Mr Norris Changes Trains (published in the US as The Last of Mr. Norris) was published by the Hogarth Press in 1935. William Bradshaw (Isherwood’s narrator, using his own middle names) meets Arthur Norris on a train crossing into Germany. Norris is a middle-aged Englishman of impeccable manners, dubious finances, and a wig that shifts alarmingly when he is nervous. He is charming, evasive, snobbish, and — as Bradshaw gradually discovers — a con man of considerable skill, who is simultaneously working for the Communists and selling information to their enemies.
The novel unfolds against the background of the last years of the Weimar Republic — the street battles between Communists and Nazis, the economic crisis, the political paralysis — but the politics are experienced through the comic filter of Norris’s personality. Norris attends Communist meetings with the same fastidious distaste he brings to bad wine. He negotiates with shady intermediaries while worrying about the quality of his shirts. His secret life — which includes a taste for sexual masochism, delicately handled by Isherwood — is another compartment in a personality that consists entirely of compartments.
Isherwood’s achievement is to make Norris simultaneously funny and frightening. His charm is genuine — he is excellent company, and his good manners are not mere affectation — but his amorality is equally genuine. He will betray anyone if the incentive is sufficient, not out of malice but out of a constitutional inability to take the consequences of his actions seriously. In the context of Weimar Berlin, where betrayal was becoming the organizing principle of political life, Norris is both a comic figure and a symptom.
Collecting Mr Norris Changes Trains
First edition (Hogarth Press, London, 1935): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $2,000–$5,000
- Very good/very good: $800–$2,000
- US first (William Morrow, 1935): $300–$800