Documents and fables

Tim Garton Ash

Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography Brian Finney (Faber 0.50) 'German boys and girls,' Christopher Isherwood wrote in 1931 in a paper started by Oswald Mosley, 'will grow up to be real men and women, whatever their party. They will live to become brave and worthy citizens of their country'. Whatever their party? 'It is to be hoped,' he portentously concluded, from the full height of his 27 years, 'that we can say as much for our own younger generation.'

This passage seems to me remarkable enough to merit a comment from a critical biographer. Mr Finney does not quote it. He merely observes that the only work Isherwood published in 1931 was 'a potboiler' article on 'the youth movement in Germany' for Action, Mosley's short-lived periodical edited by Harold Nicolson, which he had already disparagingly labelled 'the rankest John Bull stuff.' What that stuff was, whether the label was accurate, we are not told.

A year later Isherwood is in London. 'Few Englishmen seemed to have heard of the New Hitler Youth Movement. (Nor have I. Was this opposed to the Old Hitler Youth Movement?) 'Naturally he talked endlessly about this with his Communist friends.' And how. It would be interesting to learn how his views on German boys and girls developed.

What induced Isherwood to write such nonsense in 1931? By 1935, when he came to write the most powerful of his Berlin stories— 'The Nowaks' — his observations on the politics of German youth were sharp enough. And on his own: "Christoph's a Communist," said Otto. "Aren't you Christoph?" "Not a proper one, I'm afraid." Frau Nowak smiled: "What nonsense will you be telling us next? How could Herr Christoph be a communist? He's a gentleman." ' Mr Finney's 'critical biography' is frustrating to read because, given generous access to his subject and the sources about him, he has not asked the important questions: biographically, critically, or historically. Why did the young English writer go to Berlin of all places in 1929? Finney notices that Isherwood's own latest version (Berlin meant Boys) is a strident oversimplification. He does not stop to examine the complexities. He does pause to examine the decision to emigrate to the United States in January 1939. His examination is marred by the judgement that Isherwood left 'after the threat of war had receded with the Munich Agreement.' Does Mr Finney believe that now? Did Isherwood believe it then? How far was it a political decision, or a decision against politics? Isherwood's politics are a difficult subject because, like some of his German contemporaries he was not sure of them himself. Yet he was a brilliant observer of politics. Read the description of a Communist meeting in Neukoelln in Mr Norris Changes Trains, or the 'Berlin Diary' for 1932-33. These melancholy-comical vignettes of the dissolution of the Weimar Republic can stand comparison with anything written by German writers of the time.

Indeed this comparison would be richly rewarding. Compare Erich Kaestner's Fabian with Mr Norris. Mr Finney does not attempt it. He remains firmly within the insular tradition of English literary criticism. Let us then consider Isherwood as a disciple of Forster and a 'Thirties Writer'. It is a thankless task to analyse why his writing is so funny. It is difficult to pinpoint the characteristics of his style. But one can usefully ask where the novels lie on the literary map whose polar coordinates are labelled 'reportage' and 'fable'. These were identified by Spender as poles of the English literary island as early as 1934. Samuel Hynes has re-labelled them 'document' and 'parable'. They are central to his account of the 'Auden generation', Brian Finney, who is clearly conversant with every winkle of Ish. Crit., must have them in mind.

Let us take the case of Mr Norris. We have already said that it contains matchless passages of reportage, of document, of record. It is unfaultable in detail: dates, election results, the hotel at which Hitler always stayed, all are accurate. Reality is recorded not with the camera's eye, but with the selective strokes of the artist's brush. (As in the early sketches of Jeanne Mammen. The painting of this little-known Berlin artist is the finest visual complement I know to Isherwood's writing. They observed the same milieux. Perhaps his publishers should illustrate their editions with her work. It could not be worse than the horrible things which now deface their paperback covers.) This artist could no more get &local detail wrong than he could put a word out of place. Stendhal once said that 'All the pleasure, and all the truth, is in the details'.

But is the story also a 'fable'? A 'parable' of Hitler's rise to power? A novel of allegory and interpretation — as much, in its modest, playful, English way, as the polyphonic masterpiece of Isherwood's lofty companion in Californian exile, Thomas Mann: a half-undressed string quartet before the full-dress symphony of Dr Faustus? Mr Finney thinks it is. We learn of an 'identification between Norris and Hitler.' Arthur's self-centred hedonism,' he remarks tautologically, 'in fact parallels the attitudes of the Berlin population at large during the final years of the Weimar Republic. His sexual masochism is like their political selfabasement.' Oh dear, as Arthur Norris would have said. This is bad English (wherever is the Berlin population if not 'at large'? 'Inside', I suppose. Doing time. Maybe Arthur provides another parallel there.) It is bad history. And it is bad criticism. A curiosity of Mr Finney's research is that he could actually try out his ideas on his subject. If he floated that critical balloon before the master, there is no mention of the response.

