Diaries: Volume 1, 1939-1960 (Isherwood, Christopher Diaries) [Hardcover]

Christopher Isherwood (Author)

Book Description

Series: Isherwood, Christopher Diaries | Publication Date: December 19, 1996

At times pious, at times profane but always unashamedly honest, The Diaries of Christopher Isherwood provide an inside look at the life and times of one of the most celebrated writers of the century. Chronicling Isherwood's life from 1939, when he emigrated to the United States, until 1960, these entries cover some of the most turbulent years of his career and give readers unprecedented insight into the major turning points in his life. Here, Isherwood relates the spiritual crisis he went through as World War II began, his discipleship (along with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard) with the Hindu monk Swami Prabhavananda and his decision to become a pacifist. Here also are his accounts of his intense social life in Hollywood, his career as a screenwriter and his many sexual affairs. Readers will be particularly fascinated by his revealing anecdotes and gossip about the literary greats (such as W. H. Auden, Thomas Mann, E. M. Forster, and Tennessee Williams) and movie stars (such as Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Laurence Olivier) of the time.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Christopher Isherwood is noted for his novels and autobiographical writings, especially The Berlin Stories (the basis for the film, Cabaret) and Christopher and His Kind. But Isherwood put at least as much of his genius in his Diaries as he did in his writings intended for immediate publication. The first volume follows Isherwood as he emigrates from England to the United States where he became a Hollywood scriptwriter. This volume continues with his lifelong affair with Don Bachardy to his establishment as a major writer in the early 1960s. Isherwood's Diaries are beautifully written, gossipy, and indispensable for anyone who cares about writing, the creative process, and gay history.

From Publishers Weekly

Gossip, Isherwood noted in his diary after reading the Goncourt journals, can achieve "the epigrammatic significance of poetry. To keep such a diary is to render a real service to the future." He was then in the second year of his own diary, begun in January 1939 with his exit from England for a new life in America, his home until his death in 1986. He would draw on the diary for his novel A Single Man (1964), but the work for which he would be best remembered was done in the 1930s?the plays with Auden and the Berlin Stories, turned by John van Druten into I Am a Camera and musicalized further as Cabaret. The diaries show him only as an observer of these money-spinning stage metamorphoses. To many readers, the most important part of this literally weighty book will be the index. Although not in the canonized elite of the Auden-Priestley generation, Isherwood, through his connections on both sides of the Atlantic and his Hollywood scriptwriting years, encountered a vast number of people whose doings and misdoings make his diaries a mine of rumor, anecdotage and mere facts. Of lesser interest to some readers will be Isherwood's Vedanta discipleship with Southern California swamis, his desultory drug-taking experiments, his sexual adventures in the local gay community or his recuperation from hangovers. The diaries show him, however, to be on occasion a memorable observer of his contemporaries (one is "like Dorian Gray emerging from his tomb") and an unmemorable critic (Waiting for Godot is "Franco-Irish ugliness and stupidity"). Bucknell, who edited and introduced Auden's Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928 and founded the W.H. Auden Society, furnishes a glossary of capsule biographies and textual notes.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1104 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins (December 19, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061180009
• ISBN-13: 978-0061180002
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 2.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #984,764 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The truth is plain, June 25, 2000

By 

vernon hewitt - See all my reviews

This review is from: Diaries: Volume 1, 1939-1960 (Isherwood, Christopher Diaries) (Hardcover)

I found this book compelling for a number of reasons. Like at least two reviewers here, as an Isherwood fan, I found his accounts of the early years fascinating. More interesting perhaps, one of the reasons I found them fascinating was because they were often banal, tedious, (but were they ever malicious?) full of frality and the soft vanities of an aging man. Surrounded by vain and often shallow people, his struggle to find spirituality in his work and in his friends was admirable, even if at times it did shock. In the end it is the humility of some of these entries that struck me, the fear that the best was behind, that ahead lay only decline and darkness. Finally, the genre of the diary is a peculiar entity. I am not sure it can be read like a book. It requires to be read in small bits, and always with an eye to the odd disjuncture of privacy and the public domain. Isherwood would not have been ashamed by this work, he might well have seen it as a parody of St Augustine: please make me celebite, but not yet.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I thought this was a fascinating acount of Isherwood's life, April 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Diaries: Volume 1, 1939-1960 (Paperback)

This title should be read by all fans of Isherwoods' novels and stories for insight into the man's character and life-style during his middle years after he emigrated to the United States. I was particularly interested in his committment to Vedanta and how that developed during these years, as well as the gradual development of his relationship with the very young Don Bachardy about whom we have so little information otherwise. Bachardy was and is a very private person. Isherwood emerges as a complex man and, like most diaries, this book shows him with all his personality warts as well as the ups and downs of his daily life. He suffered acutely at various times from very human maladies; boredom, writers' block, lonliness and hypochondriacal concerns. I think this has to be remembered when reading someone's diaries or letters. It's like seeing a person undressed; you get to view the good, the bad and the ugly. There is surprisingly little of Isherwood's sexual views or life included here however; certainly not much that is explicit, and his occasional bitchy remarks about Hollywood personalities is refreshingly candid. I would compare these diaries to those of Evelyn Waugh although Isherwood was far less the curmudgeon that Waugh was and lacked Waugh's crusty mean spiritedness.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pleasant reading, January 26, 2008

By 

Ben Monaghan (Portland, ME USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Diaries: Volume 1, 1939-1960 (Paperback)

Not sure why some people reacted so strongly to this book. Yes, at times it reads like a secretary's account of some very dull meeting - but that is also its charm. There's an utter lack of pretense or self drama. Rather, it is a very meticulous accounting of the people Isherwood meets and his struggles to achieve a spiritual balance. This is like watching time pass while sitting on a curb where nothing much happens - only the view is of another's world and time. I enjoyed the gentleness of this man although his experiences and spiritual struggles are far from my own.