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Christopher Isherwood (1904 - 1986)
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 Lost
Years : A Memoir, 1945-1951 by
Christopher Isherwood, Katherine Bucknell (Editor)
The English writer Christopher Isherwood settled
in California in 1939 and spent the war years working in Hollywood
film studios, teaching English to European refugees, and
converting to Hinduism. By the time the war ended, he realized he
was not cut out to be a monk. With his self-imposed wartime vigil
behind him, he careened into a life of frantic socializing,
increasing dissipation, anxiety, and, eventually, despair. For
nearly a half decade he all but ceased to write fiction and even
abandoned his lifelong habit of keeping a diary.
This is Isherwood's own account, reconstructed
from datebooks, letters, and memory nearly thirty years later, of
his experience during those missing years: his activities in Santa
Monica, and also in New York and London, just after the war. Begun
in 1971, in a postsixties atmosphere of liberation, Lost Years
includes explicit details of his romantic and sexual relationships
during the 1940s and unveils a hidden and sometimes shocking way
of life shared with friends and acquaintances--many of whom were
well-known artists, actors, and film-makers. Not until the 1951
Broadway success of I Am a Camera, adapted from his Berlin
stories, did Isherwood begin to reclaim control of his talents and
of his future.
Isherwood never prepared Lost years for
publication because he rapidly became caught up in writing the
book that established him as a hero of gay liberation, Christopher
and His Kind.
With unpolished directness, and with insight and
wit, Lost Years shows how Isherwood developed his private
recollections into the unique mixture of personal mythology and
social history that characterizes much of his best work. This
surprising and important memoir also highlights his determination
to track down even the most elusive and unappealing aspects of his
past in order to understand and honestly portray himself, both as
a writer and as a human being.
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Excerpt:
Anglo-American writer, born in Disley, Cheshire,
England, and educated at the University of Cambridge. His
experience as a tutor in Berlin from 1928 to 1933 provided the
background for two volumes of short stories, The Last of Mr.
Norris (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The two
collections describe the seedy lives of a group of Berliners and
expatriates who fail to foresee the dramatic impact the Nazis
eventually have on German society. The books were reissued
together in 1946 as The Berlin Stories and were later
adapted as a play, I Am a Camera (1951; film, 1955) and as
a musical, Cabaret (1966; film, 1972). In collaboration
with the poet W.
H. Auden, Isherwood wrote three experimental plays: The Dog
Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On
the Frontier (1938). Isherwood settled in the United States in
1939. Several of his subsequent novels—such as Prater Violet
(1945), Down There on a Visit (1962), and A Meeting by
the River (1967)—are concerned with the experience of
sensitive individuals in incongruous settings and circumstances.
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Excerpt:
Anglo-American novelist and playwright, best
known for his stories about Berlin in the early 1930s. Isherwood's
novels were based largely on his own life. Many of his famous
literary friends appeared in his books under different names,
including W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Virginia Woolf.
"I am a camera with its shuter open, quite
passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at
the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her
hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully
printed, fixed." (from Goodbye to Berlin, 1939)
Isherwood was born in Disley, Chesire, as the
son of an army officer, who was killed in World War I. The family
had lived in the neighboring village of Marple since the sixteenth
century, when, as successful farmers, they were able to buy 'The
Hall' - an Elizabethan mansion - standing in a big waterlogged
park. In his childhood Isherwood travelled around with his
father's regiment. In 1914 he was sent to St. Edmund's preparatory
school, where he made friends with the future poet, W.H. Auden. He
studied at Repton School and in 1925 at Corpus Christi Cambridge,
without taking a degree. After Cambridge he worked for a time as a
secretary to André Mangeot, a French violinist, and earned also
his living as a private tutor.
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From the Knitting
Circle
Excerpt:
In 1939 Christopher Isherwood emigrated to
California to be a scriptwriter for MGM, and in 1946 he took US
citizenship. In 1953 he started a relationship with the
18-year-old Don Bachardy who later became well known as a painter.
They lived together until Christopher Isherwood died at the age of
82...
This site has extensive resources.
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Excerpt:
August 26 is the birthday of noted author
Christopher Isherwood. Born in England in 1904, he came to the
U.S. in 1939 and lived in Santa Monica from then until his death
in 1986. Isherwood is probably best known for The Berlin
Stories, stories that fictionalize his life in pre-World War
II Berlin and that were adapted as the stage play I Am a Camera
and the popular musical Cabaret.
The Huntington Library made headlines in 1999
with the announcement of the acquisition of Christopher
Isherwood's complete archive, received from Don Bachardy. The
collection contains literary drafts, diaries and journals,
photographs, audio and videotapes, and letters from many authors,
including W. H. Auden, Truman Capote, E. M. Forster, Somerset
Maugham, Stephen Spender, Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams.
For fans of Isherwood, original materials from
the archive will be on display when The Huntington presents a
major exhibition on Isherwood's life and works in 2004, to
commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth. In
addition, leading up to the exhibition, there will be lectures and
symposia discussing this influential author.
The collection will be available for scholarly
research once it has been processed and catalogued. Qualified
scholars with a specific research project involving this archive
may contact the Curator of the collection, Sara S. Hodson at shodson@huntington.org
for further information.
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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