The Brothel and the Kimono: Christopher Isherwood’s Humble, Queer, Inoperative Goodbye to Berlin
p. 221-236
Résumé
The Berliners the narrator/character meets and depicts in Goodbye to Berlin (1939) are the casualties of the 1929 crisis and scapegoats of the Nazi State to come. Isherwood’s Berlin is a brothel-house where self-reliance has been replaced by ubiquitous vulnerability and matter-of-fact resilience. It is also a place where a young Jewish store manager is apt to don a kimono over his business suit, embodying a more sophisticated form of humble resistance, androgynous, passive, oriental. Goodbye to Berlin’s queer voice and loosely built, cinematic, inoperative narratives constitute a ‘humble’ text, undermining from below fascist ideologies, liberal-humanist certainties and aesthetic fallacies.
Texte intégral
1Arrogance, rather than humbleness, is usually associated with the Auden-Isherwood gang, aka the Young Writers of the Thirties. Prone to discard the alleged Bloomsbury Ivory Tower as liberal bourgeois false consciousness and high modernist poetics as too formalist and just as passé as Edwardian novels, they were in quest of a new style to capture the immediate social and historical unrest. In a 1932 letter to E. M. Forster, Isherwood humorously compares his generation to ‘little Macbeths who have killed Duncan and have to go on murdering and murdering.’1
2A not so humble rebellion against literary predecessors, Isherwood’s writings should also be pitted against, or at least read in the context of the objective, documentary trend of 1930s British literature—a trend epitomised by George Orwell’s social observations of the Paris and London slums in Down and Out in Paris and London, by the Mass Observation movement which blurred the line between the visual arts and sociology, also by war narratives and travelogues.
3In her 1940 essay ‘The Leaning Tower’ Virginia Woolf calls the left bourgeois writers of the thirties the ‘leaning tower generation,’ exposing their ethically precarious viewpoint: to her they are preaching about the plight of the lower classes from the height of their male middle-class privilege, and yet she acknowledges that ‘the leaning-tower writer has had the courage to tell the truth, the unpleasant truth, about himself’.2 The authorial situation Isherwood has to negotiate in Goodbye to Berlin is indeed that of an English writer born into the Protestant upper-middle-class narrating the collapse of the bankrupt German middle class and the rise of anti-Semitic violence. It is also that of a homosexual writer witnessing the social and political vulnerability of a Lumpenproletariat of prostitute boys out of reformatory schools—a vulnerability, he would later confess, he was exploiting in a colonial—like situation.3 His queer, shy, self-effacing narrative namesake persona allows him to tell some of the ‘unpleasant truth about himself,’ but also, more essentially, to maintain his Berlin narratives in an inoperative4 twilight zone between objective reporting (potentially patronising, exploitative and predatory) and a personal artistic vision (apt to lapse into self-indulgent autobiography).
4In Goodbye to Berlin the character/narrator called ‘Christopher Isherwood’ eschews gazing from above at humbled Berliners struck by the economic crisis and endemic street violence. This observer, who compares himself to a passive camera, recording without thinking or judging, is not that passive and not that neutral, and neither is his voice as a narrator. An unobtrusive shadowy presence inside his movie shots or still pictures, ‘Christopher Isherwood’ is a humble protagonist performing casual acts of resistance. His modestly subversive queer voice, reverberated by the bare style of the author, undermines such master narratives as the capitalist ethos of self-reliance, the communist utopian end of history, and literature as serious, autonomous high art.
5The earthly resilience and humility of his Berliners elude socio-political-psychological statements uttered from above, while the humbly un-heroic queerness of the narrator’s voice and eyes challenges Nazi self-aggrandizement, communist bravado and capitalist self-righteousness: the six Berlin stories can be read as so many humble, inoperative vanishing lines, brushing past symbolism and committed meaning while subtly eschewing formal and interpretative closure.
