America was obviously the next place on the list. I’d had a brief, false, hysterical glimpse of New York the previous summer, under the guidance of George Davis, who has a genius for melodramatic showmanship. We shot up and down skyscrapers, in and out of parties and brothels, saw a fight in a Bowery dive, heard Maxine Sullivan sing in Harlem,3 went to Coney Island on July the Fourth, met Maxwell Anderson,4 Muriel Draper5 and Orson Welles, drank all day long and took Seconal every night to make us sleep. I came back to England raving about Manhattan, and convinced, like every tourist, that New York is the United States.
Looking forward to our life there, I imagined a milieu in which my London “personality” would function more freely, more cynically, more successfully than ever. I saw myself as a natural citizen of the go-getters’ homeland. Oh, I’d talk faster and louder than any of them, I’d learn the slang and the accent, I’d adapt like an Arctic fox. Before long, I’d be writing the great American novel. I was very sure of myself.
The possibility of war, that familiar, six-year-old shadow in the background, had less to do with my emigration than any of my critics will ever believe. At the beginning of 1939, I had honestly begun to think that the crisis had passed over, or had, at any rate, been indefinitely postponed. Even Dr. Katz, that Cassandra of the thirties, had predicted, for the first time, that there would be no war this year. It wasn’t until March that the situation began to look really hopeless.
If I were writing a novel—trying, that is to say, to persuade a reader that I was telling him something psychologically plausible—I should have great difficulty at this point. Because now I have to describe a state of mind which introduces a new period in my life.
To put it as simply as possible, for the sake of making a start: while I was on board the Champlain, I realized that I was a pacifist.
Maybe it would be more exact to say: I realized that I had always been a pacifist. At any rate, in the negative sense. How could I have ever imagined I was anything else? My earliest remembered feelings of rebellion were against the British army, of which my mother and myself were camp followers, and against the staff of St. Edmund’s School, who tried to make me believe in a falsified and sentimentalized view of the 1914 war. My father taught me, by his life and death, to hate the profession of soldiering. I remember his telling me, before he left for France, that an officer’s sword is useless except for toasting bread, and that he never fired his revolver because he couldn’t hit anything with it, and hated the bang. I came to adore my father’s memory, dwelling always upon his civilian virtues, his gentleness, his humor, his musical and artistic talent. Growing up in the postwar world, I learnt—from my history master, from Noël Coward, from Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon—to loathe the old men who had made the war. Flags, memorials and uniforms made me tremble with rage, because they filled me with terror. I was horribly scared by “war,” and therefore secretly attracted to it. I’ve been into all this at great length in Lions and Shadows. No need to repeat it here.
However, these neurotic fears were greatly reduced by our trip to China. True, it wasn’t really very dangerous; I think there were only three or four occasions on which we were likely to have been killed by bombs or bullets. But a very little danger will go a long way psychologically. Several times I had been afraid, but healthily afraid. I no longer dreaded the unknown, or feared that I should behave worse than other people. When we were back in England and the Munich crisis began, I was frightened, of course, but I didn’t get frantic. I even stayed on in London out of curiosity; I didn’t want to miss the first air raid.
Before China, my pacifism was so entangled with cowardice that I could never examine it at all. After China, it was only a matter of time before I should stop repeating slogans and borrowed opinions and start to think for myself. Thinking was impossible as long as I was playing the returned hero, and exploiting it sexually. Thinking was impossible as long as I was lecturing on the Sino-Japanese war and appealing for aid to Chiang Kai-shek. Thinking was impossible during Munich. But the post-Munich hangover brought on the cold, meditative fit, and this boat trip provided the opportunity. A voyage, in this respect, resembles an illness. Time ceases to itch and distract us. We can pause and take stock of our position.
One morning on deck, it seems to me, I turned to Auden and said: “You know, I just don’t believe in any of it any more—the united front, the party line, the antifascist struggle. I suppose they’re okay, but something’s wrong with me. I simply can’t swallow another mouthful.” And Auden answered: “No, neither can I.”
