Chalmers's discovery was Isherwood's as well, and Forster's tea-tabling understatement provides Isherwood, from the very start of his writing career, with his characteristic way of rendering the world. Helping him to understand his limitations, Forster also directed him to his strengths. 'I was a cartoonist,' he writes insightfully in Lions and Shadows about his range and dramatic power, 'not a painter in oils.'
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The embodiment of that complex is Eric Vernon, a form both of Philip Lindsay and of Isherwood, who bears with him Isherwood's own burden of having to live with the myth of the hero-father who died in the war, as well as the shame of never having had the opportunity to fight in it himself. Eric represents a character type to whom Isherwood, as a young writer-and for transparently personal reasons-was especially interested: 'the neurotic hero,' as he calls him in Lions and Shadows, 'The Truly Weak Man.' Unable directly to confront himself or the demands of his mother, Eric eventually manages to elude Lily's control over him by finding refuge in the greater authority of Catholicism. He delights in the new peace his decision has brought him, but Isherwood clearly sees it as an abnegation of personal freedom that is no solution at all.
Although Eric's effort to escape from Lily repeats the pattern of mother-son opposition of All the Conspirators, the novel sees failure and frustration everywhere, both within and across generational groupings. If the old cannot understand the young, they cannot understand each -757- other, either. Death and decay brood over the novel, in which the comfort of the once-vital Victorian past, as symbolized by John Vernon, has now become a doddering burden, with his 'silver moustache and slobbery mouth like a baby's… smiling with pleasure and amusement at his own helplessness and weight.'
The novel's final scene captures the full sense of the futility of living in a world in which people cannot make significant contact with each other, in which language serves as a source of misunderstanding rather than connection. Margaret writes a fatuously sentimental letter to Edward, bravely acknowledging his homosexuality, claiming how close she feels to him, and assuring him that their total sexual incompatibility will become less and less important as time passes. Edward reads the letter in Berlin to his newest-but clearly by no means his last- young homosexual pickup, who understands neither Edward nor English. Isherwood gives the last words of the novel to the uncomprehending Franz, whose simplistic piety concludes the book on a painfully ironic note: ''You know, said Franz, very serious and evidently repeating something he had heard said by his elders: 'that War… it ought never to have happened. '
To reveal the disarray and lack of focus of a society to which war did indeed happen, Isherwood devised a form that would itself undercut the possibility of achieving any easy, stable view of things. Rather than a continuous narrative moving linearly across the years (1920 to 1929) covered by the novel, Isherwood chops up the narrative into four distinct 'snapshots,' and then presents them out of chronological order: 1928 is followed by 1920, 1925, and finally 1929. Though Isherwood argues in Lions and Shadows that in this 'epic disguised as a drawing room comedy' it is more interesting to 'start in the middle and go backwards, then forwards again,' such a structure also has the effect of making us uncertain about our judgments, about where we stand in this confusing world. The reader has to work hard to put together the fragmented narration and, in the process, experiences some of the difficulty of the denizens of Isherwood's bleak world who grope their way through it without light or love or direction.
Even as he worked on The Memorial in Berlin (it was finally published in 1932), Isherwood was gathering material for a large novel whose title he projected as 'The Lost.' If 'the lost' could also be said aptly to characterize the condition of the characters in his first two novels, the phrase had particular significance for Isherwood now as he -758- looked about him in the political and moral cauldron that was Berlin in the early thirties. He attributed three separate meanings to the title: those who were blindly being led into the horrific Nazi future; those who were already designated, like the Jews, to be Hitler's victims; and those who, less tragically, were treated as social outcasts, like Sally Bowles, Otto Nowak, and Mr. Norris, among others. In addition, Isherwood notes in his diary that all his chief characters are linked by the fact that 'each one of them is conscious of the mental, economic, and ideological bankruptcy of the world in which they live.'
The idea for a single novel called 'The Lost' became too tangled ever to materialize. Instead, Isherwood funneled the 'mob of characters' he had already created in two different directions: Arthur Norris into a novel bearing his own name (the original English title, Mr. Norris Changes Trains, was transformed for American audiences into The Last of Mr. Norris), and the rest into Goodbye to Berlin. Although the single volume in which both have been published in the United States under the title Berlin Stories tends to obscure the fact that they are two distinct works, both are faithful to Isherwood's original vision, in that they document the lives of the lost. Berlin, not unlike Graham Greene's London, is both a physical city and a metaphorical presence, defining a world in which people no longer have the power to control their own destinies: 'The whole city lay under an epidemic of discreet, infectious fear. I could feel it, like influenza, in my bones,' comments the narrator of The Last of Mr. Norris. Political and social disintegration are simply the public forms of the private emptiness and fear that beset all the characters: the two blend seamlessly with each other. Permeating both novels, in John Lehmann's memorable phrase, is 'the noise of history,' announcing, to those prepared to hear it, the approaching cacophony of Germany's moral insanity. Above all, both seek to render the texture and oddity of the life Isherwood encountered in Berlin, 'to present the bizarre as if it were humdrum and to show events which are generally regarded as extraordinary forming the daily routine of somebody's life.'
Isherwood chose Norris for his first subject, he tells us, because 'of all of his Berlin characters, Norris was the most bizarre.' As we follow him through his endless string of duplicities, evasions, and betrayals, as we observe him with his cosmetics and wig and learn about his sexual pleasures, we have no difficulty understanding Isherwood's estimate of him. But more than simply a bizarre character in his own right, Norris is at the same time emblematic of the moral vacuum in which all the -759- characters are living. Without any discernible conscience or principle, prepared to change trains and allegiances (hence the appropriateness of the original title) whenever necessary to ensure his survival, Norris in his own charming style is no less evil than the Nazis. Or than Schmidt, his unpleasant servant who functions as a kind of coarse and brutal double of Norris and with whom, at the end of the novel, he is 'doomed to walk the earth together.'
Norris is a compelling fictional character, and the novel works simply as a portrait of a subtly perverse creature making his way in a complicated, corrupt time. But the story of Norris is told not by an omniscient, third- person narrator but by William Bradshaw, a fact that deepens and enriches the novel considerably. For as the book progresses we realize that the focus is not on Norris alone but on what Bradshaw makes of Norris on the one hand, and what Isherwood makes of Bradshaw on the other. The fertile ambiguities begin with the name of the young English narrator. Isherwood's full name was Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood, and in granting his narrator what he calls 'his two superfluous middle names' Isherwood points to a relationship while simultaneously distancing himself from it. One of the important ways in which Bradshaw differs from Isherwood is in his lacking any perceptible sexual dimension. Although he was initially attracted to Berlin because, as he says in Christopher and His Kind, 'Berlin meant Boys,' Isherwood could not permit Bradshaw a homosexual life for two reasons: the social scandal it might cause his family at home and the aesthetic disturbance it would generate within the novel. If the narrator were to become odd and interesting because of his homosexual 'fantasies, preferences, and prejudices,' he might upstage the centrality of Norris, thereby blurring the emphasis Isherwood sought.
Isherwood, then, maintains an ambivalent connection to Bradshaw, best defined by Isherwood's own assertion that he 'both acknowledged and disowned his kinship with the Narrator.' A similar ambivalence exists between Bradshaw and Norris. From the very first page, when he meets Norris in the train, Bradshaw tries to
