Lions and Shadows

by Christopher Isherwood

  However, as there were none of these spectacles available, Weston had decided to take me to a meeting of a college essay club: ‘You may as well see,’ he added, darkly, ‘what Oxford’s really like.’ I was ushered into a large crowded room. Weston introduced me, brusquely, to about two dozen young men and several dons: the young men inspected me with unfeigned curiosity, and I wondered, uneasily, what on earth Weston had been telling them about me, in advance. (It was three or four years later that I discovered how, at this period, he had gone about proclaiming that Seascape With Figures (which he’d read in manuscript during our summer holiday) was ‘the only novel’ since the War!) The meeting began with ‘private business’—an excuse, it seemed, for the members of the club to be as rude to each other as they knew how. I quite expected a free fight; but apparently it was merely the Oxford (or the ‘English’) manner: they were all enjoying themselves enormously. Presently, one of the young men remarked that it would have been much better to hold the meeting on the following Saturday; whereupon Weston jumped to his feet and shouted: ‘I take that as a personal insult to my guest!’ This protest was duly entered in the minutes of the club. I blushed and sat there feeling very silly.

  The paper which followed was on ‘The Concept of Duty.’ Its author read it very fast, in a sulky, gobbling voice, as though he expected to be contradicted at any moment. It was all very abstruse, in the jargon of technical philosophy; I barely understood a single sentence. Nervously fingering the return half of my railway ticket in my waistcoat pocket, I was astonished to find how apprehensive and unhappy this university atmosphere still made me feel. It was now a year and a half since I had left Cambridge; but had I ever completely escaped? No, I had not. This room, these cultured voices still exercised something of their evil, insidious power; they made me feel, yes, competitive. Against my will, against my better judgment, something inside me wanted to stand up, to declaim, to behave, to astound them all. And because I wouldn’t, couldn’t, I sat and sulked, trying to look distinguished and abstractedly helping myself to unwisely large quantities of bananas, mulled claret and preserved fruits. I returned to London next day, with the beginnings of a violent attack of influenza. Gargling my swollen throat, I cursed the Oxford climate: but Oxford wasn’t to blame—it was Weston himself. Henceforward, I caught a bad cold nearly every time we met: indeed, the mere sight of a postcard announcing his arrival would be sufficient to send up my temperature and inflame my tonsils. During the next two years, these psychological attacks became one of our stock jokes: Weston, during his Homer Lane period (of which more, later) referred to them as ‘the liar’s quinsey.’ I have never been able to explain them satisfactorily, even to myself. Were they due to cosmic composition of our respective auras? Or a manifestation of my tireless Sense of Guilt? Was the analyst-patient relationship between Weston and myself far more permanent and profound than either of us realized? Honestly, I can’t say. Or perhaps I won’t say. It makes no practical difference. I record my symptoms here, without further comment, for what they are worth to the professional psychologist—my modest exhibit in the vask freak museum of our neurotic generation.

  Polly and Roger East were married on January the eighth, 1927, at the registrar’s office in Marlowes Road. Rube, an art student friend of Polly’s, and myself were the only witnesses. The extreme casualness of the ceremony made it rather impressive: it was a solemn thought that such a serious transaction could be carried through with such ease—I felt as though I had seen two people run over and killed while laughing and chatting in the street. Not that there was anything in the least tragic about the proceedings themselves: indeed, they nearly opened with a bit of slapstick farce. I was the first to arrive; very smart in my best suit, with buttonhole, hat and gloves. The other three turned up together, five minutes later. Roger ambled in, hatless, with untidy hayrick hair, wearing a floppy old greatcoat and rubber-soled shoes. Polly followed him, in a very arty blue cloak. Rube came last, like a page: he was dressed in a much-soiled fisherman’s jersey and a pair of shapeless grey flannel bags. The registrar’s clerk surveyed us with a disapproving eye: ‘You two come over here, please,’ he said, addressing Polly and myself: ‘We’re late, as it is. We’d better start at once; there’s another couple waiting.’ We explained and got ourselves sorted out, only just in time. Afterwards at the wedding breakfast—custard, Chianti and iced cake in the new flat—Polly seemed unnaturally quiet: several times, I surprised her regarding me with a thoughtful stare. ‘What’s the matter?’ Roger asked. ‘I was only thinking,’ she answered, quite seriously, ‘how awful it’d have been if I’d married Bisherwood, by mistake.’

  That evening, I felt in a mood to celebrate: Philip and I went together to see Sybil Thorndike and Henry Ainley in Macbeth. At that time Sybil Thorndike was my favourite tragic actress and Macbeth my favourite Shakespeare play. On the whole, I was very much disappointed. Sybil made a fine sinister entry with the letter; but later on she got much too noisy. Ainley stood about the place looking dazed, as well he might; for the producer had made his castle several times as big as Waterloo station, and the young men of the court ran up and down yelling like porters. Philip and I had blown the last of our money on stalls. During the interval, we turned round and saw Polly and Roger standing at the back of the pit. Philip was terribly shocked. According to his notions of propriety, the Easts, on such an occasion, ought to have taken the Royal Box.