Those were not our words, but psychologically it was as simple as that. It sounds incredible, but Auden’s agreement took me completely by surprise. It appears that, since China, we had been living in such a rush that we had never been able to get in five minutes’ quiet, sincere conversation—even when alone together. We had merely shouted to each other from two parallel, racing express trains. Auden is always cagey, anyway. Sometimes, when I’m talking, that furrow appears between his eyes, his mouth begins to twitch, and I know he’s bothered about something; but he’ll only disagree with me in public when the subject we’re discussing isn’t important to him at all.
Now, in a few sentences, with exquisite relief, we confessed our mutual disgust at the parts we had been playing and resolved to abandon them, then and there. We had forgotten our real vocation. We would be artists again, with our own values, our own integrity, and not amateur socialist agitators, parlor reds.
That was about as far as we went, for the present. Auden, however, had his Anglo-Catholicism to fall back on. Unwillingly, he had denied it, all these years. Now he could admit to it again. I had nothing of this kind, and I didn’t yet clearly realize how much I was going to need it. For myself, the positive part of the change consisted in putting my emotions back from a political onto a personal basis. Edward had always said, quite rightly, that my mind was unfitted for abstract ideas; it could only grasp concrete examples, special instances. Anti-Nazism had been possible for me as long as Nazism meant Hitler, Goering and Goebbels, the Gestapo, and the consuls and spies who potentially menaced Heinz on his travels. But now Heinz was caught. He had become, however unwillingly, a part of the Nazi machine, at work in a Berlin factory. Now Werner was helping to build the Siegfried line,6 and dozens of boys I had known were in the German army.
Suppose I have in my power an army of six million men. I can destroy it by pressing an electric button. The six millionth man is Heinz. Will I press the button? Of course not—even if the 5,999,999 others are hundred per cent Jew-baiting blood-mad fiends (which is absurd). This attitude, which might be called the extreme Sodom and Gomorrha position, where only one Lot is required to save the Cities of the Plain, may be contrasted with the equally violent radicalism of some good democrats of the period, who declared that Hitler was responsible for every crime and that the German people were innocent lambs, and were nevertheless ready to burn down the Just City for the horrible sake of one little sodomite.
Both Auden and I felt it was our duty to tell our friends what had happened. We wrote to most of them, soon after our arrival in New York. M. accepted the change, and I think it pleased her—though she could never quite agree. John Lehmann wrote that he was “puzzled,” but this didn’t make him hostile, and he has been a faithful friend ever since. Edward, a good while later, sent me two letters, the first disgusted, the second a model of charity towards an attitude one can’t understand. Olive [Mangeot], after much bewilderment, remembered only that we cared for each other—like the marvellous woman she is. Forster was greatly interested, and perhaps somewhat influenced. Stephen [Spender] made a typically subtle comment: “I rather envy you.”
The voyage was stormy. The Champlain seemed very small, slithering down the long grey Atlantic slopes, under a heavy sky. One night I was sick—breaking my round-the-world record. Wrapped in rugs, like invalids, we sipped bouillon, or watched movies in the saloon, where French tapestries flapped out from the creaking, st
raining walls. We were bored, and amused ourselves by helping with the puppet show in the children’s playroom, improvising Franco-English dialogue full of private jokes and double entendres. Off the coast of Newfoundland, we ran into a blizzard. The ship entered New York harbor looking like a wedding cake.
Erika and Klaus Mann were the first to welcome us. They had come out to the ship on the quarantine launch, posing as journalists who wanted our interview. Erika was nervous and ill. She kept coughing. Klaus was full of gaiety and gossip. As we came ashore, I looked around for Vernon [Old], whom I’d radioed from the Champlain to meet me. At first, I didn’t recognize him among the crowd, his face was so pinched and scarlet with the cold. He had been waiting there for hours.