Isherwood’s ‘leaning tower’ Depiction of Humbled Berliners Humble Berlin
6The two ‘Berlin Diaries’ which constitute the opening and closing fragments of Goodbye to Berlin have the same loose structure and cinematic quality, if on a different scale: the first one hinges round Fraulein Schroeder’s boarding house and its dwellers in a decaying middle-class district depicted from the narrator’s window as ‘street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuable and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle-class.’5 The final one, set in the days before and after Hitler’s rise to power, in the winter 1932–1933, has a wider scope and opens on a bird’s eye’s view of the city: ‘In the cold the town seems actually to contract, to dwindle to a small black dot, scarcely larger than hundreds of other dots, isolated and hard to find, on the enormous European map.’ (Isherwood 1998, 230) Then the narrative camera scans its cold streets and parks, focusing on the extreme deprivation of young migrants from the countryside:
But the real heart of Berlin is a small damp black wood—the Tiergarten. At this time of the year, the cold begins to drive the peasant boys out of their tiny unprotected villages into the city, to look for food, and work. [. . .] And there they cower on benches, to starve and freeze, and dream of their far-away cottage stoves. (231)
7The rest of the second diary is a cut-edited montage of shot-sequence-like paragraphs, where second-hand reports on the lives of impoverished or persecuted Berliners alternate with first-hand accounts of communist resistance and Nazi violence—the latter culminating in a close-up on the poked-out eye of a beaten-up youth (248).
8Isherwood’s Berlin is a quaint, baroque, non-totalisable space, slightly absurd, self-consciously ‘pompous’ in its civic centre and nonchalantly ‘shabby’ elsewhere (230–231). Its aura of decadent excess has already been commodified into a sham tourist attraction, while the grand Prussian aura of military aggressiveness is mocked or played down: it is ironically glimpsed at in the Gothic-medieval bric-à-brac in the narrator’s room at Fraulein Schroeder’s, featuring stained glass images of Bismarck and the king of Prussia, as well as sham-looking, yet heavy and sharp halberds (10); it is made fun of in Sally Bowles’ boasting about the faun-like primitiveness of her Prussian lover (54); it is denied in the melancholy vision of Berlin as a small vulnerable spot surrounded by ‘an immense waste of unhomely ocean—sprinkled with leafless corpses and ice-lakes and tiny villages which are remembered only as the outlandish names of battlefields in half-forgotten wars’ (230). In the end Berlin is like a bare, fragile, suffering body the English narrator empathises with, even quite literally merges with: ‘Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching’ (230).
The Lost, or Humbled Middle-Class Berliners
9A similar mix of amused distance and tactful empathy is directed at its inhabitants. As Isherwood explained, Goodbye to Berlin was originally to be a full-fledged organic novel entitled The Lost, a Weimar Republic version of Balzac’s Splendeur et Misère des Courtisanes. But the grand title, with its moral-religious connotations, was abandoned together with the totalising form of a historical novel, and replaced by ‘little broken bits of something,’ modest, contingent ‘slivers’ of narratives released individually before being collected in a single volume.6 Thus individual lives supersede typologies, as the characters’ idiosyncrasies are foregrounded, dwarfing both narrative structure and social or moral paradigms.
10The economic fall and provisional resilience of middle-class Fraulein Schroeder, ‘Christopher Isherwood’’s Nollendorfstrasse landlady, simultaneously exemplifies and subverts what the narrator had introduced as the generic bankruptcy of the middle-class: from a respectable woman of independent means, the early 1920s inflation and 1930s economic crisis have turned her into a quasi-domestic servant to her lodgers, without even a room of her own. Yet the camera-like narrator follows her at such close angle that a merrily grotesque narrative line supersedes her superficial biography of doom. Her sense of loss at renouncing respectability and privacy is questioned by her obvious relish in dealing with scatological matters and improper gossip: the narratives, which sometimes sound like the unedited recording of her monologues, complacently transcribe her matter-of-fact tolerance for all sexual matters, with ‘Christopher Isherwood’ as complicit listener smiling at the sexual innuendoes of her stories, her down-to-earth idiolect and imagery (‘go trot trot’ [18]); ‘If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be an omnibus!’ (232), and habit of backing words with no-nonsense action and pantomime: ‘“Why, I remember the time when I’d sooner cut off my right hand than empty this chamber [. . .] And now,” says Frl. Schroeder, suiting the action to the word, “my goodness! It’s no more to me than pouring out a cup of tea!”’ (12).
