Prater Violet

by Christopher Isherwood

  When the last take was finished, he came solemnly up to Anita, in front of everybody, and kissed her hand. “Thank you, my darling,” he said. “You were great.”

  Anita loved it. Her eyes filled with tears.

  “Friedrich, I’m sorry I was naughty sometimes. I shall never have an experience like this again. I think you’re the most wonderful man in the world.”

  “Well,” said Lawrence Dwight, addressing his artificial leg, “Now we’ve seen everything, haven’t we, Stump?”

  * * *

  ARTHUR CROMWELL had a flat in Chelsea. Wouldn’t we all go round there for a nightcap? Anita said yes. So of course Bergmann and I had to accept. Eliot and Lawrence and Harris joined us. And Bergmann insisted on bringing Dorothy, Teddy and Roger. Then, just as we were starting, Ashmeade appeared.

  I was afraid there would be a row—but no. I saw Bergmann stiffen a little. Then Ashmeade took him aside and said something, smiling his subtly flattering smile.

  “You go with the others,” Bergmann told me. “Ashmeade will drive me in his car. He wants to talk to me.”

  I don’t know what they said to each other; but when we all arrived at Cromwell’s flat, it was obvious that a reconciliation had taken place. Bergmann was sparkling, and Ashmeade’s smile had become intimate. After a few minutes, I heard him call Bergmann “Friedrich.” And, more marvelous still, Bergmann publicly addressed him as “Umbrella.”

  At the party which followed, Bergmann was terrific. He clowned, he told stories, he sang songs, he imitated German actors, he showed Anita how to dance the Schuhplattler. His eyes shone with that last reserve of energy which one puts out in moments of extreme exhaustion, with the aid of a few drinks. And I felt so happy in his success. The way you feel when your father is a success with your friends.

  It must have been close on four o’clock when we said good night. Eliot offered us a ride in his car. Bergmann said he preferred to walk.

  “I’m coming with you,” I told him. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I was wound up like a watch. In Knightsbridge, I could probably find a taxi to take me home.

  * * *

  IT WAS that hour of the night when the street lamps seem to shine with an unnatural, remote brilliance, like planets on which there is no life. The King’s Road was wet-black, and deserted as the moon. It did not belong to the King, or to any human being. The little houses had shut their doors against all strangers and were still, waiting for dawn, bad news and the milk. There was nobody about. Not even a policeman. Not even a cat.

  It was that hour of the night at which man’s ego almost sleeps. The sense of identity, of possession, of name and address and telephone number grows very faint. It was the hour at which man shivers, pulls up his coat collar, and thinks, “I am a traveler. I have no home.”

  A traveler, a wanderer. I was aware of Bergmann, my fellow-traveler, pacing beside me: a separate, secret consciousness, locked away within itself, distant as Betelgeuse, yet for a short while, sharing my wanderings. Head thrust forward, hat perched on the thick bush of hair, muffler huddled around the throat under the gray stubble, hands clasped behind the back. Like me, he had his journey to go.

  What was he thinking about? Prater Violet, his wife, his daughter, myself, Hitler, a poem he would write, his boyhood, or tomorrow morning? How did it feel to be inside that stocky body, to look out of those dark, ancient eyes? How did it feel to be Friedrich Bergmann?

  There is one question which we seldom ask each other directly: it is too brutal. And yet it is the only question worth asking our fellow-travelers. What makes you go on living? Why don’t you kill yourself? Why is all this bearable? What makes you bear it?

  Could I answer that question about myself? No. Yes. Perhaps … I supposed, vaguely, that it was a kind of balance, a complex of tensions. You did whatever was next on the list. A meal to be eaten. Chapter eleven to be written. The telephone rings. You go off somewhere in a taxi. There is one’s job. There are amusements. There are people. There are books. There are things to be bought in shops. There is always something new. There has to be. Otherwise, the balance would be upset, the tension would break.

  It seemed to me that I had always done whatever people recommended. You were born; it was like entering a restaurant. The waiter came forward with a lot of suggestions. You said, “What do you advise?” And you ate it, and supposed you liked it, because it was expensive, or out of season, or had been a favorite of King Edward the Seventh. The waiter had recommended teddy bears, football, cigarettes, motor bikes, whisky, Bach, poker, the culture of Classical Greece. Above all, he had recommended Love: a very strange dish.

  Love. At the very word, the taste, the smell of it, something inside me began to throb. Ah yes, Love … Love, at the moment, was J.

  Love had been J. for the last month—ever since we met at that party. Ever since the letter which had arrived next morning, opening the way to the unhoped-for, the unthinkable, the after-all-quite-thinkable and, as it now seemed, absolutely inevitable success of which my friends were mildly envious. Next week, or as soon as my work for Bulldog was finished, we should go away together. To the South of France, perhaps. And it would be wonderful. We would swim. We would lie in the sun. We would take photographs. We would sit in the café. We would hold hands, at night, looking out over the sea from the balcony of our room. I would be so grateful, so flattered, and I would be damned careful not to show it. I would be anxious. I would be jealous. I would unpack my box of tricks, and exhibit them, once again. And, in the end (the end you never thought about), I would get sick of the tricks, or J. would get sick of them. And very politely, tenderly, nostalgically, flatteringly, we would part. We would part, agreeing to be the greatest friends always. We would part, immune, in future, from that particular toxin, that special twinge of jealous desire, when one of us met the other, with somebody else, at another party.

  I was glad I had never told Bergmann about J. He would have taken possession of that, as he did of everything else. But it was still mine, and it would always be. Even when J. and I were only trophies, hung up in the museums of each other’s vanity.

