Day at Night: Christopher Isherwood

James Day public television pioneer and chairman of the CUNY TV Advisory Board passed away in April 2008 his legacy includes the series day at night which aired for 130 episodes beginning in 1973 the program features interviews with many of the great thinkers and achievers of the 20th century these 30 year old programs have been restored the interviews remain fresh and relevant today exploring issues that are still important to society showing them again as CUNY TVs tribute to Jim and his contributions to public television Kristopher issue what is the author editor and translator of enough books to tax a good-sized bookshelf but it was a couple of his short stories set in the Berlin of the early 30s stories about a struggling young English writer and his friendship with a cafe singer named Sally Bowles that will identify him for most people the stories were fashioned by John van druten into a play and later a film whose title I am a camera was taken from issue woods opening sentence the play became the basis of the hit stage and film musical cabaret a strong autobiographical thread runs through much of issue was writing particularly in such novels as lions and shadows and down there on a visit his most recent book Kathleen and Frank is autobiography an affectionate portrait of his parents he collaborated his lifelong friend WH Auden on several plays and a travel book about China and he's translated books from German French and Sanskrit mr. issue would have you seen cabaret yes I have seen it I didn't see it as a stage play as a matter of fact I only saw it on the screen did you like it I like it much better than I think I would have liked the stage play and people i buy the stage play I mean the musical because of course there was a stage play I'm a carrier too I am a camera but in cabaret on the stage all my friends went to see it and they all said oh we loved it but Christian must never go well I don't know they thought it would fill me with said horror but it didn't well on the screen was very different you see the screenplay was written largely by a very good friend of Mines you wheeler and he really did everything he could to kind of bring it back to the book and to make it much more like Berlin it was the book of the the musical that I chiefly objected to but you I suppose are very recognizable to yourself in the story itself having gone through two generations from the original Berlin story well now I wouldn't say that actually Michael York of all the actors who played that part was most like me he was like my good-looking brother and he was at great pains to make himself look you see we do it these both have broken noses and he grew his hair like I used to wear it during the kind of Hitler Swach over one eye or Veronica Lake and made himself look as as like me when I was young as he could did you wear your hair that way because it was the period when Hitler was coming to power as a kind of narrator copied me I had it know it is very British than to wear your hair very long I say yeah do it were you ever able to know what became of the girl you call Sally Bowles oh yes yes I remained in touch with her for the rest of her life as she died last yeah only last year yes we're about the same age mm-hmm um she had a very strange your life she married she met a man who was a left-wing journalist and who actually fought in Spain in the Spanish Civil War and she went to Spain and emerged from a very brave and stayed in Madrid during the bombardment and everything and emerged from it a party member for the rest of her life and that was the one subject on which she was a little bit boring because she you know echoed the party line but there were talked about other things and she had a beautiful daughter who didn't have a career and the least bit like hers but became a distinguished lawyer hmm it was a very handsome girl - she looked wonderfully well even in later life she had a sort of long especially was a little bit if you had to compare with well-known people a little bit like merle oberon and in a soul she had a kind of humor in her face she was a little bit like beatrice lillie hmm sort of combination of the two what influence did those years in Berlin have upon you this was 1929 - about about 1931 32 33 33 yes you left when Hitler came to power did you know it yes very soon afterwards so though that was three to four years in Berlin and at a very critical time in your life I suppose an impressionable time certainly what what influence how did it shape your thoughts and your life or did it oh well very much yes in the first place of course there was a great psychological escape from my kind of English persona I became a person who spoke German and I lived a very different kind of life I lived mostly in in a working-class district and got rid of all my kind of nicely nice upper-class English school boy persona and wore kind of bell-bottom pants and sweaters all of which I mean everybody does nowadays but in those day you know I felt very much part of the the scenery it was a protest in a protest against all that that you had been up to that point why did you want to leave all that behind why did you want to lose yourself in the new persona in Berlin well when you say you I mean I I personally have always had the theory that one is I'm not now speaking about God or anything of this kind but that one is run by another part of one's will to which one has a almost no access whatsoever as to say something which plans ahead for you when you try to buck its plans through your ignorance or alarm