Christopher Isherwood

This chapter takes as its starting point the experiences that led Raymond Williams to compile the influential Keywords (1976), tracing the impact of the Great War on the development of language – on the capacity of simple words and phrases to absorb meanings according to changes in immediate values and in types of valuation – through the use and abuse of game-play vocabulary in the formative writings of Edward Upward and Cambridge contemporary Christopher Isherwood. Examining the surviving stories, poems and dialogues that derived from the pair’s Mortmere Fantasy, together with later more overtly autobiographical works, the chapter draws on Judith Butler’s work on the performative to reposition these authors as maturing conscious agents actively producing their own identities through calculated acts of linguistic transgression. In rehearsing creatively the values that will shape their adult lives, these writers do not – as  traditional criticism would suggest – use certain words in certain ways because of who they are, they are who they are because of the ways in which they use certain words. The Mortmere writings cannot, then, simply be dismissed as self-indulgent juvenilia, but must instead be understood as complex performances, interconnected imaginative spaces within which Upward and Isherwood collaborated to test the dominant values of their day and – finding them wanting – began to establish linguistically a .set of rules with which they could themselves identify.

Technicians of the unknown cinema: British critical discourse and the analysis of collaboration in film production, by Martin Stollery Since the early 1970s British cinema history has conventionally been characterized as an unknown landscape, a tradition for which even those who created it knew little and cared less. This essay argues instead that especially in the mid 1930s and late 1940s there was an active discourse with the film industry's technical community, a debate that was particularly concerned with issues of collaboration and authorship. Concentrating on the work of Adrian Brunel and Ivor Montagu and their associates, notably film editor Ian Dalrymple, the essay outlines one aspect of this debate, and observes its traces on the production of Berthold Viertel's Little Friend (Gaumont-British, 1934).

This History offers a new and comprehensive picture of 1930s British literature. The '30s have often been cast as a literary-historical anomaly, either as a 'low, dishonest decade', a doomed experiment in combining art and politics, or as a 'late modernist' afterthought to the intense period of artistic experimentation in the 1920s. By contrast, the contributors to this volume explore the contours of a 'long 1930s' by repositioning the decade and its characteristic concerns at the heart of twentieth-century literary history. This book expands the range of writers covered, moving beyond a narrow focus on towering canonical figures to draw in a more diverse cast of characters, in terms of race, gender, class, and forms of artistic expression. The book's four sections emphasize the decade's characteristic geographical and sexual identities; the new media landscapes and institutional settings its writers operated in; questions of commitment and autonomy; and British writing's international entanglements.

TABLE OF CONTENT

1. TOUCH OF PINK
2. TWIST INSIDE THE LIFE OF HUSTLERS – Gay version, Charles Dickens' classic Oliver Twist.
3. THE TWO OF US
4. THE TRUTH ABOUT ALEX
5. THAT’S WHAT I AM
6. SONG FOR A RAGGY BOY
7. THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (2)
8. SHOCK TREATMENT
9. QUEER AS FOLK (2)
10. ALAN BROWN – PRIVATE ROMEO – 2011
11. PRAYERS FOR BOBBY (MUST SEE, ESPECIALLY PARENTS WHO HAVE GAY SONS)
12. PORNOGRAPHY A THRILLER
13. PANSY DIVISION – TOTAL ENTERTAINMENT
14. PANSY DIVISION – THAT’S SO GAY
15. MULLIGANS – 2008
16. ROB WILLIAMS – MAKE THE YULETIDE GAY
17. LIKE IT IS
18. LATTER DAYS
19. ALMODOVAR – LA PIEL QUE HABITO (2) (French)
20. JET BOY
21. CLINT EASTWOOD – LEONARDO DI CAPRIO – J. EDGAR HOOVER (2) (English & French)
22. PETER PARNELL – HYDE IN HOLLYWOOD – 1991 – CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING
23. A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD
24. HESHER
25. GET REAL
26. FARINELLI IL CASTRATO – 1994
27. EDGE OF SEVENTEEN
28. OSCAR WILDE – THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY – FILM 1973
29. CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD – CHRISTOPHER AND HIS KIND
30. BROTHERHOOD
31. BREAKFAST WITH SCOT
32. BEAUTIFUL THING
33. ADAM AND STEVE
34. LAURENCE ANYWAYS

