BOOKS OF THE WEEK
Bergmann's Masterpiece
By JOHN WAIN I laughed. " Quite a lot of Englishmen do get married, you know."
"They marry their mothers. It is disaster. It will lead to the destruction of Europe."
" I must say, 1 don't quite see . . ." " It will lead definitely to the destruction of Europe. I have writtenthe first chapters of a novel about this. It is called The Diary of an Etonian Oedipus." Bergmann suddenly gave me a charming smile. " But do not worry. We shall change all that." THE quotation is from Mr. Isherwood's last novel, Prater Violet; and here,* eight years later, is Bergmann's master- piece. With differences, of course; Bergmann, not being a real person, could not write it himself, so Mr. Isherwood stepped in; this meant, since Mr. lsherwood's change of hationality, that the hero could not be anything so Limey as an Etonian, and became the Anglo-American equivalent, with mixed parentage, an English childhood and a Cambridge education, but still careful to use expressions like ' gotten ' and ' from here on in.' But then Bergmann, too, went out to Hollywood " with his family, early in 1935," and it's his novel underneath it all. The hero has no parents, only a lot of money, and he marries, first, a distinguished novelist to whom he Looks Up, and second a very pretty little fly-by-night on whom he (rather painfully) Looks Down, and who had already been his mistress while the distinguished one was dying of heart disease. It certainly leads to the destruction, not of Europe (that is vieux jeu by now), but of his own personality, which he sets about restoring by involving himself in a street accident, In a psychosomatic sort of way, so that he has to stay in bed for a long time with a fractured thigh, being nursed by his kindly old Quaker aunt and a strong,*txtroverted German girl who has Known Trouble. With the aid of his first wife's letters, he goes over his past life and re-lives, the whole brouhaha, breaking off now and then to talk to the German girl (about Trouble), to his aunt (about the neighbours) and to a couple of local homosexuals (about homosexuals). Finally all is well, his divorce comes through, his leg gets better, Gerda tells him, " She will come, the one you want," and he declares, " I really do forgive myself, from the bottom of my heart."
That, baldly, is the plot, but plot-summaries are no index to quality. The first thing to be said is that this novel was worth waiting a long time for. Mr. Isherwood was in a very difficult position, and he has the right to expect a sympathetic as well as a demanding audience. Any novelist who is not prepared simply to carry on,' writing to a formula which his readers have grown to like and expect—in other words, any serious novelist—has to be on his.guard against an early success. Not financial success, .but technical success : the perfect, blind- alley, bricked-up way of doing it,' which can never be improved on. With the Berlin books, Mr. Isherwood achieved this success. There can 'never be a better book, of its kind, than Mr. Norris Changes Trains, and that fact must have hung round the author's neck like an albatross. One sees this from the fact that, as a novelist, he has been silent for so long. Goodbye to Berlin in 1939 was followed by fifteen years of time-marking—translations, a travel book, one very minor novel which did not even, try to break new ground. Fifteen years is a long time, but we can now see that it was not wasted. The way ahead seems to be found. The superb technical skill has not been sacrificed, neither has it become a whalebone corset to cramp the internal qrgails. Let me explain why I think this.
There was in truth only one way in which Mr: Isherwood's novels could have developed, while still remaining recognisably his. Observation, eye for character, mechanical construction— all were perfect. The only point at which growth was possible was in the figure of the narrator, the I,' the camera. Mr. Isherwood's work has been a paradox : in theme very largely autobiographical, in spirit and tone entirely impersonal. If we go back as far as The Memorial, in 1932, we find an obvious, but unsatisfactory, device for avoiding the intrusion of per- sonality; there simply is no central character, and the action is diffused over a wide field of minor figures, Observed from a central point which is never occupied, as if a window were looking at them of its own accord, without a face behind it. Then a face does appear behind the window, and we get the long string of first-person books, complete with a hero actually called ' Isherwood '—a neat touch, in view of the fact that the window is never opened and the face is that of a waxwork. We may surmise that, during these fifteen years, Mr. Isherwood has debated within himself whether to go on with first-person narration or not. But having made the decision to retain it, the only possible movement was in that direction; and so we get, for the first time, an Isherwood book in which the I' is a real, suffering, developing human being.