because it's like you're like a backseat driver really then possibly psychosomatic consequences follow I'm willing to theoretically to believe that that you get sick or something but the great thing is that the thing has got its own plans and they usually entail a revolt of some kind because it's only by by revolting from whatever you happen to be that you go into position B and from position B you can then possibly reach position C which you can view both a and B with some kind of justice not that I'm claiming to having Steven spend as it has wonderful phrase in his autobiography system I hope people won't think that I have survived my life like some grave disease I think the idea when it becomes wise when Minds older is very unsound but still what is the the this will you speak up to which you have no access what is the source of that will if you have no access to it is it some outer force that provides that energy to drive in that direction a kind of predestination now I think it's part of one's self but I think it often it it sort of knows better what's good for you is the accumulation of your own experience it's interested in really in making you function I also think it knows when you're going to die in other words that if you'll only let it it will finish you off at the right moment without undue fuss and there again is very important not to back it on that again medication does otherwise but you can't change it to have no access to it that is to say how do you buck it how do you it or is it something the manner in which you die if it knows when you're going to do back it by going along you've done back it but I'm a you you the best thing there is to go along with it if you can only find out what it wants hmm you went to Berlin originally as I understand it to visit your lifelong friend always garden yes what was the circumstances under which you an ordinate Oh at school we met at school he was almost three years younger than I was and what age did you meet well he was 7 and I was 9 or 10 you're very young oh yes real young but all of that wouldn't have meant terribly much I mean we got along well together but so we did with we were all little boys kind of rushing around screaming at the top of our voices but then we met again when he was in his teens and I was just about 20 or 21 whatever it was and he'd written all this poetry and I was too preferred I couldn't imagine it amazed me you know the earlier the quieter the mood sure oh because I thought of him always a kind of scientist he was tremendously interested in all things scientific all through his life he was the son of a doctor and he is one of his favorite occupations was looking at catalogues of mining machinery he was very interested in geology too and I had that kind of old-fashioned prejudice that I thought that poetry was written by classical rather than scientific or modern as they used to say in school groups and he produced all this poetry and at least I had the sense to realize that was remarkable but the funny thing was that it wasn't the kind of poetry he was going to write or become famous for it was really very imitative it was rather like Robert Frost rather like Thomas Hardy I was like Edward Thomas and beautiful and indeed if my memory is not at fault he had got an offer for it already from some publisher but he was changing so fast and coming under so many influences that he refused to publish any of it and he went on to write other kinds of poetry and then published that were you setting about to be a writer as a young man is there something that the latter who shared he was white quite aware of the fact of you intended to be a writer yes and that was why we we then became such tremendous buddies because we had this in common you see and furthermore which made it all the better I wanted to be a prose writer so it was absolutely no competition both you know when you're young you always cast your friends in roles as being you know these so-and-so so immediately he became the poet and I became the novelist were you influenced by your reading as a youngster to become a writer oh yes I think everybody is mm-hmm you know in the in the most basic way oh yes I I didn't really understand how one would come around it without literary influences because after all like everything else you do as you as you begin to develop a personality is done by imitation I mean you couldn't become a baseball player without watching ballgames could you and there has to be something that you're imitating and something you your ambition is fired by you went to Cambridge yes that's right my intention did not graduate as a matter of fact though close to graduation you through some gesture on your own part indicated that you didn't want to complete your examination well it was very childish thing to do in a way but it was sensibly the action in itself was sensible because I was in great danger of becoming an academic and that is a danger yes he wouldn't have suited me at all in fact I would never have written or anything then I don't think I would've had a quite different life it was too too safe to Snug it really offered a tremendous fortress into which you could retire and just lead a life and of study and reyes writing books of a sort but not the kind of books I wanted to write and what did you do to prevent getting that degree and thus getting locked into the fortress of academia um that is a great problem because you see if I just done something you know in the in the outside world I might have been forgiven they might have they might have said well alright it's