Prater Violet

by Christopher Isherwood

  “Didn’t he leave any message?”

  “Yes, sir. You was to meet them for lunch, at the Café Royal. One o’clock sharp.”

  “Well, I’m damned.”

  I went into the lobby, sat down in a chair and wiped my forehead. That settled it. Who in hell did they think they were? Well, this would be a lesson to me. One thing was certain: they wouldn’t hear from me again. Not if they came to the house and sat on the doorstep all day long.

  * * *

  I FOUND THEM in the Grill Room.

  I was ten minutes late, a little concession to my injured vanity. The headwaiter knew Mr. Chatsworth and pointed him out to me. I paused to get a first impression before approaching their table.

  A gray bushy head, with its back to me, confronted a big pink moon-face, thin, sleek, fair hair, heavy tortoise-shell glasses. The gray head was thrust forward intently. The pink face lolled back, wide open to all the world.

  “Between you and me,” it was saying, “there’s just one thing the matter with them. They’ve got no savoir vivre.”

  The pale round eyes, magnified by their lenses, moved largely over the room, included me without surprise: “It’s Mr. Isherwood, isn’t it? Very glad you could come. I don’t think you two know each other?”

  He didn’t rise. But Bergmann jerked to his feet with startling suddenness, like Punch in a show. “A tragic Punch,” I said to myself. I couldn’t help smiling as we shook hands, because our introduction seemed so superfluous. There are meetings which are like recognitions—this was one of them. Of course we knew each other. The name, the voice, the features were inessential, I knew that face. It was the face of a political situation, an epoch. The face of Central Europe.

  Bergmann, I am sure, was aware of what I was thinking. “How do you do, sir?” He gave the last word a slight, ironic emphasis. We stood there, for a moment, looking at each other.

  “Sit down,” Mr. Chatsworth told us, goodhumoredly.

  He raised his voice. “Garçon, la carte pour monsieur!” Several people looked around. “You’d better have the Tournedos Chasseur,” he added.

  I chose Sole Bonne Femme, which I don’t like, because it was the first thing I saw, and because I was determined to show Chatsworth that I had a will of my own. He had already ordered champagne. “Never drink anything else before sunset.” There was a little place in Soho, he informed us, where he kept his own claret. “Picked up six dozen at an auction last week. I bet my butler I’d find him something better than we had in the cellar. The blighter’s so damned superior, but he had to admit I was right. Made him pay up, too.”

  Bergmann grunted faintly. He had transferred his attention to Chatsworth, now, and was watching him with an intensity which would have reduced most people to embarrassed silence within thirty seconds. Having eaten up his meat with a sort of frantic nervous impatience, he was smoking. Chatsworth ate leisurely, but with great decision, pausing after each mouthful to make a new pronouncement. Bergmann’s strong, hairy, ringless hand rested on the table. He held his cigarette like an accusing forefinger, pointed straight at Chatsworth’s heart. His head was magnificent, and massive as sculptured granite. The head of a Roman emperor, with dark old Asiatic eyes. His stiff drab suit didn’t fit him. His shirt collar was too tight. His tie was askew and clumsily knotted. Out of the corner of my eye, I studied the big firm chin, the grim compressed line of the mouth, the harsh furrows cutting down from the imperious nose, the bushy black hair in the nostrils. The face was the face of an emperor, but the eyes were the dark mocking eyes of his 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.

  From wine, Chatsworth had passed, by a natural sequence of ideas, to the Riviera. Did Bergmann know Monte Carlo? Bergmann grunted negatively. “I don’t mind telling you,” said Chatsworth, “that Monte’s my spiritual home. Never cared much about Cannes. Monte’s got a je ne sais quoi, something all its own. I make a point of getting down there for ten days every winter. Doesn’t matter how busy I am. I just pull up stakes and go. I look at it this way; it’s an investment. If I didn’t have my time at Monte, I just couldn’t stand this bloody London fog and drizzle. I’d come down with the flu, or something. Be in bed for a month. I’m bloody well doing the studio a favor; that’s what I tell them. Garçon!”

