Prater Violet

by Christopher Isherwood

  I laid the poem carefully on the mantelpiece. It seemed to be the only safe place in the room. “Is this your wife?” I asked, looking at the photographs.

  “Yes. And that is Inge, my daughter. You like her?”

  “She has beautiful eyes.”

  “She is a pianist. Very talented.”

  “Are they in Vienna?”

  “Unfortunately. Yes. I am most anxious for them. Austria is no longer safe. The plague is spreading. I wished them to come with me, but my wife has to look after her mother. It’s not so easy.” Bergmann sighed deeply. Then, with a sharp glance at me, “You are not married.” It sounded like an accusation.

  “How did you know?”

  “I know these things.… You live with your parents?”

  “With my mother and brother. My father’s dead.”

  Bergmann grunted and nodded. He was like a doctor who finds his most pessimistic diagnosis is confirmed. “You are a typical mother’s son. It is the English tragedy.”

  I laughed. “Quite a lot of Englishmen do get married, you know.”

  “They marry their mothers. It is a disaster. It will lead to the destruction of Europe.”

  “I must say, I don’t quite see…”

  “It will lead definitely to the destruction of Europe. I have written the first chapters of a novel about this. It is called The Diary of an Etonian Oedipus.” Bergmann suddenly gave me a charming smile. “But do not worry. We shall change all that.”

  “All right,” I grinned. “I won’t worry.”

  Bergmann lit a cigarette, and blew a cloud of smoke into which he almost disappeared.

  “And now,” he announced, “the horrible but unavoidable moment has come when we have to talk about this crime we are about to commit: this public outrage, this enormous nuisance, this scandal, this blasphemy.… You have read the original script?”

  “They sent a messenger round with it, last night.”

  “And…?” Bergmann watched me keenly, waiting for my answer.

  “It’s even worse than I expected.”

  “Marvelous! Excellent! You see, I am such a horrible old sinner that nothing is ever as bad as I expect. But you are surprised. You are shocked. That is because you are innocent. It is this innocence which I need absolutely to help me, the innocence of Alyosha Karamazov. I shall proceed to corrupt you. I shall teach you everything from the very beginning.… Do you know what the film is?” Bergmann cupped his hands, lovingly, as if around an exquisite flower. “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 anything. It cannot wait for you to understand it. It cannot explain itself. It simply ripens to its inevitable explosion. This explosion we have to prepare, like anarchists, with the utmost ingenuity and malice.… While you were in Germany did you ever see Frau Nussbaum’s letzter Tag?”

  “Indeed I did. Three or four times.”

  Bergmann beamed. “I directed it.”

  “No? Really?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “I’m afraid I never read the credits.… Why, that was one of the best German pictures!”

  Bergmann nodded, delighted, accepting this as a matter of course. “You must tell that to Umbrella.”

  “Umbrella?”

  “The Beau Brummel who appeared to us yesterday at lunch.”

  “Oh, Ashmeade…”

  Bergmann looked concerned. “He is a great friend of yours?”

  “No,” I grinned. “Not exactly.”

  “You see, this umbrella of his I find extremely symbolic. It is the British respectability which thinks: ‘I have my traditions, and they will protect me. Nothing unpleasant, nothing ungentlemanly can possibly happen within my private park.’ This respectable umbrella is the Englishman’s magic wand, with which he will try to wave Hitler out of existence. When Hitler declines rudely to disappear, the Englishman will open his umbrella and say, ‘After all, what do I care for a little rain?’ But the rain will be a rain of bombs and blood. The umbrella is not bomb-proof.”

  “Don’t underrate the umbrella,” I said. “It has often been used successfully, by governesses against bulls. It has a very sharp point.”

  “You are wrong. The umbrella is useless.… Do you know Goethe?”

  “Only a little.”

  “Wait. I shall read you something. Wait. Wait.”

