, his father was killed in the war, in the world into which he was born. Completely changed during his, uh, adolescence, and he became a renegade from all of his, uh, patrimony. Went away to Berlin in the, uh, in 1929 for the first time, changed his life there, and then went on eventually to California, where he wrote for the movies, which was a kind of childhood dream.

Yes, you told us he came to Berlin in 1929 and that he came from a privileged background in England. What drove him to leave that background and come to the city?

Well, as with all young people, there was a tangle with his mother, his surviving parents. There was a lot of private rebellion. But really, what he, uh, as a very young boy, knew that he was more interested in boys than girls as romantic partners, and he struggled with that all through, uh, school and university. And in the, uh, in the late 20s, his good friend, uh, W.H. Auden, went off to Berlin, uh, and came home with stories, uh, about, uh, the freedom there, the sexual freedom, the boy bars, and so on. And Christopher, uh, knew he had to go and, uh, find out more about that.

So, you mentioned Auden being the first one to come to Berlin. Stephen Spender is another writer who is often, you know, thought of as being very connected to the other two. And in fact, the three of them, Isherwood, Auden, Spender, are often thought of as almost representing a group, right? You know, writing together, uh, being very close to each other. And I think Berlin is the place that kind of is seen traditionally as having kind of brought the three together. Can you tell us a little bit more about the relationship between these three writers, and especially about their friendship? Really, was it as unproblematic as most people think?

No, it, of course, it was not. And, um, you know, Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden were very, very close. They went to what the English called, uh, prep school together. It was a boarding school, uh, where they met, uh, when Christopher was 10 and Auden was eight. And then, and they were actually quite good friends at boarding school. There's a diary left from that time with, uh, of, of Christopher Isherwood's that talks about his, um, endless conversations with Auden when they were little boys. And they met again in 1925 by chance in London. A friend brought Auden to tea at Isherwood's house. They were very close. Isherwood wrote several times in later years, in the 30s and again in the 70s, about how they were two of a kind. They wrote plays together, um, they, they traveled to China together to write a book about the Sino-Japanese War in 1938. When, when Isherwood first went out to Berlin, he went to join Auden. Auden showed him the city, took him to the Institute for Sexual Science, um, took him to the bars. It wasn't until 1928 that Isherwood met Spender, who was an undergraduate in Oxford. And, you know, Auden introduced them. Uh, first, he showed Isherwood a story that Spender had written and sort of spiced up the, uh, the coming meeting. Isherwood and Spender became very, very close friends, but there was a terrific rivalry. Um, and Spender, um, I mean, Isherwood portrays him as, um, in some ways, a, a sort of, uh, genius buffoon who, um, and, you know, often did the opposite of what made sense. Was a terrible gossip, and, um, got himself repeatedly in life into tangles. You know, in the 50s, he, he, um, he, uh, well, in '67, he was exposed as having, uh, gotten involved in, uh, you know, running a magazine that was funded by the CIA, which everyone seemed to know was funded by the CIA, except for Spender. But what happened in, in, uh, Germany in the, uh, earlier, uh, days in the 30s was that Spender was a bit of a tagalong and came and did everything Christopher was doing, and then, and then went back to London and told everyone all about it, which really got up Isherwood's nose because he was busily, he, it was his copy, Berlin was his copy. And they fell out. Spender had planned to introduce, to dedicate his first book of poems to to Isherwood, and he decided not to. He later restored the dedication. But, uh, Spender then, uh, decided that other German cities would do just as well and went and spent time in Hamburg and other places. But they did remain lifelong friends, and this rivalry was, was a joke between them as well.

Yes, that's very interesting. And suddenly, you know, they, they also wrote it about each other, right, in their writing. So it's a friendship that spills into into the literature as well. I was interested, right now, when you mentioned, uh, Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institute of Sexual Science. As you probably know, in the exhibition, one of the things that we are trying to reconstruct is a series of places that were particularly important for English writers, places that become sort of hotspots in, in, in their network. And, and the Institute was certainly one of them. And we know that Isherwood, in fact, even lived in the next door to, to, to Isherwood's Institute. Can you tell us a little bit more about what Isherwood made of that kind of place, which is surely very much unlike what he would have been familiar with in England?

