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CALIFORNIA, USA, August 26, 2004: The Huntington Library (http://www.huntington.org) in San Marino, California is presently mounting an exhibition to celebrate the centennial of Christopher Isherwood, feted as the best English prose writer of the twentieth century, and whose translations with Swami Prabhavananda of the Bhagavad Gita and selections from the Upanishads remain among the best. Born in England, Isherwood left his native country in 1929 and never returned to live. With poet W. H. Auden, he first went to Berlin, and his novels based on that city were the basis for the hit stage play and movie, Cabaret. In 1939 he and Auden immigrated to the USA. Isherwood eventually settled in California, attracted by its film industry and its open way of life. He met Swami Prabhavananda, a Hindu monk of the Ramakrishna Order and founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California and learned meditation at Swami’s Vedanta Center, staying the war years there in the hope of becoming a monk. In 1945 however, he decided the monastic life was not for him, and he lived a dissipated life for several years, travelling restlessly for 18 months. He did not write during those years, but later reconstructed them in his memoir “Lost Years” published posthumously. A Broadway hit in 1951 brought him back to writing. He kept diaries until illness prevented him from writing in 1983, and these shed much light on his struggles and intellectual processes. Isherwood produced some of his best work between the ages of fifty and seventy, including what many consider his best novel, A Single Man (1964), a meditation on the temporality of life, but filled with humor, compassion and intelligence. The novel reveals Isherwood’s passion for literature and film. Unlike so many writers who were destroyed by Hollywood, Isherwood balanced his work for the movies with literary projects. Sue Hodson, a curator the Huntington, praises Isherwood’s “seamless, transparent prose,” which “seems so simple that its beauty and power sneaks up on you.” The sheer volume of his works was difficult to compress into the exhibition; his pacifism, Vedanta experiences, sexual orientation, the film industry, the many artists and writers whom he knew. His diaries and correspondence revealed him as honest, humane, and compassionate. Read the long report at “source” for more.

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