11Moral and ethical judgments are suspended or kept at bay, as the very notions of cynical coat-turning, political contradiction and moral fall are made irrelevant—they fail to grasp the reality of a character who expresses her respect for the ‘Führer’ but two months after voting for the communists, befriends her pro-Nazi, anti-semitic Bavarian lodger Frau Mayr but helps sexually liberated Sally Bowles get an abortion, all the while being ‘on intimate terms’ with a young bartender half her age. Universals, logic and values have been buried under her prosaic survival mode: the grotesquely inconsistent amorality of the landlady confirms Isherwood’s tongue-in-cheek assessment of his rented room’s baroque collection of bizarre objects as ‘an uncompromising statement of her views on Capital and Society, Religion and Sex’ (11).
Working-Class Boys and Upper-Class Jews: the Brothel (Humbleness) and the Kimono (Humility)
12The motif common to most of Isherwood’s Berliners’ lives and the humble core of their condition as observed by ‘Christopher Isherwood’ might precisely be the necessity for them to radically compromise, i.e. to steer clear of propriety and more or less literally set themselves for sale or rent. Two elements that may have seemed mentioned only incidentally in the opening page of the first ‘Berlin Diary,’ a room-by-the-hour hotel and a woman in a kimono, assume a motif-like relevance later in the following stories. Indeed prostitution is ubiquitous, while in the section entitled ‘The Landauers’ the kimono reappears, associated with the young Jewish department store owner Bernhard Landauer, an early casualty of the Nazi regime—the only character who dies within the frame of the stories, he is also the only one explicitly referred to as ‘humble,’ and derogatorily so.
13In ‘The Nowaks,’ the narrator comes and stays in the Hallesches Tor tenement apartment of Otto’s working-class parents. In the preceding section, ‘On Reugen Island,’ the sixteen year-old boy had stepped into ‘Christopher Isherwood’’s diegetic life and camera field as the paid lover of a casual acquaintance of his upper-class Englishman Peter Wilkinson. In his autobiography, Isherwood reveals that Peter Wilkinson was an autofictional character into whom the author had written his own jealous, needy relation with Otto Nowak’s real counterpart (Isherwood 2001, 44–46). While the real Isherwood bluntly states that his younger self moved into a place barely fit for habitation because he wanted to live with his young German lover, the reasons why the fictitious ‘Christopher Isherwood’ decided to live with the Nowaks are opaque—he claims them to be friendship and a cheaper rent.7 But even though it remains ambiguous whether ‘Christopher Isherwood’ himself is one of Otto’s sexual clients, it is clearly suggested that the Nowak family depend on the younger son’s gigolo business to survive. The parents half-condone it by taking some of his money, while the unemployed elder brother Lothar, who joined the Nazi youth, is a stern, silently disapproving presence. The Nowaks are objectively humbled, struck by unemployment, poor health, degrading living conditions, and dependent on foreign money like jungle natives on a colonial trader’s gifts.8
14The author of ‘The Nowaks’ must have been aware of the pitfalls awaiting the ‘leaning-tower writer’ when recording the lives of the destitute—humbling his characters further through a patronising gaze, reifying or typifying them through middle-class sentimentality or intellectual dryness.9 His narrator does report on his characters’ humble circumstances in conventionally moving images, for instance metonymic close-ups on the reddened swollen eyelids of a Hallesches Tor dive rent-boy (Isherwood 1998, 150), or on the sodden shoes of coughing, shivering consumptive Frau Nowak tramping the streets from doctor to doctor until her confinement in a faraway sanatorium (156). He unobtrusively records her petty bureaucratic humiliations and her reactions of enduring equanimity, distrust or pride, when boasting about her obviously incompetent doctors or proudly dismissing the inspector of housing’s visit of her insanitary flat as ‘spying’ (147). The narrative voice hovers between a symbiotic ‘we’ making ‘Chris’ one of the family, especially against middle-class bureaucratic Others (‘as though we were to blame’ (147) and camera-like self-effacement. Counterpointing this self-effacing symbiosis, ‘Christopher Isherwood’’s sense of alienation in this foreign working-class environment is foregrounded: in the following passage, for instance, the hyperbolical terms and metaphors (‘enormous’, ‘jungle’) and the adjectives ‘alien’ and ‘uncanny’ convey an almost ontological sense of otherness, eschewing middle-class travelogues understated sense of cultural and class distance:10
Lying in bed, in the darkness, in my tiny corner of the enormous human warren of the tenements, I could hear, with uncanny precision, every sound which came up from the courtyard below. [. . .] It was alien and mysterious and uncanny, like sleeping out in the jungle alone.
