Lions and Shadows

by Christopher Isherwood

  Remember, you are a domestic servant: try to get on good terms with your future colleagues without delay. The butler or parlourmaid who opens the door to you may be a valuable potential ally: the ladies’ maid, if she gets a down on you, won’t miss an opportunity of saying something spiteful as she brushes her mistress’ hair. And don’t be proud or squeamish about your wages. Some employers will take a subconscious sadistic pleasure in forgetting to give you your week’s money and manoeuvering you into having to ask for it when visitors are present. Others will frankly tip you: ‘Never mind about the change.’ You may even receive the oddest perquisites: a half-empty box of cigarettes, a discarded pair of trousers, a slightly stale chocolate cake. Never, on any account, refuse.

  If you are under thirty, and have an educated voice, a shaven chin and a clean neck, you should have no difficulty in getting a tutoring job at any time: it is the tragic elderly ex-army officers, with their excellent credentials and frayed shirt-cuffs, who are turned down again and again in favour of some plausible young ignoramus like myself. Everything is against the older man, and he knows it: sometimes he pathetically offers to reduce his terms. At one house, I saw the phantom trade union in action. A friend of the family, himself a preparatory-school master, had been called in to interview the applicants. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told me, ‘I’ll back you up. There was another chap here. Been in the navy. He only asked for two and a half guineas a week; so I soon put a spoke into him.’

  But there are jobs and jobs; and it would take a very bold or desperate man to accept some of them, however high the wages. A friend of mine, who had all but agreed to accompany a rich American family back to Arizona, hastily changed his mind on being asked, in peculiarly sinister tones, by his future (‘highly nervous’) pupil, if he was fond of poisonous snakes. I myself refused two offers before settling down, about the middle of November, with my first family. In both cases, the would-be employers were charming and the pay was good: it was the responsibility involved which I couldn’t bring myself to face. A well-to-do, cultured, elderly married couple wanted me to relieve them of their delicate nephew for the next three years. The two of us were to take a cottage in the country, fish, shoot, buy a small car, go abroad whenever we felt inclined—live, in fact, like elder and younger brother, until the boy was old enough to matriculate for Cambridge. The idea was certainly tempting; but all my instincts were against it—I didn’t want to bind myself for so long a time—and in the end, after much hesitation, I said No. I am very glad now that I did so; I think the arrangement would have been thoroughly bad, both for the boy and for myself. On the second occasion, however, I didn’t hesitate for a moment. A widowed lady interviewed me in the lounge of a Kensington hotel. ‘I’m not looking for a tutor, Mr Isherwood; I’m looking for a companion. Nobody could teach my son anything—he’s a genius.’ And she went on to describe how the boy, who was only fourteen, spoke four languages perfectly, composed orchestral music, studied the calculus every night before going to sleep and had beaten some Polish champion, whose name I forget, at chess. I was engaged on the spot; but wrote next morning to say that I found I should have to be away from London for several months.

  About this time, I came across Roger East, my friend of the Cambridge film society days, whom I hadn’t seen, now, for more than a year. He had given up trying to get into films for the moment, he told me, and was doing free-lance journalism of various sorts. Also, he was just about to get married. His fiancée, Polly, was an artist. She had an enormous mass of bobbed hair, a Midlands accent, and the tiny face of an attractive Pekingese dog: I felt perfectly at home with her from the very first. Polly had a trick (which in almost anybody else would have been horribly disconcerting) of attending not to what you said but the way in which you said it. ‘You’re ever so funny, you know, Bisherwood,’ she would tell me, at the end of a long and serious conversation between Roger and myself. ‘Do you always flap about with your hands, like that? Hasn’t anybody ever told you how funny you are?’ She invariably called me ‘Bisherwood’—a contraction of Bradshaw-Isherwood, my ponderous double-barrelled name, hitherto so carefully ignored in these pages.) ‘Oh, I do wish I could have seen Roger when he was at Cambridge!’ she would add: ‘I bet he wasn’t half a scream, with his high-necked jumpers and his silk scarves, and all!’

