Hello to Isherwood

I had no idea there was Goodbye to Berlin upstairs in the library. I have no idea where it came from or when it did except that it must have been a long time ago. Yet again, the resource serves its purpose by filling in a gap until the next books arrive and whyever it was I first acquired it, the investment eventually paid off. I've certainly not read it before.

It is categorized on the back as 'Fiction/Literature' by Triad Granada. Really? Of course the Marcel in A la recherche is not Proust and Stephen Dedalus is not Joyce, Paul Morel is not Lawrence, and a lot of fiction is going to have its origins in the life of the person that wrote it but the fact that 'Sally Bowles' wasn't the name of the person Isherwood knew doesn't seem enough to make Goodbye to Berlin fiction rather than memoir. It's a fine line, to be sure, and eventually any sort of reportage is partial, subjective, selective and thus somehow fiction. But I arrive at the same broad conclusion that I did with 'free verse' a little while ago. It doesn't matter. It's writing and our only concern is whether it's worth reading.

And, yes, it certainly is. Isherwood is a very good writer because he's easy to read. The pages flow by like the smoothest of gin cocktails, leading you in so beguilingly until you realize you've enjoyed yourself more than you thought you had.

In his looks, deportment and writing, Isherwood was the tidy, well-presented one. Auden had the capacity for greatness but his facility could sometimes make him verbose and possibly even a bit 'general' in the wide sweep of his plentiful wisdom. MacNeice was the sensible one and Spender lucky to be involved. Berlin 1930-33 could have been sleazier this account if it had been reported by others, I dare say.

If everybody was reading La Peste two years ago, Goodbye to Berlin might be relevant now with an expansionist man suffering with his own ego de-stabilizing Europe, the far right candidate in France not a complete no-hoper in their democratic election and a narcissist with a very low IQ with chances of four more years as President of the USA.

Among Isherwood's stories of his nights out with his various acquaintances, who range from Nazi-sympathizers to Jews, is one to a wrestling show which is quite clearly fixed and, as professional wrestling mostly still does, is more choreography than sport but he writes,

The political moral is certainly depressing: these people could be made to believe in anybody or anything.

 

And ninety years later, it still is and it's no less depressing now.