Isherwood is a remorselesscritic of his own work, just as he is an expert mocker of his past personae. 'What repels me now about Mr Norris,' he wrote in 1956, in a prologue to Gerald Hamilton's autobiography Mr Norris and!, 'is its heartlessness. It is a heartless fairy-Story about a real city in which human beings were suffering the miseries of political violence and nearstarvation.' He accuses himself of 'misinterpreting' these 'scenes of desolation' to suit his 'childish fantasy'. 'This I later began to understand — which is why my second book about Berlin is at least rather better than my first.' This is too self-depreciatory. Of course Mr Norris is more than the had fairy in a childish fantasy. Mr Norris is a novel of time and place. Arthur Norris is a hero of the time — a criminal and a liar. The book is very funny about the amorality of the place — but (like Kaestner's Fabian) not itself amoral. As Wordsworth wrote of Tom O'Shanter', 'I pity him who cannot perceive that in all this, though there was no moral purpose, there is a moral effect.'

Is it heartless about the starving and the hungry and the hopeless? Well, I'm not sure what more the author could have done for them, except to write about them as he did in 'The Nowaks' (first published in John Lehmann's New Writing). Again, Mr Finney is not particularly illuminating on this marvellous story. He is, for example, surely wrong to describe the slum spiv Otto Nowak as 'utterly selfish', 'like an animal', with a 'complete indifference to those around him'. Witness his concern for his mother in the nightmarish last scene at the sanatorium. Isherwood is right that his second book is better than his first. It is more compassionate. The Nowaks's story is the history of countless working-class families in the depression. He makes it real, funny, pathetic, moving. Unless he has quite exceptional energies — like Alfred Doeblin, who worked throughout the Twenties as a GP deep in the east end of Berlin, and wrote his great novel around his patients — the writer can do no more.

Bertolt Brecht did no more in this period. I talked recently to someone who was at the first night of the Dreigroschenoper. She described how the audience, disgorging onto the Schiffbauerdamm in their tails and stoles, were surrounded by grey, ragged, shadowy figures, begging. Isherwood was not in that audience. He first saw the piece years later in New York. He first met Brecht in America. Finney suggests in his only mention of Brecht that there was a direct influence from the Dreigroschenoper and Mahagonny on The Dog Beneath the Skin. In 'The Nowak? Isherwood describes sleeping in the back room of a slum tene ment building where one could hear every noise: 'It was alien and mysterious and uncanny, like sleeping out in the jungle alone.' In the jungle of the city. 'As I thought over what Kipling did for the nation which 'civilised the world,' the 23-year-old.

Brecht announced to his diary in 1921, 'I came to the epoch-making discovery that no-one has yet describedthe city as a jungle.' Self-dramatists both, Brecht and Isherwood moved through the great city jungle like Kipling adventurers braving dangers thrown up by their own fertile imaginations. Brecht created a mythical America: the land of jazz, wrestling, Bourbon whisky, the Salvation Army, the Virginia cigar, the negro, and — the gangster as hero. The hinterland of Mahagonny.

Germany was to the young Isherwood what America was to the young Brecht.

Berlin was his Mahagonny. More seriously, their artistic answers to the rise of Nazism are sometimes similar. Compare the crude satire ofArturo Ui with the crude caricature of On the Frontier (which was cravenly censored in the autumn of Munich to make the parallels between Westland and Nazi Germany less obvious). Finally they met, in the real America. In their meeting, the gulf which divides them becomes apparent.

Isherwood hints at it, mildly, in Christopher and his Kind. Brecht notes it, sardonically, in his Arbeitsjoumal. The gulf between Brit ish and German intellectuals is captured in miniature in Isherwood's remark about Berthold Viertel: 'He could be dazzlingly witty, grotesquely comic, but never silly, never frivolous.' Oh dear. I know what he means.

The last 40 years of Isherwood's life are helpfully chronicled in some 100 pages of Finney's book, although a lot of that is taken up with the literary reworkings of That Decade. It is not a distinguished book, but a useful and worthy compilation — an interim report after 75 years. There are some nice details. Just over 50 years ago Christopher Isherwood slipped away from his medical studies at King's College, London, to travel to the City Viler Than Sodom: His excuse to the college authorities: he was getting married.