Prater Violet

by Christopher Isherwood

  “Friedrich, I’ve just read the news…”

  “Yes.” His voice had no expression in it at all.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “There is nothing any of us can do, my child.”

  “Would you like me to come round?”

  Bergmann sighed. “Very well. Yes. If you wish.”

  I hung up and phoned for a taxi. While I was waiting for it, I hastily swallowed some breakfast. My mother and Richard watched me in silence. Bergmann had become part of their lives, although they had only seen him once, for a few minutes, one day when he came to the house to fetch me. This was a family crisis.

  Bergmann was sitting in the living room when I arrived, facing the telephone, his head propped in his hands. I was shocked by his appearance. He looked so tired and old.

  “Servus,” he said. He didn’t raise his eyes. I saw that he had been crying.

  I sat down at his side and put my arm around him. “Friedrich … You mustn’t worry. They’ll be all right.”

  “I have been trying to speak to them,” Bergmann told me, wearily. “But it is impossible. There is no communication. Just now, I sent a telegram. It will be delayed for many hours. For days, perhaps.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be all right. After all, Vienna is a big city. The fighting’s localized, the paper says. Probably it won’t last long.”

  Bergmann shook his head. “This is only the beginning. Now, anything may happen. Hitler has his opportunity. In a few hours, there can be war.”

  “He wouldn’t dare. Mussolini would stop him. Didn’t you read what the Times correspondent in Rome said about…?”

  But he wasn’t listening to me. His whole body was trembling. He began to sob, helplessly, covering his face with his hands. At length, he gasped out, “I am so afraid…”

  “Friedrich, don’t. Please don’t.”

  After a moment, he recovered a little. He looked up. He rose to his feet, and began to walk about the room. There was a long silence.

  “If by this evening I hear nothing,” he told me, suddenly, “I must go to them.”

  “But, Friedrich…”

  “What else can I do? I have no choice.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to help them.”

  Bergmann sighed. “You do not understand. How can I leave them alone at such a time? Already, they have endured so much.… You are very kind, Christopher. You are my only friend in this country. But you cannot understand. You have always been safe and protected. Your home has never been threatened. You cannot know what it is like to be an exile, a perpetual stranger.… I am bitterly ashamed that I am here, in safety.”

  “But they wouldn’t want you to be with them. Don’t you realize, they must be glad you’re safe? You might even compromise them. After all, lots of people must know about your political opinions. You might be arrested.”

  Bergmann shrugged his shoulders. “All that is unimportant. You do not understand.”

  “Besides,” I unwisely continued, “they wouldn’t want you to leave the picture.”

  All Bergmann’s pent-up anxiety exploded. “The picture! I shit upon the picture! This heartless filth! This wretched, lying charade! To make such a picture at such a moment is definitely heartless. It is a crime. It definitely aids Dollfuss, and Starhemberg, and Fey and all their gangsters. It covers up the dirty syphilitic sore with rose leaves, with the petals of this hypocritical reactionary violet. 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.…”

  The telephone rang. Bergmann seized it. “Yes, hullo. Yes…” His face darkened. “It is the studio,” he told me. “You speak to them.”

  “Hullo, Mr. Isherwood?” said the voice of Chatsworth’s secretary, very brightly. “My word, you’re up early this morning! Well, that’s splendid—because Mr. Harris is a little bit worried. He’s not sure about some details in the next set. Perhaps you could come in a little sooner and talk things over before you start work?”

  I covered the mouthpiece with my hand. “Do you want me to tell them you’re not well?” I asked Bergmann.

  “Moment … Wait … No. Do not say that.” He sighed deeply. “We must go.”

  It was an awful day. Bergmann went through it in a kind of stupor, and I watched him anxiously, fearing some outburst. During the takes, he sat like a dummy, seeming not to care what happened. If spoken to, he answered briefly and listlessly. He made no criticisms, no objection to anything. Unless Roger or the camera operator said “No,” the scene would be printed; and we went on dully to the next.

