by Allan Massie
“And you weren’t ashamed to pretend?” Chris said.
“Yes, to some extent I was ashamed. I don’t like telling lies. But I’d come to America not as a refugee – though I suppose I was that too – but to try to tell the American people what the Nazis are really like and to tell them that they also must one day be ready to go to war against the Brown Plague. It wasn’t a popular message then, you know. Indeed it still isn’t. What chance would I have had of being heard if I had announced that I was a homosexual and that the boy standing beside me was my lover? We all have to pretend.”
“Not me,” Chris said. “I made a resolution long ago that I am never going to deny what I am. I’m not going to submit to the heterosexual dictatorship.”
Even then Klaus wondered if Chris revealed his homosexuality to the studio bosses in Hollywood. But he didn’t mention his doubts. The truth was he admired Chris’s defiant attitude and often wished he could match it. But then he thought: we’re different, our position, if not condition, is different. Chris has renounced the political struggle and become a pacifist. How, he asked me, could he fire a gun at a German soldier when that soldier might be Heinz, who had been compelled to return to Germany because attempts to get him another passport had failed, who had been sentenced to a prison term on account of his relations with Chris and was, he believed, now in the army?
So perhaps in their incompatibility they were both right. He couldn’t argue against the position Chris had adopted, but he didn’t think Chris justified in condemning his.
Was it then or another day they had talked about Maugham?
No matter. He recalled the conversation as the bus carried him away from the Villa Mauresque and the sun slid behind a cloud and it began to rain again.
Perhaps it was later, after Maugham had visited Chris in California in connection with his novel The Razor’s Edge, which was being made into a film. People said the main character, Larry Something who travels East in search of spiritual wisdom, was based on Chris. Sometimes he denied it indignantly, “He’s such a twerp, that Larry, a ridiculously romanticised figure and anyway he’s hetero, even if it’s obvious the old man was in love with him. Actually that makes it worse because he lacked the honesty and courage to admit it.” Sometimes he giggled and said, “Well, if the old boy did model him on me, he botched the job.”
All the same Chris was fond of Maugham, whom he referred to often as “darling Willie”. He had reason to be grateful to him, Klaus remembered, for Maugham had once been heard to say, “That young man holds the future of the English novel in his hands,” which delighted Chris naturally, even if it again reduced him to giggles. “Such a responsibility. I’m afraid I’ll drop it,” he said.
Anyway Chris reported that on one of these occasions Maugham had come close to tears as he said, “The tragedy of my life is that I have pretended I was three-quarters normal and only a quarter queer whereas really it was the other way round from the start…”
“Actually, “Chris said, “I don’t believe he’s even a quarter hetero. The old darling’s lived a lie all his life. No wonder he’s unhappy.”
Perhaps it was after the death of his lover and companion Gerald – Alan Searle’s predecessor – that Maugham had come out with this anguished confession. But how else could he have lived, granting his ambition? He had been twenty or so, hadn’t he, when Wilde was sent to prison, and he knew very well that he walked a dangerous path and that people wouldn’t have staged his plays or bought his books if they had known him to be as he was. In any case Chris had danced on the same tightrope. You had to read between the lines in his Berlin books and that earlier novel, The Memorial, which Klaus loved, to know that he was queer. In the Berlin stories he had even lent his boyfriend Otto, Heinz’s predecessor, to another character, a weedy and neurotic Englishman. Klaus had actually been more open in some of his own novels, though not Mephisto.
Then Chris, with that outspoken frankness which, even after he had known him for years, still took Klaus by surprise, because it seemed to him so un-English, said, “Your father’s the same, isn’t he?”
Difficult to explain that this was a misconception, difficult because of the kernel of truth which both Klaus and Erika had long recognised. But it was wrong all the same, and not only because the Magician truly loved Mielein, as well as needing her, and theirs was a happy marriage, unlike what he had learned of Maugham’s.
