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Where Joy Resides: An Isherwood Reader
Where Joy Resides: A Christopher Isherwood Reader is a wide-ranging collection of fiction and nonfiction, this is the perfect introduction to the author's writings...
350 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1989
5 people are currently reading
94 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Isherwood
160 books1,512 followersEnglish-born American writer Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood portrayed Berlin in the early 1930s in his best known works, such as
Goodbye to Berlin
(1939), the basis for the musical
Cabaret
(1966). Isherwood was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist.
With W.H. Auden he wrote three plays— The Dog Beneath the Skin (1932), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938). Isherwood tells the story in his first autobiography, Lions and Shadows .
After Isherwood wrote joke answers on his second-year exams, Cambridge University in 1925 asked him to leave. He briefly attended medical school and progressed with his first two novels, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932). In 1930, he moved to Berlin, where he taught English, dabbled in Communism, and enthusiastically explored his homosexuality. His experiences provided the material for Mister Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1938), still his most famous book.
In Berlin in 1932, he also began an important relationship with Heinz Neddermeyer, a young German with whom he fled the Nazis in 1933. England refused entry to Neddermeyer on his second visit in 1934, and the pair moved restlessly about Europe until the Gestapo arrested Neddermeyer in May 1937 and then finally separated them.
In 1938, Isherwood sailed with Auden to China to write Journey to a War (1939), about the Sino-Japanese conflict. They returned to England and Isherwood went on to Hollywood to look for movie-writing work. He also became a disciple of the Ramakrishna monk, Swami Prabhavananda, head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. He decided not to take monastic vows, but he remained a Hindu for the rest of his life, serving, praying, and lecturing in the temple every week and writing a biography, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965).
In 1945, Isherwood published Prater Violet, fictionalizing his first movie writing job in London in 1933-1934. In Hollywood, he spent the start of the 1950s fighting his way free of a destructive five-year affair with an attractive and undisciplined American photographer, William Caskey. Caskey took the photographs for Isherwood’s travel book about South America, The Condor and The Cows (1947). Isherwood’s sixth novel, The World in the Evening (1954), written mostly during this period, was less successful than earlier ones.
In 1953, he fell in love with Don Bachardy, an eighteen-year-old college student born and raised in Los Angeles. They were to remain together until Isherwood’s death. In 1961, Isherwood and completed the final revisions to his new novel Down There on a Visit (1962). Their relationship nearly ended in 1963, and Isherwood moved out of their Santa Monica house. This dark period underpins Isherwood’s masterpiece A Single Man (1964).
Isherwood wrote another novel, A Meeting by the River (1967), about two brothers, but he gave up writing fiction and turned entirely to autobiography. In Kathleen and Frank (1971), he drew on the letters and diaries of his parents. In Christopher and His Kind (1976), he returned to the 1930s to tell, as a publicly avowed homosexual, the real story of his life in Berlin and his wanderings with Heinz Neddermeyer. The book made him a hero of gay liberation and a national celebrity all over again but now in his true, political and personal identity.
With W.H. Auden he wrote three plays— The Dog Beneath the Skin (1932), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938). Isherwood tells the story in his first autobiography, Lions and Shadows .
After Isherwood wrote joke answers on his second-year exams, Cambridge University in 1925 asked him to leave. He briefly attended medical school and progressed with his first two novels, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932). In 1930, he moved to Berlin, where he taught English, dabbled in Communism, and enthusiastically explored his homosexuality. His experiences provided the material for Mister Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1938), still his most famous book.
In Berlin in 1932, he also began an important relationship with Heinz Neddermeyer, a young German with whom he fled the Nazis in 1933. England refused entry to Neddermeyer on his second visit in 1934, and the pair moved restlessly about Europe until the Gestapo arrested Neddermeyer in May 1937 and then finally separated them.
In 1938, Isherwood sailed with Auden to China to write Journey to a War (1939), about the Sino-Japanese conflict. They returned to England and Isherwood went on to Hollywood to look for movie-writing work. He also became a disciple of the Ramakrishna monk, Swami Prabhavananda, head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. He decided not to take monastic vows, but he remained a Hindu for the rest of his life, serving, praying, and lecturing in the temple every week and writing a biography, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965).
