Mr. Norris Changes Trains is a spectacular, amusing, magnificent magnum opus which has been attached to the equally sublime Goodbye to Berlin http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/08/g... to form the acclaimed Berlin Stories, based on the experiences of the author and real life people he has met in Berlin, in the early 1930s, when the Nazis would rise and eventually get to power, while Mr. Arthur Norris aka Gerald Hamilton will become friends with William aka Willi Bradshaw (presumably Christopher Isherwood projected into fiction, the narrator of the story anyway) 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. Gerald Hamilton was a gun-runner for the IRA, a con-man caught in embezzlement plots, a Commie symp and then, turning far, far right, he was against war with Germany, espousing the views of fascist Oswald Mosley. Facing arrest in the UK, he tried to escape to Ireland dressed as a nun. Isherwood published this book in 1935 while the wayward Gerald Hamilton was spinning left and right. How could Isherwood resist using Hamilton as an amusing character? In 1945, Isherwood published Prater Violet, fictionalizing his first movie writing job in London in 1933-1934. In Hollywood, he spent the start of the 1950s fighting his way free of a destructive five-year affair with an attractive and undisciplined American photographer, William Caskey. Caskey took the photographs for Isherwood’s travel book about South America, The Condor and The Cows (1947). Isherwood’s sixth novel, The World in the Evening (1954), written mostly during this period, was less successful than earlier ones.

Nei primi giorni di marzo, dopo le elezioni, il tempo si fece d’improvviso mite e caldo. “E’ il clima di Hitler” diceva la moglie del portinaio; e suo figlio osservava scherzosamente che dovevamo essere grati al giovane Van der Lubbe, perché l’incendio del Reichstag aveva sciolto la neve. “Un così bel ragazzo” osservò la signora Schroeder con un sospiro. “Come mai può aver fatto una cosa tanto terribile?”. La moglie del portinaio sbuffò. In a surprise development, Mr Norris takes William along to a Communist Party meeting, a hall full of Berlin’s working class, to which he makes a surprisingly impactful plea of solidarity with the poor peasants and workers of China!). William goes along and meets Anni and Otto there (chapter five). It is very funny when all four of them return to Arthur’s flat, open a bottle of wine,m and jovially refer to each other as Comrade Arthur, Comrade Otto and so on. William receives a message from Arthur that may just sum up the whole novel. ”Tell me, William, his last letter concluded, what have I done to deserve all this?” Miles, Jonathan (2010). The Nine Lives of Otto Katz. The Remarkable Story of a Communist Super-Spy. London, Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0-553-82018-8.Throughout the 1930s Isherwood wrote novels and essays and collaborated with his friend from prep school, W.H. Auden, on three experimental plays – The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1937) and On the Frontier (1938) – as well as writing an extended prose account of their joint visit to China during the Sino-Japanese War, which was published along with Auden’s poems as Journey to a War (1939). The novel follows the movements of William Bradshaw, its narrator, who meets a nervous-looking man named Arthur Norris on a train going from the Netherlands to Germany. As they approach the frontier William strikes up a conversation with Mr Norris, who wears an ill-fitting wig and carries a suspect passport. 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

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Fryer, Jonathan (1977). Isherwood: A Biography. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company. ISBN 0-385-12608-5– via Google Books. 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] I'll leave you to discover Norris's fate for yourselves, it is an entertaining and apt conclusion for one so despicable, depraved and corrupt.

Isherwood sketches with the lightest of touches the last gasp of the decaying demi-monde and the vigorous world of Communists and Nazis, grappling with each other on the edge of the abyss.

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Thomson, David (21 March 2005). "The Observer as Hero". The New Republic. New York City . Retrieved 11 February 2022. In another moment, when I had drunk exactly the right amount of champagne, I should have a vision. I took a sip. And now, with extreme clarity, without passion or malice, I saw what Life really is. It had something, I remember, to do with the revolving sunshade. Yes, I murmured to myself, let them dance. They are dancing, I am glad.

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.You guys out there in gigabytes land all know I have a serious problem with Solipsistic Autism. You want fries with that? Just sayin, so you know the purely fictional headspace I’m coming from…