Book description
'A slip of a wild boy: with quick silver eyes,' as Virginia Woolf saw
him in the 1930s, Christopher Isherwood journeyed and changed with his
century, until, by the 1980s, he was celebrated as the finest prose
writer in English and the Grand Old Man of Gay Liberation. In this
final volume of his diaries, capstone of a million-word masterwork, he
greets advancing age with poignant humour and an unquenchable appetite
for the new; aches, illnesses, and diminishing powers are clues to a
predicament still unfathomed. The mainstays of his mature contentment,
his Hindu guru, Swami Prabhavananda and his long term companion, Don
Bachardy, draw from him an unexpected high tide of joy and love.
Around his private religious and domestic routines orbit gifted
friends both anonymous and infamous. Bachardy's burgeoning career
pulled Isherwood into the 1970s art scene in Los Angeles, New York and
London, where we meet Rauschenberg, Ruscha, and Warhol (serving foetid
meat for lunch) as well as Hockney (adored) and Kitaj. Collaborating
with Bachardy on scripts for their prize-winning Frankenstein
and their Broadway fiasco, A Meeting by the River, extended
ties in Hollywood and the theatre world. John Huston, Merchant and
Ivory, John Travolta, John Voight, Elton John, David Bowie, Joan
Didion, Armistead Maupin each take a turn through Isherwood's densely
populated human comedy, sketched with both ruthlessness and
benevolence against the background of the Vietnam War, the Energy
Crisis, the Nixon, Carter and Reagan White Houses.
In his first book of this period, Kathleen and Frank,
Isherwood unearthed the family demons that haunted his fugitive youth.
When contemporaries began to die, he responded in Christopher and
His Kind and My Guru and His Disciple with startling
fresh truths about shared experiences. These are the most concrete and
the most mysterious of his diaries, candidly revealing the fear of
death that crowded in past Isherwood's fame, and showing how his
life-long immersion in the day-to-day lifted him, paradoxically,
toward transcendence.
Sharp and often very funny...marvellous and marveling -- Peter Parker
Spectator Meticulously and lovingly edited by Katherine Bucknell. at its
best his prose still seems fresh and in the moment Spectator
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
. Between 1929 and 1939 he lived mainly abroad, spending four years in
Berlin and writing the novels
Mr Norris Changes Trains
and
Goodbye to Berlin
on which the musical
Cabaret
was based. He moved to America in 1939, becoming a US citizen in 1946,
and wrote another five novels, including
Down There on a Visit
and
A Single Man
, a travel book about South America and a biography of the Indian mystic
Ramakrishna. In the late 1960s and '70s he turned to autobiographical
works:
Kathleen and Frank
,
Christopher and His Kind
,
My Guru and His Disciple
and
October
, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy.
