Lost Years Read Online Free

from the Land of the Dead
; April, the Los Angeles premiere of James Bridges’ production of
A Meeting by the River
; also in 1972, Isherwood receives an award from the Hollywood Writers’ Club for a lifetime of distinguished contributions to literature.
    1973 Isherwood and Bachardy travel to London for the filming of
Frankenstein
; they visit Wyberslegh and afterwards go to Switzerland and Rome; summer, they work together on a screenplay of
A Meeting by the River
; Jean Ross dies; September 29, Auden dies; October, Isherwood begins a new autobiographical book eventually titled
Christopher and His Kind
; December, Isherwood and Bachardy’s screenplay,
Frankenstein: The True Story,
is published by Avon Books.
    1975 Isherwood works with Bachardy on a TV script adapted from Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Beautiful and Damned
.
    1976 May, Isherwood completes the final draft of
Christopher and His Kind
; July 4, Swami Prabhavananda dies; November, Isherwood’s new U.S. publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux, publishes
Christopher and His Kind; Frankenstein: The True Story
wins best scenario at the International Festival of Fantastic and Science Fiction Films.
    1977 March, the U.K. edition of
Christopher and His Kind
is published by Methuen.
    1979 May 15, Richard Isherwood dies of a heart attack; Isherwood and Bachardy collaborate on
October
.
    1980
My Guru and His Disciple
is published in the U.S. and the U.K.; July 16, Isherwood hears that Bill Caskey is dead;
October,
with drawings by Bachardy, is published.
    1981 October, Isherwood learns that he has a malignant tumor in the prostate.
    1983 July, Isherwood makes his last diary entry.
    1986 January 4, Isherwood dies in Santa Monica.

Lost Years
A Memoir 1945–1951
Christopher Isherwood
Edited and Introduced by
Katherine Bucknell

Introduction
    On his sixty-seventh birthday, August 26, 1971, Christopher Isherwood began to write the autobiographical memoir which is contained in this volume, about his life in California and New York and his travels abroad to England and Europe from January 1945 to May 1951. He called the work a reconstructed diary, and he intended it to recapture a lost period following World War II when he had all but abandoned his lifelong habit of keeping a diary. He based the reconstructed diary on his memories and on what he called his “day-to-day diaries,” the pocket-sized appointment books in which he regularly noted the names of people he saw on a given day and sometimes, cryptically, what they had done together. 1 He also drew on the handful of diary entries he did make during the lost years 2 and on letters he had written at the time (he asked for some letters to be returned to him for reference), and he consulted a few friends for their own recollections. The reconstructed diary, never completed by Isherwood but also never destroyed, is now published for the first time as
Lost Years: A Memoir 1945–1951
.
    Like his earlier autobiography about the 1920s,
Lions and Shadows
(1938),
Lost Years
describes the relationships and experiences which gave inner shape to Isherwood’s life during the period it portrays, but in contrast to
Lions and Shadows,
the memoir begun in 1971 is based as closely as possible on fact. Unlike Isherwood’s other diaries, kept contemporaneously with the events they recorded, the manuscript of the reconstructed diary shows many alterations, often using white-out. Moreover, it is heavily annotated with Isherwood’s own footnotes, which comment, correct, and elaborate on his narrative. With a scholarly precision he might have mocked when studying history at Cambridge in the 1920s, he sharply scrutinized and questioned his memories, trying to establish exactly what happened and to understand why.
    Lions and Shadows
had aimed to entertain and was prefaced by Isherwood’s disclaimer that “it is not, in the ordinary journalistic sense of the word, an autobiography; it contains no