  Pausing to order Crêpes Suzette, without consulting either of us, Chatsworth went on to explain that he wasn’t a gambler, really. “Have to do enough gambling in the motion-picture business, anyway. Roulette’s a damn silly game. Only fit for suckers and old women. I like chemmy, though. Lost a couple of thousand last year. My wife prefers bridge. I tell her that’s her bloody insularity.”

  I wondered if Bergmann’s English was equal to understanding all this. His expression was getting more and more enigmatic. Even Chatsworth seemed to be aware of it. He was becoming a little unsure of his audience. He tried another opening, which began by congratulating the headwaiter on the Crêpes Suzette. “Give Alphonse my compliments, and tell him he’s excelled himself.” The headwaiter, who evidently knew just how to handle Chatsworth, bowed deeply. “For you, monsieur, we take a leetle beet extra trouble. We know you are connoisseur. You can appreciate.”

  Chatsworth fairly beamed. “My wife tells me I’m a bloody Red. Can’t help it. It just makes me sick, the way most people treat servants. No consideration. Especially chauffeurs. You’d think they weren’t human beings. Some of these damned snobs’ll work a man to death. Get him up at all hours. He daren’t call his soul his own. I can’t afford it, but I keep three: two for day and the other fellow for the night. My wife’s always after me to sack one of them. ‘Either we have three,’ I tell her, ‘or you drive yourself.’ And she’ll never do that. All women are bloody bad drivers. But at least she admits it.”

  Coffee was served, and Chatsworth produced a formidable red morocco-leather case of beautiful workmanship, as big as a pocket Testament, which contained his cigars. They cost five and sixpence each, he informed us. I refused, but Bergmann took one, lighting it with his grimmest frown. “Once you’ve got a taste for them, you’ll never smoke anything else,” Chatsworth warned him, and added graciously, “I’ll send you a box tomorrow.”

  The cigar somehow completed Chatsworth. As he puffed it, he seemed to grow larger than life size. His pale eyes shone with a prophetic light.

  “For years, I’ve had one great ambition. You’ll laugh at me. Everybody does. They say I’m crazy. But I don’t care.” He paused. Then announced solemnly, “Tosca. With Garbo.”

  Bergmann turned, and gave me a rapid, enigmatic glance. Then he exhaled, with such force that Chatsworth’s cigar smoke was blown back around his head. Chatsworth looked pleased. Evidently this was the right kind of reaction.

  “Without music, of course. I’d do it absolutely straight.” He paused again, apparently waiting for our protest. There was none.

  “It’s one of the greatest stories in the world. People don’t realize that. Christ, it’s magnificent.”

  Another impressive pause.

  “And do you know who I want to write it?” Chatsworth’s tone prepared us for the biggest shock of all.

  Silence.

  “Somerset Maugham.”

  Utter silence, broken only by Bergmann’s breathing.

  Chatsworth sat back, with the air of a man who makes his ultimatum. “If I can’t get Maugham, I won’t do it at all.”

  “Have you asked him?” I wanted to inquire, but the question sounded unworthy of the occasion. I met Chatsworth’s solemn eye, and forced a weak, nervous smile.

  However, the smile seemed to please Chatsworth. He interpreted it in his own way, and unexpectedly beamed back at me.

  “I bet I know what Isherwood’s thinking,” he told Bergmann. “He’s right, too, blast him. I quite admit it. I’m a bl
oody intellectual snob.”

  Bergmann suddenly looked up at me. At last, I said to myself, he is going to speak. The black eyes sparkled, the lips curved to the form of a word, the hands sketched the outline of a gesture. Then I heard Chatsworth say, “Hullo, Sandy.”

  I turned, and there, standing beside the table, incredibly, was Ashmeade. An Ashmeade nearly ten years older, but wonderfully little changed; still handsome, auburn-haired and graceful; still dressed with casual undergraduate elegance in sports coat, silk pullover and flannel bags. “Sandy’s our story editor,” Chatsworth was telling Bergmann. “Obstinate as a mule. He’d rewrite Shakespeare, if he didn’t like the script.”

  Ashmeade smiled his smooth, pussycat smile. “Hullo, Isherwood,” he said softly, in an amused voice.

