18. sally bowles is transsexual
on “parlour socialism” and the formation of gay identity in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye To Berlin
“But the real heart of Berlin is a small damp black wood - the Tiergarten.” (p. 227) [1]
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I will admit, I already went into Goodbye to Berlin expecting transvestites. Knowing that visiting Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was a significant moment in Isherwood’s first trip to Berlin, and indeed, his life and gay identity as such, I arrived ready for at least some slight trickle of trans historical debris. Perhaps my impulse towards biographical or auto-fictional readings of literature is misguided, but it’s hard to shake. Particularly when the author opens so self-consciously as to say;
Because I have given my own name to the ‘I’ of this narrative, readers are certainly not entitled to assume that its pages are purely autobiographical [...] ‘Christopher Isherwood’ is a convenient ventriloquist’s dummy, nothing more.
And all of this is combined with the fact that Isherwood’s eventual memoir, Christopher and His Kind (which I have not read) was so self-consciously positioned in forms of midcentury gay identity formation - apparently even “gay liberation” according to Isherwood (don’t laugh!) - that the question of how that process of formation happened, and the position of trans people within this process, through his various attempts to write about his life was already intriguing to me.
Taken at first glance, the evidence is disappointing. The best you get in explicit #TransRepresentation is one scene in the final chapter, ‘A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-1933)’, in which Christopher and his friend Fritz visit The Salomé, which
turned out to be very expensive and even more depressing than I had imagined. A few stage lesbians and some young men with plucked eyebrows lounged at the bar, uttering occasional raucous guffaws or treble hoots - supposed, apparently, to represent the laughter of the damned.
Trans women appear here (they are later referred to as ‘men dressed as women’) as inauthentic Berliners, mostly there to scandalise the sightseers, and doing a bad job at it. Even then Isherwood can’t help but hold the threat of Nazi violence over them as if it’s a joke (“the laughter of the damned”). Coincidentally, this is also the only occasion on which Isherwood mentions lesbians or lesbianism.
However, I suspect some traces of transsexuality may have found their way into the text even in spite of the dismissive attitude of Christopher and his kind. For one thing, within the first few pages, Isherwood invokes sexualised medicine;
Hearing that I was once a medical student, she [Frl. Schroeder, the landlady] confides to me that she is very unhappy because of the size of her bosom. She suffers from palpitations and is sure that these must be caused by the strain on her heart. She wonders if she should have an operation.
Women’s relationships to medical institutions remain a theme throughout the text, from here to Frau. Nowak’s stay at a sanatorium, seemingly incarcerated against her will.[2] But of course, the centrepiece of this conversation has to be Sally Bowles’ abortion, presented by some (perhaps under the influence of the musical, Cabaret) as the climax of the novel.
It is therefore of interest here that the character Sally Bowles was based on a real person, the cabaret singer and later Communist Party of Great Britain organiser, Jean Ross. It is of even more interest that Ross hated both Goodbye to Berlin and Cabaret. For one thing, Isherwood’s fiction risked making knowledge of her abortion public - it was still illegal in the u.k. in 1939, when the book was published, and she was afraid she might be prosecuted. More significantly, however, she resented that Isherwood had depicted her as frivolous, fixated on sex, and indifferent to politics - even an antisemite. This, she argued, was projection on Isherwood’s part, since at the time, he and his friends “fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the storm troopers looked in their uniforms.”[3] If this is the case, this would not be the first time a gay male writer has deployed a female character as a proxy for their own sexuality; you could name examples from Oscar Wilde to Tennessee Williams and beyond. But personally at least, I find most of these examples relatively benign. At minimum, misogyny is not the weirdest thing happening in the text. But Jean Ross brings home the real world consequences of these kind of tactical literary inversion, and also the consequences for the politics of those inverts. Ross’ communism is not only transferred to Christopher, but it is diluted in the transference to a mere “parlour socialism” (p.79), the earnestness of the committed revolutionary organiser receding in Isherwood’s ironic distance.
