Christopher Isherwood, Inside Out, Katherine Bucknell, c. 2024.
The author is the editor of four volumes of diaries by Christopher Isherwood; The Animals, a volume of letters between Isherwood and his longtime partner, Don Bachardy; and W.H. Auden's Juvenilia: Poems, 1922 -1928. She is the director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation as well as a founder of the W. H. Auden Society and co-editor of Auden Studies. Bucknell is also the author of four novels: Canarino, Leninsky Prospekt, What You Will, and +J. She lives in London.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; www.fsgbooks.com
Index: 37 pages.
Prologue
Christopher Isherwood escaped Nazi Germany, 1939.
Carries with him 550 sets of printed pages for Goodby to Berlin, the collectio of fictionalized diary passages and stories based on isherwood's real-life experiences in Berlin frm 1929 to 1939 when Hitler was rising to power.
Leonard and Virginia Woolf were about to publish the book; Hogard Press.
Reviewed by Edmund Wilson.
Goodbye to Berlin -----> Caberet and Liza Minnelli stardom as Sally Bowles.
Next novel: The World in the Evening (1954).
Next novel, Down There on a Visit (1962).
California and mysticism.
Isherwood worked on the boundary of fiction and nonfiction.
WH Auden.
"In this biography, I highlight connections between Isherwood's real-life experiences and his writing. Last paragraph page 5.
Author: female, American living in London.
"The liberal atmosphere of Weimar bloomed again in southern California as the New Age experiemtns of the 1940s -- to which so many European refugees were party -- gave way to the counterculture of the 1960s and the open rebellion of civil rights movements for all minority groups.
"I have spent several decades editing Isherwood's diaries and studying his writing. The books he left unpublished and unwritten at his death -- in particular the million-plus words of his American diaries -- tip the scale toward his adopted country. I focus new attention on his California life..."
His California circle: Isherwood, Auden, Stephen Spender, Edward Upward and a wider circle including Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice changed English literature so boldly and completely in the 1930s that they became identified as a movement, even though some of them hardly knew each other and they were seldom all together in the same place. .... close friendships with Aldous Huxley, Lincoln Kirstein, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Tony Richardson,and David Hockney.
His most important partner: Don Bachardy.
I am lucky to have had unlimited access to Bachardy, who arguably knew Isherwood better than anyone else.
The Bloomsbury Group, particular his immediate forebears E.M. Forster and virginia Woolf. His engagement with French and Russian writers was more clandestine but no less important.
At Cambridge with Upward ...
... his lyrical masterpiece about a day int he life of a homosexual, expatriate professor living in southern California, A Single Man (1964) ...
This book: the gay world that lay hidden in plain sight through the first three-quarters of the twentieth century can hardly be imagined in today's Western culture -- the difficulty, the danger, the pain, the excitement, the fun, the complexity and nuance of this secret community before liberation, before AIDS, before gay marriage.
Chapter 1
Son of the British Army Heir to the Estate (1904 - 1915)
Wyberslegh Hall, high Lane, Cheshire, 1904
Limerick, Ireland, 1912
Boarding School, Hindhead, 1914
Chapter 2
Sacred Orphan (1915 - 1923)
Public School, Repton, 1919
Chapter 3
Failed History Scholar, Published Novelist (1923 - 1929)
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 1923
London, 1925
Chapter 4
Berlin, Sex, Politics, and Fame (1929 - 1939)
Berlin, 1929
Greece, 1933
London, 1933
Wandering, 1934
London, 1937
China, 1938
Manhattan, 1938
London, 1938
Chapter 5
Hollywood Screenwriter and Hindu Monk (1939 - 1945)
Los Angeles, 1939
Haverford, 141
Los Angeles: Laguna Beach: Trabuco, 1942
Brahmananda Cottage, Hollywood, 1943
Chapter 6
American Apostate (1945 - 1953)
Santa Monica Canyon, 1945
England, 1947
Manhattan, 1947
South America, 1947- 1948
Paris, 1948
England, 1948
333 East Rustic Road, Santa Monica, 1948
Laguna, 1950
New York, 1951
Berlin, 1952
The Garden House, Brentwood, 1952
Chapter 7
Don Bachardy (1953 - 1961)
Homeless, 1953
Mesa Road, Santa Monica, 1954
Grand Tour, Europe, 1955- 1956
Sycamore Road, Santa Monica, 1956
The Far East and India, 1957
145 Adelaide Drive, Santa Monica, 1959
Chapter 8
Existential Isherwood: The Outsider (1961 - 1964)
Hampstead, London, 1961
Adelaide Drive, Santa Monica, 1963
Belur Math, Near Calcutta, 1963
Adelaide Drive, Santa Monica, 1964
Chapter 9
The Animals' Golden Age (1964 - 1986)
Tahiti And Australia, 1969
Chelsea, London, 1970
Notting Hill, London, 1973
Adelaide Drive, Santa Monica, 1973
London, 1976
Adelaide Drive, Santa Monica, 1976
Acknowledgments, p. 731 - 733
Notes, p. 735 - 812
Index, p. 813 - 850
Illustration Credits, p. 851 - 852.
Other links:
https://www.metmuseum.org/articles/animals-love-letters-christopher-isherwood-don-bachardy.
The Auden Group, also called Auden Generation and sometimes simply the Thirties poets, was a group of British and Irish writers active in the 1930s that included W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood and sometimes Edward Upward and Rex Warner.
Although many newspaper articles and a few books appeared about the "Auden Group", the existence of the group was essentially a journalistic myth, a convenient label for poets and novelists who were approximately the same age, who had been educated at Oxford and Cambridge, who had known each other at different times and had more or less left-wing views ranging from MacNeice's political scepticism to Upward's committed communism.
The "group" was never together in the same room: the four poets (Auden, Day-Lewis, MacNeice and Spender) were in the same room only once in the 1930s, for a BBC broadcast in 1938 of modern poets (also including Dylan Thomas and others who were not associated with the "Auden Group"). The event was so insignificant that Day-Lewis failed to mention it when he wrote in his autobiography, The Buried Day, that the four were first together in 1953.
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