This suffering and development are vividly brought before the reader, so that the book is continuously interesting and often moving. The journey onwards from helpless dependence, through a desert of empty frivolity, towards genuine self- discovery, is shown as a real struggle and not a smooth, fore- seeable moving from point to point. What makes it especially convincing is that Mr. Isherwood does not try to make his hero a likeable man; neurotics arc bores, and Stephen is not only boring but weak and foolish, so that for the first \half of the book one's feeling is rather like that of Huck Finn when he read A Pilgrim's Progress: " It was about a man who left his wife and family—it didn't say why." This is right; we begin to care what happens to him in proportion as we understand his struggles to put things right, and by the end we are about ready to forgive him as he forgives himself. Another subtlety, another dimension of compassion and reality built into the story, is the.treatnient of Elizabeth, the novelist-wife. She is presented as a sensitive' writer, the typical female novelist in istlyogue with the intelligentsia of the entre deux guerres, and Mr. sherwood describes her with so much sympathy as to arouse horrified suspicion that he, like his author, is taken in by the th of her" genius.' Again, this is right; the true estimate reserved for the end of the book, when Stephen looks back nd sees her clearly as a minor artist with the conscience of it major one; the discovery is one more evidence that his mental fog is clearing. This portrait of Elizabeth Rydal, by the way, is one more lvidence of Mr. Isherwood's tremendous skilfulness, a real our de force. To do it he had to write a series of letters in Which Elizabeth describes her daily life, and her feelings at the approach of death; a task which would be far beyond the scope of most novelists, since it involves, not a mere self- identification with the imaginary writer, but the creation of an attitude towards her which has the seeds of a criticism within it—a criticism, moreover, which must be directed along particular lines to meet the needs of the story. This must have ineant a close study of any actual documents which could provide a model; and to compare Elizabeth Rydal's letters with , he similar writings of real women of her kind and generation, becoming when it is directed by a genuine artistic purpose. Take a specimen. Here is Mr. Isherwood's Elizabeth : I had inside me a terrified animal, a creature absolutely blind and deaf and senseless with fear. No use arguing with it or getting angry. No use trying to beat it into submission. Violence would never make it budge. It was then, Mary, that I suddenly knew what to do. I gathered the creature up into my arms, as it were, ever so gently, and nursed it, and soothed it. 1 don't really quite know what I mean by this, because 1 don't know exactly who the '1' was, who did the nursing. But it was done somehow, and that's the only way 1 can describe it .. .1 was two quite distinct people at that moment— that much I know—and one of them tended the weakness of its animal sister and carried it, into the bathroom, where it vomited. And then—utter, utter relief ! The creature wasn't frightened any more; it was far too busy relieving itself. And I felt touched by its weakness, and amused.
And here is Katherine Mansfield in 1922: A queer bit of psychology: I had to disappear behind the bushes today in a hollow. That act made me feel nearer to normal health than I have felt for years. Nobody there: nobody wondered if 1 was all right, i.e. there was 'nothing to distinguish me, at that moment, from an ordinary human being.
The one is more' written-up' than the other, and legitimately so; but the same quality of experience is communicated. It is a Richardsonian transference achieved by a writer who, the rest of the time, is nothing like Richardson. Or, to see it another way, it is the final flowering into seriousness of the old sift of mimicry from the days of Lions and Shadows. And that word ' seriousness' is, at last, the key to one's estimate. The camera has become an X-ray. Most of this ubject-matter is already treated in the earlier novels, but here t is faced with a new courage. Sexual perversion was rather comic when Mr. Norris indulged in it, and only just not comic With Baron Pregnitz, and Maurice Scriven and Edward Blake.
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