This thesis explores the modern urban spaces depicted in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning Midnight. It focuses especially on the city’s mediation through the flâneur, a wandering, observant city figure who for the first time in these late modernist texts can be found outside the previous definition of white, Christian, straight male. The close reading of these texts allows views of Dublin, Berlin and Paris as semi-colonial space-time presences each faring differently from the approaching end of colonialism. My argument is that by investing the figure of the flâneur with non-native, non-imperial power to observe, these late modernist authors re-map their novels’ cities as multi-vocal spaces, eschewing the binary code of insider/outsider which had reigned since at least the inception of modernity.

It is September 1931. In one of the shabby Victorian houses at Brunswick Square in Bloomsbury lives E. M. Forster. The apartment, which was rented as a hideaway from motherly concern, becomes the meeting place of Forster and Christopher Isherwood, and the starting point of a lifelong friendship between the famous master and his gifted student. Having recently returned from Berlin, Isherwood becomes an inexhaustible source of stories about the German homosexual demimonde -an embodiment of Forster's dreams, a world about which Forster listens with untiring attention. 1 Isherwood's stories about the gay subculture then flourishing in Germany -a place which could almost certainly match the visions of Arcadia cherished by English homosexuals -became a point of reference and confrontation for the Forsterian vision known from Maurice (1971), a still unpublished novel which Forster completed twenty years before, in 1913. The picture which Forster paints in this novel is a truly idyllic setting resembling the Shakespearean Forest of Arden, where all social conventions are suspended and the lovers, irrespective of their gender, may freely indulge in romance. Maurice draws significantly on Greek tradition and the stereotypical representation of Arcadia as a site of purity and virtue. However, this model is challenged by the images depicted in Christopher Isherwood's writing, in which Arcadia is more sexualized and more public, but still intimate. Most of Isherwood's stories, including Christopher and His Kind (1976), are set in interwar Berlin, a city known for its vibrant night 1 Wendy Moffat, E. M. Forster: A New Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 13-16.

This thesis explores the modern urban spaces depicted in James Joyce's Ulysses, Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin and Jean Rhys's Good Morning Midnight. It focuses especially on the city's mediation through the flâneur, a wandering, observant city figure who for the first time in these late modernist texts can be found outside the previous definition of white, Christian, straight male. The close reading of these texts allows views of Dublin, Berlin and Paris as semi-colonial space-time presences each faring differently from the approaching end of colonialism. My argument is that by investing the figure of the flâneur with non-native, non-imperial power to observe, these late modernist authors re-map their novels' cities as multi-vocal spaces, eschewing the binary code of insider/outsider which had reigned since at least the inception of modernity. vi Acknowledgments First, I want to thank my supervisor, Professor Juan Christian Pellicer, for his inspiring scholarship, insightful, constructive criticism, and extraordinary encouragement throughout my project. Without his insistence that Ulysses ought to be a part of this study, I doubt I would have dared to take up the challenge presented by that sublime work. I am also grateful to Professor Erik Kielland-Lund for his kindness and perspective, and to Christina Sandhaug for her timely help during my planning stage, not to mention her inspiring teaching of modernist works which engaged my interest in this project. Thanks, too, are due to Associate Professor Rebecca Scherr for her British and American Modernism syllabus, which introduced me to Jean Rhys, and launched my idea of a thesis on urban modern literature. To my parents, Martha and Ronald Steinman, I owe a large debt of gratitude, for consistently encouraging my love of drama and literature. To the University of Oslo librarians, I regret that I did not fulfill my goal of graduating without an overdue fine, but thank you all the more for your tireless efforts to retrieve numerous books from other libraries, often from outside of Norway! Finally, to my wife, Ina, who has read numerous drafts and provided never flagging moral support, you have inspired me yet again to sit in wonder at your effortless editing skills.

