Goodbye to Berlin - Christopher Isherwood

...for his 'Berlin Novels' - Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains - that he is, rightly or wrongly, best-known. In comparison to some of his very strong later novels, 'Mr Norris' may perhaps be seen as rather overrated, but, in the case of 'Goodbye to Berlin', its longevity as a popular novel is certainly deserved.

Of course, the term 'Berlin Novels' is, in truth, a misnomer; for, in his self-elucidated role as a slowly reeling ...
...succession of fragmentary snapshots of Berlin as it was in the early thirties, in the chaotic years between the end of the financial slump and the beginning of governmental Nazism. He has long been recognised as one of the great stylists of the twentieth century, and nowhere is this more evident than here, in his 'Berlin Diaries', opening, famously: 'From my window, the dark, solemn, massive street...'

Like this, as from a window, ... more

'I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.'

As a novelist, poet, dramatist, film director and outspoken ex-pat Englishman, Christopher Isherwood accomplished a good deal in a short time, but it is for his 'Berlin Novels' - Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains - that he is, rightly or wrongly, best-known. In comparison to some of his very strong later novels, 'Mr Norris' may perhaps be seen as rather overrated, but, in the case of 'Goodbye to Berlin', its longevity as a popular novel is certainly deserved.

Of course, the term 'Berlin Novels' is, in truth, a misnomer; for, in his self-elucidated role as a slowly reeling camera, Isherwood seeks only to present his readers with a succession of fragmentary snapshots of Berlin as it was in the early thirties, in the chaotic years between the end of the financial slump and the beginning of governmental Nazism. He has long been recognised as one of the great stylists of the twentieth century, and nowhere is this more evident than here, in his 'Berlin Diaries', opening, famously: 'From my window, the dark, solemn, massive street...'

Like this, as from a window, Berlin is observed, captured, and conveyed, in Isherwood's striking, cogent, and inimitable style. The players emerge, by turns: Sally Bowles, high-class whore and ex-pat Englishwoman, exemplified later by Liza Minelli in the derivative film, Cabaret; Peter and Otto, blinking English graduate and his little German friend; Isherwood's bustling housekeeper, and the guests who come and go in the boarding house. All are viewed through Isherwood's lens, and all have their own story to be told, always with grace and accuracy.

There is, to these Berlin diaries, a certain sharpness, a visceral nature that lends a sense of togetherness to the whole, making it so much more than the sum of its parts. The episodic nature of the book might have allowed it, in the hands of any other writer, to fragment into merely a collection of short stories, but Isherwood's narratives are all linked quite clearly together, the characters never disappearing without trace, as characters in one's life do not disappear without trace. Isherwood gives the narrator his own name - and he is a narrator with whom I fell immediately in love - but he is at pains to state that the book is not autobiographical, and the narrative voice does not necessarily represent himself, or every part of himself. This is Berlin pictured as Isherwood saw it, through people half-created as exemplars, amalgamations of those he encountered during his time in the city with his close friend and fellow writer, WH Auden.

The book is, quite simply, a masterpiece. Every part of it, every paragraph reads like prose poetry. Orwell called them 'brilliant sketches of a society in decay', and he could not have been more accurate, or more correct. They are brilliant. And a large amount of this brilliance is derived from the fact that, as Isherwood leaves Germany before the election of 1933, we know it's all going to end in tears.
 

...less