ISHERWOOD IS <STRIKE>MY</STRIKE> RYAN ROSS'S SOUL

[epershand]

Meanwhile, my head was full of new shadowy tremendous ideas for an immense novel: nothing less ambitious than a survey of the post-war generation. Its scene was to be Cambridge, bohemian London, the Alps and North Wales... I made elaborate plans—all of them, intentionally, a little vague: for the truth was, the subject seemed so exciting, so wonderful, that I hardly dared to begin. It was much easier to draw diagrams in coloured chalks, beautifully shaded, with arrows, numbers and wavy lines, and pseudo-technical terms invented for the occasion, such as "fifth static area" or "Tommy-roger Motif bridge-passage to Welsea." I would wake up in the middle of the night to scribble emotionally in my note-book: "The treatment must be nearly pure Objective. The Epic Myth. In a sense, there must be no actual 'development.' Like gossip. Very slow-moving maddeningly deliberate genre-packed scenes. People's attitudes to their own Coriolanus-myth."

Lions and Shadows, p. 162

Ok, maybe my soul.

It makes me deeply sad that I am never actually going to write the ridiculous Ryan-as-Isherwood/Spencer-as-Auden story in my heart, because drawing beautiful detailed chalk diagrams for it is *so fun.* Sigh.

VITAL ETA:
epershand: ...I just misheard an MCR lyric and thought it was about Ruskin
WOW /o\
oliviacirce: LOLOLOL
what lyric?
epershand: looking it up
I thought "Gonna take off all my skin" was "Gonna [mumble] Ruskin"
in My Way Home is Through You
oliviacirce: hahahah
oh man, but what if your way home WAS through Ruskin
that would be...worrying
but I would read that AU
epershand: right?
I have been reading Isherwood, so I am in a ridiculous headspace
oliviacirce: PRE-RAPHAELITE AU
it is not really as good as the bloomsbury AU, but it does have potential
epershand: no, I just want gerard in the bloomsbury AU to say ridic things about Ruskin
oliviacirce: that's fair
I was thinking about Ryan Ross being Christina Rossetti
epershand: I am in full on "I don't know how to convince myself of my own masculinity without having been in WWI" mode
WAT
THAT IS AMAZING
oliviacirce: YOU KNOW IT
at first I was like, "Pete?" but then I was like, no, RYAN
I don't think it actually holds up
but then, Goblin Market

Comments

[oursin]

I have seldom been as disappointed as I was when I finally got hold of a copy of Romer Wilson's The Death of Society, which Isherwood burbles about in L&S as having been a massive inspiration to him around the same time as he was writing or not-writing the above book, which had always made me curious about it as possibly some Forgotten Gem of its era. I just could not see it at all, to the point that I could not imagine how, at all, it could have been Isherwood's kind of thing. It's not even enjoyably trashy.

[epershand]

That is incredibly disappointing. I have to admit, though, that any book being mentioned in L&S is generally an indication that I probably *won't* like it, because I tend to assume that they take themselves seriously in a way that Isherwood-the-narrator never does.

I was actually kind of upset when I found out that All the Conspirators and the Montmere short story collection actually existed in the world and weren't just metaphors for the kind of writing he was doing at that age.

[oursin]

The Mortmere stories were only published posthumously - at least, posthumously as regards Isherwood, Upward was still alive at the time, I think. Also rather a disappointment compared to how they come over in L&S.

[epershand]

Yeah. I ran across them in a used bookstore at one point and really wish I hadn't .

[oliviacirce]

OH MY GOD YOUR TAGS.

[epershand]

YES.

btw I *finally* renamed my Isherwood tag today. I am psyched! #ponderousdoublebarrelledname #gratuitousiconisgratuitous

[naraht]

You know what I would like to read? An Isherwood-as-Isherwood and Auden-as-Auden story...

[epershand]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around writing them--honestly, I'm incredibly intimidated except by way of softening them through other people. And I can't even write other-people-as-them because of the intimidation of living up to their existing narrative voices.

I suspect that I could probably write Edward Upward fic forever though... and I do actually have several handwritten pages of Britten epistolary fic buried somewhere in my apartment. Britten's letter-writing style is catchy--my own letters were oddly like his for a couple of months after I read all the excerpts in Britten's Children.

[eccentric_hat]

This is probably a predictable comment from me, but the epic he was trying to write reminds me quite a bit of A Dance to the Music of Time. Particularly the part about how there should be no actual development, as in gossip (someone described the series as "nothing happens and everything happens").

It's not as mythic as this thing was aspiring to be, but that may be a side effect of the fact that it actually exists.

I read a profile of Michele Bachmann the other day that mentioned how some leading lght in her religious subculture abjured the Renaissance, and I was suddenly strongly reminded of Ruskin, which was a bizarre feeling.