Este ensayo apareció originalmente en Ricardo Piglia: una poética sin límites , compilado por Adriana Rodríguez Pérsico en colaboración con Jorge Fornet (publicado en 2004 por la Editorial de la Universidad de Pittsburgh en la serie ACP del IILI). En 2012, formó parte de Contra la fatiga del arte. Notas sobre cine, literatura y otras yerbas (publicado por Ediciones de La Grieta).

To write plays are not easy, to make them verse, is difficult but to cooperate in composing poetic drama, is of great challenge. This study tries to prove the capability and manageability in collaboration not only in ordinary prose drama but also in poetic plays. It aims to trace, through an analytical and critical technique, the procedures of collaboration showing, to what degree both of the two collaborators, Auden and Isherwood, achieved success in dealing with contemporary poetic drama using modern language. The research is an approach on one of the likely best plays they shared, The Ascent of F6 (1933). The study starts giving a glance on poetic drama then it traces the collaboration between W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood with special reference to the poetic play The Ascent of F6.

Le opere autobiografiche di Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Christopher Isherwood, Michel Leiris e Alberto Savinio testimoniano in modo originale del nuovo statuto del genere autobiografico novecentesco. La comune e ossessiva attività memorialistica produce un mosaico di forme e temi autobiografici, un paradigma di soluzioni narrative che permette di osservare il récit de vie da una prospettiva ermeneutica feconda. Come cambiano i narratori e i personaggi, le strutture formali e i tempi del racconto di un’opera autobiografica composta nel tempo, attraverso numerose stazioni del ricordo? Come si modula la rappresentazione dell’esistenza nel reiterato bisogno di tornare sul vissuto e sul narrato delle prove autobiografiche precedenti?

Dating from his conversion to Vedanta in 1939, the writings of British expatriate Christopher Isherwood’s California period offer testimony of a life engaged with spiritual inquiry and praxis pursued over more than four decades, yet texts from this period are either ignored or dismissed by critics intent on maintaining the standard view of the writer. Isherwood theorised the writing of religion in his essay ‘The Problem of the Religious Novel’, yet it is in the least overtly religious text, A Single Man,1 where the influence of his training in the Ramakrishna Vedanta tradition is seamlessly integrated. Moreover, the impact of Vedanta teaching (particularly in its Advaitist formulation) on Isherwood’s textual personae, his experiments with first-person point of view, his interrogation of the problematics of writing religion and a sustained engagement with a religious praxis not based on a repudiation of his sexuality, are all contributing to a third wave of interest in this controversial writer today.

The 1930's was a period in which the fragmentation of modernity shaped innovations in both literature and filmmaking. The relationship between film and the literature in this period was symbiotic in a way that it had not been previously, due to experimentation and development of technique, technology and theory. This allowed film to exploit emotive literary techniques through expressionism, and writers of the 1930's to borrow structural elements and filmic perspectives for their literary work. Christopher

Combining narratological analysis with autobiography studies, this article looks at examples of focalization strategies in several autobiographical works. It adopts Dorrit Cohn's distinction between consonant and dissonant self-narration (identification or distance between the narrating-I and the experiencing-I) to explore how authors engage creatively with different positions of the autobiographical "I," and how this engagement contributes to their texts' aesthetic qualities. Starting from a brief exposition of the role of the narrating-I and the experiencing-I in autobiographical narratives, the article discusses the juxtaposition of the two selves' perspectives in Sylvia Fraser's My Father's House, which is achieved by means of a dexterous combination of consonant and dissonant self-narration. Examples of dissonant self-narration from Günter Grass's Peeling the Onion and Christopher Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind and of consonant self-narration from Mary Karr's memoir trilogy (The Liars' Club, Cherry, and Lit) then demonstrate how self-dissonance may help convey a work's meta-autobiographical message, while self-consonance seems to contribute to readers' immersion in the narrative.

