SOURCE: Thomas, David P. “Goodbye to Berlin: Refocusing Isherwood's Camera.” Contemporary Literature 13, no. 1 (winter 1972): 44-52.

I am a camera with its shutter open,
quite passive, recording, not thinking.
Recording the man shaving at the window
opposite and the woman in the kimono
washing her hair. Some day all this will
have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

The second paragraph of Goodbye to Berlin (1930)¹ has become almost the obligatory starting point for discussions of Christopher Isherwood's fiction. Richard Mayne asserts that it “very closely describes the role which Isherwood plays as the narrator of his novels. Here, he is a self-effacing onlooker, making no judgments, forming no attachments, withholding imaginative sympathy, ultimately not involved,”² while G. H. Bantock, quoting the same passage, complains of “the lack of a sense of personal reaction, except insofar as the mere angle at which the camera is held can imply a comment.”³ Introducing an interview with Isherwood, George Wickes noted that in Goodbye to Berlin the author “perfected his technique of observing through a dispassionate narrator bearing his own name”⁴—again referring to the “camera.”

These examples can be multiplied, especially from among Isherwood's reviewers. In a more weighty context, Norman Friedman selected the offending (in this case) paragraph to illustrate “what seems the ultimate in authorial exclusion” for his PMLA article on “Point of View in Fiction.”⁵ He went on to argue that the effort “to transmit unaltered a slice of life is to misconceive the fundamental nature of language itself: the very act of writing is a process of abstraction, selection, omission, and arrangement.”⁶ It would be difficult to gainsay this pronouncement, and Isherwood certainly appears open to a charge of aesthetic naiveté. But all these commentators, Friedman included, have agreed to treat the “camera” passage as a declaration of authorial method—as, in effect, a short theoretical manifesto. “Isherwood,” the narrator of Goodbye to Berlin, is Isherwood, they imply.

There are good reasons for assuming this identity. Not only does Isherwood use his own name for the central character (and narrator) of several works of fiction, but he has insisted that “my work is all part of all an autobiography.”⁷ To any reader of Isherwood's novels, from All the Conspirators (1929) to A Meeting by the River (1967), this fact is self-evident. Lions and Shadows (1938), his very slightly fictionalized autobiography of the twenties, provides keys to certain recurring characters and themes in the fiction as a whole. “Chalmers” (Edward Upward), for instance, appears in All the Conspirators; “Weston” (W. H. Auden) crops up again in Down There on a Visit (1962), with “Stephen Savage” (Stephen Spender). In the same book, “John” is clearly John Lehmann, while there seems little purpose in the “disguise” of “E. M.” for Forster. In his preface to Mr. Norris and I, by Gerald Hamilton,⁸ Isherwood acknowledges the latter as at least the point of departure for his most famous rogue, while his indebtedness to Berthold Viertel, the Austrian film director, in the creation of Friedrich Bergmann (Prater Violet, 1945) itself inspired a commentary by Viertel.⁹

Isherwood's fictional heroes, moreover, even when they are not given his own name, have on several occasions been implicitly identified by place of origin. Marple Hall, in Cheshire, Isherwood's childhood home, appears as “Chapel Bridge” in the lives of Eric Vernon (The Memorial, 1932), “Isherwood” (Down There on a Visit), “George” (A Single Man, 1964), and “Oliver” (A Meeting by the River, 1967).

Much of Isherwood's fiction has been based upon actual diaries; he has always invoked the verité of actual events with an acute sense of specific place and time—making use of what he has described as “islands of fact.”¹⁰ In these respects he has striven for a sense of the personal and the actual. In fiction of this sort, the author/reader relationship is unusually close: the reader is, in fact, obliged to take an interest in the authorial personality, for that personality is both the means and, substantially, the subject of the work. Isherwood makes this quite explicit in his prefacing note to Exhumations (1966), a collection of miscellaneous stories, essays, and short reviews: “This book is compiled chiefly for those who already feel some interest, never mind how slight, in my writings and, hence in me [my italics]. … If I am in a museum, I am beyond excuses; the past does not have to excuse itself. If I am in a courtroom, it is the business of someone else to defend me. …”¹¹ It is all very well to insist, as Isherwood does in his preface to Mr. Norris and I, that “the inquisitive and the malicious are eager to discover in every novel a roman à clef. But their miserable little key fits nothing but a broken pad-lock of their own discretion; it will never open the doors of Life or of Art”¹²—yet an author who assumes that interest in his work implies interest in himself can hardly complain of prying readers. The very meagerness of his disguise invites further speculation.

It is this apparent contradiction, the highly autobiographical writer who grows indignant at his too-intrusive readership (the public as Peeping Tom), which makes “I am a camera” more significant with reference to Isherwood's technique than has been recognized. For the passage must be read in character, as the revelation of personality and not the exposition of theory. It is, indeed, entirely misleading as a description of Isherwood's narrative method.

