The reviewer is warned from the start. Writing of himself as a reviewer (about thirty-five reviews in three years for The Listener), Christopher Isherwood remarks: “I dare say I was no more or less dogmatic, spiteful, irresponsible and smart alecky than my colleagues or the run of people who do the job today.” That, you would think, spikes the critical guns before they can fire on this collection of stories, articles, and verses, which Mr. Isherwood himself in a reviewer mood suggests will be of most interest to those already aware of his work and of him (“I cannot pretend that it is a self-sufficient, self-explanatory artwork”).

Yet there are times when a reviewer must reject the role assigned to him in advance, however accurate it may be, and tightly control his dogmatic inclinations, his spite and irresponsibility, his urge to be smart alecky, in order to save an author from himself. Perhaps of all the English writers of his generation, Mr. Isherwood brings out this spirit: he is so obviously a great talent too often tied down like Gulliver in Lilliput by mere pygmy concerns. To be more explicit, there are times when this fine writer, gifted with one of the most lucid yet graceful styles in contemporary prose, seems to be doing nothing more than playing the eternal undergraduate. Reading parts of this latest book, where old literary friends pop up yet again in admiring reminiscences or reviews (“I have come to feel that it is a job to be avoided, unless you are badly in need of money or want to recommend some book you greatly admire”), an Isherwood admirer might be forgiven for thinking there ought now to be a law against his mentioning either Auden or Spender for twenty years. It is hard to say anything revealing about your friends because you see them through a mist of sentiment, and Mr. Isherwood hardly ever reveals more than his admiration. But the names keep coming up like great symbols of the past in which he is stranded: the old campus days of discovery when everything was golden or at least memory makes it so, the crusading days in Spain or China, the safaris to the front-line. We are never sure, when Mr. Isherwood is in this kind of 1930s mood, whether he was driven to seek experience at its most intense—experience of death—like a Hemingway or whether he was running away to a boyish excitement from an adult reality he hated. One could argue that Hemingway was escaping from the mid-west just as much as Isherwood may have been ducking the industrial north of England where he was born, but at least an obsession with death showed in Hemingway's work from the beginning: it was only Berlin that struck to the heart of Mr. Isherwood's talent. The rest—the war experiences, California, postwar London—seem only to prick the surface of his consciousness and of his prose.

In Exhumations he recalls that in his novel Down There On a Visit “Paul” tells “Christopher”: “You know, you really are a tourist, to your bones. … That's the story of your life.” One cannot help thinking this is Mr. Isherwood expressing the familiar worry of a writer who leaves home. The life of the exile at its most superficial is that of the tourist: an intense involvement is needed to transform him. Mr. Isherwood did not find that kind of experience—at least it is not reflected in his writing—anywhere in his travels except in that comparatively short period before the storm in Berlin: there the exile was involved, the “tourist” was transformed, and all his great qualities—of observation, of modest intuition, of gaiety, of stylistic grace—combined to produce a justification of all the literary promise and the boosting. It also underlines, however, our sense of loss in his work: that it has not so far ever again matched his talent. This may not have just been a case of the exile never finding the right moment, the right background to transform the “tourist”: it may also have been due to a conflict between his style as a writer and his philosophy as a man.

His combination of camera realism in his observation and his relaxed, lyrical, occasionally bitchy, gossipy style seems at odds with the profound tranquillity of the Hinduism he accepted: West and East were perhaps at war in his talent in the later work. The more Hindu he became, the more heavily “literary” he grew, His detractors, of course, always claim that after pursuing foreign wars with undergraduate zeal he missed his chance by not staying in Europe for the Second World War. That seems too easy: you might just as well claim he should have remained at home in the industrial north, and then we would have missed his Goodbye to Berlin. A writer's life is often a matter of instinct: he goes where he feels he has to in order to survive. The younger Isherwood gave every sign of feeling stifled in England: perhaps we would have had nothing at all if he had stayed at home.

Writing here of his novel All the Conspirators, begun when he was twenty-one, he remarks: “I now detect a great deal of repressed aggression in this kind of obscurity.” Did this “repressed aggression” also repress his talent? Was perhaps the calm grace of his style achieved at great cost, with a raging “aggression” stifling him under the surface? We do not know. We can only conjecture about his lover's quarrel with England because he certainly repressed most of it in his writing. He does explain here that whereas today's Angry Young Man is angry with Society and its official representatives, the Angry Young Man of his generation was angry with the Family and its official representatives. “The vanquished became love-starved old maids, taciturn bitter bachelors, chronic invalids, harmless lunatics; or they died, if they were lucky.” And was it to escape this fate that some of them became exiles, tourists, perhaps even pacifists, mystics?

Mr. Isherwood's work offers no real answers, but it constantly raises the question. In this sense Exhumations, with its collected scraps from his literary past, might have provided at least a broad hint. But the stories and the verse and most of the articles are at his chattiest, least revealing level; only the religious articles have an independent life apart from Mr. Isherwood's literary legend. Perhaps this means that where once we seemed to lose him to exile (“I bet you're always sending postcards with ‘down here on a visit’ on them”) now we have simply lost him as a writer to his religion.