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. In the late 1960s and '70s he turned to autobiographical works: Kathleen and Frank, Christopher and His Kind, My Guru and His Disciple and October, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy. He also became a disciple of the Ramakrishna monk, Swami Prabhavananda, head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California.

Mr Norris Changes Trains – What I Think About When I Think Mr Norris Changes Trains – What I Think About When I Think

It’s hard to draw a conclusion about what Isherwood believed from the way he drops this hate into his story. There must be a whole genre of fiction that includes various meetings on trains, Strangers on a Train being the obvious one that comes to mind! At first skeptical of Hitler, she eventually “thrilled with a furtive, sensual pleasure, like school-boys, because the Jews, their business rivals, and the Marxists…had been satisfactorily found guilty of the defeat and the inflation, and were going to catch it. I learned more about the events unknown to me before that contributed to the rise of Hitler's Germany which Isherwood highlights. On the train to Berlin, his travelling companion is Arthur Norris, an older man, with an obvious wig and of nervous disposition, particularly as they approach the German frontier.

His experiences provided the material for Mister Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1938), still his most famous book. There is an amount of pathos at the end of the novel, when Bradshaw realises Norris’s true colours and hopes for a more honest discourse. All this said, the novel is a bit thin and, if one were honest, not especially well constructed, with a number of characters peppered in like afterthoughts, appearing once early in the novel and then reappearing toward the end in a gesture toward tying up loose ends. I suppose at this stage of their rise, before they gained power, while they were saying the less inflammatory things that would win over voters and gain them a foothold in popular politics, the Nazis might have seemed to some to be celebrities of a sort. His portrait of the "severely repressed homosexual" Bernhard Landauer, modeled, Isherwood tells us, on Wilfrid Israel, is complex, poignant.

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He couldn't say this in the 1930s, when the stories were first published, or even in the 1950s, when a new edition came out. As literature, I was relieved to discover the novels hold up and the characters remain as lively as ever.

Yet it’s because of what’s going on in the ‘background’ that the characters achieve their importance as they live their lives under, and in spite of, an increasing atmosphere of menace. Several hours later I woke to find myself lying curled up on the floor, with my face pressed against the leg of the sofa. So many wonderful books to discover, all vying for our time and attention – if only we had enough time in which to read them. Isherwood's vignettes are very touching, very funny, and, given our current political climate, very unsettling. Norris Changes Trains [1935] and Goodbye to Berlin [1939], which reflect his experiences of postwar Germany), in part by its readiness for political involvement, and in part by its openness to the writing of the avant-garde of the Continent.