So what remains? The two Berlin books certainly, even if together they fell short of his ambition to write a great novel to be entitled The Lost. Both Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin are fragments of what was to be that work.
Hensher, remarking that his problem in youth was ‘the lack of a subject’, declares that it was ‘solved’ by his move to Berlin. That lack of a subject may have been evident in his first novel, All the Conspirators. But the criticism doesn’t apply to its successor, The Memorial (1932). Subtitled ‘Portrait of a Family’, and dedicated ‘To my Father’, with no indication that his father had been killed in the war, this is also a ‘Condition of England’ novel:
She was questioning him about the work in South Wales … Eric described, with brusque gestures, a town where fourteen of the nineteen pits had been closed down and thirteen shops in the main street had had to shut … The houses are mostly condemned. People lived on bread and pickles.
The novel may be called a study of post-war discontents.
There are strong elements of auto- biography, as in everything Isherwood wrote. Eric’s mother, Lily, is very evidently Kathleen Isherwood. It’s in some ways a cruel portrait, though at times oddly sympathetic, a reflection of the angry, yet loving war he conducted with his mother. The treatment of homo- sexuality, never absent from his work, is skilful. It would, I guess, have been possible for many of the book’s first readers to have been scarcely aware of it.
One of the strengths of the novel is that, unusually, there is no character to be identified with Isherwood himself. This allows him the freedom he rarely availed himself of later to enter into the minds of his other characters. In passages which come close to being a stream of consciousness, he allows us to follow their thoughts. Consequently, they seem more rounded, and we feel we know them better, than any of the characters in the Berlin books, who exist for us only as seen, heard and understood by the Herr Issyvoo narrator (William Bradshaw in Mr Norris.) Isherwood does this so successfully that one wonders why he abandoned this way of writing subsequently.
The Memorial was turned down by at least four publishers (including Jonathan Cape, who had brought out its predecessor) before being published by the Hogarth Press on the recommendation of John Lehmann. Peter Parker judged it ‘one of Isherwood’s best, and least regarded, books’, one which, unlike his others ‘creates an autonomous fictional world’. That seems to me a fair verdict. Certainly it’s the Isherwood novel to which I return most often and most willingly.
Comments
David L Nilsson
February 7th, 2009 5:03pmMassie does not mention the most striking aspect of "The Memorial"-- the scrambled time-scheme, so that we first see characters as older than when we re-encounter them. Isherwood explains why he did this in his fictionalised memoir "Lions and Shadows", another most enjoyable and amusing work.
"All the Conspirators" is a refreshingly detached and astringent version of the usual frustrated-artist/rebel first novel. And pace Massie, "Down There on a Visit", though not unmarred by Isherwood's latter-day Californian camp tone of voice, is a splendid return to form. Seemingly fragmentary, it somehow builds into a unity more convincing than the scraps of "Goodbye to Berlin".
The last time I read "The World in the Evening", I found it more interesting and worthwhile than generations of critics lazily quoting its original notices have acknowledged.
Isherwood was not the equal of his true literary guru, Maugham; but he shares with him the gift for writing about things that continue to matter by means of multum in parvo, in courteously limpid, wonderfully fluent, cunningly colloquial-seeming prose.
He is never pompous or obscure. No wonder the lit crit lads neglect Maugham and Isherwood: not enough word puzzles to generate PhD theses.
Report this comment
Bill Corr
February 7th, 2009 2:46pmSnobbery and discreetly unmentioned racism, while frowned on in some supposedly-enlightened circles, are potent talismen* against being suckered by some Oriental or semi-Oriental fraud or other.
The Swami Prabhavananda who so enchanted Aldous Huxley, like the assorted Maharishis, plump-little-Indian-boy-wonders or Osho the Bhagwan, or Gurdjieff or The Mother in Pondicherry or the Russki who was the guru of FDR's supersmart-but-gullible Vice-President, Henry Wallace, may or not have been out-and-out charlatans and frauds - and one thinks of the Maharishi's carnal desire for Cynthia Lennon and the Bhagwan's collection of gleaming Rolls-Royces - but the people who are suckered by them certainly end up looking very silly indeed.
Evelyn Waugh referred to Aldous Huxley's "yogibogi" silliness with appropriate contemptuous disdain, but - on the other hand - converts to these kinds of loopy cults seldom desire to blow themselves, and others, to bits on public transport, do they?
* talismen: plural of talisman
Report this comment