ت ما

CRITICISM

VIEWS OF THE DAMNED

Reprinted from The Observer Weekend Review (London), the following is a critical review of Christopher Isherwood's latest novel, Down There on a Visit. Angus Wilson is the author of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

Christopher Isherwood

CECIL BEATON

By ANGUS WILSON

R. ISHERWOOD'S longawaited novel, The World in the Evening," received a hostile Press by English critics when it appeared in 1954. From this generally unfavourable view I strongly dissented. The central theme, it is true, was a failure. Mr. Isherwood had known a deeply felt spiritual experience, but he failed to convey it in the central character, Stephen. As so often in his work where he is striving beyond his powers, he fell into a kind of louche cosiness that was very off-putting. The insufficiency of his intellectual approach, too, became embarrassingly apparent in a book that strove after a Dostoevskian theme.

Nevertheless, in the brilliant creation of two female characters and in the great dexterity of its formal piecing together, "The World in the Evening" was a real advance on his earlier work, indeed it was possibly the first novel that he ever wrote. My review in Encounter ended: "Mr. Isherwood has not failed in his promise and... he promises even more for the future."

Now, in 1962, after eight years, appears DOWN THERE ON A VISIT. It does not, I'm afraid, fulfil that promise. True, there are two advances. The central figure-once again, as in the Berlin stories, Christopher himself-changes as the book moves through the years and these changes are conveyed with great subtlety.

This greater self-awareness happily also entails a considerable ironic assault upon Mr. Isherwood's love of cosiness. That slightly arch selfsatisfaction which he seems never to have lost about being at home in, a

louche world is now subjected to a' salutary battery of mockery by at least two characters whose descent into the pit of despairing moral abandonment goes far deeper (and, therefore, in Mr. Isherwood's “sinning to sanctity moral scheme is far more promising) than his own more gingerly approaches to the crater.

THIS ironic purging is implicit in the title, for whereas the various characters around whom he has grouped this retrospect of his life since 1928 have all in different ways gone down into the hell of absolute alienation, he touches these limits only when, in their company, he is "down there on a visit." The central line, then, of spiritual self-discovery is a great advance on Stephen's wobbly interior voyaging in "The World in the Evening." For the rest "Down There on a Visit" seems to me a return to the manner of Mr. Isherwood's early stories; and this regression is inadequate for the enlarged themes that now concern him.

Perhaps it does not matter that the book lacks the new imaginative force which made "The World in the Evening" Mr. Isherwood's first seriously constructed novel. There are many more ways than one of presenting fiction, and presumably one of them may be the type of slightly altered factual chronicle which I imagine "Down There on a Visit to be. The method, however, has many pitfalls.

19:

In the earlier episodes-Mr. LanAmbrose, caster, Waldemar Christopher," in his various degrees of finely contrasted youthful egotism, stands apart from the other characters as he did in "Mr. Norris Changes Trains," in "Sally Bowles," or any 13

mattachine REVIEW