Right. Yes. Well, you know, I was thinking about this this morning. In his later work, in the 1970s, in "Christopher and His Kind," when he talked much more openly about the sexual life in Berlin, he, he, he introduced the Institute as terrifically important. And he talked about how, when he went there, he came for the first time face to face with his tribe. He talked a little bit about how being gay had been, uh, something that he and his friends, uh, it was felt like a private clique to him. And when he went to the, uh, Institute, he, uh, saw this as something that was being scientifically studied. Um, and I think it was a great, uh, it offered a kind of, uh, strength, uh, to him that any institution will offer. And in Isherwood's life generally, we see him often at the edge of an institutional life, never really joining in openly, but taking strength and knowledge from, uh, the study and the academic aspect of the Institute. He said that, you know, Hirschfeld to him was a bit of, you know, a fuddy-duddy older man. There's a letter to his mother when he says, you know, the Tiergarten is like Hyde Park. He's trying to say to his mother, don't worry, I'm, I'm staying in a really, you know, nice neighborhood, respectably, a respectable one. Yes. And that they're, there are people here with degrees, you know, Doctor So-and-so. But he actually was incredibly interested in the, uh, underlife of the city. He was, he, his explorations, um, were into the slums. He was interested in poverty. And I think he looked on, um, the opportunity to penetrate to a darker side of the city. For him, this was, um, really important. As a, as a privileged, you know, um, upper-middle-class, super well-educated boy, he wanted to meet boys on the streets. He want, he was really fascinated, uh, by the, by the figure of the boy, young, vulnerable, alone, tested by the world. And we get it again and again, in "Goodbye to Berlin" and in "Mr. Norris Changes Trains." These young boys who want to play a role in life, who don't have employment, who, you know, they want to be a character in the show. And they're pulled to the city because it offers, it seems to offer wealth, opportunity. And it isn't just about, uh, it's about getting your next meal, but it's also about having an identity, being somebody. He was really interested in those boys. And he very, um, deliberately went and lived, um, with the family of one of his lovers, Walter Wolfe, um, in Hales Tor, in a, in a slum tenement. And, you know, in his later writing, he dismissed this and says, oh, I only went for a month, and I always could have afforded to move out. But I think for a young person of his background to do that was actually a stunning, um, act. And, um, and it produced some of his, uh, really most, um, revealing work. And when, when "The Novaks" was published in, uh, "New Writing" in, uh, '36, I mean, that was the thing that made him, I think, the most famous as as a leftist. And he was really interested in, in the problems of, um, you know, of poverty and, and what to do about it.

Yeah, yeah. And that's certainly one of the things that make his writings about Berlin so special, right? And quite different from what other English writers were reporting on at the time. The fact that he was able to penetrate into this working-class world. And he obviously used his sexuality, as it were, right, you know, and his sexual connections in order in order to get there. Um, you mentioned, um, the importance of, uh, clubs, of the, um, counter-cultural scene, of the gay underworld, etc. What do we really know about what Isherwood, when he was here, in terms of kind of moving in that world? Where did he go? What did he do when he was here?

