- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
-
Foreword Outside the Frame -
Introduction An American Outsider -
I A Single Man and Los Angeles Culture in the 1960s -
1 A Single Man and the American Maurice -
2 Labor of Love -
3 Working through Grief in the Drafts of A Single Man -
4 Writing the Unspeakable in A Single Man and Mrs. Dalloway -
5 A Whole without Transcendence -
6 Ford Does Isherwood -
7 A Real Diamond -
II The Religious Writer -
8 Isherwood and the Psycho-geography of Home -
9 Isherwood and Huxley -
10 Down Where on a Visit? -
11 A Phone Call by the River -
12 “Give Me Devotion … Even Against My Will” -
13 Spiritual Searching in Isherwood’s Artistic Production -
III A Writer at Odds with Himself in Cold War America -
14 Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward -
15 Huxley and Isherwood: The California Years -
16 The Celebrity Effect -
17 A Writer at Work -
18 Pulp Isherwood -
19 Not Satisfied with the Ending - Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Index
A Phone Call by the River
A Phone Call by the River
- Chapter:
- (p.155) 11 A Phone Call by the River
- Source:
- The American Isherwood
- Author(s):
Paul M. McNeil
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
This chapter offers a reading of Christopher Isherwood’s final novel, A Meeting by the River (1967), which explores the moral challenges he had glimpsed dimly between 1940 and 1951. In a letter from Oliver to Patrick, the reader is introduced to two English brothers. Oliver writes from Calcutta, where he lives in a Hindu monastery a few miles outside the city, on the bank of the Ganges. Patrick is in the United States on business, working on a film project in Los Angeles. Oliver’s conversion is at the heart of the story. His journal entries tell of the struggles he confronts as he strives to realize “the ideal of moksa.” They also record Oliver’s perception of Patrick’s “enlightenment.” Patrick’s letters, however, subvert this conventional reading altogether, telling a different story about a darker side of Vedanta. In particular, his musings on bisexuality and marriage fit into Isherwood’s larger, critical examination of Vedanta.
Keywords: novel, Christopher Isherwood, A Meeting by the River, conversion, moksa, enlightenment, Vedanta, bisexuality, marriage
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
-
Foreword Outside the Frame -
Introduction An American Outsider -
I A Single Man and Los Angeles Culture in the 1960s -
1 A Single Man and the American Maurice -
2 Labor of Love -
3 Working through Grief in the Drafts of A Single Man -
4 Writing the Unspeakable in A Single Man and Mrs. Dalloway -
5 A Whole without Transcendence -
6 Ford Does Isherwood -
7 A Real Diamond -
II The Religious Writer -
8 Isherwood and the Psycho-geography of Home -
9 Isherwood and Huxley -
10 Down Where on a Visit? -
11 A Phone Call by the River -
12 “Give Me Devotion … Even Against My Will” -
13 Spiritual Searching in Isherwood’s Artistic Production -
III A Writer at Odds with Himself in Cold War America -
14 Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward -
15 Huxley and Isherwood: The California Years -
16 The Celebrity Effect -
17 A Writer at Work -
18 Pulp Isherwood -
19 Not Satisfied with the Ending - Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Index
