Thomas, Dylan (1914–1953) . British poet, born and raised in Wales, where his father was the English master at Swansea Grammar School. Thomas began writing poetry in childhood, left school early and published his first book, 18
Poems, in 1934 while working as a journalist. In London he also worked as a scriptwriter and broadcaster for the BBC and wrote stories as well as poems.
His marriage in 1937 to Caitlin Macnamara was famously stormy and drunken, but Thomas’s work nevertheless attracted critical acclaim and a wide audience.
After the pair moved back to Wales together in 1949, he made a series of taxing reading tours through the USA because he needed the money. He died in New York of alcohol poisoning in November 1953. His Collected Poems appeared in 1952, and he completed a version of his radio play Under Milk Wood not long before he died.
Todd, Thelma (1905–1935) . American movie actress. She owned an establishment on the Pacific Coast Highway north of Santa Monica incorporating a restaurant, a gambling casino and a whorehouse, and she was murdered there. Afterwards the restaurant––named Chez Roland after Gilbert Roland with whom Todd was supposed to be in love––remained in business for many years; Isherwood always referred to it as “Thelma Todd’s.”
Tooker, George. American painter. He became Paul Cadmus’s lover after they met at the Art Students League in New York in 1942, and he was friendly with Cadmus’s circle. During the 1950s he moved to Vermont with another artist, William Christopher, and continued his career there.
Trabuco. Monastic community founded by Gerald Heard in 1942, on a ranch about sixty miles south of Los Angeles and roughly twenty miles inland. An anonymous benefactor provided $100,000 for the project, and Isherwood’s cousin, Felix Greene, administered the practical side, buying the property and constructing the building, which could house fifty. By 1949 Heard found the responsibility of leading the group too much of a strain and Trabuco was given to the Vedanta Society.
Tree, Iris (1896–1968) . English actress, poet, and playwright; third daughter of actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree. She published three volumes of poetry and wrote poems and articles for magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as Botteghe Oscure, Poetry Review, and The London Magazine. In youth she travelled with her father to Hollywood and New York and married an American, Curtis Moffat, with whom she had her first son, Ivan Moffat, born in Havana. Until 1926 she lived mostly in London and in Paris where she acted in Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle; she toured with the play back to America where she met her second husband, the Austrian Count Friedrich Ledebur, with whom she had another son, Christian Dion Ledebur (called Boon) in 1928. Iris Tree had known Aldous and Maria Huxley in London, and they Glossary
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introduced Isherwood to her in California during the war. With Alan Harkness, she brought a troupe of actors to Ojai to start The High Valley Theatre, and she adapted, wrote, and acted in plays for the group, including her own Cock-a-doodle-doo. She moved often––from house to house and country to country––and in July 1954 left California for good, settling in Rome where she worked on but never finished a novel about her youth. Her marriage to Ledebur ended in 1955. Isherwood modelled “Charlotte” in A Single Man partly on Iris Tree and wrote much about her in D 1.
Turville-Petre, Francis. English archaeologist, from an aristocratic Catholic family. Isherwood met the eccentric Turville-Petre through W. H. Auden in Berlin in 1929, and it was at Turville-Petre’s house outside Berlin that Isherwood met Heinz Neddermeyer in 1932. In 1933 when Isherwood and Heinz fled Germany, they spent nearly four months on Turville-Petre’s tiny island, St. Nicholas, in Greece. Turville-Petre is the model for “Ambrose” in Down There on a Visit.
Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. One of Hollywood’s five biggest studios. It was formed by a merger between Twentieth Century Pictures and Fox Film Corporation. Darryl F. Zanuck ran it from 1935 to 1952
and again from 1962 with his son Richard Zanuck. Alan Ladd Jr. took over in the 1970s, and Twentieth Century-Fox has since been sold and resold, eventually to Rupert Murdoch. Its many stars have included Shirley Temple and Marilyn Monroe, and Fox produced the first widescreen Cinemascope film, The Robe, in 1953, followed by other big screen spectaculars, including The King and I (1956), Cleopatra (1963), and The Sound of Music (1965).
Isherwood worked at Fox scripting Jean-Christophe in 1956 and 1957, but the film was never made.
UFOs. In June 1947 an Idaho businessman, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing through the window of his private plane, near Mt. Rainier, flying objects which he described to the press as looking like “skipping saucers.” So many more “sightings” followed around the country that the U.S. military officially investigated the possible threat to national security. In his 1950 book Is Another World Watching? (The Riddle of the Flying Saucers in the U.K.), Gerald Heard described many of these early UFO sightings. He believed they were either top secret, ultra-fast experimental aircraft which the government was covering up or, more exciting to him, visitors from Mars. Among the numerous accounts of flying saucers analyzed by the U.S. Air Force between 1947 and the mid-1950s, about ten percent of reported sightings were never accounted for. As the terminology indicates, they remain Unidentified Flying Objects. Official U.S.
investigations were abandoned in 1969.
Upward, Edward (b. 1903) . English novelist and schoolmaster. Isherwood met Upward in 1921 at their public school, Repton, and followed him to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. They were closely united by their rebellious attitude toward family and school authority and by shared literary interests. In the 1920s they created the fantasy world, Mortmere, about which they wrote surreal, macabre, and pornographic stories and poems for each other; their excited schoolboy humor is described in Lions and Shadows where 356
Glossary
Upward appears as “Allen Chalmers.”
Upward made his reputation in the 1930s with his short fiction, especially Journey to the Border (1938), the intense, almost mystical, and largely autobiographical account of a young upper-middle-class tutor’s conversion to communism. Then he published nothing for a long time, writing only fragments while he devoted himself to schoolmastering (he needed the money) and to communist party work. From 1931 to 1961 he taught at Alleyn’s School, Dulwich, where he became Head of English and a housemaster; he lived nearby with his wife, Hilda, and their two children, Kathy and Christopher.
After World War II, Upward and his wife became disillusioned by the British communist party, and they left it in 1948; but Upward never abandoned his Marxist-Leninist convictions. In the face of psychological difficulties of some magnitude, he returned to his writing in earnest towards the end of the 1950s, and eventually produced a massive autobiographical trilogy, The Spiral Ascent (1977)––comprised of In the Thirties (1962), The Rotten Elements (1969), and No Home but the Struggle. The last two volumes were written on the Isle of Wight, where Upward retired in 1962, and they have been followed by several collections of short stories. Upward remained a challenging and trusted critic of Isherwood’s work throughout Isherwood’s life, and a loyal friend. He is often mentioned in D 1.
van Druten, John (1901–1957) . English playwright and novelist. Isherwood met van Druten in New York in 1939, and they became friends because they were both pacifists. Of Dutch parentage, van Druten was born and educated in London and took a degree in law at the University of London. He achieved his first success as a playwright in New York during the 1920s, emigrated in 1938 and became a U.S. citizen in 1944. His strength was light comedy; among his numerous plays and adaptations were Voice of the Turtle (1943), I Remember Mama (1944), Bell, Book, and Candle (1950), and I Am a Camera (1951) based on Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Many of these were later filmed. In 1951, van Druten directed The King and I on Broadway. Van Druten usually spent half the year in New York and half near Los Angeles on the AJC Ranch, which he owned with Carter Lodge. He also owned a mountain cabin above Idyllwild which Isherwood sometimes used. A fall from a horse in Mexico in 1936 left van Druten with a crippled arm, and partly as a result of this, he became attracted to Vedanta and other religions (he was a renegade Christian Scientist).