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both before and after this visit. Heinz’s conscription first turned Isherwood towards pacifism. Their shared wanderings are described in Christopher and His Kind and their friendship also serves as one basis for the “Waldemar” section of Down There on a Visit. He is sometimes mentioned in D 1.
Nin, Anaïs (1903–1977) . American writer. Nin was born just outside Paris, raised in New York from age eleven, and spent most of the 1920s and 1930s back in Paris seeking out the company of writers, intellectuals, and bohemians.
She was a model, a dancer, and a teacher, and later became a psychoanalyst, as well as writing novels, short stories, and literary criticism. She is now best known for her six-volume Diary which began to appear in the 1960s and which tells, among other things, about her Parisian friendship with Henry Miller. She had many love affairs and was married twice. Her second husband, Rupert Pole, is a stepgrandson of Frank Lloyd Wright. By the 1970s the pair had settled in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles in a house designed by Wright’s grandson, Eric Lloyd Wright.
Norment, Caroline. American Quaker relief worker and administrator.
Norment was director of the American Friends Service Committee’s Cooperative College Workshop, the refugee hostel in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where Isherwood worked as a volunteer during the war. She was in her fifties when Isherwood first met her in late summer 1941. She had previously done relief work in Russia and Germany, and she had also served as Dean of Women at Antioch College in Ohio. As he mentions in Lost Years, Isherwood wondered whether Norment somehow attracted or unconsciously caused fires.
In his wartime diaries he had recorded for April 30, 1942 that there was a bad fire at the hostel, Norment’s fifth. In two earlier fires she had lost most of her possessions; later, there were two more near fires also at the hostel (D 1, pp.
212–14). Norment is the original of Sarah Pennington in The World in the Evening; Isherwood took the character’s first name from the actress Sara Allgood, whom Norment resembled.
Novak, Alvin (b. 1928) . American pianist, born in Chicago. He moved to Los Angeles as a teenager with his family, and his father died shortly afterwards.
Novak put himself through college at UCLA, where he studied philosophy and met other members of The Benton Way Group with whom he became closely involved. At twenty-six, when he graduated, he began a new life in New York, developing his gift for the piano into a professional career as a teacher and performer. Later he lived increasingly on Long Island, organizing concerts in the Hamptons as well as teaching and performing there.
Obin, Philomé (1891–1986) . Haitian painter. Obin was an important figure in the Haitian art movement and one of the first to apply to the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince in the early 1940s. He was a devout Protestant, and reportedly prayed and sang hymns while he painted; among his important works were a Crucifixion and a Last Supper for the Saint-Trinité Episcopal Cathedral in Port-au-Prince.
Ocampo, Victoria. Argentine writer, critic, editor, and publisher. She owned and edited Sur (South), the international literary magazine for which Isherwood had agreed, a few years before he met her, to assemble the work of 338
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some modern writers to be translated into Spanish. She also ran her own small publishing house––Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf were among the contemporary writers she introduced to her Argentine audience.
Her background was privileged and traditional, and she was celebrated as a beauty in her youth, but she was bohemian and an outspoken feminist who preferred to write in French rather than Spanish. During the 1950s she was imprisoned by the Perón regime. She was a close friend of Maria Rosa Oliver, who helped her with Sur, and of Tota Cuevas de Vera. In early 1948, Isherwood and Caskey visited the three of them in Buenos Aires and in the nearby seaside resort, Mar del Plata.
O’Hara, John (1905–1970) . American journalist, short story writer, and novelist, from Pennsylvania. Many of his books were later reworked as movies, including Butterfield 8 (published 1935, filmed 1960), A Rage to Live (1949, filmed 1965), and Ten North Frederick (1955, filmed 1958). Pal Joey (1940) was adapted for the stage as a musical comedy by O’Hara himself with Rodgers and Hart, who wrote songs for it which are still well-known, such as “My Funny Valentine” and “The Lady Is a Tramp.” It was filmed in 1957.
O’Keeffe, Georgia (1887–1986) . American painter. Raised on a farm in Wisconsin, she studied art in Chicago and New York early in the century and was a pioneer of American modernism. Her early work was abstract; later she became more figurative, painting townscapes and landscapes as well as the flower and plant forms for which she is most widely known. O’Keeffe married the photographer Alfred Stieglitz in 1924. He had promoted the work of European artists such as Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Brancusi and later of American artists, including O’Keeffe, in a series of New York galleries from just after the turn of the century. Camera Work, which Isherwood mentions, was published from his first gallery and eventually included not only photography, but all the visual arts, as well as criticism, reviews, and new American writing. O’Keeffe wintered in New Mexico from the 1930s and settled there in 1946 after Stieglitz died, although from the 1950s she began to travel widely.
Old, Vernon (not his real name). American painter; raised in New York City and New England and educated partly at Catholic boarding school.
Isherwood met Vernon Old in 1938 when first visiting New York, and Vernon featured in Isherwood’s decision to return to New York in 1939. They moved to Los Angeles together that spring, but split up by mutual agreement in February 1941. Vernon then lived unsteadily on his own, working on his painting. He could not return to his family as his parents were divorced and he did not like his mother’s second husband. During the war, he tried to become a monk, first in a Catholic monastery in the Hudson Valley and later at the Hollywood Vedanta Center and at Ananda Bhavan, another center which became the Sarada Convent, in Montecito. Later, he married and had a son before divorcing. His painting career was increasingly successful, and in the late 1950s he tutored Don Bachardy. He appears in Christopher and His Kind and in My Guru and His Disciple (as “Vernon,” without a surname) and in D 1.
Oliver, Maria Rosa. Argentine intellectual. Isherwood first met her during Glossary
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the war when she visited Hollywood in August 1944 with an introduction from Lincoln Kirstein. She asked Isherwood to find contemporary writers whose work could be translated into Spanish for her friend Victoria Ocampo’s literary magazine, Sur. When Isherwood and Caskey saw her in Argentina early in 1948, Caskey photographed her for The Condor and the Cows. Oliver’s legs were partly paralyzed, and she was confined to a wheelchair.
Ouspenskaya’s school. The School of Dramatic Arts founded by Maria Ouspenskaya (1876–1949), a Russian actress who first arrived in Hollywood with the Stanislavsky troupe in 1923.