SOURCE: Ferres, Kay. “Many a Civil Monster: Politics and the Narrator in the Berlin Fiction.” In Christopher Isherwood: A World in Evening, pp. 43-65. San Bernardino, Calif.: The Borgo Press, 1994.

In the following excerpt, Ferres provides a history of the composition and publication of Goodbye to Berlin and discusses the chronology of the stories.

Mr. Norris Changes Trains was written rather rapidly after Isherwood and Heinz had left Berlin, during their stay at Tenerife. It was published at the Hogarth Press. The other elements of The Lost were written and published at different times during this unsettled exile. In the course of the composition of the various episodes that make up Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood was also occupied with the dramatic collaborations with W. H. Auden, and wrote several screenplays with Berthold Viertel. Traces of these experiences are evident in Goodbye to Berlin, but the novel itself is...