All of life was a play for Christopher Isherwood; sometimes he was the lead actor, sometimes a clear-eyed observer in the stalls. In person he was a born performer—charming and gregarious and adaptable; as a writer he delighted in playing one of his personae off against another, drawing most of his books from his life but presenting himself now as “Christopher,” then as “Herr Issyvoo.” After he fled his entitled life in England, as Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood, for 47 years in the U.S., he rejoiced in the fact that L.A. seemed a movable stage set, a mirage.
His belief that everything was masquerade was deepened, of course, by his life in Hollywood, where he cheerfully cranked out scripts for decades to support his subtle and pellucid books. But it also derived from the Vedanta school of Hinduism that he embraced for over 40 years, in which a wandering monk was said to clap at regular life “as though the whole universe were an enormous theatrical performance.”