Esta dissertação propõe a análise dos romances de Alfred Döblin e Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Alexanderplatz e Adeus a Berlim, respectivamente, sob o paradigma da forma de György Lukács. O objetivo é dar forma a hipótese de que é possível perceber na leitura de ambos que, há uma articulação entre as ideias de modernidade, masculinidade, guerra e luto. Trabalha-se com a ideia de que na gênese da forma estas questões estiveram presentes e que os autores articulam narrativas que trazem à tona o panorama da cidade de Berlim no período da República de Weimar. A ideia é a observar, da perspectiva destes romances, como o mito da cidade se articula ao cenário e ao aftermath da Primeira Guerra Mundial e como as ficções criadas pelos
autores demonstram uma tentativa de elaboração da experiência de luto.

A cura di Mario Faraone e Gianni Ferracuti Grafica e webmaster: Giulio Ferracuti www.interculturalita.it Studi Interculturali è un'iniziativa senza scopo di lucro. I fascicoli della rivista sono distribuiti gratuitamente in edizione digitale all'indirizzo www.interculturalita.it. Nello stesso sito può essere richiesta la versione a stampa (print on demand).

In A Single Man (1962), Christopher Isherwood describes the ‘fag hag’ as a ‘gross-insucking vulva of sly, ruthless, greedy flesh’. She is a vampiric convertor of gay men, an agent of the heteronormativity and devourer of difference. However, this paper will contend that such assertions mask the longed-for possibilities of fag-hag kinship that Isherwood continually seeks in his published and unpublished works.
Questions of intersectional oppressions render both parties in the fag-hag friendship precarious to the approach of the other. Looking at archival examples, as well as Isherwood’s works, I argue that fag-hag relationality involves living on a knife-edge, tottering between friendship and destruction. This unstable, ambiguous relationality is reflected, I argue, in Jacques Derrida’s theories of relationality. I restage Derrida’s Parages and its dance of proximity and distance, of fear and longing within the fag-hag kinship’s queer cross-gender, cross-sexuality framework. I contend that fag-hag relationality’s mode of crossed borders and unexpected meeting points may be epitomised as that of the ‘bump.’
The bump is a moment of proximity and distance, of touching and not touching and, as I argue, of identification and disidentification. Looking to manifestations of the bump in popular, academic and literary texts, the bump’s nature appears ambiguous. It is both a felicitous ‘bumping into’ and a violent ‘bumping off’. For Isherwood, to bump into the fag-hag risks the destruction of the gay male. Yet, I propose that Isherwood’s invocation to repeat the bump—to develop the fag-hag relationality is in the ‘hope against hope’ of as-yet-unknown joys and possibilities. In turn, Isherwood offers us a dream of a queer relationality without fear of destruction.

Offering a radical reassessment of 1930s British literature, this volume questions the temporal limits of the literary decade, and broadens the scope of queer literary studies to consider literary-historical responses to a variety of behaviours encompassed by the term ‘queer’ in its many senses. Whilst it is informed by the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe, it is also profoundly concerned with what Christopher Isherwood termed ‘the market value of the Odd.’ Drawing, for its methodology, on the work of Raymond Williams, it traces the impact of the Great War on the development of language, examining the use of ten ‘keywords’ in the prose of Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Hamilton, and that of their respective literary milieux, in order to establish how queer lives and modern sub-cultural identities were forged collaboratively within the fictional realm. By utilizing contemporary perspectives on performativity in conjunction with detailed close readings it repositions these authors as self-conscious agents actively producing their own queer masculinities through calculated acts of linguistic transgression.

