I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am shocked to see that I am smiling. You can’t help smiling, in such beautiful weather. The trams are going up and down the Kleiststrasse, just as usual. They, and the people on the pavement, and the teacosy dome of the Nollendorfplatz station have an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the pastlike a very good photograph.
No. Even now I can’t altogether believe that any of this has really happened… .
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CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
Christopher Isherwood is one of a group of gifted writers who emerged in England in the 19.30’s. A United States citizen since 1946, he was elected a member of the (U.S.) National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1949. He lives in Santa Monica, California.
In 1929, a year after the publication of his first novel, Isherwood went to Berlin to visit W. H. Auden (his friend since boarding school days) who had been sent there by his parents to learn German. Isherwood’s Berlin period lasted four years “Hitler’s coming to power made me an honorary refugee,” he has saidand it was in Berlin that he found the materials for his famous novels The Last of Mr. Norris (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939) which, combined, became The Berlin Stories, first issued by New Directions in 1946. The play, / Am a Camera, adapted by John van Druten from The Berlin Stories, opened on Broadway in 1951, and later became a motion picture.
Isherwood’s two earlier novels, both with an English setting, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932) are now published by New Directions, as well as his autobiography, Lions and Shadows (1938). Novels written since he came to live in the United States are Prater Violet (1945), The World in the Evening (1954), Down There on a Visit (1962), and A Single Man (1964). He has published three verse plays and a travel diary (about China in 1938) in collaboration with Auden. A second travel book, The Condor and the Cows (1949), is the diary of a South American journey.
Isherwood has described himself as “a member of the Wider Quaker Fellowship and a pacifist.” He is now at work on a life of Ramakrishna, 19th century Indian saint. With Swami Prab-havananda of the Vedanta Society of Southern California he has edited two volumes of Vedanta philosophy and has translated from the Sanskrit The Bhagavad-Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga Aphorisms.