The double life of a single man
In the late 1930s, the author W. Somerset Maugham said that Christopher Isherwood “holds the future of the English novel in his hands.” But the younger writer was about to leave London for Los Angeles. He and his close friend W.H. Auden emigrated in January 1939. En route, their ship was beset by a blizzard. It arrived in New York looking like a wedding cake, in Isherwood’s evocative description. Their journey to the New World was a wholescale rejection of what Isherwood had long thought of as “the Test.” For earlier generations, this had been the Great War (Isherwood’s father, Frank, was killed at the Battle of Ypres). For them, it was to be World War Two. Auden and Isherwood would be damned as cowards, but Isherwood had already found other interests.