Lectura crítica de la novela de Christopher Isherwood 'A Single Man' ('Un soltero' o 'Un solo hombre'), centrándonos en la representación de la homosexualidad y la soledad del protagonista, y en la posible distancia irónica entre su papel como 'centro de consciencia' y la perspectiva crítica ofrecida por el autor implícito sobre su tragedia personal.

English abstract: A critical reading of Christopher Isherwood's novel 'A Single Man' (1964), focusing on the representation of the protagonist's homosexuality and solitude, and on the possible ironic distance between his role as a 'center of consciousness' and the implied author's critical perspective on his personal tragedy.

Au travers de son oeuvre essentiellement autobiographique et autofictionnelle, le romancier anglais Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) nous propose une réflexion sur la fragmentation et la discontinuité des récits de soi pour les subjectivités qui vivent l’exil et la marginalisation.
Homosexuel d’abord discret, ses romans tracent différents portraits de ses déplacements consécutifs en Europe dans les années 30, puis de son exil définitif aux États-Unis au moment de l’éclosion de la guerre. Par des récits déconnectés et différentes versions de lui-même comme protagonistes, son oeuvre nous révèle les limites de la narration à rendre compte des vies fragmentées. D’un côté, il est forcé de dissimuler sa vie affective avant son coming out des années 60. En conséquence, le protagoniste de ses romans est asexué et déconnecté, la critique en dit un « sexless nitwit ». D’un autre côté, incapable de faire correspondre les différents fragments de sa vie, il s’avoue incapable d’en faire un récit unifié et continue.
Par notre étude de ses romans et carnets, nous chercherons donc à montrer comment les différentes fragmentations de la vie de l’auteur empêchent d’en faire un récit à soi unifié, et comment ces limites narratives peuvent être des limites à l’introspection de l’auteur lui-même. En déjouant les catégories cardinales de la théorie narrative (auteur, continuité, unicité, etc.), les récits fragmentés d'Isherwood donnent à voir les vies autrement invisibles à la théorie narrative.

20. yüzyıl modernizminin coğrafyaları büyük kentlerdir. Baudelaire’in Paris’i, Dostoyevski’nin Petersburg’u, Freud’un Viyana’sı, Kafka’nın Prag’ı gibi Berlin de 20. yüzyılın cazibe merkezlerinden biridir. Berlin’in iki dünya savaşı arasında sunduğu imge çok katmanlı, kozmopolit bir kent görüntüsüdür. Daha 1. Dünya Savaşı’nın hemen ertesinde Berlin, modern çağın başat özelliği olarak kendini dayatan toplumsal düzensizliğin odak noktasıdır. Savaştan yenik çıkan Wilhelm Almanya’sı dağılmış, monarşik iktidarın sınıfsal istikrara dayanan yapısı yerini kimliklerin bulanıklaşıp rollerin değiştiği yeni, çoğunlukla da kaotik bir toplumsal alana ve bu alanın içinde hareket eden insanlara bırakmıştır. Bu çalışma, böylesi insan imgeleri üzerinden 1930’lar Berlin’inde gündelik yaşam deneyimlerine ve bu deneyimlerin toplumsal dinamikler içindeki rolüne iki farklı ulusal edebiyatın, Alman ve İngiliz edebiyatlarının penceresinden bakacaktır. Irmgard Keun’un Yalancı İpek Kız’ı (1932) ile Christopher Isherwood’un Hoşça Kal Berlin’i (1939), Weimar Cumhuriyeti’nin çöküş dönemiyle eş zamanlı Nasyonal Sosyalizm’in yükselişine ve bununla beraber Berlin’in geçirdiği dönüşümün boyutlarına şahitlik eder. Yalancı İpek Kız’da genç bir Alman kadının deneyimleri ile Hoşça Kal Berlin’de orta yaşlı bir İngiliz erkeğinin yaşantıladıkları arasındaki benzerlikler/farklılıklar, 1930’lar Berlin’inin kapsamlı bir portresini çizer. Bu iki romanı kent-birey etkileşimi bağlamında tartışmak, iki savaş arası modernizmin kıskacındaki bu metropolün, sakinlerini kimlik gözetmeksizin ötekileştirdiğini göz önüne sermektedir.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Modernizm, Berlin, kent sakini, Irmgard Keun, Christopher Isherwood