  Roger was living in a furnished room in Romilly Road—a short rather dreary street leading out of the Fulham Road, with its crashing buses and shabby little shops, into the northern half of the art-slum district which lies between the Old Brompton Road and the river. The tall damp grey houses were inhabited by small-part actors, film supers, journalists, artists’ models, and pupils from the Royal College of Music and the Slade. Most of the upper floors had been converted into studios: their grimy toplights blankly reflected the sky, beneath wireless masts which were like fishing-rods curved by the weight of a perpetual catch. Nevertheless, Romilly Road had a certain romantic charm, when you came to know it well. It was one of those streets of which people say, in bohemian circles, that ‘everybody’ has lived in it, at some period or other: there are streets like it in every big city, and they represent a certain stage, either very early or very late, in the artistic career. You may pass through Romilly Road twice during your life: once on the way up, once on the way down—to the bottom. The work-house-infirmary, appropriately enough, is just round the corner. I was thrilled to discover that Kathy herself had spent some months in the Road, inhabiting a small basement flat. Had I lived there a few years earlier, I might actually have seen her opening the door in the morning to take in the milk or hurrying along the street to the confectioner’s for some buns because D. H. Lawrence was coming to tea.

  For, already, I had quite decided to settle in Romilly Road—or, as Roger put it, to ‘join the Romilly Group.’ I arranged to take over his room when he left it, at the end of the year, to marry and set up with Polly in a flat.

  Meanwhile, my novel, Seascape With Figures, had been finished and revised. Our family friend had approved of it in general, wisely insisting, however, that the tempting but preposterous episode of the little girl’s death must be cut out altogether. On her encouragement, I had sent the manuscript, already, to two well-known publishers. They had refused it, of course. One of them wrote saying that my work had ‘a certain literary delicacy, but lacked sufficient punch’—a pretty damning verdict, when your story ends with a murder. My friend advised me to persist: two refusals, she rightly said, were not enough. But I was pessimistic. Chalmers hadn’t cared much for the book: I had failed, somehow to carry out our original scheme. And now I no longer felt—as I had felt a year earlier—that I wanted to see something of mine published at once, at all costs. There seemed, suddenly, to be plenty of time. I would put the thing away for six months, I decided, and try to rewrite it later.

  Meanwhile, my head was full of new shadowy tremendous ideas for an immense novel: nothing less ambitious than a survey of the post-war generation. Its scene was to be Cambridge, bohemian London, the Alps and North Wales. All my friends were to appear: Chalmers, Philip, Eric, Weston, the Cheurets—and, of course, myself. I made elaborate plans—all of them, intentionally, a little vague: for the truth was, the subject seemed so exciting, so wonderful, that I hardly dared to begin. It was much easier to draw diagrams in coloured chalks, beautifully shaded, with arrows, numbers and wavy lines, and pseudo-technical terms invented for the occasion, such as ‘fifth static area’ or ‘Tommy-roger Motif bridge-passage to Welsea.’ I would wake up in the middle of the night to scribble emotionally in my note-book. ‘The treatment must be nearly pure Objective. The Epic Myth. In a sense, there must be no actual “development.” Like gossip. Very slow-moving maddeningly deliberate genre-packed scenes. People’s attitudes to their own Coriolanus-myth.’

  But one thing, at any rate, I had definitely decided I knew what my novel—if it were ever written—would be called. Its title was to be The North-West Passage. I had had this phrase in my head, already, for several m
onths: it repeated itself again and again, usually in the most obscure connections. Like ‘lions and shadows’ or ‘the rats’ hostel,’ it was a private key to a certain group of responses; all, needless to say, related to the idea of ‘The Test.’ More rationally, it symbolized, in my mind, the career of the neurotic hero, The Truly Weak Man—antithesis of ‘the truly strong man’ spoken of by the homicidal paranoiac whose statement is quoted by Bleuler:

  The feeling of impotence brings forth the strong words, the bold sounds to battle are emitted by the trumpet called persecution insanity. The signs of the truly strong are repose and good-will … the strong individuals are those who without any fuss do their duty. These have neither the time nor the occasion to throw themselves into a pose and try to be something great.

  ‘The truly strong man,’ calm, balanced, aware of his strength, sits drinking quietly in the bar; it is not necessary for him to try and prove to himself that he is not afraid, by joining the Foreign Legion, seeking out the most dangerous wild animals in the remotest tropical jungles, leaving his comfortable home in a snowstorm to climb the impossible glacier. In other words, the Test exists only for the Truly Weak Man: no matter whether he passes it or whether he fails, he cannot alter his essential nature. The Truly Strong Man travels straight across the broad America of normal life, taking always the direct, reasonable route. But ‘America’ is just what the truly weak man, the neurotic hero, dreads. And so, with immense daring, with an infinitely greater expenditure of nervous energy, money, time, physical and mental resources, he prefers to attempt the huge northern circuit, the laborious, terrible north-west passage, avoiding life; and his end, if he does not turn back, is to be lost for ever in the blizzard and the ice.

