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A historical novel about British author Aldous Huxley
and his circle from 1929-1933, including Isherwood, Auden,
Spender.
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Nominations:
2004 Independent Publisher Book
Award
for Historical Fiction
2004 Writers Notes
Annual Book Award
for General Fiction
2003 ForeWord
Magazine's Book of the Year Award
for Fiction: Historical
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“David Garrett Izzo breathes new life into some of the
great literary figures of the twentieth century. Historically
accurate, fresh with energy, true to character (no easy feat),
his prose offers rich new moments with Aldous Huxley,
Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden and others of their
constellation. Izzo creates a wonderfully voyeuristic
atmosphere.”
--Dana Sawyer, author of Aldous Huxley: A
Biography
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“Whether you are an adept of Aldous Huxley, W. H. Auden,
Christopher Isherwood, or any of artistic figures of the
1930’s, you will be enlightened and entertained by David
Garrett Izzo’s remarkable A Change of Heart. His
recreations are so astonishingly alive and accurate that you
feel you are there at the creation, a sudden intimate of a
brilliant and select group of artists and writers. Auden and
Spender and others parry and debate, live and breathe again;
the past recaptured! Izzo knows the period so deeply and has
such powers of synthesis that even someone like myself who has
been reading Auden for forty years will find fresh facts and
will see material already known anew. Stunning, dense, just,
and in the largest and best sense, true!”
--Roger Lathbury,
George Mason University
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“Though daunting at the outset, Izzo’s scholarship and
wealth of information about the real lives of his central
characters soon become the novel’s strength. The richness of
fact and detail—especially about the principles’ psychological
motivation, including, of course, for most of them their
homosexuality—bring to life these figures of literature and
literary stature. And in so doing give a deeper layer of
meaning to their literature.”
--Toby Johnson, Editor,
White Crane Journal
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“A Change of Heart by David Garrett Izzo is a
detailed portrait of a now mythical time, England and Germany
in the 1930s, as told through the lives of real and fictional
characters. Here are the young Christopher Isherwood, Wysten
Auden and Stephen Spender, as well as the celebrated Aldous
Huxley and D. H. Lawrence. David Garrett Izzo draws on his
vast knowledge of the times, the people, and their work to
create a novel reminiscent of Huxley’s Point Counterpoint and
Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin yet all his own. Izzo recreates
the lives and loves of young and established writers and
artists, along with their artistic, philosophic and political
battles.”
--James J. Berg, editor, The Isherwood
Century and Conversations with Christopher
Isherwood
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| Sample from A Change of
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"Wherever he happened to be, Aldous Huxley seemed to
stand above everyone physically and metaphorically as the
tallest man in the room. His height was a symbol of an
intellect that the dons at Oxford had envied--and this when he
was just their brilliant student. Now, at thirty-five, he was
the caustically devastating satirist of international acclaim
whose novels skewered the very same dons and their ilk among
the upper classes--his class. At the moment, while he and his
twenty-one-year old companion, Peter Eros, are sipping after
dinner cordials, another member of Huxley's class could be
heard speaking vociferously. Huxley's monocle targeted the
source of a blustery, orotund voice entering Palliser's, the
restaurant where those who were in the news went if they
wished to remain news. Gossip columnists paid "Francois" the
maitre'd dearly for nightly tips concerning his reservations
listing.
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The moment's elite of the elite could dispense with
reservations altogether to be seated in what was called,
affectionately or disparagingly as the case may be, the "rare
area" where tables were never reserved but granted at the
discretion of "Charles," the manager. The rarest of rare
enjoyed a perpetual slot in the celestial seating plan, royal
titles and knighthoods dominating. For one among the rest who
were only rare for various duration, one's zenith must
inevitably peak; the climb, whether merited from a stubborn
endurance or a miracle of mercurial precipitousness,
ultimately must turn down and then one hears the near fatal
words, disbelievingly at first--fragile vanity is a terrible
thing--the sound of "down" from Charles: "Did you not call,
Sir?" Tonight these words had just been directed at the now
loud figure detected by Huxley's deadly monocle:
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"Oh dear," Aldous whispered to Peter at their table in
the rare area, "it's Wembley. I'm afraid he's not the
brightest candle in the chandelier."
Indeed, Everett
Wembley, despite his pedigree and money, despite his recent
fame as the founder and leader of the British Freemen, would
make a scene. Deplorable! And tres gauche, it simply wasn't
done. Better men than Wembley accepted their fate with
grace--either pure or feigned-- and had their aides make the
necessary phone call. Wembley, Britain's Mussolini (another
fool) had been, until recently, an appealing fascist, at least
until Aldous aimed his surgeon's pen at him. (For Huxley, the
fascists, seemingly buffoons on the surface, were symptomatic
of much more dangerous emotions now circulating in Europe. In
1925, when Aldous lived in Florence, Italy, the Fascisti, guns
in hand, searched his house with his wife Maria and
five-year-old son Matthew enduring the nonsense as well. One
does not find any humor in such a violation from clowns or
otherwise.)
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In his currently best selling novel, Point
Counterpoint, Huxley barely troubled to hide Wembley under
a different name, calling him Everard Webley. The novel's
success had graduated Huxley from cult status to
sensation.Aldous was in London briefly, having returned from
where he was staying in Suresnes, France, to attend the
premiere of This Way to Paradise, a play adapted from
Point Counterpoint. No doubt, in Huxley's book, Wembley
is vivisected in public. Others make the cut as well,
particularly Huxley's good friend, D. H. Lawrence as Rampion,
and Nancy Cunard as Lucy Tantamount, with her name not too
subtly meaning that Lucy was tantamount to Cunard, she of the
shipbuilding fortune, and a femme fatale who had once thrown
Aldous over to be heaped upon a stack of other bodies trampled
in her wake. She was aware of the reputation attributed to
her, but declared herself a modern woman; broken hearts were
not her responsibility. The wags of the gossip circuit called
her Nancy Canard, the French word for hoax, or worse,
Nancy Canaille, for scoundrel.
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In his novel, Aldous spared no one including himself. He
is the novel's novelist, Philip Quarles, who, with his aloof
detachment and otherworldly perambulation into esoteric
abstraction, pushes his wife Elinor into the arms of--yes, of
all people--Webley. (Maria Huxley, one can be assured, is not
Elinor, although she wouldn't disagree that Aldous was
sometimes Philip, but a tamed version under her pragmatic
Belgian earth-mother spirit that matched in quiet fire her
husband's ice cool brilliance.)"
....
Copyright
© 2003 by David Garrett Izzo.
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Photo by Carol A. Corrody.
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David Garrett Izzo is a writer of fiction and drama as
well a scholar of modern British and American literature with
numerous books and articles of literary criticism, literary
philosophy, literary biography, and literary history. He is an
expert in the years between the world wars. Izzo is at Temple
University in Philadelphia.
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The American World of Stephen Benet
Aldous Huxley
and W. H. Auden On Language
Christopher Isherwood: His
Era, His Gang, and the Legacy of the Truly Strong
Man
The Writings of Richard Stern: The Education of an
Intellectual Everyman
W. H. Auden
Encyclopedia
Christopher Isherwood Encyclopedia
W. H.
Auden: A Legacy (editor)
Advocates and Activists Between
the Wars (editor)
Thornton Wilder: New Essays
(editor)
Stephen Vincent Bent
(editor)
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