Oh, well, he'd, you know, I, I think the, the bar that has fascinated scholars is the one called the, um, Cozy Corner. Um, yes, that's right. We also have a feature here, Corner Nosters, or something. It was, um, um, near, probably near Simeon Strasse, um, near where he lived with Walter Wolfe, and which I guess is disguised as the Alexander Casino. He felt that it was, um, you know, there's the sort of fancier places which he, uh, would go to around Nollendorf Strasse were of great interest to him. But he felt that all foreigners went there, to the, to the glittery, better-known cabarets. So he was interested in going to these, um, more nameless places. And he had a friend, a British archaeologist called Francis Turville-Peter, from a similar background to his, except that he was Catholic, who was a rather brilliant archaeologist, famous as a very young man, but troubles with, he was an alcoholic, really. And he was being treated by Magnus Hirschfeld for syphilis. And that's how Isherwood, um, decided to live at the Institute. I mean, he'd been there with Auden, but Francis Turville-Peter was living next door to the Institute in this annex that Hirschfeld's sister had, because he was being treated for syphilis, and he often had to stay in bed for the day. And he would take, um, Isherwood off to bars. And the two of them, according to Isherwood's later account, were really interested in the whole kind of anthropological aspect of the boy world. So, you know, he, he later, he later criticized his youthful behavior as very, um, exploitative. That it was all based on this transactional, like, I'm the rich foreigner, and I have money, and the boys are hungry. But I think there was a genuine interest in who they were, how they lived, and how this world functioned. And there are letters, you know, from the period in which he talks quite a lot about the boys and, uh, how to befriend them and interact with them. And also, you know, what things cost. I think it's important for, uh, to introduce, uh, something else about his, his sort of study of what it meant to be gay. You know, he read all the literature, starting with, you know, Oscar Wilde and so forth. Pretty young. When Auden went to Berlin, he met a man called John Layard, who was the patient of an American psychologist called Homer Lane. And these two, along with perhaps D.H. Lawrence, were kind of preaching, um, what Isherwood called the gospel of, um, the devil is conscious control. You'll be ill if you don't give in to your sexual needs and explore them and grow through them. Um, so although you've got this public and institutional, uh, Hirschfeld studying and, you know, a pretty well-known public figure in Berlin in, uh, and, you know, working to change the penal code, attending court cases to testify on this and that, protecting also, I mean, you know, people know, I, I guess, about the, the Institute, but there was also this private, um, uh, pilgrimage that Auden and Isherwood were on to try to understand who they were, what they were, how they were made. And, so some of it was through these private friendships. John Homer Lane was dead already, so John Layard was the only conduit for information about, you know, Lane's theories about, um, growing through, um, uh, you know, emancipating yourself by doing what you needed to do, following your urges. And they, you know, they were reading Freud and saying, well, Freud's a bit of a square. And, you know, we need to, D.H. Lawrence taught Isherwood the importance of touch and the actual, you know, physical, uh, acting on what what you had only imagined. So Isherwood and Auden, both incredibly powerful imaginations. And when they got away from England and away from their, um, social circle, people who knew them, they were related to, you know, so many people that they socialized with, they didn't want to embarrass their families. Yeah. And in Berlin, it was as if imagination and theory, uh, could be acted on and could become real.

That's fascinating. It's fascinating this idea of the city where, you know, you can realize yourself in a way that you couldn't possibly do in England, right? I mean, the other thing that seems to me very important here is the political context. You know, we've already mentioned, you've already talked about some of these boys and the way that, you know, their, um, situation of poverty puts them in a position of vulnerability, etc. But there's also the incredible volatility of the Berlin politics at the time, you know, very much split between the right and the left, etc. Isherwood seems to me to have kind of dipped his feet into this, or was it a little bit more than that?

