Brothers & Others

A MEETING BY THE RIVER, by Christopher Isherwood. 191 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.50.

At a dinner party 30 years ago, Somerset Maugham turned to his hostess and, in one of his rare pronouncements on writers and writing, remarked that the future of English literature was in the hands of a handsome young man across the room, Christopher Isherwood. Not long afterward Isherwood abdicated; in 1936, he emigrated to California and left much of his creative vitality in England. Apparently only Irish expatriates write better when they leave their native land.

If Maugham was exaggerating, he at least had a point. Isherwood writes so well that his recent brief, cameolike novels, Down There on a Visit, A Single Man and now A Meeting by the River, surpass most of the encyclopedic psychodramas produced by men laboring under weightier careers.

The plot meanders down the familiar path to self-discovery that earlier pilgrims--Aldous Huxley, Maugham himself--have trod before. The hero is Oliver, who, like Isherwood, has become fascinated by Oriental mysticism. He decides to become a monk--a step that Isherwood considered but never took--and goes to India to become a swami. On the eve of the final vow-taking, his elder brother Patrick, a London publisher and one of the most cheerfully decadent characters in recent fiction, appears at Oliver's monastery by the Ganges. Unable to leave so much integrity untouched, Patrick tempts Oliver with prospects of money and fame, hints that his wife and even he himself would be available for Oliver's pleasure.

It seems to be Isherwood's intention to show the spirit of Vedanta triumphant against such corruption, but it is the evil Patrick who runs away with the book. Much of the story is told through his letters home. They all tell the same facts, but each is satanically slanted to fit in with the several views of him self that Patrick wants to cultivate: the dutiful son, the weak but loving husband, the homosexual friend in power. The letters also give Isherwood a chance to poke fun at Olde England in parodies ("This brassy tea, this wooden toast, these chalk-white scrambled eggs as dry as leather").

The disappointment, though, is that Isherwood stints. Patrick is fully as alive as Sally Bowles, the heroine of Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, and could support a longer novel. But Patrick is too briefly met. For the reader taken with the charming villain, A Meeting by the River is only a teaser.

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