Lost Years: A Memoir 1945 - 1951

by Christopher Isherwood

  [25 From “Solomon and the Witch”: her last line after the lovers realize their union has not been perfect enough to bring about the end of the world.]

  26 Commenting on these character changes in a letter to Christopher, Beatrix wrote that it was “all done by faith.”

  27 This may have been the party referred to in Christopher’s “Coming to London” article, at which “an animated discussion of existentialism was interrupted by one of the guests exclaiming piteously: ‘Oh, I’m so cold!’” I seem to hear Rosamond Lehmann speaking the line. If she did, this may have been a bit of sisterly bitchery, implying that John, with his well-known stinginess, was depriving his guests of coal which he actually had in the cellar and blaming the temperature on the fuel rationing.

  28 Robert Helpmann played Flamineo, Margaret Rawlings Vittoria. [In fact, the play is Jacobean.]

  29 Stephen Spender started living with Tony in 1932 (I think) and Christopher must have met Tony soon afterwards. They saw a good deal of each other during the next few years—especially in 1935–1936, when Christopher, Stephen, Heinz and Tony went to Portugal together and took a house in Sintra. As long as Christopher was with Heinz and Tony was with Stephen, relations between Christopher and Tony were apt to become strained. In his journal, Christopher accuses Tony of being a born prig and of taking it upon himself to judge Heinz because he sulked. But, in fact, Tony was only priggish because he was imitating Stephen, and Heinz was only sulking because Christopher was being so gloomy about the political outlook. Left to themselves, both boys had quite happy natures, especially Tony.

  In the summer of 1937, Christopher went to stay with Stephen at a house Stephen had taken in Kent, near the coast. Inez Pearn, whom Stephen had married in the previous year, was there; and so was Tony. To Christopher, the marriage seemed absurd; it was the sort of relationship Shelley might have had. Stephen would embrace Inez and then go across the room and embrace Tony. Tony said laughingly: “You’re like a man with a couple of spaniels,” but he resented Stephen’s behavior; and so did Inez, I guess. Christopher didn’t care what Inez felt; he found her repulsive. Stephen was aware of this, and he slyly encouraged Christopher and Tony to bitch her. I remember a walk they all took together among some sand hills. Inez slipped and fell in the sand, and Christopher exclaimed, “Stephen, your wife’s down!” The tone in which he said this made Stephen giggle maliciously. (Two years later, Inez fell in love with a spotty-faced poet named Charles Madge and left Stephen.)

  During this visit to the house in Kent, Christopher and Tony naturally found themselves in alliance. Christopher felt that Tony was being humiliated and therefore tried to build up his ego. Tony felt that Christopher was lonely for Heinz, who had been arrested in Germany that spring, and therefore tried to cheer him up.

  One day, the four of them were driving home from the beach in their swimsuits. Christopher and Tony were sitting in the back of the car. They were laughing a lot, a bit drunk maybe, and then they started to become conscious of each other’s naked bodies. They groped and jacked each other off. I don’t think Stephen and Inez were aware of this. But, that night, Tony came to Christopher’s room, and they had sex properly, and next morning Tony told Stephen about it. Stephen couldn’t very well object, but he was surprised and displeased—which was, no doubt, exactly how Tony wanted him to react.

  Christopher and Tony later agreed that something very odd had happened—two people who have known each other intimately for nearly five years suddenly find themselves taking part in a seemingly unpremeditated sex act. But the act itself now seems easy to explain; it was a spontaneous counterdemonstration against Stephen’s marriage. What is much odder is that this pair of old friends were then to discover that they were marvellously compatible sex partners.

  In the Portugal days, after some quarrel with Tony, Christopher had written spitefully about Tony’s “primly composed rabbit mouth.” And once he had said to him sarcastically, “If you were my little boy—” to which Tony had answered, “Thank God I’m not!” But now Christopher began to find Tony’s face charming and to be hotly excited by Tony’s strong coarse-skinned white body and thick curly reddish brown hair. And Tony told Christopher that he was a much better sex mate than Stephen had been, because he knew how to lead down from an orgasm as well as up to it.

