& Before the modern hillside residence, and three hundred and ten days of sunshine a year in Santa Monica, Christopher Isherwood was an undergraduate at Corpus Christi. , his 1938 novel, describes the “macabre” university city as a site of “perpetual darkness” – apt, perhaps, in this grey, post-Euros summer. But for all its fine weather, even Santa Monica was at first reproached in a letter to E.
M. Forster as a “thin, noisy tone-film of fast cars [and] advertisements”; Isherwood would “stay for the present” or else join “an ambulance corps” (in fact, he stayed for the rest of his life.) But freedom is insisted upon: a self-described “foreigner by temperament”, Isherwood lived in motion, ejecting himself from Cambridge without a degree by writing gibberish on his exam papers.
He was always moving on. He touched more lives than can be counted. The worlds he visited never forgot him.
“His 1938 novel describes the ‘macabre’ university city as a site of ‘perpetual darkness’ – apt, perhaps, in this grey, post-Euros summer” That first “macabre” city is no different. To mark the centenary of his matriculation, the Parker Library’s ‘Isherwood in Cambridge’ exhibition pleasingly synthesised eclectic displays from Isherwood’s student days with more contemporary-inspired work. As curators, Eliza Haughton-Shaw and Conrad Steel faced the not-so-simple question of how to present an exhibition that the subject “would almost certainly have.