Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood

I’m still reading 20th century English novels. After finishing The Berlin Stories a week ago I knew I wanted to read this next. It’s been on my reading list ever since I read The Sun and Her Stars, about Salka Viertel. Salka’s husband, from 1918 to 1947 was Berthold Viertel, on whom Isherwood based the character in this novel: the Viennese film director, Friedrich Bergmann.

I call this a novel but it’s really a long short story, focused on one tale, told straight through from beginning to end, and centered on just a few characters. It is 128 small-size pages in the edition I read (Random House, second printing). I read it in one sitting.

Prater Violet is the name of a movie. Prater is a park in Vienna and Violet refers to a poor girl in the movie who sells violets. It’s a terrible name for a film, or for a novel. Friedrich is developing the project for a fictional British film company called Imperial Bulldog (based on Gaumont-British). Christopher Isherwood (his character uses his real name) is hired as a writer. In real life, Viertel found Isherwood through Jean Ross, the English actress that Isherwood wrote about as Sally Bowles. Viertel read Isherwood’s second novel, The Memorial, and liked it, and liked that Isherwood spoke German and, being an amateur at film-making, would respect Viertel and not get in his way.

Except that the location is London, this could easily have been one of The Berlin Stories. The story tells what happened to Isherwood immediately after he left Berlin in 1933. The year is 1934. Isherwood is living with his mother and brother in London, working on a novel (The Last of Mr. Norris, which was published in 1935) when he receives a phone call from Friedrich Bergmann. He has lunch with Bergmann and the head of Imperial Bulldog, named Chatsworth, and takes the job. The plot tracks the writing, how the story is developed by Isherwood and Bergmann, the pressure from the film company, the actual filming, an episode when the project seems to fall apart then is rescued, through to the completion of the picture. There’s a gorgeous passage at the end where Isherwood meditates on love and death as he and Bergmann walk home together through night-time London after the wrap party. The actual movie that Isherwood worked on with Bergmann in 1934 was Little Friend, though the plots of that movie and Prater Violet are completely different.

Isherwood’s insider perspective of the sometimes ridiculous, sometimes genius manner in which a studio film gets made reminded me of Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, which Isherwood must have known. The Last Tycoon was published in 1941 (after Fitzgerald’s death in 1940). Isherwood wrote Prater Violet in 1945, while he was working at Warner Brothers in Hollywood, the same year that he brought together The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin as the single volume The Berlin Stories.

As in The Berlin Stories, the background of the gathering menace of the Nazi’s is important. Though essentially a comic story about filmmaking, the world around them is darkening and Bergmann’s situation is particularly fraught. His wife and daughter are still in Vienna. An episode of skirmishes between Fascist and Socialist forces in Vienna (February, 1934) worries Bergmann but he learns his family is OK once he’s able to reach them.

In truth, the Viertel family had already immigrated to the United States by 1934. Salka and Berthold were living in their home in Santa Monica with their three sons. Salka was working at Metro pictures (she was making Queen Christina with Greta Garbo at this time). Berthold was called from Santa Monica to London to work on Little Friend. He stayed on to make more films.

At the end of Prater Violet, Isherwood refers obliquely to a lover by the initial “J.” being careful to avoid pronouns. In Berlin, Isherwood had met a German named Heinz Neddermeyer. They had left Berlin together but Heinz was refused entry to Britain. They continued a peripatetic and long-distance relationship around Europe and North Africa until 1937 when Heinz was arrested and sent to a German Labor Camp. He was soon released but though Isherwood tried he was never able to get his friend out of Germany. Heinz later married and had a son he named Christoph.

Isherwood arrived in Santa Monica in 1939, re-connected with the Viertels, started work at Warner Brothers, and even lived for a time with a boyfriend in rooms above the garage at the Viertel home.