Salka. See Viertel, Salka.
Samuels, Lesser. American screenwriter. In 1940 Isherwood was hired to polish dialogue on Samuels’s script for a remake of A Woman’s Face; not long after, Samuels asked Isherwood to help him on Maugham’s The Hour Before Dawn. Like Isherwood, Samuels had worked for Gaumont-British during the 1930s. In subsequent years they often worked together, sometimes on their own ideas, including Judgement Day in Pittsburgh (for which they were paid $50,000), The Easiest Thing in the World, and The Vacant Room. Samuels was married and had a daughter. There are a number of passages about him in D1.
Sansom, William (1912–1976). British writer, born in London. Sansom travelled in Europe during the 1930s and wrote stories about the Blitz when he was in the London Fire Service during the war; these were published in 1944 as Fireman Flower. Afterwards he published many further volumes of stories, and he also wrote travel books and novels, including The Body (1949) and The Cautious Heart (1958).
Sarada. “Sarada” Folling was a young nun at the Vedanta Center when Isherwood arrived in Hollywood in 1939. She was of Norwegian descent, had studied music and dance, and while at the center learned Sanskrit. Her father lived in New Mexico. Sarada later moved to the convent at Santa Barbara where Isherwood occasionally saw her. She was a favorite of Prabhavananda, who gave her the Sanskrit name Sarada, but eventually left the Vedanta Society rather suddenly after becoming interested in men. Thereafter, Prabhavananda forbade her name to be mentioned to him. Isherwood tells about her in D1.
Saroyan, William (1908–1981). American writer of Armenian parentage, born in Fresno, California. Saroyan turned down a Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time of Your Life (1939). Other plays include My Heart’s in the Highlands (1939), Love’s Old Sweet Song (1941), The Beautiful People (1941), Get Away Old Man (1944), and The Cave Dwellers (1957). He also published many volumes of short fiction, and his novels include The Human Comedy (1943), The Adventures of Wesley Jackson (1946), Rock Wagram (1951), Mama, I Love You (1956), Papa, You’re Crazy (1957), Boys and Girls Together (1963), and One Day in the Afternoon of the World (1964). Some of his novels and plays were made into films: The Human Comedy (1943) won an Academy Award. From the 1950s onward, Saroyan turned increasingly to autobiography and memoirs.
Schindler, Mr. and Mrs. German actor and his wife. He had worked with Max Reinhardt in Europe. Isherwood met them when they arrived at the Haverford refugee hostel, via an Italian concentration camp, in March 1942; he records in D1 that they left Haverford by the end of June.
Schlee, George. New York financier of Russian background. Schlee met Greta Garbo towards the end of the 1930s at his wife Valentina’s New York dress shop, and the three became involved in a long-running ménage a trois. In the late 1940s, Garbo bought an apartment in the Schlees’ building on East 52nd Street, and when Schlee died in his sleep in 1964, he was in a suite adjoining Garbo’s at the Hotel Crillon in Paris.
Scott-Kilvert, Ian. British cultural administrator. He matriculated at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, in 1936 as a classicist but changed to English and took his B.A. in 1940. Afterwards he became Head of the Recorded Sound Department at the British Council. He appears as “Graham” in Lions and Shadows.
Searle, Ronald (b. 1920). English artist and cartoonist. He created the St. Trinian’s schoolgirls and achieved more serious recognition for the drawings he made while held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese during World War II. He was for many years a theatrical illustrator for Punch, contributed to The New Yorker and The New York Times among other publications, and had numerous one-man gallery shows. Later he also designed animated films and film sequences.
Shankara. Hindu religious philosopher and saint (of between the sixth and eighth centuries AD), widely recognized as an emanation of Shiva. Shankara wrote commentaries on the Brahma Sutras, the principal Upanishads, and other religious texts, as well as philosophy, poems, hymns, and prayers. Much of his work is not attributed with authority. He probably organized the Hindu mendicant orders.
Shearer, Moira (b. 1926). Scottish-born ballet dancer and, later, actress. She also became a writer, publishing biographies of Balanchine and of Ellen Terry as well as reviewing books. See also Ludovic Kennedy, her husband.