(Isherwood 1998, 153, italics mine)
15These lines also yield an unconscious subtext of colonial-like guilt and uneasiness, a warning, like the narrator’s (psycho) somatic symptoms (a mysterious rash coupled with edgy sleeplessness), that he will soon have to leave the Nowaks.’
16While at the Nowaks’, ‘Christopher Isherwood” s potentially prying gaze is neutralized by his hosts’ radical extroversion, their taste for pantomime matching Fraulein Schroeder’s and similarly abolishing distance between observer and observed. Otto revels in his erotic allure and shows off to the narrator, displaying his muscular body, boasting about the generosity of his paying lovers, overplaying his part as the family’s bad boy. His father, before falling into a state of alcoholic stupor and childish hysteria at the end, appears as an endearingly grotesque story-teller/pantomime artist, who acts every single scene he describes. On first meeting ‘Christopher,’ he gives flesh to his faith in internationalist pacifism, re-enacting a moment of fraternisation with a French soldier during World War I, with the narrator featured as the Frenchman during the pantomime. A final anti-idealist and anti-sentimental twist has Otto’s father candidly mention that he didn’t dare turn his back in the end for fear his French counterpart should still kill him—a finale that ends up wreaking havoc in the apartment, bringing Herr Nowak very close to Fraulein Schroeder’s firm, resilient earthly stand below ideologies.
17This hyper-real quality of the narratives keeps sentimentality or moral judgment at bay, or at least unsettles them. It also generates fluid echoes between characters of various social classes, all of them unashamedly dependent on others’ money—Sally Bowles and ‘Christopher’ are ‘kept’ by a rich American for a while, Frau Kost is a full-fledged prostitute, the nature of bartender Bobby’s relation with Frl. Schroeder remains unspecified—, while the foreign money-providers are portrayed as sick neurotic patients in need of their rent-boys’ care. Goodbye to Berlin’s characters appear as vulnerable, dependent, and at least partially exploited and commodified, like the city itself, with its supposedly raw, seedy dens turned into a touristy exotic show, to be consumed and bragged about back home in England:
The Englishmen talked in loud, high, excited voices. They discussed communism and van Gogh and best restaurants. Some of them seemed a bit scared: perhaps they expected to be knifed in this den of thieves. [. . .] And a young man with a monocle murmured: ‘All the poetry in the world is in that face.’ I knew what he was feeling at that moment: I could sympathize with, even envy him. But it was saddening to know that, two weeks hence, he would boast about his exploits here to a select party of clubmen or dons. (159)
18The section immediately following ‘The Nowaks,’ ‘The Landauers,’ features a wealthy Jewish family and has the narrator adjust his camera lens to their ambiguous position—culturally and economically dominant yet threatened, scapegoated, victimized. The young left-leaning writer is reluctant to pay a visit to members of his own class; he is persuaded to do so only after Nazi Bavarian Frau Mayr called the department store owners ‘Filthy thieving Jews’ (175), and he becomes closely acquainted with Natacha Landauer and her cousin Bernhard. While the Nowaks’ objective humbleness found expression in hysterical good humour, slap-stick comedy and Otto’s self-conceit, Bernhard Landauer is the only character perceived as subjectively humble—a far-Eastern kind of ‘over-civilized’ humility which disturbs the narrator and strikes him as arrogant:
This evening he was wearing a beautifully embroidered kimono over his own clothes. [. . .] His over-civilized, prim, finely drawn, beaky profile gave him something of the air of a bird in a piece of Chinese embroidery. (192–3)
[. . .] his gestures [. . .] are clothed in arrogance, in the arrogant humility of the East. (197)
19Too refined and complicated, too much of an aesthete, too exhausted and melancholy to commit to a cause and embrace Sionism or communism wholeheartedly, he irritates the narrator with his introspectiveness, irony, and acceptance of his capitalist duties and his doom as a German Jew. The focalizing character’s passive-aggressive hostility to this character remains a psychological blind spot. Yet it might reflect Isherwood’s artistic and ethical stance regarding genuine humbleness/humility—objective rather than subjective, shown rather than analysed, alien to introspection and autobiographical confession. Bernhard’s humility is dismissed;11 still, the fragile, androgynous, sanctuary-like microcosm he creates (and invites the narrator to join) remains a powerfully self-contained, if tenuous, image, woven into Isherwood’s stories.12
Goodbye to Berlin’s Vanishing Lines of Resistance Low Comedy
20The humble motif in Goodbye to Berlin can be marked out as its non-sentimentalised cinematic representation of the destitute and commodified, also of the most vulnerable and doomed should the Nazis (or the communists in the case of the wealthy Landauers) take over Germany. The politically subversive potentialities of humble lives, with the cinema as their natural medium of representation and Charlie Chaplin their archetypal screen-incarnation, have been highlighted by Guillaume Le Blanc in L’Insurrection des vies minuscules.13 In other words, there might be no need for anti-fascist and anti-capitalist preaching or discursive statements to undermine dominant ideologies: Isherwood’s narrative persona’s self-effacing presence and shy, queer voice are apt to undermine Nazi masculinist bombast, while most of his characters are endowed with what Guillaume Le Blanc brings forth as a modest, down-to-earth, amateurish quality of resistance to an oppressive order.
