Uniwersytet Warszawski

Wydział Neofilologii

Piotr Olański

Isherwood’s Camera:

Traces of Cinematic Narrative in Christopher Isherwood’s

Oeuvre

Praca doktorska

Na kierunku filologia

w zakresie filologia angielska

Praca wykonana pod kierunkiem

Dr hab. Prof. UW Dominiki Oramus

Warszawa, Wrzesień 2019 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS 2

ABSTRACT 4

ABBREVIATIONS OF TITLES USED 7

PREFACE 8

CHAPTER ONE: HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 11

1.1 The development of cinema and film language: a historical account 11

1.2 The screenplay as a genre: definition and history 28

1.3 The relationship between cinema and the novel: a historical account 37

1.4 Theoretical approaches to the relation between cinema and literature 44

1.5 Cinematic narrative in practice 52

CHAPTER TWO: AN OVERVIEW OF ISHERWOOD’S WORK AND HIS

RELATIONSHIP WITH CINEMA 59

2.1 Autobiographical and other biographical sources 59

2.2 Biography and oeuvre overview 64

2.3 Isherwood’s cinematic experiences inside and outside Hollywood 78

CHAPTER THREE: ISHERWOOD’S RECURRENT LITERARY FORMS AS

THE KEY TO CINEMATIC AESTHETICS IN HIS WORKS 102 3

3.1 The copious self-chronicler 102

3.2 Autobiographical forms: diary vs memoir 105

3.3 Diaries 107

3.4 Editing 110

3.4.1 In memoirs 110

3.4.2 In novels 127

CHAPTER FOUR: THE STUDY OF ISHERWOOD’S ALIENATIONS

THROUGH SELECTED THEMES IN HIS WORKS 138

4.1 Isherwood, the traveller 138

4.2 Isherwood, the flâneur 141

4.3 Isherwood, the queer 156

4.4 Isherwood, the Quaker and Vedantist 164

CHAPTER FIVE: FILM ADAPTATIONS OF ISHERWOOD’S TEXTS 168

CONCLUSION 190

WORKS CITED 195

Primary Sources 195

Secondary Sources 196

4

ABSTRACT

Praca analizuje twórczość Christophera Isherwooda w poszukiwaniu narracji obficie czerpiącej ze stylistyki filmowej. Ze względu na autobiograficzny charakter większości dzieł pisarza, jego

życiorys stanowi jeden z kluczy, przy pomocy którego owe powieści są interpretowane. Isherwood jako podróżnik, brytyjski emigrant pracujący w Hollywood, gej oraz zwolennik hinduizmu jest postacią, o której zawsze można mówić jako o „obcym”. Skomplikowane więzi z otaczającym go

środowiskiem (bądź ich brak) a zatem często i poczucie alienacji stanowi znakomity powód do ujęcia swoich obserwacji na temat rzeczywistości w zdystansowany sposób, typowy właśnie dla kamery rejestrującej rzeczywistość.

Rozdział pierwszy przedstawia tło do analizy powieści Isherwooda. Przedstawione są kluczowe momenty w rozwoju technologicznym kina oraz ich odbiór przez publiczność, co wiąże się również ze zmianą wrażliwości, estetyki oraz postrzegania rzeczywistości zarówno u przeciętnego widza jak i pisarza oraz krytyka. W rozdziale zawarte są również definicje owych technik, w celu ułatwienia późniejszej ich identyfikacji ze strategiami narracyjnymi zaobserwowanymi w powieściach Isherwooda. Kolejnym ważnym aspektem omawianym w rozdziale jest kwestia scenariusza filmowego, będącego formą pośrednią pomiędzy literaturą a filmem. Autor przedstawia rys historyczny gatunku oraz opisuje sytuację pisarzy (między innymi

Isherwooda) zwerbowanych do Hollywood w celu pisania scenariuszy. W rozdziale pojawia się również przegląd teorii opisujących wpływ filmu na literaturę oraz najważniejszych pisarzy uznanych jako zainspirowanych twórczością filmową.

Rozdział drugi stanowi przegląd twórczości Isherwooda wsparty jego rysem biograficznym. Autor skupia się szczególnie na związkach pisarza z filmem, a więc jego pracy w

Hollywood, analizując pamiętniki oraz wykłady Isherwooda, jak również jego doświadczenia filmowe opisane w powieści Prater Violet, która jest bodajże najbardziej treściwym zapisem 5 spotkań pisarza ze światem filmu. Analiza wyżej wymienionych tekstów pozwala ustalić jaki był stosunek Isherwooda do przemysłu filmowego jak i filmu jako sztuki. Pod uwagę wzięte również zostaną informacje z rozdziału pierwszego dotyczące pisarzy pracujących dla Hollywood, rozwoju scenariusza filmowego oraz tak zwanej powieści filmowej, czyli takiej, która jest zapisem doświadczeń pisarza zaangażowanego w tworzenie filmu.

Rozdział trzeci spogląda na twórczość Isherwooda z perspektywy jego powieści na poły biograficznych, które opisują doświadczenia pisarza z jego podróży. Pierwszoosobowy narrator

Isherwooda o tym samym imieniu jest dość nietypowym obserwatorem rzeczywistości, co zresztą powiedziane jest wprost w jednej z analizowanych w tym rozdziale powieści Goodbye to Berlin gdzie narrator porównany jest do kamery pasywnie rejestrującej rzeczywistość. W rozdziale postaram się prześledzić obecność kamery w powieściach Mr Norris Changes Trains, Down there on a Visit, Goodbye to Berlin oraz częściowo w Christopher and His Kind.

Owo kluczowe porównanie do kamery zostanie zanalizowane w świetle teorii definiujących estetykę filmową w podobny sposób do sławnego cytatu z powieści Isherwooda a zatem chociażby Impresjonizmu (zarówno malarskiego jak i literackiego) jak i teorii montażu wypracowanych przez Siergieja Eisentsteina oraz współczesnych mu radzieckich twórców. Teorie te wspominają o natychmiastowej, bezpośredniej rejestracji rzeczywistości, która może się wydawać niedoskonała i wymagać „edycji”. Jako że znaczna część dzieł pisarza opisuje jego doświadczenia w nazistowskim Berlinie, a więc wielkim mieście ulegającym gwałtownym przemianom, jednym z filtrów interpretacyjnych będzie próba porównania narratora

Isherwoodowskiego do postaci dziewiętnastowiecznego flaneura a co za tym idzie jego postrzegania przestrzeni miejskiej oraz stanu zawieszenia w swoistej próżni, będąc jednocześnie 6 częścią otaczającego środowiska oraz osobą spoza tegoż środowiska, co prowadzi do rozważań opisanych szerzej w rozdziale trzecim.

Rozdział czwarty skupia się na zjawisku alienacji bohaterów Isherwooda, która według autora rozprawy jest bardzo często powodem, dla którego pisarz korzysta w swoich powieściach z technik filmowych. Wyliczone i przeanalizowane zostaną przypadki, w których Isherwood pokazuje wyobcowanie swoich bohaterów przy pomocy języka filmu. Spojrzymy na bohaterów

Isherwooda odzwierciedlających jego własne życie, a więc na bohaterów „obcych” na emigracji, bohaterów homoseksualnych, a więc tych odstających od normy w czasach opisywanych przez pisarza oraz bohaterów uciekających od kultury zachodu poszukujących własnej tożsamości w kręgu kulturowym hinduizmu tak bliskiego w pewnym momencie pisarzom pracującym w

Hollywood.

Rozdział piąty skupia się na analizie filmowych adaptacji powieści Isherwooda celem sprawdzenia, czy opisane w poprzednich rozdziałach narracyjne techniki naśladujące język filmu znalazły odzwierciedlenie w artystycznych i technicznych rozwiązaniach zastosowanych przez reżyserów owych adaptacji. Analizie zostają poddane dwie adaptacje powieści Goodbye to Berlin jak również takich tytułów jak Christopher and His Kind czy A Single Man.

7

ABBREVIATIONS OF TITLES USED

Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange = Film and Fiction…

The World in the Evening = The World…

Goodbye to Berlin = Goodbye…

Mr Norris Changes Trains = Mr Norris…

Down There on a Visit = Down There…

Christopher and His Kind = Christopher…

My Guru and His Disciple = My Guru…

8

PREFACE

Since its emergence at the turn of the nineteenth century, cinema has firmly established itself as one of the most influential disciplines in the arts. Despite the fact that the twenty-first century has brought us digitisation and immersed humanity into the murky waters of social media, cinema’s ubiquity and popularity as a form of entertainment as well as artistic expression is still indisputable. The birth of film gave humanity a new means of telling stories and portraying reality, impacting the existing arts and modifying their methods of reflecting the world. Cinema was also able to combine a number of other methods of artistic expression, but this required adaptation and constant evolution. When simply recording reality proved to be insufficient for early filmmakers, they began drafting their first stories and telling them by the means of the moving image.

Undoubtedly, theatre and literature served as very rich sources of inspiration and stories to be told.

Film adaptations of novels and plays became a significant part of cinematic history. This is why the relationship between cinema, literature, and theatre has been predominantly analysed from the perspective of said film adaptations, as there is an assumption that the written word feeds the image. Fewer publications have been devoted to the reverse perspective. Ubiquitous as they are, films have changed the way we perceive reality. We very often think in cinematic terms, and that way of seeing and thinking is true for writers and critics as well. The former use film language in their work, whilst the latter very often notice traces of film languages in literary works created before the birth of the tenth muse.

As a frequent moviegoer fascinated by cinema, yet professionally involved in literature studies, I found the phenomenon of cinematic imagination particularly intriguing. The fact that literature can and does intentionally imitate film for various purposes has led me to search for writers whose literary style reflects cinematic aesthetics. Christopher Isherwood’s work in 9 particular has proven to be interesting material for analysis, as it contains a number of references to film language, but also to the world of filmmakers. Since Isherwood’s work is heavily autobiographical, the cinematic character of his writing comes from his experiences as a screenwriter in Hollywood. In his texts, Isherwood is an observer who compares himself to a camera; he watches and records the surrounding reality with the detachment of a documentalist.

This impartial camera narrative raises the question of why Isherwood (or rather his characters) wants to remain distanced. The aim of this thesis is to look at the instances of cinematic language in Isherwood’s novels and diaries and understand how important they are in expressing

Isherwood’s detachment and alienation in the various environments he had a chance to be part of.

For the purpose of the analysis, this thesis is divided into five chapters. The first provides the necessary background and context to look at Isherwood’s oeuvre from a cinematic perspective.

The chapter outlines milestones in film history and discusses how they may have had an impact on our imaginations, but more importantly the vision of writers and critics, Isherwood included.

Not only is the rise of cinema described, but its relationship with the world of literature, in particular how the silver screen incorporated literary works and fed on them. Furthermore, this part of the thesis is a repository of key film techniques and their definitions that will be used throughout the thesis.

The second chapter provides a biographical and literary overview of Christopher

Isherwood. Particular focus is put on the stages of Isherwood’s life that had an impact on his cinematic imagination: his childhood years and fascination with the cinema; his work in Europe with filmmakers; and finally, his screenwriting in Hollywood. Prater Violet is discussed in detail in the chapter as a novel where Isherwood portrays the film industry.

Since Isherwood’s main source of inspiration was his life, which he describes in his diaries, 10 the third chapter explores the autobiographical aspect of his work. This approach was inspired by an implication of the most famous quotation from his novels, in which the Isherwoodian narrator compares himself to a camera that passively records reality; that is, all the footage that is captured by a camera needs to be edited, printed, and fixed. The aim of the chapter is twofold: to analyse

Isherwood’s process of editing his texts from scraps of his diaries into a ready product, and to answer the question of whether Isherwood’s creative process of combining various plots from his diaries and other scribblings can be compared to film editing. Furthermore, the chapter looks at other cinematic techniques visible in Isherwood’s writing, such as the use of the present tense and affinities with screenplay language, descriptions resembling specific camera shots and sound editing, and so on.

Aside from observations on the use of cinematic language in Isherwood’s texts resulting from his fascination with cinema and his work in the film industry, this thesis explores other, less apparent reasons for this characteristic technique. The fourth chapter of this thesis focuses on different themes in his writing, namely “outsider personalities” of his protagonists and first-person narrators. In addition to what has been discussed in the previous chapters, namely Isherwood as a writer in Hollywood, four other perspectives are discussed: Isherwood, the tourist/traveller;

Isherwood, the flâneur; Isherwood, the homosexual; and Isherwood, the Vedantist. As we will come to see, very often the situations which Isherwood’s protagonists find themselves in as strangers lead to the use of language that resembles a screenplay, that is, written in the present tense and abundant in cut-like editing.

In the final chapter of this thesis, we will look at various film adaptations of Isherwood’s prose, which will be the ultimate verification of whether certain literary solutions applied by the author of Goodbye… have found a one-to-one transition onto the silver screen. 11

CHAPTER ONE: HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

The aim of this chapter is to outline the historical and theoretical background necessary for the analysis of cinematic traces in Isherwood’s texts. The analysis will comprise the history of film language from both American and European cultural circles. Particular focus will be put on the screenplay as an intermediate form between film and literature, with the assumption that many writers working for the film industry, including Isherwood, may have incorporated features of screenwriting in their novels. Further on, a selection of literary approaches to the phenomenon of cinema will be presented, followed by some basic assumptions of mine about what is understood by the concept of cinematic fiction. Last but not least, an overview of critical approaches to the film–novel debate will be presented, including a list of references for the issues discussed in this and subsequent chapters.

1.1 The development of cinema and film language: a historical account

One of the crucial elements in an analysis of the relationship between film and the novel is an overview of cinematic history. Information about when particular film techniques emerged in cinema’s development is necessary to ascertain whether those techniques may have influenced the writing styles of novelists associated with film. However, we will not cover the history of cinema in its entirety, as the intention of this research is to highlight specific periods and movements which had a significant influence on the formation of the twentieth century imagination and the aesthetics applied in various arts. Thus, the history of cinema until the decline of so-called classical

Hollywood cinema will be of greatest importance, as by that time most film techniques had already been developed and become basic elements of film language. The way films were made at that time is considered by some as the most dominant style in filmmaking (Bordwell and Thompson 12

94). Discussing movements and developments from later periods would prove largely unnecessary, as they were predominantly marked by the reworking of conventions that already existed in the minds of filmmakers and audiences. Furthermore, since the aim of this research is to analyse the oeuvre of Christopher Isherwood to ascertain whether there are any cinematic inspirations in his work, the analysis will concern formal tendencies in cinema and their literary counterparts until

Isherwood’s death in 1985, especially techniques in use by the time he wrote his last novel, My

Guru…, published in 1980, which is an account of his immersion in Vedantism as well as his work in the film industry. Undoubtedly, in terms of the scope of the thesis it is advisable to specify what is understood by the term cinema and how it is going to be used throughout this thesis. An example of a clear definition of the word cinema and its synonyms can be found in How to Read a Film by

James Monaco, who mentions three terms that refer to the moving image: film, cinema, and movie:

French theorists are fond of making the differentiation between “film” and “cinema”. The

“filmic” is the aspect of the art that concerns its relationship with the world around it; the

“cinematic” deals strictly with the aesthetics and internal structure of art. In English, we

have a third word for “film” and “cinema” – “movies” which provides a convenient label

for … its function as an economic commodity … In general we use these three names for

the art in a way that closely parallels this differentiation: “movies”, like popcorn, are to be

consumed; “cinema” (at least in American parlance) is high art, redolent of aesthetics;

“film” is the most general term with fewest connotations. (Monaco 252)

Keith Cohen, another critic studying film aesthetics, claims in his book Film and Fiction… that the term movie best reflects the nature of the medium, as it is derived from the phrase “moving images” (53).

For the purpose of this thesis, the preferred wording would be “cinematic”, whilst 13

“film/filmic” can be considered as a more general term and a synonym for the preferred term.

Occasionally, the word “movie” will also appear in more sociological/economic contexts. Now, the only remaining matter regarding the scope of this analysis is which cinema will be taken into consideration, as Isherwood and his works are shared by American and European (British) culture.

Both European and American cinemas have to be taken into consideration for several reasons.

Firstly, American cinema is of vital importance because of its commercial success and popularity around the world, but predominantly because Isherwood was working in Hollywood, which would seem to indicate that it is the obvious choice. However, in one of his interviews he states that he was particularly fascinated by French New Wave (FNW) cinema and Michelangelo Antonioni, which gives importance to European cinema in the context of this analysis. Secondly, discussing only one of the cinemas in question would be insufficient, as some of the movements from Europe inspired American filmmakers (e.g., Soviet montage) and vice versa (certain Hollywood directors and films inspired FNW artists). Last but not least, one must not forget that Hollywood was a popular emigrant destination for European artists of all sorts (especially those related to the film business, but also writers such as Isherwood) who brought some European character to the works created in Hollywood.

The history of cinema presented here is largely based on two major accounts. One is James

Monaco’s How to Read a Film (1979), and the other is David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s

Film Art: An Introduction (2008). These two sources are supported by Jerzy Płażewski’s Film

History for Everyone (Historia filmu dla każdego) (1986).

The beginnings of cinema are particularly important for the scope of this research. As a new medium with yet-to-be-limited possibilities and an undeveloped language of its own, film had to take inspiration from other arts. In fact, whilst writing about film history, James Monaco 14 includes a pre-cinematic period (i.e., before the invention of the Cinematograph), which entails different visual forms, such as painting and photography, that had a significant influence on the emergence and development of film’s form (254). This stage in cinema’s history is vitally important for the analysis conducted in this thesis, as it is necessary to distinguish which practices originated before cinema appeared and which were actually assimilated by cinema to the extent that we now think of them as exclusively cinematic, even though they in fact first appeared in painting, theatre, or literature. By referring to cinema’s inspirations drawn from other arts, I do not mean simply borrowing themes and stories that could be told with the new medium, but rather the imitation of particular techniques.

When thinking about the possible influences on the formation of cinema, perhaps the most obvious sources of this affection are those that can be described as visual (in comparison to those regarded as literary). Amongst the potential visual inspirations for cinema, apart from the above- mentioned painting and theatre, photography – from which cinema actually “sprung” – should also be mentioned. In the case of painting, the work of the Pre-Raphaelites is notable for its influence, as their movement is considered to be an example of the notion of sister arts, which refers to the phenomenon of combining literature and images. The concept of ut pictura poesis, as it is alternatively called, is worthy of further analysis in relation to the history of cinema, but does not fall fully within the scope of this thesis. The work of the Impressionists, however, is uniquely suited to the analysis of this thesis, as it was this artistic movement which saw the development of technical solutions that were used not only in film, but also literature.

Impressionism is crucial for discussing certain cinematic qualities in literature. Some

Impressionist techniques that were used by writers were later developed into cinematic techniques.

For instance, one of the recognisable features of Impressionism is the depiction of the same object 15 from different angles (or time in order to observe how the changing light altered the perception of the object in question). The parallel between cinema and painting here is that of the point-of-view

(POV) technique. Another technique is editing or montage, which enables a juxtaposition of different points of view when narrating the same event. In his book Film and Fiction…, Keith

Cohen recalls the words of French writer André Malraux, who says that “cinema as a means of expression dates from the time a movie was grasped as a series of shots and not as the recording of a real or fictional event” (qtd. in Cohen 41). What Malraux may be implying here is that cinema was born with the emergence of montage/editing, which allowed the juxtaposition of two or more points of view in one scene. The new technique allowed for a perception of reality similar to that practised by Impressionists, who in their paintings depicted the same objects and places from different spatial (painting from a different angle) and temporal (painting the same object in a different lighting due to the change of time) perspectives. A similar technique can be found in some of Isherwood’s texts.

Since the scope of this thesis covers the aesthetic exchange between literature and film, I will not refer to literature’s contribution to the development of cinema at this stage. A separate subchapter will be devoted to this phenomenon. However, it is worth noting the analysis of Kamilla

Elliott in her book Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003), wherein she argues that contrary to what some critics claim (e.g., James Monaco, one of the most significant scholars working on the topic and a major point of reference for this chapter), it was not the novel that influenced cinema to the greatest extent, but rather theatre. Elliott thoroughly analyses the relationship between cinema, theatre, and the novel. As a point of evidence, Elliott gives the example of Charles

Dickens, whose texts, amongst other Victorian novels, are considered especially cinematic.1 This

1 The phenomenon of looking for film traits in pre-cinematic texts will be discussed further in this chapter. 16 might be explained by the realist style in which they were written. Interestingly, Dickens himself stated that he had often been inspired by the theatre (Elliott 123). In this case, what we may call cinematic is in fact theatrical. However, there is no need to search as far back in time as the writing of Dickens to prove that the theatre had a considerable influence on cinema. We need only note that during the very beginnings of cinema, films were merely recordings of stage plays. Jerzy

Płażewski recalls that from the very first release of an artistic film in France, cinema started to feed on the theatre. Numerous theatre personalities were invited to take part in historical films or adaptations of plays (e.g., King Oedipus in 1908) to very poor effect: none of the lengthy monologues were cut from the films and the actors performed their roles as if for the theatre, but since the medium had changed, the effect was comical (Płażewski 16). It was a different story, however, for the playwrights who were hired to write the first screenplays. They undoubtedly employed many theatrical conventions, which over the years were adapted for use in film. In her research on this phenomenon, Elliott mentions that cinema was long denied the title of the seventh art because it borrowed so heavily from the theatre (115).

Cinema’s arrival into the world brought with it many significant technical advances that would be used by future filmmakers. In the last decade of nineteenth century, the first devices that could record and project films were introduced: Edison’s 35 mm camera and the Kinetoscope (a device that allowed individual users to watch films), and the Lumières’ Cinématographe (which was capable of both recording and displaying images). The first people to actually show a film to an audience were the Lumières in 1895. Even at that time, there were already attempts being made to combine the moving image and sound (Edison had attempted to connect his camera to a phonograph). As David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson claim in their book, “the first films were extremely simple in form and style. They usually consisted of a single shot framing an action, 17 usually at long-shot distance” (442). According to Bordwell and Thompson, until 1903 the majority of films concentrated on documenting reality, thus showing phenomena that were worth seeing, but nevertheless they were not free of narrative. Initial attempts to make film more than a passive recording of the surrounding world were visible in the first special effects and comic scenes, the latter being by Edison and the Lumière brothers (The Waterer Watered, 1895).

However, the true development of the narrative form, as well as some famous special effects, came with the works of George Méliès – the first magician of cinema.2 It might be said that he discovered the possibility of editing by accident. Whil he was filming the movement of carriages, the camera got stuck for a split second. The result of this error was the omnibus he was filming unexpectedly changing into a hearse. This accidental cut, imperceptible on screen, made Méliès “the first master of the mise en scène technique” (Bordwell and Thompson 443), which led to numerous films showing people and things disappearing and turning into other people and things. Méliès built a studio and constructed elaborate settings to create his fantastic worlds. His discovery led him to search for story inspirations in other arts. For example, he was the first director to adapt classic stories such as Cinderella. Méliès’ work relied extensively on people and things being “on and off” the screen, which helps us understand the term mise en scène. Bordwell and Thompson give the definition of mise en scène as “all elements placed in front of the camera to be photographed: the settings and props, lighting, costumes and make up, figure behaviour” (479). All of these components contribute to the construction of a story. However, it should be remembered that not all elements of a story are present on screen – those that aren’t are instead implied and have to be imagined and connected by the viewer on the basis of what is seen.

2 James Monaco mentions two approaches to film at the time of its birth. The first was more documentary and realist in nature (associated with the Lumière brothers), whilst the second was closer to Expressionism (associated with Méliès) (319). In the case of Méliès, one can go even further and say that he was the person who brought fiction – and even science fiction – to cinema. 18

Despite these early experiments and advances in cinematic storytelling, the film that is considered to be the true beginning of narrative form in cinema is The Great Train Robbery (1903), which Bordwell and Thompson call the prototype for classical American film (445) and Monaco calls one of the milestones in film history (319). It is one of the first films to have action with clear linearity of time, space, and logic. The film’s creator, Edwin S. Porter, one of Edison’s directors,

“is often considered the ‘inventor’ of editing” (Monaco 319), which Bordwell and Thompson define as “editing that alternates shots of two or more lines of action occurring in different places, usually simultaneously” (477). The juxtaposition of shots in films at such an early stage allows us to search for similarities in literature with the assumption that cinema may have inspired the first cinemagoers to experiment with literary forms.

The Great Train Robbery triggered the development of a narrative form that is dominant in cinema from 1904 onwards. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that the new artform spread across countries in Europe during the First World War due to the fact that there were no boundaries to film production and distribution between countries. As a result, European cinema had a significant role in commercial film production. Meanwhile in America, film production moved from the East Coast to the West Coast. Hollywood seemed like the ideal place for the film industry to develop in due to its weather conditions and varied landscape and nature, which guaranteed numerous set possibilities. After the First World War, Hollywood became the dominant player on the market, “contributing to the creation of distinct differences in the formal traits of individual national cinemas” (Bordwell and Thompson 444) and gave rise to what Bordwell and Thompson call classical Hollywood cinema, a style that dominated Hollywood productions for many years and to a great extent defined what we now call cinema. As Bordwell and Thompson state, “Before

1920, the American industry assumed the structure that would continue for decades: a few large 19 studios with individual artists under contract and a peripheral group of small independent producers” (444). This point in cinema’s history will prove important for our analysis because of two factors. First, it was the time at which of the first writers were employed in the film industry, and second, as mentioned above, the aesthetics of this period are probably amongst the most influential and characteristic in their simplicity. Furthermore, this period is an inexhaustible source of clichés that are eagerly used in literature as well as other arts.

Another forefather of cinema worth mentioning here is David Wark Griffith, who began his directing career in the first decade of the twentieth century. The famous creator of The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) is said to have introduced numerous innovative solutions to film language, and for this reason his work is considered to be vital in film history. James

Monaco states that Griffith was one of the first directors who attempted to have cinema regarded as art, or at least as something more profound than simple entertainment for the masses (321). As

Bordwell and Thompson claim in their book, “Griffith certainly didn’t invent all the devices with which he has been credited, but he did give many techniques strong narrative motivation” (471).

Even as a young director, he would focus on the actors’ faces and their expressions, which required the use of unusual framing, such as medium long shots or medium shots (framings that scaled the object respectively as small and moderately sized), which at the time were a novelty for filmmakers. Griffith’s films were widely influential. For example, the editing used in Intolerance influenced the Soviet artists responsible for the development of the montage technique in 1920.

Since Griffith started in the theatre, he had a lot of experience with actors and theatrical devices, lighting in particular. He skilfully used close-ups (i.e., framings that scaled the object as large, taking up the whole screen), tracks (i.e., a mobile framing that travels through space forwards, backwards, or laterally), pans, and parallel editing. However, as Monaco notes, at that time in the 20 formation of film language it was fairly easy to take credit for technical development: “Griffith’s close-ups, tracking and panning were all devices that cried out to be discovered and used; judged by the standards of the established arts, they were hardly innovative. In film, however, it was very easy to set records if you were among the first to play the game” (319). Monaco explains his belief through two arguments. First of all, he claims that cutting is an inherent part of film. If we think about this statement, it is difficult to argue with. As contemporary viewers used to a medium that is already more than a century old and that developed its form to please the masses, it would be difficult to imagine a film without cuts. Films that experiment with the form of cuts in the present day are very demanding and might even seem artificial to the viewer. Furthermore, Monaco highlights the fact that cinema borrowed from other arts that at the stage of cinema’s narrative formation had devices similar to cutting to offer (319).

Speaking of other arts that offer their aesthetics to film language, it is worth mentioning the works of Cecille B. DeMille. At the beginning of his career, he used a technique that resembled chiaroscuro, also known as the Rembrandt/north technique, which is a lighting strategy that was developed in classical painting (Bordwell and Thompson 446). DeMille’s early approach is an example of cinema’s ability to incorporate the methods of other arts in order to enrich mise en scène. The aim of the technique was to contrast the lighting on a figure, typically by putting the light source in a low back angle to give the effect of a soft backlight coming from a person, which very often created the effect of a halo. This technique was widely used in the 1930s and 1940s to dramatic and romantic effect (Beaver 204–206). The 1909–1917 period saw the development of continuity principles and techniques, such as: eyeline matches, which alternated shots of the character looking at something and then the camera portraying the object of their observation; match on action, where a certain event was shown from different angles to give the effect of 21 uninterrupted action; and the shot reverse shot, which alternated shots on characters during a conversation. These are important in terms of the above-mentioned classical Hollywood cinema style, which was heavily dependent on the principle of continuity. Devices such as eyeline matches and their various derivatives can be found in the prose of Christopher Isherwood and will be explored in further chapters.

The relationship between cinema and other arts in the first three decades of the twentieth century is more strongly visible amongst European filmmakers working at that time, as Monaco observes in his book:

In Europe filmmakers worked more closely with established painters, musicians, and

playwrights, not just because they found themselves in the same town, but also because the

new medium appealed to the avant-garde movement that was then establishing itself.

(Monaco 323)

Furthermore, Europe was more open than the United States to blending trends and movements in literature, painting, and theatre with cinema. Movements such as German Expressionism (1919–

1926), Impressionism, and Surrealism (1918–1930) contributed to enriching film language with several techniques.3 Surrealism brought with it the development of mise en scène through graphic design (Bordwell and Thompson 448). Undoubtedly, considering what has already been said about the influence of Impressionism on literature and painting, it is understandably of greatest interest to the scope of this research.

Impressionism was built in opposition to the idea of the cinema as entertainment craft and focused instead on psychological matters, characters’ feelings, and impressions. The interest fell not on external physical behaviour, but on inner action, which obviously was much more difficult

3 The dates framing the cinematic periods and movements given in brackets are taken from Bordwell and Thompson. 22 to depict from a cinematic point of view and at the time required the development of new techniques and approaching cinematic narrative from a new, fresh perspective. Plot time and subjectivity were manipulated to a great extent. Impressionist films often presented such phenomena as memories (through flashbacks), dreams, fantasies, and other states of the mind.

Another important aspect of Impressionist cinema was a focus on what the characters perceived, which was achieved through the frequent use of POV cutting, “showing a shot of a character looking at something, then a shot of that thing, from an angle and distance replicating the character’s vantage point” (Bordwell and Thompson 451). An example that Bordwell and

Thompson give in their book is of a state of dizziness/drunkenness, which is depicted by distorted or filtered shots of a revolving camera, giving an effect of vertigo. Furthermore, Impressionist filmmakers used rhythmic editing that reflected the pace of the event/experience. Because

Impressionism showed phenomena that cinema was not interested in before, new techniques had to be developed, including new lenses, multiple-frame images (Polyvision), widescreen ratios, and new means of frame mobility (strapping cameras to cars, carousels, and locomotives).

An important landmark in film history and for the analysis in this thesis is Soviet montage

(1924–1930), which contributed to the development of editing and increased its narrative significance in storytelling. Juxtaposing seemingly unrelated scenes gave directors the power to comment on the recorded reality and stimulated the audiences’ imagination and creative thinking.

The best-known artists of the movement, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod

Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov, were inspired by the achievements of Hollywood and Impressionists, where editing was already used. The Soviet directors wanted to turn away from lengthy, distant shots to pictures that were created out of a combination of shots. “Montage seemed to be the way forward for modern cinema” (Bordwell and Thompson 455). Each of the representatives had their 23 own idea of montage and its functions. Kuleshov experimented with juxtaposing shots from different footage to create meaning. According to Pudovkin, shots “are like bricks to be joined together to build a sequence” (Bordwell and Thompson 455). However, the most developed theories and practices are attributed to Sergei Eisenstein, who believed “that shots should not fit together perfectly but rather create a jolt for the spectator” (Bordwell and Thompson 455). In his text The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram, through the analysis of ideograms and haiku, Eisenstein draws closer to his key ideas of intellectual cinema and film montage. His concept stems from the construct of haiku, which juxtaposes two images with independent meaning, which when they are collided together create “something that is graphically undepictable” (Kundu 17). Eisenstein’s theories introduce so-called intellectual montage (i.e., the juxtaposition of a series of images to create an abstract idea that is not present in any one image) and parallel montage into cinema. An example of the latter is one of the most famous cinematic scenes from Battleship Potemkin (1925), where a two-minute event is shown from different angles, prolonging it to six minutes. By using editing in this way, the perception of time in the film changes. Last but not least, Dziga Vertov, who was also known for the use of editing, only in documentaries, claimed that the filmmaker is like an eye, gathering shots from many places and linking them creatively for the spectator. In his theoretical writings, he compares the eye to the lens of a camera, which gave rise to the concept of kino-eye (кино, transliterated as kino, is Russian for cinema) (Bordwell and Thompson 410). Needless to say, Vertov’s idea of the filmmaker seems very familiar to Isherwood’s famous phrase, “I am a Camera”.

The many technical solutions that were developed in the silent cinema period allowed for relatively complex storytelling in film. Filmmakers’ view of cinema changed in 1927 with what was perhaps the most important milestone in the history of cinema, namely the first “talkie”, or 24 sound movie (The Jazz Singer). Although cinema had been complemented with sound before, this was the first time that sound had actually been recorded. The first sound productions were very difficult due to the appearance of a microphone on set that recorded every sound. As a result, cameras, which at that time made a lot of noise, had to be put in a sound booth, limiting their movement. This obviously influenced the form of contemporary films, forcing filmmakers to make a step back and return to static pictures that resembled stage plays. However, the problem was quickly resolved and by 1929 it caused few problems. As Bordwell and Thompson state, “diegetic sound provided a powerful addition to the continuity editing [e.g. a] line of dialogue could continue over a cut, creating smooth temporal continuity” (456). The use of diegetic sound will also be visible in some of Isherwood’s texts as a way of introducing and linking two scenes, as well as incorporating flashbacks.

After the emergence of sound in film, the film industry saw the formation and development of genres in cinema that coincided with Hollywood’s heyday. This so-called period of classical

Hollywood cinema is strongly associated with the emergence of the star and studio system in the

1930s. Throughout the 1920s, various film companies had begun merging into giant studios that dictated the rules of the industry. Silent movie celebrities began to perish with the emergence of the talkies, although some succumbed to the new rules of the studios. From that point on, those tycoons would employ actors, directors, screenwriters, and other film creators. Stars were now associated with particular film studios and acted as their trademark. As James Monaco claims in his book, “the structure of the Hollywood system was such that even powerful directorial personalities were more often than not submerged in a sea of studio styles, actors’ styles, producers’ requirements and writers’ idiosyncrasies” (331). Historically, this period is the most important for the scope of this thesis for several reasons. 25

First of all, as stated before, it is the period in which the style that would define the traditional understanding of filmmaking formed. Undoubtedly, the question that needs to be answered here is what is understood by the word “traditional”. In their study of classical

Hollywood cinema, Bordwell and Thompson define the traits and aesthetics of the period that will be associated with the word traditional in this thesis. Films made in this period were centred on personal psychological causes, with action triggered by desire. There was a great deal of focus put on preserving clarity: the plot was goal-oriented, reality was presented in an objective way, and, to speak in Seymour Chatman’s terms, the focus was rather on kernels than satellites. There was also “a strong degree of closure at the end” (Bordwell and Thompson 95–96).

Secondly, at that time, not only were classical techniques being developed, but the style also gave rise to cinematic clichés that have since been widely used by different arts and most heavily exploited by pop culture. Literature also took advantage of this development. Notable examples include Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man (2002) and Angela Carter’s The Passion of the New Eve (1977), both of which use clichés as basic elements in the construction of the narrative. James Monaco comments on the development of clichés whilst referring to the development of film genres in the period: “throughout the classic Hollywood period, the genres refined themselves; by the end they were nearly self-parodies. Yet they proved engrossing in two respects: on the one hand, by their nature, genres were mythic … Their elements were all well known; there was a litany to each popular genre” (334).

Yet another important movement worth considering when discussing the relationship between cinema and literature is the FNW (1959–1964). Firstly, because it gave rise to numerous new methods in the art of filmmaking, amongst them a break with the continuity principle.

Secondly, because their rejection of the heritage of French cinema meant that FNW artists were 26 simultaneously fascinated by the very phenomenon of film, including the products of Hollywood.

Jean Luc Godard, one of the movement’s most famous representatives, said:

We were all critics before beginning to make films, and I loved all kinds of cinema – the

Russians, the Americans, the neorealists. It was the cinema that made us – or me, at least

– want to make films. I knew nothing of life except through the cinema. (qtd. in Bordwell

and Thompson 461)

This quotation is important, not only because it corroborates FNW directors’ liking for Hollywood, but also because it states that their imagination and perception of the world were shaped by this medium. This will also be visible in some opinions of the writers of the time which will be discussed further in a subchapter devoted to the relationship of literature and cinema.

The FNW was the movement associated with the emergence of the auteur, which also meant an important shift in the powers that influenced the final form of cinema. Films were increasingly associated with the auteur or director, not a studio or actors. Furthermore, the fact that the movement comprised cinema critics, that is, people of the word and not the image, resulted in a curious blend of the two arts. Alain Resnais, a key representative of the FNW, “brought some avant-garde complexity of the new French novel to the cinema” (Monaco 353). He worked with novelists, several of whom – Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras, for example – later turned to filmmaking themselves. It is also worth mentioning that these writers very often wrote their novels in the present tense, which is typical of screenplays and therefore closer in its form to cinema.

