A contemporary of W. H. Auden, and protégé and confidant
to E. M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood ran with the cream of
the literary crop. Somerset Maugham once remarked to Virginia Woolf:
"that young man holds the
future of the English novel in his hands." Isherwood is probably best
known
for his
Berlin Stories,
out of which Hollywood squeezed the musical
Cabaret. But he was also a serious novelist, whose work, as Auden
said, was to "solve the 'I' problem in narration." The editors of this
collection of essays, reminiscences, and interviews show how he solved
that
problem by developing what they call a "new form of documentary fiction,
one that mixes autobiographical recording and introspection."
Born in England at the beginning of the twentieth century, Isherwood
achieved early success when he published his first novel at the age of
24.
He lived in Berlin as the Nazis rose to power and later traveled with
Auden to the frontlines of the Sino-Japanese War as a "documentary man."
Months before the outbreak of World War II, he moved to New York with
Auden
and then continued on by himself to Los Angeles. He would remain in
California for the rest of his life and turned out some of his
strongest,
most imaginative work there. In Los Angeles he became
immersed in the community of European emigres and intimate with the
likes of Aldous and Maria Huxley, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Bertolt
Brecht, Thomas Mann, Igor and Vera Stravinsky, Charles Laughton, and
Tony
Richardson. His screenwriting jobs took him from studio to studio. It
was also in L.A. that he began his lifelong engagement with Vedantic
Hinduism, and where he met his lifetime companion, the artist Don
Bachardy.
Isherwood's life is captivating; he took the same risks in life as he
did in his fiction. (Imagine any of today's gay novelists being
entrusted to cover the genocide in Rwanda.) He
is not so much known for any great innovations in narrative structure as
for the skillful way he projected his life and his spiritual quest
onto his fiction. In doing so he made explicit the transience of the
self: Throughout this collection, writers like Edmund White, David
Bergman,
and Armistead Maupin refer to the famous passages in A Single Man
in which Isherwood compares the self to a rock pool. The Isherwood
Century is a
concise collection that should inspire new readers to pick up
Isherwood's
novels and those familiar with his work to get to know a bit more about
the
writer's extraordinary life.
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