Searching for Technique

Abstract

Born on 26 August 1904, the first son of upper middle-class British parents, Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood spent a childhood that was mainly happy, surrounded with trappings of ease that stopped short of ostentatiousness. His father, Francis (Frank) Edward Bradshaw Isherwood, was a capable professional soldier, although temperamentally unsuited for the position, taking more pleasure from artistic, musical, and dramatic abilities, often performing in comic amateur revues. Isherwood’s mother, Kathleen Machell Smith, from a family of successful merchants, accustomed to grand social gatherings, was protected by both parents, her father in particular opposing her marriage to Frank on the grounds that he could not adequately support her. When Kathleen married, at thirty-five, she made Frank agree not to come between her and her mother; his assent may be judged by his asking Mrs Smith to join them on the second day of the honeymoon.

One sheds one’s sickness in books, repeats and presents again one’s emotions to be master of them.

—D. H. Lawrence

I think art is absolutely inseparable from truth. Any sort of concealments that you’re putting up about your life injure you as an artist just as they injure you as a person.

—Christopher Isherwood