'What's nationality these days?' asks the English tramp on a Greek steamer in V. S. Naipaul's In a Free State , and the question seems equally apt whether it is applied to Naipaul or to Christopher Isherwood. Writers are generally assumed to draw their inspiration for material from their native roots: sometimes they write better without them or by transplanting them. 'I write because I am trying to study my life in retrospect, and find out what it is made of, what it is all about, ' Isherwood once observed in an ...
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'What's nationality these days?' asks the English tramp on a Greek steamer in V. S. Naipaul's In a Free State , and the question seems equally apt whether it is applied to Naipaul or to Christopher Isherwood. Writers are generally assumed to draw their inspiration for material from their native roots: sometimes they write better without them or by transplanting them. 'I write because I am trying to study my life in retrospect, and find out what it is made of, what it is all about, ' Isherwood once observed in an interview, and that quest has led them on the path of the expatriate for most of his adult life. His first two books, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932), studies of English life in the aftermath of 1918, sprang from an initial revolt against his background and education, the struggle of an only son to avoid spiritual suffocation. The years spent in Germany which inspired the Berlin novels and stories of the 1930s continued the process of discovery: his emigration to America in 1939 and his growing interest in Eastern religion represented the third and most decisive stage in this search for an authentic self. Francis King's essay traces this evolution all through Isherwood's very diverse oeuvre, describes his struggle and final success in assimilating his American experience, and points out that his last books, A Meeting by the River (1967), and his memoir of his parents, Kathleen and Frank (1971), mark a final reconciliation with and acceptance of his heredity. He notes the extent to which autobiographical material, as Isherwood would be the first to admit, has played a far larger part than invention in shaping his novels. The scope of Isherwood's world has been restricted by this somewhat solipsistic approach, the method summed up by the adaptation of the title of Sally Bowles into I am a Camera , but the essay pays tribute to the lucidity, the honesty and the outstanding gifts of description and dialogue which characterize all his best work. Francis King was born in 1923 and educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford. He has written fifteen novels, three collections of short stories, a volume of poetry and two travel books. He regularly reviewed fiction for the Sunday Telegraph and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1952 and the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize in 1965.
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