Good-Bye to Berlin. By Christopher Isherwood. Hogarth Press. Pp.347. 7s. 6d. By Thomas Moult
Mr. Christopher Isherwood, whose collaboration with Mr. Auden in several volumes suggests that he is a poet by nature even if his work so far is in prose, and drama, has collected a group of his sketches about pre-Nazi Germany and, to leave them less inconclusive than they might have been in their fragmentary state, also about the same country since Hitler. The main impression left by the book is one of smouldering indignation that is only kept from blazing up by an artistically assumed detachment. Judged solely as art, though, the six pieces, including fragments of a diary, are vague and uneven, and as personal impressions they are overegoistic and too lacking in the saving grace of humour. But, like his generation, Mr. Isherwood has a horror of what they call sentimentality, and this is a pity, because the meatless bones at the other literary extreme are no more attractive. The story of Sally Bowles, for instance, is so dry and tasteless that we speculate as we read it ╤and it comes early in the book ╤ where Mr. Isherwood╒s virtue lies as an artist.
Fortunately before the end there is a study of Jewish family life entitled ╥The Landaeurs,╙ and this is Mr. Isherwood as we expected him. Almost with a stroke of the pen he makes the outpourings of the Nazi fanatics seem not only mean but pygmy.