Even in context, the passage is discredited in these terms, as a brief analysis of the first three paragraphs of Goodbye to Berlin will show. The opening paragraph appears to set a standard of discreet reportage: “From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle-class” (p. 1). At risk of pedantry, this is worth examining as the “recording, not thinking” “print” of the “camera.” In point of time, cameras should limit themselves to the present; yet “the lamps burn all day.” Cameras should be careful about place; yet “the whole district is like this.” Above all, perhaps, cameras should not use metaphors: “monumental safes,” is, however, metaphorical both as a primary comparison and as a prefiguration of the bankruptcy of the Darmstaedter und National which occurs in the Sally Bowles section of Goodbye to Berlin—an event which expresses the final collapse of the German bourgeois economy. The disintegrating security of that bourgeoisie is thus doubly-exposed, so to speak, in this phrase.

This simply demonstrates by explication what Friedman asserts theoretically. “I am a camera,” which follows immediately, would therefore seem to be an affectation (Regard, the author at work!), or a genuine misunderstanding of the limitations of the reporter-stance. It is the third paragraph which really defines its context:

At eight o'clock in the evening the house doors will be locked. The children are having supper. The shops are shut. The electric-sign is switched on over the night-bell of the little hotel on the corner, where you can hire a room by the hour. And soon the whistling will begin. Young men are calling their girls. Standing down there in the cold, they whistle up at the lighted windows of warm rooms where the beds are already turned down for the night. They want to be let in. Their signals echo down the deep hollow street, lascivious and private and sad. Because of the whistling, I do not care to stay here in the evenings. It reminds me that I am in a foreign city, alone, far from home. Sometimes I determine not to listen to it, pick up a book, try to read. But soon a call is sure to sound, so piercing, so insistent, so despairingly human, that at last I have to get up and peep through the slats of the venetian blind to make quite sure that it is not—as I know very well it could not possibly be—for me.

(pp. 1-2)

All pretence at narrative impersonality has been abandoned. The camera gives way to confession. The pseudo-detachment of the observer/reporter crumbles before the “despairingly human” call of the world without. As V. S. Pritchett has noted, the thirties role of the reporter was an updated version of the late nineteenth-century separation of artist from “Life.”¹³ It is a role which “Isherwood,” in his “garret” above the Berlin streets, cannot sustain. “I am a camera” can be seen for what it is—a defensive mask, the pseudo-impersonality of a young man, “alone, far from home,” attempting to protect a vulnerable personality against the terrors of isolation. What this third paragraph makes clear is that “Isherwood” really wishes to abandon his narrow vantage-point, that he yearns for a “call” to the “human” from his hiding-place in art.

Lions and Shadows provides insight into the Isherwood hero (in whatever varying degrees of relationship with himself). It reveals, furthermore, the extent to which Isherwood's fiction is dominated by two psychological patterns: to neurotic withdrawal, on the one hand, and to open confession and forms of personal dependence on the other. Describing a holiday to Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight, he writes of how he tried to conceal his failure to mix easily with other young people by affecting artistic “objectivity”; but “beneath all my note-taking, my would-be scientific detachment, my hatred, my disgust, there was the old sense of exclusion, the familiar grudging envy.”¹⁴ That envy remains in “Isherwood's” half-suppressed wish for a “call” to the world of common human affections. Just as the “camera” provides a spurious theoretical justification for this neurotic dissociation, so did the Isherwood of Lions and Shadows rationalize his predicament. After this holiday, he decided that future dealings with his “own caste” would require special strategies. “The most I shall ever achieve, I thought, will be to learn how to spy upon them unnoticed. Henceforward, my problem is how to perfect a disguise.”¹⁵

“To spy upon them unnoticed” behind a “disguise”—the consequences for Isherwood were not merely a defensive pose as the “objective” realist. A theory of the novel developed which was far removed from the apparent (and mistaken) naiveté of the camera. In Lions and Shadows, he outlined his new conviction: “I thought of the novel (as I hoped to learn to write it) essentially in terms of technique, of conjuring, of chess. The novelist, I said to myself, is playing a game with his reader; he must continually amaze and deceive him, with tricks, with traps, with extraordinary gambits, with sham climaxes, with false directions.”¹⁶ The novel is designed as riddle, “a game” in which technique is largely measured by its power to “deceive.”

For an autobiographical novelist the further consequences of this preoccupation with disguise, concealment, and riddle are essentially personal. Technique is directed towards masking the “I” (where the first person is used), or in setting the reader off on “false directions” when he seeks the authorial personality behind the narrative persona or protagonist. The “Isherwood” who emerges from his retreat to pull back the curtains, however briefly, allows a momentary revelation of the unprotected self. Hunt-the-author is manifestly part of the “game.”

