I really enjoy Christopher Isherwood’s books and have always been curious to know more about him. Though most of his novels are loosely based on incidents in his own life, they are of course fictionalised. But it turns out that in 1976 Isherwood published Christopher and His Kind 1929–1939 – a memoir that revisits that 10-year period in his life and retells it as a, well, tell-all.

The period of 1929–1939 is when Isherwood lived mostly in continental Europe – after his childhood and early years in England, before his emigration to the USA where he remained until his death. He spent the first four years of this decade in Berlin – a time famously memorialised in his novel Goodbye to Berlin, which formed the basis of the play I Am A Camera and later the musical Cabaret. While living in Berlin he wrote and saw the publication of The Memorial, which was his second novel but the first to achieve some success.

Isherwood was gay and out to his friends and family for pretty much his whole life. He socialised with fellow queer intellectuals and lived openly with his partners. But he didn’t write about this aspect of his life publicly until the 1970s. Understandably, as California – where he had settled – did not decriminalise homosexuality until 1975.

Christopher and His Kind is gossipy and confessional, with some interesting quirks. For one, Isherwood describes his younger self in the third person, as though this is just another novel with a main character called Christopher. Which would maybe make sense if this was a straightforward narrative otherwise. But Isherwood’s future self injects commentary and later memories using first-person “I”. He also repeatedly compares this telling of events to the versions in his novels (and subsequent plays and films). Which is informative, if a little overly defensive at times of his past self’s decisions.

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