'Isherwood' by James J. Berg
Author Christopher Isherwood (The Berlin Stories, A Single Man) was also an accomplished public speaker. Isherwood on Writing collects a series of lectures he gave at California colleges in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. He offered intriguing thoughts on the role of the writer not merely as “the outsider,” who consciously realizes he’s in a minority, but as “the cooperative outsider,” who “tries to regard this role as socially constructive.” He spoke vividly of the distinctions between theater and cinema, and the challenges of depicting good people in literature. For him, a saint “is a person who develops through stages to an increasing self-awareness attended by a sense that all creatures and the objects of this universe are at one with the Godhead.” Drawn to Hindu and Daoist philosophy, sainthood in that sense was Isherwood’s goal as a person and a writer.