Shivananda, Swami (d. 1934). Hindu monk; a direct disciple of Ramakrishna. Shivananda was originally named Tarak Nath Ghoshal, and his father was legal advisor to a rani. He met Ramakrishna in 1880, when he was about twenty-six, and though he afterwards married, he remained celibate and eventually renounced the world to live as a monk. After Ramakrishna’s death, there followed a period of wandering; then Shivananda founded a Ramakrishna monastery at Benares, and in 1922 he became President of the Ramakrishna Order.
Sister Lalita (Sister) (d. 1949). Carrie Mead Wykoff, an American widow, met Vivekananda on one of his U.S. lecture tours and became a disciple of Swami Turiyananda (another direct disciple of Ramakrishna). Turiyananda gave her the name Sister Lalita. In 1929 she invited Swami Prabhavananda to live in her house in Hollywood and within a decade they had gathered a congregation and built the Hollywood temple in her garden. She appears in D1.
Smedley, Agnes (1892–1950). American journalist and author; a radical advocate of feminist, communist and nationalist causes. She was involved in Margaret Sanger’s birth control movement and was jailed for her role in trying to organize an overseas Indian independence movement. During the 1920s she lived in and wrote about Weimar Germany. Smedley was helpful to Isherwood and W. H. Auden when they met her in Hankow in March 1938. She spent nearly a decade there organizing medical supplies for Mao’s Eighth Route Army, writing a book about the army, and writing for German and American newspapers about the antifascist struggle in China. She had many Chinese contacts and she was also a willing go-between for the U.S. government; she was frequently at the U.S. Embassy and was friendly with American officials. Smedley died under the accusation of being a Soviet spy.
Snow, Edgar (1905–1972). American author; born and educated in Missouri. Snow began his career as a reporter. He went to China in 1928 and became correspondent there for several U.S. and British papers. In 1936 he was the first correspondent to interview Mao Tse-tung. During World War II he covered Asia and later Europe, and he was the first correspondent to enter liberated Vienna. Afterwards he travelled widely as a special correspondent for various newspapers and magazines. Snow wrote a number of books about Chinese and Soviet communism; among the best known is Red Star Over China (1937). He also made a documentary film about China at the end of the 1960s. Isherwood and W. H. Auden mention Snow in their foreword to Journey to a War because he helped them with information and introductions for their China trip.
Sorel, Paul (b. 1918). American painter, of midwestern background; his real name is Karl Dibble. Sorel was a close friend of Chris Wood, and lived with him in Laguna in the early 1940s. He moved out in 1943 after disagreements about money and in 1944 went to New York for a time, then intermittently returned. Chris Wood continued to support Sorel for the rest of Wood’s life, though they did not live together at all after 1953. Sorel is also described in D1.
Sorokine, Natasha. White Russian intellectual, raised in France where she and her parents were officially stateless. At her lycée, she was taught by Simone de Beauvoir, befriended her and became part of de Beauvoir and Sartre’s intimate circle during the war. De Beauvoir described their friendship in her memoirs La Force de l’âge (1960) and Tout compte fait (1972), thinly disguising Natasha as “Lise Oblanoff.” (In fact, de Beauvoir and Sartre called her Nathalie and, according to Ivan Moffat, also addressed her as Sarbakhane—after a West African trumpet of great length and exotic design.) According to de Beauvoir, Sorokine’s interest in philosophy led her to pursue a degree at the Sorbonne during the war. During the same period, she became romantically involved with a student of Sartre’s, a young Spanish Jew who was arrested and killed by the Nazis near the end of the war, leaving her devastated. Not long afterwards, she met and married Ivan Moffat, joining him in
California. They had a daughter, Lorna Moffat, but the marriage did not succeed, and Sorokine struggled to make a living. She wrote, taught French, worked in a kindergarten, waitressed, and studied law. Her fiction was never published. She married a second time, to a physicist Sidney Benson, with whom she had a son and adopted a daughter, but she was plagued by ill health and mental instability. She died in the late 1960s.
Speaight, Robert (1904–1976). British actor and writer; educated at Lincoln College, Oxford. He established a stage reputation by the start of the 1930s and began publishing novels around the same time. Among his many stage roles was Becket in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in 1935. During the later part of his career he published scholarly books on Shakespeare and a number of biographies.