21Isherwood’s narratives offer several Chaplinesque moments when the humble character turns the tables and undermines power relations. The rent-boys at the Alexander Casino dive are also amateurish pickpockets and shoplifters, who gleefully outsmart police descents, cadge cigarettes from West End tourists and brazenly steal random objects from Landauers.’ Their dive is neither a professional theatre of operations nor a den of vices, but a microcosm where friendships can develop, where a Salvation Army girl collecting money mixes with a mad cocaine addict, the boys and the narrator. The reality of destitution, prostitution and violence is not denied and surfaces in glimpses of poignant little scenes, for instance Pieps, the beaten runaway boy with ‘heavy reddened eyelids,’ patiently telling his story to an indifferent ‘elderly, shaven-headed, respectable-looking man’ (150). Yet Isherwood captures a mood of rebellious resilience which allows his narratives to evade master discourses—the socio-medical-philanthropist one of vice explained by social misery, the fascist one of corruption and decadence, the capitalist one of self-reliance. The Hallesches Tor dive is a ‘humble’ place where resourceful, dis-employed, subordinate lives14 can be glimpsed at somewhere below typologies and ideologies, and escape their commodification as seedy, dissolute Weimar Berlin.
22More or less all the characters in the Berlin Stories including ‘Christopher Isherwood’ are somehow amateurs, wandering below their established social roles, never quite fitting into their own social personae. The very beauty of Sally Bowles’s singing performance lies in its casual, unprofessional quality:
She sang badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides—yet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse what people thought of her. Her arms hanging carelessly limp, and a take-it-or-leave-it grin on her face, she sang. (38)
23As a would-be Dame aux Camélias (48), she turns out to be clumsy and tactless, and falls short of her claimed ambition to be a kept woman. In a rare reflective moment, the narrator calls himself a ‘sham’ artist and ‘parlour-socialis [t]’ (85), and when Otto proudly introduces him as a communist, he answers ‘not a proper one,’ letting Frau Nowak have the last word: ‘What nonsense [. . .]! How could Herr Christopher be a communist? He’s a gentleman’ (139). The political discussion at the Nowaks’, with the mother nostalgic for the Kaiser, the father a pacifist internationalist, Lothar a fledgling Nazi, Otto and ‘Chris’ improper communists, ends up in low slapstick comedy. Isherwood captures what Le Blanc calls the ‘vanishing lines’ or ‘minority rhythms’ of ‘small’ lives, somewhere below, or on the sideline to the ‘majority rhythms’15 of History. By contrast, national socialist ideology is embodied in two characters with a firm professional identity: Bavarian music-hall yodelsinger Fraulein Mayr, a self-proclaimed artist who indulges in sadistic acts of anti-Semitism, and a smug racialist Nazi surgeon.
