Christopher Isherwood wrote the fictional "Mr Norris Changes Trains" based on his experiences in Berlin in the early 1930s. He left England to work in Berlin as an English tutor since Berlin was much more liberal toward homosexuals. The character William Bradshaw (named after Isherwood's middle names) acts as a narrator and an observer in the book. Sally Bowles & Co came later, c 1939, when our author "got the political pittcha." Although the musical "Cabaret" is a rouser with everyone singing that life is a cabaret ole chun, Isherwood focused on the lost and rejected. He caught the tormented, self-destructive spirit of Berlin which Broadway excised. He'd gone to Berlin because of the favorable money-exchange. And, coming from a strangulating UK environment where you faced jail if caught in the bushes with a boy, he read that anything went in Berlin. As Gerald Hamilton said, "We live in stirring times. Tea-stirring times."

Mr Norris Changes Trains: Christopher Isherwood (Vintage

This made me ponder the history of New York, and in particular the Lower East Side, which I learned on my tour of The Tenement Museum was the area of NYC where German, Prussian and Bohemian immigrants made their home in the 19th century. It made me wonder whether NYC’s Germanic past was a reason for the present day culture having similarities to that of interwar Berlin. Isherwood began work on a much larger work he called The Lost before paring down its story and characters to focus on Norris. The book was critically and popularly acclaimed but years after its publication Isherwood denounced it as shallow and dishonest. Otto turned up at Arthur’s about a week later, unshaved and badly in need of a meal. They had let him out of prison the day before. When I went round to the flat that evening, I found him with Arthur in the dining-room, having just finished a substantial supper. urn:lcp:mrnorrischangest0000ishe:epub:e7e62b5e-1328-492a-befd-4da5b353c2dd Foldoutcount 0 Identifier mrnorrischangest0000ishe Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t6941xr7d Invoice 1652 Isbn 0749386819 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9794 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000244 Openlibrary_editionHis glance, now vacant for a moment, was clouded again. An unpleasant thought seemed to tease him like a wasp; he moved his head slightly to avoid it." Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth A charming city of avenues and cafés, a grotesque city of night-people and fantasts, a dangerous city of vice and intrigue, a powerful city of millionaires and mobs - all this was Berlin in 1931, the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power. Apparently Gerald Hamilton went through life managing to amass a large number of distinguished and not-so-distinguished friends, despite being a liar, a thief, and completely two-faced. A man guaranteed, in any political situation, to choose the most repellent side, and who fabricated almost every detail of his life. Hamilton would sell a friend down the river for the smallest amount of money. Despite being permanently bankrupt, he frequently managed to live a life filled with five-star hotels, fine wines, and good food, whether in Weimar-era Berlin or London in the swinging sixties. All this and more is, so I understand, contained in The Man Who Was Norris: The Life of Gerald Hamilton by Tom Cullen a book, as the title suggests, devoted to The Man Who Was Norris. I hope to read it at some point. As far as the novel itself goes, I was expecting something more. I imagined that there would be a much closer look at the debauched lifestyles being led in Berlin by the Bright Young Things of this period, something closer to a Vile Bodies in Berlin than I found but that aside the characters are wonderfully drawn (most natably the fabulous titular character of Mr Norris) and the relationship between Bradshaw and Norris is terribly entertaining.

Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood | Goodreads Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood | Goodreads

While working as a private tutor in Berlin in the 1930s, the English author Christopher Isherwood wrote Mr Norris Changes Trains, a novel set in the city during the final years of the Weimar Republic. Despite the troubled times of its setting, Mr Norris is a warm and engaging story which charts the somewhat peculiar friendship that develops between two men following a chance encounter on a train.One of the many delights of this novel is the character Isherwood has created in Mr Norris. He is a rather delicate and fussy individual, used to the finer things in life even though he seems to have little money of his own to indulge in such luxuries. (His daily grooming regime is very precise and elaborate, not unlike that of a grande dame with lotions and face creams aplenty.) That said, when he is flush, he is more than generous to his friends, buying them little presents whenever he can. As he gets to know Bradshaw, Norris reveals a little of his childhood and the years he spent travelling around Europe with his adoring mother prior to her death. I loved this description of how Mr Norris frittered away his inheritance in the space of a couple of years, in the days of his early twenties when he didn’t know any better. Mr Norris, based on Isherwood's friend, Gerald Hamilton, is a charming, nervous, middle-aged man whose lifestyle is supported by conning people, selling secrets, and other criminal activities. He's a bit of a comical, prissy figure with a wig that has a tendency to sit off-center. He has regular appointments with Anni, a woman with tall boots and a whip. The book did remind me of a class I had in sixth grade. The teacher’s first name was Francis which I remember because I had an Aunt named Frances and I couldn’t figure out why this guy was named Francis. He decided as a lesson in discrimination to take the most Aryan among us, blond and blue-eyed prefered, and drap construction paper billboards around us graffitied with anti-aryan rhetoric. We also had to wear dunce caps and for the length of the school day, one day only, we had to walk to all our classes wearing these ridiculous raiments. Students continued to scrawl their own thoughts of our unworthiness on us as the day progressed. I of course was an Aryan poster child, a bit gaunt, but you know the artist could have plumped me up a bit to promote a more healthy version of Hitler youth. It was one of the longest days of my life. I will never forget the feeling of being held apart, unable to escape even for a moment that I had been singled out for persecution.

Mr. Norris Changes Trains | The Modern Novel Isherwood: Mr. Norris Changes Trains | The Modern Novel

I heartily recommend Mr Norris Changes Trains, it's an engaging tale which is also historically fascinating through its powerful evocation of the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s.I think,’ he continued at length, ‘I may safely claim that in the course of my whole career I have very seldom, if ever, done anything which I knew to be contrary to the law….On the other hand, I do and always shall maintain that it is the privilege of the richer but less mentally endowed members of the community to contribute to the upkeep of people like myself. I hope you’re with me there?’ (pg. 48) The name of the narrator, William Bradshaw, is drawn from Isherwood's full name, Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood. In subsequent novels Isherwood changed the narrator's name to "Christopher Isherwood", having come to regard "William Bradshaw" as a "foolish evasion". Isherwood did not explicitly claim that he was William Bradshaw although the novel describes Isherwood's own experiences. He sought to make the narrator as unobtrusive as possible so as to keep readers focused on Norris. Although Isherwood was living more or less openly as a homosexual, he balked at making Bradshaw homosexual as well. In part this was to help the average reader identify with the narrator by minimising the differences between the narrator and the reader. Not to do so meant that "The Narrator would have become so odd, so interesting, that his presence would have thrown the novel out of perspective. ... The Narrator would have kept upstaging Norris's performance as the star." Isherwood's decision had a more pragmatic reason as well; he had no desire to cause a scandal and feared that should he cause one his uncle, who was financially supporting him, would cut him off. Yet Isherwood had no interest in making Bradshaw heterosexual either, so the Narrator has no scenes of a sexual nature. [9]