prater violet (christopher isherwood)

Who says there’s anything new under the sun? The notion of auto-ficcion is sometimes bandied around as a post-modern concept, but here’s a resolutely modernist Isherwood constructing a novel wherein the central character is one Christopher Isherwood and reads for all the world like a piece of non-fiction. The conceit helps to lend authenticity to a minor text, which describes the author’s experiences as a screenwriter working for a Viennese film director, Friedrich Bergmann, (modelled on the real life director Berthold Viertel), contracted by a British studio to make the powder puff movie. The details of movie making in the thirties are enjoyable and suggest a world that hasn’t changed all that much. In the first decade of this century I spent a fair amount of time drifting around the edges of the old film world in Soho and the characters who crop up in Prater Violet are dead ringers for the down-to-earth figures one would meet there. The novel’s twist occurs with the Austrian Anschluss when the director’s family is threatened by the Nazi takeover, which in turn puts the film in jeopardy. Isherwood’s novel is too discursive to really engage with the implications, but even so, the way the people working on the film react to an event in a distant country which will eventually have unimagined consequences in Britain feels disconcerting, the insularity contributing to a blasé lack of concern, something Isherwood is aware of. The novel was published in 1945 and one can imagine Isherwood working on it during the war, mindful of the way in which the events that lead up to the catastrophe were ignored; in the words of Auden: “How everyone turns away, quite leisurely from the disaster.”