  Everybody in the unit reacted to his mood. Anita made difficulties, Cromwell hammed, Eliot fussed idiotically, the electricians were lazy, Mr. Watts wasted hours on lighting. Only Roger and Teddy were efficient, quiet and considerate. I had tried to explain to them how Bergmann was feeling. Teddy’s only comment was, “Rotten luck.” But he meant it.

  In the evening, just as we were finishing work, a telegram arrived from Vienna: “Don’t be silly, Friedrich dear. You know how newspapers exaggerate. Inge is still on holiday in the mountains with friends. I have just made a cake. Mother says it is delicious and sends love. Many kisses.”

  Bergmann showed it to me, smiling, with tears in his eyes. “She is great,” he said. “Definitely great.”

  But now his personal trouble gave way to political anxiety and anger, which grew from day to day. Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, the struggle continued. Without definite orders, without leadership, cut off and isolated into small groups, the workers went on fighting. What else could they do? Their homes, the great modern tenements, admired by the whole of Europe as the first architecture of a new and better world, were now described by the Press as “red fortresses”; and the government artillery was shooting them to pieces. The socialist leaders, fearing this emergency, had provided secret stores of arms and ammunition; but the leaders were all arrested now, or in hiding. Nobody knew where the weapons were buried. Desperately, men dug in courtyards and basements, and found nothing. Dollfuss took tea with the Papal Nuncio. Starhemberg saw forty-two corpses laid out in the captured Goethe Hof, and commented: “Far too few!” Berlin looked on, smugly satisfied. Another of its enemies was being destroyed; and Hitler’s hands were clean.

  Bergmann listened eagerly to every news broadcast, bought every special edition. During those first two days, while the workers still held out, I knew that he was hoping against hope. Perhaps the street fighting would grow into a revolution. Perhaps international Labor would force the Powers to intervene. There was just one little chance—one in a million. And then there was no chance at all.

  Bergmann raged in his despair. He wanted to write letters to the conservative Press, protesting against its studied tone of neutrality. The letters were written, but I had to persuade him not to send them. He had no case. The papers were being perfectly fair, according to their own standards. You couldn’t expect anything else.

  By the beginning of the next week, it was all over, except for the government’s vengeance on its prisoners. The workers’ tenements were made to fly the white flag. The Engels Hof was renamed the Dollfuss Hof. Every man over eighteen from the Schlinger Hof was in prison, including the sick and the cripples. Terrorism became economical, since a new law stopped the unemployment pay of those who had been arrested. Meanwhile, Frau Dollfuss went among the workers’ families, distributing cakes. Dollfuss was sincerely sad: “I hope the blood that flowed in our land will bring people to their senses.”

  The other centers of resistance, in Graz, Steuer and Linz, were all crushed. Bauer, Deutsch and many others fled into Czechoslovakia. Wallisch, caught near the frontier, was hanged at Loeben, in a brightly lighted courtyard, while his socialist fellow-prisoners looked on. “Long live freedom!” he shouted. The hangman and his assistants pulled him from the scaffold and clung to his legs until he choked.

  Bergmann sat in his chair facing the set, grim and s
ilent, like an accusing specter. One morning, Eliot ventured to ask him how he had liked a take.

  “I loved it,” Bergmann told him, savagely. “I loved it. It was unspeakably horrible. It was the maximum of filth. Never in my whole life have I seen anything so idiotic.”

  “You want to shoot it again, sir?”

  “Yes, by all means. Let us shoot it again. Perhaps we can achieve something worse. I doubt it. But let us try.”

  Eliot grinned nervously, trying to pass this off as a joke.

  “So?” Bergmann turned on him suddenly. “You find this amusing? You do not believe me? Very well—let me see you direct this scene yourself.”

  Eliot looked scared. “I couldn’t do that, sir.”

  “You mean that you refuse to do it? You definitely refuse? Is that what you mean?”

  “No, sir. Of course not. But…”

  “You prefer that I ask Dorothy to direct this scene?”

  “No…” Eliot, poor boy, was almost in tears.

  “Then obey me!” Bergmann flared at him. “Do what I order!”

