LGBTQ+ Literature Christopher Isherwood’s Down There on a Visit, 1964

Christopher Isherwood

First Edition

Isherwood, Christopher. Down There on a Visit, 1964, returns to episodes from the writer’s life in Europe and California through four interconnected narratives involving Lancaster, Ambrose, Waldemar, and Paul, including characters and relationships drawn from the homosexual worlds Isherwood knew before and during the Second World War. First published in 1962, the novel moves from Berlin in 1928 to the Greek islands in 1933, London in 1938, and California in 1940. Its autobiographical narrator encounters a reactionary Englishman with a death wish, an English expatriate attempting to establish a utopian community on a Greek island, a man escaping Hitler’s Germany, and Paul, described as the “most expensive male prostitute in Europe.” Isherwood wrote openly about homosexual experience well before the emergence of gay liberation, and the novel connects sexual relationships with exile, political upheaval, loneliness, and the search for unconventional ways of living.

Isherwood, Christopher. Down There on a Visit. London: Four Square Books, 1964. First Four Square edition, first printing. 272 pages. Mass market paperback in pictorial wrappers. Measures 4.25 x 7 inches. The cover reproduces the illustration used for the British first edition, showing a suited man before a mirror while an older man watches nearby. Its promotional copy reads: “The candid camera eye of Christopher Isherwood records the private hell of four men; their worlds of loneliness, despair and degradation.” The language markets the novel through sexual and psychological sensationalism while retaining the four-man structure central to the book.

Isherwood had lived in Berlin from 1929 and left Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, later traveling through Europe with his German partner Heinz Neddermeyer before emigrating to the United States in 1939. Down There on a Visit revisited this earlier period from the perspective of an openly homosexual writer living in California with artist Don Bachardy; Isherwood completed the novel’s final revisions in London in 1961 while Bachardy studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. Published two years before A Single Man, the book forms part of Isherwood’s increasingly direct treatment of male homosexuality in fiction and autobiography. Very good condition. This Four Square printing preserves the British paperback marketing of a novel grounded in Isherwood’s experiences of homosexual life, expatriation, and political displacement before World War II.

Item #19938

Price: $75.00