Wescott, Glenway (1901–1987) . American writer. Wescott was born in Wisconsin, attended the University of Chicago, lived in France in the 1920s, partly in Paris, and travelled in Europe and England. Afterwards he lived in New York. Early in his career he wrote poetry and reviews, later turning to fiction. His best-known works are The Pilgrim Hawk (1940) and Apartment in Athens (1945). He was President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from 1957 to 1961. From the late 1930s, Wescott, his longterm companion Monroe Wheeler, and George Platt Lynes shared a country house in New Jersey.
Whale, James (1886–1957) . British actor and stage and film director. Whale’s film career began when he arrived in Hollywood in 1930 to direct Journey’s End, which he had produced for the stage in London and New York. He went on to make other movies, including Frankenstein with Boris Karloff (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein with Karloff and Elsa Lanchester (1935), Showboat (1936), and The Man in the Iron Mask (1939). He retired in 1941 to paint, then in 1949
tried to make another film, but it was never released.
White, J. Alan. British publisher. He joined Methuen in 1924, became a director in 1933 and retired as Chairman in 1969. He brought many new writers to the firm (which had already published Conrad and James), emphasizing the importance of taking risks on new talent. During the war, he was exempted from military service even though he was only thirty-five because his boss, C. W. Chamberlain, said he could not run the firm without him. White moved his family to Kent and commuted to London to struggle with paper and labor shortages and wartime printing regulations; at night he served in the Home Guard. Prater Violet, published in New York in 1945 but delayed in England until the spring of 1946, was Isherwood’s first publication with Methuen. White got the book for his new postwar list simply by offering Isherwood more money than any other English publisher. Methuen remained Isherwood’s U.K. publisher for the rest of Isherwood’s life, and posthumously, until 1998 when Random House attempted to take over the imprint which by then belonged to a larger group, Reed Books. Methuen achieved inde-362
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pendence through a management buy-out, but permitted Isherwood to go to Chatto & Windus at Random House. (Random House was already publishing Isherwood’s diaries in a Vintage paperback edition; by chance, Chatto had in any case been the home since 1946 of Isherwood’s much earlier publisher, the Hogarth Press.)
Williams, Emlyn (1905–1987) . Welsh playwright and actor. Williams wrote psychological thrillers for the London stage, including Night Must Fall (1935), and is perhaps best known for The Corn Is Green (1935), based on his own background in Wales and in which he played the lead; both of these were later filmed. He acted in many other stage productions, including Shakespeare and contemporary theater. During the 1950s he toured with one-man shows of Charles Dickens and Dylan Thomas (the Dylan Thomas show was titled Growing Up). Isherwood first met Williams in Hollywood in 1950 and saw him and his wife Molly again in London and Hollywood in subsequent years.
Williams, Tennessee (1911–1983) . American playwright; Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Mississippi and raised in St. Louis. His father was a travelling salesman, his mother felt herself to be a glamorous southern belle in reduced circumstances. His essentially autobiographical play, The Glass Menagerie, made him famous in 1945, and soon afterwards he wrote A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Many of his subsequent plays are equally well-known––such as The Rose Tattoo (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1962)––and were made into films.
Williams also wrote a novella, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950). When he first came to Hollywood in 1943 to work for MGM, he bore a letter of introduction to Isherwood from Lincoln Kirstein; this began a long and close friendship, with numerous visits on both coasts, often to attend openings of Williams’s plays. There are many passages about Williams in D 1. Williams’s longtime companion, Frank Merlo, died of cancer in 1963.
Windham, Donald (b. 1920) . Novelist and playwright, from Georgia.
Windham was a friend of Lincoln Kirstein and of Glenway Wescott as well as of Paul Cadmus and George Platt Lynes, and wrote a book, Tanaquil, based on this circle of artists. Isherwood probably met him in New York early in the 1940s, certainly by 1942. Windham worked for Kirstein at Dance Index, and ran the magazine while Kirstein was away in the army during the war. He also collaborated with Tennessee Williams––a close friend––on the play You Touched Me! (1945). Isherwood wrote a blurb for Windham’s 1950 novel The Dog Star.
Winter, Ella. American author and translator. During the 1920s she translated from German The Diary of Otto Braun with Selections from His Letters and Poems and Wolfgang Koehler’s The Mentality of Apes. Her book about the Soviet Union, Red Virtue: Human Relationships in the New Russia (1933), was a bestseller. Winter’s first husband, Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936), was a journalist and author (she edited his letters), and she later married the American playwright and screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart. The Stewarts were neighbors of Salka Viertel in Santa Monica.
Winter, Keith. British novelist, playwright, and screenwriter; born in Wales, Glossary
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educated at Berkhamsted and Lincoln College, Oxford. His 1934 play, The Shining Hour, was filmed in 1938 with Joan Crawford and Margaret Sullavan (using a script by Jane Murfin and Ogden Nash), and during the 1940s Winter worked on numerous screenplays at MGM and at Warner Brothers, where Isherwood mentions being friendly with him. One of Winter’s boarding-school novels, The Rats of Norway (1932), was staged successfully in London, but flopped in New York in 1948. Winter also wrote the first movie adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, later scripted by Isherwood and Terry Southern.
Wood, Christopher (Chris) (d. 1976) . Isherwood met Chris Wood in September 1932 when W. H. Auden took him to meet Gerald Heard, then sharing Wood’s London flat. Wood was about ten years younger than Heard, handsome and friendly but shy about his maverick talents. He played the piano well, but never professionally, wrote short stories, but not for publication, had a pilot’s license and rode a bicycle for transport. He was extremely rich (the family business made jams and other canned and bottled goods), sometimes extravagant, and always generous; he secretly funded many of Heard’s projects and loaned or gave money to many other friends (including Isherwood). In 1937 Wood emigrated with Heard to Los Angeles and in 1941 moved with him to Laguna. Their domestic commitment persisted for a time despite Heard’s increasing asceticism and religious activities. Ultimately, the household disbanded as their lives diverged, though they remained friends. From 1939, Wood was involved with Paul Sorel, also a member of the household for about five years. Wood appears throughout D 1.
Worsley, Cuthbert. English writer, theater critic, and schoolmaster. T. C.
Worsley was a friend of Stephen Spender and in 1937 accompanied him to the Spanish Civil War on an assignment for the Daily Worker. Worsley returned to Spain soon afterwards to join an ambulance unit. He later wrote about this period for The Left Review and in Behind the Battle (1939), as well as in a fictionalized memoir published much later, Fellow Travellers (1971). During the 1950s he wrote about theater for the Financial Times.
Wright, Frank Lloyd (1869–1959) . American architect. A preeminent figure in twentieth-century architecture, Wright originated the organic principle that the form of a building should develop naturally from its setting, from its function, and from its materials. He began as a designer in a Chicago firm and eventually opened his own practice, first expressing his genius for spacious, open-plan interiors in his low-standing “prairie” houses. His houses in particular tended to conform to the features of the natural landscape in which they were set, but also, he was trained as a civil engineer, and he was able to apply the principles of engineering to his architectural designs. Thus, he initiated new techniques in offices and other large public buildings––such as concrete blocks reinforced with steel rods, air conditioning, indirect lighting, panel heat, and new uses of glass. In 1910, Wright established Taliesin, near Spring Green, Wisconsin. It was both his home and an architectural school (named after a sixth-century Welsh bard). Later, in 1938, he founded Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he spent the winter months and where apprentice architects also gathered to work with him. His foundation, the 364