Resnais explored the function of time and memory in narrative to stunning effect in such films as

Night and Fog (1956), Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), and Last Year in Marienbad (1961). In technical terms, the FNW can be characterised by frequent movements of the camera. There are 27 numerous panning and tracking shots that follow the characters or that trace out relations within a locale. FNW films often lack goal-oriented protagonists, and the narratives themselves very often had surprising, unexpected shifts in tone. The editing lacked continuity and the films’ endings were very often ambiguous. On the one hand, then, we have FNW artists fascinated by the art of cinema and its heritage, but on the other they were also making inroads into the art that were entirely different from what its heritage offered. Considering the traits of classical Hollywood cinema that have already been discussed, the FNW goes in an entirely different direction. This was what fascinated Isherwood, who mentioned in an interview that his greatest admiration in contemporary cinema was for Godard and Antonioni. He concluded his opinion about contemporary cinema by saying that, “You see, I love unpredictability, strangeness in films. And that’s what I want to see more of in the cinema in the future” (Berg and Freeman, Conversations with Christopher Isherwood 51).

Yet another period in the history of cinema that is potentially important for the scope of this thesis is mentioned by Bordwell and Thompson when they refer to the period after the golden age of Hollywood. This subsequent period is associated with phenomena such as New Hollywood, independent filmmaking, and the so-called movie brats (e.g., Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg,

George Lucas), a generation that was not as tightly connected to the studios and film school graduates and that therefore had knowledge of the history of cinema and its techniques. Again, this seems to be important when analysing the influence of cinema on people’s imagination. Whilst the scope of this thesis is the analysis of the literary mind looking through the camera lens, discussing cinema’s overall influence would also prove helpful, for example, when looking at the styles of filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s. Interestingly, what prevailed in the style of these filmmakers was the immortal continuity principle. Cinema also had greater possibilities due to the 28 appearance of special effects.

Some of them [i.e., the directors stated above] cultivated more flamboyant styles: camera

movement and slow motion to extend the emotional impact of a scene/split screen devices,

flaunting long takes, startling overhead compositions and adapting classical conventions to

modern tastes. (Bordwell and Thompson 466)

The techniques stemming from the continuity principle and developed by the directors of the 1970s and 1980s undoubtedly influenced our imagination and the way in which we perceive and record reality. Take slow motion, for example, which is ubiquitous in popular culture and numerous accounts of accidents and unusual events. In everyday conversations, we often find the phrase “it was like a movie – everything was in slow motion.”

In this subchapter we have walked through the history of cinema, detecting some of the most important film techniques for the analysis of Isherwood’s prose. However, we have looked at how these techniques function in cinema without enough insight into how they could be translated into the written form. In order to understand this better, we will now lean on the form that links the word and the image: the screenplay.

1.2 The screenplay as a genre: definition and history

The screenplay as a form of artistic expression has been given little credit over the years, and there are few publications which attempt to analyse this phenomenon. One can of course find numerous manuals on screenwriting, but not many of them attempt to analyse the genre itself. According to

Jill Nelmes, “within academia, whilst novels and plays are studied on many courses, the screenplay form is usually seen as part of the film production process” (“Some Thoughts on Analysing the

Screenplay…” 107). Some recent publications that can give us a scholarly overview on the subject 29 prove that the perception of this notion has been gaining interest in recent years. My analysis of the genre will be conducted predominantly on the basis of Maciej Karpiński’s Niedoskonałe odbicie. Warsztat scenarzysty filmowego (2006) (published in Polish) and will be accompanied by

Jill Nelmes’ Analysing the Screenplay (2010).

Undoubtedly, as an intermediary form that combines the aesthetics of literature and film, the screenplay is an important link between the two disciplines. First of all, it must be noted that in the heyday of Hollywood, many well-known writers were employed by the film industry. These writers may have been influenced by the work they did for the cinema and created texts abundant in the film jargon.

In his book Niedoskonałe odbicie (Imperfect Reflection), Maciej Karpiński differentiates two modes of screenwriting: the novelistic and the filmic.4 The novelistic is characterised as reflective and Impressionist, sometimes even poetic. It focuses on the content and the meaning of the story and it abstains from suggestions of the directorial type that suggest the composition and the content of the image itself, which is characteristic of the cinematic screenplay. One more important division made by Karpiński is between the internal, subjective version of the story, which is typical of novelistic screenwriting, and the external, objective method of portrayal, which is characteristic of the cinematic screenplay. In some sample screenplay passages analysed in the course of Karpiński’s research, another very important trait appears that differentiates the two types of composition: the tense of the narration. The past tense is more typical of novelistic scripts, while the present tense is more closely associated with cinematic scripts (207–208). Interestingly, writers, or rather screenwriters, very often engage in saturating their scripts with film jargon, and in this way they meddle with the tasks of the director and editor. Too detailed a description leaves

4 The translation of the book’s title is my own. 30 very little room for the directors’ contribution. Karpiński describes the abuse of film language in screenplays as “directing on paper”. Thus, a well-written script should reduce stage directions as much as possible, because they will be filled in by the specialists responsible for transforming the script into images, that is, the director, costume designer, stage designer, etc. How would that be useful in an analysis of the relationship between the script and the novel? If we assume that the information above is common knowledge and used by writers working for Hollywood, we might expect that some of them can be found in the novels of these writers as well.

As regards the studies on screenwriting, very often theoretical approaches concentrate on the form of the film itself. Most publications related to screenplays are handbooks listing the do’s and don’ts of the art of screenwriting. The appearance of the first screenplay can be traced back to a film already discussed in this thesis, namely Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery. An important fact related to the creation of the screenplay is that Porter was inspired to write the script on the basis of a stage play he had seen in the theatre. The story of the train robbery was written to mimic the scenes of the play. However, the first true screenwriter was Gene Gauntier, an actress, stage designer, director, and editor who started her career as a screenwriter in 1906. At that time, the concept of film adaptation had already appeared. As stated before, George Méliès was one of the pioneers in this area. Interestingly, Gauntier heavily exploited literature in her search for a story, always intending to go as far from the original as possible. Later on in her career, during a film adaptation of the life of Jesus Christ, Gauntier encountered the first difficulties in adapting literature (in this case the Bible) to film. According to what she wrote in her journal, some aspects that were only hinted at in the Bible had to be shown on the screen in order to preserve coherence

(qtd. in Karpiński 43). This demonstrates the importance of mise en scène in cinema, the organisation of which is essential for clarity in cinematic storytelling. Gauntier finished her 31 screenwriter career in 1918. In the era of the silent cinema, the demand for scripted stories was already so big that film studios had created story departments, which comprised former playwrights and journalists who produced screenplays on a mass scale. Studios also received many scripts from amateurs, but it quickly became clear that most of them were useless, which made way for the American concept of the script as a product of shared authorship. Although produced on a considerable scale, screenplays were far from being treated seriously. For example, the first version of David W. Griffith’s Intolerance was eight hours long, and only after the editing did it gain any coherence. According to Karpiński, critics claim that if Griffith had used scripts more often, his movies would have been much more logical and coherent (53). An interesting point here is that there are two tools in cinema which constitute a film “narrative”: the script during pre- production and editing during post-production. In the following chapters, we will be able to see how those two elements are related to the literary techniques Isherwood uses in his works.

An important figure in the development and growth of the screenplay’s importance was

Thomas Ince, who was the first to actually insist on a greater coherence between scenes and contributed to the development of continuity as mentioned above as well as so-called narrative, which is the style typical of American screenwriting that focuses on a skilful leading of the story.

In comparison to narrative, the European style is more reflective and Impressionist. Thus, in analogy to the differentiation discussed earlier in this chapter, the American style is more technical, whilst the European style is closer to the literary form.

I have already mentioned that the film industry used journalists and playwrights for screenwriting. However, there was no mention of writers, who were a very important part of film history and obviously of this thesis. A noticeable development of writing for the cinema can be observed in the first half of the twentieth century in America. Amongst the novelists-turned- 32 screenwriters working for Hollywood, we can find such names as William Faulkner, Dashiell

Hammett, and Aldous Huxley.

In his article “The ‘Eastern’ Writer in Hollywood” (and by eastern he means Americans from the East Coast as well as European writers), John Schultheiss writes that there were two significant periods in American film industry regarding the participation of writers. The first period entailed the early twenties, which witnessed “the shift from the movie personality to the well- written story” (13). The second dates for the thirties and early forties, when the film industry was in need of “snappy dialogue and story elements which would take advantage of the motion picture’s new dimension of sound. During this latter time almost every noteworthy literary figure came West to write for films” (1). In some of these cases, the transition from paper to celluloid was forced by the economic situation and cinema’s growing popularity; in others, it was curiosity about the new medium.

Samuel Goldwyn was the first to recognise the importance of writers in Hollywood and invited some of them to work for the industry in 1919. The need to employ writers and playwrights to write scripts was to a certain extent an attempt to elevate cinema to the actual level of art and change its perception as a mere form of entertainment for the masses. Goldwyn realised that audiences were gradually growing tired of the star-based concept of cinema. The group of authors that was invited to Hollywood was called the Eminent Writers and comprised novelists and playwrights. Elmer Rice was probably the most recognisable member of this group. But this first attempt to bring authors to Hollywood ended in failure. John Schultheiss mentions that the writers of those times had great difficulty in finding themselves in a new domain. Most of them were very reluctant to employ the techniques that cinema had managed to develop by that time (15). Some of them were also ignorant of the possibilities cinema could offer, such as close-ups. In the 1920s, 33 writers clung too strongly to the theatrical form, which to a certain extent was a regression in the form of film and was undoubtedly not very attractive for contemporary audiences that were already familiar with some cinematic techniques. However, there were also writers who were so immersed in the new reality that their scripts were overloaded with cinematic language and solutions, which put the continuity and clarity of the film at risk. It is also worth noting that the failure of the writers in Hollywood was partially caused by the reluctance of the majority of film industry veterans to accept the newcomers. Many of the scripts submitted were immediately rewritten by script departments that already existed in the studios, which would very often claim that what they were given could absolutely not be transformed into pictures. As Schultheiss repeats after one of the film hisyotians, Richard Griffith, although the cooperation between the film industry and writers was a failure, the screenplay gained a more stable and organised literary form (17).

A separate chapter in the relationship between cinema and literature is the use of so-called titles in silent cinema, which complemented the story being shown in images. These “captions” were created by title writers who specialised in this kind of work. With the emergence of the talkies, a conflict appeared between the two groups (title writers and screenwriters) about whom should continue the work related to the written word.

The appearance of the talkies and therefore the development of the screenplay was treated with certain distance amongst European filmmakers. Many thought the form of film would be spoilt by sound and the spoken word, as cinema was mainly the art of the image (Karpiński 56).

The French avant-garde rejected the script, whilst Russian directors such as Vertov and Eisenstein saw great potential in this newly born hybrid form. Eisenstein was reported to have said after writing a script that “the film is almost ready, it has only to be shot now”5 (qtd. in Karpiński 56).

5 My own translation: “Film jest gotowy, teraz trzeba go tylko nakręcić.” 34

When the talkies appeared, the form of the screenplay became stable and has not changed significantly over the years.

The revival of the novelist-turned-screenwriter came in the 1930s with the emergence and development of sound cinema. Obviously, the change in the medium’s technical possibilities forced many specialists to abandon the film industry, including film stars whose voices did not prove to be as attractive as their silent performances and screenwriters who did not have experience in writing for the screen and stage. As a result, Hollywood once again decided to use the literary environment to write their scripts. The demand for those writers was enormous, and many of them were lured by high salaries. There were so many writers in Hollywood at the time that one might speak of literary movements forming in Hollywood. John Schultheiss recognises three such groups, one of which was the “bohemian” type, which was interested in Hindu mysticism and pacifism. Amongst its members one could find Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russel, Christopher

Isherwood, and Berthold Viertel (18).

Interestingly, Karpiński claims that many writers wrote their scripts just as they wrote their novels and could not adjust their work to the new form (60). He mentions writers such as Nathanael

West, William Faulkner, and Francis Scott Fitzgerald. If the scripts written by novelists were actually far from the form of a screenplay, and one can still speak about numerous film techniques employed by these writers in their novels, the impact of cinematic aesthetics must have been considerably intense. Apparently the scripts written by the writers often had to be rewritten, and in the end they were never the work of one writer (Karpiński 60). Very often there would be several authors working on the same idea simultaneously. This practice was one of the most despised amongst authors working for the film industry (Schultheiss 26). Surprisingly, none of Fitzgerald’s scripts were ever used. Cinema continued to be treated as entertainment for the masses, even 35 though the industry employed novelists and playwrights to change that situation and elevate the level of production. Nevertheless, it was not long before audiences’ tastes became used to the studios’ plans as well as the writers’ ambitions.

Some of the writers described their experiences in Hollywood in novels such as

Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon and West’s The Day of the Locust. Such testimonies usually painted a bitter picture of the film industry as an entity that took advantage of writers and led to their artistic deterioration. Some of the novelists even referred to Hollywood as a system that bound artists. It must be noted that writers working for Hollywood very often despised the work they were assigned to do.

In his book The Nickel Was for the Movies (1995), Gavriel Moses describes this type of writing as the Hollywood novel, which is a genre that focuses on the workings of the film industry from a writer’s point of view. Such texts could be described as cinematic because of their metatextual character. In this case, the metatext obviously refers to the processes of filmmaking.,

We can find several novels in Isherwood’s oeuvre that are close to the idea of the genre described above. Prater Violet is about the process of writing a script for a film that will later be shot in a

British studio. The World… is set in Hollywood and the protagonist is the husband of a famous film star, whilst Down There… contains a section set in Hollywood with some biographical elements of Isherwood’s life as a screenwriter. These novels will be discussed in the following chapters.

In his article, Schultheiss also touches upon a very important matter, namely the influence of Hollywood on the creativity of playwrights and novelists. Apparently working in the film business had such an impact on writers that it was very difficult for them to get back to “actual writing” (26). Despite the fact that screenwriting was treated as a means of making a living and 36 therefore creating conditions for oneself to pursue one’s literary work or interests, many writers found it very difficult to achieve the artistic level of the works they created before embarking on their adventure in the film industry. Their subsequent texts were very often hybrid forms that resembled the scripts that the writers had previously worked on.

Analysing the form of the script, Karpiński reaches interesting conclusions, stating that the screenplay is related to literature on three levels: the first is that very often films are adaptations of literature; the second is that many screenwriters actually deal with other literary forms (as

Isherwood did, for example); and the third, and perhaps most important, is that the screenplay is a hybrid form that uses the language of literature to transcribe and transform it into film language

(58).

Another important difference between the screenplay and any other literary form is that the screenplay is only a draft of an actual work of art. One might claim that actually this is the same for the stage play, but many examples of stage plays are often treated as separate literary forms that might not necessarily be staged. Furthermore, the play is highly dependent on good dialogue and interpretation, whilst in the case of cinema what is actually written on the page is just a small part of the final work. As stated before, the scripts do not, or rather should not, specify what kind of shot should be used in a scene or how the film should be edited. Thus it is not only the dialogue and performance that matters, but what will actually be included in the final version of the film and how it is going to be made. These differences are reflected in Christopher Isherwood’s thoughts on the differences between cinema and the novel, where he defines filmmaking as a collective exercise compared to novel writing, which is dependent on the writer only.

One must not put it on a par with the novel, for in the screenwriting the director is boss.

The films are a visual operation and in my view one should not really say that one is a 37

writer in films unless one is writer-director. If a director said to me “Your script is sacred,”

I would be suspicious of his ability … The difference between writing a novel and a

screenplay is like passing from a totalitarian world where the writing is all our doing down

to the last comma – where you are absolutely responsible – to the extraordinarily

cooperative world of creating a screenplay… (qtd. in Schultheiss 24–25)

Similarly to Karpiński’s view on the screenplay, Isherwood’s thoughts direct us to the notion of a script being just one of the elements of a film, and one that is by all means subject to change. As a blueprint of a vision, it undergoes a number of creative changes during the production process.

Returning to Karpiński’s differentiation between the screenplay and traditional literary forms such as a play or a novel, he recalls a thought of Erwin Panofsky, according to whom a play is written with the intention of providing material for numerous interpretations and therefore also alterations, whilst a screenplay is actually written for a particular production: “The sign of a screenplay expresses not only a form, but also a will to become another form, thus embodying a form in motion” (qtd. in Karpiński 64).6 Karpiński also refers to the words of the American film producer David Brown, who says that “the film script is an imperfect reflection of a film” (qtd. in

Karpiński 66).

1.3 The relationship between cinema and the novel: a historical account

Another important factor in the analysis of Isherwood’s prose from a cinematic perspective is to look at the relationship between literature and film, namely how cinema shaped the imagination of the writers who witnessed its emergence, but also how certain techniques used in prose before cinema had been given film attributes. James Monaco makes an attempt to compare the novel and

6 My own translation of the following: “znak scenariusza wyraża (…) nie tylko formę ale ponadto ‘wolę formy, any stać się inną formą’, czyli ujmuje ‘formę’ w ruchu.” 38 film from the perspective of their development:

Interesting parallels exist between the history of the art form of the novel during the course

of the past three hundred years and the development of film during the past one hundred

years. Both are, above all, popular arts that depend on large numbers of consumers to

function economically. Each began with roots in journalism – that is, as a medium of

record. Each developed through an early stage marked by invention of freshness and soon

reached a complex system of genres that served a wide range of audiences. Finally, each

entered into a later period of consolidation, identified by a stronger concern for elite,

aesthetic values over those of popular entertainment, as it was challenged by a new medium

(film for the novel, television for film). (Monaco 263)

Later, Monaco claims that in terms of its development cinema is technologically based as opposed to audience-based. Whilst the evolution of the novel relied on the tastes of readers, cinema needed the improvement of technology.

With the emergence and development of cinema, literature became the natural source of inspiration for the new medium. Along with theatre, literature nourished films with stories. In her essay “The Cinema” (1926), Virginia Woolf writes:

All the famous novels of the world, with their well-known characters and their famous

scenes, only asked, it seemed, to be put on the films. What could be easier and simpler?

The cinema fell upon its prey with immense rapacity, and to the moment largely subsists

upon the body of its unfortunate victim. But the results are disastrous to both. The alliance

is unnatural. (Woolf 173)

According to Woolf, cinema significantly simplifies the content of the texts it attempts to adapt to its own language. The aim of the cinema is to tell a story, to present an action, without really 39 focusing on or even being able to present the characters’ thoughts, more complex emotions, and internal struggles in depth. These novel characters on the screen become one-dimensional. In her essay, Woolf discusses three types of film – the newsreel, classical Hollywood cinema, and the avant-garde film. Her observations on the simplification that cinema brings are mostly in relation to the second of these types. What seems to be the main problem, according to Woolf, is that filmmakers were more interested in telling stories than in observing life through the camera lens.

Referring to the third category she analyses, namely avant-garde film, Woolf envisions how cinema would look if it “were left to its own devices” (174). Recalling Robert Wiene’s Dr Caligari, she states that cinema could be capable of evoking certain emotions instead of speaking about them.

Even if Woolf’s vision of cinematic development did come to life in some experimental forms and movements, classical Hollywood (or, in other words, continuity) cinema has become the dominant form of film expression and has therefore influenced the imagination of its audiences by changing our perception of reality and its artistic presentation. This might be treated as a part of a larger trend in the visual and written convergence of various arts. In his book on the relationship between film and fiction, Keith Cohen writes about a mutation of signs, such as the word and the image, and states that the above-mentioned trend has been documented since the early nineteenth century (3). An example can be found in the works of the Pre-Raphaelites. The twentieth century convergence of word and image led to cinema devouring novels in search of inspiration, but also to the novel’s form being changed. Writers started thinking in a cinematic way and blended the discourses of film and fiction. Many writers focused on screenwriting in their careers, or at least had a film adaptation in mind whilst writing their novels. John Fowles, in his

Notes on an Unfinished Novel, writes the following about the bond between his novels and cinema: 40

A charge all of us who sell film rights have to answer is that we wrote our books with this

end in view. What has to be distinguished is the legitimate and illegitimate influence of the

cinema on the novel. I saw my first film when I was six; I suppose I’ve seen on average –

and discounting television – a film a week ever since; let’s say some two and a half

thousand films up to now. How can so frequently repeated an experience not have indelibly

stamped itself on the mode of imagination? At one time I analysed my dreams in detail;

again and again I recalled purely cinematic effects … panning shots, close shots, tracking,

jump cuts, and the rest. In short, this mode of imagining is far too deep in me to eradicate

– not only in me, in all my generation. (Fowles 144–145)

Fowles’ testimony reflects the scale of the impact cinema has had on its audiences, writers and critics amongst them. In fact, this observation inspired me to begin research on the influence of cinema on literature. Fowles recollects that after a detailed analysis of a dream, he arrived at affinities between the way he dreamed and cinematic aesthetics. This indicates that the way we replicate cinematic aesthetics in our thoughts, dreams, and texts might be unconscious in contrast to the intentional use of this form of artistic expression. Undoubtedly, this is also how we can assess literary texts: whilst some of them will incorporate film language on purpose, others might be doing so unintentionally, reflecting a contemporary way of thinking and imagining.

When speaking about writers influenced by the cinema, certain distinctions have to be made. Whilst John Fowles might have been working under the charm of films he had seen, some writers borrowed cinematic techniques to experiment with the form of the novel in order to express what up to that point had seemed inexpressible. David Daiches finds an example of such an appropriation in the style of some Modernist writers:

Stream-of-consciousness writers employ a number of devices analogous to those used by 41

film directors, particularly the technique of montage in which they found a ready-made

device to aid them in accomplishing their fundamental purpose, that is, to represent the

dual aspect of human life – the inner life simultaneously with outer life. (qtd. in Weseliński)

76)

Daiches’ assumption might also be an introduction to the writings of Christopher Isherwood. As we will learn in the following chapters, Isherwood’s prose is often defined by the statement his narrator makes in Goodbye… when he compares himself to a camera, which is passive in its observations. The camera-style narrative, in contrast to literary aesthetics, will stand for what

Daiches calls the outer life.

Keith Cohen also discusses the similarities between cinematic aesthetics and Modernist literary techniques. He refers to Arnold Hauser’s The Social History of Art, where, as we read below, many of the experimental forms used by Modernist writers resemble cinematic techniques:

The discontinuity of the plot and scenic development, the sudden emersion of the thoughts

and moods, the relativity and the inconsistency of the time standards, are what remind us

in the works of Proust and Joyce, Dos Passos, and Virginia Woolf of the cuttings, dissolves

and interpolations of the film, and it is simply film magic when Proust begins two incidents,

which may lie thirty years apart as closely together as if they were only two hours between

them. (Cohen 84)

Looking at the techniques listed in the above quotation, we can see that the majority of them are related to editing, which will be one of the focal points when discussing Isherwood’s prose from the perspective of cinematic aesthetics.

The reflections on the relationship between cinema and literature above give us an idea of what techniques we will be looking for in Isherwood’s texts. But how then are we to recognise 42 cinematic narration in the novel? What are the characteristics of such a style? The idea concentrates on the issues of time and space. In his book On Art, Umberto Eco defines the spatio-temporal differences between literature and cinema:

the difference between cinematic and novelistic action seems to be the following: the novel

tells us: “this happened, then another thing happened and so on”, whilst film presents us

with a sequence: “this + this + this and so on” – it is a sequence of displays of the present,

which can be hierarchically ordered only in the editing phase. (Eco 208)7

Thus, according to Eco the novel cannot present numerous plots or events at the same time. On the other hand, with the use of various forms of editing, cinema is able to juxtapose diverse temporal and spatial elements. It should be assumed that the experimental twentieth century novel was not taken into consideration in the quoted analysis of film and novel narration. Literary narration from the twentieth century cannot be analysed this way, as it was already under the influence of cinema.

The possibility of juxtaposing two elements that break the traditional chronological flow of time is one of the characteristics of cinematic narration. Such a juxtaposition in a novel forces the reader to become the editor. As Keith Cohen notes, “in order for the reader to put together the elements of narration and character portrayal often discontinuously, he must establish continuity in his own mind, reflexively” (84). Cinema and its continuity principle, on the other hand, releases the viewer from that effort, making its audiences passive, as we read in various analyses of film and fiction. An example of this observation is that made by Jonathan Wallace in his article on

Edith Warton’s House of Mirth:

7 My own translation from the Polish edition of Eco’s book: “Różnica między akcją filmową a powieściową wydaje się zatem następująca: powieść powiada nam: ‘Wydarzyło się to, potem wydarzyło się to itd.’, podczas gdy film stawia nas wobec sekwencji: ‘To + to + to itd.’ - jest to sekwencja przedstawień teraźniejszości, które można hierarchicznie uporządkować dopiero w fazie montażu.” 43

When we read a novel, we live in the author’s world; we perform the mental effort of

meeting her at her home, rather than making her come to ours. Movies, by comparison, do

the exact opposite; they bring everything to us, and expect us to do no work whatever. A

world that makes perfect sense on paper may make none whatever on celluloid, because

brought to us as passive recipients it no longer seems to hold together. When we go to it,

we provide the glue. (Wallace)

David Trotter, in his text on Woolf and the Cinema, explains which quality of a film contributes to this passive state. It is, in fact, the continuity principle that focuses on telling the story, rather than focusing on all of the details:

Continuity editing made it possible to situate the spectator at the optimum viewpoint in

each shot, and to keep that viewpoint on the move as the story developed. The optimum

viewpoint is not that from which the action can be seen in its entirety, but that from which

it could be understood in its essence. (Trotter 15)

This is what was problematic for Woolf in the relation between the film and the novel she wrote about; the focus on essence in film adaptations often led to simplification of the world described in written texts.

An important aspect within the film–literature relationship is time, as we have seen in Eco’s description of the differences between these two forms of artistic expression. He defines film as a sequence of displays of the present. The manifestation of cinematic narration in the novel is achieved through the present tense, which gives the feeling of things happening “right now”, as though projected on a screen. The present tense is also characteristic of the screenplay’s form as well as stage directions in theatre plays. However, in a screenplay the present tense is more frequently used, as descriptions and stage directions are more abundant. Let us take a sample from 44 a screenplay to look at its form. The following is an excerpt from A Serious Man by Nathan and

Joel Coen:

The boy who is listening to the transistor radio – DANNY Gopnik – sits at a hinge-topped

desk in a cinderblock classroom whose rows of desks are occupied by other boys and girls

of about twelve years of age. It is dusk and the room is fluorescent-lit. At the front of the

room a gray-haired man in a worn suit and tie addresses the class. DANNY straightens one

leg so that he may dig into a pocket. With an eye on the TEACHER to make sure he isn’t

being watched, he eases something out: A twenty-dollar bill. (Cohen, Ethan; Cohen, Joel)

In the following sections of this chapter, as well as in the analysis of Isherwood’s texts, we will see how the use of the present tense brings novels’ narrative style closer to cinema, and how in the case of Isherwood’s characters it may evoke a feeling of alienation or being out of place.

1.4 Theoretical approaches to the relation between cinema and literature

The phenomenon described in the previous subchapter has been widely discussed by film and literary critics from the very beginnings of cinema. The scope of the analysis did not only refer to texts created after the birth of cinema, but actually even before. One of the examples is the

Victorian novel. A lot of attention within this topic has been given to the writings of key

Modernists such as James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf in England, as well as

Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Nathanael West in the United States.

Some theoretical and practical experiments that blend cinema and the novel can be attributed to

Alain Robbe-Grillet and the authors surrounding the literary concept of nouveau roman in France.

The fact that so many scholars have been trying to compare the rules that operate within the two arts is evidence enough that they have many features in common. As already mentioned, 45 we know that literature has been an inspiration for film in terms of content, that is, the stories it tells. Thus, one branch of study is predominantly concerned with so-called film adaptations.

Another branch is more concerned with how film aesthetics have been incorporated into writing.

We are already aware of such an influence in the texts of writers already mentioned in this thesis.

However, the influence of film aesthetics on the perception of writers must also be attributed to critical theories, as some of them search for cinematic traits not only in the literature of the Film

Age, but also in pre-cinematic texts.

In the overview of the theoretical approaches to the topic in question, several common statements and theses can be recognised. First of all, most of the scholars mentioned below search for the origins of cinema in the nineteenth century, and, apart from obvious inspirations such as photography and painting, much of what cinema inherited is attributed to the nineteenth century novel. Several critics mention Dickens as the ultimate source of analogies between literary and cinematic aesthetics. Some of them pronounce Dickens’s prose as cinematic, while others highlight the precedence of the highly visual and perceptive Dickensian style and its role in the formation of cinema’s storytelling principles. Secondly, when speaking about literary works that were created during the Film Age, scholars refer to the convergence of film and novel aesthetics rather than of one art borrowing from another.

The theories presented below mostly comprise critics publishing in the twenty-first century in order to get the most recent look at the described phenomenon, but one must not forget about the pioneers of this discipline. Seymour Chatman, in his Story and Discourse (1978), outlined the characteristics of literary and cinematic style. A very general overview of the phenomenon of the influence of the cinema on the novel can also be found in James Monaco’s How to Read Film

(1977). 46

The debate on the relationship between cinema and the novel in the twenty-first century can be traced to Kamilla Elliott’s Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003). Elliott observes that the study of the relationship between film and fiction is paradoxical on the one hand, since there is a clear opposition between these two forms of artistic expression, as one is “words” and the other “images”. But Elliott also reminds us about the other side of the debate, namely the concept of sister arts, where certain values such as narrative strategies, sources, and contexts are shared by the two forms in question (1).

In order to trace the beginnings of the paradox, Elliott goes back to pre-cinematic times and analyses the relationship between words and images on the basis of poetry–painting

(eighteenth century) and novel–illustration (nineteenth century) relationships. She shows how the analogies between the arts had been used to actually separate them (critics actually stated that there are some overlapping qualities of words and images that are redundant in cinema, hence there is no need to combine those two elements in the cinematic form). In her analysis of interart relations,

Elliott refers to the concept of “cinematic novels” and “literary cinema”. Repeating after Christian

Metz, Elliott states that “the nineteenth century novel [not only] influenced the western film, but that it in some sense became film, whilst the modern novel evolved in a different direction” (3). It is important to note that a crucial part of Elliott’s book is devoted to the Victorian novel, which according to Elliott inspired and established a basis for the cinematic portrayal of reality and storytelling. To corroborate her statement, she notes that Victorian novels have been the most frequently adapted amongst literary texts. Summarising the novel–film debate, Elliott recalls the state of paralysis in the discourse caused by the categorisation of the word and the image and the line being between the two. Hence, it is impossible to talk about the relationship between the two arts in any other way than by means of structure. In her analysis of the criticism of the relationship, 47

Elliott states that any other attempt would end in semiotic heresy.

In her analysis, Elliott also shows how different artistic domains permeate and create a melting point of aesthetics:

Novel and film studies are particularly hospitable to a critique of theory from practice,

since there is often no clear demarcation between theorists, academic critics, novelists,

filmmakers, reviewers and reader-reviewers. For example, Sergei Eisenstein, who

mainstreamed both the analogy of the cinematic novel and of film “language”, was theorist,

critic and filmmaker. Novelists like Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William

Faulkner became screenwriters. Novelists like Fitzgerald, Leo Tolstoy, and Virginia Woolf

have written about the novel’s relationship to cinema. Other novelists are academics:

semiotician Umberto Eco wrote a novel, The Name of the Rose, and later critiqued its film

adaptation. Anthony Burgess has been professor, novelist, screenwriter, film reviewer and

adapter of literature to theater and film – he even composed music for a theatrical

adaptation of one of his novels, A Clockwork Orange. (Elliott 6)

On the basis of the examples given above by Elliott, cinema presents itself as a medium which at various stages of its development was often created by artists that came from a different field of expertise. Perhaps at cinema’s early stages this could have been explained by the fact that it was still a form of artistic expression in which pioneers and invited writers and critics could contribute to its growth. In its later, more advanced stage of development, cinema has become such an important piece of culture that it has become difficult not to refer to it in this way.

What seems to be vitally important in Elliott’s research is the division of scholarly approaches to the topic. According to the author, there are two camps with various approaches to the relationship between cinema and literature. One focuses on novels written after the birth of the 48 tenth muse. The main assumption is that these writers had either watched films or written for the cinema, which provides a logical explanation as to why cinematic traces can be found in the novels they were writing. The second approach disregards chronology, making the concept of the cinematic novel an anachronistic one. These critics tend to find the language of film in nineteenth century Victorian novels (114–115).

The influence of cinema on the literary narrative is also the object of study in Gautam

Kundu’s Fitzgerald and the Influence of Film (2008). The author begins with the assumption that

“film … became the source of the novelists’ experimentations in technique, and determined the shape, form, and texture of at least some of their more significant literary productions” (1). He then goes on to define cinematic style as a result of writers’ pursuit of a new, innovative type of writing: “in its desire to stretch its boundaries and to make the significant visible, audible, and tactile, good writing has tended to be visual, to actualise and vivify the seen world, to record fully a specific moment of perception with a convincing abundance of details” (15). As can be seen from the quoted opinion, Kundu’s remark concerns specific cinematic qualities (i.e., spatio- temporal qualities) that are not typically found in other forms of artistic expression such as painting or theatre.

In his analysis of Fitzgerald’s prose, Kundu provides an overview of the theories that accompany the film–novel relationship as well as a history of the phenomenon, and gives examples of prominent American novelists that employ cinematic language in their texts. These include:

John Dos Passos in his U.S.A. trilogy, where so-called camera eye sections and newsreel sections can be found; William Faulkner, who used his experiences as a screenwriter to write his novels;

Hemingway, who focused on behaviour and action just as a film camera does; and last but not least, Gertrude Stein and Hart Crane, who experimented with film forms in their novels to 49

“challenge the limitations of literary language” (3). Obviously these examples are just a prelude to the analysis of the oeuvre of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was strongly connected with the film industry. In general, Kundu characterised Fitzgerald’s style in relation to cinema as emphasising modality and being abundant in an insider’s knowledge of screenwriting and the film business in general. Similarly to Kamilla Elliott and David Seed, another critic discussed further on in this chapter, Kundu also makes reference to Victorian novels (and particularly Dickens) as a source of inspiration for cinema and highlights the fact that literature’s emulation of cinema was typical of

Modernist writers who experimented with the literary form to a great extent and for whom cinema was one of the forms of expression that enabled them to enrich the literary form.

A significant part of Kundu’s overview is devoted to the writings of Sergei Eisenstein, who greatly contributed to film theory and practice. Kundu recalls Eisenstein’s fascination with

Dickens’ novels and his theory that Dickens’ works are very cinematic in form. The author claims that the pronouncement of the famous Soviet director triggered a debate on the influence of film on the novel (Kundu 12).

The writings of Eisenstein, the creator of Battleship Potemkin, reveal his deep fascination with the new medium and his cinematic sensibility. He analyses other arts, stating that there are numerous analogies between the principles governing film language and those operating within literature, painting, and theatre. He sees those analogies in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the works of some of the Romantic poets, the paintings of Meming [sic] and El Greco, the music of Mozart and

Bach, and the prose of such prominent writers as Tolstoy and Dickens. Such a wide array of art forms brings us back to the concept of cinema as a force that combines all the other arts because of its ability to record reality.

In his theoretical endeavours to combine the structures operating within film and prose, 50

Eisenstein traces the origins of montage in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, where in a scene in a farmers’ market two sets of dialogues are introduced interchangeably, giving the effect of two scenes being edited together (qtd. in Kundu 16).

Eisenstein draws much attention to Charles Dickens’ works as a source of inspiration for the cinema, and formulated his ideas in Dickens, Griffith and Film Today (1944). He finds analogies in Dickens’s prose to the films of David Wark Griffith and suggests what other visual techniques employed by Dickens could have been used by Griffith.

Further on in his book, Kundu mentions critics who take a historical rather than a formalist approach to the relationship between literature and film. Arnold Hauser claims that cinema embodies the changes in sensitivity and expression in other arts and therefore the critical study of film should focus on its beginnings. Claude-Edmonde Magny supports Hauser’s ideas and also suggests that attention should be drawn to the way in which cinema influenced novels while simultaneously acknowledging that the novel had a significant impact on the formation of cinema.

In Magny’s writing, the concept of “continual present” appears (which, according to Kundu, is a feature very often attributed to film), which she proposes is expressed by the devices of “cutting” and “cross-cutting”. Yet another historical approach is presented by John Fell in his text Film and

Narrative Tradition (1974), in which he locates the beginnings of cinema at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and states that cinema is a part of the traditions of the Victorian era. Fell is one of the scholars who pronounces the birth of cross-cutting in cinema with the release of Griffith’s The Great Train Robbery (Kundu 18–20).

In his account of theories that accompany the phenomenon in question, Kundu mentions

Alan Spiegel’s Fiction and the Camera Eye (1976) and Keith Cohen’s Film and Fiction… (1979) as important publications because they steer the discussion towards considerations of time, space, 51 and ontology (20). Keith Cohen’s work is also one of the sources for this thesis, particularly because of his in-depth analysis of Impressionism and its development across the arts, which, as already mentioned, was a movement that is particularly useful in the analysis of cinematic narratives in novels.

Yet another noteworthy publication in the field studying the exchange of film and literature dynamics is David Seed’s Cinematic Fictions (2009, reissue 2012). Just as Kundu does, Seed recognises the importance of cinema in the formation of literary styles in the first half of the twentieth century. The scope of his work predominantly concerns American literature. In his overview of the critical approaches to the topic, Seed notes that scholars tend to concentrate on the works of Modernists when speaking about the influence of film on cinema. This should not come as a surprise, as Modernism – the vast movement that it was – was developing in literature at the same time that the new medium of film was taking its first steps. An equally important observation is that during its formation, cinema had already become a source of inspiration for writers and could already be considered diverse: “the cinema was not a single or stable entity. Some novelists drew on silent film; others looked to the Russian theorists for inspiration; and yet others turned to continental makers rather than to Hollywood” (5).

In his book, Seed analyses the oeuvre of particular writers from the perspective of the influence of cinema on their writing. He gives us a thorough look at the texts of Gertrude Stein, F.

Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Each of these writers used film aesthetics that marked their literary style. For instance, Hilda Doolittle employed the concept of memory film8, John Dos Passos explored the technique of Soviet montage, whilst the writers of the 1930s incorporated documentary techniques (5). Seed also discusses the phenomenon of the

8 That is a technique where comparisons with film are being made to describe the process of incorporating memories into the writer’s memoir (Seed 62). 52

Hollywood novel, which will be important for the scope of this thesis.

1.5 Cinematic narrative in practice

Having learned about the history of cinema and the script, let us look at cinematic devices that may appear in literature. These can be arranged into three dimensions: visual, auditory, and temporal. The first will represent a variety of camera movements and lighting. The second will focus on the role of sound in the narration process, that is, how music is used to comment on and accompany events, but also how it is used to support montage, which is in fact the third dimension to be discussed. Editing represents the temporal aspect, as it enables a variety of solutions such as cuts, flashbacks and flashforwards, ellipses, and other techniques that allow diegetic time to be controlled. Yet another element that is important for this dimension is the use of the present tense, which gives the sense of immediacy of events.

The first term that is important for film narration is mise en scène, which is understood as

“all of the elements placed in front of the camera to be photographed: the setting and props. lighting, costumes and makeup, and figure behavior” (Bordwell and Thompson 479).9 In other words, mise en scène is everything that the viewers can see on the screen. In literature we will encounter several examples of characters imagining a certain situation as if it were a film scene.

When analysing various writers’ employment of cinematic techniques in their texts, the techniques that can be most commonly observed are those that resemble camera movements. Thus, we will see a number of shots. A frequent example is the establishing shot, “usually involving a distant framing, that shows the spatial relations among the important figures, objects, and setting in a scene” (Bordwell and Thompson 478). The equivalent of this technique in the novel is a

9 The definitions of the terms are based on Bordwell and Thompson. 53 description of the setting of a scene. A good example is identified in The Great Gatsby by Gautam

Kundu in his book on Fitzgerald’s cinematic techniques:

In film, the long shot usually focuses attention – from a distance – on a full figure of a

subject, on the natural setting, the sky, the road, or on a city street. When used at the

beginning of a story, it becomes an establishing shot, similar to one in a film to “set” the

location of the scene that follows. In Gatsby, Nick Carraway’s description of the

“elaborate” Buchanan mansion is a good example of such a “shot”. “[The] house was even

more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion,

overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a

quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens – finally

when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum

of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected

gold and wide open to the wide afternoon.” (Kundu 34–35)

As mentioned before, cinematic techniques are identified not only in texts created after the emergence of cinema, but also those which were created alongside or just before the arrival of the new medium, which shows the emergence of a certain sensitivity and new perspective in writing.

In Cinematic Fictions, David Seed recalls the opening in one of the chapters of The Red Badge of

Courage by Stephen Crane, which as we can expect begins with a description much resembling an establishing shot: “Great brown clouds had floated to the still heights of air before him… The woods filtered men and the fields became dotted” (qtd. in Seed 7). As this is a nineteenth century novel, two conclusions might be drawn from comparing this scene to an establishing shot: the first, as mentioned above, is that Crane already had a cinematic quality in his writing (probably due to the earlier emergence of the photo camera); the second is that the perspective of contemporary 54 writers is heavily influenced by cinematic sensitivity.10

Another type of literary solution that resembles film language is the following shot (often synonymous with a tracking shot), which is defined as a shot with framing that shifts to keep a moving figure on screen. An example of this technique can be found in David Lodge’s Nice Work, in which the reader follows the protagonist through his morning routine where the whole process is described from a camera perspective: “It is 7.40 when Vic emerges from the lavatory. The tempo of his actions begins to accelerate. He strides through the kitchen, where Marjorie is listlessly loading his soiled breakfast things into the dishwasher, and runs up the stairs. Back in the en suite bathroom, he briskly cleans his teeth and brushes his hair” (25). The last sentence in the quotation is unclear in this sequence, as it might suggest two things – the camera following the protagonist to the bathroom, but also a cut to a scene where the character is already in the bathroom. This ambiguity is caused by the word “back”, which suggests an abrupt change.11

Another film technique, obverse to the following shot, is the POV shot. “This one is taken with the camera placed approximately where the character’s eyes would be, showing what the character would see. It is usually cut in before or after a shot of the character looking” (Bordwell and Thompson 479).

One of the most popular film techniques that is noted in literature by critics is the close-up.

Bordwell and Thompson define the close-up as “a framing in which the scale of the object shown is relatively large; most commonly a person’s head seen from the neck up, or an object of a comparable size that fills most of the screen” (477). With a close-up, the audience has a chance to get a better, closer look at the object of the camera’s interest. In order to achieve a similar effect

10 A similar use of this technique can be found in Isherwood’s Prater Violet, which will be described in detail in the following chapters of the thesis. 11 Similar impressions arise from the narrative style of A Single Man, where we witness the protagonist struggling with his daily routines after the loss of his partner. 55 in literature, writers will scrutinise a person or an item, describing it in detail, therefore drawing the reader’s attention to it and slowing down the pace of the narrated events. An example of this technique can be found in Zadie Smith’s cinematic narrative, The Autograph Man. Smith’s protagonist, a collector of autographs, very often perceives reality through a cinematic prism, as he is influenced by movies created during the classical Hollywood cinema period. Seeing the world through the protagonist’s eyes means not only intertextual references, but also cinematic devices employed in the narration, such as the close-up described below:

After a while Li-Jin’s eyes wander voluntarily left. This is a mistake. He is just in time to

see his neighbour’s massive lips turning a gruesome smile. The lips curl too close to the

nose, the moustache is lifted, wide, uneven teeth are revealed … (Smith 23)

In this scene, we see how focusing on particular body parts slows the pace of the narration – as the

“eyes wander left”, we also have a change of shots – from a close-up of the protagonist’s eyes to a close-up of the face of the person the main character is observing. The latter is simultaneously an illustration of a POV technique, whereby the reader observes the described reality through the eyes of the protagonist.

The close-up, as one of the cinematic techniques most frequently borrowed by writers, is also used for a variety of other purposes. In his analysis of The Great Gatsby, Gautam Kundu gives several examples of Fitzgerald’s use of this technique during his depiction of characters. In the passages Kundu quotes, there is a visible jump from an overall description of a character’s appearance to a particular body part that seems to best define their character – a nose, eyebrows, or mouth that seem most memorable to the narrator (40). Kundu identifies several purposes of this use of the close-up, starting with “communicating physical rather than psychological states of being” (40) through ironic depiction between appearance and reality, to utilizing the close-up as 56

“a metaphor of psychological tension” (41).

An example of the latter is recalled by David Seed in Cinematic Fictions in an example from Henry James’s Crapy Cornelia:

where the protagonist’s anxiety about proposing marriage is articulated in blockage of his

visual field (visual “view”) through a process of a close-up: “the incongruous object was a

woman’s head crowned with a little sparsely feathered black hat (…) that grew and grew,

that came nearer and nearer, while it met his eyes, after the manner of the images in a

cinematograph.” (Seed 9)

Seed refers to David Trotter’s interpretation of this scene, which suggests that the protagonist is displaced from the proposal. Thus, when serving as an expression of a psychological state, cinematic techniques such as a close-up are a useful means of depicting a feeling of detachment or distance towards the situation the protagonists find themselves in.

The close-up has also been referenced in the Hollywood novel, for example in the prose of

Nathanael West, as David Seed observes in Cinematic Fictions. In The Day of the Locust, one of the characters imagines a cinematic scene of mealtimes: “He would pause to take superb close-ups of these, the corned beef on its spreading platter hemmed about with boiled potatoes and turnips and cabbage…” (qtd. in Seed 260). This use of the cinematic device reinforces the idea that film has influenced and shaped the imagination of its spectators, as we can see that they tend to think in film terms and use cinematic techniques to describe what they see, recall, or imagine. However, this narrative strategy is not only a statement on the power of the cinematic imagination, but to a certain extent also a defamiliarisation technique – the protagonists perceive ordinary objects as if they were part of a film, and therefore as something unusual and artificial.

Apart from camera movements, which are a unique feature of cinema, literature and film 57 share the method of arranging their material into a comprehensive and consistent form – editing.

In film, there are of course many more elements to be taken into consideration, such as music, which also plays an important diegetic function that comments on the narrated events, but also acts as a bridge between one scene and the next. Several components belonging to the process of film editing are transferred into the prose of Isherwood and other writers. One of the noticeable techniques is a cut, which here is understood as an “instantaneous change from one framing to another” (Bordwell and Thompson 478). This change might take a different form, such as an eyeline match, which obeys “the axis of action principle in which the first shot shows a person looking off in one direction and the second shows a nearby space containing what he or she sees.

If the person looks left the following shot should imply that the looker is offscreen right” (Bordwell and Thompson 478). Another similar example would be a shot reverse shot which usually consists of two or more shots edited together that alternate between characters, typically during a conversation. In continuity editing, characters in one framing usually look left, while in the other framing they look right. Over-the-shoulder framings are common in shot-reverse-shot editing

(Bordwell and Thompson 480). Examples of such shots can be found in Isherwood’s A Single

Man. Alternating shots in literature may take the form of bracketed text. David Seed, in Literature and Visual Media, mentions the use of this technique by Virginia Woolf in what is considered “her most cinematic” novel, Mrs Dalloway:

Woolf shows consummate skill in this novel at applying a device similar to a reverse shot

in film, where we are given temporary access to one character’s subjectivity and shifted

into the consciousness of another character within the same scene. The reversal of the gaze

in such cases temporarily objectives Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith as they

appear to others, and in this way Woolf negotiates to and fro between subjective and social 58

life, constantly revealing gaps between the two. (Seed 56)

As mentioned at the beginning of this section, not only are there affinities between literature and film in the field of visual representation, but also in the way they use sound. Sound in film plays an important narrative role, setting the tone of the scene but also gluing two scenes together as a type of transition. In cinema, sound takes two forms: diegetic and non-diegetic. The former is part of the film world and originates from it, whilst the latter represents instances such as mood music or the narrator’s commentary.

On the basis of the above examples, we can already see that cinema indeed has aesthetics and techniques to offer that literature has appropriated. A number of the techniques exemplified above are also visible in Isherwood’s writing and will be explored in further chapters. We will also be able to see how Isherwood, as a Hollywood novelist-turned-screenwriter, described his vision of the film industry and whether it was in line with his colleagues’ visions from previous generations. Furthermore, since Isherwood heavily relies on his own life when writing, we will see how the cinematic editing techniques described in this chapter overlap with the way in which

Isherwood edited his diary entries to create a novel or a memoir. 59

CHAPTER TWO: AN OVERVIEW OF ISHERWOOD’S WORK AND HIS

RELATIONSHIP WITH CINEMA

2.1 Autobiographical and other biographical sources

It is probably impossible to discuss Christopher Isherwood’s prose without referring to his life, as the majority of the texts he wrote are to a great extent based on his personal experiences, albeit after undergoing some slight modifications. Although some real people and places have been given new names, there is an unchangeable element around which all other modifiable elements revolve.

A trademark of Isherwood’s prose is his surname itself, which he very often gives to his characters and which in effect suggests that Isherwood is the protagonist of his own work. As he claims himself in My Guru…, “To me, ‘Christopher Isherwood’ was much more than just my name; it was the code word for my identity as a writer, the formula for the essence of my artistic power”

(142). Undoubtedly, the reader cannot put an equals sign between this fictitious character and the actual writer. However, the name has been used throughout Isherwood’s oeuvre with purpose and undoubtedly serves as the best source of biographical information on Isherwood, which comes in various forms. For the purpose of the differentiation between the author and the protagonist, references to the latter will be put in inverted commas throughout this and subsequent chapters.

The abundance of the writer’s life in his own texts of various genres is observed by Alfred

Corn in the article “I Am a Diary”, in which he says that taking into consideration the variety of autobiographical material Isherwood produced, his work would probably “qualify as the most complete account of a human life lived in the twentieth century” (27). Indeed, looking at

Isherwood’s work we can distinguish several categories of his texts as sources of biographical knowledge. The first and most obvious of these sources are four volumes of diaries published after

Isherwood’s death. This initiative was overseen by Isherwood’s life partner, Don Bachardy. These 60 diaries comprise various periods in Isherwood’s life: Diaries, Volume One: 1939–1960, The

Sixties, Diaries, Volume Two: 1960–1969, Liberation, Diaries, Volume Three: 1970–1983, and

Lost Years: A Memoir, 1945–1951. Undoubtedly, these seem to be the most valuable material for

Isherwood as a reference point and inspiration for his novel writing. In Christopher…, Isherwood says the following about his diaries:

During his years in Germany, Christopher kept a diary. As he became aware that he would

one day write stories about people he knew there, his diary entries got longer. They later

supplied him with most of the material which is used to create period atmosphere in Mr

Norris and Goodbye to Berlin. (40)

From this excerpt, it can be seen that throughout his literary career Isherwood realises the great potential of the diary to provide material for his novels. His notes on the people he meets and the places he visits become sketches of his future writing. The thoughts and plots he writes about constitute elements of a future story, sometimes even constituting a novel’s skeleton. Very often they also make up the majority of a published text, as in the case of My Guru… (1980) and

Christopher… (1976).

One may also learn about Isherwood from the lectures he gave at Los Angeles State

University, where he taught English literature. Isherwood on Writing captures not only

Isherwood’s teachings about prominent English writers, but more importantly his views on writing, cinema, theatre, and other arts. A significant part of this lecture collection is actually devoted to Isherwood’s own writing and is tellingly named “The Autobiography of My Books”, where Isherwood shares his inspirations and discusses his writing techniques as well as key themes in his work. 61

Amongst Isherwood’s novels, we can distinguish between his semi-autobiographical work and memoirs such as A Journey to War (1939), The Condor and the Cows (1949), Christopher…

(1976), and My Guru… (1980), which are either Isherwood’s testimony of a journey made or a look back at a certain period, not to say “aspect”, of his life (respectively, his journeys in first

China and then South America, homosexuality, and Vedanta philosophy and lifestyle). All of his texts contain modified biographical information. The majority of the characters are Isherwood’s friends and acquaintances whose names are modified and adjusted for the purposes of the novel.

A very good example of such a text is Lions and Shadows, the first of Isherwood memoirs and the one that is to some extent his “portrait of an artist as a young man”. It contains Isherwood’s recollections of his school and university years spent with Wystan Hugh Auden, Stephen Spender, and Edward Upward. Another example is Down There…, which is a compilation of four texts describing different periods in Isherwood’s life, each focusing on a different country he spent time in.

Apart from diaries and memoirs, there have been several publications of letters between

Isherwood and Edward Upward, Edward Morgan Forster (Letters Between Isherwood and Forster on Homosexuality and Literature), his mother Kathleen (Kathleen and Christopher), and his lover and partner Don Bachardy (The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don

Bachardy). Isherwood also published a booklet on his childhood years titled A Lancashire

Childhood (1946).

One must not forget that apart from the direct references to Isherwood’s life in his memoirs and semi-autobiographical novels, the link between the writer’s life and his characters and stories is also clearly visible in the texts where an “Isherwood” character does not appear. For example, in All the Conspirators (1928) he examines generational conflict, which is related to his aversion 62 towards the way his parents (particularly his mother) lived and brought him up, whilst in A Single

Man (1964) the protagonist is an English literature professor, which is a clear overlap with

Isherwood’s teaching career at Los Angeles State University.

The self-contained world of Isherwood’s life and work did not stop scholars from compiling and rearranging this information into new texts. As Hilton Als says in his review of

Peter Parker’s biography of Isherwood, “the biographer of a copious self-chronicler has a particular burden: the feeling that he might be serving up leftovers” (“I, ME, MINE”). We can distinguish two periods of intensified publications on the author. The first dates back to the late

1970s and 1980s of the twentieth century, which could be because by that time Isherwood was an accomplished writer, but also because his death in 1986 certainly triggered the summarisation of his life achievements. Amongst the publications of that time, we can find Brian Finney’s

Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography (1979) and Jonathan Fryer’s Isherwood (1978).

More recent studies date to the beginning of the new millennium. As far as biographical texts are concerned, one major publication, not to say magnum opus, must be mentioned: Peter Parker’s biography Isherwood: A Life Revealed (2004), an in-depth, meticulous description of Isherwood’s life and work that uses a variety of available reference material, but that also reveals previously unpublished material such as diaries, Isherwood’s early writing, and even a fragment of an unpublished novel. As a comprehensive study of Isherwood’s life, Isherwood: A Life Revealed has become one of the major reference sources for Isherwood scholars.

Parker’s biography and the glut of available material on Isherwood brings us to yet another title that reinforces the image of the great, self-contained Isherwood universe. In 2005, David

Garret Izzo published the Christopher Isherwood Encyclopedia, which is a reference source on 63

Isherwood, people and places related to him, and key terms associated with his writing and lifestyle. It also contains critical readings of all of his texts.

Last but not least, one must not forget Katherine Bucknell. Although she has not published a separate biography on Isherwood (except for a short biographical note on the website of the

Christopher Isherwood Foundation), she should be considered an Isherwood biographer due to the fact that she edited all of Isherwood’s posthumously published diaries. Her introductions to various volumes of diaries are a valuable source of information.

Apart from general biographical texts that provide an overview of Isherwood’s life and work, there are also numerous titles devoted to particular periods or aspects of Isherwood’s life.

The following prisms can be found: Isherwood in Berlin (a significant part of his writing is devoted to the time he spent in Germany during the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazi regime – this is covered by Norman Page in Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years); Isherwood and Vedanta philosophy (as we know, Isherwood was intensely involved in the movement in America and even travelled with his guru to India – this is discussed by Victor Marsh in Mr Isherwood Changes

Trains); Isherwood and film; Isherwood and the Modernist circle; and finally Isherwood’s homosexuality (this is discussed in Queer Times: Christopher Isherwood’s Modernity by Jamie

M. Carr). All of these thematic areas are important for the principal analytical aim of this thesis. I would like to argue that all of the areas that define Isherwood’s life have a common denominator

(apart from Isherwood himself, of course), that is, Isherwood’s feeling of alienation in the environments and situations described above.

As can be deduced from the paragraph above, the themes in Isherwood’s writing distinguished by scholars very often mirror the author’s own interests. As the texts he writes are highly autobiographical, these themes are actually also key points in his biography. These are: his 64 relation with a mother who could not free herself from the ordeal of losing her husband in the

Great War (Kathleen and Frank, All the Conspirators), his adolescent life spent in boarding school and waived academic career (The Mortmere Stories, Lions and Shadows), his trips around Europe and his experiences witnessing the rise of Nazi Germany (Mr Norris…, Goodbye…, Down

There…, Christopher…), his life in the US and working for the film industry (Prater Violet, Down

There…), homosexuality (Christopher…, A Single Man), and Vedanta and pacifism (My Guru…,

A Meeting by the River).

2.2 Biography and oeuvre overview

On the basis of the themes described above, we can briefly say who Christopher Isherwood was.

He was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, traveller, pacifist, follower of Vedanta, and a homosexual. He was born in Cheshire on 26th August 1904 and died in his home in Santa Monica on 4th January 1986. His father Frank died in the Great War when Isherwood was only 11. His mother Kathleen had a profound impact on the boy and his development as a writer. First of all, she had refused to stop grieving her late husband. In his review of Peter Parker’s Isherwood: A

Life Revealed, Thomas Mallon writes, “the most important psychological fact of Isherwood’s early life was the overeager embrace of widowhood by his mother, Kathleen, who became in her son’s mind a monster of nostalgia, a ruffled, squawking martyr suspended in an amber of Edwardian pride and prejudice” (5). Another reviewer of Parker’s magnum opus on Isherwood, Hilton Als, mentions an important fact about Isherwood’s attitude towards his mother: “Parker shows

Isherwood’s distaste for Kathleen and all that she stood for (England itself) as the author’s primary source of inspiration – the thing against which he defined himself” (“I, ME, MINE”). This observation can be treated as one of the first signs in Isherwood’s biography that confirms his 65 otherness as well as the will to alienate himself. In this particular case it is alienation from his homeland, represented to a certain extent by his mother. As will be seen further in this chapter, this was one of the reasons Isherwood set out on his journey to Germany, which he would have thought of as his new “spiritual homeland”. Not only did Kathleen Isherwood have an impact on the content of her son’s writing, but on the form he often chose in his literary career as well. She was the one who inspired Isherwood to start writing diaries and memoirs, as she also kept a diary.

It might then be said that Isherwood owes his autobiographical style to a family tradition.12

His school years in St Edmund’s School and then at Repton brought his first important friendship with Edward Upward. Even as Cambridge undergraduates, they created the fictitious, surreal world of Mortmere, which was supposed to be a parody of their university life. Mortmere stories were then recalled and described by Isherwood in his first memoir, Lions and Shadows

(1938), in which he also describes his Repton years.

In 1925, Isherwood met W. H. Auden, which is another landmark in his biography. Their friendship bordering on romance became an important part of Isherwood’s life. He became

Auden’s mentor and had a significant influence on his early texts. Between 1935 and 1939, they wrote three plays together (The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F6, and On the Frontier) and a travel journal on the Sino-Japanese War (Journey to War). Through Auden, Isherwood met

Stephen Spender, who also became his close friend. Spender described Isherwood and their friendship in his memoir World within World (1966). His first impressions of Isherwood are telling, especially in what they reveal about Isherwood’s approach to the reality around him as well as his significant influence on Auden’s work:

12 The influence of Isherwood’s mother on his writing dates back to his childhood years, when she encouraged him to assemble and write A Story of My Friends. 66

Isherwood, according to Auden, held no opinions whatever about anything. He was wholly

and simply interested in people. He did not like them nor dislike them, judge them

favourably or unfavourably. He simply regarded them as material for his work. At the same

time he was the Critic in whom Auden had absolute trust. If Isherwood disliked the poem,

Auden destroyed it without demur. Should he select one line for praise and condemn the

rest, Auden skilfully inserted this line into a new poem (101).

Spender’s impressions of Isherwood give us his passive, non-judgemental camera attitude. What also seems to be the key observation is the fact that he regarded people as “material” for his work, which indicates the need to work on and rework material, thus the activity of editing, which will be one of the cinematic techniques described further in this thesis.

The most important event related to Isherwood’s friendship with Auden was the time they spent together in Germany during the Weimar Republic, which became the topic of Isherwood’s best-known novels and themes, that is, Mr Norris… (1935) and Goodbye… (1939). There are several reasons why Isherwood decided to leave England for Berlin. According to Norman Page,

Berlin was an attractive place in which to live for young writers and artists, as it was a cultural centre in the way that Paris had been for writers in the nineteenth century, not to mention it was simply cheaper for a young man to live there on a family allowance. But the most important reason for Isherwood’s move to Berlin was its promiscuity and open-mindedness. His first visit to see

Auden encouraged him to move to there: “the brief visit, though apparently barren of sexual escapades, was of considerable significance in that Isherwood fell under the spell of Germany and received a vision of it as a Promised Land of liberation and fulfilment, a spiritual homeland” (11).

Prior to his departure for Germany, Isherwood studied medicine for a brief time and also worked as a secretary for André Mangeot, which is described in his novel Lions and Shadows 67

(1938). He published his first novel, All the Conspirators, in 1928. The text explores family relationships and the generational tension between parents and their offspring. The portrait of the mother, who was based on Kathleen Isherwood, is often mentioned about the novel. Isherwood commented on this topic in the lecture “The Autobiography of My Books”:

What I wanted to present then was such a comedy, a tea-tabled version of life, which

nevertheless took itself seriously and indeed with intense feeling, a feeling of a domestic

struggle to the death – what Shelley calls the great war between the old and the young – in

which the young are passionately fighting on the side of the Freudian revolution against

their elders. (Isherwood on Writing 152)

At the time the novel was written, Isherwood’s idea of this literary form was that it should be contrived, a sort of contraption. Special care was taken in the choice of words, each of them with a specific meaning to the resolution of the plot. This tendency, as he himself claimed, was later changed entirely (Isherwood on Writing 154). Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how

Isherwood’s literary style formed from one novel to the next.

Isherwood had a breakthrough in 1929 thanks to two important events. First, Isherwood decided to end his short adventure with medicine at King’s College London. This was also the time of his first trip to Berlin to see Auden. Isherwood was absolutely enchanted by Berlin and what it had to offer in terms of sexual freedom. This is confirmed by a very explicit statement in

Christopher… “To Christopher, Berlin meant boys” (2). Thus, primarily Berlin was the search for sexual adventure for Isherwood who was looking for Puppenjunge (doll boys). This search ended with his first important relationship, namely with the working-class boy named Heinz

Neddermeyer. This event influenced his writing as well as life philosophy. For the majority of the time he spent in Europe before his departure to the United States, Isherwood tried to save Heinz 68 from the oppressive system of his homeland. He took him to Belgium, England, Portugal, and

Spain just to avoid Heinz being recruited by the Nazi army. Their journey lasted five years, from

1933 to 1937, and is described in Christopher… and other novels. More importantly, when

Isherwood finally left for America, he still remembered his lover, who eventually became a Nazi trooper. Knowing this, Isherwood had serious reservations swearing the oath to defend the United

States during his naturalisation. He was afraid that were he ever called on to take part in battle, he might meet his beloved and be forced to hurt him. This image contributes to Isherwood developing a strong sense of pacifism and immersing himself more intensely into the philosophy of Vedanta.

Starting from his visit to Berlin, Isherwood began his journey through Europe and met many people who had a profound influence on the content of his novels. In 1931 he met Jean Ross, who inspired the most famous Isherwood character (apart from himself), Sally Bowles. Isherwood wrote a series of short texts and published it under the title Sally Bowles (1937), which were later incorporated in his novel Goodbye…. Yet another important friendship was made at that time and also gave life to a prominent literary character. There is also Gerald Hamilton, who in turn was the inspiration for another title character, Arthur Norris (from Mr Norris…).

Last but not least, 1932 saw the start of Isherwood’s most valuable friendship with literary guru E. M. Forster, who having read Isherwood’s second novel The Memorial was intrigued enough to meet its author. Isherwood describes Forster in one of his texts as the only living writer he could actually look up to (Christopher… 108). Their friendship lasted 38 years. Throughout this time they discussed each other’s texts and whilst the relationship was considered mostly as

Forster-mentor, Isherwood-disciple, the latter also had his word during the creation of Forster’s

Maurice. 69

After parting with Heinz, who was arrested and deported to Germany from Luxembourg,

Isherwood travelled with Auden to China in order to gather material for their co-authored reportage on the Sino-Japanese War called, A Journey to War (1939). In 1938, the first set of Isherwood’s memoirs, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties, were published. This collection covers Isherwood’s younger days, his school and university experiences in Cambridge, and his first work experience as a tutor and secretary. Lions and Shadows is also an account of the first friendships that Isherwood made. Several of the characters described in the memoirs are

Isherwood’s close friends who had a significant influence on his life and writing, and who often appeared on the pages of his books. It is also where we learn for the first time of Isherwood’s fascination with films and cinema, which seems to have been a passion of his since his childhood and teenage years.

During the 1930s whilst he was still in Europe, Isherwood published two important novels about Nazi Germany that brought him significant recognition. These were respectively Mr

Norris… (1935) and Goodbye… (1939), which introduced some key Isherwood characters:

William Bradshaw (who is yet another “Isherwood” character; this time, however, Christopher

William Bradshaw Isherwood used his middle names for the purpose of naming his protagonist) and Sally Bowles. The novels portray Berlin and pre-war Europe, the changing social moods, and the clash between Communist and Nazi supporters.

In 1939, both Isherwood and Auden decided to flee Europe for America. As at the time

Isherwood was already a recognised writer with several novels published, his decision to leave

Europe and Britain due to the continent’s incompatibility with his and Auden’s beliefs and lifestyles, the decision was taken with mixed feelings by the literary and intellectual world in

Britain. This was particularly intense after the Second World War broke out and there was a strong 70 demand on the part of the press and some political environments for Isherwood and Auden to return to their homeland. Some perceived Auden and Isherwood as traitors, others as pioneers and heroes.

Their arrival and time spent on the East Coast proved to be successful for Auden, who soon managed to make himself visible as an artist and gain recognition. Isherwood was in the shadow of Auden’s achievements and did not hesitate to mention the fact in one of his diary entries.

Furthermore, he dreamt of California, as his friend John Lehmann mentions in his memoir about

Isherwood (50).

His first years in the United States, especially those during the Second World War, abounded in various activities loosely connected with his literary career. Isherwood made some friends in literary and refugee circles. He kept in touch with Aldous Huxley, Igor Stravinsky,

Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams. He also met Gerald Heard, who introduced Isherwood to the world of Hinduism, yoga, and Vedanta philosophy. In Los Angeles, Isherwood met

Vedanta’s leader, Swami Prabhavananda, who became his guru. Isherwood became so involved in

Vedanta, he considered and practised to become a monk. Simultaneously, for some time he succeeded in combining this lifestyle with his homosexual desires and Hollywood screenwriter career. Deeply involved in the life of his new community, he worked on translating the Bhagavad

Gita, a part of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, which might be considered a literary exercise during a period of writer’s block. Translating an ancient text and avoiding the mistakes of previous translators was a daring task. The time Isherwood spent within the Vedanta group and his aspirations to become a monk were described in a memoir called My Guru… published in 1980

(one of Isherwood’s last books). The text was written on the basis of the diaries that Isherwood 71 had kept for most of his life and he was therefore able to create memoirs on the basis of them, selecting the information he needed to focus on a particular aspect of his life.

Yet another environment and stage in Isherwood’s life that is worth mentioning was his volunteer work at a Quaker-led centre for German refugees, whom he taught English and helped prepare for a new life in the United States. He spent almost a year in the centre between 1942 and

1943. This year was an experience that resonated in his memoirs; one of feeling alien to the community he was simultaneously part of.

Throughout the war, Isherwood concentrated on work for MGM and other film studios.

Although not many of the scripts he was working on saw the light of day, he earned more than enough to lead a wealthy life in California. During that time, he managed to meet prominent

Hollywood figures, including Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin. Whilst he was active as a screenwriter, he suffered writer’s block until the end of the war and did not complete a novel until

1945, when Prater Violet was published. The novel itself is a vivid account of working in the film industry, heavily abundant in film jargon and of course feeding on Isherwood’s life and experiences as well as the people he met at different stages in his life. The text describes his cooperation with the Viennese director Berthold Viertel while he was still in pre-war Europe.

The war was an important moment in Isherwood’s formation of his pacifist approach. The vision of facing his former lover Heinz as a soldier of the enemy armies reinforced Isherwood’s attitude. In his efforts to understand and define pacifism, Isherwood consulted Gerald Heard and

Aldous Huxley, which, as mentioned before, led Isherwood to the topic of mysticism and Vedanta.

Before

After the war, Isherwood decided to visit his friends and family in England. He only managed to do so in 1947 due to problems with his health. The years he spent in the United States 72

(and Hollywood in particular) had changed him significantly, and this was particularly visible during his trip to England. What seemed to be natural for Isherwood, who had been raised in British culture, was now defamiliarised. He himself had become a different person. An account of these changes can be found in John Lehmann’s memoir on Isherwood. For example, we can read about

Isherwood’s impressions of London and England:

throughout the years I had spent in Hollywood I had never tired of protesting against the

American film presentation of English life. What caricature. What gross exaggeration! But

now – and increasingly during the weeks that followed13 – I began to reverse my

judgement. Is it possible to exaggerate the Englishness of England? (…) we would pass

through an English village complete with a village church in a country churchyard; so

absurdly authentic that it might have been bodily off a movie lot at MGM… and as for the

accents … Half the population appeared to be talking like Richard Haydn14 as a Cockney

bank clerk, the other half like Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.15 (qtd. in Lehmann 69–

70)

Yet another interesting observation is made by Lehmann himself when he meets Isherwood after the war. This is how he describes the general impression of Isherwood’s British friends: “We noted that his favourite talk was of Hollywood and movie-stars; and we wondered sometimes whether he didn’t in fact see us as characters in a film – an American film of little old England heroically carrying on in spite of all trials and tribulations” (72). Lehmann’s impressions would suggest that

13 Isherwood refers here to his stay in England/London in 1947. 14 Richard Haydn, (1905–1985) was an inimitable London-born character actor, noted for his put-on nasal delivery and pompous, fussy manner (The Internet Movie DataBase). 15 Philip St. John Basil Rathbone (1892–1967) was a South African-born English film and theatre actor most famous for his role in the 1939 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (The Internet Movie DataBase). 73 working with the film industry had influenced the way in which Isherwood thought of his homeland and that was, of course, now in cinematic terms.

From 1947 to 1948, Isherwood published a travel log called The Condor and the Cows, which was the result of his six-month journey through South America with William Caskey, his partner at that time. The book was Isherwood and Caskey’s joint venture. One wrote the text, whilst the other took pictures. In the meantime, Isherwood was already working on his next novel, which wasn’t published until 1954. The World… was born from pain, and Isherwood had many doubts regarding its style of narration. In his correspondence with Lehmann, Isherwood expressed his preference towards other forms of writing, saying that, “after this, I go back to old poker-face

Christopher Isherwood and his reportage. Real novels are too difficult” (qtd. in Lehmann 78). The novel was not taken well by critics, and Isherwood got very critical feedback from two publishing houses he sent the book to. According to Lehmann, Isherwood himself had discussed his doubts with Edward Upward, saying that it was “terribly slipshod, and vulgar and sentimental in a

Hollywoodish way” (80). Isherwood’s observation is very important, as it draws us to another potential influence on him as a writer, although this time one that is perceived negatively. In comparison to Prater Violet, which was an answer to the impact of Hollywood’s extravagance on the writer and an attempt to describe the new, intense experience of the film industry, The World… might be considered proof that Hollywood changed Isherwood’s ways. His characters became flat, superficial, and one-dimensional, which was a frequent characteristic of Hollywood movies.

A year before publishing The World…, Isherwood met 18-year-old Don Bachardy, who would later become his life partner until Isherwood’s death. This relationship was perceived as controversial by Isherwood’s Californian friends, as there was a 30-year age gap between the two men. Bachardy developed his artistic talent as a painter with Isherwood’s support and contacts. 74

The two of them also collaborated on literary and film projects, such as Frankenstein: The True

Story (1973), in the later periods of their relationship.

With the scarce successes of his latest novel and some ups and downs in the film industry

(his scripts not finding great success), Isherwood returned to his previous interests of memoirs and autobiographical novels and started work on Down There…, which consisted of four parts, each based on his experiences from a different period of his life and trips around the world. In the meantime, his previous writing got the attention of critics due to a stage and film adaptation of

Sally Bowles. John Van Druten adapted Isherwood’s text into a play, which received significant critical recognition and became a hit.

Amongst other activities already mentioned in this chapter, Isherwood also took up academic teaching at Los Angeles State University (1950s–1960s), where he gave lectures on

English literature. His work as a lecturer is documented and published under the title Isherwood on Writing, as described in the previous section of this chapter.

In the 1950s when he was working on The World…, Isherwood was already thinking of getting back to autobiographical writing and therefore embarked on a new initiative, which saw daylight in 1962. Down There… explores a number of Isherwood’s experiences from around the world: again we read about pre-war Nazi Germany, but also about Isherwood’s journeys through

Europe (Greece) and his life in the United States (California). As mentioned before, Isherwood’s writing is heavily based on his diaries, which makes every section distinct not only because of the location in which Isherwood’s characters are, but also in style. For example, the Greek episode consists almost entirely of diary entries, which by their raw character resemble movie script aesthetics (rapid, brief descriptions, jumping from scene to scene, written in the present tense).16

16 Examples will be provided in chapter three. 75

As Philip Hensher mentions in the foreword to the novel, the characters from different sections also show various levels of maturity and experience (xv). Interestingly, the title suggests that Isherwood is always travelling and does not have a stable place where he could be based. This makes him a sort of outsider.

Another turn in Isherwood’s writing career came in 1964 with A Single Man, which according to many scholars is Isherwood’s greatest achievement. Just as in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs

Dalloway (by which Isherwood was inspired when writing this text), A Single Man is a day-in-the- life novel that tells the story of a literature professor who has lost his beloved. For the first time,

Isherwood concentrates on his character’s homosexuality to a significant extent. The protagonist

George is the perfect example of an individualist, a person living amongst others but who also feels secluded. This is reflected not only in the character monologues, but also in the narrative style of the novel, which is written in the present tense. This gives the story the impression of being in flux, but simultaneously a strong resemblance to a movie script. The third-person narrator reinforces the feeling of distance. This is a novel where Isherwood again seemingly diverts from autobiography and resigns from his “Isherwood” protagonist. However, the text still has traces of autobiography – Isherwood’s motivation for writing the novel was his fear of losing his partner,

Don Bachardy. Furthermore, as David Garret Izzo claims, the novel is in a way a sequel to Down

There… and a dialogue between the Isherwood of the past and that of the present (158). Needless to say, George’s background is visibly similar to that of Isherwood’s.

Isherwood’s interest in experimental forms did not end with A Single Man and he continued to seek new forms throughout the 1960s, which resulted in the publication of an epistolary novel and the initiation of work on another memoir project related to his parents. In 1967, he published

A Meeting by the River, a story of two brothers in the form of a letter exchange. Once again we 76 can see how much value Isherwood sees in material such as letters, diary entries, notes, and the like. This is not the first time he used letters in his novel. Previous examples can be found in The

World…, where the protagonist Stephen reads the letters of his former wife, Elizabeth Rydall, which constitutes a significant part of the story.17 This is also Isherwood’s return to the topic of

Vedanta philosophy and of course a look back on his own life, as the novel is a story of two brothers, one of whom decides to become a monk and informs his brother about the fact while inviting him to India. Interestingly, the novel had two drafts and was then rewritten by Isherwood and Bachardy for stage and film purposes, but the play and script that came out of this collaboration were never turned into a play or film during Isherwood’s life.