Well, he was, very much inclined to the left. And he later, um, insisted, well, he never joined the Communist Party, and he later insisted that his commitment to the left was confused and, um, and rather ignorant. He had a very close friend, Edward Upward, who that were going on, uh, post-revolution, and was very excited and inspired by that. Um, I think for Isherwood, the whole, he, Isherwood also worked for, um, Willy Munzenberg and the, you know, he did translating work for, uh, essentially a communist front. Munzenberg, you know, is sometimes called the Red Millionaire. I mean, he didn't have any money of his own, but I've discovered in my researches that he too had an apartment in Hirschfeld's sister's annex, and all sorts of people were running into one another in the hallways there. So, you know, as to how Isherwood first made the connection, it's unclear. But, um, they, they may have run into each other literally in the hallways of the of the Institute. Um, so he did do that translating work. He did read all the books, you know, he read his Marx, he read his Lenin, and he believed with his generation, uh, that the communists were going to change the world. He was not, um, I, it took him a long time, and he portrays this, I think, very, um, convincingly in "Goodbye to Berlin," to, you know, people thought the workers, uh, were the heart, were gonna, were gonna win, that they were the heart of the city, they were the pulse. But, you know, he wrote about, um, the Nazi rise after it had already succeeded. And what I think he tried to show is that, um, the comedy and the clownishness and the, um, impossible, like, how could people so crude or, um, unpolished, um, take over? And I don't want to offend anyone's political convictions now, but I think there's, there was a remarkable match-up with what we saw with, you know, Trump, who seemed to be kind of never in control of what was taking place, and somehow had this genius for, um, getting his way. I, I think this is one of the things to really enjoy in, um, and "Goodbye to Berlin" is just the brilliance with which he shows that, um, uh, it just didn't seem possible for this group, um, to win. But the more they were made fun of, and the more they were laughed at, uh, the more savage the, uh, the anger. And, uh, that is shown with a kind of, um, slow, hypnotic pace that, I mean, reading it now, it's, it's just incredibly frightening, very understated.

Yes, but, very realistic. Yes. I mean, it's interesting, you're talking about the, the texture, as you were, in the style of, um, of Isherwood's novels. I think it's, uh, important to remind, um, people, like you just did, that these are retrospectively written works, for the most part, right? You know, this is, these are works that he wrote after he'd come back to Britain. And he immortalized a time that was already, and the city, in a way that already did not exist anymore, because the Nazis had already taken over. And that kind of liberal and slightly chaotic Berlin that he had loved so much, and already by that point, effectively disappeared. I mean, one of the fascinating things about, um, Isherwood's novels is precisely that relationship to his own autobiography, right? You know, that desire that drives, you know, Isherwood readers to say, okay, so this is the place where Isherwood went, these are the people that he knew. And that obviously stems from the fact that he fictionalized real people there. For example, you have Jean Ross, you know, the, the English kind of bohemian artist, who was turned into Sally Bowles. You have Gerald Hamilton, who is turned into Mr. Norris, etc. Can you tell us a little bit more about how Isherwood manipulated his own autobiography? You know, his narrator in "Goodbye to Berlin" is called Christopher, like himself, you know? What, how does he use his experience of being here? How does he turn it into fiction?

Well, um, I think, you know, he kept diaries. And so when we say he wrote retrospectively, we should also try to remember that he was using diaries that he was writing on a day-to-day basis. So, observations he made as to what was actually taking place often then appear in something that he writes later with very, very tiny changes in order to make a particular impression. Um, and each of those characters that you've named, um, are, you know, said and known to be the models for the characters in the books. Each of the real people that you've mentioned. And yet, it's, each of them also has many other exemplars, both in literature and in real life. And we see him blending into his Jean Ross character, for example, I believe, a little girl he knew when he was only eight years old. Is very much, uh, brought back to life in the, in the, in the Sally Bowles figure, as well as, you know, figures from literature, you know, and perhaps, um, from cinema as well. For example, um, uh, you know, "Pandora's Box." He went to see in Berlin, and certainly that, uh, Louise Brooks, completely captivated him. And that androgynous kind of look, you know, we see some of that in Sally Bowles' character. And what he's doing is going for, um, you know, a combination of things, maximum entertainment. But also, there's always a moral intention. And he worried that Mr. Norris, that Gerald Hamilton, both "Mr. Norris Changes Trains" was so entertaining, and people laughed so much, that they didn't see the critics, quite how worried he was about the fascist rise. And, you know, it's possible to see in the Mr. Norris character also a kind of Hitler figure, who is tricking people and pulling the wool over their eyes. And there's a lovely bit near the end where he just, you know, it's a sort of kaleidoscope effect. He only has to tweak a tiny bit. And he had this gift for generalizing from a particular example, you know, what oft was thought but nere so well expressed. I mean, it seems like he's grabbing it out of thin air, but he read constantly, he went to the movies constantly, and he was blending, you know, many, many things with his own personal observations. So it was very tied to a specific time and place, and also rooted in a long kind of canon of, um, similar figures. And this gave, um, weight and vitality to what he, uh, wrote in what is really fiction, and based on, based on real experience.