  All that week, he seemed to be possessed by a devil. He tried to quarrel with everybody, even the loyal Teddy and Roger. We moved to another small set—a room in the Borodanian palace. Harris was present when Bergmann inspected it. I knew there would be trouble.

  Bergmann found fault with everything. “In which stables,” he asked Harris, “did you get these curtains?” Then he discovered that one of the doors wouldn’t open.

  “Sorry, sir,” the carpenter explained, “we didn’t have no orders it was to be made practical.”

  Bergmann snorted frantically. He walked up to the door and gave it a violent kick. We looked on, wondering what was coming. Suddenly, he swung round upon us.

  “And there you all stand,” he shouted, “grinning at me like evil, stubborn monkeys!”

  He stormed out. We avoided each other’s eyes. It was ridiculous, of course. But Bergmann’s rage was so genuine, and somehow so touching, that nobody wanted to laugh.

  An instant later, his tousled head popped in through a window of the set, like an infuriated Punch.

  “No!” he cried. “Not monkeys! Donkeys!”

  It would have been kindest, perhaps, to shout back at him, to afford him the exquisite relief of a fight. But none of us would do it. Some were sorry for him, some sulky and offended, some embarrassed, some scared. I was a bit scared of him, myself. The others assumed that I could manage him; but they were quite wrong. “You talk to him, Chris,” Teddy would tell me. And once he added, with surprising insight, “Talk to him in German. It’ll make him feel more at home.”

  But what was I to say? To have tried to excuse Bergmann’s outbursts to himself would merely have made things worse. I knew he was ashamed of them, five minutes later. I only avoided his rage by keeping very close to him. Though he took little notice of me, he needed my presence, as a lonely man needs his dog. There was nothing I could do to help, except to maintain our contact.

  I was with him nearly every evening, until he was tired enough to go to bed and lie still. I don’t think he slept much. I would have offered to spend the night on the couch in his living room, but I knew he would resent that. I couldn’t treat him as an invalid.

  One evening, while we were having supper in a restaurant, a man named Patterson came up to our table. He was a journalist, who did a movie gossip column for one of the daily papers, and spent most of his time hunting for news around the studios. He had visited our unit once or twice, to talk to Anita. He was a breezy, stupid, thick-skinned person, whose curiosity knew no inhibitions; in fact, he was very well suited to his job.

  “Well, Mr. Bergmann,” he began heartily, with the fatal instinct of the very tactless, “what do you think of Austria?”

  My heart sank. I tried, weakly, to interrupt and change the subject. But it was already too late. Bergmann stiffened. His eyes flashed. He thrust his head forward across the table, accusingly.

  “What do you think of Austria, Mr. Patterson?”

  The journalist was rather taken aback, as most of them are, when you ask them questions. “Well, as a matter of fact, I … It’s terrible, of course.…”

  Bergmann gathered himself together, and struck out at him like a snake. “I will tell you what you think. You think nothing. Nothing whatsoever.”

  Patterson blinked. But he was too stupid to realize he had better drop the subject. “Of course,” he said, “I don’t pretend to know much about politics, but…”

  “This has nothing to do with politics. This has to do with plain human men and women. Not with actresses and indiscreet whores. Not with celluloid. Not with self-advertisement. With flesh and with blood. And you do not think about it. You do not care one damn.”

  Even now, Patterson wasn’t really rattled. “After all, Mr. Bergmann,” he said defensively, with his silly, teasing, insensitive smile, “you must remember, it isn’t our affair. I mean, you can’t really expect people in England to care…”

  Bergmann’s fist hit the table, so that the knives and forks rang. He turned scarlet in the face. He shouted, “I expect everybody to care! Everybody who is not a coward, a moron, a piece of dirt! I expect this whole damned island to care! I will tell you something: if they do not care, they will be made to care. The whole lot of you. You will be bombed and slaughtered and conquered. And do you know what I shall do? I shall sit by and smoke my cigar and laugh. And I shall say, ‘Yes, it’s terrible; and I do not give a damn. Not one damn.’”