  * * *

  “THE WHOLE beauty of the film,” I announced to my mother and Richard next morning at breakfast, “is that it has a certain fixed speed. The way you see it is mechanically conditioned. I mean, take a painting—you can just glance at it, or you can stare at the left-hand top corner for half an hour. Same thing with a book. The author can’t stop you from skimming it, or starting at the last chapter and reading backwards. The point is, you choose your approach. When you go into a cinema, it’s different. There’s the film, and you have to look at it as the director wants you to look at it. He makes his points, one after another, and he allows you a certain number of seconds or minutes to grasp each one. If you miss anything, he won’t repeat himself, and he won’t stop to explain. He can’t. He’s started something, and he has to go through with it.… You see, the film is really like a sort of infernal machine…”

  I stopped abruptly, with my hands in the air. I had caught myself in the middle of one of Bergmann’s most characteristic gestures.

  * * *

  I HAD always had a pretty good opinion of myself as a writer. But, during those first days with Bergmann, it was lowered considerably. I had flattered myself that I had imagination, that I could invent dialogue, that I could develop a character. I had believed that I could describe almost anything, just as a competent artist can draw you an old man’s face, or a table, or a tree.

  Well, it seemed that I was wrong.

  The period is early twentieth century, some time before the 1914 war. It is a warm spring evening in the Vienna Prater. The dancehalls are lighted up. The coffee houses are full. The bands blare. Fireworks are bursting above the trees. The swings are swinging. The roundabouts are revolving. There are freak shows, gypsies telling fortunes, boys playing the concertina. Crowds of people are eating, drinking beer, wandering along the paths beside the river. The drunks sing noisily. The lovers, arm in arm, stroll whispering in the shadow of the elms and the silver poplars.

  There is a girl named Toni, who sells violets. Everybody knows her, and she has a word for everybody. She laughs and jokes as she offers the flowers. An officer tries to kiss her; she slips away from him goodhumoredly. An old lady has lost her dog; she is sympathetic. An indignant, tyrannical gentleman is looking for his daughter; Toni knows where she is, and with whom, but she won’t tell.

  Then, as she wanders down the alleys carrying her basket, light-hearted and fancy-free, she comes face to face with a handsome boy in the dress of a student. He tells her, truthfully, that his name is Rudolf. But he is not what he seems. He is really the Crown Prince of Borodania.

  All this I was to describe. “Do not concern yourself with the shots,” Bergmann had told me. “Just write dialogue. Create atmosphere. Give the camera something to listen to and look at.”

  I couldn’t. I couldn’t. My impotence nearly reduced me to tears. It was all so simple, surely? There is Toni’s father, for instance. He is fat and jolly, and he has a stall where he sells Wiener Wuerstchen. He talks to his customers. He talks to Toni. Toni talks to the customers. They reply. It is all very gay, amusing, delightful. But what the hell do they actually say?

  I didn’t know. I couldn’t write it. That was the brutal truth—I couldn’t draw a table. I tried to take refuge in my pride. After all, this was movie work, hack work. It was something essentially false, cheap, vulgar. It was beneath me. I ought never to have become involved in it, under the influence of Bergmann’s dangerous charm, and for the sake of the almost incredible twenty pounds a week which Imperial Bulldog was prepared, quite as a matter of cour
se, to pay me. I was betraying my art. No wonder it was so difficult.

  Nonsense. I didn’t really believe that, either. It isn’t vulgar to be able to make people talk. An old man selling sausages isn’t vulgar, except in the original meaning of the word, “belonging to the common people.” Shakespeare would have known how he spoke. Tolstoy would have known. I didn’t know because, for all my parlor socialism, I was a snob. I didn’t know how anybody spoke, except public-school boys and neurotic bohemians.

  I fell back, in my despair, upon memories of other movies. I tried to be smart, facetious. I made involved, wordy jokes. I wrote a page of dialogue which led nowhere and only succeeded in establishing the fact that an anonymous minor character was having an affair with somebody else’s wife. As for Rudolf, the incognito Prince, he talked like the lowest common denominator of all the worst musical comedies I had ever seen. I hardly dared to show my wretched attempts to Bergmann at all.

  He read them through with furrowed brows and a short profound grunt; but he didn’t seem either dismayed or surprised. “Let me tell you something, Master,” he began, as he dropped my manuscript casually into the wastepaper basket, “the film is a symphony. Each movement is written in a certain key. There is a note which has to be chosen and struck immediately. It is characteristic of the whole. It commands the attention.”