During one of his visits to his friends and family, Isherwood discovered a very rich collection of his mother’s diaries and letters between her and Isherwood’s father. He decided to analyse and arrange this material, which became another journey into the past and an ability to revise the image of his mother, earlier described in The Memorial. This is how the idea for

Kathleen and Frank was born. Unsurprisingly, the concept of the novel is autobiographical. In an interview, Isherwood explains that the book was supposed to be “a sort of Jungian study of the main characters in his mythology” (qtd. in Finney 268).18 The book is yet another example of writing where diary entries and letters are heavily used.

Isherwood’s two last major books are memoirs in which he carefully selects the material from his diaries to describe a particular aspect of his life. In 1976 he published Christopher…,

17 Isherwood himself claimed the novel to be an experiment, a new form of expression for him that he found challenging at times. For example, he had difficulties with all of the “off-stage” characters that appear in the book and can only appear in the testimonies of the first-person narrator (qtd. in Finney 259). 18 Finney further informs us that the first intended name of the book was supposed to be Hero-Father, Demon-Mother, and adds that these were not the only elements of Isherwood’s mythology that were explored in this title. These would also be “the Home-image, the romance of distance places, loneliness, homosexuality, the cult of being an Outsider, the anti-Hero, Vedanta and anti-religion, High Camp, etc.” (268). These elements are a clear confirmation of Isherwood’s key interests in writing that were mentioned earlier in this chapter. 77 where he focuses on his homosexuality and how it was perceived over the years and in different places. The text is particularly interesting from the perspective of the famous “I am a camera” passage where Isherwood speaks about tailoring and editing the raw observations of the camera.

With Christopher…, we have a feeling of this exact process happening. Isherwood comments on his previous novels, often critically, reveals his intentions behind this or that character, and disagrees with his artistic decisions. Christopher… was an opportunity to revisit and rewrite some previously published texts, but this time from a new perspective: the common denominator of homosexuality. The other memoir was My Guru…, for which Isherwood selected material from his diaries to create an image of his Vedanta guru, Swami Prabhavananda. This is obviously not only a picture of Isherwood’s spiritual leader, but also a portrait of Isherwood’s life in Vedanta, which was not always easy. On the one hand, Vedanta went along with his pacifistic aspirations, and on the other it was difficult to combine it with the Hollywood lifestyle and his homosexuality.

Isherwood’s biography, as well as the overview of his work, give us an image of a writer whose search for a place on earth lasted a long time, during which he managed to “record” various people, behaviours, and places. The following sub-chapters and chapters will explore how

Isherwood dealt with the experiences of cinema, travelling, religion, and philosophy as well as his sexuality. His literary style will play a significant role in describing those areas of focus. As my thesis assumes that cinema and film industry had a significant importance in shaping Isherwood’s literary style, the first stage of the analysis of Isherwood’s work will be to look at his experiences with film both in Europe and the United States. The former will show us Isherwood as a moviegoer and film admirer whose imagination was shaped by what he saw in the movie theatres. The latter will focus on his work for the industry as a screenwriter and present the process of how he incorporated screenplay style into his prose. 78

2.3 Isherwood’s cinematic experiences inside and outside Hollywood

As was discussed in the introductory chapter, cinema has had an impact on various writers in different ways, shaping their perception of reality and often their literary styles. John Fowles admitted that his imagination changed after he had watched numerous films, causing him to think in cinematic terms. A recollection or an imagined literary scene was now told with the use of film language: shots, cuts, and close-ups. In his California lectures, Christopher Isherwood also admits that cinema is an unforgettable experience and recalls one of the strongest cinematic images that remained in his memory:

Do you remember one time when, in an almost black-and-white film, where you saw a barn

in winter surrounded by the snow, a boy in a red mackinaw came out of the barn – it was

like firing a shot right in your face. These are memories, actual memories of actual films

that I’ve seen, which haunt me when I can’t remember any longer what the film was about,

how the people acted, or anything else. Now, admittedly all of what I’m saying to you is

extremely subjective and open to many protests, but for me this is primarily what the film

does. It gives you the wonder of movement and the shock of image. (Isherwood on Writing

102)

To underline the importance of these words, it must be remembered that Isherwood gave his lectures in the 1960s, which was when a change was taking place in cinematic aesthetics (i.e., the studio system was ending and there was a focus on more experimental forms). By that time, cinema was very much present amongst the other arts and forms of entertainment, so it should hardly be anything fresh and surprising for the American audience. Nevertheless, for Isherwood the two defining words are “shock” and “wonder”, which stress the impact cinema had on him. 79

Even as an adolescent, Isherwood was fascinated by films and was a frequent cinemagoer, devouring every film he could and even marvelling at those with no artistic value. He seemed to be fascinated by the medium itself, the possibilities it held, and its influence on the human mind.

He describes his impressions thoroughly in his first memoir, Lions and Shadows:

I had always been fascinated by films – ever since the pre-war days in Ireland when, at the

town’s first tiny cinema, I had never missed a single “Western” or one instalment of the

enormous serial about a lady detective… I was born a film fan… I was, and still am,

endlessly interested in the outward appearance of people… The cinema puts people under

a microscope: you can stare at them as though they were insects… The stupidest film may

be full of astonishing revelations of everyday life… Just as it is easier to remember a face

if you imagine its two dimensional reflection in the mirror; so, if you are a novelist and you

want to watch your scene taking place visibly before you, it is simplest to project it onto

an imaginary screen. A practised cinema goer will be able to do this quite easily. (85-86)19

Isherwood’s recollections summarise his interests and literary tendencies and to a certain extent could be called an early artistic manifesto. First of all, we learn about the writer’s “documentary” interest in people, which is confirmed in many of his novels where he portrays his friends, acquaintances, and the people he met during his frequent travels. The comparison to cinema as a microscope is a foreshadowing of the famous “I am a camera” statement from Goodbye…, where the surrounding reality is meticulously recorded and these recordings attempt to be unemotional, unbiased, and objective – just as we would expect from a scientist observing a new specimen under

19 One must not forget that, as in the case of Isherwood’s other biographical texts, the reality presented in this one is slightly different than the factual accounts of the writer’s life. However, the modifications Isherwood introduced into his memoirs usually pertain to characters who either have a modified name or are a blend of two actual people. Opinions and attitudes should be considered as genuine for the particular period the book is about, although Isherwood might have questioned them in his later publications. Nevertheless, these still seem to be valid, at least for some of his works written at the same time. 80 a microscope.20 However, what seems to be more important in Isherwood’s quoted recollection is the impact of cinema on the imagination of its audiences, writers included. As stated above, it is hardly a problem for a moviegoer to project a scene on an imaginary screen, which can be very useful for writing. Thus, one may conclude that Isherwood’s writing was shaped by cinema even before he started working for the film industry. Further sources also confirm the significant role of film in Isherwood’s literary formation. This topic is in fact one of the most frequently discussed matters not only in his memoirs, but also in various interviews with the author. In one of them, carried out by James Berg, the writer admitted that “the cinema has in fact sharpened the visual quality of his work, giving it a precision of outline it might otherwise not have had” (Berg and

Freeman, Conversations with Christopher Isherwood 45). Both references quoted above show that film aesthetics contributed to the visual character of Isherwood’s novels, but also to their framing and outline. As will be seen in further chapters of this thesis, the cinematic character of

Isherwood’s novels will manifest itself not only in direct reference to cinema and the imitation of film techniques such as close-ups or tracking shots, but also in how Isherwood, almost like a film editor, arranges the volumes of his diary scribblings into novels. What is recorded by the

Isherwood’s camera eye in his diaries as raw material is then put in the frames of a story and transformed into a novel. This is where the “proper framing” and the “precision of outline” play their role.

Undoubtedly, apart from the influence cinema had on Isherwood as a viewer, a significant contribution to his unique style lay in his work for the film industry both in Europe and the United

States. He had already started collaborating with the film industry before he moved to America.

20 The analytical qualities of cinema implied by comparing it to a microscope find their realisation in Isherwood’s later memoirs Christopher… and My Guru…, where Isherwood’s style partially takes the form of an encyclopaedic description of an unknown species (speaking of himself and his friends). 81

Finney’s and Parker’s biographies of Isherwood mention his cooperation with the prominent

British film producer and director Alexander Korda (who worked both in the United States and

Britain). In 1937, the writer was offered the chance to work on improving a script written by G. B.

Stern that was supposed to be directed by the German director Ludwig Berger. Isherwood’s salary requirements proved to be too high and the order was given to someone else. However, he managed to work on another script for Korda that in the end was also to be directed by Berger. Peter Parker extracts Isherwood’s recollections on this cooperation from his diaries: “My life is ruled by fat pale imperious schoolmistressy old Berger, with his hanging jowl, his grey hair brushed across to conceal bald patch, his old queen’s arrogance and vanity… It’s like collaborating with Queen

Elizabeth.” (qtd. in Parker 304)

The film was never made in the end, which would be a common fate of many writers’ work for the film industry. Interestingly, the experiences described by Isherwood above are suspiciously similar to another European cinematic venture that Isherwood took part in; that is, his work with the Austrian film director Berthold Viertel on Little Friend (1934), which, as mentioned before, became the material for Isherwood’s novelette Prater Violet.

The novel itself was written more than ten years after the film was made. Isherwood had already started working on it in the United States in 1942. However, at this time and until 1945

(when the novel was published) his attention was given to different enterprises related with

Vedanta, when he was asked by Swami Prabhavananda to work on the Bhagavad Gita. As noted before, the novel is an account of Isherwood’s cooperation on adapting a stage musical to film.

The main plot revolves around his collaboration with Friedrich Bergmann (Berthold Viertel’s counterpart) and, for the purpose of this thesis, can be divided into two significant parts: script 82 creation and the process of filming.21 Although, we are speaking about two parts of the novel there is no straightforward division made by the author as such. The split can be deduced from the narrator’s hints as well as the narrative strategies used in the novel.

The first part of the novel can be distinguished by the use of the past tense for narration.

Whilst it concentrates on the process of script creation, it is also a series of Isherwood’s observations on the film industry. The writer smuggles in some film jargon and theories, taking the opportunity to experiment with film language in this part, particularly when presenting the other characters that appear in the novel.

The portrayal of the studio and the film environment make Prater Violet a novel that belongs to the genre of the Hollywood novel. As was discussed in the introductory chapter,

Isherwood was amongst the writers who were considered novelists-turned-screenwriters. Like other representatives of this group, he faced problems in his cooperation with Hollywood: many of the projects he embarked on never saw the light of day and ended up in studio archives. The difficult relationship between the literary and cinematic worlds was a topic writers invited to

Hollywood often took up in their novels. These works did not spare bitter words and mocking images of the industry. In her book “Just Making Pictures”: Hollywood Writers, the Frankfurt

School, and Film Theory, Ulrike Weissenborn summarises the grounds for writing such pieces of literature:

The authors of the notable Hollywood novels were mostly renowned writers of fiction who

had been called to Hollywood during the depression years to work on film scripts for the

big studios. Mostly unacquainted with the filmic language necessary for scriptwriting,

21 David Fine, in his article on the Hollywood novel, mentions a similar conceptual solution in Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Slow Fade (considered an example of a Hollywood novel), where we can also observe a division of the text into two parts: a precise and sharp image of a script, and the part about the fall of a filmmaker which in its form resembles the film itself (441). 83

many of them remained rather unsuccessful at this new task. The stories about the

Hollywood years of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael

West and many others are filled with notions of despair, frustration, personal disintegration,

and in many cases heavy abuse of alcohol… The writers’ unfavorable working conditions

in Hollywood, their absolute dependence on power hungry producers and

uncomprehending studio moguls has been the main focus of most of the biographical

interpretations of the genre. (9–10)

Although Prater Violet is a novel set in England, some scholars, such as Gavriel Moses and Lisa

Colletta, consider Prater Violet to belong to the Hollywood novel genre. What characteristics would confirm this categorisation, then? In The Hollywood Novel, David Fine mentions that, particularly after the Second World War, the unravelling of the studio system, and the emergence of independent productions, the Hollywood presented in fiction gradually stopped being a geographical place and was “everywhere where movies were made and moviemakers congregated” (440). Thus, even though it is in a different location, Prater Violet deals with the same problems as Hollywood novels would, of which Weissenborn speaks in the aforementioned quotation. The distinguishable difference of the focus in Prater Violet and typical Hollywood novels is that Isherwood as a character does not seem to be disillusioned by the cinematic world or frustrated with it. He is fascinated by what Bergmann tells him about the film as a form of artistic expression, but as far as the industry itself is concerned, he is distanced from it. This aloofness seems to be typical of British writers working for Hollywood, claims Lisa Colletta:

The British literature of Hollywood is unique because it examines the mythology of the

American Dream through the lens of an older, established culture and tradition. Unlike

American Novelists such as Nathanael West, who examined the empty dream of 84

Hollywood glamour in rather personal outraged terms – a betrayal of the American Dream

– the British saw Hollywood with a bit more narrative distance. Their fiction is most often

a satiric comment on the way of life that was bankrupt but alluring and ascendant. (143)

Undoubtedly there are elements of satire in Isherwood’s texts, particularly in his often-exaggerated presentation of his characters and the industry itself, which is described later on in this chapter.

His distance is also visible in the second part of the novel, where he changes the narrative style to better illustrate the new and strange state he finds himself in when the film shoot starts.

As far as negative experiences with the film world are concerned, if anybody feels truly resentful of the industry, it is the companion of “Isherwood”, Bergmann, who very explicitly expresses his concerns. The most frequently quoted opinion of his is when he compares the encounter between himself and “Isherwood” as “two gentlemen in a whorehouse” (21). This is just a sample of Bergmann’s rhetoric, which demonises the film and the industry, calling the former

“an infernal machine” (27) and the latter “a Renaissance palace abundant in various affairs and conspiracies” (56), which we will learn about later on in the chapter. However, the novel also portrays the negative attitude of the film world towards the literary world. The conflict here is based on the opposition of innovation/technology and tradition/spirituality. The hostility between the artistic world of the olden days and the new, technologically advanced cinematic industry is best seen during Isherwood’s encounter with Lawrence, one of the set cutters, who does not conceal his resentment towards writers:

All you writers have such a bloody romantic attitude. You think you’re too good for the

movies. Don’t you believe it. The movies are too good for you. We don’t need any romantic

19th century whores. We need technicians. (…) The movies aren’t drama, they aren’t

literature – they’re pure mathematics. (62) 85

Lawrence, in a straightforward and uncompromising way, summarises the relationship between the literary and film worlds, complete with its disappointments and misunderstandings. The film industry’s endeavours to enrich the screenplay by employing writers usually ended in failure, as novelists and playwrights could not think in cinematic terms and their scripts were not fit to be put on screen, which resulted in their frequent rewriting and ultimate scrapping. As we have already learned, many of their texts have never seen daylight, which is also a phenomenon described later in a scene in Prater Violet that follows a conversation with Lawrence when, during the studio tour,

“Isherwood” discovers the Reading Department, also known as Annex G.

Annex G had originally been a warehouse. It reminded me of a lawyer’s office in a Dickens

novel. There were cobwebbed shelves, rows and rows of them, right up to the roof; and not

a crack anywhere wide enough to insert your little finger. The lower rows were mostly

scripts… Lawrence told me that the rats had gnawed long tunnels through them, from end

to end…

And then there were books. These were the novels and plays which the studio had

bought to make into pictures. At any rate, that was what they were supposed to be.22 (63)

What “Isherwood” sees in Annex G partially reflects the author’s own experiences when writing for the film industry. Many of the texts he worked on did not reach the silver screen. Accounts of those “failures” can be found in interviews and the recollections of his friends. For example, when talking to James Berg, Isherwood mentions several such cases:

In 1942 I started work … on The Hour Before Dawn. What interested me in the film was

that it told a story of a pacifist, what made him one and so forth. But they scrapped all our

22 It is interesting to see that in his description of the film industry, Isherwood refers to one of the major realist nineteenth century novelists. Dickens’ work is often considered highly cinematic in terms of its narrative techniques. Sergei Eisenstein was one of the first people to write about the affinities between cinema and Dickens’ work in Dickens, Griffith and Film Today (Kundu 17). 86

work in it and it came out as a story about a man who overcame pacifism as a temporary

weakness. And then in 1945 I began working … Wolfgang, on Maugham’s Up at the Villa.

The film was never made. (Berg and Freeman, Conversations with Christopher Isherwood

48)

These two examples are only a sample of the different projects that disappeared throughout the production process. Texts written by Isherwood were modified, scrapped, partially used, and rewritten by other screenwriters.23 Sometimes nothing was left of his original work except his name in the credits. Some cases gave rise to frustration,24 but in general Isherwood did not consider these jobs as failures in his career, nor did he think of Hollywood as having a destructive force on his work, but rather as a creative challenge and a set of exercises that in the end shaped his literary style. In the very same interview with Berg, Isherwood speaks about his approach to screenwriting and the differences between writing a novel and working for the film industry: “You have to learn to stop relying on the word and thinking in terms of possible silent sequences or sequences where the dialogue plays against the image and so on … And you must remember that all my novels, or almost all, have been written post-scriptwriting” (47–48). Two important observations might be made on the basis of this quotation. First, by saying that most of his novels have been written post- screenwriting, Isherwood acknowledges the fact that his literary style has been shaped by the script and film aesthetics. Second, we can see an example of how Isherwood’s style exactly changes.

The focus shifts to juxtapositions of images and text, which can be considered as film editing

(montage). Silence also becomes important, which seems to be a state or an effect that is difficult

23 There were also instances where Isherwood was asked to collaborate on a script with other novelists or screenwriters, which was not a method he was keen on: “You see, they have this unfortunate idea here that two people write a script, and that they will both have ideas and then you will somehow amalgamate the ideas.” (Berg et al. 48) 24 In 1968, he was working on a television programme based on the carol “Silent Night” starring Kirk Douglas. Initially, he had a lot of enthusiasm for the project, but when the major part of what he wrote was cut out of the final broadcast version he wanted to remove his name from the credits (Parker 646). 87 to achieve in writing. We can find Isherwood’s attempts to create such a feeling in the initial scene of Prater Violet. We read the first passage as though we were watching a film, or rather hearing some voices off-screen without having seen the picture yet:

“MR ISHERWOOD?”

“Speaking.”

“Mr Christopher Isherwood?”

“That’s me.”

“You know, we’ve been trying to contact you ever since yesterday afternoon.” The voice

at the other end of the wire was a bit reproachful.

“I was out.”

“You were out?” (Not altogether convinced.)

“Yes.”

“Oh… I see…” (A pause to consider this. Then suddenly suspicious.) “That’s funny,

though… Your number was always engaged. All the time.” (1)

This “auditory” beginning of the text might be considered cinematic because of its limitation to dialogue with several stage directions in brackets. In his book The Nickel Was for the Movies,

Gavriel Moses also observes the cinematic quality of “the telephone scenes” in the novel, referring to the telephone that parallels the fragmentation of film syntax:

The “continuity” of a film-job offer emerges from several discontinuous and aggressive

telephone conversations in which different voices talk to Isherwood as if the context is

perfectly understood and if the recipient’s agreement is taken for granted. This dialogue is

quite accurate in capturing the structural nature of film communication, in which materials

from disparate temporal and geographical locations are forcibly blended into a continuous 88

story while the spectator is subjected to this illusion in condition of diminished resistance.

(Moses 169)

The feeling that we get in the telephone scenes is that of an intrusion into the presented world, an abrupt element that gives the effect of disrupted continuity in the novel.

Yet another layer of Isherwood’s portrayal of the industry is the vivid personalities his narrator meets during his studio journey. Apart from the hostile cutter, Lawrence, “Isherwood” meets other equally strong characters, including the studio manager, Mr Chatsworth, who seems to be a stereotypical portrait of a film tycoon. When in the novel “Isherwood” is approached by

Chatsworth’s agent for the first time, the reader senses how superficial the planned film will be in terms of portraying Vienna:

“Your agent says you know all about Vienna?…”

“He must have meant Berlin.”

Oh, Berlin? Well, that’s pretty much the same set-up, isn’t it? Mr Chatsworth wanted

someone with a continental touch. (2)

As can be seen, the priority here is not the actual authenticity of presenting Austrian reality, but only the feeling of authenticity the spectator should feel. Suspension of disbelief here plays a crucial role, as the producers intend to project a Viennese spirit but without an in-depth understanding of it. Paradoxically, by inviting an Austrian director and an English screenwriter who speaks German and has been to Germany, the producers of Prater Violet hope to give an authentic touch to their production. The situation Isherwood portrays in his novel is one of the most frequently discussed issues when speaking about the relationship between literature and cinema, particularly in relation to film adaptations of novels. Cinema very often flattens the characters and the profundity of the plot and makes them superficial. In contrast to the written 89 word, film is limited by time and often cannot show the details we find in a novel, which of course does not mean such problems may not appear in literature as well. Even Isherwood fell victim to such a process in his novel The World…. Jonathan Fryer for instance speaks of the novel’s flatness as a result of cinema’s impact on Isherwood: “[m]any people felt that The World in the Evening confirmed their worst fears about the effect of Hollywood on good novelists. There is little of the old Isherwood sparkle in the book, and some passages read like the dialogue from a poor ‘B’ movie

(184).

Chatsworth, as a representative of the barbaric film world, is presented not only through meaningful comparison and descriptions, but also by cinematic means. Even though it is the second part which technically resembles a film more, we can find passages which foreshadow what is going to happen during the film shooting stage. In one of the scenes when Bergman and

“Isherwood” meet Chatsworth, their encounter is presented in a rather peculiar way that imitates a close-up, which is also in a way an establishing shot as it introduces us to the scene and gives it the right perspective: “The first thing I saw were the soles of his shoes and the smoke of his cigar.

The shoes stood upright on their heels, elegantly brown and shiny, like a pair of ornaments, next to two bronze horses which were rubbing necks over an inkstand” (57). The close-up metaphorically presents the importance of the film producer and his attitude towards the director and screenwriter, that is, of his disrespect and patronising treatment of the two.

Chatsworth is, however, not the only character recorded by Isherwood’s camera. We observe the same scrutiny of Friedrich Bergmann. Again, Isherwood uses a literary close-up to look in detail at his colleague. When the camera is close enough, the close-up turns into a tracking shot that closely examines Bergmann’s face: 90

Bergmann’s strong hairy, ringless hand rested on the table. He held his cigarette like an

accusing forefinger, pointed straight at Chatsworth’s heart. (…) Out of the corner of my

eye, I studied the big firm chin, the grim compressed line of the mouth, the harsh furrows

cutting down from the imperious nose, the bushy black hair in the nostrils. (15)

The character of the impulsive director is the alter ego of Berthold Viertel, with whom Isherwood not only worked on the film that was the basis for Prater Violet, but who was also a close friend of Isherwood’s in the United States. Viertel’s wife, Salka, ran a salon in California that Isherwood frequently visited and where he met prominent artists such as Igor Stravinsky and Aldous Huxley.

Bergman is the key character in the novel – he introduces “Isherwood” to the world of film and is the carrier of film theories that “Isherwood” then requotes. The relationship between the two men might be interpreted as a teacher and student, even as a guru and his disciple following David

Gareth Izzo’s reading of the novel.25 Furthermore, through Bergmann, Isherwood introduces an important topic that is recognised by many scholars, that is, of politics and the unstable European countries such as Austria or Germany that we already know from Goodbye…

In the first part of the novel, we can occasionally encounter film theory interwoven with the characters’ dialogues and speeches. These foreshadow the action in the second part of the novel, which is different in form. For example, during one of his conversations with “Isherwood”,

Bergmann says:

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 anything. It

cannot wait for you to understand it. It cannot explain itself. It simply ripens to its inevitable

25 In Christopher Isherwood Encyclopedia, we can find a reading of the novel where Bergmann is treated as Isherwood’s guru and the notion of film itself is related to or even a metaphor for the Vedantic universe (Izzo 138). 91

explosion. This explosion we have to prepare, like anarchists, with the utmost ingenuity

and malice. (27)

Isherwood reuses this metaphor several times in the novel. In one instance he depicts the unstoppable nature of the machine when describing the process of shooting itself, where we sense that the cinematic narrative will only end when the process of filming finishes as well.

Furthermore, Bergman’s theory is passed by the writer to his family, but in a altered form.

Isherwood supports the metaphor of the “infernal machine”, comparing the film with painting and prose and highlighting the fact that the film has “a certain fixed speed” (29) and cannot be looked at in fragments, whereas you can skim a book or look at a particular corner of a painting.26 When watching a film, the viewer is dependent on what the director wanted to show them. Theories voiced first by Bergmann and then repeated by “Isherwood” are identified by Gavriel Moses in

The Nickel Was for the Movies:

Implicit in these views expressed by a newly “educated” Isherwood is the kind of film

theory that leads to such notions as “ideological montage” and the argument that the

rhetorical structure of film allows the artist greater control over the reception of the work

than do those of painting and narrative. These are film theories current in the Russian

cinema of the twenties and thirties and which are thus absorbed into the texture of this

novel. (170)

Interestingly, when “Isherwood” shares the secrets of film art with his family it can be seen best that although he is seemingly reluctant about all this new business, he is under its charm and

26 Which at the time Isherwood was writing the novel was impossible from the perspective of the viewer, of course, but has since become possible with the emergence of new forms of data storage (e.g., forwarding and rewinding a tape or a file, or the selection of scenes on a DVD). 92 fascinated by what he discovers with Bergmann, who becomes a sort of guru for Isherwood.27 We can see this more clearly in the production stage of the film Isherwood describes. Yet again, we can see Bergmann through the lens of a camera. This time, however, we also see the admiration

“Isherwood” has for his teacher:

I watch him throughout the take. It isn’t necessary to look at the set; the whole scene is

reflected in his face. He never shifts his eyes from the actors for an instant. He seems to

control every gesture, every intonation, by a sheer effort of hypnotic power. His lips move,

his face relaxes and contracts, his body is thrust forward or drawn back in his seat, his

hands rise and fall to mark the phases of the action. (Prater Violet 74)

Yet again we can see how Isherwood uses the close-up to present a character. He also seems to be fascinated by Bergmann’s movements and ability to control the situation on set. His gestures (not only those on set) are so memorable and influential that at some point Isherwood realises he is using them himself: “I stopped abruptly, with my hands in the air. I had caught myself in the middle of one of Bergmann’s most characteristic gestures” (29). The close and special relationship between the two artists is expressed once more in the final chapter of the novel, where “Isherwood” compares his cooperation with Bergmann to a film itself once again. He and the director are actors during a performance, screenwriters creating each other’s characters (“Mother’s Boy” and “a

Foreigner with the funny accent”), and finally a father and son (120).

Friedrich Bergmann is also a carrier of Isherwood’s ideas which will accompany the writer in his further novels and texts. He voices Isherwood’s interests in observing the surrounding reality, which will later be manifested in the words “I am a camera”:

27 Which is described in detail by David Gareth Izzo in the Isherwood Encyclopedia, where he reads Prater Violet via Vedanta religion (135-139). 93

Bergmann spoke to anybody whose face happened to interest him… One evening, in the

bus, there were two lovers. The girl was sitting in front of us, the young man stood beside

her, holding the strap. Bergmann was delighted with them. “See how he stands? They do

not even look at each other. They might be strangers. Yet, they keep touching as if by

accident. Now watch, their lips are moving. That is how two people talk when they are

very happy and alone, in the darkness. Already they are lying in each other’s arms in bed

….”

(…) Nobody seemed to mind, or even to misunderstand his intentions. I envied him

his freedom – the freedom of a foreigner. I could have done the same thing myself in

Vienna or Berlin. (49–50)

It is clear how Bergmann thinks in cinematic terms: what can be seen on the street is potential material for a story or a film. The image captured in a cinematic frame by the observer/camera is continued in the imagination of the artist, who adds another scene and another frame to what he has witnessed. Bergmann’s camera is a meticulous one; it sees details and nuances; it closes in on what is being observed. This camera also has “no shame”, just like a journalist taking pictures or filming a documentary amongst the objects being filmed. “Isherwood” also envies Bergmann’s

“foreigner attitude”, which is important here, as it is the quality he himself apparently could use in his own encounters.

At the time the novel was written and actually took place, cinema was a still very young art (only several years after the introduction of sound to film). It was no wonder, then, that it attracted attention and was difficult to describe other than in comparison with older arts that were more solidly grounded in people’s minds and imaginations. That is why, apart from comparing cinema to an “infernal machine” with its own sequence and tempo, the reader of Prater Violet can 94 also find similarities listed by the protagonists. For instance, we read that film is structurally similar to music: “The film is a symphony. Each movement is written in a certain key. There is a note which has to be chosen and struck immediately. It is characteristic of a whole. It commands the attention” (32). When Bergmann and “Isherwood” begin sightseeing around London and visit the

National Gallery, he discusses his approach to camera angles and the lighting of close-ups on the basis of Rembrandt’s paintings, who as we know from chapter one had an actual influence on the style of filmmaking, especially in the 1930s and 1940s.28

However, similarities between cinema and other arts are not only found between the techniques themselves, but also when the film industry is the object of comparison. When

“Isherwood” explores the film studio on his own, meets Lawrence, and then examines Annex G, it is already clear that the image of the film industry as the promised land is an illusion, particularly for novelists-turned-screenwriters. The environment is also bitterly commented on by Bergmann, who as an artist (and only then a director) is disillusioned with what the film studio offers him.

The reader finds these feelings in an ironic comparison to a Renaissance palace:

You see, the film studio of today is really like a palace of the sixteenth 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,

there are incompetent favorites. There are great men who are suddenly disgraced. There is

the most insane extravagance, and unexpected parsimony over a few pence. There is

enormous splendor, which is a sham; and also horrible squalor hidden behind the scenery.

There are vast schemes abandoned because of some caprice. There are secrets which

everybody knows and no one speaks of. There are even two or three honest advisers. These

28 See chapter one, page 20. 95

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. (56)

This complex and detailed comparison summarises the phenomena Hollywood novels try to describe. On the basis of the above passage, yet again we can see the image of a ruthless film producer as a god who keeps an eye on the budget and the audience’s preferences. Artistic attempts are quenched if they are not in line with the business. Simultaneously, a film studio is a place where people struggle to get into or remain in influential and powerful circles. It is a place where thousands or even millions (depending on the period) are spent on celebrities, decorations, and the crew, where people live a lavish lifestyle. The image we get from Bergmann’s comparison is an environment soaked in decadence where artistic values must be forgotten.

What is described and discussed by Isherwood and his companion in the first part of the novel is put into practice in the second part. This is when the narration changes its form and to a certain extent resembles a screenplay. As shooting starts, there is a change from the narrative to the present tense. In relation to what was said about Eco’s distinction,29 the introductory paragraph in the “shooting sequence” seems significant:

We started shooting the picture in the final week of January. I give this approximate date

because it is almost the last I shall be able to remember. What followed is so confused in

my memory, so transposed and foreshortened, that I can only describe it synthetically. My

recollection of it has no sequence. It is all of a piece. (Isherwood 67)

What can be inferred from the protagonist’s account is that the process of shooting (filmmaking) is a new experience to him, therefore it cannot be expressed by traditional literary means. Three important words describe Isherwood’s “coverage” from the set: synthesis, sequence, and piece.

29 See chapter one, page 42. 96

The use of the adverb “synthetically” in the quoted passage suggests artificiality, but also a certain fusion of elements, in this case discourses. In his book on Graham Greene, Andrzej Weseliński gives a definition of montage “which suggests a building action, working up from raw material, and which denotes then, a process of synthesis” (73). Thus, what the use of the adverb suggests is

Isherwood’s awareness of the blend of discourses he has to make in order to express his experiences of work on the set. Piece and sequence send us back to what Eco says about the language of film, namely that it is a “sequence of the displays of the present”. According to

“Isherwood”, the account “has no sequence” and “is all of a piece”. On the one hand, this may mean that the recollections from the location function as raw footage in need of editing. On the other hand, the lack of sequence and uniformity of the material may be simply characteristic of cinematic narrative.

The quoted passage functions as an introduction to the cinematic sequence in the novel. It is as though Isherwood ended his literary narration here with a colon. The tense of the following text changes from the narrative (past) to the present. The cinematic part opens with an extended description of the set:

Within the great barn-like sound-stage, with its high, bare, padded walls, big enough to

enclose an airship, there is neither day nor night: only irregular alternations of activity and

silence. Beneath a firmament of girders and catwalks, out of which the cowled lamps shine

coldly down, like planets, stands the inconsequent, half-dismantled architecture of the sets;

archways, sections of houses, wood and canvas hills, huge photographic backdrops, the

frontages of the streets; a kind of Pompei, but more desolate, more uncanny, because this

is, literally, a half-world, a limbo of mirror images, a town which has lost its third 97

dimension. Only the tangle of heavy power-cables are solid, and apt to trip as you cross the

floor. (67)

The passage has two aspects we can speak of, namely how Isherwood writes and what he writes about. The description of the set is an interesting portrait of a collage of illusions, a place where elements of fiction are brought together and stored in one place. It is interesting to note that a similar approach can be found in another Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust. According to

David Fine’s article, what we can find in West’s novel is a sort of architectural masquerade. West’s characters live behind facades (literally and metaphorically) that are “externalizations and spatial projections of the compulsive role-playing of the characters … Living and performing have become the same” (437). Isherwood seems to reach similar conclusions when he says that the world has lost its third dimension.

As mentioned before, the analysed passage is also important in terms of how Isherwood speaks about the film world. On the one hand, the description abounds in metaphors and similes typical of literary discourse. On the other hand, this detailed description of the set may be associated with an establishing shot and its function of introducing the surroundings and the place where the action will take place.30 The quoted description goes on for almost a page and gives further details of the set. The focus is moved to one of the sets (“In the corner, amidst the ruins, there is life. A single set is brilliantly illuminated”) only to move to the middle of it to present the

“source of life”:

in the middle of the set, patient and anonymous as tailors’ dummies, are the actor and

actress (…) Mr Watts, a thin bald man with gold rimmed spectacles, walks recklessly back

30 It is interesting to note that establishing shots were most frequently used during the classical era of filmmaking, which roughly dates to between 1910 and 1960. This would seem to prove that trends in cinema appealed to writers (using cinematic narrative) as well. 98

and forth, regarding them from various angles. A blue glass monocle hangs from a ribbon

around his neck …. (Isherwood 67)

Taking all of the description passages, the following can be observed: the scene begins with an establishing shot that gradually narrows the area of our interest, transitioning into a close-up that shows the character’s outfit.

Several pages later, Isherwood moves on to describe the shooting of one of the film scenes.

In its form, the passage resembles a screenplay. If not for the clearly stated beginning and ending of the shooting sequence, we would never know the difference between the narration in the script part and in the preceding and following parts:

At last we’re ready. The rehearsal begins. Toni is standing alone, looking pensively out of

the window. It is the day after her meeting with Rudolf. And now she has just received a

letter of love and farewell, cryptically worded, because he cannot tell her the whole truth:

that he is the Prince and that he has been summoned back to Borodania. So Toni is

heartbroken and bewildered. Her eyes are full of tears. (This part of the scene is covered

by a close-up.)

The door opens. Toni’s father comes in.

Father: “What’s the matter, Toni? Why aren’t you at Prater?”

Toni (inventing an excuse): “I – I haven’t any flowers.”

Father: “Did you sell all you had yesterday?”

Toni (with a far-away look in her eyes, which shows that her answer is symbolic): “I can’t

sell yesterday’s violets. They wither so quickly.” 99

She begins to sob, and runs out of the room, banging the door. Her father stands looking

after her, in blank surprise. Then he shrugs his shoulders and grimaces, as much as to say

that woman’s whims are beyond his understanding.

“Cut.” Bergmann rises quickly from his chair and goes over to Anita, (68–69)

One of the traceable elements differentiating the script part from the rest in this passage is the punctuation. The actors’ parts are introduced by a colon, whilst the characters’ utterances are commented on by the narrator.

Apart from the present tense, screenplays use elliptical sentences introduced in brackets.

Particular attention should be drawn to the bracketed comments. They function here as stage directions, but this is only one of the cinematic functions of the brackets. Prater Violet is one of several novels where Isherwood uses brackets for digressions,31 which may indicate problems with organising the text into a certain sequence. Bracketed text seems less relevant and put in a particular place by necessity, as though the text were a draft version. This observation leads us back to the passage from Goodbye… where Isherwood speaks about the need to fix and print what the camera has recorded.

As mentioned above, one of the characteristics of the Hollywood novel is the impression of two worlds blending. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the real from the cinematic and certain elements are interwoven. This can be observed when Isherwood uses stage directions to describe his characters’ actions or uses jargon to describe non-film-related situations. For instance, during his visit to the studio he meets production secretary Dorothy, who at a point “smiles the smile of a new secretary – bewildered still, but prepared for anything in the way of lunatic employers” (23). This smile seems to be taken out of a repository of facial expressions available

31 Brackets will also be used as a means of introducing another narrative level in A Single Man discussed in further chapters of this thesis. 100 for a screenwriter when creating a scene and giving some directions to the actress and the director during shooting. Another example can be found in a scene where “Isherwood” finishes a phone call in his family home and is questioned by his mother: “‘Was that Stephen?’ my mother asked.