  Patterson, at last, was looking a bit scared.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Bergmann,” he said, hastily. “I quite agree with you. I’m on your side entirely. Oh, yes … We don’t think enough of the other fellow, and that’s a fact.… Well, I must be toddling along. Glad to have seen you. We must have a talk, some day.… Good night.”

  We were alone. Bergmann was still fuming. He breathed hard, watching me out of the corner of his eye. I knew that he was waiting for me to make some comment.

  And I couldn’t. That night, as never before, I felt emotionally exhausted. Bergmann’s intense, perpetual demand had drained me, it seemed, of the last drop of response. I no longer knew what I felt—only what I was supposed to feel. My only emotion, as always in such moments, was a weak resentment against both sides; against Bergmann, against Patterson, and against myself. “Why can’t they leave me alone?” I resentfully exclaimed. But the “I” that thought this was both Patterson and Bergmann, Englishman and Austrian, islander and continental. It was divided, and hated its division.

  Perhaps I had traveled too much, left my heart in too many places. I knew what I was supposed to feel, what it was fashionable for my generation to feel. We cared about everything: fascism in Germany and Italy, the seizure of Manchuria, Indian nationalism, the Irish question, the workers, the Negroes, the Jews. We had spread our feelings over the whole world; and I knew that mine were spread very thin. I cared—oh, yes, I certainly cared—about the Austrian socialists. But did I care as much as I said I did, tried to imagine I did? No, not nearly as much. I felt angry with Patterson; but he, at least, was honest. What is the use of caring at all, if you aren’t prepared to dedicate your life, to die? Well, perhaps it was some use. Very, very little.

  Bergmann must have known what I was thinking. After a long silence, he said, kindly and gently, “You are tired, my child. Go to bed.”

  We parted at the restaurant door. I watched him walking away down the street, his head sunk in thought, until he was lost among the crowd.

  I had failed him; I knew it. But I could do no more. It was beyond my strength.

  That night, I think, he explored the uttermost depths of his loneliness.

  * * *

  NEXT MORNING, Ashmeade came onto the set. I wondered why. He seemed to have no special mission. He nodded to Bergmann, but didn’t engage him in conversation. For some time, he stood watching, with a faint, secret smile on his lips.

  Presently, Bergmann walked off into
a corner, to speak to Dorothy. This must have been what Ashmeade was waiting for. He turned to me.

  “Oh, Isherwood, can you spare me a minute of your valuable time?”

  We strolled away together, toward the other end of the stage.

  “You know,” Ashmeade told me, in his soft, flattering voice, “Chatsworth’s very grateful to you. In fact, we all are.”

  “Oh, really?” I was cautious, somehow suspecting this opening.

  “We quite realize,” Ashmeade chose each word, smiling, as if it tasted nice, “that you’re in rather a difficult position. I think you’ve shown a great deal of tact and patience. We appreciate that.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” I said. I knew exactly what he was driving at now. And he knew that I knew. He was enjoying this little game.

  “Well, I’m going to be frank with you. This is between ourselves, of course.… Chatsworth’s getting worried. He simply can’t understand Bergmann’s attitude.”

  “How dreadful!” My tone was thoroughly nasty. Ashmeade gave me one of his poker-face looks.

  “Everybody’s complaining about him,” he continued, his voice becoming confidential. “Anita talked to us yesterday. She wants to be released from the picture. We wouldn’t agree to it, of course. But you can’t blame her. After all, she’s a big star. Bergmann treats her like a bit player.… It isn’t only Anita, either. Harris feels the same way. So does Watts. They’re prepared to put up with a good deal of temperament from a director. But there’s a limit.”

  I said nothing. I hated having to agree with Ashmeade.

  “You two are still great friends, aren’t you?” It sounded like a playful accusation.

  “Better than ever,” I told him, defiantly.

  “Well, can’t you give us some idea of what’s the matter with him? Isn’t he happy here? What’s he got against us?”

  “Nothing … It’s hard to explain.… You know he’s been worried about his family.…”

  “Oh, yes, this business in Austria … But that’s all over now, isn’t it?”