Spender, Humphrey (b. 1910). English photographer and designer; brother of Stephen Spender. He was educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, Norfolk; at the University of Freiburg, Breisgau, Germany; and at the Architectural Association School, London. During the 1930s he worked as a portrait and commercial photographer from his own studio in London, was a staff photographer for the Daily Mirror newspaper, and became the official photographer for Mass Observation. Before the war he moved to Picture Post magazine. He trained in the Royal Army Service Corps (Tanks) in 1941, worked for the Ministry of Information, and became a War Office Official Photographer and afterwards a Photo Interpreter for Theatre Intelligence Service. When the war ended, he returned to Picture Post, but gradually gave up photography to paint and to design textiles. He had many individual shows in these media during the 1940s and 1950s, and also taught design at the Royal College of Art and at several other schools in London until the mid-1970s. From the late 1970s, a revival of interest in his photographs led to numerous exhibitions of his 1930s work. Spender married twice (his first wife died of Hodgkin’s disease) and had one son with each of his wives.
Spender, Natasha Litvin. English concert pianist; she married Stephen Spender in 1941 and had two children with him, Matthew and Lizzie.
Spender, Stephen (1909–1995). English poet, critic, autobiographer, editor. W. H. Auden introduced Isherwood to Spender in 1928; Spender was then an undergraduate at University College, Oxford, and Isherwood became a mentor. Afterwards Spender lived in Hamburg and near Isherwood in Berlin, and the two briefly shared a house in Sintra with Heinz Neddermeyer and Tony Hyndman. Spender was the youngest of the writers who came to prominence with Auden and Isherwood in the 1930s; after they emigrated, he cultivated the public and social roles they abjured in England. He worked as a propagandist for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War and was a member of the National Fire Service during the Blitz. He was co-editor with Cyril Connolly of Horizon and later of Encounter. He moved away from his early enthusiasm for communism, but remained liberal in politics. In 1968, at the request of Russian dissident Pavel Litvinov and with the combined support of various celebrated intellectuals (mostly personal friends) and of Amnesty International, Spender helped to found Index on Censorship to report on and publicize the circumstances of persecuted writers and artists throughout the world. His 1936 marriage to Inez Pearn was over by 1939, and in 1941 he married Natasha Litvin with whom he had two children. Spender appears as “Stephen Savage” in Lions and Shadows and is further described in Christopher and His Kind and in D1. He published an autobiography, World Within World, in 1951, and his Journals 1939–1983 appeared in 1985.
Stafford, Jean (1915–1979). American novelist and short-story writer. Her much-praised first novel, Boston Adventure, appeared in 1944 and her second, The Mountain Lion, in 1947, followed by other novels and numerous short stories. She worked on The Southern Review and occasionally taught college. In 1966 she published an interview with Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, A Mother in History. Her Collected Stories (1969) won the Pulitzer Prize. When Isherwood met Stafford in 1947 she was married to the poet Robert Lowell, but this first marriage (for both) ended in 1948; later she was married to A.J. Leibling.
Stern, James (1904–1993) and Tania Kurella Stern (1906–1995). Irish writer and translator and his wife, daughter of a German psychiatrist. He was educated at Eton and, briefly, Sandhurst. In youth, he worked as a farmer in Southern Rhodesia and as a banker in the family bank in England and Europe, then travelled until settling for a time in Paris in the 1930s, where he met Tania Kurella. They married in 1935. She was a physical therapist and exercise teacher, exponent of her own technique, the Kurella method. She fled Germany in 1933 to escape persecution for the left-wing political activities of her two brothers, already refugees. Isherwood met the Sterns in Sintra, Portugal in 1936 through William Robson-Scott and introduced them to W. H. Auden with whom they became close friends, later, in America. James Stern’s books include The Heartless Land (1932), Something Wrong (1938)—both story collections—and The Hidden Damage (1945), about his trip with Auden to survey bomb damage in postwar Germany for the U.S. Army. Tania Stern collaborated on some of his translations. Eventually they returned to England and settled near Salisbury.