But the contradiction remains: why does Isherwood's disguise prove so flimsy? Why does the mask slip? In Lions and Shadows he describes an impulse contrary to that of concealment. The “disgust” to which he refers in the Freshwater Bay incident had its expression in periodic bouts of self-revulsion and masochistic indulgence. He became “the public lavatory that anyone might flush.”¹⁷ Technique-as-concealment was checked by a need for self-abasement and public humiliation. The “nonconformist-conscience” of which Isherwood also speaks left him with a profound, if obscure, guilt complex.

This double movement, oscillating between confession and withdrawal, grounded in the psychology of the autobiographical hero, is present in every one of Isherwood's novels. The “reticence” of the camera technique, with its stress on the observed scene, is in dramatic relation to passages of self-exposure. Lions and Shadows reveals Isherwood's decision to abstract and project these qualities he had observed in himself in the fictional type of “the neurotic hero, The Truly Weak Man”¹⁸—a type conceived in Freudian terms as the victim of mother-fixation, given to hero-worshipping wise father figures. A characteristic pattern emerges, expressive of the hero's neurosis. In All the Conspirators, Philip Lindsay flees from his “Terrible Mother” to an “escape” in art. But his dependence upon her is too great; he returns to his tiny room/womb in Mrs. Lindsay's house, fights an ineffectual battle against her influence, makes one more feeble attempt at flight, suffers neurotic collapse, and is seen, in the last scene of the novel, ironically holding forth on the necessity for willpower to his friend Allen Chalmers, while living as the semi-invalid, dilettante, “kept Artist” of the rapacious Mother. Isherwood's subsequent heroes withdraw rather than collapse. Eric Vernon (The Memorial) flees from Mrs. Vernon into social work and politics; his neurosis is complicated by sternly repressed homosexual feelings, and in a crucial scene he confesses to himself that he feels sexual jealousy over his cousin Maurice. His reaction is to retreat from human contact and lose himself in the bosom of the Church. William Bradshaw (Mr. Norris Changes Trains, 1934) is also running away. The first scene of the novel takes place on the train en route to Berlin; family, country, “caste” are left behind, while Bradshaw attempts to purge himself of neurotic fears of these properties by the familiar Baudelairean descent into nether worlds—the society of criminals, sexual eccentrics, and revolutionary politics. The essentially comic tone of this novel should not obscure the significance of the long central scene where the enigmatic Bradshaw (who tells us so little of his background and delights in maintaining inscrutability) confesses his part (albeit unknowing) in a shabby political/commercial deal. His confessor is Ludwig Bayer, the Communist Party chief in Berlin, whose “paternal eyes” had impressed Bradshaw from the first: “It was a long, silly story, which seemed to take hours to tell. I hadn't realized how foolish, how contemptible some of it would sound. I felt horribly ashamed of myself, blushed, tried to be humorous and weakly failed, defended and then accused my motives, avoided certain passages, only to blurt them out a moment later, under the neutral inquisition of his friendly eyes. The story seemed to involve a confession of all my weaknesses to that silent, attentive man. I have never felt so humiliated in all my life.”¹⁹ The progression is clear. Unlike Philip Lindsay, who keels over, unlike Eric Vernon, who conceals his “weakness” by renunciation, Bradshaw confronts and confesses his motives for joining politics—a sphere which until this confession had seemed to be a glamorous spy-game. The humiliation is necessary to Bradshaw's “cure,” although it works no miracles. He is left alone, free of the immediate influence of his past (he can resist it), and freed of illusions about the nature of his “exile.”

Goodbye to Berlin is made up of six associated but separate narratives in which the narrator is “Isherwood.” The transition from Bradshaw to “Isherwood”—with implicitly increasing openness about the autobiographical nature of the work²⁰—may be measured by the opening paragraphs I have discussed. The pose of withdrawal is insufficient. Goodbye to Berlin is engagé in the sense that it is committed to discovery of the “human” among those Isherwood termed “the Lost.”²¹ The commitment is humanistic, not political; indeed, the true theme of this most famous of Isherwood's works of fiction is a search for contact, for participation in the lives of others. It attempts to cure the neurotic hero by tapping springs of human sympathy, substituting people for the artificial sanctuary of art, religion, or politics. The hero is still impelled to flight, but has found a new honesty and self-knowledge. During the Sally Bowles section, “Isherwood” and Sally have been taken up by Clive, a rich American drifter. He plans to take them on a round-the-world trip, away from the uncomfortably imperative realities of Berlin. “Isherwood” is at first ready to function as an indeterminate parasite. But as they discuss the plan, the funeral of Herman Muller is taking place beneath the window of their hotel:

We had nothing to do with those Germans down there, marching, or with the dead man in the coffin, or with the words on the banners. In a few days, I thought, we shall have forfeited all kinship with ninety-nine per cent of the population of the world, with the men and women who earn their living, who insure their lives, who are anxious about the future of their children. Perhaps in the Middle Ages people felt like this, when they believed themselves to have sold their souls to the Devil. It was a curious, exhilarating, not unpleasant sensation: but, at the same time, I felt slightly scared. Yes, I said to myself, I've done it now. I am lost.