She generally knew when I needed a cue line” (3). The way Isherwood describes the scene suggests an artificiality in his conversations with his mother that is theatrical (or even cinematic) in form.32

In this chapter we had a chance to learn how Isherwood’s work was shaped by the cinema and what his experiences were with the film industry. Screenplay language was heavily present and used in two ways: first, as Prater Violet was about filmmaking, the language was adjusted to this topic, giving it an additional dimension. The second was to show the distance of the author to the presented world, which was something new for Isherwood, as prior to his involvement with the industry he only knew cinema from the perspective of a filmgoer. Furthermore, the distance that can be felt in the literary style Isherwood is using can be interpreted as a criticism of the film industry. We must not forget Hollywood was an object of heavy critique by novelists-turned- screenwriters, who aired their frustration in the Hollywood novel genre. Although not as frustrated as others, Isherwood also found a way to comment on the hectic and brutal world of filmmaking by imitating film and using satirical elements in Prater Violet.

Further chapters of this thesis will continue exploring the film language in Isherwood’s prose to verify if it was used in contexts other than those related to cinema and combine those instances with the writer’s feeling of distance towards the reality around him. Whilst this chapter focused on literary styles that use camera movements and script techniques, the next chapter will shift its interest slightly and analyse the technique of editing and montage, knowing that

32 This tiny passage illustrates the relationship between Isherwood and his mother. The complex relationship between the two is explored further in All the Conspirators and Kathleen and Frank. 101

Isherwood’s novels feed heavily on the raw material from the diaries he kept and can actually be considered edited versions of Isherwood’s diaries. 102

CHAPTER THREE: ISHERWOOD’S RECURRENT LITERARY FORMS AS THE KEY

TO CINEMATIC AESTHETICS IN HIS WORKS

In the previous chapter we looked at Isherwood’s cinematic experiences and interests. We have seen how this topic can become a trigger for the use of a specific narration style resembling film aesthetics. However, these experiences are not the only factors influencing Isherwood’s cinematic narratives. This chapter will explore other instances where film language has been used by the author of The Berlin Diaries. First of all, we will examine the most extensive part of Isherwood’s writing, namely various forms of his autobiographical writings and how those texts have been reused and transformed throughout Isherwood’s literary career, looking for affinities between the transformation of diary entries into memoirs and film editing. The second part of the chapter will look for instances where Isherwood abandoned his namesake narrator and created a text loosely based on his own experiences, but very heavy in cinematic aesthetics with a particular focus on editing techniques.

3.1 The copious self-chronicler

In his review of Peter Parker’s biography of Isherwood, Hilton Als calls the writer a “copious self- chronicler” (“I, ME, MINE”), which is a very accurate description of a novelist who had a tendency to rewrite and reuse themes and plots from his previous texts. Isherwood’s work is a self-contained universe, with almost every text referring to the author’s life. Yet another telling impression of

Isherwood and his autobiographical work can be found in an introduction to an interview with the writer George Wickes:

As I came down the steps from the street I heard typing, and as I looked into the open front

door I could see Isherwood and his typewriter facing me across an old-fashioned circular 103

dining room table. When he rose to greet me, I realized that it was his image I had seen,

reflected in a wall-size mirror. The impression was rather disconcerting as he materialized

opposite his double, but altogether appropriate for a writer who has so often reflected

himself in his fiction. (Berg and Freeman, Conversations with Christopher Isherwood et

al. 25)

What seems to be interesting in Wickes’ anecdote is the mirror itself and the activity of reflecting oneself in fiction. As will be shown further in this chapter, Isherwood uses this motif to recall his memories.

The basic construction material for this world was Isherwood’s diaries, which served as raw footage for a number of texts that were almost always autobiographical in their nature. In one of the interviews, the writer highlights the importance of those as foundations of his other texts:

Q: Do you write from notes? Letters? Diaries?

A: Diaries, yes. I’ve always kept diaries extensively, and they give me a great sense of

security because I feel at least this part is factual. Having, however, built on these little

islands of fact, I think one goes back and reconstructs everything and interferes with

everything. But I do find it a great reassurance – the only kind of reassurance one can have

– to have some notes of an actual experience or an actual scene or people or whatever.

(Berg and Freeman, Conversations with Christopher Isherwood 5)

These “little islands of fact” are the images immortalised by the camera in Goodbye… – the people, places, and actions seen by the narrator that will need careful editing, printing, and fixing. The means of incorporating the diary entries into his novels often resembles film editing with several techniques such as cuts or flashforwards. Furthermore, the present tense – often used in 104

Isherwood’s diaries – generates associations with film dynamics (meant to show things happening now) and the aesthetics of a screenplay.

Speaking of the scripts themselves, Isherwood’s experience with these allowed him to fictionalise his experiences in the novels, as he admits in Christopher…:

I now realize that what seduced Christopher was his recent experience with the screenplay

of Little Friend. This had shown him that he could invent situations in areas of life which

were quite unknown to him; invent them without shame, although part of himself regarded

this newly discovered faculty as being a kind of betrayal. Henceforth, from time to time,

he would be unable to resist using it. It was so much fun. (193)

It can already be seen in the above fragment that although fiction is tempting, Isherwood remains predominantly an autobiography writer than a typical fiction writer.33 In the mentioned interview with Stephen Poss, Isherwood admits that he does not feel comfortable “writing out of personal experience” (6). As readers of Christopher…, we witness the writer’s literary development and can see that with each novel Isherwood tries to depart from fictitious account of events and prefers to concentrate on his life: “Like The Lost, Paul is Alone was an attempt by Christopher to pack a section of his past life into a plot structure … Finally, he realized that he simply wanted to describe his life as he had lived it. What inspired him, was the commentary he would make on it, not the melodrama he could make out of it” (219). The opportunity to comment on the past events arranged into themes is a part of the editing, printing, and fixing of what the camera eye had recorded. This is why the autobiographical character of Isherwood’s prose is important for the scope of this thesis: the way Isherwood arranges his diary memories into novels and memoirs might also resemble film

33 Further on in the novel, we can read more about Isherwood’s strategy of gathering information about the areas of life he did not have experience in himself: “Christopher, like many other writers, was shockingly ignorant of the objective world, except where it touched his own experience. When he had to hide his ignorance beneath a veneer, he simply consulted someone who could supply him with the information he needed” (198). 105 editing.

The scope of this chapter’s analysis is Isherwood’s diaries, two memoirs, and some novels that employ heavily the diary style. Isherwood’s diaries comprise three volumes: Diaries, Volume

One: 1939–1960, The Sixties, Diaries, Volume Two: 1960–1969, and Liberation, Diaries, Volume

Three: 1970–1983. The first focuses on Isherwood’s exploration of America, including the time he spent in Quaker society, his endeavours in the film industry, and also his initiation into and exploration of Vedanta. Fragments on his spiritual journey were then used in his memoir My

Guru…. The second focuses on the relationship with his life companion, Don Bachardy, but also events such as his return to London. The third covers his engagement in the Los Angeles art scene of the 1970s. Apart from his recollections on Vedantism, there are other two memoirs. The first of them, analysed in this chapter, is Christopher…, which captures Isherwood’s recollections on his homosexual life, but is simultaneously a very rich source of the author’s comments on the books he had written up to that point in time. The other memoir is called Lost Years: A Memoir, 1945–

1951 and is a text Isherwood did not plan on publishing, therefore its form may seem unpolished.

This makes it an even more interesting object of study, as it may better show his process of transforming his diaries into fiction. This chapter will also focus on one of his novels: Down

There…, a text composed of four autobiographical sections, some of which using the diary style, which will be a helpful illustration of Isherwood’s creative process.

3.2 Autobiographical forms: diary vs memoir

Before jumping into the very process of editing the raw material gathered in the diaries, it is important to understand the difference between the autobiographical genres in question, namely between a diary and a memoir. A clear distinction between the two is given in “Memoirs: From 106

Scribblings into High Art” by Leslie Schenk, who says that a memoir signifies “a more-or-less one-time attempt at summing up, whereas a diary is an ongoing recording of the events in its author’s lifetime, whether intimate or sociohistorical” (475). Georges Gusdorf, in “Conditions and

Limits of Autobiography”,34 gives a similar description of the notion of the autobiography itself:

“The author of an autobiography sets themselves the task of telling their own story. Their intention is to gather all of the scattered elements of their private life and combine them into a wholesome sketch” (28).35 Autobiography or memoir is then either a collection of memories, snapshots, and impressions that could have been stored in a diary or simply recollections that are put on paper for the first time. The common denominator here might not only be one’s life presented as a whole, but also a particular area, aspect, or perspective from which the author wants to present their story.

This is the case with Christopher… and My Guru…, which are collections of memories that focus on Isherwood’s homosexual life and Vedanta, respectively.

Knowing what has been said about the difference between a diary and a memoir, we can see that the former requires some kind of immediacy in describing events – its function is to capture the current moment and state of mind of the author. A memoir or autobiography, on the other hand, is heavily based on recollection and what this entails – a modification of the memories themselves.

In his study on the memoir, Thomas Couser mentions the importance of memory in creating a memoir: “calling a narrative about yourself a memoir usually signals that it is based primarily on memory, a notoriously unreliable and highly selective faculty. In turn, this creates the expectation that the narrative may be Impressionistic and subjective rather that authoritatively fact based” (19).

34 The title translation comes from the version of the text translated by James Olney in a collection edited by himself called Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton University Press 2014), yet due to the unavailability of the full text I am using a Polish version of the text and providing my own translation of the citations. 35 My own translation of the following: “Autor autobiografii stawia sobie za zadanie opowiedzenie swojej własnej historii. Chodzi mu o to, żeby zebrać rozproszone elementy swego życia osobistego i złożyć je w całościowy zarys.” 107

Isherwood’s memoirs are either built on the basis of his diary entries or his recollections. This does not mean, however, that they lack the feeling of subjective or Impressionistic narrative, as the gap between the diary excerpts is filled in by the author’s comments, interpretations, and alterations of the “facts” written in his notebook years before.

3.3 Diaries

From his interview with Stephen Poss, we have already learned that diaries were very important for Isherwood’s writing. A complementary explanation to this statement can be found in

Christopher…, where “Christopher” discovers the advantages of documenting memories: “During his years in Germany, Christopher kept a diary. As he became aware that he would one day write stories about the people he knew there, his diary entries got longer. They later supplied him with most of the material which is used to create period atmosphere in Mr Norris and Goodbye to

Berlin” (40). From this excerpt it can be seen that throughout his literary career Isherwood realised the great potential of the diary as material for his novels. His notes of people he had met and places he had visited became a draft of his future writing. In Isherwood’s biography by Parker, we can find an interesting observation that the diaries also serve as a space where the writer rehearses the plots of his novels.36 This approach to writing is visible when Isherwood writes about the poetry of one of his best friends, W. H. Auden: “From Christopher’s point of view, Wystan’s poems were like rabbits he produced from a hat; they couldn’t be talked about before they appeared”

(Christopher… 48). According to the quotation, contrary to prose, poetry seems to be recording reality through a filter that allows for an immediate ultimate form of representation. Prose, in comparison, requires thorough consideration, editing, and rewriting. Undoubtedly, Isherwood’s

36 This exercise is written in the present tense and resembles a synopsis followed by a series of questions which are supposed to clarify the motivations of the characters. Parker quotes the entire section (605). 108 diaries have this primary, raw form, which requires processing. Taking into consideration the famous quotation about the camera, it could be concluded that Isherwood’s credo from Goodbye… refers predominantly to his diaries and not exactly his novels.37 This, however, will not only be the case, as shown later in this chapter.

Yet another example showing how prevalent the diary aesthetics are in Isherwood’s writing can be found in Christopher… where we read a note from his diary about an idea for a novel that is… a diary: “Idea for a novel or a story: a diary which begins very literary, chatty, amusing. In the middle, the diarist makes an admission which changes the whole significance of what he has been describing” (143). This excerpt brings us back to Isherwood’s aforementioned aim of writing mostly about his life and as faithfully to reality as possible. Undoubtedly, the form of a diary gives appropriate opportunities to achieve this goal.

The fact that Isherwood gives so much importance to his diaries might be explained by his priorities in writing, which he mentions in one of his lectures. “I have to confess that I don’t think primarily of form. What I’m concerned in doing is trying to communicate my experience of life

… when we get to Finnegans Wake I feel that the form, to put it very mildly, becomes a great deal more important than the experience” (Isherwood on Writing 147). Strangely enough, even if

Isherwood himself does not consider form a priority in writing, he is praised by scholars, such as

Katherine Bucknell, for the perfection of his form. Bucknell claims that in his diaries there is no place for a randomly chosen word or badly constructed sentence:

In his diaries, though, language rules over inchoate fears, over the chaos of experience,

over the passage of time. Page upon page reflect the clarity of his mind, his absolute

37 Although one has to remember that the “raw” diary style is incorporated in the novels as well. Examples can be found in Prater Violet when the protagonist describes his experiences on the film set, which have been described in chapter two of this thesis). 109

mastery of syntax, his easily ranging, precise diction, his effortless power of description,

his gaiety, his delight in the ridiculous. As his curling line of ink stretches from inches into

yards, and, probably miles over a million words piled up, but only a few words are ever

altered. There are hardly any mistakes of any kind. The diaries are an endless transcript of

life – without blot, without error, without mistreatment, without verbal crime. The

recordkeeper is perfectly trained, alert, even fastidious. (Diaries 1939-1960 IX)

In Bucknell’s presentation of Isherwood’s diaries as flawless registration of reality, two things are striking if we think about the camera theme. The first is the reference to the diaries as a transcript

– so, once again an activity of recording something without any selection, but as is. The second is the mastery and precision of language, which might also be associated with the camera lens that captures the recorded object with precision and without mistakes. It is the editing (or in other words that may be suitable here, we could say the process of selection) itself which alters and distorts the recorded reality. And this is what happens in the process of creating memoirs and novels out of diary materials.

Isherwood’s priority in communicating the experience of life over form might seem to be in conflict with the assumption that his style involves editing the material he recorded in his diaries and which is then tailored into an appropriate literary form (a novel in this case). However, what has to be remembered here is that even if the diaries showed a sign of verbal perfection, they were still treated as raw material that could be used for novel writing. They were ideas to be developed and fictionalised.

110

3.4 Editing

3.4.1 In memoirs

Looking more closely at the diary entries incorporated in Isherwood’s prose, we will find numerous examples of the technique described above, which resembles the cinematic style. This involves editing diary entries as if they were to be incorporated into a film. Traces of such a strategy can be found in Prater Violet, where Isherwood shifts the narrative style to a diary form when he starts writing about his experience during the film shoot. Similar techniques are also used in Down There…, where two novel sections introduce the reader to the story through a description resembling an establishing shot. In the first of those, entitled “Ambrose”, we are presented with the present-tense description of a journey:

FIVE YEARS HAVE gone by – this is May 1933 – and here I am, starting out another

journey. I am on a train going south from Berlin toward the Czechoslovakian frontier.

Opposite me sits Waldemar.

What am I doing here? What is he?

I suppose I could answer “escaping from the Nazis”. Waldemar would back me up on this,

because he loves melodramatic explanations. And I shall probably describe this journey as

though it were an escape and dangerous, one day when I am far from here and among

people who are ill-formed enough to be impressed. But, this morning, I am well aware that

that kind of posing would be heartless and childish. (59)

We can see a combination of literary and cinematic techniques here – the chapter starts with a flashforward, used both in literature and cinema, linking the current section to the previous one.

Then we experience the establishing shot itself: a description of two characters on a train with a strong emphasis on the here and now. The narrator’s reflections on the unreliability of recollections 111 when he refers to the future description of the event make the passage metatextual. Thus, we have a chapter starting with a diary-like entry, suggesting the immediacy of events but glued to the rest of the story by a flashforward.

The following chapter, “Waldemar”, uses the diary style heavily. It starts with a very straightforward diary entry that in its form resembles a screenplay:

ON A BOAT this time.

Late in August 1938; a cross-Channel steamer, just coming into Dover harbor.

How tiny it always seems! No more than a cranny in the old cheese cliffs; a drab doll town

with the stubborn little castle standing guard above it, in a light summer drizzle. Oh, the

staring, unblinking, uncompromising familiarity of it all! The loud, rude squawking of the

gulls! How compactly the English sit, confronting their visitors: here we are, take us or

leave us – this is where you’ll do things our way, not yours. Byron saw the last of them

here. So did Wilde. (145)

The abrupt “on a boat this time” very much suggests a diary entry but is immediately followed by a sentence we would most likely find in a screenplay. “Isherwood” then turns to observing, but with a much more literary touch than a cinematic one, commenting on the view of the island approaching as the ship advances. As his speech on the English finishes, there is a perspective change – the reader stops seeing the world through the character’s eyes and observes the narrator himself in a close-up:

Take a good look at me standing there. Do I seem defeated, downcast, dismal? Anxious –

yes. Those crow’s feet at the corners of my eyes, I got them from constant, anxious

squinting ahead, like a sea captain in a fog. The two deeply grooved brackets in my cheeks

have been dug by nervous grimaces, pursings of the lips. But my eyes are bright, my face 112

is still youthfully lean, and a stranger would be surprised to hear that I shall be thirty-four

at the end of this month. (146)

This change of perspective on the one hand may be associated with another shot, a change of camera angle, but on the other it also gives an impression of “Isherwood” already looking at himself from the perspective of time. “Isherwood” is simultaneously a first-person narrator, but also looking at himself with us, the audience. The present tense, diary-like scene is incorporated into the story by the narrator’s reflections on what he sees.

The introductions to both “Ambrose” and “Waldemar” show how Isherwood used cinematic techniques, including a combination of shots, flashforwards, and script-like present tense narrative, to start a new plot within a novel whilst simultaneously guaranteeing continuity to the text.

The other two sections of Down There… show other visual methods Isherwood uses in his texts to introduce his recollections. In “Mr Lancaster” and “Paul”, the writer employs the metaphor of a mirror,38 which is commonly used imagery when talking about autobiographers:

Very very occasionally in the course of life – goodness knows how or why – a mirror will

seem to catch your image and hold it like a camera. Years later, you have only to think of

that mirror in order to see yourself just as you appeared in it then. You can even recall the

feelings you had as you were looking into it. (21)

The use of the mirror metaphor may have two meanings – first of all, Isherwood recalls his memories and builds a story based on them, once again creating autobiographical text. As mentioned above, the comparison of an autobiography to a mirror is not uncommon amongst biography theorists. For example, Georges Gusdorf refers to the Lacanian notion of the mirror

38 Interestingly, the first edition of Down There… published by Methuen (1962) has a cover focusing on the mirror theme in the novel. We can see Isherwood looking at his younger self in a mirror. 113 reflection as a stage of development in every human:

A primitive man in a first encounter with his reflection in a mirror is dismayed, just as one

would be by one’s photo or a film. A child raised in a civilized society will have enough

time to tame any illusions given by a convincing image from the mirror. However, even a

mature man or a woman, if they think about it for a while, will find restlessness and a

narcissistic fascination outside of this confrontation. The first sound from a tape recording

or a film image raise the same restlessness in our personalities. The autobiographer is able

to overcome this feeling by giving themselves to it; beyond all of these images they search

for the destiny of their being. Let us here recall Rembrandt, who was fascinated by

Venetian glass and endlessly creating self-portraits, similarly to Van Gogh later, which

were testimonies of themselves and the signs of the new vibrant anxiety of modern man

stubbornly striving to explain the mystery of one’s own self.39 (25)

Down There… shows the reader Isherwood’s multiple reflections from a different stage of his life

– just as Rembrandt’s or Van Gogh’s self-portraits do. What makes Isherwood different from the painters and their attempts to capture themselves at a particular stage of life is that the writer combines his snapshots and creates a new entity out of them. This resonates with David Garret

Izzo’s observation of the mirror theme in Isherwood’s writing:

39 My own translation of the following: “Człowiek prymitywny w pierwszym zetknięciu jest przerażony odbiciem w lustrze, podobnie jak obrazem fotograficznym czy filmowym. Dziecko wychowane w społeczeństwie cywilizowanym ma dostatecznie dużo czasu, aby oswoić się z warstwą pozorów, jaką podsuwa mu przekonujący obraz z lustra. Nawet jednak człowiek dorosły, mężczyzna czy kobieta, jeśli się nad tym trochę zastanowi, poza tą konfrontacją z sobą odnajduje niepokój i fascynację Narcyza. Pierwszy dźwięk z magnetofonu czy ożywiony obraz filmowy budzą w naszej osobowości to samo zaniepokojenie. Autor autobiografii przezwycięża ten niepokój, poddając mu się; ponad wszystkimi tymi obrazami poszukuje uporczywie przeznaczenia swojego bytu. Wspomnijmy o Rembrandcie, zafascynowanym lustrem weneckim i tworzącym bez końca autoportrety - jak później van Gogh - te świadectwa o sobie samym i znaki nowego żywego niepokoju człowieka współczesnego, z uporem dążącego do wyjaśnienia tajemnicy swojej własnej osobowości.” 114

Isherwood began looking into life and its constituents as a mirror that he not only looked

into but in which he saw his past lives looking at him. These past lives did so in a

multiplicity of times, places and disguises that were becoming integrated into a fluid

tapestry from which he could observe certain details, but not separately. Now the details

comprising the bigger picture of his life were all of a piece, without “before” or “after” but

continuous and contiguous. (42)

The adjectives used by Izzo, namely “continuous” and “contiguous”, lead to yet another important comparison Gusdorf made in his study of autobiography. According to Gusdorf, the difference between a picture and an autobiography is the following: whilst a painting presents the present, the autobiography focuses on depicting continuity and lasting. Gusdorf highlights that this is not done through adding subsequent pictures to existing ones, but rather arranging all of the available material into a sort of “film” that is created according to a predefined script. This indicates the creation of a new object out of existing material, because a diary and an autobiography have different purposes: whilst a diary is focused on the immediate registration of events, emotions, and impressions, an autobiography looks at those elements from a distance and tries to use them as construction elements that can be used to establish the writer’s identity over time (28). An important comparison in Gusdorf’s thoughts on autobiography is the affinity with film, which consists of particular scenes, and the writer as a film editor putting all of those scenes together.

Yet again we see that autobiography has a common denominator, a binding element, which here is metaphorically referred to as a script – the skeleton of the whole story. This binding element is the crucial characteristic of autobiography, as it underlines the fact that seemingly unrelated events now become unified in one entity. The continuity that autobiography offers simultaneously gives the gathered recollections a new, broader meaning. In his analysis of the notion, Gusdorf 115 continues the metaphor of the mirror in Flemish and Dutch painting, where the image in the mirror is more than just a reflection. He refers to the fact that in some of those paintings which present interiors, a recurring theme could be found. A mirror can be seen on the wall that not only reflects the room, but also adds a new perspective to the reflection. The similarity Gusdorf sees between this technique and autobiography is that indeed it is not only a simple recollection of the past, but an activity of “forming oneself in one’s own image”,40 giving a new meaning to past events and experiences (39). In other words, we could say that autobiography is an effort to understand oneself by looking at one’s life from new perspectives and arranging moments into specific themes that define who we have become. Both memoirs – Christopher… and My Guru… – show visible traces of memory modification, rewriting, and adaptations to new contexts. That, however, refers not only to the so-called raw material in the form of Isherwood’s diaries, but also his novels and other forms he created. Every piece of writing serves Isherwood as potential material for a new literary construct: his memoirs. This, in conclusion, leads to his notion of recycling what he has already written, making his later texts specifically intertextual and metatextual. By quoting his own work, he simultaneously comments on their construction.

The importance of the mirror metaphor is twofold. Besides being a part of the autobiography discourse, it also introduces a strong visual context to Isherwood’s prose, as in order to describe what is seen in the mirror, the author will use a narrative style that resembles film

40 My own translation and paraphrasing of the following: “Autobiografia jest pewnym momentem życia, które opowiada; stara się wydobyć sens tego życia, sama jednak jest pewnym sensem w tym życiu. Część całości chce odzwierciedlać całość, ale dorzuca coś do tej całości, której stanowi jedynie moment. Niektóre obrazy flamandzkie lub holenderskie, przedstawiające wnętrza, ukazują na ścianie małe lustro, w którym ten sam obraz odbija się, ale obraz w lustrze nie powtarza jedynie sceny, lecz dodaje jej jak gdyby nowy wymiar, niby perspektywę zbieżną. Podobnie autobiografia nie jest prostym streszczeniem przeszłości; jest przedsięwzięciem - i dramatem - człowieka, który usiłuje w pewnym momencie swojego życia uformować się na swoje własne podobieństwo.” 116 aesthetics.41 These reflections are a recollection from a different period in Isherwood’s life. The first association that comes to mind with such a technique is that of snapshots. However, as the recalled scene develops, we see that it is more dynamic than just a single picture. For example, the

“mirror” quotation from Down There… is an introduction to a chain of events that are described by the narrator as a cinematic sequence abounding in close-up-like descriptions and the present tense (21–23). Yet again, this style overlaps with the feeling of being a stranger and being detached:

I see my twenty-three-year-old face regarding me with large, reproachful eyes, from

beneath a cowlick of streaky blonde hair. A thin, strained face, so touchingly pretty that it

might have been photographed and blown up big for a poster appealing on behalf of the

world’s young: “The old hate us because we’re so cute. Won’t you help?”

And now I experience what that face is experiencing – the sense which the young so

constantly have of being deserted. (21)

The detachment here is twofold: first, we see the distance between the first-person narrator and the recollection of himself – this is a distance in time. Secondly, we have a direct statement of the protagonist being “deserted”, which on the one hand is more literal, as the young “Isherwood” feels abandoned by his companion, Mr Lancaster. On the other hand, this situation puts the

41 A similar observation is made by Victor Marsh, who referring to Gore Vidal’s reading of Isherwood’s work, considers the use of mirrors as cinematic: “We see this device at work on multiple levels in ‘Mr Lancaster’, from Down there on a visit (1962b) in which he juggles with points of view of himself as narrator and protagonist at different points in time. The narrative draws on experiences Isherwood had decades previously (he dates it as 1928, when he was twenty - three years old ) when he had holidayed with an older bachelor with distant ties to his family (a cousin of his mother), who invited young Christopher to visit him in ‘a North German Harbour city’. Writing about himself in retrospect produces a distance that allows for ironic detachment from his former, callow self and the creative licence to re - work events and the characters. However, it also acknowledges a journey from one subject position to another. Again, the effect is cinematic.” (Marsh 110)

117 protagonist in an awkward relationship with his surroundings:

I am in mortal dread of being challenged by the manager of the restaurant or by one of the

various waiters who are hanging around the room … Fixing my eyes upon my reflection

in the mirror, I try to exclude these men utterly from my consciousness, to eradicate every

vestige of a possible telepathic bond between us. (22)

Furthermore, recollecting this scene, “Isherwood” refers to the common state of “the young being deserted”, which might be related to the rebellious character of the young in general.

The “mirror” metaphor directly returns in the last episode of recollection in the novel when we read about Isherwood’s Hollywood years. Yet again, the narrative style is similar to the previously described scene where the present tense is used. And again the reader finds Isherwood in a state of detachment, this time even scorn, towards the film industry he works in and the people he sees around him:

Another look into the mirror – my own face dimly reflected through the fashionable

twilight of a Beverly Hills restaurant, confronting three people on a banquette with their

backs to the glass. This is the autumn of 1940. We are just getting ready to start lunch. Six

thousand miles away is the war. One step outside is the flawless blue sky and the California

sun, which will hardly lose its warmth till Christmas. Here inside is richly dark leather with

gleams of brasswork; an ambience of movie agents, mulled contracts and unhungry midday

greed … Also, I am sulking because I don’t want to have lunch with any of these people.

(203)

Similarly to the opening scene in “Waldemar”, “Paul” starts with an abrupt, script-like elliptical sentence followed by a close-up on Isherwood’s face and then a deep focus on the Beverly Hills restaurant. Not only is this recollection vivid because of the images presented, but because of the 118 protagonist’s reluctance to participate in the event – we see a similar detachment in the first

“mirror” quotation. Adding to this is the fact that both of these scenes take place in a restaurant and are part of respectively the first and the last sections of the novel, we can see a narrative frame inserted into this title.

Isherwood’s memoirs are, however, not the only works where the mirror motif is used. The theme also appears in his novels A Single Man and The World…. Similarly to the memoirs, the mirror here functions as a means of presenting the protagonists from different moments in their lives. For instance, George from A Single Man stares at the mirror in the morning, reminiscing about his life:

Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its faces within its face – the

face of the child. The boy, the young man, the not-so-young man – all present still,

preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this

living creature is – Look at us – we have died – what is there to be afraid of? (2)

Whilst Down There… uses the motif of the mirror as a trigger for recollection, where each glimpse at the looking glass introduces a new recollection or a story, in A Single Man the mirror reflections happen simultaneously. Interestingly, though, that does not make the two novels that distinct in this perspective. In his compendium on Isherwood, Christopher Isherwood Encyclopedia, David

Garret Izzo mentions that despite being significantly different stylistically, both novels are similar thematically. Izzo’s research shows that in fact A Single Man starts where Down There… has finished, which is with the death of a beloved partner. Furthermore, the time span of the former text is 24 years, whilst the latter is 24 hours, which indicates a certain consistency and continuity in Isherwood’s writing. Taking those two assumptions into consideration, and reading the novel with Vedantic philosophy, Izzo highlights the fact that for Isherwood the difference of a time span 119 of 24 hours (A Single Man) and 24 years (Down There…) has no metaphysical importance: “the method is to observe the four past Isherwoods … George’s reverse process turns the microcosm of his one day into a macrocosm of all his days” (154).

Interestingly, in the above-quoted scene from A Single Man we read about “it” looking in the mirror – the pronoun refers here to George, who has not acknowledged his identity yet. Seeing just this passage from the novel, one might get the impression of a literal realisation of the Lacanian mirror stage. According to Lacan, in the mirror stage the child is finally able to perceive themselves as one entity, understanding that what was once perceived as separate parts is a single entity. In this way, it is the activity of integrating those images into one piece. Simultaneously, it separates its inner image from the outer image (i.e., that in the mirror) discovering oneself as somebody else, the other amongst others. The consequence of passing through the mirror stage is a shift from the realm of the Imaginary to the realm of the Symbolic, the domain of language (qtd. in Burzyńska and Markowski 64). Isherwood’s “it”, similarly to a child realising that their until-then unperceived body constitutes a separate entity, seems to be performing the very same exercise every morning.

Contrary to the child, though, this entity is built out of layers of experience, a variety of life stages coming back to the protagonist as he stares into the mirror. This repeated activity seems to be an impossible back and forth voyage between the Imaginary and the Symbolic.42

The use of the mirror in A Single Man provides an opportunity to generate cinematic-like descriptions, such as close-ups. Just after the passage quoted above, the reader observes George’s face, part by part: “harassed stare, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its toxing, coarsened nose, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat

42 In the novel we also find scenes where the protagonist returns from the formed “George character” into “it”. In certain passages discussed in chapter four, we will see how this return is manifested by reducing George into separate body parts again, as if they were independent entities with lives of their own. 120 hanging limp in tiny wrinkled folds” (2). A similar visual solution is offered in The World…, where a mirror reflection introduces the looks of the main character. The description is very visual, going into great detail about the foreground and the background, which gives the impression of a painting hanging on the wall.

A mirror on the opposite wall showed me how I appeared to the outside world: a tall blond

youngish-oldish man with a weakly good-looking, anxious face and dark, over-expressive

eyes, standing in a corner between a cobbler’s table and a fake spinning-wheel, holding a

highball glass in my hand. A miniature brass ship with a fern growing out of it was fastened

to the wall beside my cheek. I looked as if I were trying to melt into the scenery and become

invisible, like a giraffe standing motionless among sunlit leaves. (61–62)

The mirror here not only introduces highly visual language, but also allows the first-person narrator a distanced perspective of himself. Simultaneously, the passage suggests the protagonist somehow does not fit in the whole picture, which relates to a common theme of many of Isherwood’s protagonists, namely being “the other”, an alienated individual who does not fully belong to the community he writes about.

In A Single Man and The World…, the theme of the mirror is used to introduce visual language but does not invoke extensive flashbacks. Down There… uses the mirror for this very purpose. However, there are also texts where the mirror “trigger” is not used, but there is a cinematic trait present in the way Isherwood’s previous writings are included in the newly constructed texts. The incorporation of diary entries or diary-like passages is widely used by

Isherwood in the two previously mentioned memoirs – My Guru… and Christopher…. In comparison to Down There…, these two titles are not fiction, therefore the diary alterations have a different meaning and lead us towards the concept of rewriting one’s life and giving it new 121 significance. Furthermore, as some of the texts show, rewriting or editing impacts not only the

“raw” diaries, but also Isherwood’s previous novels. We can distinguish two editing methods in these texts. In the first, just as though he were putting together a jigsaw puzzle, Isherwood rearranges the material taken from his diaries, adding a brief commentary here and there for the purpose of consistency. This happens in My Guru…, where Isherwood tells us of Swami

Prabhavananda, his spiritual guide and supervisor in Vedanta. A substantial part of this non-fiction text is a selection of diary passages that are enhanced by Isherwood’s comments. The writer looks back at his diary entries and complements them with thoughts and feelings that were not recorded previously, often shedding new light on his memories. This is in line with what Gusdorf said about the autobiographical creation process, namely that it is about giving meaning to bits and pieces of an author’s life. In My Guru…, some whole chapters consist of Isherwood’s diary excerpts edited and arranged in a way to show his spiritual situation at a particular time. Therefore, in a piece of work such as this, Isherwood’s role is not writing per se, but rather editing the text and arranging already existent components. An example can be found when Isherwood recollects a meeting with the Swami:

I felt terribly awkward – like a rich, overdressed woman, in the plumes and bracelets of

my vanity. Everything I said sounded artificial and false. I started acting a little scene,

trying to appear sympathetic. I told him I wasn’t sure I could do these meditations and lead

the life I am leading. He answered, “You must be like the lotus on the pond. The lotus leaf

is never wet.” (…)

In this account, there is one enormously important omission.

My vague reference to “the life I am leading” seems to refer merely to a worldly

life in the conventional sense; my efforts to get employment and money. I must have told 122

the Swami about these, too, thus prompting him to advise me to be like the lotus leaf –

which is a standard Hindu precept. But the question I had actually come to ask him was a

far more serious one. If his answer was unsatisfactory to me, there would be no point in

our ever seeing each other again. (20)

The italics and normal text serve to differentiate between the diary excerpts and Isherwood’s commentary – we can clearly see how the initial account is complemented by recollections not present in the diaries. The use of expressions such as “seems” and “must have” suggest an analysis and interpretation of what has been written in Isherwood’s journals.

A similar situation appears in Down There…, where one part of the novel describing

Isherwood’s stay on St Nicholas island in Greece is incorporated into the text from Isherwood’s diaries, which the author confirms in Christopher… (142). This memoir also gives us another instance of the mixing of diary entries and main text, where journal recollections complement the main text to give it more authenticity and diversity. Such juxtapositions display the cinematic effect of editing.

At this point, Hans and Waldemar appeared with a ham they had just unpacked. It had got

wet and was saltier than hams usually are. I didn’t care. We cut slices off it and stuffed

them into our mouths, suddenly and fiercely hungry. I don’t remember anything more about

the evening.

[From my diary: the entries have no dates.]

Christ, I have a hang-over! Not that that’s new. I always have a hang-over in the

mornings here. I am writing this on one of the packing cases in front of the huts and the

sun is shining down with an appalling vertical intensity. (Isherwood 92–93) 123

Starting a new paragraph, the diary entry initially seems not to fit into the narrative mode

Isherwood has been using in this section of the novel, but in fact it is a different perspective on what he was describing in the previous section. The hangover might be the answer to “what was happening the other night” that the protagonist does not remember anymore. We do have, then, the topic of a forgotten night used for continuity purposes, which often happens in movies when an object or a situation leads to another scene which opens with a similar object or a situation.

Whilst the strategy described above is mostly based on the rearrangement of components and gluing them together with a commentary, the other is more complex as it involves rewriting and adding metatextual commentaries. That is, Isherwood reveals to the reader which of his friends served as prototypes for his characters. He unveils the actual names of the people he wrote about and who previously appeared under a pseudonym in his prose. This approach is most visible in

Christopher…, which contains references to such novels as The Berlin Novels (Goodbye…, Mr

Norris…), Lions and Shadows, Prater Violet, Down There…, and The Memorial. However, one must not rule out such texts as My Guru… as well as the earlier Lions and Shadows. An example description taken from Christopher… refers to Goodbye…: “In Goodbye to Berlin, the name of the street is given as the Wassertorstrasse, the Water Gate Street, because Christopher thought it sounded more romantic” (50).

Writing from the perspective of a much more mature author, Isherwood treats his earlier novels with a significant dose of distance towards the “Isherwood” of the olden days, regardless of whether this is just the author’s alter ego or simply his younger self. As he himself states in an interview with Stephen Poss, “More and more, writing is appearing to me as a kind of self-analysis, a finding-out something about myself and about the past, and about what life is like, as far as I’m concerned” (Berg and Freeman, Conversations with Christopher Isherwood 5). Again, 124

Christopher… is a novel where this is most clearly visible. One can find numerous instances of

Isherwood questioning what he has written in his other texts and claiming that these are actually either incomplete and not fully sincere or that they do not go along with his current beliefs. In other words, the author of Christopher… implies that his current version of the text is more valid and important than what was written by the author of Goodbye… which was an earlier novel.43 What is more, Isherwood often has a strong preconception that his current recollection of the past is more valid than his perception written closer to the time the actual event took place. Thus, the reader here experiences Isherwood’s reckoning with himself from the past, summarising his achievements and considering his life decisions:

I don’t blame Christopher the amateur observer for this lack of foresight. I do condemn

Christopher the novelist for not having taken a psychological interest, long before this, in

the members of the Nazi high command. Even as late as 1932 it would have been possible

for him to meet them personally … What inhibited him? His principles? His inertia?

