628
PARTISAN REVIEW
not convinced of the wrongness of the view of Isherwood's literary
career, widely current at least till recently, which sums it up as
"Thirties: Failure: What Did You Expect?" On this view only the
Berlin sketches and stories, together with
Lions and Shadows,
are
likely
to
have permanent literary value. Finney does not, I think,
distinguish sharply enough between documentary and literary interest.
I suspect that a lasting interest in much of Isherwood's work can only
be sustained by those who either have a personal sympathy for him, or
are concerned with diagnosing some of the psychological and cultural
aspects of the decline of the British ruling class. Much of his weaker
work lapses embarrassingly into silliness, infantilism, and false sim–
plicity, and seems to lack irony even of the defensive kind-what a
contrast
Lions and Shadows
is, in this respect, with
Down There on a
Visit!
And there is a suggestion of chronic immaturity in his habit of
treating questions of serious general human interest wholly in terms of
his opposition to his father and mother. His lack of any real power of
invention is sure ly a great failing in a novelist. And the plays written
with Auden seem today rather thin extravaganzas; even the best of
them,
The Dog Beneath the Skin,
is too irresponsible to be taken
seriously, while not funny enough to be good light entertainment.
But those of us who had a youthfu l enthusiasm for his work were
not, I think, mistaken. Isherwood 's gifts as a writer are real. His neat,
spare style looks easy to do, but it is not, as many imitators have
unintentionally shown. The famous "I am a camera" is of course
misleading, since Isherwood had to choose where to turn his camera,
and he turned it to Mr. Norris and Sally Bowles and the rest of them, all
in their various ways cases of arrested development which fascinated
him because, as he now recognizes, he was one himself. The social
realism of his 30s stories is, then, very 1,imited, and the political
significance of the Berlin work has been exaggerated; its real center of
interest is the author's equivocal attraction to "innocent" depravity,
childlike selfishness, or psychopathic amorality. Isherwood himself
has criticized these stories sharply. His youthfu l alter ego, the "young
foreigner," is, he says, "The only genuine monster in them." But here
he is too harsh. In the best pages of the Berlin stories the documentary
and the literary interest are at one, because of the young Isherwood's
extraordinary eye for significant detail and his inimitable comic touch.
From his own admittedly specialized point of view he has given
posterity an utterly convincing glimpse of the Weimar Republic in its
death-throes. We remain grateful above all for
Mr. Norris Changes
Trains.
It continues to deserve its place among the "modern classics."
Readers of
Lions and Shadows
will remember "Stephen Savage,"
