9. Paul Morand (1888–1976), French novelist and poet. He was a member of the Academie française.
10. This letter from Isherwood is not in the Forster papers and is, presumably, lost. For an excerpt of the article that appeared in Horizon, see the introduction in this book.
11. German white wine from Hockheim on the river Main.
12. This letter from Isherwood is not included in the Forster papers.
13. This letter from Isherwood is not included in the Forster papers.
14. Forster is responding to an epigram, signed “W.R.M.” (W. R. Matthews, Dean of St. Paul’s), appearing in the Spectator on June 14, 1940, which critically targets Auden and Isherwood’s desertion of England. Forster wrote a lengthy response that appeared in the Spectator on July 5, 1940. (Furbank, E. M.
Forster, 2:238). For the epigram and an excerpt of Forster’s response, see Introduction.
15. Forster’s pamphlet, What I Believe, originally titled, Two Cheers for Democracy, was published by the Hogarth Press. (The Hogarth Press was founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.)
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16. George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72); Henry James’s novel, A Portrait of a Lady (1881).
17. Robin is the son of Bob and May Buckingham and is attending school in Berkshire.
18. In his nonfiction work, The Summing Up (1938), Somerset Maugham expresses his personal views on a variety of topics.
19. Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo (1886–1978), was a Spanish writer, historian, and pacifist. Living in England during the 1930s, he organized a resistance to Franco’s dictatorship in Spain.
20. Putney is a neighborhood in southwest London.
21. Forster’s letter is actually dated October 11.
22. The “enemy aliens” were German refugees, most of whom had professional careers in Germany. Isherwood taught English at the Quaker operated hostel, which assisted refugees in finding work in the United States. (Parker, Isherwood, 431).
23. Forster’s essay, “The New Disorder,” an overview and negative assessment of current society, appeared in the December 1941 issue, vol. IV, no. 24 of Horizon.
24. Wilhelm Tell (1804), a play by the German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), is based on the Swiss legendary hero of the early four-teenth century.
25. Claudian (Claudius Claudianus), Roman poet, who lived from approximately 370 to 402 CE. Some of his works record the turbulence of the late years of the Roman Empire.
26. Gaumont-British Picture Corporation was a major film production company in Britain during the 1930s. It produced Berthold Viertel’s film, Little Friend, in 1934.
27. Salka Viertel (1889–1978), Berthold Viertel’s Polish-born first wife, was an actress (in Vienna) and a screenplay writer. The Canyon, the first novel by Peter Viertel (b. 1920), was published in 1940 and offers an adolescent boy’s view of life in Santa Monica Canyon. He later collaborated with John Huston and James Agee on the screenplay for The African Queen (1951).
28. Brian Howard (1905–58) was an English poet who, like Isherwood during the 1930s, was seeking a safe country for his German companion.
29. During the war, Cecil Day-Lewis was a publications editor at the Ministry of Information.
30. Roger Senhouse (1899–1970) was a British writer, publisher, and translator of French works by Colette and others. He was also Lytton Strachey’s lover.
31. Josef Wilpert, Die römischen mosaiken und malereien der kirchlichen bauten vom IV. Bis XIII jahrhundert [ Roman Mosaics and Paintings of the Church Buildings of the 4th to 13th Centuries], Freiburg i. Br., 1924; Hayford Peirce and Royall Tyler, L’Art Byzantine, 2 vols., Paris, 1932.
32. Torquay was a town on the south coast of England where many children who evacuated from London attended boarding schools. In June 1942 several bombs were dropped on a crowded beach.
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33. Virginia Woolf committed suicide in March 1941.
34. This bracketed phrase is Forster’s.
35. John Lehmann’s literary journal, The Penguin New Writing, published from 1940 to 1950.
36. Benjamin Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo. Britten’s life partner was the tenor, Peter Pears.
37. William Henry Beveridge (1879–1963), British economist and social reformer. His report (published in December 1942), Social Insurance and Allied Services (“The Beveridge Report”), formed the basis for the post-World War II Labor government’s Welfare State and National Health Service programs.
38. Only the second page of this letter survives.
39. Lionel Fielden (1896–1974) was a British journalist and senior producer of the BBC during the 1930s and first Controller of Broadcasting for the Indian State Broadcasting Service, whose name he changed to All India Radio in 1935.
Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525–69) was a Flemish painter whose best known works are of landscapes with peasants. Auden’s famous poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” ruminates on Brueghel’s painting, “The Fall of Icarus.”
40. Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was a Jewish Austrian writer whose works include biographies of Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette. Not wishing to live in a world increasingly overrun by Nazi Germany, he and his second wife, Lotte, committed suicide in Brazil in 1941.
41. Richard Graham Bradshaw Isherwood (1911–79) was Christopher Isherwood’s younger brother.
42. Isherwood is residing at the Vedanta Society Center in Los Angeles.
43. Max-Pol Fouchet was the editor of the French literary journal Fontaine: revue mensuelle de la poésie et des lettres françaises from November 1942 to May 1946.
The publication ceased in 1947. André Gide (1869–1951), French novelist.
44. Ulysses (1922) is the monumental modernist novel by James Joyce (1882–1941).
45. The parenthetical comment is by Forster. “Herts” is an abbreviation for Hertfordshire.
46. In 1922, Forster burned some indecent stories he had written in order to devote himself fully to writing A Passage to India. Forster maintained that he did this “not as a moral repentance but out of a feeling that the stories
‘clogged’ him artistically. They were ‘a wrong channel’ for his pen” (Furbank, E. M. Forster, 2:106).
47. Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) was a British poet who published several volumes of poetry in the 1920s.
48. La Chartreuse de Parme is a novel by the French writer, Stendhal (1783–1842).
49. Somerset Maugham’s novel, The Razor’s Edge, was published in 1945. The film of the book, starring Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney, was made in 1946.
50. “Geraldean” refers to Gerald Heard.
51. Double Lives: An Autobiography of William Plomer was published in 1943.
52. Marple Hall was Isherwood’s ancestral home in Cheshire, England.
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53. It eventually becomes the novel, Prater Violet, which was published in 1945.