Neither is an excuse. (124)

This stylistic approach of self-scrutiny, which appears mostly in Christopher… might be explained by the very concept of the novel. If we consider the title of the book, it gives the impression of a

43 From the perspective of Christopher…, which reflects upon many of Isherwood’s texts, complementing and very often questioning what was written in them, we might get the impression that the narrator in those previous texts is unreliable. This observation is also recalled by Victor Marsh who refers to Rose Kamel’s statement that: “[h]is [Isherwood’s] autobiographies suggest that we read him as a fictional character described by somewhat unreliable narrator in turn created by an implied omniscient author who can erase and cancel out his narrator at will” (qtd. in Marsh 110). Katherine Bucknell refers to this topic in terms of semi-autobiographical writing. She mentions that the impression might be coming from the camera label given to Isherwood’s writing, which made it passive, thoughtless recording and as a result led to misconceptions of the presented reality as true and objective. Bucknell claims that “in Isherwood’s various works, he changed his materials at different times … depending on what he was writing about … Isherwood as a writer was incapable of being ‘passive’, of ‘not thinking’ and he knew full well that the mere act of recording his experience … changed it. Such a literary device makes an implied philosophical statement: that it is not possible for a writer to be entirely objective. But Isherwood does not offer readers an ‘unreliable’ narrator. He simply offers the opportunity for readers to form their own opinion of the precise way in which the narrator’s point of view may be intervening between reader and ‘reality’. He puts himself at the edge of a picture to remind us that he is filtering reality, not only recording it” (Berg and Freeman, The Isherwood Century 14). 125 scientific study on some kind of species, community, or culture; a distanced, unemotional analysis of someone’s life. A similar observation might be found in the introduction to Liberation, Diaries,

Volume Three where Katherine Bucknell writes about Isherwood’s reason for keeping diaries: “he wanted to make a record of the whole human creature in context, in its natural habitat, so that he could consider and analyse its habits and commitments, its rituals and choices” (Liberation,

Diaries, Volume Three: 1970–1983 XV). The idea of the scientific character of the writing is confirmed in Isherwood’s previously quoted interpretation of his texts as self-analysis. Isherwood speaks of himself in the past in the third person singular and refers to himself as “Christopher”, which should not come as a surprise knowing his other books. However, in Christopher… the narrative solution again draws the reader’s attention, as this time “Christopher” seems to be much closer to the actual author than the semi-fictitious literary constructs from Isherwood’s previous works. On the other hand, the “Christopher” from Christopher… was written with first-person narration. Thus, the title in question gives us two “Christopher” authors: the one from the past described in the book, and the first-person narrator who is the author of the memories described in the novel. Going a bit further and analysing the title of the other book discussed here, we can see a similar approach. My Guru… contains information about three people: Isherwood, the author of his guru’s “biography” (represented by the word “My”), his spiritual guide (“Guru”), and

Isherwood from the past (“His Disciple”). We see that even in the title Isherwood draws a thick line between himself now (i.e., at the time of writing the book) and then. Furthermore, in

Christopher… not only does Isherwood quote himself, but he also creates an image of “Isherwood” at a particular stage of his life by using accounts of his friends and fellow writers. For instance, in the novel in question we may find excerpts from Stephen Spender’s autobiography, World within

World, letters between Isherwood and Spender, and Isherwood’s correspondence with W. H. 126

Auden. In the below excerpt, we can see how Isherwood attempts to retrieve memories from his friend’s book and how he simultaneously contrasts this image with his own recollection of himself:

According to World within World, Christopher had: a neatness of the cuffs emphasized by

the way in which he often held his hands extended, slightly apart from his body.

(I myself think that Christopher had unconsciously copied this from the pose of a fighter

in a Western movie who is just about to draw his guns.)44 (56)

The recollection that Isherwood shares with the reader is more of an assumption, a hypothesis made about his own actions and attitudes from the past, yet again confirming the unreliability and remoteness of recollections in comparison with diary entries. As we can see in the passage above, we have Isherwood shown in the lens of Stephen Spender, which is contrasted with Isherwood’s own perception of the image. These “interpretations” once again bring us back to the concept of a scientific or rather literary study, when, on the basis of the given data, some assumptions are made and arguments are stated. This applies not only to Isherwood’s life in the form of diaries, but also his fiction. The reader of Christopher… is bound to encounter passages where Isherwood attempts to interpret his own novels and link the concepts described in the diaries to works that have already been published. For example:

But here “Isherwood” is playing to the gallery. The novel he seems to be referring to, The

Memorial, is described with willful inaccuracy – none of its characters are unhappy for

“ingenious” reasons, they are bereaved and lonely and in need of love, as people are often

on any social level. “Isherwood”, merely because he has moved to Simeonstrasse, feels

that he has broken with his bourgeois past. Anything written about the upper class is simply

44 Additionally, it is worth noting here Isherwood’s image of himself as a product of cinematic imagery, as his perception is based on a movie cliché (which is exactly what Fowles was speaking of in his realisation about how cinema has shaped our imagination). This is evidence that Isherwood’s writing was influenced by cinema. 127

not worth reading, he implies. (53)

It seems the concepts Isherwood once had whilst writing his novels disappeared somewhere, are no longer transparent and clear, and require assumptions and interpretations. Isherwood from the past is almost as remote to Isherwood writing Christopher… as another novelist whose work needs to be evaluated.

The texts analysed in this section have shown Isherwood’s heavy dependence on diaries, which contributed to his characteristic cinematic style, but more importantly have drawn us to another visible trait of the writer’s style. Whether in his fiction or autobiographical texts, we encounter a certain amount of distance and detachment. This is seen in Isherwood’s reserve towards his characters and recollections, but also in the protagonist’s feelings and attitudes towards the surrounding reality. This alienating character will find its representation in the narrative style of Isherwood’s novels, which is the topic of the following chapter.

3.4.2 In novels

Memoirs represent one side of the cinematic character of Isherwood’s writing. Yet another is to be found in his novels, and one in particular: A Single Man (1964), Isherwood’s most critically acclaimed novel. Even though the protagonist does not carry Isherwood’s name, as in the case of many other novels of his, the text itself is highly autobiographical. As Isherwood claims himself,

“[It] is fundamentally about me, at my present age, living right here in the Canyon, but under rather different circumstances…. It isn’t in the first person!” (qtd. in Finney 249). The text, which is a study of “middle age loneliness” (Finney 248), was initially supposed to be a portrait of a woman

(who still remains in the novel in the character of Charlotte) and, as Finney suggests, may have been influenced slightly by a difficult situation between Isherwood and his life partner, Don 128

Bachardy, who due to his thriving career was frequently absent in the year the novel was written.

Perhaps it is because the text is about Isherwood, but “under different circumstances”, that it differs significantly from Isherwood’s other writings from a formal perspective. Techniques that were only occasional occurrences elsewhere are here strongly visible. The present tense accompanies the reader throughout the novel (excluding recollections) and the descriptions are very meticulous and minute, giving the feeling of close-ups that are used systematically, as shown below. There is also a very interesting technique (which also appears occasionally in other texts) of using brackets that can be compared to film editing as well. There is a reason for the use of the above-mentioned techniques: all of them allow Isherwood to show the protagonist’s detachment and alternative modes of being. In some scenes, we find George fully aware of his reactions and in control of his body; in other passages, he is a soulless animal interacting with his surroundings but somehow without the appropriate level of consciousness.

As mentioned above, one of the characteristics of Isherwood’s writing is the use of brackets, which seems to be an important device when speaking about a cinematic narrative in the novel, particularly in such texts as A Single Man and Prater Violet. In her introduction to Virginia

Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Hermione Lee explains the need for the use of brackets: “Since fiction is not music or painting or film or any unspoken thoughts, it requires formal strategies if it is to try and be several things at once. These strategies may be as complicated as a whole section written from the point of view of the passage of time, or as simple as a pair of brackets” (xi).

Brackets are extensively used in both above-mentioned texts. A Single Man abounds in different uses of the technique. Just as in Prater Violet described in chapter two, there are cases of bracketed text used for stage directions,45 as well as some additional, “vagabond” commentaries

45 “Geo” – (very humbly) – “would you possibly be free tonight?” (18) 129 and unspoken thoughts, as Hermione Lee calls them.46 However, the most significant manifestation of this technique pertains to the cinematic montage, which is an editing strategy developed by Soviet directors such as Pudovkin, Vertov, and Eisenstein. Several techniques developed by Eisenstein can be found in A Single Man. Let us look at one of the initial passages from the book, where we deal with a cinematic flashback:

He fixes himself a plate of poached eggs with bacon and toast and coffee, and sits down to

eat them at the kitchen table. And meanwhile, around and around in his head, goes the

nursery jingle his Nanny taught him when he was a child in England, all those years ago:

Poached eggs on toast are very nice–

(He sees her so plainly still, grey-haired with mouse-bright eyes, a plump little body

carrying in the nursery tray, short of breath from climbing all those stairs…)

Poached eggs on toast are very nice,

If you try them once you’ll want them twice! (5)

The passage gives the impression of an editing technique that utilises sound. The sentence George hears in his head is a link between the description of his breakfast and his childhood recollections.

The protagonist’s memories are bracketed, which suggests another layer of discourse. In the cinema it often happens that the sound from one scene overlaps with another scene. In such cases, the sound is the linking factor. This technique is often used to present memories. We see somebody thinking, and what takes us to the past in the head of the protagonist is somebody speaking or a sound that still occurs in the scene presenting the protagonist at the moment of thinking.47 The

46 “So Benny wanders off to interfere with three much smaller tots, two boys and a girl, who are trying to dig a hole on the vacant lot between the Strunks and the Garfeins. (Their two houses face the street frontally, wide openly, in apt contrast to the sidewise privacy of George’s lair.)” (12) 47 An example can be found in the film adaptation of A Single Man, where the sound of a ringing phone in George’s study triggers a memory of the day he learned of his partner’s death. We first hear the sound of a ringing phone (00:07:16), we see George’s face at the moment he is getting ready for work and looking in the direction of the phone (00:07:19). Looking at his face in the “present”, we can already hear the sound of a conversation held in the “past”: 130 same happens when George recalls the nursery rhyme. A similar solution using the sound as the linking element appears in Prater Violet, although it is not bracketed. The beginning of the book opens with a dialogue that hardly contains any of the narrator’s comments.48 This resembles film scenes which are commenced by sound only. There is no establishing shot at the beginning, and the viewers see a black screen but can hear dialogue or a telephone ringing and so they know that the action has already begun. There is no description before the dialogue, just as there is no establishing shot at the beginning of the film or scene.

Yet another “phone scene” solution is used in A Single Man. It is preceded by a scene that offers another montage technique, a shot reverse shot, which is an edit based on two or more shots pieced together that alternate characters (Bordwell and Thompson 480). Isherwood uses its literary equivalent in a scene where George peeps through the window whilst sitting on the toilet: “Sitting on the john, he can look out of the window. (They can see his head and shoulders from across the street, but not what he is doing.) It is a grey lukewarm California morning; the sky is low and soft with Pacific fog…” (7). The passage presents what George sees through the window, which resembles an establishing shot, but the reader also knows what can be seen from the place observed by George. Usually brackets introduce a scene that is inserted into the main stream of narration. In this case, we observe two different points of view, but brackets may also introduce other types of shots, such as a close-up. To reinforce the idea of a shot reverse shot in this scene, we can look at the cinematic adaptation of Isherwood’s novel, which treats this fragment in a very similar way – first we see the protagonist looking and right after there is a cut to what is seen by George, namely his neighbour, who catches his gaze and smiles at him (Ford 00:12:21–00:12:29). At this very

“Finally. You know it has been raining here all day…”. Only at 00:07:23 is the sound from the past linked to George’s image from that moment. Therefore, the phone conversation links two of the scenes, guaranteeing coherence and continuity to the story told. 48 Please refer to page 87 for the quotation. 131 moment there is another cut to George’s perplexed face due to the fact he has been spotted and he himself hides from the look of Mrs Strunk, the neighbour. This amusing situation is followed by the sound of the phone, which forces George to get up from the toilet and hurry to answer the phone with his pants around his ankles. In the novel, Isherwood applies the very same strategy as in Prater Violet, allowing for the voyeurism scene to end and starting the phone scene from a new novel section and paragraph:

Damnation. The phone.

Even with the longest cord the phone company will give you, it won’t reach into your

bathroom. George gets himself off the seat and shuffles into the study, like a man in a sack-

race. (17)

Yet again, we see how the simplistic and minimalistic use of words can give a sense of interruption, an abrupt turn in the chain of events, which to a certain extent resembles editing with sound. The phone here is an element that binds the voyeur scene with the phone conversation that Charlie is just about to begin.

The phone scene is not the only one in the novel beginning with a sound. Another can be observed during the protagonist’s lecture at the university. This time, Isherwood uses the opportunity to focus on the description of the sound using the text in brackets:

“After many a summer dies the swan.”

George rolls the words off his tongue with such hammy harmonics, such shameless

relish, that this sounds like a parody of W.B. Yeats reciting. (He comes down on dies with

a great thump to compensate for the And which Aldous Huxley has chopped off from the

beginning of the original line). (45)49

49 Yet another scene of montage can be seen when we observe George’s friend, Charlotte, through his eyes. “She has obviously had at least a couple already. Her hands fumble as she lights a cigarette. (The Indonesian ashtray is full, as 132

In this passage we are dealing with two cinematic instances: one is the beginning of a scene with the use of sound, as described above. The other is a meticulous description of how the protagonist pronounces (or should pronounce) the title which is the beginning of the scene. Interestingly, the stage directions here are formally mixed, as part of them appear in the main part of the text, whilst others seem to be an additional layer, complementing the narrator’s description. The difference between the two stage directions is that one is more literary (or even poetic) in its form, using comparisons and adjectives, whilst the other focuses on accentuating the words and is therefore closer to classic stage directions.

Sound is not the only cinematic element that is used for the purpose of juxtaposing two scenes, giving the impression of their being connected by the means of film editing. Yet again we can see how certain situations or a protagonist’s thoughts are interrupted by a sudden change of thought course, but also the appearance of characters that disrupt the protagonist’s functioning in the world. Not only, then, can we see an abrupt change of scenes, but also a certain shift in style.

For instance, in the scene where George drives to work, we read about his views on current political matters. Suddenly, his thoughts are interrupted as George corrects his way of thinking:

And as for the senator, wouldn’t it be rather amusing to–

No.

(At this point, we see the eyebrows contract in a more than usually violent spasm, the mouth

thin to knife-blade grimness.)

No. Amusing is not the word. These people are not amusing…(25)

From thoughts on current political affairs in the United States, we abruptly move to a description of George’s facial expression. We do not even see his entire face, rather its parts, which gives the

usual, of lipstick market stubs.)” (97). From a generic description we move to a close-up which is juxtaposed with another one. 133 impression of an extreme close-up, that is, a framing in which the object is very large. Usually this is used to depict small objects or body parts (Bordwell and Thompson 478). What is most important in this fragment is the blending of discourses, just as in Prater Violet. It may be stated that George’s thoughts are described in a literary mode, whilst the inserted description of the face belongs to cinematic language.

This mixture of cinematic and literary styles, as well as the inconsistencies in how

Isherwood’s camera works, are also observed by David Thomas in his article “Goodbye to Berlin:

Refocusing Isherwood’s Camera”. Thomas compares his assumptions on how the camera’s point of view should function with Isherwood’s descriptions from Goodbye…: “In point of time cameras should limit themselves to the present; yet ‘the lamps burn all day.’ Cameras should be careful about place; yet ‘the whole district is like this.’ Above all, perhaps, cameras should not use metaphors: ‘monumental safes,’ is however metaphorical…” (47). Particularly the last comparison referring to metaphorical language indicates that Isherwood’s descriptions from Goodbye… are not fully cinematic, but rather a mixture of prose and film. Looking at Lions and Shadows, Thomas refers to Isherwood’s vision of the novelist, which might explain the mixture of discourses and abrupt change of styles: “I thought of the novel (as I hoped to learn to write it) essentially in terms of technique, of conjuring, of chess. The novelist, I said to myself, is playing a game with his reader; he must continually amaze and deceive him…” (qtd. in Thomas 49). Perhaps, then, the cinematic narrative strategies are used to break the storyline and distract the reader.

Following the idea of the literary and cinematic styles interwoven in the novel, there is yet one more visible difference between these two aesthetic modes. We already know that the protagonist is very often detached from the surrounding world. His existence in public spaces such as the shop, the gym, or the university itself requires him to step into a certain role, which he is not 134 always very fond of – these moments in life that do not interest him are either skipped in the novel

(i.e., from George’s consciousness) or if they are in the text, they are simplistic in form, merely descriptive of his activities. But in the scenes where he is emotionally involved, the style becomes richer and more vivid, such as in one of the final scenes where he bathes with his student Kenny in the ocean: “As for George, these waves are much too big for him. They seem truly tremendous, towering up, blackness unrolling itself out of blackness, mysteriously and awfully sparkling, then curling over in a thundering slap of foam which is sparked with phosphorus” (132).50

Let us look at one more scene where George is exposed to a highly emotional (or maybe even sensual) situation. During the walk with one of his colleagues from the campus, he suddenly shifts his focus from a conversation to observing two tennis players whom he finds very attractive.

The conversation he was having with one of his university colleagues is interrupted by the narrator introducing another set in which the next scene is going to happen:

“Well, first of all–” George begins.

They are passing the tennis courts, at this moment. Only one court is occupied, by

two young men playing singles. (37)

This interruption resembles a cinematic cut. We have the conversation scene juxtaposed with the two men on the court. The description of the players is very meticulous; on the one hand, it contains the details of a close-up technique, but on the other, a literary style with rich descriptions and similes dominates the passage: “He is going to win. His opponent, the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touching gallantry in his defiance. He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his classical cream marble body seems to handicap him” (37). Reading the

50 Interestingly, these changes in the protagonist’s mood are reflected in the film adaptation as well. Whenever we experience an emotional spike, the colours in the movie become more saturated. This is, yet again, very visible with any encounters George has with Kenny (Ford 00:26:50–00:26:58), as well as during the memorable scene from the shop parking lot where George smokes a cigarette with a stranger (Ford 00:41:46–00:41:50). 135 passage, one cannot escape the feeling that one was watching some sort of a wildlife documentary, where the object of study is given the full focus – the literary descriptions give a sense of slow motion that allow us to capture every detail of the exhibits. This is perhaps why as we progress with the description of the game, the narrator calls the players “these young animals”, which of course might also have the meaning of the youngsters being attractive to George only because of their physique or simply yet another manifestation of George’s distance from his surroundings.

How was the above situation adapted to the screen? First of all, George’s response and the following conversation is dominated by the sounds of the ball being hit by the tennis rackets. The descriptions from the novel that are full of George’s admiration reflected in literary comparisons are turned into close-ups reinforced by slow motion. Although we do not see slow motion in

Isherwood’s text in this particular passage, it has already been flagged here that the slow motion equivalent is visible in the writerly style of the novel (Ford 00:19:00–00:19:45). We might, then, assume the effect Isherwood wanted to achieve is continued on the screen, but in other situations as well. The slow motion in the film version will serve many expression purposes, but in this scene it is used to express the utter focus with which George is observing the tennis players. This poetic scene is suddenly cut, just as it was introduced.

This game is cruel; but cruelty is sensual and stirs George into hot excitement. He feels a

thrill of pleasure to find the senses so eager in their response; too often, now, they seem

sadly jaded. From his heart, he thanks these young animals for their beauty. And they will

never know what they have done to make this moment marvellous to him, and life itself

less hateful–

Dreyer is saying, “Sorry Sir – I lost you for a minute, there,” (…) his whole concentration

fixed upon George’s talking head. 136

For it obviously has been talking. (38)

This abrupt return from sensual spectatorship depicts a very important characteristic Isherwood gave to his protagonist – the ability to step out of his consciousness. We see two Georges: one referred to as “it”, a talking head, a dummy interacting with its surroundings on auto-pilot; and then the conscious George observing and commenting on his physical counterpart. The cinematic language and the change of style helps to achieve this duality of the protagonist, which undoubtedly leads to the topic of alienation, which is discussed in detail in chapter four.

The set of the tennis court, assumedly because of its character as a place where one can watch a show in the form of a game, gives more opportunities for visual descriptions in the novel, this time leading to descriptions that resemble the focus change of a lens:

They have reached the tennis courts. The courts are all in use now; dotted with moving

figures. But George, with a lizard-quick glance of a veteran addict, has already noted that

the morning’s pair has left, and that none of the players are physically attractive. On the

nearest court, a fat middle-aged faculty member is playing to work up a sweat, against a

girl with hair on her legs. (61)

The scene starts with a blurred establishing shot which transforms into a deep focus. As the blurred image of dots turns into people, the POV camera eye of George notices particular players and then the details of their bodily construction going as far as the hair on their legs.

Similarly to the scene with “poached eggs”, where a flashback is invoked by the sound of a nursery rhyme appearing in George’s head, brackets are used in other scenes to introduce flashbacks, such as in the scene where George visits an old friend of his and his partner’s:

George sits down beside her and takes her hand. If he had done this even two months ago,

it would have been loathsomely false. (One of his most bitterly shameful memories is of 137

the time he kissed her on the cheek – was it aggression, masochism? Oh, damn all such

words – right after he found out she’d been to bed with Jim. Jim was there when it

happened. When George moved toward her to kiss her, Jim’s eyes looked startled and

scared, as if he feared George was about to bite her like a snake. But now taking Doris’s

hand isn’t false, isn’t even an act of compassion…. (77)

We see how a recollection is invoked in George’s mind by the touch of Doris’s hand. The character of recollection in this scene is visible in the use of brackets, suggesting a clear division between here/now and then/there as well as the change of the tense inside and outside the brackets.

As could be seen in this chapter, Isherwood’s focus on an autobiographical form and his need to rewrite and edit his diary entries has made space for the incorporation of techniques that resembles those of a film production. On the one hand, the recollections of particular scenes that are strongly attached to a memory in his life serve as a good opportunity for him to use the present tense as indicative of screenplay language. On the other hand, we have several instances of

Isherwood juxtaposing elements from his diaries or various plots in a way that resembles film editing. Something of particular interest in Isherwood’s narrative style is the passages from A

Single Man, where the film-like narration is most visible. The novel, which is considered

Isherwood’s greatest achievement, probably has the strongest portrayal of an alienated protagonist, which leads us to one of the possible reasons why cinematic language is used throughout

Isherwood’s works. Portraits of alienated characters and how their states influence the narrative style will be discussed in the following and the final chapter of this thesis. 138

CHAPTER FOUR: THE STUDY OF ISHERWOOD’S ALIENATIONS THROUGH

SELECTED THEMES IN HIS WORKS

In the previous chapter, we saw how Isherwood’s work on his memories and the way in which he shaped them into novelistic text contributed to the cinematic style of his work. That is, however, not the only reason why language that is so similar to cinematic language should appear in all of the novels and memoirs analysed so far. As mentioned in the assumptions of this thesis,

Isherwood’s cinematic language also reflects his distance towards the reality around him. This remoteness of the author and his narrator counterparts can yet again largely be explained by

Isherwood’s life. No matter where and when he was, he could usually refer to himself a stranger, whether that was because of his sexual orientation, country of origin, religious beliefs, or simply his field of expertise. This chapter will examine all of those roles along with the language that accompanied them.

4.1 Isherwood, the traveller

Knowing Isherwood’s biography, one can allow oneself the statement that the writer led a traveller’s life. Although Germany (and Berlin in particular) may be the country most frequently associated with him, the author of A Single Man spent several years travelling through pre-war

Europe visiting Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. Before he migrated to the United States, he managed to go as far as China with W. H. Auden in order to make a series of reportages. During his stay in the United States, he first tried his luck on the East

Coast, but then moved to California following the classical American “go west” pattern. We learn about his journey to South America from a journal he wrote with his partner Bill Caskey. His involvement in Vedantism led him to India, where he travelled with his spiritual guru, Swami 139

Prabhavananda. Isherwood’s vivid and intense life of a traveller not only gave him an opportunity to observe different nations and cultures, but also contributed to his writing style and attitude towards the people and places he encountered. As a traveller faraway from home, it was difficult not to feel like a stranger.51 One of the ways Isherwood shows this state of detachment is the language that he uses in his writing. The most often quoted passage from Goodbye… presents

Isherwood’s narrator as a passive observer of reality. Having written the text early in his career,

Isherwood had a chance to follow literary interpretations of the “camera passage” and he himself observed how strongly the interpretation of a detached observer clung to him as an author and protagonist of his texts. He recalls this pattern in Christopher…, reminiscing about writing

Goodbye…:

“Isherwood” sits looking out of the window. According to the time scheme of the

novel, he has only just arrived in Germany. He is the detached foreign observer,

getting his first impressions. “I am a camera,” he says to himself, “quite passive,

recording, not thinking.” This phrase, I am a camera, was the title John van Druten

chose for the play he made out of the novel, in 1951. Taken out of its context, it was

to label Christopher himself as one of those eternal outsiders who watch the passing

parade of life lukewarm-bloodedly, with wistful impotence. From that time on,

whenever he published a book, there would always be some critic who would quote

it, praising Mr. Isherwood for his sharp camera eye but blaming him for not daring to

get out of his focal depth and become humanly involved with his sitters. (59)

51 The very fact that he was an islander somehow made him additionally separated from the European countries he visited. Interestingly, England was also to a certain extent distant for Isherwood. His parents’ home was something he wanted to escape from. After some time living in the United States, he decided to visit his homeland for the first time after the Second World War. British streets, customs, and people seemed awkward to him. However, he was able to relate to this Britishness via the means of film when he observed that everything he experienced on the street was actually very cinematic (see page 75 in this thesis). 140

Is there a reason to claim that the detachment of “Isherwood” from Goodbye… is an actual theme in his writing, or a singular literary concept used by the writer in one novel only? Even if not suggested directly by the writer, this attitude can be felt across the various titles he wrote. In chapter two, we saw how cinematic language was used to show Isherwood’s remoteness towards the film world he had just entered. This chapter will try to capture moments when Isherwood felt like a stranger throughout his journeys. The observations from his travels that will serve as material for analysis are gathered in his diaries and novels such as Mr Norris…, Goodbye…, Down There…, and Christopher…. There are two reasons for looking at this particular theme in Isherwood’s writing. First, as a traveller Isherwood devoted a relatively large amount of time to his urban experiences. There are parallels here with the nineteenth century concept of the flâneur. It was his immense interest in the city and his voyeuristic tendencies that made him a man of cinematic sensitivity in the twentieth century, as some critics claim. Secondly, as briefly mentioned before in this thesis, Isherwood’s writing is heavily based on his diaries and involved editing already written text to create new work. His novels related to travelling were written partially using this technique and show a broader writer’s tendency to reuse and relive moments from his past in new texts. This is particularly visible in his memoirs, which are the “editing, printing and fixing”

Isherwood mentions in Goodbye…. These texts also show a certain degree of distance towards the stories and characters Isherwood created in the past.

Before looking at Isherwood as a flâneur and traveller, it is important to remember that this reading is based on a selection of the accounts of the writer’s life that he made in a variety of texts, each of them autobiographical to varying extents. We might, then, be looking simultaneously at the writer, first-person narrator, and protagonist. The differences of narration levels should not be 141 a hindrance here, as the aim of this section is to depict a certain theme in Isherwood’s writing, not distinguishing between diaries, memoirs, and novels.

4.2 Isherwood, the flâneur

Both characteristics described in the introductory section of this chapter lead us to Walter

Benjamin, the German philosopher, who was deeply interested in the concept of flânerie and the urban space, to which he devoted his major works. Just like Baudelaire explored the streets of

Paris, so did Benjamin with Berlin. A great work that came out of Benjamin’s exploration was the immense The Arcades Project, but also a smaller piece consisting of impressions of the city named

One Way Street. The strategy that Benjamin uses in his writing, which he calls literary montage, is a juxtaposition of quotations (The Arcades Projects 460-1).

The flâneur, first described by Baudelaire and then elaborated by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Flâneur” as well as in his magnum opus, The Arcades Project, takes pleasure from experiencing the city, strolling through it at his own pace against the vivid urban tempo of life. In

Krzysztof Rutkowski’s text Włoczęgopisanie. Paryż jako miasto znaków, we can find a definition of a flâneur as someone who has a lot in common with a poet, philosopher, a new homme de lettres, but also a voyeur, an idler, and an outcast. It is a persona that does not play by society’s rules, yet is somewhere there amongst the urban crowd. The flâneur can enjoy idle time, as he does not have a regular, down-to-earth occupation, allowing for endless strolls through the city and an embrace of the urban panorama. He reads the city in a literal and metaphorical way: absorbing the adverts, leaflets, and posters on the walls and shop exhibitions, but also reading between the lines and searching for the hidden meanings of the city. An important feature of the flâneur is his longing to watch. Just like a photographer or a reporter, he is in the middle of events, but not a part of them 142

(Rutkowski 34–35). This quality has made the flâneur an attractive figure for literature and culture studies, particularly in the twentieth century with the development of photography and the emergence of cinema, mediums that perfectly align with the traits of the nineteenth century wanderer. For instance, Anke Gleber, in her book The Art of Taking a Walk: Flânerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture, explains how the concept finds its way into the Modernist times of the twentieth century: “The flâneur … represents a disposition that is closely affiliated with the gaze of the camera, renders the sensitivity of a director who records his own vision, and repeats the spectatorship of a moviegoer who perceives the images of reality as an ongoing film of modernity” (6). Gleber mentions that flânerie links various phenomena of modernity, tourism amongst them. In her analysis of this phenomenon, the scholar refers to Dean MacCannell’s The

Tourist: “A New Theory of the Leisure Class who … among these alternate forms of tourism … includes, ‘people watching’ and the activity of looking at ‘almost anything that is moving – [even] a scrap of paper blown by the wind.’” Gleber concludes that “these nuances of scopophilia, these cinematic sensitivities embrace the very sensations of flânerie” (132). From these observations we can distil two crucial similarities with the author of Goodbye…. An obvious condition not counted by the two is that Isherwood is an homme de lettres, an artist with a solid portion of idle time, living off a family pension (at least during his first travels), with no stable or regular job of mortals.

Initially, Isherwood is not even bound by university classes – he fails (or rather refuses) to graduate

Cambridge and then quits medical school. However, one of the major links between the writer and the character of a flâneur is tourism. We have already learned about the major destinations of his travels and their outcome – novels, plays, journals, and diaries. One of these works clearly relates to the state of being a tourist, which is highlighted in the very title of the novel as well as in its closing chapter: “You’re exactly like a tourist who thinks he can take in the whole Rome in one 143 day. You know, you really are a tourist, to your bones. I bet you’re always sending postcards with

‘Down here on a visit’ on them. That’s the story of your life…” (344). These words shouted out by one of the characters to “Isherwood” summarise his life and how it is constructed of constantly changing places. The actual title of the novel is Down There…, which is a composition of recollections of Isherwood’s travels where the distance of these events is reflected by the change of the adverbs of space (here/there).

However, being a tourist is not itself an argument for calling Isherwood and his alter ego characters flâneurs. It is MacCannell’s observation of a tourist’s inclination to observe that links the writer and the nineteenth century stroller, which is clearly seen in the opening sequence in

Goodbye…: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving in the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair” (223).

This opening sequence of Isherwood’s most famous book has led several scholars to consider

Isherwood as an example of a twentieth century flâneur, as the comparison of the narrator to a camera captures the flâneur’s “visual passions”, as Lutz Koepnick claims (255). Koepnick also lists Isherwood amongst twentieth century enthusiasts of a stroll along the “boulevards of modern life” (218) amongst Walter Benjamin, Franz Hessel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Louis Aragon. The famous quotation also complements Gleber’s earlier cited interpretation of a twentieth century flâneur. Isherwood is simultaneously a cameraman, director, and spectator of the surrounding reality. Later in her study, Gleber actually refers to Isherwood’s text and perceives it as a paraphrasing of the flâneur’s condition being a manifestation of scopophilia (152). Another scholar, Johannes Weber, associates Isherwood’s manifesto with the literary montage described by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project (288).52 What can definitely be seen from all of these

52 In one of the chapters of The Arcades Project, Benjamin describes his technique of working on the text. Interestingly, he calls it a literary montage, which meant collecting and juxtaposing quotations (his and others) to create meaning. 144 quotations is that film is a medium that matches the flâneur’s qualities perfectly. Its aim is to observe and record reality, but from a certain distance, without getting involved in the filmed events and circumstances. Quoting Gleber once again, the “flâneur’s inclination is to look but not to touch” (130). An example of such an attitude is visible in Isherwood’s recollections from

Christopher…, where we can find an interesting remark on being “in” and “out” of the urban space, which corresponds to the subjective–objective relation of the flâneur towards the city. Isherwood is a foreign writer in a foreign city, and depending on his needs can get involved in the life of

Berliners, but also very easily withdraw from it:

To work in this public atmosphere seemed better suited to his new way of life. He

wanted to be in constant contact with Germans and Germany throughout the day, not

shut up alone … And how strange and delightful it was to be sitting here, with Turkish

smoke tickling his nostrils and German beer faintly bitter on his tongue, writing a

story in the English language about an English family in an English country house! It

was most unlikely that any of the people here would be able to understand what he

was writing. This gave him a soothing sense of privacy, which the noise of their talk

couldn’t seriously disturb; it was on a different wavelength. With them around him, it

was actually easier to concentrate than when he was by himself. He was alone and yet

not alone. He could move in and out of their world at will. He was beginning to realize

how completely at home one can be as a foreigner. (22)

Benjamin does not believe in arranging his material into a linear text. The juxtaposition of elements creates new meanings, but the quotations themselves are not modified (460). This is to a certain extent similar to Isherwood’s writing technique expressed in the famous “I am a camera” passage. In the preface to Goodbye…, Isherwood also mentions that it consists of loosely connected diaries and sketches (242). Furthermore, Benjamin intends to use all the material he has gathered. There are no leftovers for him, which is again a similar case to Isherwood, who in terms of publishing has used the vast majority of the material he gathered. 145

The urban space, in this case cafés and bars, becomes a natural habitat for a foreign traveller such as Isherwood. He takes pleasure in being part of the crowd, but also having the privilege of private space and distance due to language differences. Thus, the city equals home and enables artistic and literary creation.

“I am a camera” was the opening passage to Isherwood’s portrait of Germany in

Goodbye….53 Further in the book, we have a chance to see the city through different stories and perspectives. A certain dichotomy can be felt in the novel, which again could be associated with the figure of the flâneur as a person who is in between, in both a subjective and objective relation with the city. On the one hand, Isherwood’s character feels like a stranger, but there is also something inviting in the city, a certain calling:

Because of the whistling, I do not care to stay here in the evenings. It reminds me that I am

in a foreign city, alone, far from home. Sometimes I determine not to listen to it, pick up a

book, try to read. But soon a call is sure to sound, so piercing, so insistent, so despairingly

human, that at last I have to get up and peep through the slats of the Venetian blind to make

quite sure that it is not – as I know very well it could not possibly be – for me. (243)

We can see that from the very beginning there is a strong bond between “Isherwood” from

Goodbye… and the city, which literally calls to him. The feeling of remoteness is felt in the first segment of the novel. Although the readers initially do not experience the German streets, they do have an insight into German society through Isherwood’s observations of the lodgers of the house where he rents his room. The corridors of Frl. Schroeder’s house are almost like a vibrant street

53 It is interesting to note that Isherwood’s vision of Berlin has become a simulacrum of the city. In one of the interviews with Isherwood, he mentions the fact that publishers requesting a book about Berlin from historians and other writers were very disappointed, as the Berlin from those books was not what they expected. It lacked the vibrance Isherwood depicted in his text. This again pertains remotely to the fact that our perception of the world is built in many ways on simulacra, many of which are constructed by the cinema. 146 where people of different beliefs, occupations, and origins meet. Reading about the house, one cannot help feel as though it were a reportage, a documentary on a specific group of people:

All day long she54 goes padding about the large dingy flat. Shapeless but alert, she waddles

from room to room, in carpet slippers and flowered dressing gown pinned ingeniously

together, so that not an inch of petticoat or bodice is to be seen, flicking with her duster,

peeping, spying, poking her short pointed nose into the cupboards and luggage of her

lodgers. She has dark, bright, inquisitive eyes and pretty waved brown hair of which she is

proud. She must be about fifty-five years old. (245)

Isherwood uses the present tense to describe everything that he sees. He is sensitive to various aspects of what he sees: from mannerisms to architecture.

The longer “Isherwood” dwells in the city, the more he identifies with its streets and buildings, but the sense of detachment remains and this is because of the circumstances he finds himself in. “Isherwood” experiences Berlin during violent changes, which he as a foreigner is not part of and refuses to get involved in. During one of the scenes, “Isherwood” along with Sally and her companion witness the funeral of a German Social Democratic politician, Herman Muller.

When Clive enquires about who the man in the coffin is, Sally shows her lack of interest. This triggers an interesting remark by the narrator regarding his involvement in the preoccupations of

Berliners:

We had nothing to do with those Germans Down There, marching, or with the dead man

in the coffin. In a few days, I thought, we shall have forfeited all kinship with ninety-nine

percent of the world, with the men and women who earn their living, who insure their lives,

who are anxious about the future of their children. Perhaps in the Middle Ages people felt

54 Frl. Schroeder, the landlady of the lodging house Isherwood’s character stays at. 147

like this, when they believed themselves to have sold their souls to the Devil. It was a

curious, exhilarating, not unpleasant sensation: but, at the same time, I felt slightly scared.