  Our eyes met. “What the hell are you doing here?” I wanted to ask him. I was really quite shocked. Ashmeade, the poet. Ashmeade, the star of the Marlowe Society. Obviously, he was aware of what I was thinking. His light golden eyes smilingly refused to admit anything, to exchange any conspiratorial signal.

  “You two know each other?” Chatsworth asked.

  “We were at Cambridge together,” I said briefly, not taking my eyes from Ashmeade’s, challenging him.

  “Cambridge, eh?” Chatsworth was obviously impressed. I could feel that my stock had risen several points. “Well, you two will have a lot to talk about.”

  I looked squarely at Ashmeade, daring him to contradict this. Ashmeade simply smiled, from behind his decorative mask.

  “Time to be getting back to the studio,” Chatsworth announced, rising and stretching himself. “Dr. Bergmann’s coming along with us, Sandy. Have that Rosemary Lee picture run for him, will you? What the hell’s it called?”

  “Moon over Monaco,” said Ashmeade, as one says Hamlet, casually, without quotation marks.

  Bergmann stood up with a deep, tragic grunt.

  “It’s a nasty bit of work,” Chatsworth told him cheerfully, “but you’ll get an idea what she’s like.”

  We all moved toward the door. Bergmann looked very short and massive, marching between Chatsworth’s comfortable bulk and Ashmeade’s willowy tallness. I followed, feeling excluded and slightly sulky.

  Chatsworth waved the attendant aside with a lordly gesture and himself helped Bergmann into his overcoat. It was like dressing up a Roman statue. Bergmann’s hat was a joke in the worst taste. Much too small, it perched absurdly on his bushy gray curls, and Bergmann’s face looked grimly out from under it, with the expression of an emperor taken captive and guyed by the rebellious mob. Ashmeade, of course, wore neither hat nor coat. He carried a slim umbrella, perfectly rolled. Outside, Chatsworth’s Rolls Royce, complete with chauffeur, was waiting—all light gray, to match his own loose-fitting, well-cut clothes.

  “Better get plenty of sleep tonight, Isherwood,” he advised me graciously. “We’re going to work you hard.”

  Ashmeade said nothing. He smiled, and followed Chatsworth into the car.

  Bergmann paused, took my hand. A smile of extraordinary charm, of intimacy, came over his face. He was standing very close to me.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Isherwood,” he said, in German. “I shall call you tomorrow morning.” His voice dropped; he looked deeply, affectionately, into my eyes. “I am sure we shall be very happy together. You know, already, I feel absolutely no shame before you. We are like two married men who meet in a whorehouse.”

  * * *

  WHEN I got home, my mother and Richard were in the drawing room waiting for me.

  “Well!”

  “Any success?”

  “What was it like?”

  “Did you meet him?”

  I dropped into a chair. “Yes,” I said, “I met him.”

  “And—is everything all right?”

  “How do you mean, all right?”

  “Are you going to take the job?”

  “I don’t know.… Well, yes … Yes, I suppose I am.”

  * * *

  ONE OF Chatsworth’s underlings had installed Bergmann in a service flat in Knightsbridge, not far from Hyde Park Corner. I found him there next morning, at the top of several steep flights of stairs. Even before we could see each other, he began to hail me from above. “Come up! Higher! Higher! Courage! Not yet! Where are you? Don’t weaken! Aha! At last! Servus, my friend!”

  “Well?” I asked, as we shook hands. “How do you like it here?”

  “Terrible!” Bergmann twinkled at me comically from under his black bush of eyebrow. “It’s an inferno! You have made the as-cent to hell.”

  This morning, he was no longer an emperor but an old clown, shock-headed, in his gaudy silk dressing gown. Tragicomic, like all clowns, when you see them resting backstage after the show.

  He laid his hand on my arm. “First, tell me one thing, please. Is your whole city as horrible as this?”

  “Horrible? Why, this is the best part of it! Wait till you see our slums, and the suburbs.”

  Bergmann grinned. “You console me enormously.”

  He led the way into the flat. The small living room was tropically hot, under a heavy cloud of cigarette smoke. It reeked of fresh paint. The whole place was littered with clothes, papers and books, in explosive disorder, like the debris around a volcano.

