He Belonged

Much praise, much deserved, already has been spoken of Christopher Isherwood, who died Saturday at his home in Santa Monica at the age of 81. His elegant, innovative and unflinchingly honest prose made him one of this century’s most important English-speaking writers. As such, he belonged not only to his native Britain and his adopted America, but also to the whole world of letters.

He also belonged in a special way to this city, the place in which he spent nearly half his life and where he and his art always seemed so much at home.

Isherwood was one of a group of powerful and original European artists who settled here in the 1930s as refugees. They included novelists such as Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley and Isherwood, dramatist Bertold Brecht and the two giants of 20th-Century music, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. Their friends and relatives remain among us, but the artists themselves are gone. They have, however, left behind a connection to and an awareness of the international avant-garde that continues to enrich and inform Los Angeles art to this day.

Things other than art also helped make Isherwood a singular man. He was a homosexual, a pacifist and a serious convert to Vedanta--an ancient Eastern creed. The concerns that arose from these personal facts were central to his work, though they never gave rise to polemics or propaganda. Rather, they produced a practical and humane spirituality that was no less real because it had transcended dogma.

Choices of the sort that Christopher Isherwood made are unfashionable, even unpopular, in today’s America. Yet the life and work of the man who made them enriched us all.