Queer Amateurish Subversion
24The only labels the narrator accepts are those of ‘confirmed anti-fascist’ (252), awarded by an anti-Nazi German resistant in the second diary, and ‘queer,’ an insult from an American tourist half-reclaimed by the narrator and his friend Fritz, who answers back with a candid double-entendre, ‘Eventually we’re all queer’ (238). Indeed what we could name a queer—that is, un-manly—mode of resistance to fascist ideology underlies the stories. A casually emblematic scene takes place on the day of the anti-Semitic boycott of Berlin’s Jewish stores:
On the morning of the Jewish boycott, I walked round to take a look at Landauers’. [. . .] Quite a lot of people went into the building. I went in myself, bought the first thing I saw—it happened to be a nutmeg-grater—and strolled out again, twirling my small parcel. One of the boys at the door winked and said something to his companion. I remembered having seen him once or twice at the Alexander Casino, in the days when I was living with the Nowaks. (226)
25The transparent bare prose and unheroic action yield a subversive subtext: the masculinist Nazi mystique is doubly undermined—by ‘Christopher Isherwood” s lady-like department store purchase, and by it being performed under the eyes of a potential former sexual partner of his, turned Nazi bully. Once again, the line of resistance is from below, not from above. Similarly, the so-called ‘communist’ cell members he becomes acquainted with are quaint and amateurish: their GQ looks like a small homely students’ bar, ‘sham and gay and jolly’ (239), where boy-scout brotherhood and queer untidy dandyism (a girl looking like Henry VIII, a cigar-smoking proprietress) brush shoulders with a slightly insane, unmethodical passion for revolution. But at the same time the queer gaze of the narrator also exposes the masculinist, misogynist mystique of the communist youth organisation, as identical to the latent homosexuality of the Hitler-Jugend.
26The subversive dimension of the narrated events, Sally’s abortion, or the fact that Peter, Christopher and Otto’s ménage à trois of sorts hardly disturbs the seaside village where proper German families spend their holidays, are just as alien to respectable English middle-class values as to the looming Nazi order; they are all the more subversive because they are muted and played down, presented as natural enough, and thus resist their commodification as exotic instances of decadent Weimar Berlin. In the six stories tenuous, transient, improper communities form then drift apart, between homosexual friends and lovers, between ‘Christopher Isherwood’ and Sally Bowles, between the eclectic set of guests at Fraulein Schroeder’s, like so many queer, humble, inoperative spots of resistance to the fascist myth of an organic national community.
27Indeed in Goodbye to Berlin the sexually transgressive bypasses the arrogant flamboyance of high camp in favour of queerness, that is, a playfully casual, communal (‘we’re all queer’ [238, italics mine] disregard for and derision of ‘masculine’ roles—whether those of hero or bully. Incidentally, ostentatiously stylised camp icon Oscar Wilde appears to be so commodified as to belong to patriarchal discourse—that of bright, benevolent, yet slightly smug pater familias Herr Landauer, eager to sound enlightened in front of his young English guest (188). While Christian or spiritual forms of humility are absent from or dismissed by the resolutely secular world-view of the narrator, humbleness being stripped of its philosophical and religious dimensions, similarly the narrator’s queerness steers clear of the individual arrogance of camp—the better to subvert both the flamboyant sham of Nazi propaganda and self-righteous middle-class propriety.
Inoperative Art
The Diary Form: Meanings Suspended
28A casually subversive viewpoint from below rather than a self-assuredly committed gaze from above, Goodbye to Berlin’s humble mode also lies in the way writing resists the allure of symbols and avoids dramatising contingent events into inevitable history. Of course, buds of the totalitarian horror to come are woven into the six stories: in the second ‘Berlin Diary,’ the author’s montage-editing has shots of Nazi book-burning, lurid street violence and arbitrary arrests alternate with scenes and anecdotes concerning ordinary Berliners and the narrators’ acquaintances. In the ‘On Reugen Island’ section, the narrator records seeing ‘a child of about five years old, stark naked, marching along all by himself with a swastika flag over his shoulder and singing Deutschland über alles,’ juxtaposing the disturbing yet expected image with another vignette of Nazi ideology, the little doctor’s lessons about the superiority of the Nordic type and ‘mental disease’ of so-called communists (110).