  During the rest of 1937 and the second half of 1938 (after Christopher got back from China) Tony and Christopher went to bed together whenever an opportunity offered itself—either at Pembroke Gardens or on visits to Cuthbert Worsley and Tony Bower, who were then having a big affair. In August 1938 they stayed for a while at Dover and then went over to Ostende where they saw Gerald Hamilton. They always had a lot to talk and laugh about and became very fond of each other and grateful for so much mutually satisfied lust. But their relationship was absolutely without romance—which only meant that Christopher could spend nights with Tony even when he was in love with somebody else. He always fucked Tony; that was what they both enjoyed most. The first time Christopher did it, he found the act so delicious that he was unwilling to wash Tony’s shit off his cock, so he let it stay there till next morning. I think this was the one occasion when Christopher reacted to Tony in a way which could be called sentimental.

  30 They landed at about 9:00 a.m. on April 25.

  [31 Elevated train.]

  32 I now realize that another, surprisingly important reason was Christopher’s desire to impress Hayden Lewis—that smiling sneering spectator and critic of the drama of his affair with Caskey. Christopher was determined that Hayden should have to admit that Caskey’s life was more exciting, more interesting, more glamorous, more fun than it had ever been before he met Christopher.

  33 Such behavior sounds scarcely credible, but I’m sure memory isn’t at fault here. Pilates was the sort of eccentric character who can get away with murder. I dare say the girls he did this to were lovers or old friends, who were either excited or amused by him. The gym was often almost empty when Christopher was there, and perhaps Pilates knew instinctively that Christopher would be a suitable audience for his exhibitionism.

  34 This may not have been due to Christopher’s laziness. It’s possible that the gym was closed during the summer.

  [35 939 Eighth Avenue.]

  36 I have discovered (September 1973), since writing the [above] paragraph, an entry in another diary notebook [6” X 81/8”, also containing diary “Holland 1935”], dated Good Friday, April 4, 1947. This begins by stating that Christopher has already worked out a draft of a novel called The School of Tragedy sometime during 1946, in Santa Monica. However, Christopher continues, this draft won’t do at all. Its central character is Paul (Denny Fouts?). The anecdote is “too funny, too clever, too trivial for the subject matter.” (I don’t know what this means, unless Christopher is referring to an idea he had of writing a story about Caroline Norment’s curious involvement with accidental fires. See the journals, March 1, 1942 [D1, pp. 212–14].)

  Christopher goes on to describe a new story line for the novel, moving around the partners in three love affairs. Two of these couples survive in the published version of The World in the Evening—Stephen (called Charles in this notebook) and Gerda; Charles (called Stephen) and Bob (called Roy). The third couple was to have been Sarah (Caroline Norment) and Dr. Kurt Traube (Carl Furtmueller, on whom, in real life, Caroline had a violent crush, until he got engaged to and married one of the American Quaker helpers at the Haverford hostel—his own wife having died a few months earlier). This “Sarah” would obviously have been very different from the later Sarah! Stephen–Charles is actually working at the hostel. He has given up his life to social work after an unhappy marriage (to a character like Jane). He has a friendly sex relationship with Gerda, to get her through the period of anxiety and waiting until her husband escapes from Germany and rejoins her. Stephen—Charles and Gerda then part as loving friends.

  Charles–Stephen is a doctor who has a boyfriend, Bob–Roy, in the navy. Bob–Roy is killed—
he never appears “on stage.” Charles–Stephen joins the navy too. (Incidentally, it’s curious to note that Christopher was planning to make Bob—Roy an architect in civilian life—about fourteen months before Christopher met Jim Charlton (see page 159 [and note 1]). I suppose that, when Christopher chose that profession for Bob-Roy, he was thinking of Bob Stagg (see here). But, before he met Jim, he had never been interested in a young man as an architect. Sarah’s romance with Dr. Traube is the only one with a conventional happy ending. They get married after Traube’s wife dies. Frau Traube has some lingering disease. Charles–Stephen, who is her doctor, finishes her off and later admits to Stephen—Charles that he has done so.

  Christopher made at least three more entries in this same diary notebook—including synopses, lists of characters and seating plans for the hostel dining room. The last dated entry is on June 9, 1947, so they overlap the entries in the large thin notebook.

