Isherwood set out initially to be a novelist, not an autobiographer; but his apprentice efforts as well as later attempts to dramatize characters and situations and to write confidently about adult emotions, are all relative failures. Most of his best work, written in Europe in the thirties—Sally Bowles, Goodbye to Berlin, Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Lions and Shadows, together with the later rechauffe of much the same material in Down There on a Visit (1962)—is artfully artless reportage by a naif 'I' who bears one of Isherwood's own christian names, or it is direct if slightly fictionalized autobiography.

With Isherwood's self-absorption is associated both his recessive orientation towards the past and his preoccupation with the immature…. Isherwood's style at its early best has a bare particularity which accords well with the triviality of his subject-matter. (pp. 71-2)

[An] admission by one of Isherwood's later mouthpieces that...