Dilettante of the Depths

DOWN THERE ON A VISIT (318 pp.)--Christopher Isherwood-- Simon & Schuster ($4.75).

Christopher Isherwood, that permanently promising young man, seemed during the '30s to be the two dandiest literary dactyls since Joyce's Malachai Mulligan. To earnest literary leftists of the decade, Auden, Spender and Isherwood were pronounced as one word, and in 1935 Isherwood and Auden were acclaimed for an amusing prose and verse play (The Dog Beneath the Skin) that twitted the British Establishment satisfactorily, even if it struck no telling blows in the class war. Isherwood's most promising work came four years later: Goodbye to Berlin, six wistful stories whose curiously passive hero announced that he was a camera.

When Isherwood's next important book appeared in 1945--it was Prater Violet, a short satirical novel about film-making in London--it did nothing to damage its author's reputation but also did little to fulfill his promise. An unsuccessful novel called The World in the Evening followed in 1954. But the elegant dactyls remained on the literary scene. Their possessor had moved to Southern California in 1939. There he taught, wrote film scripts that seldom saw celluloid, and set aside left-wing politics to dabble in Vedanta--living, as Alfred Kazin once remarked acidly, "by the River Ganges where it flows into the Hollywood desert."

Down There on a Visit is the best work this prim, prickly near mystic has done in years. Like all of Isherwood's books, it is coyly set in the form of autobiography-but-not-really; its narrator, as usual, is a ventriloquist's dummy named Christopher Isherwood whose surface sometimes seems faintly warm. Characteristically, there is too little fiction for a novel, too little truth for autobiography. Yet in his cagey, canny way, the author has written an engaging work of self-revelation.

Fallen, Arch. Deftly and with good humor, the author describes four representative adventures; they show "Isherwood" through the years discarding one pose after another, like a man trying on dressing gowns. At 23, the hero is a rather insensitive Sensitive Young Author. Invited to visit a "cousin" named Lancaster who is a shipping executive in Hamburg, the young man has a perfectly hideous time. His notion of himself as Jack the Philistine Killer falls comically to pieces when he finds himself fascinated by Lancaster's boundless, vulgar energy.

Five years later, another adventure: the hero is roosting in a colony of homosexuals on a Greek island, posing as the archest of fallen angels. Under the erratic leadership of Ambrose, a bogus decadent out of Dorian Gray, he takes up a life of wine sipping, and feebly attempts a diary. Eventually Isherwood decides that chaos is not his cup of tea. Later, safe in England, he muses, "I didn't belong on his island. But now I know I don't belong here, either." Lugubriously he adds, "Or anywhere." The reader is tempted to interject that the author-hero belongs exactly where he is, in Hollywood-on-the-Ganges.

Dead & Deadly. But five years later the hero-author is still afloat; he returns to England from a China tour a war correspondent and a successful author, "fashionable to exactly the right degree--chic, not vulgarly famous." In the end. of course, success tastes of ashes, and Isherwood, fleeing from the nasty politics of '38, is off for the New World. Two years afterward he has become the standard Hollywood Hindu, writing film scripts and learning yoga from a gossipy, shrewd old mystic. Eventually that familiar taste of ashes recurs--it pervades all of Isherwood's writing.

Still, although Down There sometimes seems little else than a portrait of the artist as an aging adolescent, Isherwood is always superior to his official poses. Without being committed to either, he knows the world of respectability and the underworld of self-indulgence--the deadly and the dead souls. He is a dilettante of the higher depths, a kind of demi-Virgil leading the reader through a hop-skip-and-jump tour of Hell. Isherwood has neither the pilgrim's passion for the journey nor the tourist's awe, but at his best he is a delightful guide.

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