Glossary
1930s. Hyndman ran away from his working-class home in Wales at eighteen and spent three years in the army before becoming unemployed and meeting Spender. He split with Spender in the autumn of 1936, became a communist, joined the International Brigade, and went to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
In Spain, he was greatly disillusioned and became a pacifist. He deserted and was imprisoned, but eventually Spender, who had followed him to Spain, obtained his release. Hyndman appears as “Jimmy Younger” in Spender’s World Within World and in Christopher and His Kind.
Ince, Thomas (1882–1924) . American film director and producer. Ince moved from stage and vaudeville to become an important figure in the early film industry. The studios he built at Culver City in 1916 evolved into MGM and the company, Triangle, which he formed with two other partners, D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett, eventually became United Artists. His later films were released through Adolph Zukor. Ince became mortally ill while on board William Randolph Hearst’s yacht Oneida; his death two days later was attributed to heart failure resulting from severe indigestion, but rumor suggested that Hearst shot Ince, either because he suspected Ince of having an affair with Marion Davies or because Hearst suspected Charlie Chaplin, also on board the yacht, of having an affair with Davies and shot Ince when he mistook him for Chaplin.
Isherwood, Henry Bradshaw. Isherwood’s uncle (his father’s elder brother).
In 1924 Uncle Henry inherited Marple Hall and the family estates on the death of Isherwood’s grandfather, John Bradshaw Isherwood. Though he married late in life (changing his name to Bradshaw-Isherwood-Bagshawe in honor of his wife), Uncle Henry had no children; thus, Isherwood was his heir, and for a time after Isherwood’s twenty-first birthday he received a quarterly allowance from his uncle. The two had an honest if self-interested friendship, occasionally dining together and sharing intimate details of their personal lives. When Henry Isherwood died in 1940, Isherwood at once passed on the entire inheritance to his own younger brother, Richard Isherwood.
Isherwood, Kathleen Bradshaw (1868–1960) . Isherwood’s mother. The only child of Frederick Machell Smith, a successful wine merchant, and Emily Greene, Kathleen was born and lived until sixteen in Bury St. Edmunds, then moved with her parents to London. She travelled abroad, mostly with her mother, and helped her mother to write a guidebook for walkers, Our Rambles in Old London (1895). She married Frank Isherwood in 1903 when she was thirty-five years old. They had two sons, Isherwood, and his much younger brother, Richard. After the second battle of Ypres in May 1915, Kathleen was told her husband (by then a colonel in the York and Lancasters) was missing, but it was many months before his death was officially confirmed, and she never obtained definite information about how he died. Isherwood’s portrait of her in Kathleen and Frank is partly based on her own letters and diaries (he regarded the latter as her masterpiece), but heavily shaped by his attitude towards her. She was also the original for the fictional character “Lily” in The Memorial. Isherwood mentions her throughout D 1.
Like many mothers of her class and era, Kathleen consigned her sons to the care of their nanny from infancy and later sent Isherwood to boarding school.
Glossary
323
Her husband’s death affected her profoundly, which Isherwood sensed and resented from an early age. Their relationship was intimate and mutually tender in Isherwood’s boyhood, increasingly fraught and formal as he grew older. Like her husband, Kathleen was a talented amateur painter. She was intelligent, forceful, handsome, dignified, and capable of great charm. Isherwood felt she was obsessed by class distinctions and propriety. As the surviving figure of authority in his family, she epitomized everything against which he wished to rebel. Her intellectual aspirations were narrow and traditional, despite her intelligence, and she seemed to him increasingly backward looking. Nonetheless, she was utterly loyal to both of her notably unconventional sons and, as Isherwood himself recognized, she shared many qualities with him.
Isherwood, Richard Graham Bradshaw (1911–1979) . Christopher Isherwood’s brother and his only sibling. Younger by seven years, Richard Isherwood was also backward in life. He was reluctant to be educated, and never held a job in adulthood, although he did wartime national service as a farmworker at Wyberslegh and at another farm nearby, Dan Bank. In childhood Richard saw little of his elder brother who was sent to boarding school by the time Richard was three. The two brothers became closer during Richard’s adolescence, when Isherwood was sometimes at home in London and took his brother’s side against their mother’s efforts to advance Richard’s education and settle him in a career. During this period Richard met some of Isherwood’s friends and even helped Isherwood with his work by taking dictation. Richard was homosexual, but he seems to have had little opportunity to develop any longterm relationships, hampered as he was by his mother’s scrutiny and his own shyness.
In 1941, Richard returned permanently with his mother and nanny to Wyberslegh––signed over to him by Isherwood with the Marple estate––
where he lived, more and more, as an eccentric semi-recluse. There are further passages about him in D 1. After Kathleen Isherwood’s death in 1960, Richard depended upon a local family, the Bradleys. He had become friends with Alan Bradley after the war when Bradley was working at Wyberslegh Farm, and Bradley and his wife, Edna, cared for Richard when Kathleen died. Later, Bradley’s brother, Dan Bradley, took over the role with his wife, Evelyn (Richard referred to them as the Dans). Richard was by then a heavy drinker.
Marple Hall fell into ruin and became dangerous, and Richard was forced to hand it over to the local council which demolished it in 1959, building houses and a school on the grounds. He lived in one of several new houses built beside Wyberslegh, with the Dans in a similar house next door to him, and when Richard died he left most of the contents of his house to the Dans and the house itself to their daughter and son-in-law. Richard’s will also provided for money bequests to the Dans, Alan Bradley, and other local friends. Family property and other money was left to Isherwood and to a cousin, Thomas Isherwood, but Isherwood refused the property and passed his share of money to the Dans.
j a p a m . A method for achieving spiritual focus in Vedanta by repeating one of the names for God, usually the name that is one’s own mantra; sometimes the repetitions are counted on a rosary. The rosary of the Ramakrishna Order has 324
Glossary
108 beads plus an extra bead, representing the guru, which hangs down with a tassel on it; at the tassel bead, the devotee reverses the rosary and begins counting again. For each rosary, the devotee counts one hundred repetitions towards his own spiritual progress and eight for mankind. Isherwood always used a rosary when making japam.
Jay. See de Laval, Jay.
John, Augustus (1878–1961) . English painter, trained at the Slade during the 1890s. His most admired work was produced during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and he is remembered above all for his portraits, especially of literary figures including Hardy, Yeats, Shaw, Dylan Thomas, T. E. Lawrence, Joyce, and Joyce’s friend Oliver Gogarty. John knew many other writers, and led a flamboyantly bohemian life involving numerous affairs and children out of wedlock. He is said to be the model for characters in various novels of his period.
Johnson, Celia (1908–1982) . British actress, primarily on the stage. She made her film debut in Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942) and is best known for her role in his Brief Encounter (1945). She also appeared in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968) and continued to act on stage and television until near the end of her life.