Two of the Conspirators

Abstract

My relationship as editor/publisher/friend with Christopher Isherwood began with the acceptance by The Hogarth Press of his novel The Memorial. I had joined the Press as trainee manager, at the age of twenty-three, in the New Year of 1931. Only a few months before I had met Stephen Spender through my sister Rosamond, and we rapidly became friends. One day we took a long walk by the river Thames, up towards Great Marlow where Shelley had lived, and he talked eagerly to me about his plans for writing poetry-I already admired the early poems I had seen-his life in Germany where he had decided to settle, and his close friend Christopher Isherwood, who was established in Berlin and whom he and Wystan Auden clearly revered as a great writer of the future. He told me that Isherwood had been deeply disappointed at the way his first novel All The Conspirators had been received, and that he had failed so far to find a publisher for his second novel, The Memorial.