Yes, I said to myself, I’ve done it, now. I am lost. (300)

This state of being above average and beyond the problems of mortals leads to a characteristic of the flâneur mentioned before by Rutkowski: he can allow himself to endlessly stroll through the city streets as he does not have to sit in an office or any other job. He earns his own living or is provided for or does not earn a living at all, vegetating, not having any other choice (35). In his

Berlin experience, “Isherwood” finds himself in all of those states at different stages of his stay.

He lives off family allowance and his modest earnings as an English teacher, but then also uses the luck of meeting Sally and through her Clive, an affluent businessman who guarantees both characters several weeks of indulgence in Berlin bars and shops.

Throughout the novel and its various sections we see how the relationship between the first-person narrator and the city changes. The initial calling at some point changes into a strong bond, an identification with the city, its streets and buildings, as the Nazi ideology advances:

“Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb” (464). This impression of Berlin is taken from the last part of The Berlin

Novels, A Berlin Diary, which describes Isherwood’s final visit to the city. This section is most abundant in the descriptions of the streets and events happening out there – Nazis growing in power and confidence, the conflict between them and the Communists, the escalation of violence towards and oppression of Jewish inhabitants of Berlin. It is also a journey into various Berliner bars which offer an array of personalities to be examined and recorded. 148

Despite the fact that it was the “I am a camera” quotation and the vivid portrait of Berlin that earned Isherwood the title of a twentieth century flâneur, the references to this concept may be found across a wider scope of his work. The author not only gives the qualities of a detached wanderer to the protagonist of his own name, but also to other more and less prominent characters.

Even if “Isherwood” is not the flâneur himself, it is often a person close to him or someone he admires. A perfect example is Friedrich Bergmann from Prater Violet. In the eyes of “Isherwood”, the impulsive film director is someone to look up to, simply because of his open-mindedness and lack of social barriers, which allow him to blend into the crowds, observe them and, what is more, comment loudly on what he observes. In one of the quotations from the novelette mentioned in chapter one,55 Bergmann observes a couple in a tram and begins to discuss with “Isherwood” what he sees. Despite the fact that the discussion reaches the ears of fellow passengers and the objects of interest themselves, there is no reaction, as if Bergmann was air, non-existent.

The tram scene shows us the basic flâneur characteristics in Bergmann’s behaviour – an observer commenting on the surrounding reality whilst simultaneously being beyond it. What is not yet visible is the cinematic quality of Bergmann’s character. However, in the previous chapter we had a chance to see a related quotation from the same scene of the book, where Bergmann develops a cinematic story out of the “snapshot” of the couple he sees on the tram. Therefore, we initially see the director as a voyeur who develops the material captured on the street into a story.

Furthermore, a very curious relation can be seen between Bergmann and “Isherwood” when we look at their knowledge of and movement through London. Although Bergmann is a foreigner who hardly knows the city, he is the one who leads “Isherwood” on long strolls through

55 See page 93 of this thesis. 149 the streets and districts unknown to the protagonist. There is a certain reversal of roles where the native inhabitant becomes a tourist and the foreigner a guide:

We started making sightseeing excursions together. Bergmann showed me London: the

London he had already created for himself in his own imagination; the dark, intricate,

sinister town of Dickens, the old German silent movies, Wedekind and Brecht. He was

always the guide, and I the tourist. Whenever I asked where we were going, he would say

“Wait,” or “You will see.” Often, I think he hadn’t the least idea, until we actually arrived.

(48)

Thus, we have a subjective portrait of London put into a heavily intertextual context that includes a cinematic perspective of silent cinema (and the writing of Dickens, whose works are often considered to have a cinematic touch), but also a very characteristic trait of flânerie, namely walking without aim or purpose. Even if Bergmann had an ultimate goal of reaching a place, we know he kept it secret for “Isherwood”, which in fact made it a journey into the unknown.

The “Isherwood” character, on the other hand, is not as vivid as a candidate for a flâneur in Prater Violet as his mentor is. What can be said about him is the lack of belonging he feels.

First, and most importantly, because the film industry is a novelty for him, the very process of making the film he is working on is described as a sort of a trance, where “Isherwood” loses control and changes his narration into a cinematic flow of words. This limbo he finds himself in echoes at the end of the novel when the screenwriter meets with his guru director for the last time. The circumstances of this encounter do not seem to fit ordinary men: “It was the hour of the night at which man’s ego almost sleeps. The sense of identity, of possession, of name and address and telephone number grows very faint. It was the hour at which man shivers, pulls up his coat collar, and thinks, ‘I am a traveler. I have no home’” (116). Despite being in his homeland, Isherwood 150 does not feel at home, and London is yet another place for him where he is “there on a visit”.

Several pages earlier, he wonders whether he has not travelled too much and “left his heart in too many places” (99).

It is interesting to see how Isherwood perceives London in Prater Violet taking into consideration what we have learned from his other texts, for example, his first memoir Lions and

Shadows. In a recollection of a vacation spent with Philip Linsley, Isherwood recalls how fascinated he was by the city. Moreover, looking at the quotation from the memoir below, the reader can find strong flâneur qualities. Whilst “Isherwood” from Prater Violet had to be led through the city streets, the young writer from Lions and Shadows leads his own way through the urban space, and it is certainly an unconventional one:

Two tastes we had in common – a passion for cinema-going and an endless pleasure in

walking about the London streets. Particularly we were fascinated by the great lost

decaying districts, where the fly-blown respectability of the lower middle class clings to

its dreary outposts against the slums … then there were the areas dedicated to favorite

novels … But for myself, at this time London was much more than a sociological pageant

or complex of literary associations. It was the only big city I really knew, and so it was a

synthesis of all big cities; it fed my place-romanticism and my boundless dreams of travel.

(94-95)

Since Lions and Shadows is one of the memoirs, we may assume the above citation reflects

Isherwood’s interests, passions, and future goals at the time without really fictionalising them for the purpose of protagonist creation. Cinema and city strolling complement each other and highlight the author’s interest in observing people, whether on the silver screen or a city street. The fact that these two are together also corroborate the idea of a relationship between flânerie and 151 voyeurism/scopophilia. Isherwood is interested in the city for various reasons, all of which seem to fit very well with the description of a flâneur. He wanders along the most famous shopping streets, enjoying their splendour and pretending to be rich,56 but is also fascinated by abandoned and forgotten places. Then there is the intertextual city – Isherwood here is a flâneur “reading” the urban space in search of references to the novels he has read. Last but not least, London is a promise and a foreshadowing of Isherwood’s travels in further stages of his life.

As we have learned, Bergmann is a facilitator of the urban experience for “Isherwood”.

The same happens partially in Goodbye…, where “Isherwood” explores Berlin with Sally Bowles.

Her lavish lifestyle, lack of commitment, and artistic character are features that could be recognised in a flâneuse figure. We cannot really say that Sally is a flâneuse as there are also many contradictory character traits in her, such as naivete, a lack of interest and attention to detail, and an inability to observe and read between the lines. Depending on her mood, she can either be

“hitting the town” and disappear from Isherwood’s sight for hours or even days, or spend all the time on the sofa not caring to eat anything. However, because of her vivid personality and tendency to get involved in strange relationships and situations, “Isherwood” gets a splendid opportunity to observe people and make new portraits of Berliners. If “Isherwood” is the camera, Bowles is the camerawoman involving the protagonist in situations he probably would not have found himself in alone.

When the weather was fine and I hadn’t any lessons to give, we strolled as far as the

Wittenbergplatz and sat on a bench in the sunshine, discussing the people who went past.

Everybody stared at Sally, in her canary yellow beret and shabby fur coat, like the skin of

56 “One of our favourite amusements was pretending to be very rich. Wearing our best clothes, we would saunter down Bond Street, pausing at every second shop, entering a watchmaker’s to enquire the price of a gold waterproof wrist- watch, turning up our noses at a selection of seven-and-sixpenny ties, choosing the most expensive.” (94) 152

a mangy old dog. “I wonder,” she was fond of remarking, “what they’d say if they knew

that we two old tramps were going to be the most marvellous novelist and the greatest

actress in the world.” (294)

Depending on the moment, Sally and Christopher are either “tramps” with little money enjoying what the city can provide to them or lucky enough to be supported by somebody else’s money and enjoy all the treasures of commercial Berlin.

Another example from the Berlin Novels is identified by Paul Piazza, who sees a flâneur in Arthur Norris: “Norris is an essentially comic character, a colorful flâneur delighting in mysteries, dabbling in communism and fascism, reveling in the decadence of wigs and scents and vintage wines. (…) His sexual tastes are comically perverse, his reading matter unashamedly pornographic, his manner clandestine and affected” (91). As a person “delighting in mysteries”,

Norris is a performer, an actor who very unskilfully tries to conceal his secrets in front of Bradshaw

(Isherwood). The first-person narrator is very much aware of Arthur’s attempts, as the descriptions of the encounters with the eponymous character often refer to some kind of performance (e.g., page 25 or 75 when Bradshaw speaks about “performing a ritual”). Bradshaw likes to play along with Norris’s game, and becomes a performer himself in numerous situations. At some point, he even “builds a romantic background” (44) for Norris, who is temporarily unable to get the truth out of him. Arthur’s theatrical character is not only visible in his behaviour, but also in his

“costumes”. In the very first scene of the book, during the encounter on the train, the narrator scrutinises Norris and observes a wig on his head. Later on, when they are in Berlin, he manages to learn how important it is for Norris to properly prepare himself before stepping out onto the city streets. This is observed not only by Bradshaw, but by other characters such as Frl. Schroeder:

“He’s so particular, Herr Bradshaw. More like a lady than a gentleman. Everything in his room 153 has its place, and I get into trouble if it isn’t all just as he wants it. I must say, though, it’s a pleasure to wait on anybody who takes such care of his things. You ought to see some of his shirts, and his ties. A perfect dream! And his silk underclothes!” (119). Bradshaw also learns this directly from

Norris: “… Arthur would impart to me the various secrets of his toilet. He was astonishingly fastidious. It was a revelation to me to discover, after all this time, the complex preparations which led up to his every appearance in public” (122–23). Such a preoccupation with appearance makes

Norris a twentieth century dandy, another construct that has common features with the figure of the flâneur. The image of a dandy walking a turtle on a leash on the streets of nineteenth century

Paris showed a certain status and distance from the rest of society, yet they were somehow involved in the life of the street and became a significant part of flâneur imagery.

Arthur’s perfection is not limited to his clothing, but also is strongly visible in his apartment, which in the eyes of the narrator generates specific associations. In the below passage, yet again we notice the narrator’s sharp camera eye paying attention not only to people, but to the surroundings as well:

Left alone, I looked around me, slightly mystified. Everything was in good taste, the

furniture, the carpet, the colour scheme. But the room was curiously without character. It

was like a room on the stage or in the window of a high-class furnishing store; elegant,

expensive, discreet. I had expected Mr Norris’s background to be altogether more exotic;

something Chinese would have suited him, with golden and scarlet dragons. (16)

On the one hand, yet again we see that Norris builds an aura of extraordinariness around himself, increasing Bradshaw’s expectations; on the other, his house is described as having no character and reminds Bradshaw of a room on the stage or in a store exhibit. We have two important comparisons here: the first is theatrical, whilst, more importantly, the second is commercial. The 154 latter brings us to the notion of window shopping, which is very much related to the concept of the flâneur, whose objects of study were very often those shop windows.

Moreover, Norris, just like Bradshaw/Isherwood, is a traveller with a number of experiences from various European cities:

By the time we had reached Bentheim, Mr Norris had delivered a lecture on the

disadvantages of most of the chief European cities. I was astonished to find how much he

had travelled. He had suffered from rheumatics in Stockholm and draughts in Kaunas; in

Riga he had been bored, in Warsaw treated with extreme discourtesy, in Belgrade he had

been unable to obtain his favourite brand of toothpaste. In Rome he had been annoyed by

insects, in Madrid by beggars, in Marseilles by taxi-horns. In Bucharest he had had an

exceedingly unpleasant experience with a water-closet. Constantinople he had found

expensive and lacking in taste. The only two cities of which he greatly approved were Paris

and Athens. Athens particularly. Athens was his spiritual home. (7)

The quotation above shows Norris as a man of many experiences, but also puts him in a negative, comical light. Amongst this exclusiveness, good wines, and slick appearance there is a lot of clumsiness which makes Norris’s performance not entirely successful. Yet, in the eyes of the narrator, he is a very interesting exhibit who attracts many curious situations. As with Sally

Bowles, Norris gets involved in a variety of peculiar events and relationships which lead him and

Bradshaw to places as varied as communist headquarters, and hotels and restaurants occupied mostly by supporters of Hitler, but they also explore the nightlife – and here the scope is also wide.

They enjoy luxurious restaurants, but also decadent bars such as The Troika, which also appears in Sally Bowles, where the eponymous character sings. 155

Last but not least, certain traces of flânerie are also visible in the behaviour of George, the protagonist of A Single Man. After the loss of his partner, George looks at the reality he encounters with distance. The reader can feel how detached the protagonist is in public places. What used to be daily routine now seems insignificant. George seems to be beyond this. In that sense, he is an idler who can allow himself aimless wandering.

One of flâneur’s features is his interest in the places of commerce. The very title of

Benjamin’s magnum opus refers to such a place. Isherwood’s novel, set at least a century later, shows us modern arcades through the eyes of George. Shop exhibitions have changed into supermarkets, festively lit boulevards, and gyms – all of these are an essence of a modern man’s desire. We can follow George in his “stroll” through those places: “As George drives down the boulevard, the big unwieldy Christmas decorations – reindeer and jingle bells slung across the street on cables secured to metal Christmas trees – are swinging in a chill wind. (…) Shoppers crowd the stores and the sidewalks, their faces somewhat bewildered, their eyes reflecting, like polished buttons, the cynical sparkle of Yuletide” (81). This is just a fragment of a sequence of

George’s visits – to the gym, the hills above the city to admire the cityscape, and finally a supermarket. All of these are a result of purposelessness and are, in fact, wandering. George’s lonely strolls amongst the crowds might give the impression of the character’s proximity to the flâneur of the 1960s, but more importantly they lead us to one of the key themes of the novel, namely the inability of a homosexual individual to find himself in a heterosexual, still predominantly conservative society. That sphere constitutes another alienated Isherwood.

156

4.3 Isherwood, the queer

Homosexuality appears openly in several of Isherwood’s texts written at a later stage of his career, with Christopher… being the most direct reference to his own orientation and related to the gay liberation movement. In his texts prior to these revolutionary times for the LGBT community, his characters were often hinted to be homosexuals, or their sexuality was ambiguously presented.

Richard E. Zeikowtz in the introduction to Letters between Forster and Isherwood on

Homosexuality and Literature gives an example of Mr Norris where Isherwood decided not to make the character openly homosexual as it would divert the reader’s attention from the eponymous character. The same strategy has been used in Goodbye…(4). Furthermore, according to the research done by Victor Marsh, in the 1930s sincerity in the topic was not welcome and only during his US years Isherwood became more bold with the homosexuality of his protagonists in his novels starting with A World… and only with A Single Man ten years later did he place a homosexual character in the centre of his text (86). As Jamie Harker writes in Middlebrow Queer:

Christopher Isherwood in America, the topic of gay experience was particularly important and recurrent in Isherwood’s American novels throughout the period of Cold War and all of his

American novels contain a gay character (xiv). As for the very term “queer”, according to Harker,

Isherwood used it to describe his sexuality and express the detachment from the mainstream culture. His involvement in Vedanta strengthened the affinities between his approach and the queer theory, since the movement rejected the concept of “a unified autonomous self as false masks of identity that obscure a deeper complexity and chaos”(x), which were in line with “queer critiques of identity categories as disciplinary regimes…” However, Harker also observes that, as much as

Isherwood might have used the term “queer” to criticize the surrounding heterosexual majority, there was a more common context he used it in: 157

In addition, despite his rejection as coherent self, Isherwood remained committed to the

idea of gay identity as a meaningful category; his discussions of his "tribe" or his "kind"

suggest a gay universalism that is distinctly unfashionable in contemporary queer theory.

While Isherwood sometimes used the term as a critique of mainstream society, he used it

more commonly simply as a synonym for "gay". In other words, Isherwood's "queer" is not

our "queer." (xii)

By our “queer” Harker would understand the actual reluctance for easy the categorisation into the norm (hetero) versus deviation (homosexual) developed in the 1990s, in comparison to

Isherwood’s reference to homosexuals as a group with clearly defined traits.

Isherwood’s detachment from the mainstream culture described by Harker is visible in his novel A Single Man. As we already know, deals with the story of a gay professor in mourning after the loss of his lifelong partner. George is left alone in this world, with only his friend Charley to confide in. His mourning therefore becomes even more difficult and is a trigger for rapid changes of thought and mood. These changes give opportunities for film language to enter the spotlight once again. Furthermore, George’s otherness requires him to perform a role within this society, yet again providing a number of film and theatre metaphors, which we will discuss below.

A Single Man offers two contexts for the detachment of the protagonist, the primary one being his homosexuality, and the secondary one his foreign origin. The former reason is not only related to his sexual identity, but also the state we find the protagonist in, namely mourning. How is this alienation expressed then? First of all, George needs to place himself within society, act according to its rules, and be careful not to trespass certain social boundaries. He conceals his feelings and internalises his polemics with the status quo. He does so by entering roles expected by society and the local community – that of a neighbour, professor, citizen. To highlight this fact, 158 several times throughout the text Isherwood uses performance-related metaphors. These are used most frequently in the scenes at the campus, where George conducts a lecture and interacts with his colleagues. The lecture as such already indicates a performer–audience relation, but Isherwood reinforces this by comparing George to an actor:

So now George has arrived … He is all actor now; an actor on his way up to the dressing

room, hastening through the backstage world of props and lamps and stagehands to make

his entrance. A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the

doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation

which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, “Good morning!” (29–30)

Looking at his entrance to the lecture hall, we see that there is a special mode George gets himself into – one that is compliant with the expectations of the audience. In his academic performance,

George brings out his Britishness, which apart from homosexuality is yet another factor that differentiates him from society and makes him “the Other”. The imagined vision of a British professor is described as a cliché, which might be related to certain stereotypes generated by cinema. In chapter two, we saw how in his diaries Isherwood described his visit to England and recalled how what he saw corresponded to the image of his home country generated by Hollywood films. Here, we may assume that the expectations towards his “performance” as the British professor very much stem from the audience’s imagination generated by cinema. George’s thoughts on society being shaped by cinema and, more importantly, television are also visible at the very beginning of the novel through the in-depth portrait of his neighbours, the Strunks. As

George observes one of the Strunk kids, we learn the following:

Benny has taken over the digging. He strips off his windbreaker and tosses it to the little

girl to hold; then he spits on his hands and picks up the spade. He is someone or other on 159

TV, hunting for buried treasure. These tot-lives are nothing but a medley of such imitations.

As soon as they can speak, they start trying to chant the singing commercials. (12–13)

The new generations are thus formed by television and cinema culture, their actions and reactions conditioned by what they see on screens. The observation on this “cinematic” nation appears once more in a conversation between George and his colleagues at the cafeteria. One of the protagonist’s fellow professors, describing differences between the United States and Mexico, speaks about her experience of returning to America, where people “all seemed to be running, the way they do in the old silent newsreels” (69). Both mentioned comparisons show cinema in a rather negative light

– film aesthetics are used to ridicule; they are the epitome of shallowness and a lack of proper purpose.57

Even though George’s life seems to be a medley of various performances, which might imply that he does not have the privilege to be himself, certain roles have an invigorating effect on him. Being very conscious about the roles he is taking gives him strength to control his interlocutors, just as in the case of his academic lecture: “He draws strength from these smiles, these bright young eyes. For him this is one of the peak moments of the day. He feels brilliant, vital, challenging, slightly mysterious and, above all, foreign. His neat dark clothes, his white dress shirt and tie (the only tie in the room) are uncompromisingly alien from the aggressively virile informality of the young male students” (41). Despite being an invigorating experience, interaction with his students does not necessarily mean integration – George is the odd one out. His neatness represents the old, European (perhaps British only) organised world. Furthermore, this neatness is perhaps a sign of being effeminate in contrast with his students’ “virile informality”.

57 Throughout the lecture, there is one more reference to performance, which might also be considered as ridiculing the society George interacts with. When analysing Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan George is compared to “an attendant in a carnival booth, encouraging the crowd to throw and smash their targets; it’s all good clean fun” (51). Thus, the analysis of the novel is trivialized – it is compared to pure, thoughtless entertainment. 160

The lecture hall is not the only stage for George where he is looking for applause. The same readiness to act out in his role as a man whose life is perfectly fine appears on his way to the university cafeteria: “The Cafeteria is crammed. George stands at the door, looking around. Now that he is a public utility, the property of STSC, he is impatient to be used. He hates to see even a minute of himself being wasted. He starts to walk amongst the tables with a tentative smile; a forty-watt smile ready to be switched up to a hundred and fifty watts, just as soon as anyone asks for it” (34). Despite leaving the lecture hall, George is still performing his role and is longing to be spotted and given interest. His readiness to burst at others with positivity might also indicate his willingness to belong with this society, or at least to establish a closer bond to it. Let us look once again at how George is described in this scene: “a public utility”, “a property”, “impatient to be used”. All of these descriptions indicate a level of dehumanising passivity, as if George were an object, a mechanical doll the purpose of which is to entertain.

When George finally leaves the campus, we read one more description of him as a performer, this time in the convention of a circus artist:

A performer at the circus has no theatre-curtain to come down and hide him and thus

preserve the magic of the spell unbroken. Poised high on the trapeze under the blazing arcs,

he has flashed and pulsed like a star indeed. But now, grounded, unsparkling, unfollowed

by spotlights yet plainly visible to anyone who cares to look at him – they are all watching

the clowns – he hurries past the tiers of seats towards the exit. Nobody applauds him any

more. Very few spare him a single glance. (72)

The passage continues and the metaphor of a circus artist transforms itself once again into an image of a doll, or rather a robot, which, as its energy levels drop, becomes slower and slower –

Isherwood yet again here uses the slow-motion effect, focusing on each body part belonging to 161

George. Interestingly, the circus scene is a separate “paragraph” with spacing applied that makes it a separate “scene” in the novel. Because of this, it is also hard to establish which audience the author has in mind here – whether these are George’s colleagues with whom he has just had a vivid discussion about Americanness or whether they are his students.

Throughout the novel, we can find George’s reflections about being other. From these thoughts, we learn that George’s surroundings are allegedly aware of his otherness, which manifests itself in tiny little everyday things. These are situations where George is paradoxically not asked to play by the rules, but play the rebel. An example can be found at the beginning of the novel, when we get to know George’s neighbours, the Strunks. In an encounter with the Strunks’ offspring, George gets too emotional, which he is later ashamed of. However, the conflict between him and the kids seems to be like a lifelong vendetta:

George is ashamed of his roarings because they aren’t play-acting. He does genuinely lose

his temper and feels humiliated and sick to his stomach later. At the same time, he is quite

aware that the children want him to behave this way. They are actually willing him to do

it. If he should suddenly refuse to play the monster, and they could no longer provoke him,

they would have to look around for a substitute. The question – is this play-acting or does

he really hate us? – never occurs to them. (11)

Just as in the case of the lectures, the interaction between the neighbours and George is based on expectations towards the performed role.

Despite the fact that A Single Man was written in the US and came out at the time of rising gay liberation, the expectations towards George performing certain roles in the society seem to be similar to Isherwood’s experiences from the 1930s still in England. In his analysis of Isherwood’s queer themes, Victor Marsh observes that “[i]n the gentrified circles in which he [Isherwood] grew 162 up, even if his emerging non-conformist sexuality might have been discreetly tolerated, I suggest that duty would have required the display of a second layer of behaviour for public consumption

(80).” As a critic looking at Isherwood’s spiritual development, Marsh further discusses the writer would later “make great literary use of the trope of the ‘performing’ self, rehearsing different possibilities for identity” (95).

George’s alienation is not only visible through the variety of performing arts metaphors, but more significantly it is very much manifested via the main character’s personality split, which was noted in chapter three. A Single Man has a third-person omniscient narrator – what is important, though, is that throughout the whole novel we are dealing with George’s focalisation, which gives the feeling of distance, just as though the novel were in fact a first-person narration, but the narrator was actually able to step out of himself and observe the events externally. Yet again, George’s entrance onto the campus may serve as an example of this narrative strategy:

“Today, George is lucky. There is room for him on the lot nearest his classroom. George slips his parking card into the slot (thereby offering a piece of circumstantial evidence that he is George); the barrier rises in spastic mechanical jerks, and he dives in” (28). The narrator in this passage seems to be projecting George’s emotions and attitude towards the circumstances he finds himself in, but also mentions a very important question of George’s uncertain identity. It seems that the protagonist needs to remind himself who he actually is – George, a university professor, with characteristic reactions, responses, and life philosophy. The evidence of George existing yet again relates to the idea of role-play. In the previous chapters, we have seen how stepping in and out of the role is supported by the change of narrative style. Once George leaves his body, we can actually experience slow motion, and a number of close-ups in the form of meticulous descriptions of

George’s body parts. “And now, as he drives, it is as if some kind of autohypnosis exerts itself. 163

We see the face relax, the shoulders unhunch themselves, the body ease itself back into the seat”

(21). The autohypnosis, as George drives, leads to a number of George’s reflections on the current world and its politics and attitudes towards the Other (the queer), but as the reflections come to an end, we realise along with the narrator focalising George that his body has been performing its functions, whilst the mind drifted away into the aforesaid reflections:

God! Here we are, downtown already! George comes up dazed at the surface, realising

with shock that the chauffeur-figure has broken a record; never before has it managed to

get them this far entirely on its own. And this raises a disturbing question: is the chauffeur

steadily becoming more and more of an individual? Is it getting ready to take over much

larger areas of George’s life? (26)

In this scene George is in fact two separate entities – the word entity has certain significance here, as according to George, the chauffeur-figure, which is George’s bodily form, is not even considered to be a human being; it is more of a creature deprived of its humanity. Furthermore, the narrator mentions “them”, which assumedly is George’s conscious self and the body itself.

Interestingly, we can observe a predecessor of the driving scene in another of Isherwood’s novels, The World…. The protagonist, driven by rage at his partner, jumps into the car to escape the party they both went to. As he drives, he observes how his mind and body detach:

After that, everything came unstuck. The car bolted headlong with me down the road,

squealing and skidding around the curves. My left hand wanted to swing it over the edge

and plunge it to a blazing wreck in a gully; but my right hand refused, and was stronger.

My voice was yelling dirty insane words about the things it would do to Jane. My mind sat

away off somewhere, calm and strangely detached, disclaiming all responsibility for this

noisy madman, just watching, listening and waiting for what would happen next. 164

(11)

The description, apart from the split of the mind and the body, also deconstructs the body itself, the same way as in A Single Man. With the eyes of the first-person narrator we see the hands, one by one, then we hear the voice, the impression being that all of these components are separate. In terms of the narrative difference between the two passages, A Single Man is written in the present tense, whilst The World… keeps the past tense, which is more typically used for storytelling.

Both passages show a tendency of Isherwood’s protagonists to lose themselves in stressful or overwhelming situations. We have already seen a similar case in Prater Violet, where the new experience of filmmaking triggered a certain madness in the protagonist, who was entirely devoured by work and this was reflected in the change of the narrative style (a shift from the past to the present tense).

4.4 Isherwood, the Quaker and Vedantist

The process of the mind–body split itself might be related to another important aspect of

Isherwood’s life, namely his deep involvement with the Vedanta movement. Throughout his travels, particularly in the US, Isherwood explored his spirituality and had a chance to live in two religious communities. First of all, he lived for a year with a Quaker community, and later he devoted his time and energy to the Vedanta movement, which also contributed to his declaration of being a pacifist. Both of those experiences yet again put Isherwood in the position of being a stranger. In one of his memoirs, My Guru…, we can find Isherwood’s account of moving to

America and the feeling of alienation that accompanied it. This was channelled partially through the portrayal of Isherwood’s guru, Swami Prabhavananda: 165

How much more alone he was than I, exiled among us aliens! What a stifling little prison

1946 Ivar Avenue must be for a still vigorous, subtly intelligent man of powerful emotions,

cut off from everything he had known and loved in his youth. Imagine what it must mean

to have to accept our distasteful Western ways, our grossness of perception, and be resigned

to trying to teach us, every day until he died. Yes, this was a life sentence, stretching out

before him in its appalling tameness and sameness. How could he bear it? How had he

borne it so long? (70)

By studying Vedanta and the culture of the East, Isherwood steps into the double role of a stranger.

He is an alien, as he defines himself in the citation above, amongst Americans, but also seems to be detaching from “Western values”. He struggles in this detachment, as on the one hand he wants to get more deeply involved in Vedanta, but there is also the queer side of Isherwood that rebels against the direction Vedanta is leading him in.

Isherwood’s thoughts on being alien in the United States can also be found in his account of his time amongst the Quakers. He spent approximately a year supporting the community in running a hostel for refugees from countries taken over by Nazis during the Second World War.

His task there was to teach refugees English as well as “teach the American Way of Life”, both of which were supposed to prepare the refugees to start their independent lives in America. In his interactions with the refugees, Isherwood observes their reluctance to use the language of their new home as well as appropriate the new culture and religion. These seemed to be a reminder that they were aliens in this land. Similarly to his reflection on Swami, the alienation of refugees reminds Isherwood about his own, very similar state:

What they didn’t realize was the extent to which I, too, was an alien, in Quakerdom. But,

unlike them, I wanted to belong to it. Already I was using Quakerese in conversation with 166

my fellow workers: “Caroline, I have a concern.” “Caroline, does thee want me to take thy

letters to the mail?” I attended the Haverford Meeting House on Sundays and within a few

weeks found myself standing up and speaking. Playacting? Yes, partly. But playacting

about something that was entirely serious to me. There is no reason why you can’t equate

the Quaker Inner Light with the Hindu Atman. I was really talking about Vedanta to them,

but in their idiom, not mine. It was merely my self-consciousness which made this into a

theatrical performance. (82)

Interestingly, yet again Isherwood is a stranger in this community, but does not intentionally isolate himself from this environment and longs for inclusion. This state is very similar to what we have witnessed already in A Single Man – alienation combined with a craving to belong, and, as a result, stepping into yet another role, engaging oneself in a theatrical performance.

Whether a traveller in a foreign city, a writer amongst filmmakers, a homosexual, or a member of a religious community, Isherwood’s protagonists (and often himself) very often feel out of place, simultaneously demonstrating the ability to blend in and become part of the crowd.

This gives him an opportunity to closely observe his surroundings and describe them in his diaries, novels, and memoirs. The language used for these descriptions will very often depend on whether he is currently performing the role or rather impartially observing the course of events, particularly in situations where Isherwood or his protagonists enter a new environment and the feeling that accompanies them is that of detachment or insecurity. We have witnessed this in Prater Violet, where the protagonist gets involved in the process of filmmaking; in A Single Man, with the protagonist’s overall detachment to his neighbours, academic colleagues, and students; and in My

Guru… occasionally, for example, when the protagonist is just about to receive his holy order as a Vedanta monk: 167

Against my will, terrified, helplessly attracted, I cross the vast empty courtyard in

blazing sunlight, pull the bell chain – clang, the grim ironbound wicket opens. They

are all inside, in the shadows, cowled and black-robed, waiting for me. Within a

moment, they have stripped me of my clothes and forcibly robed me. I stammer the

irrevocable vow. I vanish into silence and an eternal indoors, trapped by the Trappists,

a monk! (90).

The quotation above is not a registration of an actual feeling, but rather a fantasy formulated in the protagonist’s mind triggered by the events to come. Isherwood related here to a film from 1936 called The Garden of Allah, which inspired this vision. The vision, as he claims, is inspired by

“anti-Catholic” horror tales resulting from his Protestant upbringing. In the provided context, we can see yet again how film contributes to the character’s imagination. 168

CHAPTER FIVE: FILM ADAPTATIONS OF ISHERWOOD’S TEXTS

There have been several attempts to adapt Isherwood’s texts to screen, some of them achieving artistic success, others turning out to be mediocre or even failures. The primary objective of this chapter will be to look at the adaptation strategies that reflect Isherwood’s visual style of writing.

The analysis of those Isherwood texts that made their way to the silver screen is also an opportunity to verify whether literary techniques identified as cinematic in the previous chapters of this thesis have their counterparts in the film adaptations.

Not counting the documentaries, there have been four films created on the basis of

Isherwood’s texts. It is no surprise that the dominant theme in Isherwood adaptations is his Berlin years. Two of the adaptations have been based on The Berlin Stories: the 1955 film I Am a Camera, directed by Henry Cornelius and written with John van Druten as an actual adaptation of a theatre play created on the basis of the novel, and Bob Fosse’s famous Cabaret (1976), which yet again comes from a stage adaptation of the same novel. The BBC production Christopher… (2011), directed by Geoffrey Sax, is an adaptation of Isherwood’s memoirs and presents Isherwood’s

Berlin experiences from the perspective of his homosexuality, but also shows us the inspirations for the writer’s most famous characters, Sally Bowles and Mr Norris. Last but not least, we have the Oscar-nominated adaptation of A Single Man by Tom Ford in 2009.58

The first two adaptations of Isherwood’s prose are based on The Berlin Stories/Goodbye…, the novel which brought Isherwood significant recognition. Both of them are actually an adaptation of a play that was written on the basis of elements taken from Isherwood’s account of Berlin. The

58 Interestingly, Jane Campion, the director of The Piano, had plans to adapt My Guru…, as she was very much interested by the guru–disciple dynamics. The project did not come to life in the end due to two reasons. In one interview (between Kathleen McHugh and Jane Campion), Campion states that she would have had problems with having a male figure at the centre of the story. Another more interesting reason from the perspective of this thesis is that “she couldn’t get the script right” despite several attempts (McHugh 158). The question is then whether it was the specific form of the novel that was difficult to film, or whether Campion herself was unable to get into the script the possibilities given by the novel. 169 novel has a specific structure, with a number of characters and focal points, which gives certain flexibility in constructing the film plot. We have two sections of A Berlin Diary, two sets of stories,

“The Nowaks” and “The Landauers”, each of them addressing a different aspect of the Berlin of the day. There is also a gay romance part called “On Reugen Island” and the most famous and characteristic story of “Sally Bowles”, who beside “Christopher Isherwood” becomes the protagonist of both film adaptations.

It was actually this section of the novel that inspired John van Druten to write the play I

Am a Camera, which then was adapted to the screen in 1955 by screenwriter John Collier and director Henry Cornelius. The film of the same title as the play starred Julie Harris as Sally Bowles and Laurence Harvey as “Christopher Isherwood”. Isherwood himself was initially asked to write the script for the movie, but had to decline due to other screenwriting engagements.

The overall critical reaction to this film adaptation was rather negative, highlighting the superficiality of this adaptation attempt, with notes on Harvey being miscast as “Isherwood” and disappearing in the light of Julie Harris’ overwhelmingly strong performance. Bosley Crowther from the New York Times expressed disappointment that much of Isherwood’s and Van Druten’s material (both from the novel and the play itself) was omitted in the adaptation.

Isherwood himself was not very fond of the movie, which he described in his diary: “June

23. Last night we went to a preview of I Am a Camera – a truly shocking and disgraceful mess. I must admit that John Collier is largely to blame – for a sloppy, confused script. But everything is awful – except for Julie, who was misdirected” (Isherwood, Diaries 1939-1960 509). He also shared his dislike of the film in a letter to John Lehmann “disgusting ooh-la-la, near pornographic trash – a shameful exhibition” (qtd. in Lehmann 92). 170

Because of the alleged flattening of the movie and Isherwood’s disappointment with the screenwriting work for this piece, the initial conclusions might be that there is little in the movie itself that could tell us about the actual work of Christopher Isherwood and his cinematic inspirations. Nevertheless, there are several focal points which will be helpful in this thesis. These will revolve around the use of the images and montage versus the use of words, that is, the voice- over (VO) in this adaptation. Another important aspect will be the frame in which the whole story has been put. We will also see how the authors of the film perceive the author, Christopher

Isherwood. Last but not least, the film was made in the 1950s, still heavily drawing on the aesthetics of classical Hollywood cinema and movie techniques, which might have influenced

Isherwood’s work.

The movie title uses the most famous words said by Isherwood’s protagonist, this quotation being an inseparable description of his work in the majority of critical responses to his prose. The story in this first adaptation of The Berlin Stories has a frame related to the said quotation, which is observing the world through the lens of the camera. The story of Sally Bowles is introduced through a literary event that the protagonist, “Chris Isherwood”, attends. He is surprised to learn that the author of the book discussed at the event is Sally Bowles. This discovery triggers recollections of the time spent together with Sally in Berlin. “Isherwood” starts his story, turning to the window and looking into the undefined and unknown distance (00:03:10–00:03:25). This is the moment of fade-in and fade-out transition to the intradiegetic level of the story, in which we witness “Isherwood’s” Berlin experiences. The party room changes into a Berlin apartment, where we also see “Isherwood” looking through a window. The same approach is used to close this level of storytelling. When Sally is leaving for Paris, Isherwood has the last glance at her through the window. The image of Sally getting into the cab transitions into Isherwood, the storyteller, looking 171 through the window pensively (01:31:58–01:32:20). According to Christian Quendler, the window signifies two levels of narration, the first one providing a “storytelling frame for his [Isherwood’s] remembered vision. The second one serves as a frame for focalization. (…) rather than viewing

Christopher’s story as a conventional flashback, the double-window frame draws attention to the active and passive dimensions of perception and memory” (87).

In his analysis, Quendler notices one more important affinity between the window element and Isherwood’s own thoughts on this motif: “The cinema to me is a window – a magic window that you look out of. You may look into the far world and see events enormously distant in time and place, and you may look over vast areas of landscape, as in extreme long shots, or again you may enjoy a closeness of observation which is quite impossible on stage” (qtd. in Quendler 80).