That's a tricky game to play, isn't it? To a certain extent, do the people who, who were immortalized, who were kind of caught in this game, did they ever get back to Isherwood? Did they ever feel upset that they had been manipulated and turned into characters?

Oh, yeah. I mean, he went to a lot of trouble to ask people's permission. Gerald Hamilton, who loved attention, um, you know, dined out on it for the rest of his life. He, he took on the character. Jean Ross, who was, um, a fairly serious journalist, and she lived with Claude Cockburn for a long time and had a child with him. She did not like some of how she was portrayed in Sally Bowles. I mean, he, he pursued her for her permission. The big question at the original time of publication was, can I write a story in which a character obviously based on you has an abortion, which is based on truth? And at the time, that was beyond scandalous. It was illegal, it was dangerous, and so forth. And so her hesitation, she told him he could publish it. John Lehmann was all set to publish it in "New Writing." Then she took her permission back. Then she gave it again, after all. And so it was originally published as a very small book by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. But what upset her later was a perception of the Sally Bowles figure as an anti-Semite, a semi, because she talks about the Jewish producers who want to sleep with her. She's, you know, wants to get on the stage, she'll do anything. And, um, um, you know, he, he used that very, uh, uh, broadly in the book. And I think she felt it stuck to her, and it wasn't language that she personally would ever use. But I'd just like to say that Christopher Isherwood knew what it was like to be a subject in someone else's book. It happened to him a lot. It happened to him when he was remarkably young. He was already used by a friend and neighbor of his family in Cheshire as a character in a book. And I think it upset him, and then it made him very tough. And, um, and he did always get permissions from, from his friends. But, you know, it's like, if anyone's had the personal experience of say, being quoted in the newspaper, the first time it happens, you, everyone says, well, that's not what I said.

That's right. So, talking about newspapers, I'm thinking actually about that little snippet from, is it 1952, from when Isherwood comes back to Berlin for the only time, I believe, after his stay in, um, around 1930? Can you tell us a little bit about that? Why did he come back, and why did he not want to come back again after that?

The, uh, "Goodbye to Berlin" was made into a play, "I Am a Camera," which was a huge hit on Broadway in the autumn of '51. And the, uh, Christopher had, Christopher Isherwood had been writing, uh, about American literature for "The Observer" in London. He was by then, you know, settled in California. He'd been back to England once or twice after the war. And "The Observer" commissioned him to go to Berlin and re-uh, discover his life there. He was, uh, thinking that he wanted to go. Then suddenly, he fell down the stairs and nearly broke his leg. He had all sorts of digestive issues. He had to see a bunch of doctors, and he realized that he really, unconsciously, did not want to go back to Berlin. It's a really complicated and fascinating situation. I think it was very painful for him to leave in 1933, and he had, probably invested a huge amount of psychic energy and then, you know, dealing with that. So going back, um, uh, was, was complicated. I, I think he feared to see the destruction, even in 1952. As far as I understand, there were still no trees in the Tiergarten, they'd all been used for firewood, and, you know, everything was was bombed. And they were only just beginning to rebuild some things. And then there was Heinz Neddermeyer, his boyfriend of, um, of this later part of his time in Berlin. And this was the boyfriend who he took away with him in 1933, when, when he had to flee. He took his boyfriend to Greece and then tried to get him into England. There were passport issues. I mean, everyone was trying to get passports. A lot of Germans were. Heinz was never able to get a new passport. And, um, he and Isherwood traveled all around Europe, and this was a torture and an agony, a source of gigantic anxiety. They hired a shady lawyer to help them, they tried to bribe people. And in 1937, running out of, you know, short-term permits to stay, Heinz went from Luxembourg to back into Germany at Trier to to get a promised visa and was arrested by the Gestapo. He went to jail, he served hard labor, and then he went into the army. He incredibly survived the war. He was, uh, a prisoner of war, uh, in an American camp in France when, when the war finally ended. And he wrote to Isherwood a postcard that took, you know, like a year to reach him. When Isherwood went back in 1952, he did not write in that newspaper article that he saw more than anything else. He spent time with Heinz and met Heinz's family. Heinz was married and had a son who by then was, um, 12 years old, I think. He went over to their apartment in East Germany. He, uh, Heinz came out to, um, to the West side. They went to, uh, see Isherwood's old landlady at 17 Nollendorf, that, you know, met at the Rau, who was the, um, who was the landlady in "Goodbye to Berlin." And actually, I think it turned out to be a very, um, rewarding and important return to Berlin. But it exposed, um, a lot of fears and anxieties and suffering. I mean, Isherwood was a great one for saying that for always saying he was fine, but studying his life, over the last 10 years, I mean, he definitely suffered from anxiety, panic attacks, depression. He had a couple of mini breakdowns. He coped with all these things, pretty well, but he was often, um, just a complete envelope in bed. He had unbelievable psychosomatic, um, difficulties.

