Diaries (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

The narrator of Christopher Isherwood’s early novel, GOODBYE TO BERLIN (1945), famously proclaims, “I am a camera.” Thereafter, it has been Isherwood’s literary fate to be equated with that narrator and with that narrative method: the cooly distant observer who objectively records experience, his own and others’, in neat, spare, unrhetorical but effective prose. Like all such literary commonplaces, it captures more than a grain of truth. Certainly the power of his novels resides in this ability to report on sensational or piquant or mysterious events in just such an unostentatious voice. What these diaries make clear is that this directness of expression, the unflinching observation and chronicling of life, was very much a habit of mind, evident in his public as well as in his private writing.

The rewards of this kind of candor are immediately apparent in the earliest entries here: keen-eyed portraits of the Hollywood people he associated with when he arrived in California. There are studio bosses and movies stars, intense ex-patriate intellectuals and casual romantic pick-ups, literary colleagues and spiritual gurus. The descriptions are deft and merciless. Greta Garbo, for instance, is caught repeating “quite irrelevantly,” every one of her famous expressions in the course of a quarter of an hour. It is not for nothing that the diaries could only be published after his death in 1986. Yet one almost wishes that they had been published in a suitably reduced form. At over one thousand pages, the record of these twenty-one years, rich as it is in startling revelation and amusing anecdote, tests even a responsive reader’s endurance. There is a certain amount of repetition, though that in itself serves to emphasize Isherwood’s central and persistent concerns: his writing (both art and hack work), his religion (the Hindu Vedanta), his sexual and domestic life (a series of younger men until he meets the eighteen-year-old Don Bachardy in 1953), his health, his finances, his doubts about his own achievements.

In spite of its exhaustive length, the writing Isherwood did in these diaries is likely to stand beside the pre-1939 novels as the best he produced. In both he truly was a camera, and the pictures he left are clear and telling and, one suspects, true.

Sources for Further Study

London Review of Books. XIX, January 2, 1997, p. 32.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. February 2, 1997, p. 6.

The Nation. CCLXIV, February 10, 1997, p. 27.

The New York Review of Books. XLIV, February 20, 1997, p. 11.

The New York Times Book Review. CII, January 5, 1997, p. 6.

The Observer. November 10, 1996, p. 15.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIII, November 11, 1996, p. 63.

The Spectator. CCLXXVII, November 16, 1996, p. 54.

Time. CXLIX, January 13, 1997, p. 74.

The Times Literary Supplement. January 10, 1997, p. 5.