In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’.
In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’. This is probably true. The second half of his career, after his departure to the USA in 1939, was disappointing. There were two good novellas, Prater Violet (1945) and A Single Man (1964), and a book of linked stories, Down There on a Visit (1962), which was good in parts, but his attempt at a major novel, The World in the Evening (1954) was a sad flop. There were autobiographical books of some charm and more interest, and an inferior last novel, A Meeting by the River (1967).
So something went wrong for the writer, described in the Thirties by Somerset Maugham as the young man who had ‘the future of the English novel in his hands’. The conventional explanations are probably correct: California was bad for him, as also for Aldous Huxley. Work for the film studios was demanding and unrewarding , except of course in financial terms. His commitment to Eastern mysticism and his Swami Prabhavananda, who sounds a frightful bore and also rather silly (his two ‘great objects of admiration’ were Greta Garbo and the Duke of Windsor) did him no good as a writer.
Removing to the USA, he lost his vital subject matter, and never found a replacement.(The best parts of Down There on a Visit hark back to the Twenties and Thirties.) This might have mattered less if he had been a different sort of novelist, less reliant on personal experience. He was, to quote Hensher again, ‘always a writer who could describe nothing successfully if it did not impinge on him’. He was never as objective as he pretended with the famous claim to be only a camera, though his plain, matter-of-fact style effectively disguised this for a time.
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.
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