Word: isherwood
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...faint discomfort to the author, a delight to the doting fan, and a revealing glimpse into the past. Two such novels have now been issued in the U.S., one by Nancy Mitford, the British author (Love in a Cold Climate) who hates Americans, and the other by Christopher Isherwood, the British author (Prater Violet) who became one. The first is worth noting because of the surprisingly naive notions of its adult author, the second because it marks the jumping-off point in a talented young writer's abrupt leap to adulthood...
Foil for the Lonely. Christopher Isherwood, who owns the most mellifluous name since Hiawatha, started All the Conspirators (New Directions; 255 pp.; $3) in 1926, when he was 21. It is a much better than fair first novel, although not a very robust one. It is really a school piece, full of ill-chewed borrowings from Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The hero is a sticky, artistic young man-a kind of underdone Dedalus-who rebels weakly against the smothering care of his mother. He gets some support from his friend, a medical student with the sour outlook but none...
...fondness for melodrama of an author still partly adolescent shows in All the Conspirators. Eleven years later, still moodily youthful but by then a seasoned novelist, Isherwood invented a foil for his loneliness-and created his best character-in the abundantly friendly Sally Bowles of Goodbye to Berlin...
Some nights, everything just goes right. I Am a Camera is very funny, but it is more than a ramshackle frame on which gag lines are hung. Playwright John Van Druten found some real people in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, and around them he built a real play. He does not go very deeply into the question he raises of hedonism versus social involvement, but it is nice to have an issue to fill the brief spaces between laughs...
Fallen Heart. The Oscar Levant Show repels some people and delights most. Drawing on his motley acquaintance, Levant has corralled both name stars and intellectuals as his guests. Eddie Cantor was followed by Christopher Isherwood, Adolphe Menjou by Aldous Huxley, Red Skelton by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. His subjects run the gamut from highly intellectual topics to brutal digs. Isherwood told him: "You are like a Dostoevsky character-completely unmasked at all times...