BOOKS
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link Isherwood's name with Berlin. The idea got about that he had
been "a beleaguered reporter" warning a deaf world of the dangers of
Nazism. Auden and Spender did much to reinforce that view. Auden
wrote in
The Orators:
And in cold Europe, in the middle of aUlumn destruction,
ChrisLOpher slood, his face grown lined with wincing
In fronl of ignorance-Tell the English,' he shivered,
'Man is a spirit.'
This has been ridicu led by the later Isherwood in
Christopher and his
Kind.
He went to Berlin, he says, because it "meant Boys"-it was a
society in wh ich homosexuality was publicly accepted. Whether or not
this is really an adequate account of his reasons at the time, he was
introduced to bar-boys by Auden, and a good deal of this biography is
concerned with his affairs with them. Isherwood left Berlin in 1933 to
spend some wandering years with the German boy Heinz. We have
now come to the years of Auden's and Isherwood's collaboration on
plays influenced by Brecht, and the contemporary
succes d'estime
of
the Berlin stories; and so to the last years with Heinz, the break with
Europe, and the journey to China with Auden to have a look at the
Sino-Japanese war ("everyone" was going to Spain, said Auden; he and
Christopher wanted a war of their own). This was followed by their
final departure for America in January 1939. Later chapters deal with
Isherwood in California, his submission to the influence of Heard–
Huxley "mysticism" and Vedanta, the decline of his literary reputa–
tion, and the adverse reception of books like
The World in the Evening.
Finally, the third phase of Isherwood's career is surveyed, the musical
and film treatments of his Berlin stories, his renunciation of quasi–
autobiographical fiction for a more complete and frank kind of self–
exposure. In line with the contemporary change in mores Isherwood
now not on ly openly acknowledges his homosexuality but has become
a militant propagandist for the homosexuals' cause.
Finney offers no general reevaluation of Isherwood's literary
achievement, but it can be inferred from his particular discussions that
he thinks more highly than many readers have done of the later books.
He makes great claims especiall y for
A Single Man
as a study of middle
age, praising its "detached narrative voice." Here at least, he seems to
say, Isherwood has really grown up.
A Single Man
is indeed very
readable and interesting, especially perhaps to the foreigner who has
taught at an American university. But there is something ominous in
the hero 's complacency about his own "silliness." And in the end I am
