The Memorial: Portrait of a Family was published by the Hogarth Press in 1932. It is Isherwood’s second novel (after All the Conspirators, 1928) and his first mature work. The Vernon family is a prosperous English family whose world was shattered by the death of Richard Vernon in the First World War. The war memorial of the title is both a physical object — a monument in the village — and a psychological reality: the family is memorialized, frozen in attitudes of grief, guilt, and evasion that make growth impossible.
The novel is told in four sections, arranged non-chronologically: 1928, 1920, 1925, 1929. The fragmentation is deliberate — it reflects the characters’ inability to construct a coherent narrative from their experience. Lily Vernon, Richard’s widow, has turned her grief into a social identity, performing mourning with a dedication that conceals its essential selfishness. Eric Vernon, Richard’s son, is gay (though the novel, written in 1932, can only hint at this) and alienated from everything his father’s world represented. Mary Scriven, Lily’s friend, has retreated into a genteel alcoholism.
The novel is recognizably the work of the writer who would produce the Berlin stories — the same precision of social observation, the same ironic detachment, the same attention to the way people perform rather than experience their emotions. But The Memorial lacks the Berlin books’ vivid setting and picaresque energy; it is a quieter, sadder book, and its achievement is the achievement of a minor key.
Collecting The Memorial
First edition (Hogarth Press, London, 1932): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $1,000–$3,000
- Very good/very good: $400–$1,000