The Magician had sublimated the homoeroticism which therefore played a bigger part in his work and perhaps his imagination than in his daily or conscious life. He kept his blond boys in his heart, perhaps, but at a distance. Not even kisses. The furthest he had gone with the other Klaus (Heuser) was admitted in a letter addressed to both Erika and Klaus to whom he gave his childhood name Eissi: “I call him ‘Du’,” he said of Hauser, “and at parting pressed him to my heart with his express consent.” Then mischievously he added, “Eissi is requested to step back and not disturb my circles. I’m already old and famous, and why should the two of you alone be permitted to sin?” But there was of course no sin, except in his imagination, and as for the warning, it was superfluous. Young Hauser hadn’t been Klaus’s type. This teasing, self-teasing, restraint, was very different from Mr Maugham, who had come close to giving himself away only in one novel, The Narrow Corner which was, unsurprisingly, Klaus’s favourite among those of his books which he had read. In fact the Magician had made his position clear in a table of qualities or attributes he had once drawn up. Klaus had it by heart:
Homoeroticism
Marriage
Art
Life
Death
Life
Artistry
Bourgeoisie
Aesthetics
Ethics, morality
Barren, childless
Fertile, procreative
Vagabond, licentious
Bourgeois life, fidelity
Individualistic
Social
Irresponsibility
Life obedient
Pessimism
Life willing, conformist
Orgiastic liberty
Commitment, duty
Certain words in the first column flew like arrows to Klaus’s heart: death, barren, vagabond, pessimism… But in truth that column described him precisely. He’d known that for a long time. As for the qualities listed in the other column, he might lay claim only to “commitment, duty”. Surely the tenacity of his opposition to the Brown Plague and the little rat Hitler proved that entitlement?
The bus deposited him in the square in front of the railway station. Half-an-hour to wait before the next train back to Cannes. He made for the bar, quickly from old habit surveyed it, found no one to interest him, and ordered a whisky-and-soda.
The remarkable thing was that, whereas he had only despised and loathed the little rat, the Magician, while describing him as “a catastrophe, no doubt about that”, had nevertheless made the effort to understand him, declared that was “no reason to find him uninteresting as character and destiny” – as a phenomenon also, of course. Klaus had been shocked when he first read that essay and found his father calling the little rat “Brother Hitler”. How could he? Well, first because he had been able to say “Where I am, there is Germany,” and, being German, he could not deny Hitler’s Germanity. It was something we all had in common, no matter how horrifying the realisation might be. But there was more to it than that. The man was a disaster, certainly, with his unfathomable resentment and his festering vindictiveness, but he was also a failed artist, and therefore in a sense indeed his Brother. The young Hitler had been the half-baked Bohemian in his garret or Viennese dosshouse, with his basically-I’m-too-good-for-ordinarywork, and his sense of being reserved for something special, indefinable, which, if he had expressed it then, would have had those around bursting out in derisive laughter. This rejection, common to that experienced by so many young artists who feel on the cusp of greatness but are recognised by nobody, fed his rage against th
e world, his ferociously anxious need to justify himself, his urge to compel the world to accept him at his own valuation, to subject itself to him, to satisfy his dream of seeing those who had spurned him now prostrate before him. Lost in fear, admiration and a wild besotted love. Moreover, the Magician had insisted, Hitler’s insatiable drive for compensation for the miseries he had endured, his inability ever to be content with what he had achieved, and the need to proceed ever further and more dangerously on the path he had chosen, these too were attributes of the artist. “There is a lot of Hitler in Wagner,” the Magician had once said to Klaus during the war. “The rejection of reason and bourgeois ethics, and the incapacity for irony – irony which is the saving grace of the intellect.” If the Magician was right, Hitler was the artist’s shadowself, the dark side of the moon.
And of course the will to self-destruction. Only Klaus felt no need to pull down the whole world with him. No Götterdämerung for him, an overdose would do the trick. He went to the bar and asked for another whisky.
