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But the older Mackay, the Mackay who wrote the book, at times seems almost nauseated by his hero's naive romanticism.
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And Hermann is assuredly a younger version of Mackay himself (a former publisher's assistant). Mackay's hero - Hermann, a 20-odd year old publisher's assistant - is certainly a sentimentalist in the Goethean manner which no doubt lingers on in Germany even today. No doubt Mackay's involvement strikes Isherwood as "sentimentality" - but Isherwood is "cool" and "Modern" and thus almost incapable of telling the difference between sentimentality and sentiment. Perhaps it is a personal reaction, but I would go so far as to say that Mackay's version feels more authentic to me than even Isherwood's infinitely more famous Berlin stories, first because Mackay - despite his Scottish birth - was a true Berliner, while Isherwood-the-Camera was an outsider, and second because Mackay was able to deal with his own involvement on emotional and political levels which Isherwood deliberately avoided. It gives a picture of the Berlin sexual underworld early in this century which I know, from my own experience, to be authentic." Cover of the 1st 1926 edition, privately printedĬhristopher Isherwood says of The Hustler, "I have always loved this book dearly - despite and even because of its occasional sentimental absurdities. Apparently nothing much ever changes in this particular corner of life: on the psychological level, Mackay's testimony would describe Baltimore or Manila in the 1970s with as much sharpness as Berlin in the 20s. A review of Der Puppenjunge : die Geschichte einer namenlosen Liebe aus der Friedrichstrasse by John Henry Mackay, Berlin, 1926, translated from the German by Hubert Kennedy as The Hustler: The Story of a Nameless Love from Friedrich Street, Boston, 1985.Īnyone who's ever been involved with boy prostitutes will instantly recognize John Henry Mackay's The Hustler (Der Puppenjunge) as nothing less than genuine realism - almost "Naturalism".