  37 On May 25, Christopher records a meeting with John van Druten’s boyfriend Walter Starkey, whom Christopher and Caskey had already met in January (see [Starcke,] here). Starkey had played Thad Greelis in John’s The Mermaids Singing—which ran for only fifty-three performances and was nicknamed by Dodie Smith The Mermaids Sinking—in 1945. John once told Christopher that Starkey had caused him to break a previously unbroken professional rule of his—never to have an affair with one of his actors.

  Walter’s family name was actually spelled Starcke. When he became an actor he changed it to Starkey but switched back to Starcke as the co-producer of I Am a Camera, perhaps because he wanted his acting career forgotten. However, John and Christopher went on using the spelling “Starkey” in their letters to each other, as a sort of nickname which interrelated their boyfriends: Starkey–Caskey. They never wrote or said “Walter” or “Bill” to each other when referring to them.

  38 While writing this (July 26, 1972) I heard John Huston in a TV interview say that he’d seen Truman beat Humphrey Bogart at arm wrestling, when they were working on Beat the Devil. Huston described Truman as “a power-house.”

  39 I don’t remember anything about the doings of Helmuth (Hellmuth?) and Fritz during this visit. They are mentioned in the 1939 journal, when they were in Hollywood. Helmuth changed his name from Schroeder to Roder after coming to the U.S. Christopher had had a brief affair with him in the old Berlin days—succeeding Stephen Spender, with whom Helmuth had had a much longer affair which ended badly but at least inspired Stephen’s story “The Burning Cactus” and, I believe, his poems beginning “After success, your little afternoon success,” and “Alas, when he laughs, it is not he / But a shopkeeper, who scrapes his hands and bows.” [Spender added a title, “Helmut,” when he later reprinted this early poem; but in letters to Schroeder he spelled the name “Hellmut.”] Now I come to think of it, I’m nearly certain that the episode in The World in the Evening, when Mariano Galdós says to Elizabeth, “Bleiben Sie liegen,” is based on the actual first meeting of Christopher and Helmuth. (See part two, chapter four.)

  40 The vicious tone of this whole paragraph suggests that there is still some soreness in this twenty-five-year-old wound to Christopher’s vanity! But, aside from this, I now see that my condemnation of Jared French as a photographer is unfair by any standards. It wasn’t incompetence that made Jared pose Christopher and Caskey in the way he did. He must have known exactly what he was doing, for the figures in many of his paintings of that period are posed in just the same style.

  [41 This may be the photograph which appears in David Leddick, Naked Men: Pioneering Male Nudes 1935–1955 (Universe Publishing, 1997), p. 84, and which belonged to Paul Cadmus and John Andersson. Isherwood destroyed his own copies of French’s photographs in 1957 or 1958.]

  [42 In late September 1938, the worst storm to hit the north-eastern states in over a century left standing only fifteen or twenty of about two hundred summer houses on Fire Island; there were many deaths.]

  43 Berthold Szczesny and Tota appear in the last two chapters of The Condor and the Cows, but discretion forced me to leave out some details about Berthold’s background and his relationship to Tota.

  Christopher first met Berthold when he [went] to Berlin to visit Auden, in March 1929. Berthold was then a hustler in a boy bar called The Cosy Corner which Auden frequented because it was near to where he was living in the Hallesches Tor district. Christopher fell for Berthold instantly—but not because he found Berthold so very attractive sexually. (In bed they were never quite compatible; Christopher felt that Berthold didn’t really enjoy it and this inhibited him. I think they only sucked cock and belly rubbed.) Berthold’s undoubtedly strong attraction—for both men and women—was that he was so vividly, charmingly, absurdly conscious of his own myth. (In The Condor and the Cows, I call it “The Szczesny Saga.”) He was thus able to make his lovers see him as he saw himself—as the romantic, homeless, penniless wanderer, the Lost Boy who roams the earth, pushed hither and thither by fate, dreamily passive yet able and willing to take care of himself when in physical danger; a boxer, a cowboy, an able-bodied seaman who nevertheless seems poignantly vulnerable and whom everyone is eager to help and protect.

