Book description
This second volume of Christopher Isherwood's remarkable diaries
opens on his fifty-sixth birthday as the fifties give way to the
decade of social and sexual revolution. Isherwood takes the reader
from the bohemian sunshine of Southern California to a London finally
swinging free of post-war gloom, to the racy cosmopolitanism of New
York, and the raw Australian outback. He charts his ongoing quest for
spiritual certainty under the guidance of his Hindu guru, and reveals
in reckless detail the emotional drama of his love for the American
painter Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior and struggling to
establish his own artistic identity.
The diaries are crammed with wicked gossip and probing psychological
insights about the cultural icons of the time - Francis Bacon, Richard
Burton, Leslie Caron, Marianne Faithfull, David Hockney, Mick Jagger,
Hope Lange, W. Somerset Maugham, John Osborne, Vanessa Redgrave, Tony
Richardson, David O. Selznick, Igor Stravinsky, Gore Vidal, and many
others. They are most revealing about Isherwood himself - his fiction
(including A Single Man and Down There on a Visit), his
film writing, his college teaching, and his affairs of the heart. He
moves easily from Beckett to Brando, from arthritis to aggression,
from Tennessee Williams to foot powder, from the opening of
Cabaret on Broadway (which he skipped) to a close analysis of Gide.
In the background run references to the political and historical
events of the period: the anxieties of the Cold War, Yuri Gagarin's
space flight, De Gaulle and Algeria, the eruption of violence in
America's inner cities, the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love, the moon
landing, and the raising and lowering of hemlines. Isherwood is well
known for his prophetic portraits of a morally bankrupt Europe on the
eve of World War II; in this unparalleled chronicle, The
Sixties, he turns his fearless eye on the decade which more than
any other has shaped the way we live now.
Five stars: ...absolutely riveting Telegraph Christopher Isherwood
continues to perform open-heart surgery on himself, without
anaesthestic, and with one beady eye on the audience...a rare treat --
Ian Samson Guardian 20101122 Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one
of the most celebrated writers of his generation. He left Cambridge
without graduating, briefly studied medicine and then turned to writing
his first novels,
All the Conspirators
and
The Memorial
. He spent four years in Berlin writing
Mr Norris Changes Trains
and
Goodbye to Berlin
on which the musical
Cabaret
was based, and then in 1939 he moved to America. He became a US citizen
in 1946, where he wrote another five novels including
A Single Man
, a travel book and a biography of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. In the
1960s and '70s he turned to autobiographical works:
Kathleen and Frank
,
Christopher and His Kind
and
October
, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy.
