ISHERWOOD, Christopher. All the Conspirators.

ISHERWOOD, Christopher. All the Conspirators.Isherwood Battles Chaotic Accordion Folder ISHERWOOD, Christopher. All the Conspirators. [Guernsey: the Star and Gazette Company for] London: Jonathan Cape. 1928. 8vo. In an attractive modern binding of olive green morocco by the Brockman Bindery, Oxford, green endpapers, spine lettered directly in gilt, top edge gilt, original endpapers bound in; pp. 255, [1 (blank)], first leaf blank; spine lightly sunned; some very occasional light foxing; a very

Isherwood Battles Chaotic Accordion Folder

ISHERWOOD, Christopher. All the Conspirators. [Guernsey: the Star and Gazette Company for] London: Jonathan Cape. 1928.

8vo. In an attractive modern binding of olive green morocco by the Brockman Bindery, Oxford, green endpapers, spine lettered directly in gilt, top-edge gilt, original endpapers bound in; pp. 255, [1 (blank)], first leaf blank; spine lightly sunned; some very occasional light foxing; a very good copy; presentation inscription to original front free endpaper ‘To the Governor | from his affectionate ex-secretary, | the author - | to remind him of happy days with the | mud-coloured file’, dated May 1928 (see below).

First edition of Isherwood’s first novel, presented to ‘The Governor’, André Mangeot (1883–1970), the French violinist who gave Isherwood his first job as secretary to his string quartet; Isherwood lived at Mangeot’s mews house in Chelsea whilst writing this work.

Isherwood began work on All the Conspirators, portraying generational struggle and the slow deterioration of middle-class English life in the wake of the First World War, at the age of twenty-one. In his autobiographical novel, Down There on a Visit, he describes the reception of the novel as a ‘flop’, perhaps accounting for its relative scarcity in the Isherwood canon.

This copy is inscribed to ‘the Governor’, Isherwood’s affectionate nickname for Mangeot, ‘from his affectionate ex-secretary, the author - to remind him of happy days with the mud-coloured file’. Whilst in the violionist’s employ, Isherwood wrote All the Conspirators at Mangeot’s home, Cresswell Place in Chelsea, later depicting it ‘with almost photographic accuracy in The Memorial, where it became the London home of Mary Scriven, a character closely based on Olive Mangeot’, André’s wife. As Mangeot’s secretary, Isherwood handled correspondence, checked tickets on the door at the quartet’s concerts, and drove the players to and from events.

The ‘happy days with the mud-coloured file’ mentioned in the inscription are described in Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows, in which Mangeot is given the pseudonym ‘Cheuret’: Isherwood describes mountains of Cheuret’s unanswered correspondence spilling out like avalanches from cupboards or stuffed into suitcases under the bed. The ‘mud-coloured file’ was a concertina-style folder for filing these letters (and copies of answers thereto), which gave Isherwood ‘more trouble than any other inanimate object I have ever encountered, before or since. How often, on arrival, I would be greeted […] with the news: “The Mud-Coloured File’s lost again! Have you seen it? The Governor’s been hunting for hours!’ And then, at last, it would be discovered, lying innocently unnoticed on a chair, toning perfectly with dull grey shadows of a late autumn morning and, from the distance of a few yards, nearly invisible. Not only could the mud-coloured file uncannily disappear: its roomy pockets seemed to swallow letters like a conjurer’s vanishing-box. Cheuret’s conception of filing differed radically from my own: if he put a paper away under the letter P, then I was sure to hunt for it in M, N, O, Q, and R - and vice versa’ (p. 106).

Presentation copies of this early work are rare; even amongst the few known copies made out to colleagues, friends and associates, this is a particularly early example, dated May 1928.

See Parker, Isherwood: A Life (2005).

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