(p. 49)

Even accepting the degree of self-dramatization and romantic exaggeration, “Isherwood” is aware of the consequences of this separation. Escape, in these terms, will bring a damned isolation. In Down There on a Visit, as the title suggests, Isherwood later explored this theme of the willful choice of a personal hell more fully.

“I am a camera,” the act of neurotic withdrawal, the blandness of Isherwood's hero in the Berlin fiction, all speak of their opposites, of an aching need to join the mainstream of direct human sympathies. There is a powerful dramatic interaction between “Isherwood's” inability to enjoy open human relationships in personal contexts and his sympathetic instinct for the destitute and despairing. In the introductory passages of the final section of Goodbye to Berlin, “A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-33),” the central symbol of the Tiergarten is positively Dickensian in its appeal to raw feeling (and perhaps sentimentality):

But the real heart of Berlin is a small damp black wood—the Tiergarten. At this time of the year, the cold begins to drive the peasant boys out of their tiny unprotected villages into the city, to look for food, and work. But the city, which glowed so brightly and invitingly in the night sky above the plains, is cold and cruel and dead. Its warmth is an illusion, a mirage of the winter desert. It will not receive these boys. It has nothing to give. The cold drives them out of its streets, into the wood which is its cruel heart. And there they cower on benches, to starve and freeze, and dream of their faraway cottage stoves.

(p. 187)

Whatever is said about this passage, it is hardly impersonal; if “Isherwood” and his camera have reference to their author, it is not to any theory of fiction he proposes. It is the Neurotic Hero, the Truly Weak Man, who takes temporary refuge behind the shutter. The camera both sees and suffers.

Notes

1. Goodbye to Berlin contains six stories, all previously published: “A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930),” “Sally Bowles,” “On Ruegen Island (Summer 1931),” “The Nowaks,” “The Landauers,” “A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-33).” All references to Goodbye to Berlin will be to the edition included in The Berlin Stories (New York: New Directions, 1963). Page references are included parenthetically in the text.

2. “The Novel and Mr. Norris,” Cambridge Journal, 6 (June 1953), 564-565.

3. “The Novels of Christopher Isherwood,” Focus V.4: The Novelist as Thinker, ed. B. Rajan (London: Dobson, 1947), p. 51.

4. Shenandoah (Spring 1965), p. 23. Other factors contributed to the popularity of the “camera” phrase amongst Isherwood's commentators. John Van Druten's adaptation of “Sally Bowles” for Broadway as “I am a Camera” gave the phrase wide currency—as did the subsequent film of the play. At the same time, there are a number of ways in which Isherwood's name is associated with filming. He was a founder-member of the Film Society at Cambridge, and confesses (see Lions and Shadows) to a lifelong devotion to the art of the cinema. He first worked as a scriptwriter for Gaumont-British in 1933, incorporating this material in Prater Violet (a novel substantially about the creativity of the camera). Since the early 1940s he has been fairly steadily employed as a writer in Hollywood. More specifically, he is ready to acknowledge certain “cinematic” qualities in his work. “I think what the movies taught me was visualization.” (“A Conversation on Tape,” London Magazine, June 1961, p. 45).

5. 70 (1955). Included in The Theory of the Novel, ed. Philip Stevick, pp. 108-137.

6. Ibid., p. 130.

7. “A Conversation on Tape,” p. 46.

8. Reprinted in Exhumations (London: Methuen, 1966), pp. 85-87.

9. Theatre Arts, 30 (May 1946), pp. 295-98.

10. “A Conversation on Tape,” p. 42.

11. Exhumations, n.p.

12. Ibid., p. 86.

13. New Statesman and Nation, 23 Aug. 1952, p. 213.

14. Lions and Shadows (London: Four Square, 1963), p. 152.

15. Ibid., p. 153.

16. Ibid., p. 159.

17. Ibid., p. 122.

18. Ibid., p. 128.

19. The Berlin Stories, p. 155.

20. Isherwood's full christened name was Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood.

21. Isherwood first intended to use his Berlin experience for “one huge tightly constructed melodramatic novel in the manner of Balzac. I wanted to call it The Lost. This title, or rather its German equivalent, Die Verlorenen, seemed to me wonderfully ominous. I stretched it to mean not only The Astray and The Doomed—referring tragically to the political events in Germany and our epoch, but also ‘The Lost’ in quotation marks—referring satirically to those individuals whom respectable society shuns in horror.” (“About This Book,” The Berlin Stories, p. v.)