Books: Fable of Beasts & Men

PRATER VIOLET — Christopher Isherwood — Random House ($2).

“You have never been inside a film studio? … It is really [the same as a] palace of the 16th Century. There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women . . . incompetent favorites . . . great men who are suddenly disgraced . . . insane extravagances . . . unexpected parsimony . . . enormous splendor, which is a sham . . . horrible squalor hidden behind the scenery . . . vast schemes abandoned because of some caprice . . . secrets which everybody knows and no one speaks of. There are even two or three honest advisers. These are the court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace, and tear their hair privately, and weep.”

“You make it sound great fun.”

“It is unspeakable,” said Bergmann. …

Viennese Movie Director Friedrich Bergmann is the grandiose, poignant, reluctant hero of Christopher Isherwood’s new novel. When Prater Violet appeared last summer in the glossy pages of Harper’s Bazaar, it caused a mild critical flurry. Now published in book form, Prater Violet is likely to draw as much critical attention as any other novel of the season. Even in a period of thriving fiction, Prater Violet would rate respect: with the Anglo-American novel at its lowest ebb in years, Prater Violet looks like a fresh, firm peach in a dish of waxed fruits.

Son of a British Army lieutenant colonel, 41-year-old Christopher Isherwood made his mark in the early ‘305 as an intellectual leftist and collaborator with

Poet W. H. Auden on plays (The Dog Beneath the Skin; Ascent of F-6). In 1930 Isherwood went to Berlin, emerged later with his third novel, The Last of Mr. Norris, and a volume of stories, Goodbye to Berlin, that established him as one of Britain’s most talented story tellers. In 1939 he landed in Hollywood, where he has divided his time between scriptwriting and translating Hindu religious teachings (BhagavadGita, The Song of God—TIME, Feb. 12).

Last week Author Isherwood finished work for Warner Bros, on screen versions of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, and his good friend Somerset Maugham’s Up at the Villa. Larry, youthful hero of Maugham’s best-selling The Razor’s Edge, is.said to be modeled on Isherwood. He is now at work on a novel about physically and spiritually “displaced persons.”

The Face of Central Europe. Prater Violet stems straight from Author Isherwood’s knowledge of Hollywood, Continental Europe and Britain—in fact, he presents himself as one of Prater Violet’s principal characters. Grim skeleton of his novel—as well as its basic irony—is the filming by British Imperial Bulldog Pictures of a tear-jerker operetta about old Vienna named “Prater Violet”—just on the eve of Dictator Dollfuss’ putsch to power. For the script of Prater Violet, Bulldog’s President Chatsworth hires Christopher Isherwood, who knows Berlin (“Berlin [‘s] . . . pretty much the same kind of setup [as Vienna], isn’t it?”) and, as director, imports famed Moviemaker Friedrich Bergmann, who is forced to take the job because the Nazis have smashed his career in Germany.

To youthful Scriptwriter Isherwood—a parlor pink who lives with his adoring mother and brother—Director Bergmann is awe-inspiring. “His head . . . was . . . the head of a Roman emperor, with dark old Asiatic eyes … big firm chin . . . harsh furrows cutting down from the imperious nose . . . bushy black hair in the nostrils. . . . But the eyes were the dark, mocking eyes of [an emperor’s] slave—the slave who ironically obeyed, watched, humored and judged the master who could never understand him; the slave upon whom the master depended utterly, for his amusement, for his instruction, for the sanction of his power; the slave who wrote the fables of beasts and men.” Muses young Isherwood: “I knew that face. It was the face of a political situation, an epoch. The face of Central Europe.”

Infernal Machine. Bulldog Pictures establishes Bergmann in an apartment in

London. Overnight he turns its trim interior into a welter of littered papers, damp towels, cast-off clothes, bottles, of hair tonic, a copy of Mein Kampf — chaos as complete as if the Balkans had been dumped in the heart of respectable Kensington. Daily, through this mush, Director Bergmann stamps the floor like a bathrobed Hercules faced with an absurd but unavoidable Labor. He roars genially at nervous Colleague Isherwood: “I am sure we shall be very happy together. . . .

Already I feel absolutely no shame before you. We are like two married men who meet in a whorehouse.” Before the two launch into their scriptwriting, worldly-wise Bergmann says to Isherwood: “You are a typical mother’s son. . . . You are innocent. … I shall proceed to corrupt you. I shall teach you everything from the very beginning. . .

Do you know what the film is? … The film is an infernal machine. Once it is ignited and set in motion, it revolves with an enormous dynamism. It cannot pause.

It cannot apologize. It cannot retract any thing. … It simply ripens to its inevitable explosion. This explosion we have to pre pare, like anarchists, with the utmost in genuity and malice.” But young Isherwood soon discovers that he is going to be taught far more than the ways of the movie. Each day Director Bergmann flies off from the romantic plot of Prater Violet at a thousand tangents.

Isherwood is daily exposed to a torrent of ideas and emotions that pour out of Bergmann like a cataract. Growling, laughing, gesticulating, Bergmann seems to combine in his ample frame the personalities of revolutionary, poet, tragedian and sentimentalist. He spends a whole morning playing the roles of the principals in the Reichstag Fire Trial (“Goodness!” squeaks his timid little English stenographer. “I’m glad I’m not over there”).

Life with Bergmann might have gone on like this forever, if Imperial Bulldog Pic tures had not suddenly grown tired of waiting for its precious script. Overnight, Bergmann and Isherwood find themselves swept out of Kensington and into the harsh reality of a Bulldog office. “It is the third degree,” Bergmann stormed. “They torture us, and we have nothing to confess.” Hollywood-Bound. But Isherwood sees that suddenly the philosophizing emperor of Kensington has been metamorphosed into Bulldog’s sullen, productive slave. In a mere two weeks Prater Violet is ready for the cameras, and Director Bergmann has forgotten the outside world in the fantastic make-believe existence where the false houses and streets of wood and canvas turn the scene into “a kind of Pompeii, but more desolate, more uncanny, because this is, literally, a half-world, a limbo of mirror images. . . .” And it is in this half-world, with its crooning flower girls and princes in disguise, that Director Bergmann hears of Dictator Dollfuss’ putsch in the real Vienna.

Prater Violet’s concluding pages mount to a harrowing climax of contrasts, in which Hero Bergmann is no longer emperor or even slave. He is simply a frantic, weeping husband and father, whose wife and family may be in mortal danger—an exile penned up in an island of indifferent aliens (“[Vienna] seems dreadfully unsettled,” remarks Isherwood’s vague, kindly mother), struggling with yards of celluloid nonsense, and going half berserk in the process. “This heartless filth . . .!” he screams. “It covers up the dirty syphilitic sore with rose leaves. … It lies and declares that the pretty Danube is blue, when the water is red with blood. … I am punished for assisting at this lie. We shall all be punished.”

But Prater Violet’s conclusion is neither bloody nor violent, but simply ironical. Director Bergmann’s family are restored to him safe & sound—and all sail for Hollywood. Young Isherwood—sadder & wiser, but no more hopeful—flees to the south of France to lie in the sun with his current girl friend. But everyone flocks to see Prater Violet—”it was even shown in Vienna.”

Prater Violet, like all good books, adds up to a lot more than the sum of its parts. It is not merely a survey of the boa constrictions of the modern movie company, and a vigorous defense of the artist caught in its coils. It is not merely a lament for the shortcomings of contemporary intellectuals. In Friedrich Bergmann, Author Isherwood sees a giant of a passing generation—a mature, tough, revolutionary artist in whom the will to live and feel is practically indestructible.