Somebody had recommended the George Washington Hotel as a place where we should feel “at home.” And, indeed, our reception by Donald Neville-Willing was like arriving at the house of a maiden aunt. A short, stout, grey-haired figure, with a beaky nose, jingling keys and a roving eye, Donald ran the hotel, which specialized in Elks and women’s clubs conventions, as though he were the Victorian housekeeper of an English ancestral mansion. He was proud of his double-barrelled name, and fervently patriotic. Although he had lived ten years in the United States, he still refused to take out his first papers. In his bedroom, he had signed pictures of the King and Queen, and a framed telegram from an equerry, thanking him for his loyal good wishes on some royal anniversary.
The discovery of some mutual “county” friends in Cheshire meant more to Donald than our dubious literary notoriety. We were respectable, and he couldn’t do enough for us. Glasses of hot punch were sent up, free, to our rooms at night. Special prices were quoted on our weekly bills. The telephone frequently rang to summon us down to teas and evening parties in Donald’s private sitting room. Donald had many theatrical connections. He introduced us to the English members of the cast of the Stokes Brothers’ play Oscar Wilde, then running with great success at one of the Manhattan theaters. These actors were all staying at the hotel. One of them, a strikingly handsome boy who played Charlie Parker, tried, unsuccessfully, the effect of water waves in my hair. He was thirty, but looked eighteen, because Marie Tempest7 had taught him the secret of perpetual youth—to go to bed every afternoon, except matinees, from two to four. I think his name was John Carroll, and I believe he was killed in the war.8
Donald not only accepted us, he accepted Vernon, also. It was at his suggestion that Vernon moved over to the hotel from a nearby rooming house. Donald tried to get Vernon a walking-on part in The American Way,9 and, later, a job in Billy Rose’s Aquacade. Vernon bought a pair of swimming trunks and practiced diving with a boy at the YMCA, but he wasn’t good enough to pass the final test.
Vernon, at this time, was growing up very fast. His various interests, which I indulged as schoolboy crazes, were symptoms of a drive towards self-education. In the next five years, they produced extraordinary results. Auden and I laughed at his barbell exercises, but we offered nothing in their place. As for his drawing, it was a year before I took it seriously, and, by that time, he bitterly resented my lack of interest. It was like my mother’s attitude to my writing, all over again. Even now, when we talk about his work, he often seems slightly on the defensive.
At that time, in any case—as the following extract from my diary will show—I was a most unsuitable companion for an eighteen-year-old boy. My conquering, confident mood had abruptly dissolved. I found I couldn’t write a line. The European news, and the high costs of our living scared me. Day after day, I moped, a jelly of cowardice, indecision, defeat. We got plenty of invitations, of course; but it seemed to me that all these lunches, suppers and cocktail parties were being offered under false pretences, as far as I was concerned. They wanted to meet Christopher Isherwood. And who was I? A sham, a mirror image, nobody. To M. I wrote: “I believe I have come to the end of my talent.” All this was very natural, of course, if I could only have realized it. I was merely going through a “change of life,” and change is always uncomfortable.
March 18. Two months since we left England. Here we are—still at the George Washington. What has happened?
This time in New York has been a bad, sterile period for me. I’ve done practically nothing. Every day, I think: now I must get busy, now I must start work. But at what? My money—including the advance I got from [Bennett] Cerf—is rapidly running out. Wystan still has several hundred dollars, and the prospect of a teaching job, later on. I have no prospects. I don’t even know what kind of job I want. My whole instinct is against teaching, or lecturing, or exploiting my reputation in any way. I would like some sort of regular, humble occupation. I got to know Berlin because I was doing something functional—the natural occupation for a poor foreigner—teaching his own language. If I can’t do something of the same kind here, I shall never get to know America. I shall never become a part of this city.
Meanwhile, as so often before, I am hypnotized by my own fears. Reading of Hitler’s Czechoslovakian coup and his plans against Romania, I feel: After all, what’s the use? In a week, or a month, I shall be for it. Wystan is determined to go back to England if war breaks out—and I shall go with him, I suppose. If I were alone, I mightn’t. Quite aside from being scared, I am entirely disillusioned about the kind of war this is going to be. Just another struggle for world trade. But they are all over there—all my friends—and the impulse to join them is very strong.
