He embraced his dismissal because it set him free from his mother’s straitening ambition that he become a university don. In 1925, Isherwood was asked to leave Cambridge University after writing joke answers on his second-year exams. Isherwood tells the story of these culture-shaping friendships in his first autobiography, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties (1938). Isherwood, Upward, and Auden formed the early core of the Leftist literary thirties generation in England, and they gathered others to them, in particular Stephen Spender. With another school friend, Wystan Auden, he wrote three plays- The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938)-which clothed the psychological and political anxieties of their time in rackety schoolboy camp. With his school and university friend Edward Upward, he devised an imaginary world, Mortmere its satirical, quasi-surreal mood colored their early work and leached into the writing of their contemporaries. In part as a riposte to his family circumstances, he formed, from his earliest years, intimate and creative friendships with a vast range of personalities from all walks and classes of life. Nevertheless, he suffered the peculiarly English privations of distant parents, boarding school at eight, and the loss of his father in the Great War. Isherwood was the grandson and heir of a country squire, and his boyhood was privileged.
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