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From The Vault

To cel­e­brate Gay Pride Month, we chose Christo­pher Ish­er­wood as the focus for this episode of From the Vault. Born in Eng­land in 1904, Ish­er­wood came to the Unit­ed States in 1939 and lived in San­ta Mon­i­ca, Cal­i­for­nia from then until his death in 1986. Ish­er­wood’s lit­er­ary career began in 1928 with the pub­li­ca­tion of his first nov­el, All the Con­spir­a­tors, and he is prob­a­bly best known for The Berlin Sto­ries, a col­lec­tion of writ­ing that fic­tion­al­ized his life in pre-World War II Berlin; this book was lat­er adapt­ed as the stage play I am a Cam­era and the pop­u­lar musi­cal Caberet.

In this pro­gram, you will hear a num­ber of rare record­ings of Christo­pher Ish­er­wood, includ­ing a record­ing of the play The Ascent of F‑6,” writ­ten by Ish­er­wood and W.H. Auden in 1937 (adapt­ed, pro­duced and per­formed in 1962 at Paci­fi­ca sta­tion KPFK-Los Ange­les by Ish­er­wood and Auden them­selves, among oth­ers), and an address by Ish­er­wood called A Per­son­al State­ment,” giv­en at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia- Berke­ley as part of the series The Writer at Mid-Cen­tu­ry: The Moral Cri­sis (1962).

Lat­er we’re joined by Sue Hod­son, cura­tor of lit­er­ary man­u­scripts at the Hunt­ing­ton Library, who dis­cuss­es the sig­nif­i­cance of Christo­pher Ish­er­wood and the record­ings held by Paci­fi­ca Radio Archives. Hod­son joined the Paci­fi­ca Radio Archives’ advi­so­ry pan­el in 2003 to help select 50 sig­nif­i­cant record­ings to be pre­served under a grant from the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts; after iden­ti­fy­ing Paci­fi­ca’s Ish­er­wood record­ings as rare and impor­tant, they were des­ig­nat­ed for preser­va­tion through this grant. Paci­fi­ca Radio Archives lat­er donat­ed dupli­cates of its restored Ish­er­wood record­ings to the Hunt­ing­ton Library’s Christo­pher Ish­er­wood Exhibit.