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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.