The scene of the Berlin street introduced by the means of transition is also a set of several cut snapshots of the city and the street at which Isherwood was living. All these are accompanied by the narrator’s voice complementing the images with the historical context of Germany and

Berlin during the Nazis’ rise to power. These snapshots are the equivalent of the novel description of Berlin’s streets, which are written in the present tense and give the sense of things happening here and now. This is contrasted with the contextual information about Nazi Germany stated in the past tense. The scene ends with an establishing shot and a zoom out, which leads back to our first- person narrator. The zoom out is on the Nazis kicking a Jew, showing perfectly the distance of the

“camera” that is escaping the scene that it was previously filming from a close perspective

(00:03:35–00:04:04). This seems to be a cue for the VO narration, which pronounces the eponymous “I am a camera”. Interestingly enough, the statement pronounced by the actor in the movie indicates a revelation – it is only at the moment of observation that “Isherwood” realises how important these words will be for defining his work. From the perspective of the recollecting 172

VO, “Isherwood” takes “refuge” in this phrase, not really getting involved in what is happening around him.

Now, there is yet another important aspect of this introductory scene adaptation – what we watch is accompanied by the narrator’s voice, which is usually considered a redundant feature for a movie, as the main language of narration is the images, music, and editing. Christian Quendler, in his analysis of I Am a Camera, recalls Isherwood’s views on the relationship between words and images and they seem to contrast with what we see in this film adaptation. According to

Isherwood, you “have to try your best to somehow oppose the words and the image” (Isherwood on Writing 233), which is more in line with Soviet montage theories when those oppositions were very much favoured. Quendler, however, challenges an assumption that could be easily made about the VO in this adaptation being a redundant element of the film. He highlights the fact that the VO is not as frequent as in movies of the same period, where the VO technique was very popular (83). This extra layer of narration gives complementary information that the viewer is unable to learn from the images. In other words, it is giving proper context to the story. This context or framework might be interpreted as the final developed version of the story. Perhaps, applying the narrative VO is a way of suggesting that “all of this” has in fact been “carefully developed, printed and fixed”. The narrator’s voice is present over several levels of narration, combining the recollections.

The image of the protagonist as thinking and writing in a very visual way is reinforced in the following scene of the movie, where we see “Isherwood’s” draft of the novel that he “has been struggling with” (00:04:13). The said draft is a mixture of scribblings and sketches and at first glance does not resemble a draft of a novel, but more like a movie storyboard (i.e., a visual counterpart of the screenplay). 173

The eponymous quotation is repeated by the protagonist yet again after he writes it down on a piece of paper – a scene interrupted by two other characters entering the set, Fritz and Frl.

Schroeder. The latter asks “Isherwood” about the meaning of the metaphor, after initially concerned about the protagonist’s well-being. She receives the explanation that the writer is “not a camera, but like one.” This artistic statement is then very explicitly paraphrased by Schroeder,

“I understand now, writing is photographs?” (00:04:56).

In the scene where “Isherwood” meets Sally, yet again the eponymous camera eye is being revoked. Through the VO we learn that Isherwood is not listening to his companion, Fritz, but rather focuses on the “innocent English girl”. He observes a quarrel between Sally and her fiancé with a “correct camera like detachment yet at the same time feeling sorry for her”. The narrator’s description is reflected in the camera language – we see how the camera slowly travels towards

Sally, leaving Fritz out of the mise en scène. We can see the argument and hear fragments of the conversation. Through a shot counter shot we see the observer’s face (00:10:50–00:11:08).

Whilst in the first adaptation of the Berlin Stories the camera gaze is shown through the window metaphor, in the second attempt to bring the novel to the silver screen, Cabaret, we observe the Berlin reality from the audience of the Kit Kat cabaret. Directed by Bob Fosse in 1972, the film was an appropriation of the already existing Broadway musical from 1966, which originated from Van Druten’s play I Am a Camera and Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, as discussed above. Because of that, the presence of Isherwood’s text in the film is diluted. The musical character of the adaptation leads to a bigger focus on the Kit Kat club and the performances, whilst in Isherwood’s texts the place is barely mentioned. However, contrary to the first film adaptation of the novel, this one gives more attention and depth to the topic of the Weimar Republic at the time of the Nazis’ rise to power. 174

In comparison with I Am a Camera, Cabaret was an artistic success, winning eight Oscars, including for best director (Bob Fosse), leading actress (Liza Minnelli), and supporting actor (Joel

Grey). According to Peter Parker, the second adaptation was more favourably perceived by

Isherwood, who after watching it for the second time said he “liked it much better” (670). The film’s commercial success also had an impact of Isherwood financially because of the royalties he received. It also increased his popularity as a writer, giving him a new group of readers.

Undoubtedly, the most characteristic element of this adaptation is its genre. The fact that Cabaret is a musical gives a number of new opportunities to depict the picture of Nazi Berlin created by

Isherwood in his novels and diaries. Almost all of the songs are performed in the Kit Kat club, from the cabaret stage – so a theatrical, confined space. This is why, as mentioned before, we can speak about detachment from a new perspective. All of the songs comment on the events presented outside the cabaret. Despite their playful character, the songs and stage performances talk about profound changes in German society. There is a certain level of detachment in this storytelling, though. First, it is the parodistic character of the songs that gives the feeling of distance. Secondly, these are addressed to the audience, who are safely seated on the other side of the club. They are seeking entertainment, but seemingly are not part of the show. At first glance, we might think that the audience is the embodiment of Isherwood’s character – simple observing and not getting involved. This, however, will later be verified in the change of the story applied by the makers of the film, where the protagonist, Brian, is several times a part of political quarrels. Interestingly, his involvement in the Berlin reality is reflected in the camera movements. When returning to Berlin after a field trip to the country and observing how intensely the nation has been infiltrated with

Nazi propaganda, Brian cannot stand it anymore and engages in a quarrel with Nazi scouts who are promoting the party on the street. At this moment, we see Brian’s face portrayed by a handheld 175 camera (01:23:33-01:23:37). Thus, the image we see is not stable, but chaotic and shaken. The camera is no longer observing from a safe distance, but actively involved in the events; it is in the middle of the action and is affected by it.

The way the songs are introduced in the film is very much in line with Isherwood’s views on cinema, where the image complements the word and vice versa. Cabaret is abundant in numerous cross-cuts, which resemble the Soviet montage style of Sergei Eisenstein, where seemingly unrelated images make meaningful film constructs and convey very strong messages.

The most memorable of such scenes is the one in which the club manager, after throwing some

Nazis out of the venue, is being beaten by them (00:21:15-00:23:39). This scene of revenge is introduced by Sally and Brian’s seemingly innocent game next to the railway tracks. When a train approaches and makes a lot of sound, Sally screams her lungs out and invites Brian to do the same, convincing him that it is a very liberating experience and he would feel marvellous about it. After hesitating briefly, Brian decides to engage in the game. With his scream and the noise made by the train, we move to the cabaret stage and see performers dressed in traditional Bavarian outfits performing a folk dance, where the choreography is based on giving each other a slap on the cheek.

With the slap we are taken to the back entrance of the club, where the manager is being beaten by the Nazis. In the next few seconds of the movie we will see the slaps alternating with the kicks and punches, all of which are glued together with the cheerful music of the folk song. At the end of the scene, once the song and the beating are done, we return to Sally and Brian just after Brian’s scream and the passing of the train. Thus, we have three story levels in this one scene, all bound together by the music. The cheerfulness of the folk song in combination with the beating give a stunning image of political violence happening behind society’s back, as they prefer to entertain themselves rather that scrutinise the actions of the Nazis. 176

Yet another scene with alternating images from the stage and reality is visible at the very beginning of the movie, during the opening song (00:02:09-00:07:02). The master of ceremony (MC) welcomes the guests (“Welcome Stranger”) to the cabaret, saying, “Leave your troubles outside.

Here, life is beautiful, the girls are beautiful, even the orchestra is beautiful.” We first see the MC through a reflection in a distorted mirror from the club. A few seconds later, as he sings the song, we see Brian passing through the train and stepping out into the station. Yet another quick return to the stage and afterwards we see the Berlin street in snapshots – as Brian walks along the platform, we see a couple of random faces of passersby. The faces of people from the street are preceded by a similar take on the cabaret audience and performers – a quick glimpse on Berlin’s bohemian society. This combination of the ordinary and extraordinary through the clash of two different aesthetics (stage reality and real-life stories) is yet another sophisticated way to talk about the diversity of 1930s Berlin. At the end of the movie (01:56:47-01:57:27), we return to the distorted image of society through the lens of the cabaret mirror. As the camera travels along the reflections in the mirror, we see more and more swastikas dominating the “social landscape”.

The introductory scene is also important in relation to Isherwood’s “I am a camera” statement from the novel, which is further explored in the first adaptation of The Berlin Novels.

Brian’s first glance at Berlin is through the train window, which might be a very loose way to relate to the initial scene from the novel, where Isherwood is observing a Berlin street from his apartment window. This is further confirmed in the mentioned snapshots, which suggest the way in which the character is perceiving the surrounding reality. Taking pictures is the way to remember (record) the place and then perhaps assess it.

Yet another adaptation taking us back to Isherwood’s Berlin years, is Christopher…, the latest movie based on Isherwood’s texts. This adaptation of one of Isherwood’s memoirs was made 177 in 2011, directed by Geoffrey Sax, and starring Matt Smith as Isherwood. As preparation for the role, Smith visited Isherwood’s lifelong partner Don Bachardy. The film was positively reviewed by the critics, but as a television production did not make a significant artistic impact (at least is comparison with Cabaret or A Single Man) with one win at the LGBT film festival Outflix, several nominations from the Broadcasting Press Guild Awards, and one from the Royal Television

Society.

As mentioned in the previous chapters, Christopher… is a memoir, a compilation and rewriting of memories collected in the diaries. The compiled recollections are presented from the perspective of the writer’s homosexuality. This is exactly what we are getting at the beginning of the movie – one of the first shots is an establishing shot that shows a writer’s study and then a travelling one, where the camera goes along the bookshelf observing the titles that Isherwood has written in his life. The scene is juxtaposed with the VO of the writer and the narrator of the intradiegetic level of the film. As the writer reminisces about what his Berlin years meant to him, we learn, just as in its literary original, that to Isherwood “Berlin meant boys” (00:00:38). Similarly to I Am a Camera, the story is told on two diegetic levels: the extradiegetic one where we see the writer, but most of all listen to his comments, and the intradiegetic one where the story told by the writer from the extradiegetic level. The VO has the editing power that glues sometimes loosely connected events from Isherwood’s life to each other. At one of the points, we actually hear a conversation between Isherwood and his brother Richard, in which the latter says “I suppose that being a writer you want to tidy things up and make it make sense, but things never do make sense do they” (01:14:50). The statement might be perhaps understood as a paraphrasing of the “I am a camera” statement from Goodbye…. The necessity of tidying up things as a writerly attribute is the “careful editing, printing and fixing” of the material captured by the camera. Several minutes 178 later in the movie, we see how our narrator takes out an album entitled Snapshots, yet another source of recollections and inspirations for the story to be completed (00:31:21).

Since the memoir comments on a number of events from the time Isherwood was in

Germany, and therefore several books he has written on that matter, we encounter “Isherwood” character prototypes without whom we would not read about Mr Norris, nor Sally Bowles.

As the memoirs in question refer to the events described in Berlin Stories, we can see several affinities between Christopher… and The Berlin Stories film adaptations. First of all, I Am a Camera and Christopher… both use VO to give the story the character of recollection.

Christopher… seems also to be inspired by the opening scenes of Cabaret. Once we enter the intradiegetic level of storytelling, the first image we see is of Jean Ross (the prototype for Sally

Bowles) sing a song in a cabaret (00:00:45). The scene is cross-cut with another one where

Isherwood travels by train to Berlin. Although not as complex and meaningful as in Bob Fosse’s movie, the scene conceptually resembles the 1976 original.

One noticeable motif in relation to camerawork is voyeurism – there are a number of scenes throughout the movie when the camera is observing the characters from a distance or a strange perspective (00:09:30, 00:20:33). Because of this, we have the feeling of somebody secretly watching the characters. One of the explanations for why such a technique was used throughout the movie is the fact that we are watching a recollection, therefore the camera is distant. Another one might be related to the main motif/perspective from which Isherwood is looking at his life and his homosexuality. The journey for boys “Isherwood” makes is full of lust and hidden glances of men looking for a hook-up.

The film also shows Isherwood as a meticulous observer. In one of the initial scenes, where he meets Gerald Hamilton (the prototype for Mr Norris), we can see a close-up of Hamilton’s 179 forehead, revealing that he is wearing a wig (00:05:49). In Mr Norris… we have a pretty similar close-up in the form of a very detailed description of Norris’s face:

There was no mistaking his warmth. He had a large blunt fleshy nose and a chin which

seemed to have slipped sideways. It was like a broken concertina. When he spoke, it jerked

crooked in the most curious fashion and a deep cleft dimple like a wound surprisingly

appeared in the side of it. Above his ripe red cheeks, his forehead was sculpturally white,

like marble. A queerly cut fringe of dark grey hair lay across it, compact, thick, and heavy.

After a moment’s examination, I realized, with extreme interest, that he was wearing a wig.

(3)

Yet another motif that can be observed in the movie is the heavy use of mirrors, which become additional lenses for the camera. The mirror scenes appear in Isherwood’s interactions with the people who have shaped his life and work: his mother (00:02:37), Jean Ross (00:28:20), Gerald

Hamilton (00:13:40). As mentioned in chapter three, the mirror metaphor was used by Isherwood in Down There… to recall his memories, which became a trigger for the story to be continued.

Perhaps the images captured in various mirrors throughout the film adaptation of Christopher… should be treated as snapshots that then served as material for his novels.

After Cabaret, another critically acclaimed adaptation that received Academy Award nominations was A Single Man, a 2009 movie by Tom Ford. Interestingly, the adaptation came many years after Isherwood’s death, but was consulted on during the production with Don

Bachardy (see film credits at 01:30:55). Isherwood’s lifelong partner even has his cameo in the adaptation, playing one of George’s academic colleagues (01:18:16–01:18:21). Ford’s adaptation emphasises the flow of time and the fact that the novel is actually an account of the last 24 hours of George’s life. Throughout the film we see numerous close-ups on the clock and a particular 180 hour. The clock close-up and the given hours serve as a certain establishing shot for the film, introducing us to important events that will capture the essence of George’s struggle through his daily life. The clock theme is not only visible, but also audible. Right after the dream George has about reuniting with his partner, he is woken up by the sounds of the external word (his neighbours). What we hear immediately after is the clock ticking – the day has just started for

George (00:03:05). At the very end of the movie, when George is having a stroke, at the moment of his death we hear the distinct sound of the clock ticking for the last time and then stopping – right after we see Jim entering the room to look at his partner’s dead body (01:28:48). This is preceded by a conversation he has with his student Kenny. When Kenny asks George about the time, the answer he gets is, “I don’t know, my watch seems to have stopped” (01:23:00).

The film adaptation of A Single Man offers us a different beginning than the novel itself, focusing on George’s partner’s death. The credit scene shows George immersed in water going down to the bottom of the ocean, in another cross-cut scene he is diving – because of the water the scene has the feeling of slow-motion pictures and a slightly a dreamlike atmosphere. The dream is interrupted by the sharp intrusion of the sound of a car crash and yet again we move to another dreamlike scene where Jim, George’s partner, lies dead on the ground next to his car. George is walking towards Jim to lie down next to his partner and give him a farewell kiss. The scene of death and imagined reunion is a frame that Ford puts to his story – the movie begins with one death

(Jim’s) and ends with another (George’s), and similar techniques are used to show these characters pass away.

From this mixture of imagined scenes and recollections, we move to the beginning described in the novel, and are initiated by the words pronounced off the screen: “waking up begins with saying ‘am’ and ‘now’” (00:03:10). Yet again in an adaptation of Isherwood’s text, the viewer 181 is experiencing the use of a VO – and here undoubtedly the use of this technique has its justification. As described in other chapters touching on this particular novel, A Single Man presents a detached protagonist. In the scenes where George drifts away into his thoughts, the narrator clearly states that what the reader follows is just George’s body, which cannot even be called a human being. This detachment in the film is partially achieved by the VO, which by definition is to a certain extent alien to the mise en scène, as we cannot see the one whose voice we can hear, even if we know whose voice it is. In the novel, where the third person narrator is detached, even in the moments of George’s focalisation we can still see the division into his physical and spiritual self, which unite only in specific moments. In his movie, Tom Ford decides to give this story a more personal touch, as the VO is a first-person narration and very often related to George’s recollections of his life with Jim. There is still detachment in George’s attitude, but it seems to be more human than in the novel.

In the first pages of the novel, we read about the formation of George – an unknown creature, step by step becoming a person with a name, looks, and a set of behaviours: “But meanwhile the cortex, the grim disciplinarian, has taken its place at the central controls and has been testing them, one after another; the legs stretch, the lower back is arched, the fingers clench and relax. And now, over the entire intercommunication-system, is issued the first general order of the day: UP” (1). As mentioned in another chapter, at this stage George is not even presented as one entity – he is fragmented, it feels as though each body part is an entity on its own. We observe it with a close-up perspective and this is exactly how Tom Ford decided to present it in the film itself: at approximately 00:03:34 we start witnessing George’s preparation for the day, which starts from getting out of bed (a close-up on the feet on the carpet), shaving (the cheeks and chin), taking pills (hands). The scene reflecting the formation of George is reinforced by the VO: 182

“it takes time for me in the morning to become George” (00:04:27). This is juxtaposed with a bird’s-eye view of a hand opening a drawer. The contents of the drawer – socks, vests, underwear

– are perfectly arranged in sections. This is the film counterpart of the scene where George is being

“assembled” to be ready for the external world. The scene ends with the VO saying, “I know fully what part I’m supposed to play” (00:04:44) and a camera ride along George’s body from top to bottom – all shown as his reflection in the mirror. Therefore, from a technical point of view, the process of George’s completion is shown by changing the camera angle from a series of close-ups to travelling shots.

Isherwood’s novel, as well as its film adaptation, present certain intrusions of the external world into George’s life. These unwanted interactions can be very cinematic in their nature, as they are sudden and disrupt the flow of events. This is why they resemble a cinematic montage

(sound and image). One such interruption is the sound of a ringing phone. In this scene (00:07:20) we hear the ringing phone whilst George looks back from a bookshelf at the device. In the meantime we already hear George’s VO talking on the phone. It turns out that the sound of the phone is simultaneously the sound in the diegetic level of the story (George now) and the recollection, which we are witnessing in the following scene, where George learns about his partner’s death. Similar sound editing techniques have been described in the previous chapters when it comes to Prater Violet and A Single Man (George recollecting on the nursery rhyme).59

The novel version of A Single Man uses third-person narration and the concept of defragmentation to show George’s distance towards the external role, and this is to a certain extent reflected in the film as described above, but Tom Ford has a number of cinematic techniques available to reinforce this feeling. The most recurrent and visible is the use of slow motion, which

59 See page 129 of this thesis. 183 appears when George observes the surrounding reality. One of the first scenes is when George is sitting on the toilet and peeping through the window at his neighbours. The scene is initiated by the sounds, which seem to be interrupting George. Intrigued by the noise outside, he looks at the yard and sees his neighbours, seemingly an ordinary, happy suburban family. We see children playing in the garden, a housewife showing her husband off to work. This idyllic scene is infested by something dark that George observes – a butterfly lands on a child’s hands, who rubs his palms, turning the beautiful creature into pieces (00:11:15–00:12:10).60 What Ford achieves in this scene is twofold: on the one hand, it shows George’s distance towards everything outside – the slow motion and background music mute the observed characters, making them somehow intangible and remote, and only selected sounds seem reach George, which are not pleasant, but rather irritating sounds that intrude on George’s world of grief. On the other hand, the scene also smuggles in the protagonist’s reflections on and perceptions of his neighbours as savages, which we can find in the novel:

They arrive in mixed groups – from which nearly all of the boys break away at once,

however, to take part in the masculine hour of ball playing. They shout loudly and harshly

to each other, and kick and leap and catch with arrogant grace. When the ball lands in a

yard, they trample flowers, scramble over rock-gardens, burst into patios without even a

thought of apology … The girls sit out on the porches, giggling together. Their eyes are

always on the boys, and they will do the weirdest things to attract their attention; (13)

60 This topic returns at when George interacts with one of the Strunk girls. What initially seems to be a conversation with an innocent girl has its twist when the child shows George her treasure: a scorpion in a jar called Ben Hur. The girl tells the story of how the scorpion is fed on a daily basis with different living creatures, which is treated by the girl and her siblings as entertainment. The jar even has artificial columns in it so that it resembles the Colosseum. This interaction ends with the girl saying, “Daddy says he wants to throw you into the Colosseum” (00:36:47-00:37:52). 184

There is something tribal in society seen through George’s eyes. Perhaps this is only the annoyance of a pedantic homosexual who is not able to relate to the rules of families with children, whereas in Ford’s lens the perception of tribalism is reinforced. The slow-motion reflective scene is ended with the shot counter shot described in chapter three of this thesis (page 130) when George’s eyes meet Mrs Strunk’s and she waves at him. Dismayed at her discovering him peeping through the window, he quickly hides behind the curtain to escape from her eyesight. This is the moment when the music illustrating the slow motion as well as the tempo of the footage returns to normal speed.

George is “awaken” from his daydream.

Yet another interesting slow-motion scene reflecting George’s detachment is at 00:15:46 – we observe George driving his car and observing people on the street. There is a shot counter shot of George and the Strunk boy dressed as a Native American and aiming at George with his bow.

George “plays the game along” and shoots back with an imagined gun made out of his hand. Since all of this is happening in slow motion, it can be deduced that what we see is the “robot” George interacting with the outside world, the “it” from the novel which cannot really be called George.

The continuation of the car ride scene is a tracking shot of George entering the campus and walking along the alleyway against a current of people flowing out of the building, which is yet another highlight Ford uses to show how alienated George is in his bereavement of his lost partner

(00:17:02). As much as it is possible, the faces of all of the people are blurred as there is a deep focus on George’s back. Perhaps this technique corresponds to the way Isherwood described a similar moment in the novel, where George is surrounded by students: “And now, all around

George, approaching him, crossing his path from every direction, is the male and female raw material which is fed daily into this factory, along the conveyor-belts of the freeways, to be processed, packed and placed on the market” (32). In this passage, the students are being 185 dehumanised and commodified by calling them “raw material”. Ford does the same with the deep focus technique, where the blurred faces suggest somehow that the characters in the mise en scène are not fully visible and developed, but merely in the background of George’s story.

An important scene in the novel described in chapter three is the moment when George, along with his academic colleague, Grant,61 are walking through the campus (00:18:47–00:19:44).

As they are having their discussion on politics, George observes two boys playing on the tennis court. As stated before, the technical solutions applied in the film adaptation to capture the tension of this moment are slow motion and close-ups.62 Apart from what has been said about the scene in chapter three, there is one important observation to be made on Ford’s depiction of this conversation. As we know during the scene, George is focused on the young men playing, not really aware of what debate he is involved in, but in the film, shards of the discussion seem to reach George’s consciousness, which results in a peculiar intrusion into the narrative. As his colleague tries to convince George of the importance of bomb shelters in case of a communist attack, George imagines Grant and his family surrounded by livestock standing in such a shelter with the floor covered in hay. This snapshot could be a reference to Grant Wood’s painting

American Gothic. Simultaneously, such an absurd juxtaposition of images leads us to the tradition of Soviet montage of attraction. Thus, in this scene we not only have slow motion to show George’s detachment, but also a montage of attractions to show how remote the preoccupations of the surrounding people are to the protagonist.

61 In the novel called Russ Dreyer. 62 Interestingly, this is not the only scene where this solution is applied. We see it at approximately at 00:17:23 when George talks to one of the university secretaries. Their discussion seems to be a background to what the camera focuses on – we see a series of close-ups again, this time on the mouth, eyes, and neck of George’s interlocutor. The scene with the secretary is a combination of slow motion and close-ups once again, showing that George is absentminded and does not really care for his surroundings. We hear the conversation, but our focus is on what George looks at, which is shown in a series of close-ups on the secretary. A very similar scene has been described in chapter four where we witness the tennis players. 186

From slow motion, let us move to some other techniques that Ford uses in his movie to suggest the state that George is in. There are scenes where the camera angle suggests a voyeur perspective, for example, the moment George sits alone in his office at the university – the camera is not fully able to see him, it is looking through the door frame (00:28:20).63 The perspective of not being able to get into the same room as the protagonist might be a visual attempt to present

George’s confinement in this world. In the scene following his visit to the campus, we see George in the bank, emptying the box in a vault – yet again George is in a room “behind bars” (00:33:47).

A similar perspective is also used when George is observed in his house, or rather through the windows of his house (01:09:46).

Since A Single Man takes place in California, Ford also uses this opportunity to smuggle in some cinematic references to the film that deserve attention. The film focuses on the visual beauty of the surroundings – one of the scenes not taken from the novel is a conversation George has in front of a liquor store with a man who attracts his attention (00:40:53–00:45:40). Carlos, as we discover the man is called, very much resembles James Dean and even admits that he asked his mother for a haircut to resemble the film star. Next to the store, we see a giant billboard of

Hitchcock’s Psycho. Janet Jason Leigh (playing Marion in the film) looks at the viewers with her eyes wide open and full of terror. When George arrives at the parking lot and parks his car, we get the impression of the famous drive-in theatres of the 1950s. In his article “Ford Does Isherwood”,

Kyle Stevens discusses the impact of Psycho on American society in the context of Ford’s movie:

Ford’s A Single Man self reflexively considers film’s impact on relations of sexual desire

and perception. Isherwood’s novel is very much concerned with the effects of living in Los

Angeles in 1962. Ford amends this to include “the dream factory” as L.A.’s original basis

63 Perhaps the voyeur is Kenny, George’s student, who in the next scene asks him, “Are you going somewhere professor? I saw you cleaning out your office” (00:31:28). 187

via a billboard still from a 1960s watershed, Psycho, of heroin Marion gazing terrified

directly forward as she is being murdered as the object of the abject Norman Bates’s sexual

desire … Psycho changed how America thought about looking and sexual desire,

bespeaking the anxiety – and consequent titillation – over desire, beauty, gender identity,

detection and visibility. (Berg and Freeman, The American Isherwood 84)

Stevens further discusses the character of the conversation between the male hustler and George.

Just as Hitchcock frequently aligned spectators’ perspectives with those of heterosexual

male heroes as they gazed at women’s bodies, Ford aligns us with George through another

series of cuts; we gaze with him at Carlos’s beauty in lingering shots of his eyes and lips.

But if Norman Bates needed a peephole (which is, Psycho suggests, part of his problem),

here none is needed, looking erotically at a man is already taboo. (Berg and Freeman, The

American Isherwood 84)

Not only is the sexual character of this encounter expressed through the editing and the gaze, but also certain metaphorical techniques used during the Hays Code era, which forbade scenes of a sexual character due to their alleged indecency.64 During the conversation, the characters are smoking cigarettes (00:41:50), and one is lighting a cigarette for the other. In times when sexuality was not explicit in cinema, such scenes usually stood for sex. Interestingly, further in the film we witness another “cigarette” scene, this time with George’s friend Charlotte. George lights a cigarette for her and himself as they are lying on the carpet (01:00:47). Just before this happens there is a very suggestive sexual tension between the characters, but as a result of Charlotte’s

64 It was different when the Motion Picture Production Code prohibited impure love unless the woman later threw herself under a train or otherwise demonstrated the ill effects of sexual sin. Even married couples were not free to disport themselves on screen. According to the overseers of morality, “even within the limits of pure love, certain facts have been universally regarded by lawmakers as outside the limits of safe presentation.” Thin and long and easily slipped between pursed red lips, cigarettes were safe metaphors then. (https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/08/movies/film-history-is-written-in-smoke.html) Accessed: 2018-25 188 feelings towards George. This is reflected in every cut in the scene – we first see one cigarette being lit, but then there is a cut to two cigarettes. Perhaps this is just Ford focusing on the beauty of the moment, but it might also be a play on the cinematic cigarette theme and two points of view

– it is just a cigarette and a separate cigarette for George, who treats Charlotte as his friend, whilst for Charlotte this is a moment of union and the promise of sex. In fact, Ford, as a filmmaker rich in film experiences of further decades, modifies the hidden message of sex in both cigarette scenes.

They are not sex, they are the promise of sex, something tangible but not to be reached because of the state George is in. He is a single man, abandoned by his partner but still faithful to him. This is why his encounter with Carlos is just a flirtatious talk, and the time spent with Charlotte is no more than a friendly cuddle. In the dialogue following the close-ups of the cigarettes, Ford gives us a quotation mark, reminding the viewers they have seen similar scenes in a number of movies:

Charlotte: Very smooth cigarette move.

George: I’ve always wanted to do that.

We can of course only assume why George always wanted to do that, but the feeling is very strong and George’s line seems now almost like a cliché – this is something George has seen somewhere, a powerful image that he remembered, something that seemed appealing enough to replicate it. It must have been in cinema.

Psycho returns one more time, in an amusing scene, where George, organised as he is, tries to figure out the best place in his house to commit suicide in a way not to stain the place too much.

One of his choices is the bathroom shower – he gets into the bathtub and slides over the curtain so we can only see his shadow, just as in one of the famous murder scenes (0:50:54).

The analysis of the above novels and their adaptations has brought several common or recurrent points in the appropriation strategies. First of all, we can find VO in almost all of the 189 films. This technique is an easy way to separate Isherwood – the narrator from Isherwood – the protagonist or to show George’s internal monologue versus the character he is playing for society.

In every film we can find a case of adaptation, where cinematic descriptions in the novels have become film techniques. These instances are predominantly detailed descriptions that become close-ups, but also slow-motion effects and cross-cutting.

It is also probably worth noting that Isherwood’s camera style of “passive recording” and

“not thinking” gave way to artistic forms that have transformed the documentary style of

Isherwood’s accounts into seemingly new, more vivid and attractive forms. His account of Berlin and encounters with Sally have been turned into a theatrical play and then a grotesque adaptation of it. Ultimately The Berlin Stories have morphed into a musical, which seems to be the most unconventional way of portraying Nazi Berlin. A Single Man, on the other hand, has been turned into a very poetic film that puts a strong focus on narrating with slow motion, music, and lens and colour changes.

190

CONCLUSION

The aim of this thesis was to analyse narrative cinematic traces in the works of Christopher

Isherwood, who as a person fascinated by cinema from his early years and working in the film industry as a screenwriter might have been influenced by cinematic aesthetics to the extent that it permeated through his texts. In one of his most famous novels, Isherwood compared his narrator to a camera “passively recording [and] not thinking”, which has been a direction and an invitation to explore the topic of the film–literature relation in Isherwood’s prose. This thesis tried not only to answer the question on when, where, and how exactly film aesthetics are used in Isherwood’s work, but also what the reasons for using such elements are.

The first step to approaching the topic was to look at the history of cinema and the development of its techniques in the twentieth century until Isherwood’s death in 1986. This historical account allowed us to list major film techniques that were used by twentieth century writers who employed film style in their narration, Christopher Isherwood among them. Attention was also given to the film script as a form intermediate between literature and film and as the film’s imperfect reflection, therefore corresponding to Isherwood’s description of his own work as needing “careful developing, printing, fixing”. Furthermore, since the film industry employed many novelists to write for the silver screen, a significant part of this subchapter was related to the history of writers working for Hollywood, which helped us to understand the challenges they had in adapting the way they worked to meet the requirements of the industry. These efforts were described by many writers including Isherwood in the so-called Hollywood novel genre also discussed in this section. Another important part in the theoretical chapter was devoted to the relationship of cinema and literature, where the latter became a rich source of stories to be told via the new medium, while the former gradually as it became more and more popular, influenced the imagination of its audiences, many writers among them. Literary narration had thus started to use 191 the language of film, which has been discussed with examples from several writers other than

Isherwood in order to demonstrate the kinds of techniques that could be expected in the writings of the author analysed in this thesis. Among these techniques, editing has been highlighted as one of the most impactful that can be found in Isherwood’s works.

In the second chapter we looked closely at Isherwood’s life and an overview of his work focusing particularly on those aspects, which could be linked to the cinematic character of his texts. We traced Isherwood’s exposure to the film medium, starting from his childhood and adolescent years to his work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. In the chapter we also looked at

Prater Violet, which is Isherwood’s text dedicated to the film industry and contains the most direct cinematic references as well as is his most comprehensive picture of the film industry. Prater

Violet is also the best novel to start the analysis with, as it has a clear division into two narrative parts that are distinct from one another. The first part corresponds to the preproduction stage of the eponymous film and shows little cinematic traces, while the second part describes the production of the film and is where we can see how cinematic language is used in action but also leads us to the important points discussed in further chapters, namely that the language of film might be used to describe states of confusion and alienation of Isherwood’s characters.

Prater Violet is a very direct representation of cinematic influences in Isherwood’s prose, since it talks about the film industry and describes the creative process of making the film.

However, there are many Isherwood titles which show affinities with film in a more indirect way that have been explored in chapter three. The reference to the camera style in the quotation from

Goodbye…, so often used by critics and regretted by Isherwood as a theme which labelled and constrained the reading of his texts, was used as a starting point for a discussion on the cinematic qualities of Isherwood’s prose. However, the focus was put not only on the passive character of 192 the camera, but rather on the need for “developing, printing, fixing”. Isherwood has been presented as a writer who constantly reinvented himself and rewrote his texts, whether they were novels created on the basis of his diaries or memoirs that attempted to give a new frame to Isherwood’s recollections. All of these texts have been treated as raw material, footage that needs editing. We have looked at how Isherwood, in the process of autobiography creation, incorporates his recorded memories into new texts and how this process may resemble film editing. The process of autobiography creation and recollections has been discussed from yet another cinematic, or, in more general terms, visual perspective, namely the metaphor of a mirror, which was frequently used by Isherwood in his texts.

If chapter three was all about the use of cinematic techniques to help introduce recollections in Isherwood’s texts, chapter four explored another important reason why cinematic techniques appeared in so many of his works. Yet again, the statement “I am a camera” was recalled there, this time focusing more on the distance and detachment that the camera-like style in Goodbye… suggested. We discussed various instances, where the cinematic techniques, often manifesting themselves in the present tense and resembling film script language, were used to depict states of discomfort, confusion, and distance in Isherwood’s protagonists. This was first observed already in chapter two, when we read about “Isherwood’s” immersion in the film production process, where the description of this new experience required a narrative style entirely different from the rest of the novel. Chapter four looked for similar narrative solutions in Isherwood’s other texts and found them when looking at the writer from the perspective of his interactions with different groups of people as a foreigner, homosexual, and Vedantist.

Last but not least, we have looked at how filmmakers have read Isherwood and verified which of the “cinematic” techniques used originally by the writer in his diaries, memoirs, and 193 novels found their way to the silver screen, and which had to be further modified or were non- adaptable. We were also able to observe how the “camera quality” of Isherwood’s observations was portrayed by filmmakers in the adaptations of the texts relating his experiences in Berlin.

Furthermore, as mentioned in the last chapter, Isherwood’s documentary style evolved in the film adaptations into different subgenres. What was passively recorded has finally been edited, fixed, and transformed into such forms as a musical. Despite such a significant modification, we can say that the most famous adaptation of Isherwood’s prose, Cabaret, has remained faithful to the theme of the passive camera, which has been incorporated into the film and juxtaposed with the cabaret songs functioning as a certain voice-over commenting on the footage.

The picture of Isherwood we get from the above-analysed aspects is that of a writer who benefited from his involvement in the film industry in terms of the style and themes in his texts.

The use of film language, particularly of the present tense combined with various close-ups, helped

Isherwood to highlight the change of discourse within the text and the characters’ moods and attitudes in Prater Violet and A Single Man. Film editing techniques proved to be very useful in arranging his diary material and incorporating it into the narrative in Down There…,

Christopher…, and My Guru…. This technique seems to be particularly useful when taking into consideration Isherwood’s interest in reinventing and rewriting his works. However, it is important to note that the elements identified above should be treated as traces and not as major characteristics defining Isherwood’s style. These are more auxiliary strategies that helped

Isherwood to diversify the structure of his text and give proper importance to certain events and character attitudes.

There are certainly elements in this thesis that have not been explored to their full potential, and those could shed some new light on the cinematic strategies used by Isherwood. First of all, 194 an in-depth comparison between specific diary entries and how these have been transformed into

Isherwood’s novels is called for. This thesis has merely traced the commentaries in the memoirs on how information from the diaries was transformed by Isherwood in the novels. In other words, we do have Isherwood’s insights on the creative process of writing a novel and intentionally modifying his recollections, but there is little diary material that has been analysed apart from what was visibly edited in the text of the memoirs. I considered these visible elements most valuable as they stand out from the text they have been incorporated into. My assumption here is that other diary entries that have been seamlessly blended into the text would not show us cinematic quality.

Furthermore, Isherwood’s literary style has been analysed here from the perspective of a recurrent theme, namely cinematic aesthetics. My interest was to show those elements and highlight their recurrence throughout the author’s life. However, we must not forget that Isherwood’s writing could also be perceived linearly by looking at how its evolution was influenced by selected events and attitudes occurring in his life, such as his move from England to Berlin and then to the United

States, the Gay Liberation years, and his immersion into Vedantism and literary involvement and support of the movement. Looking at how his style and priorities evolved along those themes could bring additional value to and understanding of his cinematic-like style.

195

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