That's interesting. I don't know if that answers your, is that, does that answer you?

Yeah, yeah. No, it certainly does. I mean, it certainly gives the sense of how conflicted, in a way, his relationship to Berlin is. And in a way, he is, you know, it gives me the impression of his post-Berlin time as a double act of trying to remember, but also try to destroy or suppress or repress or rewrite experiences here. Which brings me to the question of the diaries, right? Which is always something that I'm really kind of keen to know more about. He says he destroyed his Berlin diaries. Obviously, we believe him. You know more about Isherwood's diaries than anyone else, right? You know, and if I'm right, these are the only diaries that he kept that he actually destroyed. Why did he do that?

Well, first of all, they're not the only ones he destroyed, as far as I know. Uh, but as I, I mentioned earlier, he always is trying to, his, his public statement about why he, uh, destroyed them was that he was worried in his crossing back and forth the United States, the carrying papers, that somehow diaries with sexual detail could get him into trouble. And there is no question that, um, when Heinz Neddermeyer was arrested at Trier, you know, there was a trial. Isherwood was named as the, um, person with whom Neddermeyer had committed reciprocal onanism. And I can't remember how many countries. He certainly couldn't go back to Germany after that. That's one of the reasons he never visited Neddermeyer. He was, he was, you know, a criminal persona non grata. So he said the reason he destroyed the diaries is that they had, uh, sexual detail in them which was dangerous. But I, I believe in addition to that, that he had, he had told his story in a particular way, that was the version that he wished to survive. I mean, he later said he preferred his own, the past he'd created, to the real past. And I think one of the difficulties he had with Spender in later years, you know, Christopher, in "The Land of the Hours," Natalia Landauer is is partly based on a friend called Giza Soloveitchik, and Spender said, well, she wasn't really like that. And Isherwood would, you know, it's really hard if you're trying to make something up, and one of your best friends is saying, but that isn't historically accurate. So it's really important to understand that Isherwood was a writer of fiction, and he was incredibly close to the border of true documented history. But he studied history at school and university, he knew what history was, and he was not trying to write history. He was trying to write something new and something different. And I think he had, it was part of his power and part of his magic, um, that he needed to then, um, get rid of, um, the documentation. Now, later on, uh, later on, he saved everything. So he, he went, he visited his mother in 1947. He visited his mother, uh, at his childhood home, Weversley. His mother had saved first in their house in London, and then carrying in suitcases to all of the places she fled to escape bombing in England during the war, she carried all the papers that survived in England. And in 1947, when he went back to Weversley, where he was born, he sat and went through all of it. Some of it he then burned in the stove at Weversley. I think that by then he had already burned the Berlin diaries that all of us would love to read, love to have. That's right. Absolutely. I think he had burned them before, but he burned a lot more stuff at Weversley in 1947. But he very deliberately saved, uh, material that he subsequently used in the book called "Down There on a Visit," which has, uh, the story Ambrose, which is about just after he left Berlin, he went to Greece with Heinz Neddermeyer and stayed with Francis Turville-Peter. So, so he saved, uh, some things from the late 30s.