Across three women's films, the status of the literary novel in the midst of changing media environments is melodramatically plotted through the figure of “old acquaintance.” Vincent Sherman's 1943 Old Acquaintance pits the meager output of celebrated writer Katherine “Kit” Marlowe (Bette Davis) against the stream of popular, lowbrow novels written by her friend Millie Drake (Miriam Hopkins). This contest of literary style and production is closely adapted in George Cukor's 1981 film Rich and Famous. In Pedro Almodóvar's 1995 La flor de mi secreto, friction between literary styles and markets is subdued through melodrama's focus on affective rather than taste-making practices, appearing as a viable metaphor of the fate of book-objects in a zero-sum marketplace. This article focuses on Rich and Famous, which explores the question of affinity between women, lowbrow and highbrow, and the fate of the novel circa 1980. The particular and volatile experience of “alikeness” that founds friendship and the possibility that literary value is volatile—that high- and lowbrow are alike—are imagined in its nuanced representation of what Ronald Britton termed “publication anxiety” and in its use of cinematic space to stage the possibility of amicable if incongruous contemporaneity.

This essay explores light, as conceived in Hinduism, as an intellectual tool used to mediate the contrary impulses of body and soul. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Christopher Isherwood addressed this philosophical quandary by reference to the light-based cosmology of Bhagavad Gita. They did so by opposite means: Coleridge's search for the Hindu light was primarily based on reading, while Isherwood adopted self-cultivation practices. In ‘Dejection: An Ode’, the Indian idea of light allows Coleridge to imagine the resolution of his love for Sara Hutchinson. By contrast, Isherwood devoted himself to the Hindu light physically by involvement with a meditation centre, as documented in his memoir, My Guru and His Disciple. Like Coleridge, Isherwood suffered reputational damage for his metaphysical interests, and was deemed an unfulfilled talent. Yet W. H. Auden's ambivalent responses to Isherwood indicate his belief that the western literary canon might be enriched as a result of such esoteric experience.

Isherwood's arrival in California was one of a number of relocations - and the most successful - after a number of dislocations that seriously destabilised down his sense of being in the world. But the re-orientation was more than a geographical relocation, for it was there that he encountered his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, who was to become a spiritual guide for this former Anglican Socialist atheist.

Considering autobiographical narrative as a specific form of fiction whose material springs from the author’s personal and individual experience, which represents one of the major artistic trends throughout the 20th century, the paper analyses Thomas Wolfe’s The Story of a Novel alongside Christopher Isherwood’s similar though different autobiographical and artistic experience. Attacked by decades of criticism of being too dedicated to personal issues in his wok, Wolfe’s defence stresses the importance of the autobiographical issue for his narrative and defines as perfectly legitimate the employment of elements referable to the author’s personal experience. “Where does the material of an artist come from? What are the proper uses of that material, and how far must his freedom in the use of that material be controlled by his responsibility as a member of society?”: questions as such are at the core itself of the artistic discourse of both these writers. Whereas Isherwood’s autobiographical route starts from an initial interest and preoccupation for the incidental situation of the 1930s, and moves to a spiritual and intimist quest after his 1939 emigration to the States and conversion to Vedanta Hinduism, Wolfe’s movement is rather from the intimist and personal to the social and universal.