  Unfortunately, my idea of ‘The North-West Passage’ had very little to do with the scheme for the action of the novel which I did finally work out. As usual, I was trying to pack a small suitcase with the contents of three cabin trunks: my little comedy of bohemian life was, by this time, so overloaded with symbolism; the interplay of motifs (to use a very favourite word of mine, just then) was so complex and self-contradictory, that the book, had it ever been actually written, would have been merely a series of descriptions of the effects which I had hoped, in vain, to be able to produce. However, it wasn’t written and never will be: so here is the plot.

  A young man named Leonard, who is up at Cambridge, a great gossip and adroit organizer of tea-parties and social encounters, comes to London to listen to a concert by a well-known string quartette. After the concert is over, he goes round to the artists’ room, where he is surprised to meet Roger Garland, an old school-friend. Garland explains that he is the quartette’s secretary: he invites Leonard to come with him that evening to a studio party. At the party, a lot of celebrities and excitingly eccentric people are present, and they all talk to Roger Garland; indeed, he seems to enjoy quite an important status amongst them. Leonard is enormously impressed. He decides that Roger is far more interesting and intelligent than he had previously imagined, and determines to cultivate his society at all costs. He therefore invites Roger to visit him for the week-end at Cambridge. In the course of the evening, Roger also introduces Leonard to a girl ’cello student named Katharine Simmonds: and she and Leonard discover that they have some mutual acquaintances, the Llewellyns, who live in Wales.

  We next see Roger Garland during his Cambridge visit: this part of the action is seen through Roger’s eyes. Roger is amazing Leonard and Leonard’s friends by his wit and general poshness at a big tea-party: and, all the while, he is a worthless sham. Oh, yes, he can tell funny stories and imitate Cortot and Casals and hold forth about Hindemith and Stravinsky and Delius; but he funked the high dive in his prep. school swimming-bath and now, in the profoundest, most irrevocable sense, it is too late. That evening, Leonard introduces him to Tommy Llewellyn. Leonard has no particular opinion of Tommy; he patronizes him because he is a Rugger Blue and because the Llewellyns have a good deal of money. But the meeting makes an extraordinary strong impression upon Roger. Prophetically, he imagines, in Tommy’s face, the peculiar signs of the man doomed to a violent, epic death: ‘He is looking for his tragedy,’ Roger thinks. Tommy, so quiet and diffident, so ill at ease amidst brilliant behaviour and talk, is surrounded by an invisible aura of disaster: he is born to die. But Roger will never really die, because he has never really lived. (Guess where I got that from, reader.) Next morning, Roger, still under the influence of this meeting, has a violent reaction from everything in his past life; but even as he ‘repents’ he knows, with a pang of self-hatred, that it is all quite useless. He will never change now. He leaves Cambridge in disgust. From Leonard’s point of view, the visit has been an immense success.

  Before leaving Cambridge, Roger has confided to Leonard something of his interest in Tommy; and Leonard, delighted to be of use, has at once suggested that Roger shall join a holiday party at Tawelfan, the Llewellyns’ house in Wales. Tawelfan belongs to Mrs Llewellyn, Tommy’s aunt, a rich Celtic-Twilight poetess: there are enormous mountains in the background and slate quarries which are blasted, at intervals, with terrific detonations. An atmosphere of violent springtime sexual vitality surrounds the guests. In addition to Roger, Leonard and Tommy, there is Beau, Tommy’s younger brother, whom Mrs Llewellyn calls her ‘mountain boy’: she is bringing him up to be ‘free’ and ‘splendid,’ in the German Wandervoegel tradition. (I intended to build up a satirical subplot round Beau; but this part of the story was never properly worked out.) And there are several other young men and girls, including Katharine Simmonds, the ’cello student. (For some reason which I have since forgotten, the idea of making her a ’cello student seemed specially and attractively spiteful.)

  During this visit, Roger Garland becomes increasingly fascinated by the personality of Tommy. Indeed, he comes to feel that Tommy and he are united by some mysterious bond: there is even a certain physical resemblance between them—it is Katharine who remarks upon this. (What I was actually trying to suggest was that Tommy and Roger were two halves or aspects of the same person. Tommy is an embodiment of Roger’s dream of himself as an epic character: in fact, both Roger and Tommy are The Truly Weak Man—but, while Tommy will one day be lost in trying to force the North-West Passage, Roger will never even dare attempt it.) Katharine and Roger talk about Tommy a great deal; their interest in him draws them together. Both Katharine and Roger feel that they come nearest to Tommy when they are with each other; and so a kind of love affair by proxy begins between them. Tommy, who is really in love with Katharine, but far too tied up and inhibited to be able to show it, is secretly very unhappy about all this. Leonard, the onlooker, enjoys himself as never before.