  Bergmann called, “Mademoiselle!” and a girl came out of the inner room. She had fair smooth hair, brushed plainly back from her temples, and a quiet oval face, which would have looked pretty, if her chin hadn’t been too pointed. She wore rimless glasses and the wrong shade of lipstick. She was dressed in the neat jacket and skirt of a stenographer.

  “Dorothy, I introduce you to Mr. Isherwood. Dorothy is my secretary, the most beautiful of all the gifts given me by the munificent Mr. Chatsworth. You see, Dorothy, Mr. Isherwood is the good Virgil who has come to guide me through this Anglo-Saxon comedy.”

  Dorothy smiled the smile of a new secretary—a bit bewildered still, but prepared for anything in the way of lunatic employers.

  “And please suppress that fire,” Bergmann added. “It definitely kills me.”

  Dorothy knelt down and turned off the gas fire, which had been roaring away in a corner. “Do you want me now,” she asked, very businesslike, “or shall I be getting on with the letters?”

  “We always want you, my darling. Without you, we could not exist for one moment. You are our Beatrice. But first, Mr. Virgil and I have to become acquainted. Or rather, he must become acquainted with me. For, you see,” Bergmann continued, as Dorothy left the room, “I know everything about you already.”

  “You do?”

  “Certainly. Everything that is important. Wait. I shall show you something.”

  Raising his forefinger, smilingly, to indicate that I must be patient, he began to rummage among the clothes and scattered papers. I watched with growing curiosity, as Bergmann’s search became increasingly furious. Now and then, he would discover some object, evidently not the right one, hold it up before him for a moment, like a nasty-smelling dead rat, and toss it aside again with a snort of disgust or some exclamation such as “Abominable!” “Scheusslich!” “Too silly for words!” I watched him unearth, in this way, a fat black notebook, a shaving mirror, a bottle of hair tonic and an abdominal belt. Finally, under a pile of shirts, he found a copy of Mein Kampf which he kissed, before throwing it into the wastepaper basket. “I love him!” he told me, making a wry, comical face.

  The search spread into the bedroom. I could hear him plunging about, snorting and breathing hard, as I stood by the mantelpiece, looking at the photographs of a large, blonde, humorous woman and a thin, dark, rather frightened girl. Next, the bathroom was explored. A couple of wet towels were flung out into the passage. Then Bergmann uttered a triumphant “Aha!” He strode back into the living room, waving a book above his head. It was my novel, The Memorial.

  “So! Here we are! You see? I read it at midnight. And again this morning, in my bath.”

  I was absurdly pleased and flattered.
“Well,” I tried to sound casual, “how did you like it?”

  “I found it grandiose.”

  “It ought to have been much better. I’m afraid I…”

  “You are wrong,” Bergmann told me, quite severely. He began to turn the pages. “This scene—he tries to make a suicide. It is genial.” He frowned solemnly, as if daring me to contradict him. “This I find clearly genial.”

  I laughed and blushed. Bergmann watched me, smiling, like a proud parent who listens to his son being praised by the headmaster. Then he patted me on the shoulder.

  “Look, if you do not believe me. I will show you. This I wrote this morning, after reading your book.” He began to fumble in his pockets. As there were only seven of them, it didn’t take him long. He pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. “My first poem in English. To an English poet.”

  I took it and read:

  When I am a boy, my mother tells to me

  It is lucky to wake up when the morning is bright

  And first of all hear a lark sing.

  Now I am not longer a boy, and I wake. The morning is dark.

  I hear a bird singing with unknown name

  In a strange country language, but it is luck, I think.

  Who is he, this singer, who does not fear the gray city?

  Will they drown him soon, the poor Shelley?

  Will Byron’s hangmen teach him how one limps?

  I hope they will not, because he makes me happy.

  “Why,” I said, “it’s beautiful!”

  “You like it?” Bergmann was so delighted that he began rubbing his hands. “But you must correct the English, please.”

  “Certainly not. I like it the way it is.”

  “Already I think I have a feeling for the language,” said Bergmann, with modest satisfaction. “I shall write many English poems.”

  “May I keep this one?”

  “Really? You want it?” he beamed. “Then I shall inscribe it for you.”

  He took out his fountain pen and wrote: “For Christopher, from Friedrich, his fellow prisoner.”