![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It didn’t get out of control.” His fiction was always a transistorised reorganisation of his own self. It is also, Isherwood said, “the only book of mine where I did more or less what I wanted to do. A Single Man is widely recognised as his supreme achievement, as much a work of compressed brilliance as Chopin’s Ballade No 4. This could be seen as a fulfilment of Edmund Wilson’s sharp critical insight that Isherwood’s “real field is social observation”. Isherwood’s third act, creatively speaking, is set in Los Angeles, where he worked in Hollywood, and also pioneered American gay fiction. ![]() Later in the 1930s, he became celebrated for his Berlin fiction, especially Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), which introduced the world to “Sally Bowles” of Cabaret fame. His genius was spotted early by the Woolfs, who published The Memorial (1932) at the Hogarth Press. Indeed, there are several “Christophers” competing for a place in this list. C hristopher Isherwood made his famous declaration of artistic intent in 1939: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking… Some day all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” This cool, blank, dispassionate gaze, which often disturbed the critics, characterises all Isherwood’s writing, some of the finest English prose of the 20th century, whose decades are shadowed by his own life and work. ![]()
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