In 1945, Isherwood published Prater Violet, fictionalizing his first movie writing job in London in 1933-1934. In Hollywood, he spent the start of the 1950s fighting his way free of a destructive five-year affair with an attractive and undisciplined American photographer, William Caskey. Caskey took the photographs for Isherwood’s travel book about South America, The Condor and The Cows (1947). Isherwood’s sixth novel, The World in the Evening (1954), written mostly during this period, was less successful than earlier ones.
In 1953, he fell in love with Don Bachardy, an eighteen-year-old college student born and raised in Los Angeles. They were to remain together until Isherwood’s death. In 1961, Isherwood and completed the final revisions to his new novel Down There on a Visit (1962). Their relationship nearly ended in 1963, and Isherwood moved out of their Santa Monica house. This dark period underpins Isherwood’s masterpiece A Single Man (1964).
Isherwood wrote another novel, A Meeting by the River (1967), about two brothers, but he gave up writing fiction and turned entirely to autobiography. In Kathleen and Frank (1971), he drew on the letters and diaries of his parents. In Christopher and His Kind (1976), he returned to the 1930s to tell, as a publicly avowed homosexual, the real story of his life in Berlin and his wanderings with Heinz Neddermeyer. The book made him a hero of gay liberation and a national celebrity all over again but now in his true, political and personal identity.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 7, 2011
"And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice . . . For to miss the joy is to miss all." (From The Lantern Bearers by Robert Louis Stevenson as quoted by Christopher Isherwood in his commonplace book.
The quotation from Stevenson is placed as the epigraph to this selection of works by Isherwood. It is a selection that spans his lifetime as a writer from the early days in Berlin to the last days in Hollywood. In making the selections Don Bachardy and James P. White appropriately include the short novel A Single Man as the final selection. This is fitting because it is both the finest of Isherwood's novels and that one whose style and content delineate an ending to life and art in such a beautiful way. The other selections in the book include fictional, biographical, critical and spiritual writings that help the reader gain a picture of Isherwood's life from his own artistic creations. The result suggests how he imagined a world of love and freedom in an era when that life was hidden in ways that are difficult to comprehend in the twenty-first century. His friend Gore Vidal, to whom Isherwood dedicated A Single Man, states in his introduction: "throughout Christopher's life and work - and he made the two the same - he never ceased to attempt the impossible: to say exactly what a thing was and how it struck him in such a way that the reader might grasp it as he himself did, writer and reader as one in the ultimate collusive act of understanding."
This selection of his works captures that "collusive act" and presents it to readers everywhere.
The quotation from Stevenson is placed as the epigraph to this selection of works by Isherwood. It is a selection that spans his lifetime as a writer from the early days in Berlin to the last days in Hollywood. In making the selections Don Bachardy and James P. White appropriately include the short novel A Single Man as the final selection. This is fitting because it is both the finest of Isherwood's novels and that one whose style and content delineate an ending to life and art in such a beautiful way. The other selections in the book include fictional, biographical, critical and spiritual writings that help the reader gain a picture of Isherwood's life from his own artistic creations. The result suggests how he imagined a world of love and freedom in an era when that life was hidden in ways that are difficult to comprehend in the twenty-first century. His friend Gore Vidal, to whom Isherwood dedicated A Single Man, states in his introduction: "throughout Christopher's life and work - and he made the two the same - he never ceased to attempt the impossible: to say exactly what a thing was and how it struck him in such a way that the reader might grasp it as he himself did, writer and reader as one in the ultimate collusive act of understanding."
This selection of his works captures that "collusive act" and presents it to readers everywhere.
July 20, 2022
Prater Violet is the most entertaining. Single Man may be the “best” in literary terms. A good selection of work.
August 4, 2025
Goodbye to Berlin- 5/5
Prater Violet- 4/5
Exhumations- 2/5
Down There on a Visit- 5/5
Kathleen and Frank- 4/5
Lions and Shadows- 4/5
My Guru and His Disciple -3/5
A Single Man- 5/5
Prater Violet- 4/5
Exhumations- 2/5
Down There on a Visit- 5/5
Kathleen and Frank- 4/5
Lions and Shadows- 4/5
My Guru and His Disciple -3/5
A Single Man- 5/5
May 19, 2010
I got it to read more on the 'Cabaret' angle. Isherwood was quite the man
about town in London and later LA. Good experience to read this author
for a context of the times and insights to his literary clique.
Read
September 3, 2008I re-read this one about once a month. Lovely anthology of outstanding writing.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews