Christopher Isherwood was an author I inherited, like Graham Greene and G.K. Chesterton. Years ago, before I moved to Beirut, my father suggested that I read his expat kunstlerroman
The Berlin Stories. My mother even bought me a copy. This spring, four years later, I finished the book. I used to think that you could never love these writers – the inherited – as fully as those you find yourself. That is, of course, wrong. The opposite is often true.
The Berlin Stories is really two novels, The Last of Mr. Norris (originally Mr. Norris Changes Trains) and Goodbye to Berlin, stapled together by place and voice. In each, Isherwood’s literary avatar makes l’entre-deux-guerre Berlin his own. He teaches and drinks and wanders and watches, with the detached sadness of all expatriates, as the Nazis come to power. The work is valuable in literary terms and as an historical document. But as with the better-known A Single Man Isherwood’s strength is ultimately the personal, his power: evocation.
When I read through the autobiographical muslin of
The Berlin Stories I see the author and his disjunctive literary self but I also see me. This is a hallmark of all affecting literature: to be "personally addressed." But Isherwood has a special purchase here; he – like Lawrence Durrell – has the remarkable power to approximate another’s memories while reciting his own. When I read about the underground bars and the damp streets, Sally Bowles and the chain-smoking cynics, it’s no longer Berlin but Beirut; and I rush for a pad to scribble down evenings and conversations that I had long since forgot.
