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The Historical Novel at History’s End

Thomas S. Davis

in The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life

Chapter 2: This chapter explores late modernists who used the historical novel to show how world systemic transformation migrates into the daily lives of both ordinary and eccentric characters.

Berlin

Andrew Thacker

in Modernism, Space and the City: Outsiders and Affect in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and London

This chapter analyses how modernism in Berlin vacillates between utopian and dystopian modes and moods from the end of the nineteenth century to the conclusion of the Weimar years in 1933. It argues ... More

This chapter analyses how modernism in Berlin vacillates between utopian and dystopian modes and moods from the end of the nineteenth century to the conclusion of the Weimar years in 1933. It argues that the culture of modernism in the city is marked by the twin features of spaciousness and restlessness. It analyses the rise of Expressionism as a dominant form in the city, linking its particular mood to the technological modernity embraced by Berlin in the early twentieth century. It illustrates these arguments by considering how Expressionist artists (e.g. Ludwig Meidner) represented a particular space in the city (Potsdamer Platz), before discussing work by Walter Ruttmann, Alfred Döblin, the expatriate Russian community (e.g. Viktor Shklovsky), and the American magazine, Broom. It then discusses cafés and queer spaces in work by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. It concludes by analysing the geographical emotions prompted by Berlin in two important memoirs by English visitors to the city: Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and Bryher’s The Heart to Artemis.Less

Down Where on a Visit?: Isherwood’s Mythology of Self

Rebecca Gordon Stewart

in The American Isherwood

This chapter examines how Christopher Isherwood manipulates his creation of a “mythology of self” in the 1962 novel Down There on a Visit. In the 1950s, as Isherwood continued to struggle with ... More

This chapter examines how Christopher Isherwood manipulates his creation of a “mythology of self” in the 1962 novel Down There on a Visit. In the 1950s, as Isherwood continued to struggle with elements of The World in the Evening, he notes in his “Writing Notebook” that he has a new idea for a story, one that would turn out to be Down There on a Visit. An analysis of Isherwood’s unpublished notes alongside the final novel reveals that many of the themes that formed his original plan of rewriting Dante’s journey through Hell and Purgatory as narrated in The Divine Comedy in fact have remained at the forefront of Down There on a Visit. This chapter considers Down There on a Visit’s connection to both The Divine Comedy and Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel Là-bas in terms of style and themes.Less

Latemodernism’s Geopolitical Imagination: Everyday Life in the Global Hot Zones

Thomas S. Davis

in The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life

This chapter turns to travel narratives from global hot zones where the examination of everyday life reveals the emergence of a new form of warfare shifting the balance of power in Europe and Asia.

Sally Bowles and Berlin

Keith Garebian

in The Making of Cabaret

This chapter explains how Christopher Isherwood came to write his Berlin stories, the source of his Sally Bowles novella that became the basis for John van Druten's play I Am a Camera (1951) and then ... More

This chapter explains how Christopher Isherwood came to write his Berlin stories, the source of his Sally Bowles novella that became the basis for John van Druten's play I Am a Camera (1951) and then Joe Masteroff's libretto for the musical. The chapter supplies a detailed reading of the theme of reality and unreality that is central to Sally Bowles's story; it also draws comparisons and contrasts between the fictional Sally Bowles and her real‐life counterpart, Jean Ross. Moreover, it analyzes the flaws‐mainly distortions in characterization and politics‐in van Druten's play and the 1956 British film adaptation of it, and it shows how Harold Prince became interested in creating the musical.Less

Travellers to War

Douglas Kerr

in Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing

This chapter discusses a juxtaposition of the literary record of two journeys to observe war in Asia. The first journey was made by Auden and Christopher Isherwood, who travelled to report on the ... More

This chapter discusses a juxtaposition of the literary record of two journeys to observe war in Asia. The first journey was made by Auden and Christopher Isherwood, who travelled to report on the Sino-Japanese war in 1938. The second journey was that of James Fenton in Indochina during the early 1970s. The travellers to war considered in this chapter had also been in search of a kind of language, a way of speaking in friendship with others, which would have to be also a way of listening.Less