This History offers a new and comprehensive picture of 1930s British literature. The '30s have often been cast as a literary-historical anomaly, either as a 'low, dishonest decade', a doomed experiment in combining art and politics, or as a 'late modernist' afterthought to the intense period of artistic experimentation in the 1920s. By contrast, the contributors to this volume explore the contours of a 'long 1930s' by repositioning the decade and its characteristic concerns at the heart of twentieth-century literary history. This book expands the range of writers covered, moving beyond a narrow focus on towering canonical figures to draw in a more diverse cast of characters, in terms of race, gender, class, and forms of artistic expression. The book's four sections emphasize the decade's characteristic geographical and sexual identities; the new media landscapes and institutional settings its writers operated in; questions of commitment and autono...

In the 1950s, as Isherwood continued to struggle with the completion of The World in the Evening, he notes in his unpublished ‘Writing Notebook’ (held in the Huntington Collection) that he has a new idea for a narrative, one that after several years of editing, revisiting and revising would be published as Down There on a Visit in 1962. Although on first inspection, this published narrative seems to be removed from Isherwood’s original plan for his work to be entitled The Lost, The Shades or The Forgotten, this paper, through an examination of both Isherwood’s unpublished notes, interviews and his published work presents an argument that Isherwood’s original literary ideas of examining a process of self-understanding via a journey through purgatory in fact remains a prominent feature of this text, and indeed is in keeping with Isherwood’s overall literary trope: the construction and analysis of a self that matures and learns through a process of writing.
This paper traces the literary and creative journey that Isherwood undertook. It opens with an examination of his initial idea of creating a revised and re-imagined narrative based on the Purgatory of Dante’s la Divina Commedia and traces the creative process that Isherwood undertook in the creation of the final, published version, which narrates the journeys of a character named Christopher in four separate times and places. From my work on the drafts, along with correspondence, writing notebooks and diaries, it is my argument that the overall themes of transition and self-understanding based on a non-religious idea of self-imposed purgatory remains the focus of this narrative, despite the semi-autobiographical emphasis of the final version.
-------
We climbed, he first and I behind, until, 
 through a small round opening ahead of us
 I saw the lovely things the heavens hold,

and we came out to see once more the stars. (Dante, Inferno, Canto XXXIV, ll. 136-139)

As the closing lines of volume one of Dante’s epic poem emphasise, this is a tale of an author’s journey through the depths of purgatory towards a moment of self-enlightenment as he emerges to once again see the stars and indeed heaven. This journey is one that is led by Virgil, a character that meets Dante at his lowest moment of fear and despair as he begs Virgil to remove him from this place of evil.
Isherwood’s original conception of not merely rewriting but in fact reinventing the key themes of Dante’s Inferno also start with this premise: what he describes is also a ‘conducted tour’ through purgatory (Isherwood, ‘Writing Notebook’, p.58). Vitally, the purgatory of which Isherwood writes is a self-imposed one that is linked to themes of psychoanalysis and an inability of those stuck in this state to see themselves clearly in order to be able to escape. As Isherwood summarises: ‘nobody in [this Inferno] is permanently damned --- only temporarily self-detained’ (Isherwood, ‘Writing Notebook’, p. 58). Isherwood thus removes Divine Law; the situation that the different characters that Isherwood’s Dante character comes across on his guided tour have placed themselves there, and, moreover, it is a situation that they can get themselves out of, rather than any external factors (although arguably there are ‘devilish’ characters who are enablers of these damned characters).
There are many aspects of this novel that change as Isherwood works through the different versions of The Forgotten (as he often used for his working title). In particular there is the fact that the original narrative was to be set in Mexico, which was to ‘lend its scenery and cultural aspects “by courtesy”’ to the journey where the ‘damned’ are all ‘permanent tourists’, unable to escape (Isherwood, ‘Writing Notebooks’, p. 58). Furthermore, the characterisation of the main protagonists changes: in Isherwood’s original drafts he struggles in his casting of Dante and Virgil, using the characters Peter and Paul to represent versions of them. However, although Peter becomes Christopher, and Mexico becomes Europe and USA, the concept of a self-imposed purgatory, of accepting and understanding whom one is in order to move away from being the eternal tourist, merely down on a visit, remains a prominent theme.
------
Now, at last, I’m ready to write about Mr. Lancaster. […] I realize I must show how our meeting was the start if a new chapter in my life, indeed a whole series of chapters. (Isherwood, Down There on a Visit: 11)

