The Berlin Stories (1946), by Christopher Isherwood

The Berlin Stories (1946)
Author: Christopher Isherwood

I am a camera with its shutter open." There is something unmistakably 20th Century about this, the opening line to Goodbye to Berlin. In their coolness and clarity and melancholy detachment these words express more about a moment in time than most entire novels do. Berlin Stories is not quite a novel; it's actually two short ones stuck together, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin. But they form one coherent snapshot of a lost world, the antic, cosmopolitan Berlin of the 1930's, where jolly expatriates dance faster and faster, as if that would save them from the creeping rise of Nazism. One of Isherwood's greatest characters, the racy, doomed Sally Bowles, took center stage in the book's musical adaptation, Cabaret, but the theatrical version can't match the power and richness of the original.—L.G.

From the TIME Archive:
"This portrait of an old rapscallion is satire too cold to be amusing; it is written with the analytic distaste of one who watches without pity the dwindling of a pathologically older generation"

Old Rapscallion

Up-to-date readers of up-to-date English poetry know the names, though they may not have the numbers, of Poets Wyant Hugh Auden and Stephen Spender (TIME, Oct. 1). The first books of both Auden and Spender were dedicated to one Christopher Isherwood. Last week Author Isherwood appeared for the first time on the U. S. scene, partly returned his compatriots' compliment by dedicating The Last of Mr. Norris to W. H. Auden. To canny readers, this salute was as unmistakable a signal as a finger laid to the nose: Author Isherwood is a lad of the new day, and oldsters had best avoid him altogether or loosen their collars before they begin to read him.

Those who are led (by its jacket's encomiums) to expect another South Wind or even a Vile Bodies are in for a disagreeable disappointment. This portrait of an old rapscallion is satire too cold to be amusing; it is written with the analytic distaste of one who watches without pity the dwindling of a pathologically older generation.

Narrator of The Last of Mr. Norris is a young English Communist-intellectual. On a train to Berlin he shares a compartment with an older man, whose beautiful wig and inexplicable nervousness excite his curiosity. The young man soon discovers many a queer fact about bewigged Mr. Norris: he is a masochist, his affairs are suspiciously vague, he is somehow under the thumb of his surly secretary. Sometimes Mr. Norris seems to be rolling in money; the next, he is in Micawberish straits. Consistently disingenuous, he is soon shown to be a clumsy but optimistic liar. But the young man swallows as much of Mr. Norris' misty explanations as he can. accompanies him on nights of pleasure, helps him out of less pleasurable days. When Mr. Norris turns Communist his young friend is delighted. But when he discovers at last that he has been made a tool in an extremely nefarious scheme by which Mr. Norris is trying to sell German Communist secrets to the French secret service, our hero sees through the old codger at last. For old times' sake he helps Mr. Norris make his getaway, wishes himself a good riddance.

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