whatever I had done really so the only thing to do was direct nonsensical answers in the actual examination and that's what you did that's what I did you and I were not forgiven no they were terribly puzzled you see my I should explain my handicap was my difficulty was that I had inadvertently won I think the best scholarship of my year when I came into Cambridge entrance college that was why I was marked down in this way to be a BA academic and that was my problem because I had to get out of that if I've been just a one of the other undergraduates been perfectly alright I could've just said I didn't want to literally you went to Kings College at the University of London to study medicine oh is that was crazy I had a lot of mad idea that was the kind of life I wanted to lead a night as a doctor well I had an idea of my very romantic idea myself I also thought to myself either as a doctor on a ship which of course it's quite easy to be but terribly dull because you do nothing except just sort of perhaps the passengers are sufficiently until they can be taken ashore okay die it's more comfortable well some I thought of myself as a piece doctor I had a great image of coming ashore on the Thames or somewhere from a piece launched at night and the body is lying on the dock and you you bend over and say yes he's dead about three and a half hours and it was done with them yeah that's odd it looks like an umbrella this kind of thing you know you know the kind of a kind of doctrine in a TV series when you're a romantic as a young man a wildly romantic are you still yes yes I think so it depends how you define romantic but just when you say the word I have to say yeah well you have said in your book Kathleen and Frank that your mother Kathleen was a tremendous counter force that kept you from being an academic that kept you from being a mother's boy had kept you from being patriotic oh it's nothing all the things you feared yes that's perfectly true and of course now I'm realizing that I owe a great debt she made you a rebel in a sense yes yes that's true but you see if parents could only realize I suppose many do nowadays because of course the education of parents has preceded enormous distance since I was yeah but if people if parents could only realize that it's it's a real function you know to make some of your children at least rebel and to walk right over house and perhaps curse you you know maybe this is your greatest day or your finest hour when they do that and it's not it's not quite as simple as people say that oh yes you should always understand them you should say yes yeah I know and yes all right well yes all right heroin yes if you want it you know and this kind of thing it's maybe just exactly what you shouldn't say why would you encourage them to rebel to become independent to become but after what else is there I mean somehow are there to be to be independent yes because I mean how can you be anything else before you've been independent first become an individual yes you've spoken of your father as two men one you refer to as Frank your father together the hero father your father was a soldier yeah an officer and you moved around a good deal as a young man he was ultimately killed in a major battle in World War one and was a hero what were the differences between the hero father and Frank the father well you see what was so wonderful about my father was and what made him infinitely greater than their view of him was that their view being the others that all the all the people who saw him from the from the outside and the family was that he was a kind of a he combined being an exemplary officer a regular officer a professional soldier in the British Army throughout his life with the most extraordinary degree of bohemian ISM and liberalism and it was indeed quite a talented painter I painted watercolors to this day people come to the house and they say well who did that and as one thing which is really almost looks like something out of a sketchbook money or somebody was sort of a sort of Impressionism he painted little landscapes and flowers and charmingly but more than charmingly with real poetry he also played the piano very well he also acted he was fearless ham and very often in in parts we have a war female drag I mean he's like Charlie's aunt and real fast and this combined with this also there's another wonderful thing about him that you know he never went through big kind of gung-ho scenes about patriotism he took all this very much as a matter of course said it was his job and this sort of thing he was to say well I never he was my sword it's only good for toasting bread with and I hate firing my revolver it makes such a bang and in fact um when he was killed from all accounts he was if not unarmed at anyway he had no weapons in his hand he just had a swagger stick to make signals to the men to advance more on the left or more on the right he was leading an attack and when he was in the trenches yours nicking here's two knit scarves and things for himself and and for other officers he was rather good at and of course this in its turn had the most wonderful effect on the men who were rather when they got rattled and a fire because they they they said oh that the Colonel's nicking you know then they laughed instead of getting in being scared and so I think all that was really a function of his heroism and his heroism imposed as you've said in your book a burden upon you you became what you referred to as a sacred orphan the others the people outside the family he forced you to to live up to the image of him