14. Isherwood, together with Margaret Kennedy, wrote the screenplay for Berthold Viertel’s 1934 film, Little Friend.
15. The Woolf ’s invited Forster to join the Memoir Club, where members read frank autobiographical accounts to each other. The club met several times a year in restaurants and in the homes of members (Furbank, E. M. Forster, 2: 66).
16. Jules Romains’s (a.k.a. Louis Henri Jean Farigoule) twenty-seven volume work, Les Hommes de bonne volonté ( The Men of Goodwill), written between 1932 and 1946, traces the story of two friends: one a writer, the other a politician.
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17. Forster’s biography of his close friend, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, was published in 1934. Their friendship developed when Forster was elected to the elite “Apostles” society during his fourth year at Cambridge in 1901.
18. Forster wrote the text for a pageant to be staged on the grounds of Abinger Hall. It was intended to aid the restoration of the village church.
19. As a result of this meeting, Mrs. Myslakowska undertook the translation of Forster’s A Passage to India into Polish.
20. The Sedition Bill targeted Communist literature, making it an offense to prop-agate literature “liable to seduce soldiers or sailors from their duty or alle-giance” (quoted in E. M. Forster, Selected Letters, 2:124n. 3.) 21. Leopold Stennett Amery (1873–1955) was the Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1924 to 1929.
22. Isherwood is working on what will become the first of his Berlin novels, Mr.
Norris Changes Trains. (The title in the U.S. edition is The Last of Mr. Norris).
23. The National Council for Civil Liberties was founded in 1934 by Ronald Kidd, a freelance journalist. The council was originally formed to monitor police misconduct at the Hunger Marches. Forster, who had become involved with the council because of his fears of growing fascism in Europe, was chosen to be president. The first major campaign of the Council was against the Sedition Bill. (Furbank, E. M. Forster, 2:186–88).
24. Forster’s biography of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.
25. The French poet, François Villon (1431–ca.1463), whose poetry drew on his sordid life as a thief and drunkard. “Honte” (French) means “disgrace” or
“shame.”
26. Dr. Norman Haire (1892–1952) was a leading figure in the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology and was president of the Sex Education Society.
He supported the reform of laws against homosexuality.
27. Claud Cockburn (1904–81) was a journalist for The Times from 1929 to 1932
and for the leftist newspaper, The Daily Worker from 1935 to 1946.
28. Paul Kryger was a Danish friend of Stephen Spender’s.
29. Isherwood and Auden’s first collaboration, The Dog Beneath the Skin.
30. Isherwood’s novel, Mr. Norris Changes Trains.
31. The top corner of the back page of the letter is covered over, obstructing the last word in each line.
32. William Congreve (1670–1729), British playwright, whose most famous play is the comedy of manners, The Way of the World (1700).
33. British poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund (Charles) Blunden. Sassoon’s anti-war poems were published in The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918). Blunden’s poems dealing with the First World War are collected in The Shepherd and Other Poems of Peace and War (1922). He also wrote an autobiographical account of the War, Undertones of War (1928).
34. Siegfried Sassoon’s mansion in Wiltshire.
35. Forster’s speech at the congress, which warned about Fascist-like developments in England, such as the Sedition Act, was rather tame for an audience that consisted mostly of young French Communists.
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36. Forster had recently returned from a visit to Isherwood in Amsterdam and he is perhaps referring to Isherwood’s attempts to obtain residency for Heinz outside of Germany.
37. Forster had the first of two operations on his prostrate in December 1935. The second operation was performed in February, 1936.
38. Stephen Spender and his companion, Tony Hyndman, are staying in Portugal with Isherwood. Spender’s brother, Humphrey is also there.
39. The Dog Beneath the Skin, published in 1935, opened in London on January 30, 1936.
40. T. E. Shaw is another name for T. E. Lawrence (who was also popularly known as “Lawrence of Arabia”).
41. The article appeared in the first edition of Abinger Harvest but was subsequently deleted.
42. Oscar Wilde’s letter of reproach to Lord Alfred Douglas, which he wrote while imprisoned in Reading, England. An edited version was published in 1905.
43. D. H. Lawrence’s novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, shocking at the time for its explicit descriptions of the sexual act, was not published in unexpurgated form in England until 1960. An edited version, without the overt sexual passages, was published in 1932.
44. H[erbert] E[rnest] Bates (1906–74), a British writer whose novels include Two Sisters (1926) and Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944). Most of his works are derived from his RAF service during World War II.
45. Elinor Glyn (1864–1943) was a British author whose romantic novels of the early twentieth century, such as Three Weeks (1907), were controversial because of their erotic content and frank depiction of female sexuality. Glyn eventually relocated to Hollywood where she wrote scripts for silent movies.
46. Isherwood is referring to the collection of short pieces that will become Goodbye to Berlin. John Lehmann published “The Nowaks,” one of Isherwood’s early Berlin stories, in the first issue of the literary magazine, New Writing, in the spring of 1936 (Parker, Isherwood, 269).
47. Maurice Magnus (1876–1920). His Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, published in 1924, contains a one hundred-page introduction by D. H. Lawrence.
48. Forster is probably referring to the Scottish novelist, Neil Gunn (1891–1973), whose works include Morning Tide (1930) and The Silver Darlings (1941). He makes a case against fascism in The Green Isle of the Great Deep (1944) and in other later works.
49. Frederic Alexander Lindermann (1886–1957), Professor of Experimental Psychology at Oxford and later an advisor to Churchill during the Second World War; Sir Arthur Salter (1881–1975), Professor of Political Theory at Oxford and M. P. for Oxford University from 1937 to 1950. One of these men was probably sitting on Forster’s right.
50. Basil Henry Liddell Hart (1895–1970) was an English military historian. His works include T. E. Lawrence: In Arabia and After (1934) and The Defence of Britain (1939).
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51. Lionel George Curtis (1872–1955), a barrister who was an influential supporter of British imperialist policy. He was Adviser on Irish Affairs in the Colonial Office from 1921 to 1924.
52. Rexism was a fascist political movement in Belgium. The Rexist party (officially, Christus Rex), founded by Léon Degrelle, a Walloon, supported the abolishment of democracy and strict adherence to Church doctrine. In the 1930s, the Rexist party aligned itself with the interests of Nazi Germany.