A Writer at Work: The Isherwood Archive

Sara S. Hodson

in The American Isherwood

This chapter examines Christopher Isherwood’s collection of personal papers, which reveals the intangible, subtle aspects of his way of thinking or acting that cannot be discerned through his or her ... More

This chapter examines Christopher Isherwood’s collection of personal papers, which reveals the intangible, subtle aspects of his way of thinking or acting that cannot be discerned through his or her publications or public persona. Acquired in 1999 by the Huntington Library from his life partner Don Bachardy, with later additions from various sources, the Isherwood archive consists of 4,000 items that offer a glimpse into the writer’s life and work, including such topics as gay rights, Vedanta, pacifism, Hollywood, and the film industry. This chapter discusses some of the unique and rare elements of the Isherwood papers and their significance for research, touching on particular sections and items in the archive and what they reveal about Isherwood, his fellow writers, and the matters that meant most to him. It also looks at Isherwood as a writer, and the way his papers reveal his writing craft, with particular emphasis on the place of his 1954 novel The World in the Evening in his canon.Less

The Celebrity Effect: Isherwood, Hollywood, and the Performance of Self

Lisa Colletta

in The American Isherwood

This chapter examines how Christopher Isherwood became fascinated with celebrity culture in Hollywood in the 1940s and established a circle of friends that is a veritable who’s who of Classic ... More

This chapter examines how Christopher Isherwood became fascinated with celebrity culture in Hollywood in the 1940s and established a circle of friends that is a veritable who’s who of Classic Hollywood. Although Isherwood felt the need to distance himself from his early writing, his fame rested for many years on Goodbye to Berlin, those linked short pieces of semiautobiographical fiction based on his life in Berlin in the early 1930s. By the time Goodbye to Berlin was published in 1939, Isherwood was already making his way toward Southern California, to work in the film industry and to record his experiences at the center of a remarkable cultural shift. Isherwood’s fiction in the late 1940s and early 1950s, especially Prater Violet and The World in the Evening, addressed the lure of celebrity as well as the darker side of Hollywood.Less

Christopher Isherwood, Gay Liberation, and the Question of Style

Jaime Harker

in Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America

This chapter discusses changes in the literature of gay liberation that took place during the 1970s, specifically for Christopher Isherwood. Gay liberation in the 1970s centered on the guiding ... More

This chapter discusses changes in the literature of gay liberation that took place during the 1970s, specifically for Christopher Isherwood. Gay liberation in the 1970s centered on the guiding principle of being true to oneself. Through that guiding principle, Christopher Isherwood became a gay cultural icon with his first-ever memoir Christopher and His Kind. In spite of Isherwood’s success, there are still just a few queer literary scholars who prefer to study queer-inspired novels on the topic of gay liberation.Less

Camera Consciousness

Lara Feigel

in Literature, Cinema and Politics 1930-1945: Reading Between the Frames

This chapter explores the 1930s experiments with camera consciousness. Christopher Isherwood has Edward Upward's tutor's capacity to magnify and distort objects. The hyperreality of 1930s Germany is ... More

This chapter explores the 1930s experiments with camera consciousness. Christopher Isherwood has Edward Upward's tutor's capacity to magnify and distort objects. The hyperreality of 1930s Germany is made explicit by Stephen Spender in his 1951 autobiography. In Spender's account, the party is not merely unreal because it is filmed. Louis MacNeice's former Birmingham student Walter Allen shared the poet's fear that the ghostly, nightmarish aspects of cinema were rendering experience unreal. Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square is an account of life in the seedier parts of London and Brighton in the lead-up to war. Joris Ivens depicted the civilians' and soldiers' struggle to survive in The Spanish Earth. Robert Capa's controversial Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death or The Falling Soldier typify the hyperreal aspect of the Spanish Civil War. Like Albert Speer's chimeric buildings, which reconstitute architecture as light, the political itself has been redefined in terms of cinema.Less

Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward

Benjamin Kohlmann

in The American Isherwood

This chapter focuses on Christopher Isherwood’s friendship with fellow writer Edward Upward. According to the most familiar account of how Isherwood and Upward became friends, the two men shared a ... More

This chapter focuses on Christopher Isherwood’s friendship with fellow writer Edward Upward. According to the most familiar account of how Isherwood and Upward became friends, the two men shared a period of intense artistic creativity in the early and mid-1920s during which they collaborated on the stories about Mortmere (also known as “the Other Town”), a grotesque fantasy world they had invented during their school days at Repton. Isherwood went up to Cambridge in 1923, one year after Upward, and the frequently violent and sadistic stories about Mortmere came to be modeled increasingly on the academic cosmos of the university town and its caste of rich “Poshocrats.” This chapter reproduces the text of two letters that Upward sent to Isherwood in the summer of 1939 in response to the latter’s announcement of his conversion to pacifism and Vedanta, two systems of belief whose tenets were fundamentally at odds with Upward’s own ideological convictions.Less

Huxley and Isherwood: The California Years

Peter Edgerly Firchow

in The American Isherwood

This chapter focuses on Christopher Isherwood’s collaboration with Aldous Huxley on a number of literary projects in California during the 1950s and early 1960s. It considers how the Huxley–Isherwood ... More

This chapter focuses on Christopher Isherwood’s collaboration with Aldous Huxley on a number of literary projects in California during the 1950s and early 1960s. It considers how the Huxley–Isherwood friendship allowed the two writers to explore their common interests in Eastern religion, film writing, and the Southern California landscape. Working on scripts for plays and films was something Isherwood was good at and already had a fair amount of experience doing, not only for a lot less money a few years earlier with Berthold Viertel in London, but even more notably with his close friend W. H. Auden. He undertook several collaborated scripts with Huxley, including Jacob’s Hands—the only one ever to be published. Unfortunately, their collaborations did not lead to financial or artistic success.Less

A Single Man and the American Maurice

Lois Cucullu

in The American Isherwood

This chapter relates Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man to E. M. Forster’s 1913 homosexual fiction Maurice. In the documentary film Chris & Don: A Love Story (2007), home movies show a ... More

This chapter relates Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man to E. M. Forster’s 1913 homosexual fiction Maurice. In the documentary film Chris & Don: A Love Story (2007), home movies show a young-looking Isherwood and a boyish Don Bachardy in swimsuits at Will Rogers State Beach in the early 1950s. That footage operates in the film as the locus of the pair’s trysting. Out of their surfside camaraderie on a sunny beach grew a friendship that turned amorous and lasted until Isherwood’s death in 1986. In a 1915 critique, Lytton Strachey expressed doubt about whether the relationship between the two lovers in Forster’s novel, Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder, would last half a year, much less a lifetime. This chapter argues that such a relationship could and did last.Less

“Give Me Devotion … Even Against My Will”: Christopher Isherwood and India

Niladri R Chatterjee

in The American Isherwood

This chapter explores Christopher Isherwood’s prejudice against India. Isherwood’s deep-seated prejudice toward India dates from at least the 1930s. In his short story “The Landauers,” published in ... More

This chapter explores Christopher Isherwood’s prejudice against India. Isherwood’s deep-seated prejudice toward India dates from at least the 1930s. In his short story “The Landauers,” published in the spring of 1938 in New Writing, Isherwood’s racism is evident in the character of Bernhard Landauer. His Indophobia persisted all his life. The question arises as to why Isherwood was so prejudiced against Indians. In order to attempt an answer to that question, it may be helpful to look at the life and interests of the person whom he admittedly most hated while he was growing up: his mother Kathleen Isherwood. But once Swami Prabhavananda, his Vedanta guru, entered his life, Isherwood recognized that his negative feelings toward India were a problem and he engaged with it as best he could.Less

Isherwood and Huxley: The Novel as Mystic Fable

Robert L. Caserio

in The American Isherwood

This chapter examines the role played by the novel in Christopher Isherwood’s attitudes toward mysticism as well as his writing’s relation to Aldous Huxley. To this end, it considers the place of ... More

This chapter examines the role played by the novel in Christopher Isherwood’s attitudes toward mysticism as well as his writing’s relation to Aldous Huxley. To this end, it considers the place of religion in Anglo-American modernism, with particular emphasis on G. R. S. Mead’s modernist journal The Quest, one of the transnational conduits whereby Eastern religions, including Vedanta, entered the background that nurtured Isherwood. Isherwood’s statements about his fiction’s relation to religion are not the whole story of the ties that his novels—and the novelistic genre itself—might have to mystical experience. This chapter also looks at Huxley’s hostility to the novel form and Isherwood’s 1980 book My Guru and His Disciple. Finally, it discusses the novelistic form’s relation to contemplation and to timelessness by offering a reading of Isherwood’s Down There on a Visit.Less

“Fagtrash”: Pulp Paperbacksand Cold War Queer Readers

Jaime Harker

in Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America

This chapter examines how Christopher Isherwood’s efforts to establish his authorial identity were affected by the Cold War “paperback revolution” and his homosexual readers. The paperback revolution ... More

This chapter examines how Christopher Isherwood’s efforts to establish his authorial identity were affected by the Cold War “paperback revolution” and his homosexual readers. The paperback revolution was an innovation of literary marketing; paperback book publishers used magazine distributors to disseminate their books to drugstores and newsstands instead of bookstores. Moreover, the revolution introduced the recurring themes of sex, illegality, and taboo sex in paperback genres such as gangster, detective, western, romance, and science fiction. These themes in addition to the anxieties brought by social labelling eventually had his “queer” readers engrossed in his succeeding books.Less

Spiritual Searching in Isherwood’s Artistic Production

Mario Faraone

in The American Isherwood

This chapter focuses on Christopher Isherwood’s search for the spiritual through his American writings. In his “Afterword” to his 1963 pamphlet An Approach to Vedanta, Isherwood describes the long ... More

This chapter focuses on Christopher Isherwood’s search for the spiritual through his American writings. In his “Afterword” to his 1963 pamphlet An Approach to Vedanta, Isherwood describes the long road that brought him to Vedanta and explains that the contact with Swami Prabhavananda was above all a relationship through which he looked for a “still center” in life and art. Religious discourse plays an important role in Isherwood’s writings. Initially through Vedantic daily religious chores and rituals, and then thanks to Vedantic thought, Isherwood changes his way of reading the world and himself, which had been the main themes of his narrative. He approached Vedanta through Gerald Heard’s suggestion of meditation and yoga. Meeting Swami Prabhavananda in August 1939 was the beginning of the search of psychological and spiritual balance he subsequently appears to have found.Less

Not Satisfied with the Ending: Connecting The World in the Evening to Maurice

Joshua Adair

in The American Isherwood

This chapter examines E. M. Forster’s posthumously published gay fiction Maurice in the context of Christopher Isherwood’s 1954 novel The World in the Evening, with particular emphasis on ... More

This chapter examines E. M. Forster’s posthumously published gay fiction Maurice in the context of Christopher Isherwood’s 1954 novel The World in the Evening, with particular emphasis on commonalities between the two works. Few books have been so poorly received by friends and critics alike as The World in the Evening. Remarkable for its stylistic and thematic departures from his earlier works, the work was almost unanimously dismissed as a failure and continues to be marginalized by critics and readers. This chapter reconceptualizes the novel to appreciate its value in terms of innovation and for its significant connection to Maurice. Drawing upon Fredric Jameson’s ideas, particularly his assertion that we perpetually read through the lens of prior texts and experiences, it argues that The World in the Evening must be read as a unique narrative exploring the possibility of forming spaces within society amenable to gay men. Based on this approach, The World in the Evening can be situated as a “socially symbolic act”.Less