  Sitting very close to me, and pausing only to draw long breaths from his cigarette, he started to describe the opening sequence. It was astounding. Everything came to life. The trees began to tremble in the evening breeze, the music was heard, the roundabouts were set in motion. And the people talked. Bergmann improvised their conversation, partly in German, partly in ridiculous English; and it was vivid and real. His eyes sparkled, his gestures grew more exaggerated, he mimicked, he clowned. I began to laugh. Bergmann smiled delightedly at his own invention. It was all so simple, so effective, so obvious. Why hadn’t I thought of it myself?

  Bergmann gave me a little pat on the shoulder. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  “It’s wonderful! I’ll note that down before I forget.”

  Immediately, he was very serious. “No, no. It is wrong. All wrong. I only wanted to give you some idea … No, that won’t do. Wait. We must consider…”

  Clouds followed the sunshine. Bergmann scowled grimly as he passed into philosophical analysis. He gave me ten excellent reasons why the whole thing was impossible. They, too, were obvious. Why hadn’t I thought of them? Bergmann sighed. “It’s not so easy…” He lit another cigarette. “Not so easy,” he muttered. “Wait. Wait. Let us see…”

  He rose and paced the carpet, breathing hard, his hands folded severely behind his back, his face shut against the outside world, implacably, like a prison door. Then a thought struck him. He stopped, amused by it. He smiled.

  “You know what my wife tells me when I have these difficulties? ‘Friedrich,’ she says, ‘Go and write your poems. When I have cooked the dinner, I will invent this idiotic story for you. After all, prostitution is a woman’s business.’”

  * * *

  THAT WAS what Bergmann was like on his good days; the days when I was Alyosha Karamazov, or, as he told Dorothy, like Balaam’s ass, “who once said a marvelous line.” My incompetence merely stimulated him to more brilliant flights of imagination. He sparkled with epigrams, he beamed, he really amazed himself. On such days, we suited each other perfectly. Bergmann didn’t really need a collaborator at all. But he needed stimulation and sympathy; he needed someone he could talk German to. He needed an audience.

  His wife wrote to him every day, Inge two or three times a week. He read me extracts from their letters, full of household, theatrical and political gossip; and these led to anecdotes, about Inge’s first concert, about his mother-in-law, about German and Austrian actors, and the plays and films he had directed. He would spend a whole hour describing how he had produced Macbeth in Dresden, with masks, in the style of a Greek tragedy. A morning would go by while he recited his poems, or told me of his last days in Berlin, in the spring of that year, when the Storm Troopers were roving the streets like bandits, and his wife had saved him from several dangerous situations by a quick answer or a joke. Although Bergmann was an Austrian, he had been advised to give up his job and leave Germany in a hurry. They had lost most of their money in consequence. “And so, when Chatsworth’s offer came, you see, I could not afford to refuse. There was no alternative. I had my doubts about this artificial Violet, from the very first. Even across half of Europe, it didn’t smell so good.… Never mind, I said to myself. Here is a problem. Every problem has its solution. We will do what we can. We will not despair. Who knows? Perhaps, after all, we shall present Mr. Chatsworth with a charming nosegay, a nice little surprise.”

  Bergmann wanted all my time, all my company, all my attention. During those first weeks, our working day steadily increased in length, until I had to make a stand and insist on going home to supper. He seemed determined to possess me utterly. He pursued me with questions, about my friends, my interests, my habits, my love life. The weekends, especially, were the object of his endless, jealous curiosity. What did I do? Whom did I see? Did I live like a monk? “Is it Mr. W. H. you seek, or the Dark Lady of the Sonnets?” But I was equally obstinate. I wouldn’t tell him. I teased him with smiles and hints.

  Foiled, he turned his attention to Dorothy. Younger and less experienced, she was no match for his inquisitiveness. One morning, I arrived to find her in tears. She rose abruptly and hurried into the next room. “She has her struggle,” Bergmann told me, with a certain grim satisfaction. “It’s not so easy.” Dorothy, it appeared, had a boy friend, an older man, who was married. He didn’t seem able to make up his mind which of the two women he liked better; just now, he had gone back to his wife. His name was Clem. He was a car salesman. He had taken Dorothy to Brighton for weekends. Dorothy also had a lover of her own age, a radio engineer, nice and steady, who wanted to marry her. But the radio engineer lacked glamour; he couldn’t compete with the fatal appeal of Clem, who wore a little black mustache.