as a hero yes that's quite true to reject a good many things as a consequence because they of course they only saw it in the square east kind of way they didn't understand the least bit what he was like as a hero they didn't understand the the the inwardness of real courage which is that it's consistent giving reassurance to people and a terrible circumstances it's not what you do is sort of roaring and carrying on and killing people but it's the way you make your the people who are with you feel that they're not that they're not scared everybody's had experiences being with somebody very brave and ER and pleasant circumstances and the is always the same it is the jaw not so scared was you're coming to America and ultimately ultimately becoming an American citizen a part of the rejection of all that past and your own individuality well in a way I think it was yes there was that side to it certainly but on the other hand um I'd always longed to come to America and I'd always felt and do still feel that really as an english-speaking person you almost need to have spent a good deal of your life in both in England and in America because they're two halves of something either what does the American half represent to you oh the the sort of getting the the cobwebs out of your mouth I mean of speaking out of being much more open freer louder and so on you know but on the other hand that in itself becomes a sort of tiresome act if you if you have no other dimension and now I still feel intensity that there are certain things which the English have a marvelous quality of not not being so theatrical about everything other aspects of England that you miss oh yes sure I adore England now I didn't like England at the time but it's changed so much in the first place I always wanted England to lose the Empire I want England to be a little civilised country like the Scandinavian countries and also I like very much that England is now very cosmopolitan I mean London is like Rio you see people of every nation on earth there or Singapore and in that way of course it's more like the States but even more so I would say in a way it's more concentrated in London it's quite extraordinary and when you see these little country places and some little village somewhere and you get off the train and the ticket collector is a Chinese you know you're gonna feel that something has happened to the plane has Hollywood been a congenial home for you despite its international images being brothers superficial oh well it's been everything for me yes but how much of that is exactly Hollywood and how much circumstances I don't know I mean for instance I met people here who are very very important to me but many of them were not even Americans in the well except in the sense that they possibly had citizenship as I do but I mean for instance some it was in America that I met this monk swami prabhavananda who was my great one of great people in my life and I became interested in Hindu philosophy and so on and then of course I spent a lot of time here with Gerald heard and Aldous Huxley did they not influence you to go into in do philosophy well they introduced me to this man but as a matter of fact I was more directly involved with it than they became because they had their own kind of things you know they were a bit what has it added to your life the Vedanta didn't do philosophy a sort of a sort of foundation I mean you know I'm a sort of a in a way a kind of a well exactly a pessimistic person but a person who's always thinking well now suppose we suppose that happens and suppose that happens and suppose that happens then what do you do and at the back of it now is is what I got is what I got out of being of a dentist really I mean that there's has not that kind of ultimate terror how was it removed how does it be done to remove it oh well if I started trying to tell you that we should be Hetal long after midnight and even then I mean everything one says it's so subjective I can understand it for me and when I say Ford and I I mean I don't for one moment regard this is a kind of cure-all it made me see how many other ways there are removing it it just happened to be my way that was all it gave me a great increased respect for the other religions for instance which I had absolutely no use for at the time your books have been semi-auto by Auto biographical your novels particularly has the writing of these books been a kind of process of self-discovery yes it has to a large extent and the discovery is really not over at all or rather I should say there's a great deal more that there are further layers to be excavated you see I'm writing a book now which is a sort of a well it's not a continuation of Kathleen Frank which is about me after I grew up starts with going to Berlin there's one very very important element which is although it's implied is left out of my books and that is my homosexuality which I that has been left out you say yes I consider I mean I it has not been frankly disgusting and I am discussing it it's an important factor what's brought about the change in your attitude toward discussing it and the times themselves to some degree yes yes I would say you've been reluctant before to discuss one is reluctant ignores but and also I feel that um it ought to be discussed for kind of civil liberties reasons there's a great deal of that in it too thank you very much you

Channel: CUNY TV

Views: 49,818

Keywords: James Day, cuny tv, Christopher Isherwood

Id: kx09mDenhKU

Length: 28min 35sec (1715 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 13 2011