If the spirit of this age is faithlessness, or an unstable grasp of demi-faiths, Christopher Isherwood is then a sign of the times. In writing, lack of faith tends to rapportage, as Cocteau puts it, ‘a mere aping of the original,’ since it is the writer's outlook, or particular faith, that forces out his plot from the ‘stream of mere phenomena.’ Some of the best young writers today, imitators chiefly of Hemingway, who used a structure of rapportage through which to build his plots, amount to little, since they lack this necessary drive of an idea, a theme, a faith, through which to bring their skeletons to life. Their work is botched in its conception. Christopher Isherwood is better than these writers; his work trembles on the brink of meaning, as if this force were there, but undefined, not yet developed enough to create from his potentialities, power. So that we see tantalising mature talents, and a promise; the best maybe we have. This knowledge perhaps made him wisely abandon the ‘huge, episodic novel,’ The Lost, leaving instead these diaries and sketches. For that is what Goodbye to Berlin is, and very good too. His work being still in progress, steadily enlarges.

The diaries, Autumn 1930 and Winter 1932-3, present the material from which he sifted the ‘sketches.’ They show his usual just and calm watchfulness, whether the thing is sad or funny. Like everything he writes, they are as varied and readable as observing an interesting river. In this way they are model diaries. Being so evenly composed, one can only quote at random. There are moods, however, of loneliness, the youths whistling their girls under his window, ‘Their signals echo down the deep hollow street, lascivious and private and sad’; Frl. Schroeder, the landlady's, motherly gossip; the cafe Froika, set in action like a stale puppet machine by indifferent clients; drunken philosophy, ‘“Eventually we're all queer,” drawled Fritz solemnly, in lugubrious tones’; the Communist cafe with its tricky, desperately active lads; the treacherous arrival of Hitlerism. This and much more is described well and accurately. ‘“I am a camera,” he says, “with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking”.’ In the sketches this is developed, carefully printed, fixed.

The picture is continued in the sketches, but is there shaped by his outlook of amoral sightseeing. The author has also chosen to be no more than one of the sights. This start for a larger ‘outlook,’ insufficient to produce the theme of The Lost, is apt for the delineation of first sketches. Within this limit they are excellently formed. Sally Bowles is the best, because on the surface of the narrator's inactivity is played Sally's character, which does develop, like a modern Moll Flanders, until her final postcard, ‘“Am writing in a day or two,” it said. That was six days ago.’ Here his passivity, which in Mr. Norris Changes Trains produced a mere if entertaining record, is positive since it aids Sally's development, her ‘story,’ in fact. In ‘The Landauers’ something similar appears to be building up, but the end, where he hears of Bernhard's death in a concentration camp, is ‘out of true.’ It does not develop from the rest, which it thus leaves suddenly static, a cut-off record, revealing the lack of theme (or plot) underlying its nevertheless great interest. In ‘The Nowaks’ this is less apparent. But even there—and the story, as far as it goes, is very good indeed—the end is invented. A conflict is finely stated, but the last paragraph, with its emotive rhythms and images, fails to make a resolution. ‘On Ruegen Island’ has not this sense of want, for it has no thought of a theme, being a diary of a holiday where an interesting situation is discovered. This is excellently told and explained.

It may seem that Goodbye to Berlin fails. Yet, on reading it, the sense of success and achievement, within the limits, explained by the author, of ‘diaries and sketches.’ Certainly it is a book to have and keep. It is The Lost that failed, not Goodbye to Berlin. If it is rather The Lost that is reviewed here, it is in the hope that Christopher Isherwood has yet to write it.