[In the following review, the anonymous critic offers a mixed assessment of Goodbye to Berlin.]

This air of inflexible integrity is not unattractive. At the same time, however, it has the notable drawback that Mr. Isherwood is continually drawing the reader's attention to Mr. Isherwood. You are not allowed to forget or ignore him, which is, after all, what the reader would prefer to do in getting to know Mr. Isherwood's scenes and characters. It is not merely that there is always a character named Christopher Isherwood in the foreground of the scene; the bother is that the preoccupations of mind, stated or implied, of this Christopher are so obviously the preoccupations of mind of the Mr. Isherwood who is collecting material for a novel and has finally produced Goodbye to Berlin. Briefly, the latter's defect is that, having taken his stand in the witness-box, his imagination tends to stop short at the contemplation of himself.

It may be this confusion of aim that accounts for the inferior stuff in the book—for instance, the story of Sally Bowles, which is a flat failure and a father tasteless one. When one has said that Sally is silly, pointlessly promiscuous and a flop even as gold-digger, there is really no more to say. Mr. Isherwood insists upon saying a great deal more to no purpose. So, though to a lesser extent, with the story “On Ruegen Island.” The rest of the book, however, is another matter. Mr. Isherwood's is a genuine talent, though perhaps he nurses it in too careful and single-minded a fashion. The opening and concluding diaries have substance and strength, and “The Nowaks” and “The Landauers” are both acute and telling pieces of work. The first, which is the better, gives an extraordinarily accurate and illuminated picture of a sordid interior and sets beside it, but not too ostentatiously, the emotionalism of a forest sanatorium for consumptives. The other is a study of Jewish character in its dual aspect of social identity and racial inheritance. In both you can discover undertones that may be described, if you like, as specially contemporary. But even here the inner unity that springs from some sort of belief or imaginative acceptance is lacking.