My use of the word ‘inversion’ here is partially just the bad habit of an ex-queer studies grad (Lord have mercy on me, a sinner). It does seem that gay writers’ cross-gendered identifications are the product of a cultural/medical discourse of ‘inversion’, more or less specific depending on the context. But in the case of Isherwood, hanging around Hirschfeld’s institute and the cabarets of Kurfürstendamm, the trope clearly has some relatively concrete referents, not only in an idea of transgendered identification, but in its practices - including medical transition. This context also casts a new light on this passage from a visit to Sally before her abortion;
‘The doctor isn’t a Jew, I hope?’ Frl. Mayer asked me sternly. ‘Don’t you let one of those filthy Jews touch her. They always try to get a job of that kind, the beasts!’ (p. 64)
In The Hirschfeld Archives, Heike Bauer documents how Nazi propagandists seemingly found themselves unable to name Hirchfeld as a homosexual, whether out of personal disgust or fear of impropriety in speaking of it publicly. Therefore, Bauer argues, the identification of Hirschfeld as Jewish became a cipher for the wider networks between racial and sexual degeneracy that provoked their violent opposition to his work. This is, of course, not unusual for Nazi ideology, where Jewishness becomes a signifier of universal evil, but it does perhaps also suggest the spectre of transsexuality hanging over Sally’s illicit operation. And after all, as Christopher notes at his first attendance of Sally’s cabaret act, “She had a surprisingly deep husky voice.” (p. 31)
Many of these points are not that unusual really. Contemporary ‘gay’ identity depends on an abjection of transsexuality so as to give itself coherence to heterosexuality. Jay Prosser could tell you that much. And anyone from Marx or Lenin to any random twitter account could tell you that so many “socialists” need Communists for their veneer of radicalism whilst dismissing or even jeopardising those same Communists in the face of wider pressures. Yet it is rare to see these critiques cohere in the same figures. To be clear, I am not suggesting that Jean Ross was not in fact a cisgender woman, or even that she was necessarily good or worth reclaiming. (At least some of Ross’ resentment was fueled by Isherwood’s suggestion that she was a sex worker; she was not immune to the distancing gestures through which Isherwood so successful exploited her.) I am arguing that in the same move by which Isherwood can displace Ross’ politics onto himself and his sexuality onto her, the traces of trans social life that inevitably surrounded the production of his text begin to cohere in the character, Sally Bowles, by which he accomplishes those displacements.
If this was just some accident of writing technique, it would be of mere scholarly interest. If, however, the textual relations suggest something about the organisation of social life, between Hirschfeld’s clinic, the communities that interacted with it, and the class politics of Weimar Communism, then there may be some use in attempting to read between the lines of Isherwood’s Berlin vignettes. Even the worst opportunist might end up a useful theoretical resource, even if in spite of all their best efforts. In his crystallisation of transsexuality, sex work, and revolutionary antagonism into a single figure, amidst the wider setting of lumpen/proletarian Berlin, Isherwood may have accidentally betrayed a glimpse of a real movement in Weimar that might have abolished the present state of things; by attempting to mock and dismiss her, he betrays the threat she poses. If Christopher can only see the text’s few openly trans women as inauthentic, this too is how Sally makes him feel; “Wasn’t I a bit of a sham anyway - though not for her ridiculous reasons - with my arty talk to lady pupils and my newly acquired parlour-socialism?” (p. 79)
As Christopher and Fritz leave The Salomé, they bump into a group of young, drunk, American men.
‘Say,’ he asked Fritz, ‘what’s on here?’
‘Men dressed as women,’ Fritz grinned.
The little American simply couldn’t believe it. ‘Men dressed as women? As women, hey? Do you mean they’re queer?’
‘Eventually we’re all queer,’ drawled Fritz solemnly, in lugubrious tones.
[...]
‘You queer, too, hey?’ demanded the little American, turning suddenly on me.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘very queer indeed.’ (p. 234)
When, a few pages later, Christopher is asked by a young Communist Party activist if he is a Communist, he replies ‘no’. (p. 237) Very queer indeed.
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[1] Tiergarten was the site of Hirschfeld’s Institut.
[2] Christopher and Frau Nowak’s son, Otto, seem almost about to have sex with other women at the sanatorium before their visit is cut short. One could speculate from where Isherwood might have drawn the inspiration for such a scene, but I will only observe that there would be significant crossover between psychiatric incarceration, sex work, and the women visiting Hirschfeld’s clinic during Christopher’s stay in Berlin.
[3] Apparently, Peter Parker’s biography of Isherwood backs up Ross’ claims, revealing that his antisemitism was so bad, in fact, that after the war, the Berlin stories had to be significantly edited to prevent public embarrassment for either Isherwood or the publishers or both.
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My information on Jean Ross is entirely from wikipedia, so my apologies for any inaccuracies. Apparently she was later a film critic for the Daily Worker, and her writing on cinema is supposed to be very good. I have yet to check it out.
My argument is influenced by Glyn Salton-Cox’s reading of Isherwood in Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love, however, I suspect Salton-Cox finds Isherwood more radical than I do. That said, his reading dwells more on the implications of Isherwood’s orientalism in ways that would be productive to expand upon, particularly in the present climate.
All page references above are from the Vintage Classics edition from 1998.