Wystan himself is going through a curious phase. He’s as energetic as I’m idle. He takes Benzedrine regularly, in small doses, followed by Seconal at night. He says that “the chemical life” solves all his problems. He writes a great deal—poems and articles and reviews—makes speeches, goes to tea parties and dinners, is quite brilliantly talkative. It’s a little as if he and I had changed places. Wystan says, however, that he hates all this. But he’s unwilling to return to England, because, there, he’s the center of an even more intensive publicity.
There is much that is majestic but nothing that is gracious in this city—this huge, raw, functional skeleton, this fortress of capital, this jungle of absolutely free competition. Every street is partly a slum. Where the banks and the brownstone houses end, the slum tenements begin, with their rusty fire escapes and crowds of baseball-playing Dead End Kids.10 Beyond, on the mainland, is a wilderness of scrapyards and shacks. This country is insanely untidy.
The Bronx is built almost entirely of billboards and monster advertisements, imploring you to relax. (As if anybody could—when every doorknob gives you an electric shock!) Take the advertisements away, and there would be nothing left; no town at all. At the lower end of the island, and uptown in Harlem, huge tribes of Italians, Negroes and Jews have pitched their foul, lively camps—at the feet of the skyscrapers which dominate their heaven like totem poles. Wystan and I call the skyscrapers “the fallen angels.” You imagine them crashing down out of the sky, white-hot as meteors, to bury themselves deep in the Manhattan bedrock and slowly cool, through the ages. But the fallen angels are still angels. They are blasphemously insolvent, and utterly without pity. The young, ambitious man tries to climb them—having been told of a heaven at the top, called The Rainbow Room—and when he falls a little crowd collects, and stares. Nobody tries to help—or he might get into trouble with the insurance company. Then, down the street, come the screams of the police car and the clanging of the ambulance bell.
Vernon has been typing a poem of Wystan’s with obstinate care, letter by letter. In the middle, he paused to ask me, very seriously, why people like Dickens.
Bennett Cerf, our publisher, and his uncle, who was an intimate friend of Hart Crane, took us to see Hellzapoppin.11 They were rather shocked because we praised it so extravagantly—which shows how little they understand what made us write our plays.
A PEN Club dinner at the Algonquin Hotel. Dorothy Thompson presided,12 in crimson velvet. I made a facetious speech, with jokes out of the Reader’s Digest. When I sat down, Thompson said icily: “Delightf
ul.” Realized, too late, that we were being deadly serious. Wystan recited his poem on the death of Yeats.13 A Polish poet recited a Polish poem on Abraham Lincoln. Nobody understood a word—until the last line:
“LINKOLL-NY! Linkoll-ny! Leen-kool-ny!” (Wild applause.)
First meeting with Lincoln Kirstein. I had taken one of Wystan’s Benzedrine tablets, and the afternoon passed with an effect of terrific, smooth, effortless speed. Neither Lincoln nor I stopped talking for a single moment. We were intimates at once. Almost as soon as we had shaken hands, he began telling us about the American Civil War. He was breathless with it—as though Gettysburg had been fought yesterday.
George Platt Lynes, prematurely grey haired, with the arrogant profile of a late Roman coin, has photographed me peering out from behind a wooden property-pillar. Lincoln calls this picture “The rat with the nervous breakdown.”
March 20. Last night, I had dinner with Lincoln, that somber, electric creature. In his blue pea jacket, he looks like a mad clipper captain out of Melville. His hair is cropped like a convict’s, and his eyes, behind austere tin spectacles, seem to be examining you through a microscope. I call him Jean Valjean.14
We talked about war. Lincoln said he was certain he wouldn’t be killed. He thinks of himself as the average man. He’ll always have the statistically usual number of accidents, illnesses, etc.
Later, his friend, Peter Martinez, came in, like the rare bird that nests for a moment in a tree in the garden, before flying away to the south. When it was time for Lincoln to drive me home, he asked Pete: “Shall you be here when I get back?” Pete looked up at him, almost sadly: “I hope so,” he said, with his faint Mexican accent. Obviously, the matter was entirely beyond his control. He sometimes disappears for days.
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 10