Stern, Josef Luitpold (1886–1966). Viennese poet, journalist, and editor; identified throughout his career with the cause of the workers. Stern reformed the workers’ library in Vienna and was a high-ranking administrator in workers’ education both before and after the war. He arrived as a refugee at the Quaker hostel in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where Isherwood volunteered during the war, and Isherwood records in D1 that they met there in the autumn of 1941. Stern returned to Vienna after the war. He published nearly twenty volumes, including Klassenkampf und Massenschulung (1925), Zehn Jahre Republik (1928), Lyrik und Prosa aus vier Jahrzehnten (1948), and Das Sternbild, Gedicht eines Lebens, a collected works in two volumes (1964–1966).
Steuermann, Eduard. Polish-born concert pianist; Salka Viertel’s brother and briefly a member of her extended household during the war. He re-established his career in the USA, achieving wide recognition as an interpreter in particular of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Among his students was Alfred Brendel. Steuermann married twice, and had three daughters. His second marriage was to his student, Clara Silvers, thirty years his junior.
Steve, also Stevie. Steve Conway; see index and see also D1.
Stevens, George (1904–1975). American film director. Early in his career, Stevens directed Laurel and Hardy. He made a number of successful films in the 1930s and early 1940s, and had a special touch for comedy. His prewar films include Alice Adams (1935), Swing Time (1936), Gunga Din (1939), Woman of the Year (1941)—in which he introduced Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn—and Talk of the Town (1942). During the war, Stevens headed the Sigma Corps Special Motion Picture Unit in Europe, where, among other disturbing scenes, he filmed Dachau soon after it was liberated. Although he made some of his best-known films after his return, his work became heavier and, eventually, less successful. Later films include I Remember Mama (1947), A Place in the Sun (1951, Academy Award), Shane (1953), and Giant (1956, Academy Award).
Stokowski, Leopold (1882–1977). English-born conductor. He studied at Oxford University and at the Royal College of Music. Stokowski began as a church organist in London and then in New York and settled in the USA, becoming a citizen in 1915. He conducted many celebrated orchestras in his long career, in particular the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1912 to 1938, for which he established a superlative international reputation and where he introduced important European works to U.S. audiences—such as Mahler’s 8th Symphony, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and works by Schoenberg, Berg, and Rachmaninoff—as well as performing new American music. He conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra for Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) and was also involved in several other movies. Afterwards, he conducted leading orchestras all over the world, including the New York Philharmonic and the Houston Symphony, finally returning to London in 1972 where he often appeared with the London Symphony Orchestra.
Strasberg, Lee (1901–1982) and Paula. Lee Strasberg was an American theater director and acting teacher; he derived his approach from S
tanislavsky. In 1931, he helped to found the Group Theater (in New York), and in 1950 he became a director of The Actors Studio, where he made his reputation as a leading proponent of Method acting. Paula Strasberg, his wife (Isherwood’s landlady on East Rustic Road), became Marilyn Monroe’s acting coach.
Stravinsky, Igor (1882–1971). Russian-born composer; he went to Paris with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1910 and brought about a rhythmic revolution in Western music with his The Rite of Spring (1911–1913), the most sensational of his many works commissioned for the company. In youth he was greatly influenced by his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, but Stravinsky’s originality as a composer derived partly from his ability to borrow and rework an enormously wide range of musical forms and styles. He remained continuously open to new ideas, even into old age. Many of his early works evoke Russian folk music, and he was influenced by jazz. Around 1923 he began a long neoclassical period during which he drew on and responded to the compositions of his great European predecessors. After the Russian revolution, Stravinsky remained in Europe, making his home first in Switzerland and then in Paris, and turned to performing and conducting to support his family. In 1926 he rejoined the Russian Orthodox Church, and religious music became an increasing preoccupation during the later part of his career. At the outbreak of World War II, he emigrated to America where he settled in Los Angeles and eventually became a citizen in 1945. Although he was asked to, he never composed for films. His first and most important work to English words was his opera, The Rake’s Progress (1951), for which W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman wrote the libretto. During the 1950s, with the encouragement of Robert Craft, Stravinsky began to compose according to the twelve-note serial methods invented by Schoenberg and extended by Webern—he was already past seventy. There are many passages about Stravinsky in D1.
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