  Meanwhile, I had installed myself in Roger’s old room at Romilly Road. Bill Scott, a friend of the Cheurets, helped me move in; Jean and Edouard were in and out all day long, sorting and arranging my books on the plank shelves which I had had fitted up at one end of the room. Madame Cheuret chose the material for my curtains and the cover on my divan bed. In the evenings, Philip would pop in for a chat, gloomier than ever, since he had just failed in one of his medical exams. Even Rose paid me an occasional visit: I had always plenty of company. And if, by any chance, I was alone for an hour or two and felt bored, there was my landlady, Mrs Partridge, perpetually ready for a chat.

  Mrs Partridge was a thin lively youngish woman: a widow, with one little boy of eight, whose name was Billy. When she stopped talking for a moment and became thoughtful, her mouth drew down at the corners so that she looked suddenly very sad, and you wondered if she wasn’t, perhaps, seriously ill—but she seldom stopped talking for long. She talked about anything and everything: the weather, the neighbours, the price of food, the Easts (whom she thought ‘an ideal pair’), the records I played on my gramophone (‘the only thing with those classics,’ she complained, ‘is you can never tell when they’re going to stop.’) Mrs Partridge cooked dinner for me in the evening: she was a good cook, though apt to be vague about meal-times—I occasionally had to wait until ten o’clock at night.

  Mrs Partridge often spoke of her late husband, who had been a builder. She described how she’d refused to have a honeymoon on the ground that ‘we’d better start as we mean to go on’: in her dry, talkative way she seemed pretty tough. I wondered, nevertheless, whether she wasn’t considering marrying again, because she had a regular male visitor, a bald gloomy man in brown boots, who turned up at the most unlikely hours of the day, and sat for long spells in the smelly little greenhouse which had been converted into a kitchen, sipping a glass of port. A certain air of mystery always surrounded his arrival. Mrs Partridge was careful to shut my door before hurrying downstairs, patting her lank bobbed hair, to let him in. They conversed in low voices and stopped talking instantly if, on some excuse or other, I looked into the kitchen and disturbed them. Once or twice, they appeared to have quarrelled, because Mrs Partridge, when she returned to my room, had visibly been crying. She and I never discussed these visits, but I often speculated about them with Philip. We both came to the same conclusion: Mrs Partridge’s admirer must obviously be a married man. ‘And I shouldn’t wonder,’ Philip added, ‘if they haven’t decided to murder his wife. They’re just the kind of people you see at the assizes. And they’re abs
olutely certain to make a mess of it, poor devils. For some inscrutable reason, they always will use arsenic … God, how dreary it all is!’

  In spite of the smell from the greenhouse-kitchen, and the worse smell from the bathroom drain, and a really filthy smell which haunted the staircase (ascribed by Mrs Partridge, perhaps unjustly, to the Irish couple who lived on the ground floor) I felt, during those first weeks, very glad that I had settled in Romilly Road. My room, with its big windows, was light and airy, my books made a fine show on the plain wooden shelves, and there, in the evening, were my two arm-chairs from Cambridge, waiting invitingly before the glowing gas-fire. Yes, it was a nice snug little setting for my cosy independent bachelor life; or at any rate for the pleasing impression of that life which I wished to convey to my visiting friends. For, to be honest, the room only really came into being when I could see it through Philip’s or the Easts’ or the Cheurets’ eyes. Left alone in it, even for a few moments, I couldn’t sit still and hovered restlessly about, touching the curtains, aligning the table with the bed, altering the position of a book, like a small shopkeeper who waits for customers, uneasily arranging and rearranging his wares. Every object, big or little, had its place in the pathologically tidy scheme of my existence. Mine was the rigid tidiness of the celibate: that pathetically neat room, as I now picture it, seems to cry out for the disorderly human traces of cohabitation—the hairbrush discovered among your papers in the drawer, the unfamiliar queer-feeling garments in the dark cupboard, the too small slipper you vainly try to pull on when half awake, the wrong tooth-brush in your glass, the nail paring in the fender and in the tea-cup the strange lustrous single hair. But the room, as long as I occupied it, remained virgin, unravished; and Philip said: ‘You’ve got a nice place here, boy. God, I envy you, being on your own!’ And Jean and Edouard thought of me as leading a sort of romantic Red Indian life, beside my own camp fire, and envied me, too. Only Polly East, that merciless perceiver, noticed that anything was lacking: ‘What’s Bisherwood done to this room?’ she asked. ‘It’s quite different from when you had it, Roger. He’s made it all sort of respectable—like a public park.’