  Back in London, the proxy love-making continues: a week or two later Katharine and Roger suddenly decide to leave together for the Alps. Their first night is to be spent on the Col des Aravis. It isn’t till they are actually in bed together that the spell breaks: they discover that they aren’t interested in each other as lovers, at all. They have an all-night talk, and return to England by the next available train.

  In the autumn, Roger goes again to stay at Tawelfan. And now he finds that Tommy seems quite ordinary and dull. The mystic sign of doom has disappeared from his face. After a couple of days, Roger is heartily bored: he pines for London, the concerts and the studio gossip. If he is a sham, very well, he is a sham; he no longer cares.

  Katharine now unexpectedly appears—evidently by arrangement with Tommy himself. Tommy and she are together a great deal: nobody quite knows what is happening between them. Then, one morning, Katharine comes, in a terrible state, to Roger. She and Tommy have had a violent quarrel. She has told Tommy about her trip with Roger to the Alps, and Tommy has rushed out of the house, jumped on to his appallingly powerful motor-bicycle and ridden away at full speed. ‘He might do anything,’ she sobs. But Roger refuses to share her alarm. He has seen through Tommy, he declares; their whole cult of Tommy has been a fake. He is a nice boy, of course, and will
make a good husband; there is nothing in the least wild or dangerous about him; he is perfectly tame, Katharine needn’t worry, and within half an hour he’ll be back here, asking for forgiveness. His spiteful, witty dissertation is interrupted by some farm servants, bringing in Tommy’s body on a shutter. He has crashed at the bend of the road and broken his neck. Katharine turns hysterically upon Roger, exclaiming: ‘You killed him!’ And, thinking the whole affair over in the course of the months that follow, Roger comes to the conclusion that this is perfectly true. ‘After all,’ he reflects, not without a certain furtive conceit, ‘it is people like myself who are dangerous. We are the real destroyers.’

  Early in December, I went down to Oxford to visit Weston. I found him installed in some handsome oak-panelled rooms; in addition to the sitting-room and bedroom, he had a little closet, just big enough to hold a piano, to which he retired at frequent intervals, to play hymn tunes and Bach (just now ‘the only composer’). A cubist predecessor had painted the walls of this closet with a startling scarlet and black design, representing, apparently, a series of railway accidents and copulations between traction engines and pyramids. The University certainly suited Weston: he struck me as being, so to speak, several sizes larger than life. Talking his loudest, with the Oxonian modulations and accentuations more emphatic than ever, he showed me round the premises: there was no time to look at anything for long. On the mantelpiece was a Meccano model of a Constantinesco gear, made by Weston himself. Over the writing-table was a Picasso etching of two young acrobats (‘frightfully emotive’). Weston thrust into my hands an enormous book by Gertrude Stein (‘my God, she’s good!’), but I had barely opened it before I was told to ‘listen to this; she’s absolutely the only woman comedian.’ Weston had put a record of Sophie Tucker, singing ‘After you’ve gone away,’ on to the gramophone, but I couldn’t hear much of it, because he began, at the same time, to read aloud a poem by Morgenstern, despite my protests that I didn’t understand a word of German. After this, it was time to go out to dinner. We dined, in great style, at the George. Weston insisted on ordering champagne (‘the only possible drink. Except whisky, of course’). It occurred to me that evening, as often later, that he was one of the very few people I had ever met who ought to have been born a millionaire. (Philip was another.) And I was reminded of an absurd phrase I had once heard used by a French painter, a friend of the Cheurets: ‘Il n’a pas la nature riche d’artiste.’ Weston certainly had the ‘nature riche’: he was lavish in every possible direction. During dinner, he held forth on the subject of amusements. The cinema, he said was doomed; we’d had nothing of the slightest use since ’Way Down East. The only remaining traces of theatrical art were to be found on the music-hall stage: the whole of modern realistic drama since Tchekhov had got to go; later, perhaps, something might be done with puppets. As for the ballet—was I sure I wouldn’t have a cigar? No? Frowning severely, Weston chose the largest on the tray—as for the ballet, well, it simply ought to be forbidden by Act of Parliament. The only decent way to amuse yourself in the evenings was to go to the dog races, or some boxing, or the dirt track. I’d never been to the dirt track? Oh, but I must. It was the modern version of the Epic Life: the saga world translated into terms of the machine age. On the whole, however, Weston thought he liked the dog races even better: they were marvellously English. ‘English,’ I soon discovered, was his latest term of approbation. ‘All this continentalism won’t do,’ he declared. ‘It simply doesn’t suit us. And we do it so frightfully badly.’