Event

Auden and Isherwood: Religion versus Friendship

Join Edward Mendelson, Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and W. H. Auden’s literary executor, for an exploration of unpublished material and the religious contrast of two 20th-century writers.
Lectures

In the 1930s, before W. H. Auden returned to the Anglicanism of his childhood and before Christopher Isherwood became a Vedantist, they already differed in their views of religion, and those differences helped to shape the plays they wrote in collaboration with each other. In the 1940s and after, when their collaboration ended, they continued to explore their religious differences in letters and conversation, and those differences helped to shape their work and thought throughout their lives. This talk, which will make use of unpublished material in The Huntington’s collections, explores the ways in which Auden and Isherwood insisted on disagreeing over religion while preserving their affection and admiration for each other as writers and as persons.

This is the Isherwood-Bachardy Lecture.

About the Speaker

Edward Mendelson is W. H. Auden’s literary executor and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. His books include The Inner Life of Mrs. Dalloway (forthcoming, 2025), Early Auden, Later Auden (2017), Moral Agents (2015), and The Things That Matter (2007). He has edited 10 volumes of The Complete Works of W. H. Auden and novels by Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells. He writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and other journals, and has been a contributing editor at PC Magazine since 1987.

Black-and-white photo of two people looking at the camera, one in a button down shirt, the other in a suit and tie.

Photographers: Bachardy, Don, 1934–, and Isherwood, Christopher, 1904–1986. “With W. H. Auden on Mesa Rd. (364) Santa Monica.”