Michael Wood on Christopher Isherwood

"‘I am a camera.’ This statement is often taken as a simple assertion of a documentary impulse or desire. ‘I am a camera with its shutter open,’ the full sentence goes, ‘quite passive, recording, not thinking.’ But of course cameras don’t say ‘I’, and don’t tell us they are not thinking. Isherwood likes the complication lurking in such simple figures. The hero of his later novel, A Single Man (1964), says he is ‘like a book you have to read. A book can’t read itself to you. It doesn’t even know what it’s about’. Just before the statement about the camera and its passivity Isherwood had written this amazing paragraph (the opening of Goodbye to Berlin), where the unthinking apparatus takes interesting omissions of verbs, launches a generalisation and manages to turn a simile into a historical judgment:

'From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.'

Some camera. And yet of course the metaphor is not meaningless, or damaged by all this mental activity. It is an introduction to the Isherwood of the stories, a person whose self is in his observations, not his (fortunately rare) dips into introspection. The person who is a camera at the start of this book becomes a city at the end:

'Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the ironwork of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.'"