  After J., there would be K. and L. and M., right down the alphabet. It’s no use being sentimentally cynical about this, or cynically sentimental. Because J. isn’t really what I want. J. has only the value of being now. J. will pass, the need will remain. The need to get back into the dark, into the bed, into the warm naked embrace, where J. is no more J. than K., L., or M. Where there is nothing but the nearness, and the painful hopelessness of clasping the naked body in your arms. The pain of hunger beneath everything. And the end of all lovemaking, the dreamless sleep after the orgasm, which is like death.

  Death, the desired, the feared. The longed-for sleep. The terror of the coming of sleep. Death. War. The vast sleeping city, doomed for the bombs. The roar of oncoming engines. The gunfire. The screams. The houses shattered. Death universal. My own death. Death of the seen and known and tasted and tangible world. Death with its army of fears. Not the acknowledged fears, the fears that are advertised. More dreadful than those: the private fears of childhood. Fear of the height of the high-dive, fear of the farmer’s dog and the vicar’s pony, fear of cupboards, fear of the dark passage, fear of splitting your finger nail with a chisel. And behind them, most unspeakably terrible of all, the arch-fear: the fear of being afraid.

  It can never be escaped—never, never. Not if you run away to the ends of the earth (we had turned into Sloane Street), not if you yell for Mummy, or keep a stiff upper lip, or take to drink or to dope. That fear sits throned in my heart. I carry it about with me, always.

  But if it is mine, if it is really within me … Then … Why, then … And, at this moment, but how infinitely faint, how distant, like the high far glimpse of a goat track through the mountains between clouds, I see something else: the way that leads to safety. To where there is no fear, no loneliness, no need of J., K., L., or M. For a second, I glimpse it. For an instant, it is even quite clear. T
hen the clouds shut down, and a breath off the glacier, icy with the inhuman coldness of the peaks, touches my cheek. “No,” I think, “I could never do it. Rather the fear I know, the loneliness I know … For to take that other way would mean that I should lose myself. I should no longer be a person. I should no longer be Christopher Isherwood. No, no. That’s more terrible than the bombs. More terrible than having no lover. That I can never face.”

  Perhaps I might have turned to Bergmann and asked, “Who are you? Who am I? What are we doing here?” But actors cannot ask such questions during the performance. We had written each other’s parts, Christopher’s Friedrich, Friedrich’s Christopher, and we had to go on playing them, as long as we were together. The dialogue was crude, the costumes and make-up were more absurd, more of a caricature, than anything in Prater Violet: Mother’s Boy, the comic Foreigner with the funny accent. Well, that didn’t matter. (We had reached Bergmann’s door, now.) For, beneath our disguises, and despite all the kind-unkind things we might ever say or think about each other, we knew. Beneath outer consciousness, two other beings, anonymous, impersonal, without labels, had met and recognized each other, and had clasped hands. He was my father. I was his son. And I loved him very much.

  Bergmann held out his hand.

  “Good night, my child,” he said.

  He went into the house.

  * * *

  I NEVER SAW Prater Violet, after all.

  It was shown in London, with a great deal of publicity, and got very good notices. (“When we saw your name on the screen,” my mother wrote, “we both felt very proud, and applauded loudly. Richard kept saying, ‘Isn’t that just like Christopher?’ But, I must say, Anita Hayden is hardly one’s idea of an innocent young girl? She has a charming voice…”) It went to New York, and the Americans liked it, unusually well for a British picture. It was even shown in Vienna.

  Several months later, I got a letter from Lawrence Dwight, who was on holiday in Paris:

  A girl I know here came to me in great indignation the other day. She’s an earnest Red, and admires the political consciousness of the French workers; but, alas, it seems that the ones in our neighborhood are all going to see La Violette du Prater, a horrible British picture which, besides being an insult to the intelligence of a five-year-old child, is definitely counter-revolutionary and ought to be banned. Meanwhile, in the cinema round the corner, a wonderful Russian masterpiece is playing to empty seats.

  Incidentally, I’ve seen the Russian film, myself. It is the usual sex triangle between a girl with thick legs, a boy, and a tractor. As a matter of fact, it’s technically superior to anything Bulldog could produce in a hundred years. But you can’t expect the poor fools to know that …

  * * *

  AS FOR BERGMANN, Prater Violet got him the offer of a job in Hollywood. He went out there with his family, early in 1935.

  Books by Christopher Isherwood

  NOVELS

  A Meeting by the River

  A Single Man

  Down There on a Visit

  The World in the Evening

  Prater Violet

  Goodbye to Berlin

  The Last of Mr. Norris

  (English title: Mr. Norris Changes Trains)

  The Memorial

  All the Conspirators

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  My Guru and His Disciple

  Christopher and His Kind

  Kathleen and Frank

  Lions and Shadows

  BIOGRAPHY

  Ramakrishna and His Disciples

  PLAYS (with W. H. Auden)

  On the Frontier

  The Ascent of F6

  The Dog beneath the Skin

  TRAVEL

  The Condor and the Cows

  Journey to a War (with W. H. Auden)

  COLLECTION

  Exhumations

  TRANSLATIONS

  The Intimate Journals of Charles Baudelaire

  (and the following with Swami Prabhavananda)

  The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali

  Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination

  The Bhagavad-Gita

  Copyright © 1945 by Christopher Isherwood

  All rights reserved

  Published in Canada by HarperCollinsCanadaLtd

  Library of Congress catalog card number: 87-8610

  First published in 1945 by Random House, Inc.

  First Noonday Press paperback edition, 1987

  First North Point Press paperback edition, 1996

  eISBN 9781466853287

  First eBook edition: August 2013