  When Christopher returned to Germany a few months later, to stay with Auden at Rotehütte, a village in the Harz Mountains, he had arranged beforehand that Berthold should join them there. But Berthold didn’t show up. So Christopher made a flying visit to Berlin and found out from the owner of The Cosy Corner that Berthold was wanted by the police for robbery. Christopher returned to Rotehütte, bringing with him a boy he had hastily selected as a substitute sex mate. (I think he must have been helped in this transaction by Francis Turville-Petre (“Ambrose” [in Down There on a Visit]), for at that time he spoke very little German.) The next day, the police appeared at the village inn where Auden, Auden’s boyfriend, Christopher and the boy he had brought from Berlin were staying. The police were looking for Berthold—no doubt they had been tipped off by someone at The Cosy Corner that they might find him with Christopher. Not wanting to return empty-handed, they cross-examined the two young Germans and thus found out that Auden’s friend Otto [Küsel]—a charming boy who used to wrestle naked with him in a field near the village, to the amusement of the villagers [and about whom Auden wrote two poems, “Upon this line between adventure” and “Sentries against inner and outer”]—was an escapee from reform school. So they took him away with them, under arrest; which caused Christopher’s boy to decide that Christopher was dangerous to know and that he wanted to be sent back to Berlin immediately.

  This was Christopher’s first experience as an honorary member of the criminal class. And it was made more thrilling by a coincidence: while the police were still in the house, the mailman arrived with a letter from Berthold. Christopher read it under their very noses. Berthold wrote that he was in Amsterdam and hoped that Christopher would send him some money. Being now eager to play a part in The Szczesny Saga, Christopher proposed to Auden that they should go at once to Amsterdam. Auden agreed, though he wasn’t feeling very kindly toward Berthold, who had been responsible for disrupting his life at Rotehiitte and getting his boyfriend into trouble. (Nevertheless, Auden made his own important contribution to The Szczesny Saga; his poem “Before this loved one . . .” refers to Berthold.)

  Auden and Christopher got to Amsterdam within a day or two, and had the good luck to run into Berthold at once, right outside the post office at which Christopher had just left a letter poste restante, announcing their arrival. They could spend only a couple of days together because Berthold had no permit to stay in Holland. (Boys would say, “My papers aren’t in order,” and, “My stomach isn’t in order,” in the same plaintive tone, as if both were ailments!) So, after a real romantic German farewell (Berthold was wonderful at them) he shipped out. This was probably his first voyage to South America. Many years later, he told Christopher that he had once jumped ship at Punta Arenas, earned money there as a boxer and then made his way across the frontier and up north to Buenos Ai
res. Perhaps that was when he met Tota and became her lover. She was a millionairess and a countess and old enough to be his grandmother but as human beings they weren’t mismatched, for Tota was as sweetly silly as he was and her silliness made her seem sometimes almost girlish. As for Berthold, it was part of his vanity as a stud to be able to enjoy sex at both age limits. “With a woman,” he once told Christopher, “I get a kick out of being the first one, or the last.”

  (Aside from Berthold, only one memory of this visit to Amsterdam remains. Auden and Christopher toured the harbor and the canals in a launch. At the end of the tour, the passengers were invited to write their impressions in a guestbook. Auden wrote two lines from Ilya Ehrenburg: “Read about us and marvel! / You did not live in our time—be sorry!”)

  After this, Christopher didn’t see Berthold again for at least two or three years. At their reunion, Christopher found it odd to be able to chatter away with him in German. Christopher felt at ease with him now as with an old friend, but he had to admit to himself that the removal of the language barrier had robbed Berthold of much of his romantic mystery.

  Then, in the mid-thirties, after the Nazis had come into power, Berthold started appearing briefly in London. He was working on a freighter (either Dutch or Belgian) which plied between London and some North Sea ports. Berthold told Christopher and his friends that they were smuggling refugees into England. They brought only one refugee at a time, and they docked far up the river at a dock which wasn’t carefully patrolled. In the evening, after the customs officials had been on board, Berthold and the captain would get their refugee out of his hiding place and walk him on shore and away from the dock as though he were another member of the crew, coming with them to take a look at the town. After that, he was on his own. Sooner or later, I suppose, he would have to give himself up to the British authorities and appeal for asylum.