Light was fading when he was back in Cannes. The poignant loneliness of dusk. It was Miki’s night with his girl again. No point in going to the Zanzi, and indeed good reason not to: Probyn might be there. He couldn’t face that. He found another bar, a place on the terrace. There was a German couple at the next table. How strange to hear his language spoken here, spoken confidently, as if the war was so far behind them all, a mere parenthesis in history. The waiter brought him his whisky and a soda siphon. He took out his notebook and wrote:
“Albert’s faith in Communism had been absolute, his conversion as abrupt and complete as St Paul’s on the road to Damascus. One day he had been lost, and not only because his girlfriend had walked out on him because, she said, he believed in nothing and stank of petit-bourgeois failure; the next it was as if he stood on the bluff of a hill, gazing across the river and a landscape with classical ruins like a Poussin painting towards the golden light of a new dawn, the Promised Land. It was in a mood of exhilaration that he had accepted an invitation to the First Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow. (The invitation had itself come as a surprise because he had published so little, but the editor of an exiles’ magazine published in Amsterdam had recommended him.) What he found there was what he longed to find: a dynamic faith. It was marvellous to observe the joyful determination and zest with which the ordinary Soviet citizens participated in the collective effort to build Socialism. Literature in the USSR was not, as it was in the west, the occupation of a dilettante minority, a diversion for the bourgeoisie. On the contrary! It was recognised and promoted as an integral part of this vast creation of a New Society, a comprehensive scheme which appealed no less to the public imagination and general interest than the enactment of the Five-Year Plan and the reorganisation of Soviet agriculture into collective farms. The Conference offered a magnificent demonstration of this national concern for Literature. All its sessions were attended by workers, private soldiers and peasants who engaged with intelligence and enthusiasm in discussions about modern poetry and the role of the theatre and the cinema under Socialism. Albert felt his heart swell with joy. Tears of happiness came to his eyes.”
Yes, indeed, these had been Klaus’s own feelings, which he now lent to Albert, when he had attended that Congress and been, for a few days, enraptured, delighted too by the reverence with which all present, it seemed, regarded Maxim Gorki, and the affection, love really, they extended to the old doyen of Russian and Soviet literature. And Klaus had met other Soviet writers there like the delicate and thoughtful poet Boris Pasternak, who had charmed him. At first, that year – it was 1934 – the atmosphere, so different from that in Germany, being full of hope not hatred – had seemed intoxicating.
Intoxicating – that was actually the right word – for even before he left Moscow Klaus was experiencing the lucid revulsion of hangover. There had been an air of make-believe. People smiled to conceal their fear. There was, he realised, the same will to power there, and the OGPU was in reality no different from the Gestapo. It had been a relief to him when, a couple of years later, Gide had retracted his approval of the Stalinist regime.
And then in ’38 Klaus and Erika had gone to Spain to report from the Loyalist side in the Civil War. Should he send Albert there? No, that wouldn’t do, because it would have been impossible for an honest man, such as he was determined Albert should be, to have spent time in Spain without realising how viciously and unscrupulously the Communists, instructed by Moscow, had set out to destroy the democratic parties of the Republic. Why should this have surprised Klaus? It was natural it should horrify him, certainly, but why the surprise? Hadn’t the Communists in Germany also obeyed orders to attack the Social Democrats and undermine support for them – because Stalin believed that they, rather than the Nazis, were the chief obstacles to revolution? Stalin had underestimated Hitler and the Nazis. Klaus couldn’t forgive him, even though he admitted that he had made the same mistake himself. “That afternoon in the Carlton tea room,” he scribbled in the margin. “What a blind fool I was!”
One of the Germans at the nearby table was speaking more loudly now.
“Of course,” he said, “I experienced difficulties. It seems absurd now, but I was actually hauled before one of these courts, required to prove that I had never been a member of the Party. It was because I had served in the SS, but the Waffen SS, the fighting troops, not Heinrich’s boys, you understand. I enlisted because I was a German and a patriot, even though I never thought the ideology anything but rubbish. All that True Aryan stuff – it was nonsense, I always knew that. But I showed them my wound – this I got at Stalingrad, I said, fighting for Germany, not for the Nazis. Naturally they believed me, I come from a good family after all. And so I’ve remade my life, in our family business, which is a reputable one, believe me, and now I can say confidently that we are making a success of it. No surprise there: we Germans are after all the most efficient race in the world. Believe me, my friend, in the new Europe that must some day be constructed, we shall take the lead, even if we have for a time to disguise our mastery…”
Klaus turned to look at him. A perfectly ordinary man, a bit fleshy, but with a frank open face, well dressed, nothing repulsive about him, giving the impression of contentment, as if the twelve years of the Reich had been no more than a regrettable experience, something to be put behind him, like a bad dream the memory of which you shake off as soon as you’ve had your breakfast coffee. No doubt he thought that no one on the terrace understood German. Or perhaps he didn’t care. Why should he? He had come through. The war was behind him and there was business to be done.
