Sansom, William (1912–1976) . British writer, born in London. Sansom travelled in Europe during the 1930s and wrote stories about the Blitz when he was in the London Fire Service during the war; these were published in 1944
as Fireman Flower. Afterwards he published many further volumes of stories, and he also wrote travel books and novels, including The Body (1949) and The Cautious Heart (1958).
Sarada. “Sarada” Folling was a young nun at the Vedanta Center when Isherwood arrived in Hollywood in 1939. She was of Norwegian descent, had Glossary
347
studied music and dance, and while at the center learned Sanskrit. Her father lived in New Mexico. Sarada later moved to the convent at Santa Barbara where Isherwood occasionally saw her. She was a favorite of Prabhavananda, who gave her the Sanskrit name Sarada, but eventually left the Vedanta Society rather suddenly after becoming interested in men. Thereafter, Prabhavananda forbade her name to be mentioned to him. Isherwood tells about her in D 1.
Saroyan, William (1908–1981) . American writer of Armenian parentage, born in Fresno, California. Saroyan turned down a Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time of Your Life (1939). Other plays include My Heart’s in the Highlands (1939), Love’s Old Sweet Song (1941), The Beautiful People (1941), Get Away Old Man (1944), and The Cave Dwellers (1957). He also published many volumes of short fiction, and his novels include The Human Comedy (1943), The Adventures of Wesley Jackson (1946), Rock Wagram (1951), Mama, I Love You (1956), Papa, You’re Crazy (1957), Boys and Girls Together (1963), and One Day in the Afternoon of the World (1964). Some of his novels and plays were made into films: The Human Comedy (1943) won an Academy Award. From the 1950s onward, Saroyan turned increasingly to autobiography and memoirs.
Schindler, Mr. and Mrs. German actor and his wife. He had worked with Max Reinhardt in Europe. Isherwood met them when they arrived at the Haverford refugee hostel, via an Italian concentration camp, in March 1942; he records in D 1 that they left Haverford by the end of June.
Schlee, George. New York financier of Russian background. Schlee met Greta Garbo towards the end of the 1930s at his wife Valentina’s New York dress shop, and the three became involved in a long-running ménage à trois.
In the late 1940s, Garbo bought an apartment in the Schlees’ building on East 52nd Street, and when Schlee died in his sleep in 1964, he was in a suite adjoining Garbo’s at the Hotel Crillon in Paris.
Scott-Kilvert, Ian. British cultural administrator. He matriculated at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, in 1936 as a classicist but changed to English and took his B.A. in 1940. Afterwards he became Head of the Recorded Sound Department at the British Council. He appears as “Graham” in Lions and Shadows.
Searle, Ronald (b. 1920) . English artist and cartoonist. He created the St.
Trinian’s schoolgirls and achieved more serious recognition for the drawings he made while held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese during World War II.
He was for many years a theatrical illustrator for Punch, contributed to The New Yorker and The New York Times among other publications, and had numerous one-man gallery shows. Later he also designed animated films and film sequences.
Shankara. Hindu religious philosopher and saint (of between the sixth and eighth centuries AD), widely recognized as an emanation of Shiva. Shankara wrote commentaries on the Brahma Sutras, the principal Upanishads, and other religious texts, as well as philosophy, poems, hymns, and prayers. Much of his work is not attributed with authority. He probably organized the Hindu mendicant orders.
348
Glossary
Shearer, Moira (b. 1926) . Scottish-born ballet dancer and, later, actress. She also became a writer, publishing biographies of Balanchine and of Ellen Terry as well as reviewing books. See also Ludovic Kennedy, her husband.
Shivananda, Swami (d. 1934). Hindu monk; a direct disciple of Ramakrishna.
Shivananda was originally named Tarak Nath Ghoshal, and his father was legal advisor to a rani. He met Ramakrishna in 1880, when he was about twenty-six, and though he afterwards married, he remained celibate and eventually renounced the world to live as a monk. After Ramakrishna’s death, there followed a period of wandering; then Shivananda founded a Ramakrishna monastery at Benares, and in 1922 he became President of the Ramakrishna Order.
Sister Lalita (Sister) (d. 1949) . Carrie Mead Wykoff, an American widow, met Vivekananda on one of his U.S. lecture tours and became a disciple of Swami Turiyananda (another direct disciple of Ramakrishna). Turiyananda gave her the name Sister Lalita. In 1929 she invited Swami Prabhavananda to live in her house in Hollywood and within a decade they had gathered a congregation and built the Hollywood temple in her garden. She appears in D 1.
Smedley, Agnes (1892–1950) . American journalist and author; a radical advocate of feminist, communist and nationalist causes. She was involved in Margaret Sanger’s birth control movement and was jailed for her role in trying to organize an overseas Indian independence movement. During the 1920s she lived in and wrote about Weimar Germany. Smedley was helpful to Isherwood and W. H. Auden when they met her in Hankow in March 1938. She spent nearly a decade there organizing medical supplies for Mao’s Eighth Route Army, writing a book about the army, and writing for German and American newspapers about the antifascist struggle in China. She had many Chinese contacts and she was also a willing go-between for the U.S. government; she was frequently at the U.S. Embassy and was friendly with American officials.
Smedley died under the accusation of being a Soviet spy.
Snow, Edgar (1905–1972) . American author; born and educated in Missouri.
Snow began his career as a reporter. He went to China in 1928 and became correspondent there for several U.S. and British papers. In 1936 he was the first correspondent to interview Mao Tse-tung. During World War II he covered Asia and later Europe, and he was the first correspondent to enter liberated Vienna. Afterwards he travelled widely as a special correspondent for various newspapers and magazines. Snow wrote a number of books about Chinese and Soviet communism; among the best known is Red Star Over China (1937). He also made a documentary film about China at the end of the 1960s. Isherwood and W. H. Auden mention Snow in their foreword to Journey to a War because he helped them with information and introductions for their China trip.
Sorel, Paul (b. 1918) . American painter, of midwestern background; his real name is Karl Dibble. Sorel was a close friend of Chris Wood, and lived with him in Laguna in the early 1940s. He moved out in 1943 after disagreements about money and in 1944 went to New York for a time, then intermittently returned. Chris Wood continued to support Sorel for the rest of Wood’s life, Glossary
349
though they did not live together at all after 1953. Sorel is also described in D 1.
Sorokine, Natasha. White Russian intellectual, raised in France where she and her parents were officially stateless. At her lycée, she was taught by Simone de Beauvoir, befriended her and became part of de Beauvoir and Sartre’s intimate circle during the war. De Beauvoir described their friendship in her memoirs La Force de l’âge (1960) and Tout compte fait (1972), thinly disguising Natasha as “Lise Oblanoff.” (In fact, de Beauvoir and Sartre called her Nathalie and, according to Ivan Moffat, also addressed her as Sarbakhane––after a West African trumpet of great length and exotic design.) According to de Beauvoir, Sorokine’s interest in philosophy led her to pursue a degree at the Sorbonne during the war. During the same period, she became romantically involved with a student of Sartre’s, a young Spanish Jew who was arrested and killed by the Nazis near the end of the war, leaving her devastated. Not long afterwards, she met and married Ivan Moffat, joining him in California. They had a daughter, Lorna Moffat, but the marriage did not succeed, and Sorokine struggled to make a living. She wrote, taught French, worked in a kinder-garten, waitressed, and studied law. Her fiction was never published. She married a second time, to a physicist Sidney Benson, with whom she had a son and adopted a daughter, but she was plagued by ill health and mental instability.