Exhumation

This is a mix of reviews, essays and some short stories by Christopher Isherwood who wrote some novels in the thirties and a few plays, too. I doubt he’s well-known (I mean even in literary circles) today. He isn’t bad, but he’s not great, not one to last the ages. His work is like a mix between Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, without their uniqueness – in which case, you may as well just read Greene or Waugh. It’s serviceable stuff, but not outstanding.

He certainly was a twentieth century man – the usual British upbringing, then Spain and Germany in the thirties, and the US in the sixties where he became a convert to a form of Hinduism – and his work is a good reflection of this. His book reviews are interesting as historical documents; there’s a review of The Grapes of Wrath, just after it was published. And he was, of course – this is how I’d even heard of him – a great friend of Auden, so the things he writes about that poet are both pertinent and very interesting. For example, he says some of his more obscure poems were just a lot of lines from different poems put together in no particular order. Of course, it’d be more pertinent if Auden himself had said it. All in all, good enough, thoughtful enough, but not brilliant.