Tourists of one's own biography

In December 1935, Stephen Spender, WH Auden, and Christopher Isherwood settled in a town near Lisbon, aiming to live away from a conservative England on the brink of two wars; such experiences were evident in Diario de Sintra (Gallo Nero publishing house), which ran until August 1936; a period in which Spender traveled to Spain four months before the outbreak of the Civil War, and where he loved Barcelona, ​​where Pau Casals performed, and where he met Catalan-speaking poets.

Isherwood also refers to his partner's idea that he "is prepared to bet that Hitler will lose power before the month is out," something the author of Goodbye to Berlin considers "such a foolish view that I superstitiously hope it will come true."

But the reality would be quite different. Those British poets would eventually go into exile, some to the United States, as in the case of Isherwood, who would die in the Californian town of Santa Monica in 1986 (he was born in Disley, Cheshire, in 1904). The idealized goal of coming together in Sintra to escape British homophobia—a common trait among them was homosexuality—would end up being an unfulfilled dream.

Ultimately, this trio of poets were involved in a clash of ideologies as uncertainty arose in various war conflicts. In a way, they were "Friends in Transit ," to use Isherwood's work, originally titled "Down There on a Visit" (1962).

In this novel, we find perhaps the most incisive and cynical Isherwood of his entire career, in a prose that combines personal introspection and sociopolitical observation and is structured as autonomous yet interconnected episodes. These are four stories that constitute a valuable testimony to a wandering generation, marked by sexual repression, emerging totalitarianism, and the spiritual disenchantment of the West. In this way, the author constructs a self-portrait through others, based on different settings: Berlin, a Greek island, London, and California, from 1928 to 1940.

In each location, a character acts as a catalyst for the narrator's own process of self-discovery. Christopher Isherwood, also known as Christopher Isherwood, distances himself from himself to observe himself as a character. As the character Paul remarks at one point, Isherwood is "a tourist, through and through," a perpetual visitor to the lives of others, unable to fully ground himself in any existence other than his own, but also unable to fully ground himself in his own.

The Berlin of decadent cabarets and sexual freedom, with a National Socialist presence, where young Christopher meets Mr. Lancaster, whose rigid morality allows the narrator to discover his own desire; Greece, where Ambrose—a character based on the homosexual archaeologist Francis Turville-Petre—embodies the tragedy of internal exile after escaping British repression; the London of Waldemar, an opportunist who wants to use a young English woman to escape Nazi Germany; and the California where the gigolo Paul (based on the beautiful and eccentric Denham Fouts) shares a spiritual discovery with Isherwood...

These four moments function almost as stations of an emotional via crucis in which the characters always seem to be visiting, an expression that, although it might seem banal, summarizes the essence of the book: the inability to fully commit to others and to oneself, being a tourist in one's own life, plus the need to emotionally detach oneself as a survival strategy in a world that punishes free desire, as if Isherwood were suggesting that we are all, in a way, tourists in our own biography.

Christopher Isherwood Friends of Passage Acantilado Translation by María Belmonte 384 pages 26 euros