29Not only are Nazism’s grand bogus symbolism and corruption of psychological discourse exposed as such, but Goodbye to Berlin tries to eschew symbolism and psychology altogether. In the only passage in the free reported speech, Peter Wilkinson’s ironic autobiography, with its rash psychological self-probing and burlesque fast-motion tempo, both Peter and Christopher poke fun at Freud and the topoi of English upper class neurotic sexual repression. In other words, the paradigm of psychological analysis is made inoperative, both in its Freudian version and its debased Nazi version. Anti-fascist symbolism is undermined as well: in ‘The Nowaks,’ Otto tells ‘Chris’ that a gigantic ‘Hand’ is haunting and pursuing him—foreboding his death (142–143). The symbol of imminent disaster, of the Nazi totalitarian Hand clasping Weimar Berlin, is undercut by Otto’s narcissistic relish in posing as a tortured neurotic. The hallucination might exist, or Otto might be playing to the gallery, or he might subconsciously forebode disaster, but there is no overarching authorial voice to endorse or dismiss any particular interpretation, so meaning is left suspended along another vanishing line.
30In Goodbye to Berlin literature is a humble form insofar as it conveys the immediacy and contingency of events—including the inability of witnesses to perceive them as real, let alone understand them. Choosing the form and style of diaries in the opening and closing sections amounts to professing the artistic value of errors and partial views, and distrusting the historically validated reconstruction of hindsight. A case in point is the following diary fragment, attesting that one week before Hitler’s nomination ‘Christopher Isherwood’ joined an anti-Nazi counter-demonstration and predicted if not a communist revolution, at least the unassailable resistance of the Berlin workers’ to fascism:
The real masters of Berlin are not the Police, or the Army, and certainly not the Nazis. The masters of Berlin are the workers—despite all the propaganda I’ve heard and read, all the demonstrations I’ve attended, I only realized this for the first time today. (249)
31This combination of cinematic writing and diary writing accounts for what one might call the humbly inoperative accuracy of the Berlin stories.
Inartistic Art: a Humble Style?
32The bare syntax of Goodbye to Berlin reads like the stylistic counterpart to these humble modes of literary resistance to doxa and master ideologies. One of its most distinctive features is the repetition of the characters’ proper names and the minimal use of deictic personal pronouns, which further erases the narrator/focaliser and, cinema-like, enhances his subjects’ presence. It also maintains the stories below the elaboration of a ‘proper’ artistic style, endowing the narrator’s prose with a naïve, child-like quality.
33Scattered through the six narratives are very short similes, most of them comparisons. While the modernist metaphor was meant to grasp some common ontological truth lurking behind diverse phenomena, Isherwood’s analogies fall short of such heuristic ambition. They can be almost surrealistic images, like the following close-up on Sally’s hands, ‘The green finger-nails seemed not to belong to them at all; to have settled on them by chance—like hard, bright, ugly little beetles’ (43). Or they can reverse expected polarities into an unsettling paradox, for instance when the most vulnerable rent-boy is said to behave with his client ‘like a doctor with a nervous patient’ (150). But most often, they resemble short stumps of Proustian analogies, as if to foreground the narrator’s struggle with his sense of reality. There is a particular passage where such comparisons proliferate in the text: in the loose coda to ‘The Nowaks,’ in which ‘Christopher Isherwood’ and Otto visit Frau Nowak at a sanatorium, the narrator perceives as uncannily sinister and unreal the antiseptic all-female institution, with its military discipline and ghost—like patients, and saturates his narrative with an eclectic imagery—to him the gateway is ‘like an entrance to a churchyard’ (166), the smell of the place ‘like a breath of fear’ (167), an old woman ‘like an old dog with sores’ and a younger woman’s hands ‘like two shrivelled moths’ (168), the atmosphere in the ward ‘like soiled linen locked in a cupboard without air’ (169), and the throng of female patients are compared to ‘members of an aboriginal forest tribe’ (173), their faces ‘ghastly like ghosts against the black stems of the pines’ (174). Instead of artistically merging into the textual fabric, Goodbye to Berlin’s similes are slightly awkward, jarring collages, rough inartistic patches unsettling the text, as if reality resisted its integration into art, and thereby they frustrate the operative poetic closure of literature. The surrealistic quality of the similes, conveying the shock of unexpected encounters, can also be related to the Mass Observation Movement, its roots in surrealism and its use of montage meant to reveal the reality of ordinary experience.16
34On a structural level, the book conveys a similar sense of shying away from artistic closure and operative integration. Its formless form, its long unedited monologues, its disregard for chronology, with events overlapping from one section to the other, and the blank spaces between scenes or paragraphs amount to embracing randomness, gaps and blind spots. If we consider each individual story separately, their floating codas read like hyperbatons that unsettle their organic unity—the melancholy erosion of Sally and Christopher’s friendship (‘Sally Bowles’), the oppressively uncanny mood of the sanatorium visit (‘The Nowaks’), and the grimly grotesque overheard conversation about Bernhard’s arrest and assassination (‘The Landauers’). In the same way as he eludes psychological and symbolical paradigms, Isherwood seems to experiment with a humble poetics resisting its own artistic allure.
