Breakfast at the Prater: Christopher Isherwood, His Women and Men

Home , Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, I Am a Camera, John Van Druten, Liza Minnelli, Prater Violet

Gian Piero Piretto

My intention is to analyze Christopher Isherwood’s novel Prater Violet1 in connection with a group of books, plays and films that, despite their distance in genre, time and space, provide a basis for an interactive investigation of Isherwood’s novel.2 In Berlin Stories, imagining her own destiny and that of her friend Chris, a fictionalized version of the author, Sally Bowles tells Chris: “We two old tramps are going to be the most marvelous novelist and the greatest actress in the world”.3 Nobody, at the moment of her remark, would have agreed with her, and no-one would have been inclined to confirm her optimistic view. Still, Chris and Sally are determined to face both life and a world turning Nazi and showing very little promise. The political situation notwithstanding, and with all her weakness, unfocused passion and lack of common sense, Sally has great expectations for the future, just like the two tramps who, in Chaplin’s 1936 movie Modern Times, walk towards the horizon, uncertain yet indomitable, showing their backs to the spectators.4 The female character is fundamental in this story. Chris is a shy, insecure, and presumably gay young Englishman living in the gaudy atmosphere of Berlin in the Weimar years, who is at once attracted and bewildered by Sally’s unprompted vitality and bravery, just the opposite of his own attitude toward life. Chris depends on Sally: he has left England to get acquainted with the rest of the world, to put a distance between himself and his middle-class family, and to enjoy the sexual freedom of the most exciting European city. Meeting the unconventional and totally liberated Sally along the way, he has somehow

1 Christopher Isherwood, Prater Violet, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1945. 2 Christopher Isherwood, Sally Bowles, London: Hogarth Press, 1937; Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories, New York: New Directions, 1945; I am a camera (Broadway play based on The Berlin Stories), (Sally Bowles played by Julie Harris), 1951; John Van Druten, I am a camera (film), (Sally Bowles played by Julie Harris), 1955; Truman Capote, Breakast at Tiffany’s (novel), 1958 (Holly Golightly); Blake Edwards, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (film), (Holly Golightly – Audrey Hepburn) 1961; Bob Fosse, Cabaret, 1972 (film based on The Berlin Stories), (Sally Bowles – Liza Minnelli). 3 Christopher Isherwood, “Sally Bowles”, in The Berlin Stories, New York: Random House, 2011, 294. 4 Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times, 1936.

174 Piretto found in her a role model as well as a new, atypical mother figure. A similar situation is depicted in Truman Capote’s 1958 novel, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in which a young American writer is likewise bound to another unusual woman, Holly Golightly, a fascinating prostitute who eats her breakfast enjoying the sight of Tiffany’s windows:

The books yield different pleasures but share a page-turning joie (as Holly might say), propelled by their heroines’ magnetism. Both appeal because of the utter freshness of their protagonists, so vividly drawn and alive that they begin to become our own crazy friends. They get into our heads, and we wonder about them – whether Sally will be all right, how Holly became who she is. And like two best friends who at first seem to have everything in common, Sally and Holly turn out to be deeply different women: in their aims, their reaction to crisis.5 The novels are narrated by the introverted authors pulled into their magnetic orbits. In Sally Bowles, Isherwood’s alter ego Chris, or “Herr Issyvoo” as his (and Sally’s) German landlady calls him, is an aspiring novelist who is dimly and pleasurably thwarted from writing by the deca- dence around him. Capote’s is a slightly more detached figure, flourishing in the independence of having his own New York apartment and toiling late at night on short stories while Holly, his neighbor, forces herself into his purview.6

Two strong and intriguing women influence and resolve both the intimate and professional lives of two irresolute young men. Isherwood had traveled to Berlin invited and encouraged by his former lover and good friend, the poet W.H. Auden. Inexperienced and lacking confidence, Isherwood’s place in Berlin was insecure, but he learned from his toy boys, his female friends, and from the life around him, as he wrote in his books and later confirmed in his diary, saying, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking”:7

If I fear anything, I fear the atmosphere of the war, the power which it gives to all the things I hate – the newspapers, the politicians, the puritans,

5 Ingrid Norton, Breakfast at Sally Bowles, 2011. http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/short -novels-breakfast-at-sally-bowles. 6 Ibid. 7 Christopher Isherwood, “Berlin Diary” (1930), in Goodbye to Berlin, London: Hogarth Press, 1939.