Mr Norris Changes Trains

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So the humour derives mostly from the outrageous pretensions, lies and evasions of Mr Norris, as well as his humorous turns of phrase. He is, in his way, a sort of Falstaff, pompously fond of all the good things in life while completely unable to afford them. He is a great comic character. And then, the ending of the book, the last chapter, doesn’t at all treat the dangerous times, the Nazis’ arrival in power, the terror of his Jewish friends, at all frivolously. I thought he was being hard on himself. Isherwood felt unable to fully write about his sexuality in this novel which explains some deadened undercurrents. The plot circles around secrets, betrayals, politics and identity without ever really going anywhere with any of these themes. It is slight. Poi, scoppiai a ridere. Ridemmo ambedue. In quel momento l’avrei abbracciato. Avevamo, come si suol dire, messo il dito sulla piaga, una buona volta, e il nostro sollievo era così grande che eravamo come due giovani che si fossero fatti una dichiarazione d’amore.

It turns out to be a friendly enough chat with the authorities but it is just to let Arthur know that they know that he is linked with the Communists and they’re keeping an eye on him. Half-way hiatus William’s favourite pastime becomes watching Mr Norris, and, gosh, is that boy observant! He notices everything, every furtive glance, every twitch of the mouth, every tense muscle. Isherwood wrote the above quote in the forward to a book by Gerald Hamilton aptly called Mr. Norris and I that was published in 1956. Isherwood based the character of Mr. Norris on his friend Gerald Hamilton. Isherwood was being hard on himself. He originally went to Berlin in the 1930s to experience the deviant sexual lifestyle that was available to a young Englishman in search of expressing his sexual preferences, preferences that may have been considered deviant in the community he grew up in. In 1935 when this book was published very few people knew just how horrible things would become and those that could imagine some of it could not imagine the worst of it.

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Norris has a predilection to being dominated and beaten. A severe young lady named Anni with long boots and an assortment of whips provides him with the equivalent of sexual release in the form of controlled torture. To Norris, Anni is a beauty beyond earthly compare.

These moments are designed to show us that Isherwood has a kind of unblinking, unflinching clarity of observation. But their tactlessness, and their abrupt surprising appearance are also very funny. 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. The events depicted in The Berlin Stories are derived from Isherwood's colorful escapades in the Weimar Republic. [7] [8] In 1929, Isherwood moved to Weimar Berlin during the twilight of the Golden Twenties. At the time, Isherwood was an apprentice novelist who was politically indifferent [a] about the rise of fascism in Germany. [11] [12] He had relocated to Berlin to pursue a hedonistic life as an openly gay man and to enjoy the city's orgiastic Jazz Age cabarets. [13] [14] He socialized with a blithe coterie of gay writers that included Stephen Spender, Paul Bowles, [b] and W.H. Auden. [17]Coincidentally Gerald Hamilton also appeared in another book I recently enjoyed, the stunning Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms: The Spyhunter, the Fashion Designer & the Man From Moscow by Paul Willetts which is also well worth reading. On this reading, the narrator’s endless good humour and incessant laughing is not a sign of his wonderful bonhomie but of his ignorance and superficiality. It encourages us to remember the couple of places where Isherwood explicitly refers to the narrator’s behaviour as immature, callow and schoolboyish.

Despite this camouflage, the book can be seen as a kind of handing on of the torch. Mr Norris educates, shows and displays the camp values and behaviour of that older, late-Victorian and Edwardian, gay generation. William observes and analyses them, and in some measure absorbs them into his good-humoured schoolboy-in-Berlin persona, before taking them with him to sunny California. Things happen. They have to in a novel. Early on Mr Norris takes William to a New Year’s Eve party to see in 1931 (p.30) at the house of a certain Olga, an enormous good-natured woman. Everyone is very drunk and Isherwood describes being drunk at a party very well. People appear, disappear, he finds himself with his arms round someone, dancing with two or three people at once. He is introduced to the slightly sinister Baron von Pregnitz, then to Anni a bored prostitute wearing leather boots up to her knees. Later on William staggers down the hall, blunders into a room and finds her standing with a whip in hand while fat Mr Norris is on his hands and knees polishing her boots and she is whipping him for being such a naughty boy. Neither of them minds him blundering in, in fact Anni says he can be next.Norris is a Communist, and also a masochist. His character is brilliantly drawn by Isherwood, with his classic wit and sly humour, but he is also veiled in mystery, which the progression of the novel slowly unravels. It isn’t quite as enjoyable or illuminated as Goodbye to Berlin, but still a brilliant read. The novel stands alone, but can also be interpreted as part of a gay lineage, a tradition, handing on the torch of a subterranean set of behaviours. In his introduction to a recent edition of this book, the gay American novelist Armistead Maupin describes meeting Isherwood at the end of his life, who was kind enough to read the manuscript of his first novel. Like Mr Norris Changes Train, Maupin’s novel rotates around a number of characters in a boarding house and thus, at one remove, invokes the outrageous, camp, very funny and sad persona of Mr Norris. It’s really Maupins idea that he was taking part in a gay lineage or tradition, I’m just pointing out that the entire novel can be read in this light. Isherwood disowned it