35The famous musical film Cabaret (1972), loosely based on the ‘Sally Bowles’ story, has almost turned Goodbye to Berlin into its mere script, with Christopher Isherwood in the shadow of director Bob Fosse and lead actress Liza Minnelli. To a certain extent, it is an unfairly humbling artistic destiny for an experimental late modernist book, self-reflective, inartistic insofar as it rejects aestheticism, but not in the sense of plain social realist transparency. Yet this adaptation seems almost programmed into the book’s humble poetics—queer, mixing the cinematic and the pantomime, self-ironically aware of the commodified allure of its subject matter, humbly deriding the bombast of major ideological systems, sexy and grotesque, it has much in common with the low popular art of the cabaret.17
Notes de bas de page
1 E. M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood, Letters between Forster and Isherwood on Homosexuality and Literature, ed. Richard I. Zeikowitz(Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2008) 33.
2 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Leaning Tower,’ The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume VI (London: Hogarth Press, 2011) 274.
3 Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (1976; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001) 32.
4 I borrow the word ‘inoperative’ from Jean-Luc Nancy. In The Inoperative Community (La communauté désœuvrée, Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 2004), he uses the notion of ‘inoperativeness’ (désœuvrement) to express forms of resistance to and retreat from immanent telos and organic, fusional closure—including those inherent in fascist political systems.
5 Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1939; London: Vintage, 1998) 9.
6 Quoted in John Lehmann, Christopher Isherwood: A Personal Memoir (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1987) 29.
7 See Isherwood 2001, 51.
8 The author resorts to this comparison in Isherwood 2001, 28.
9 See this extract from a 1934 letter to E. M. Forster, where Isherwood shares his aesthetic/ethical pangs regarding how to tackle his Berlin material: ‘It’s strange, I long to do very moving Dickensy scenes with tears, and when it comes to the point I dry up like a stone and write something venomous. It’s as if I had some nasty green poison in my system’ (Forster and Isherwood 18).
10 See, for example, Orwell’s recurring use of ‘queer’ and ‘eccentric’ to refer to the Parisian underclass he mixes with and observes in Down and Out in Paris and London (1931).
11 In his autobiography Isherwood pays tribute to Bernhard’s real counterpart’s brave anti-Nazi resistance until 1939 and to his role in helping Jewish refugees after leaving for England. He barely qualifies what he remembers as his former self’s instinctive recoil from Bernhard/Wilfrid’s ‘Hindu humility’ or ‘humble-arrogant’ attitude, but explains it by his fear of a superior wisdom still unknown to him (Isherwood 2001, 68–72).
12 On Bernhard Landauer’s ‘aesthetic sanctuary’ and its ‘tenuous, provisional, ironic’ quality, see Anthony Shuttleworth, ‘In a Populous City: Isherwood in the Thirties,’ The Isherwood Century, eds. James J. Berg and Chris Freeman (Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 2001) 160.
13 Guillaume Le blanc, L’insurrection des vies minuscules (Montrouge: Bayard, 2014).
14 On the notions of ‘vie désemployée’ (dis-employed life) and ‘débrouillardise’ (resourcefulness), see Leblanc 96–99.
15 See Le Blanc 142–143.
16 See Rob Mengham, ‘The Thirties: Politics, Authority, Perspective,’ The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century English Literature, eds. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: CUP, 2012) 373. Other influences on Isherwood might be German expressionist cinema and the 1920s Neue Sehen (New Vision) movement in photography.
17 Contemporary to the writing of Goodbye to Berlin, Erika Mann’s anti-Nazi cabaret ‘Die Pfeffermühle’ (‘The Peppermill’) is a case in point of the cabaret’s potential for political subversion.
Auteur
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Aude Haffen
Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3—EMMA, France
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