As the above quotation demonstrates, Down There on a Visit focuses on the ‘I’, the Christopher that links all four travel narratives that make up the novel. It is the manner in which the different characters that he encounters on his journeys relate to these four Christophers that focus this work into a cohesive narrative. It is this idea that he is ‘at last’ able to write of Mr. Lancaster and his first experience of foreign lands, a part of his life that is notable in its absence from the seemingly autobiographical Lions and Shadows, that roots this narrative in a journey of growth and maturation, one that arguably reflects the journey that Dante undertakes through Purgatory. 
Furthermore, Isherwood’s dualistic narrator, both author and character that are called ‘I’ but who are invariably different people due to the fact that one is on a path and the other has arrived, duplicates in a sense the technique of dual characters that is seen in Dante’s work. As a reader of la Divina Commedia, we must consistently remember to distinguish between Dante the Pilgrim and Dante the Poet. With regard to Isherwood’s writing, unlike other works, Isherwood continues to name his namesake character ‘I’, although he constantly questions the reliability of his memories. Indeed, Isherwood specifically brings the readers attention to the idea that these Christophers, whilst invariably the same man, are in fact very different creatures, held together only by a skeleton and a consciousness:
And now before I slip back into the convention of calling this young man “I”, let me consider him as a separate being, a stranger almost, setting out on this adventure […] For, of course, he is almost a stranger to me. I have revised his opinions, changed his accent and his mannerisms, unlearned or exaggerated his prejudices and his habits. […] what I am has refashioned itself throughout the days and years, until now almost all that remains constant is the mere awareness of being conscious. (Isherwood, Down There on a Visit, pp. 13-14).

Emphasised here is the idea that the two Christophers are linked by a journey of self-discovery and self-understanding (in fact I would argue that Isherwood’s process of narrating and constructing himself means that there are in fact five Christophers – the one of each individual journey as well as the namesake narrator).
Although this journey is in-keeping with much of Isherwood’s earlier writing, this process remains focused on purgatory and indeed hell. Many of the characters Christopher meets on his journey are in fact the same as those originally fashioned to be included in The Forgotten (although, as previously mentioned, the setting for these encounters has changed). Indeed, Mr. Lancaster along with the inhabitants of Ambrose’s island remain largely unchanged. Ambrose in particular seems to epitomise the idea of self-imposed purgatory. Furthermore, Ambrose acts as a reflection for Christopher and propels him to move on – to become more aware of himself through a vision of one in hell.
------
Within Down There on a Visit, Isherwood ostensibly narrates himself through four separate journeys, starting with his first taste of the foreign with ‘Mr. Lancaster’ in Bremen (1928), right through to his life in California in ‘Paul’ (1940). The autobiographical feel to the narrative structure, which is once again narrated by a Christopher in the first-person, has led to this work being described as a sequel to the Berlin Stories (as advertised by Methuen Press, who republished this in 1999). However, this paper, through an examination of previously unpublished and unanalysed author notes and drafts as well as Down There on a Visit itself argues that Christopher’s journey remains in keeping with a non-religious but nonetheless spiritual journey of self-discovery that is in keeping with his original conceptualisation of recreating ‘Dante’s’ journey of discovery through hell and purgatory, and whilst the characters that Christopher meets may find themselves unable to remove themselves from their self-imposed purgatory, it is through seeing a reflection of himself as he could be that allows the narrator Christopher to gain a better understanding, thus leading to his own release into the starry night.

This collection of essays considers Christopher Isherwood’s diaries, his vast personal archive, and his published works, offering a multifaceted appreciation of a writer who spent more than half of his life in southern California. The editors have brought together the most informative scholarship of the twenty-first century to illuminate the craft of one of the singular figures of the twentieth century.