  Meanwhile, the Easts had moved into their flat, only a few streets away, and had set about transforming it from top to bottom. They were tireless art-workers: Roger, particularly, seemed to practise every kind of decorative craft by sheer instinct. All day long, he carpentered, carved, painted, stencilled, stitched, experimented with varnishes, ornamented the door-knobs, the mantelpieces, the tables, the lavatory seat. Polly and he were gradually designing allegorical wool-work backs for the chairs: Venus and Mars, the descent of Hebe and the rape of Proserpine. In spare moments, Roger wrote articles, stories and poems, while Polly drew female nudes, the fattest and flabbiest she could find. I envied their life: they seemed as busy and lively as birds. Their only tiffs were artistic, and I was frequently called in as umpire: ‘Come and look at Polly’s new daub. Tell me frankly, don’t you think it’s absolutely bloody?’ ‘Oh, Bisherwood, darling, do say you like it! I’ve been ever so depressed this morning. Roger’s only jealous because he can’t draw anything but trees.’ Roger, Polly always insisted, was a writer; he had no real business to be painting at all. When, a few months later, they both exhibited at a show, she was furious because he sold three pictures, while she sold only two.

  Every week-day morning at a quarter to nine, I set off on the long bus-ride which took me to my employer’s home, a large house standing inside its own garden, in St John’s Wood. My pupil’s name was Graham. He was eight years old, an exceptionally nervous little boy, with a pale, lively, charming face, fair hair standing up in a tuft, and big steel spectacles which were perpetually getting lost. During lessons, he wriggled and squirmed continually, put his feet on the table, stood up on the chair, or wandered off round the room, moving in a kind of trance. Yet, all the time, he was attending to every word I was saying; indeed, he attended far too carefully, and frequently caught me out in the clumsiest self-contradictions and mistakes. The big nursery was overheated, and it was often as much as I could do to keep awake. The faint purr of the gas-fire, the far-off whine of the vacuum-cleaner in a distant room and the remote hum of traffic out of doors were deliciously soothing: luxury seemed to envelop us physically, like the pleasant oppression of a day in the height of summer. I hear myself speaking, consciously, deliberately, choosing every word, carefully modulating my voice, in order not to disturb the soporific calm: ‘All this, naturally, was before the—er—resurrection.’ I give my front teeth a smart rap with the knob of my silver pencil, but fail to check a large lazy yawn.

  Divinity was my favourite subject. I tried to teach it very flatly and prosaically, with a certain flavour of Lytton Strachey impudence. My history lessons were merely a pale reproduction of the methods and manner of Mr Holmes. Maths I unexpectedly enjoyed: the kind of problems suitable for an eight-year-old boy were still just within my grasp, though Graham frequently solved them before I did. In geography and Latin, I clung firmly to the text-books and never ventured an inch without their protection. Graham knew much more French than I. My only contribution to his education in this subject was a single quotation: ‘“C’est Lescaut,” dit-il, en lui lâchant un coup de pistolet, “il ira souper ce soir avec les anges!”’ This phrase appealed to Graham so greatly that he repeated it on every possible occasion, to the mixed admiration and faint disapproval of his relations, who found it obscurely subversive.

  Graham hated writing essays and made every possible excuse to void them. This was hardly surprising. The nursery governess who had preceded me had delighted in such themes as: ‘Duty,’ ‘Springtime,’ ‘Make Hay While The Sun Shines,’ ‘A Boy’s Best Friend Is His Mother.’ And Graham, who was by nature extremely independent, had remained stubbornly suspicious of and antagonistic to the cut-and-dried schoolroom ideology. In his exercise book, I found the records of one such tussle between the governess and himself. This time, Graham had been told to ‘write very neatly a story with the title: Playing The Game’:

  There were once two boys who were brothers and they lived together and went to the same school. They both did very well at their school and became popular with everyone, but one was better at games than the other and this aroused some jealousy on the part of the boy who was worse at games than his brother. The brother who was best at games was a good sportsman but the other boy was not. The boy who was jealous of his brother got him expelled with a false charge, but his brother though expelled and numerous other troubles happened to him nothing prevented him from playing the game. He even got sent to prison again falsely by his brother but nothing hindered him from being a thorough sportsman and at last he proved that he had been falsely accused and his brother was sent to prison for five years.

  Underneath this, the governess had noted: ‘A wrong idea. Playing the game is being honourable and truthful in spite of whatever trouble you may be in or whatever punishment you know is in store for you. Write another story over the page on the same subject.’

  So Graham had tried again:

  Once upon a time there was a boy who had not done very well at his school but every time he was punished he always told the truth about what he had done and tried to do better. The result was that each time the punishment got gradually lighter till he did not have any at all. Then he began to pass all his examinations and he soon got high up in class and became very popular simply because he was a good sportsman and always played the game. Afterwards he developed a very good character and he got on very well for the rest of his life. His character and his good temper always made him popular and respected by everyone who knew him and afterwards he got a very high position for the rest of his life.