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Isherwood is daily exposed to a torrent of ideas and emotions that pour out of Bergmann like a cataract. Growling, laughing, gesticulating, Bergmann seems to combine in his ample frame the personalities of revolutionary, poet, tragedian and sentimentalist. He spends a whole morning playing the roles of the principals in the Reichstag Fire Trial ("Goodness!" squeaks his timid little English stenographer. "I'm glad I'm not over there").
Life with Bergmann might have gone on like this forever, if Imperial Bulldog Pic tures had not suddenly grown tired of waiting for its precious script. Overnight, Bergmann and Isherwood find themselves swept out of Kensington and into the harsh reality of a Bulldog office. "It is the third degree," Bergmann stormed. "They torture us, and we have nothing to confess." Hollywood-Bound. But Isherwood sees that suddenly the philosophizing emperor of Kensington has been metamorphosed into Bulldog's sullen, productive slave. In a mere two weeks Prater Violet is ready for the cameras, and Director Bergmann has forgotten the outside world in the fantastic make-believe existence where the false houses and streets of wood and canvas turn the scene into "a kind of Pompeii, but more desolate, more uncanny, because this is, literally, a half-world, a limbo of mirror images. . . ." And it is in this half-world, with its crooning flower girls and princes in disguise, that Director Bergmann hears of Dictator Dollfuss' putsch in the real Vienna.
Prater Violet's concluding pages mount to a harrowing climax of contrasts, in which Hero Bergmann is no longer emperor or even slave. He is simply a frantic, weeping husband and father, whose wife and family may be in mortal danger—an exile penned up in an island of indifferent aliens ("[Vienna] seems dreadfully unsettled," remarks Isherwood's vague, kindly mother), struggling with yards of celluloid nonsense, and going half berserk in the process. "This heartless filth . . .!" he screams. "It covers up the dirty syphilitic sore with rose leaves. ... It lies and declares that the pretty Danube is blue, when the water is red with blood. ... I am punished for assisting at this lie. We shall all be punished."
But Prater Violet's conclusion is neither bloody nor violent, but simply ironical. Director Bergmann's family are restored to him safe & sound—and all sail for Hollywood. Young Isherwood—sadder & wiser, but no more hopeful—flees to the south of France to lie in the sun with his current girl friend. But everyone flocks to see Prater Violet—"it was even shown in Vienna."
Prater Violet, like all good books, adds up to a lot more than the sum of its parts. It is not merely a survey of the boa constrictions of the modern movie company, and a vigorous defense of the artist caught in its coils. It is not merely a lament for the shortcomings of contemporary intellectuals. In Friedrich Bergmann, Author Isherwood sees a giant of a passing generation—a mature, tough, revolutionary artist in whom the will to live and feel is practically indestructible.