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The Face of Central Europe. Prater Violet stems straight from Author Isherwood's knowledge of Hollywood, Continental Europe and Britain—in fact, he presents himself as one of Prater Violet's principal characters. Grim skeleton of his novel—as well as its basic irony—is the filming by British Imperial Bulldog Pictures of a tear-jerker operetta about old Vienna named "Prater Violet"—just on the eve of Dictator Dollfuss' putsch to power. For the script of Prater Violet, Bulldog's President Chatsworth hires Christopher Isherwood, who knows Berlin ("Berlin ['s] . . . pretty much the same kind of setup [as Vienna], isn't it?") and, as director, imports famed Moviemaker Friedrich Bergmann, who is forced to take the job because the Nazis have smashed his career in Germany.
To youthful Scriptwriter Isherwood—a parlor pink who lives with his adoring mother and brother—Director Bergmann is awe-inspiring. "His head . . . was . . . the head of a Roman emperor, with dark old Asiatic eyes ... big firm chin . . . harsh furrows cutting down from the imperious nose . . . bushy black hair in the nostrils. . . . But the eyes were the dark, mocking eyes of [an emperor's] slave—the slave who ironically obeyed, watched, humored and judged the master who could never understand him; the slave upon whom the master depended utterly, for his amusement, for his instruction, for the sanction of his power; the slave who wrote the fables of beasts and men." Muses young Isherwood: "I knew that face. It was the face of a political situation, an epoch. The face of Central Europe."
Infernal Machine. Bulldog Pictures establishes Bergmann in an apartment in
London. Overnight he turns its trim interior into a welter of littered papers, damp towels, cast-off clothes, bottles, of hair tonic, a copy of Mein Kampf — chaos as complete as if the Balkans had been dumped in the heart of respectable Kensington. Daily, through this mush, Director Bergmann stamps the floor like a bathrobed Hercules faced with an absurd but unavoidable Labor. He roars genially at nervous Colleague Isherwood: "I am sure we shall be very happy together. . . .
Already I feel absolutely no shame before you. We are like two married men who meet in a whorehouse." Before the two launch into their scriptwriting, worldly-wise Bergmann says to Isherwood: "You are a typical mother's son. . . . You are innocent. ... I shall proceed to corrupt you. I shall teach you everything from the very beginning. . .
Do you know what the film is? ... The film is an infernal machine. Once it is ignited and set in motion, it revolves with an enormous dynamism. It cannot pause.
It cannot apologize. It cannot retract any thing. ... It simply ripens to its inevitable explosion. This explosion we have to pre pare, like anarchists, with the utmost in genuity and malice." But young Isherwood soon discovers that he is going to be taught far more than the ways of the movie. Each day Director Bergmann flies off from the romantic plot of Prater Violet at a thousand tangents.