That's fascinating. We're, we're almost running out of time, and I just want to ask you, no, no, that's fine. No, no, we're kind of engrossed in the tales here, right? You know, but I just want to ask you one final question, which is to do with with fame, right? You know, and with cabaret, and with, you know, it's probably the first thing that people who don't know Isherwood know about Isherwood. It's something that he didn't himself write, etc. "Goodbye to Berlin" had a second life, you could almost say, with cabarets in the 1970s. It's a very different time, right? The 1970s. Berlin is changing. Berlin is again becoming a cool city. At the time, it has again an alternative scene, etc. How did Isherwood react to that? You know, did he, was he, did he like cabaret? Did he think that this new attention towards his work was detracting from the kind of things that he was writing then? What happened then?

Well, I, I think he was of two minds. Part of him was really bothered, right from the beginning, with John Van Druten's play, "I Am a Camera." I mean, he helped to write the play, he worked with Van Druten quite a lot. The man who played him on stage in New York, I think, was a pale, uh, Juan ghost of any Christopher Isherwood character. So having your life taken over by a lot of brilliant talent, um, is an uncomfortable thing. And I think he spent a lot of his later career trying to, um, get his personality back, or even to say he'd ever had one, because, um, the narrator that he created was very deliberately a bland narrator in order not to distract from the other characters, and for other reasons as well. But this was not really him, and it was represented as him. When, when "Cabaret," the film, came out, I mean, when "I Am a Camera" came out, Julie Harris as Sally Bowles, to him, she became Sally Bowles more so than anything he could ever remember. He was 100 percent in love with Julie Harris and Sally Bowles. He was, he loved, he loved that. And he sometimes said that after she'd done it, he couldn't really remember what actually happened. He just saw her in the role. With Liza Minnelli, um, it was harder for him. She is a very tall, and, you know, she has this incredible voice. So Sally Bowles really wasn't supposed to be a great singer. Nevertheless, he sat and watched the Academy Awards in 1972, I think it was, by which time, you know, Liza Minnelli was a superstar. She was on "Time" magazine cover and "Newsweek" cover at the same time, the first person in the world ever to be on both covers at the same time, dressed as Sally Bowles. And of course, she was Judy Garland's daughter, so that was even, you know, added to it. He, um, came to like her, um, and he was thrilled at all the prizes and awards that, um, that the movie won. He never went to see the musical on Broadway. His friends kind of warned him. But what he didn't like was the portrayal of the character who kept being renamed, you know, Bradshaw, then Clifford, then Brian. I mean, he didn't like this vague sexuality, bisexual, straight, but no real libido, who was this guy. And I think he kind of still resented the world in which that was how you portrayed such a character. So, you know, I would have loved to have, um, seen him at Alan Cumming's, you know, "Cabaret," because nowadays it can all be done differently.

Yes. Well, okay. Thank you very much. It's been fascinating talking to you, and there's so much more that we could say about Isherwood, obviously, right? And then about his connection to Berlin at the time and afterwards. But, you know, we suddenly have your book to look forward to to read to read more about that. So, a book entitled "Chris." We look forward to that coming out soon. Catherine Bucknell, thank you very much indeed for talking to us today.

It's been a pleasure. Really fun to talk to you. And good luck with the exhibition.

Thank you very much. Just one final thing. The catalogue for the exhibition "Happy in Berlin" can be ordered online if you so wish. Otherwise, come to the exhibition and get your copy. And recent exhibition as well. Thank you very much.