[In the following excerpt, O'Brien praises Isherwood's detached narrative style in Goodbye to Berlin.]

Mr. Isherwood has brought to something like perfection the laconic and unemotional selectiveness of the camera. He swings his lens and refrains from running commentary. That is to say, if there is a joke in what he catches it is in it—it is not spoken “off”; if there is an emotion, the film takes its shadow and the camera-man finds nothing of his own to say. For this relief much thanks. It is a beautiful, quick way of record, and the care and passion which lie behind its present state of accomplishment deserve the highest praise.

I do not think that criticism nowadays is sufficiently generous to the pains and virtues of technique. We are forever praising the blundering “masterpieces” of would-be writers who, having, let us concede, something or other to say, do not appreciate that that condition is the common lot—but that the saying again of these oft-said things is the real issue—at which the business of being a writer begins. Reviewers of fiction must know very well that until a writer's manner is immediately recognisable it is senseless to give excited tongue after his matter. We do not mistake a Picasso woman for a Matisse, or a Utrillo landscape for a John Nash—and that is why these people are better painters than a thousand others. A woman, a landscape, a street-scene—novelists are for ever handling these materials, and we recognise them, more or less, when presented, but how often by that signed exactitude of personal vision which, say, Henry James gave, or Turgenev? An artist is only important once he has reached idiosyncrasy. He can become a very bad artist through ill-chosen idiosyncrasy, but he will be none at all until it signs his work.

The other night at a party someone forced me to answer a lot of difficult questions in a Literary Confessions album. In party spirit I made some wild shots. One query was: Name a great writer who lacked style. I named Walt Whitman, and was bored with myself afterwards because Whitman is so recognisable and so open to parody—the latter is an essential mark of the significant writer—that he can almost be said to have style. Certainly he has a style. And Christopher Isherwood is significant among contemporary writers of fiction in that he has a style—eliminatory, graceful, loose-running—at which he has worked with the restraint and passion which alone secure such a possession.

For the manner of Goodbye to Berlin, therefore, there can be nothing but praise, but whether the content is consistently worth the beautiful work expended is a question. Certainly I think that looked back on as a whole it is—the impression left of the rakish, feverish tragedy of a doomed city is grave and clear—but while reading the book one was wearied sometimes by sustained close-ups of small neuroses. However, if “On Ruegen Island” does not seem entirely worth its own technical brilliance, and if “The Novaks” is also somewhat unsatisfactory, “The Landauers” is beautiful, all the part called “A Berlin Diary” is as easy to read as it is vitally effective to the book's design—and Sally Bowles is here, Sally Bowles, first published last year, and now, at second reading, claiming all over again the warm, particular praise and gratitude which only such perverse perfection can evoke.