Goodbye to Isherwood: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Reputation‪.‬

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite, and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. (Isherwood 1969: 7) It would be no exaggeration at all to say that the first simple sentence of this quotation, the second paragraph of Goodbye to Berlin, has determined the reception of Isherwood's entire literary output from its moment of publication in 1939. Take, for example, Thomas's 'Goodbye to Berlin: Refocusing Isherwood's Camera', which begins with the classic statement that the camera "has become almost the obligatory starting point for discussions of Christopher Isherwood's fiction" (1972: 44). The simplicity of I am a camera has led to multifarious interpretations both in terms of the book's form and content. The simplest and least questionable gloss would be that it demonstrates how important still photography and cinema were in Isherwood's life. Novels centred on cinema, such as Prater Violet (1946), chapters dedicated to cinema in other works, such as in Lions and Shadows (1938), Isherwood's unsuccessful flirtation with Hollywood as narrated by Lehmann (1987) or Parker (2004) would all indicate that Isherwood was a cinema director manque. However, the controversy surrounding this statement stems less from a quantitative perspective--how much did the cinema interest him?--than from a qualitative perspective--what did he use this trope for? How politically active or passive is Isherwood as a writer? He was writing at a time when the power of the cinema was central to political life; we only have to think of Leni Rifenstahl's work or Walter Benjamin's seminal account of its power to indoctrinate in 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production' (1936). By accident or on purpose, Isherwood lighted on a memorable image that suggests that the writer remains in control to point the lens where he wills, in this case, run-down, seedy, politically violent Berlin, very much in the tradition of the politically-committed writer of reportage of the 1930s. As a representative appreciation of this fact, in his influential study The Auden Generation, Hynes argues that "Isherwood was the best documentary writer of the thirties" (1976: 342). This he attributes to the absence of great events and people, and Isherwood's focus on the lost, The Lost being the intended title of his Berlin stories. Hynes argues that Isherwood strives for coherence by juxtaposing the many elements that make up the lost: the fate of the rich as opposed to the fate of the poor; Jews, as opposed to Gentiles; the Communists against the Fascists, and so on. In other words, Isherwood imposes symmetry (1976: 355). Even in this brief extract we have an illustrative example: a man and woman performing their daily hygiene; the images are held together by the internal rhymes: recording ... shaving ... washing" and "window ... woman ... washing" (Isherwood 1969: 7). The idea that the narrator is passive is therefore difficult to uphold.