Not for the first time Klaus reproached himself for his own failure fully to comprehend the depth of the national psychosis. The truth was that he had been too bound up in his own life, which was certainly interesting enough, to bother to do so. He had been bored and disgusted by the savage boasts, but not sufficiently frightened. He hadn’t grasped the brutality that went hand in hand with resentment and an inferiority complex. Instead he had travelled giving lectures on European culture and amusing himself – and his audiences – with flippant dismissal of the brown-shirted barbarians. Extraordinary though it was, he couldn’t acquit himself of complacency. But then, he thought, what could he acquit himself of?
To be fair to himself, something he had always found difficult, he had learned at last. It was the young actor who taught him the lesson, the young actor to whom in Mephisto he gave the name of Hans Miklas. He had known him in Hamburg where he was a junior member of the company, an angry and resentful one, with his poverty, his undernourished physique, his hollow cheeks and his too-red lips. Klaus had been immediately attracted to him – the boy was so evidently unhappy. Even his ferocious jealousy of Gustaf had been appealing. At first, anyway. But the attraction was quickly replaced by disgust, for young Hans – which wasn’t his real name but for a moment Klaus couldn’t remember what that had been – was, he learned, a Nazi, had indeed joined the Party’s Youth Mo
vement as soon as he was able to, had done so originally to spite his father, an elementary schoolteacher and a Social Democrat. In the theatre canteen, after a single glass of beer, he would hold forth against Jews and plutocrats and the degenerates who were destroying Germany and corrupting German youth. Klaus soon understood that he was included among them. And yet, mingled with his disgust, there was pity. The boy was so horribly sincere and also idealistic; he really believed that, when Hitler had made, as he put it, “a clean sweep of that mob”, a new purer Germany would be born. “Yes,” he said, “whatever you think, the future belongs to us, and it will be a new world, one that is clean and honest and noble.”
What a fool! But there was nothing to be done about it. You couldn’t possibly rescue him. There were moments when Klaus would have liked to take him in his arms and cover his face with kisses and speak soothingly to him. Impossible of course – the boy would have hit him, spat in his face. Gustaf loathed him, and took pleasure in humiliating him at rehearsal. “Not like that, you dolt. Are you a clodhopping peasant? Like this, with an airy elegance, that’s what your part demands. Of course, if you’re not up to it, you can go back on the streets and caterwaul with your Nazis. You’re a joke, but I’m not going to allow you to destroy my production. Now do it again, if you can…” That sort of thing. And the poor boy, now blushing, now pale and quivering as if he had just been told his mother was dead, repeated the required movements again and again, until at last Gustaf said, “I can teach you, but can you learn, that’s the question. Well, we’ll find out the answer at to-morrow’s rehearsal…”
Yes, Klaus thought, it was the young Hans – no, Malte, that was his real name – he’d called him Hans because it seemed to fit his so ordinary resentful sense of being underprivileged – well, then, it was Malte who spouted the Nazi slogans – and really believed in them, he must allow him that – but it was Gustaf with his bullying and the relish he took in it who was, fundamentally, the real Nazi. With his solipsism too, his conviction that nothing mattered in the world but himself and the achievement of his goal, which was fame. Klaus wished he had spoken to Guy Probyn of Gustaf’s treatment of young Malte who had incidentally been hopelessly in love with the young actress Ulrika, who had eyes only for Gustaf; it might have opened the Englishman’s eyes to Gustaf’s true nature.