  Bergmann’s interest in all this was positively ghoulish. In addition, he knew everything about Dorothy’s father, another sinister influence, and about her aunt, who worked at an undertaker’s, and was having an affair with her brother-in-law. At first, I could hardly believe that Dorothy had really brought herself to reveal such intimate details, and suspected Bergmann of having invented the whole story. She seemed such a shy, reserved girl. But soon they were actually speaking of Clem in my presence. When Dorothy cried, Bergmann would pat her on the shoulder, like God Himself, and murmur, “That’s all right, my child. Nothing to do. It will pass.”

  He was fond of lecturing me on Love. “When a woman is awakened, when she gets the man she wants, she is amazing, amazing. You have no idea … Sensuality is a whole separate world. What we see on the outside, what comes up to the surface—it’s nothing. Love is like a mine. You go deeper and deeper. There are passages, caves, whole strata. You discover entire geological eras. You find things, little objects, which enable you to reconstruct her life, her other lovers, things she does not even know about herself, things you must never tell her that you know…”

  “You see,” Bergmann continued, “women are absolutely necessary to a man; especially to a man who lives in ideas, in the creation of moods and thoughts. He needs them, like bread. I do not mean for the coitus; that is not so important, at my age. One lives more in the fantasy. But one needs their aura, their ambience, their perfume. Women always recognize a man who wants this thing from them. They feel it at once, and they come to him, like horses.” Bergmann paused, grinning. “You see, I am an old Jewish Socrates who preaches to the Youth. One day, they will give me the hemlock.”

  * * *

  IN THE HOT little room, our life together seemed curiously isolated. The three of us formed a self-contained world, independent of London, of Europe, of 1933. Dorothy, the representative of Woman, did her best to keep the home in some kind of orde
r, but her efforts were not very successful. Her schemes for arranging Bergmann’s huge litter of papers only caused worse confusion. As he could never describe exactly what it was that he was looking for, she could never tell him where she had put it. This sent him into frenzies of frustration. “Terrible, terrible. This definitely kills me. Too idiotic for words.” And he would relapse into grumpy silence.

  Then there was the problem of meals. The house had a restaurant service, theoretically. It could produce bitter coffee, very strong black tea, congealed eggs, sodden toast and a gluey chop, followed by some nameless kind of yellow pudding. The food took an almost incredible time to arrive. As Bergmann said, when you ordered breakfast, it was best to ask for what you wanted at lunch, because it would be four hours before you got it. So we lived chiefly on cigarettes.

  At least twice a week, there was a Black Day. I would enter the flat to find Bergmann in complete despair. He hadn’t slept all night, the story was hopeless, Dorothy was crying. The best way of dealing with this situation was to make Bergmann come out with me to lunch. Our nearest restaurant was a big gloomy place on the top floor of a department store. We ate early, when there were very few other customers, sitting together at a table in the darkest corner, next to a rather sinister grandfather clock, which reminded Bergmann of the story by Edgar Allan Poe.

  “It ticks every moment,” he told me. “Death comes nearer. Syphilis. Poverty. Consumption. Cancer discovered too late. My art no good, a failure, a damn flop. War. Poison gas. We are dying with our heads together in the oven.”

  And then he would begin to describe the coming war. The attack on Vienna, Prague, London and Paris, without warning, by thousands of planes, dropping bombs filled with deadly bacilli; the conquest of Europe in a week; the subjugation of Asia, Africa, the Americas; the massacre of the Jews, the execution of intellectuals, the herding of non-Nordic women into enormous state brothels; the burning of paintings and books, the grinding of statues into powder; the mass sterilization of the unfit, mass murder of the elderly, mass conditioning of the young; the reduction of France and the Balkan countries to wilderness, in order to make national parks for the Hitler Jugend; the establishment of Brown Art, Brown Literature, Brown Music, Brown Philosophy, Brown Science and the Hitler Religion, with its Vatican at Munich and its Lourdes at Berchtesgaden: a cult based upon the most complex system of dogmas concerning the real nature of the Fuehrer, the utterances of Mein Kampf, the ten thousand Bolshevist heresies, the sacrament of Blood and Soil, and upon elaborate rituals of mystic union with the Homeland, involving human sacrifice and the baptism of steel.