Prater Violet was published by Random House in 1945. The narrator — once again a version of Isherwood — is hired to write the screenplay for a sentimental Viennese musical called Prater Violet, directed by Friedrich Bergmann, an Austrian-Jewish exile whose talent is enormous and whose patience with the British film industry is nonexistent. The novel follows the making of the film from script to screen, and the comedy of the process — the interference of producers, the incompetence of studio executives, the compromises that reduce Bergmann’s vision to commercial mush — is sharp and funny.
But beneath the comedy runs a darker current. Bergmann is an exile — his family is in Vienna, the Nazis are in power, and every day he works on a trivial entertainment while the world he left behind is being destroyed. The film’s Viennese setting, with its waltzes and nostalgia, is a cruel parody of the real Vienna, where fascism has extinguished the culture that the film sentimentalizes. Bergmann knows this, and his rage — directed at the film, at the British, at himself for participating in the charade — gives the novel its emotional depth.
The novel’s final pages, in which the narrator reflects on the gap between his public self and his private reality, contain some of Isherwood’s most honest and most moving prose — an acknowledgment that the camera eye, however useful, is also a defense against feeling.
Collecting Prater Violet
First edition (Random House, New York, 1945): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good/very good: $60–$150
- UK first (Methuen, 1946): $100–$250