SOURCE: Green, G. F. Review of Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood. Twentieth Century CXXVI, no. 750 (August 1939): 238-40.

In the following mixed review of Goodbye to Berlin, Green deems Isherwood a promising author.

If the spirit of this age is faithlessness, or an unstable grasp of demi-faiths, Christopher Isherwood is then a sign of the times. In writing, lack of faith tends to rapportage, as Cocteau puts it, ‘a mere aping of the original,’ since it is the writer's outlook, or particular faith, that forces out his plot from the ‘stream of mere phenomena.’ Some of the best young writers today, imitators chiefly of Hemingway, who used a structure of rapportage through which to build his plots, amount to little, since they lack this necessary drive of an idea, a theme, a faith, through which to bring their skeletons to life. Their work is botched in its conception...