1963 During the winter and early spring, Bachardy considers living alone; October, Isherwood finishes draft of Ramakrishna and His Disciples; October 21, Isherwood sends final draft of A Single Man to both his U.S. and U.K.
publishers; November 22, Aldous Huxley dies; December, Isherwood travels via Japan to India with Swami Prabhavananda and thinks for the first time of writing A Meeting by the River.
1964 January, Isherwood returns from India via Rome and New York and begins final draft of Ramakrishna and His Disciples; February, he starts to gather material for Exhumations; March, Isherwood begins working on The Loved One with Terry Southern; meets David Hockney; during the summer, Bachardy travels to North Africa, Europe, and London; July–September, Isherwood works on screenplay of Reflections in a Golden Eye; A Single Man is published in the U.S. by Simon and Schuster and, on September 10, in the U.K. by Methuen; September–December, Isherwood works on screenplay of The Sailor from Gibraltar.
Chronology
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1965 January 6, Bachardy leaves for a further long spell in New York, visiting several times during the year; Isherwood finishes The Sailor from Gibraltar and Exhumations; early February, Isherwood takes up post as Regent’s Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA); spring, he begins writing A Meeting by the River; April 8, Ramakrishna and His Disciples is published by Methuen and appears in the U.S. during the summer; November 1, he begins Hero-Father, Demon-Mother (Kathleen and Frank).
1966 Spring, Isherwood is visiting professor at UCLA; Gerald Heard has the first of many strokes; Exhumations is published in the U.S. and the U.K.; May 31, Isherwood completes third draft of A Meeting by the River; July, he agrees to work on Silent Night with Danny Mann for ABC television, travels with Mann to Austria in September for filming; October, Isherwood visits England and stays with his brother at Wyberslegh where he reads his father’s letters; November, Cabaret, Fred Ebb and John Kander’s stage musical based on I Am a Camera, opens in New York, produced by Hal Prince.
1967 January, Isherwood begins working in more earnest on the book which eventually will be called Kathleen and Frank; spring, he corrects proofs of A Meeting by the River which is published in April in the U.S. and in June in the U.K.; May, he returns to England to look at family papers at Wyberslegh for Kathleen and Frank, carrying some back to California with him; also in 1967, Isherwood works with James Bridges on a play of A Meeting by the River.
1968 Isherwood adapts Bernard Shaw’s novella The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God for the stage, and also adapts Wedekind’s Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box; Bachardy again spends time in London and in New York; spring, Hockney begins work on a double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy; October, Isherwood again begins writing Kathleen and Frank; also during 1968, Isherwood and Bachardy work together on the play of A Meeting by the River.
1969 The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God opens at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles; July, Isherwood and Bachardy travel to Tahiti, Bora Bora, Samoa, New Zealand and Australia and begin work on a screenplay of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God for Tony Richardson; also in 1969, Essentials of Vedanta is published.
1970 February–April, in London together, Isherwood and Bachardy continue to work on stage version of A Meeting by the River; Isherwood sends final draft of Kathleen and Frank to U.S. and U.K. publishers; also in 1970, E. M. Forster dies, leaving Isherwood the rights to Maurice.
1971 Isherwood completes revisions to Kathleen and Frank; February, Isherwood and Bachardy start work on a TV script of Frankenstein for Universal Studios; April 6, Stravinsky dies; August 14, Gerald Heard dies; August 26, Isherwood begins writing reconstructed diary of the “lost years,” 1945–1951; October, Kathleen and Frank is published by Methuen; also in 1971, Isherwood undergoes hand surgery for Depuytren’s contracture.
1972 January, Isherwood sees preview of film Cabaret, based on the musical, and the U.S. edition of Kathleen and Frank is published by Simon and Schuster; Isherwood and Bachardy undertake another TV script for Universal, The Lady 298
Chronology
from the Land of the Dead; April, the Los Angeles premiere of James Bridges’
production of A Meeting by the River; also in 1972, Isherwood receives an award from the Hollywood Writers’ Club for a lifetime of distinguished contributions to literature.
1973 Isherwood and Bachardy travel to London for the filming of Frankenstein; they visit Wyberslegh and afterwards go to Switzerland and Rome; summer, they work together on a screenplay of A Meeting by the River; Jean Ross dies; September 29, Auden dies; October, Isherwood begins a new autobiographical book eventually titled Christopher and His Kind; December, Isherwood and Bachardy’s screenplay, Frankenstein: The True Story, is published by Avon Books.
1975 Isherwood works with Bachardy on a TV script adapted from Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned.
1976 May, Isherwood completes the final draft of Christopher and His Kind; July 4, Swami Prabhavananda dies; November, Isherwood’s new U.S.
publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux, publishes Christopher and His Kind; Frankenstein: The True Story wins best scenario at the International Festival of Fantastic and Science Fiction Films.
1977 March, the U.K. edition of Christopher and His Kind is published by Methuen.
1979 May 15, Richard Isherwood dies of a heart attack; Isherwood and Bachardy collaborate on October.
1980 My Guru and His Disciple is published in the U.S. and the U.K.; July 16, Isherwood hears that Bill Caskey is dead; October, with drawings by Bachardy, is published.
1981 October, Isherwood learns that he has a malignant tumor in the prostate.
1983 July, Isherwood makes his last diary entry.
1986 January 4, Isherwood dies in Santa Monica.
Glossary
This glossary does not include entries for people adequately introduced by Isherwood himself in his text, nor does it incorporate information from the text. Readers should use the index to locate Isherwood’s own descriptions.
Ackerley, J. R. (1896–1967) . English author and editor. Ackerley wrote drama, poetry, and autobiography, and is known for his intimate relationship with his dog, described in two of his autobiographical books. He was literary editor of The Listener from 1935 to 1959, and published work by some of the best and most important writers of his period; Isherwood contributed numerous reviews during the thirties. Their friendship was sustained in later years partly by their shared acquaintance with E. M. Forster.
Adorno, Theodor (1903–1969) . German philosopher. In 1933, he emigrated to Oxford and then to the U.S. where he became friends with Thomas Mann; later, he returned to his academic career in Frankfurt. Adorno was a critic of phenomenology, existentialism, and neo-positivism. He also wrote about music, language, and literature.
Agee, James (1909–1955). American poet, novelist, journalist, and screenwriter; born in Tennessee and educated at Harvard. Agee’s first book was a 1934
volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He became famous for his collaboration with the photographer Walker Percy on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), about Alabama sharecroppers during the Depression (an assignment rejected by Fortune magazine). Later he wrote two semi-autobiographical novels, The Morning Watch (1951) and A Death in the Family (1957), the second of which was published posthumously and won a Pulitzer Prize (it won another Pulitzer when adapted for the stage as All the Way Home). Agee was on the staff of Time as well as Fortune, and he became widely known as a film critic.