Simon Kaplan was a thin smiling Russian with charming eyes and a shrewd wizened face. He had been assistant to a rabbi, and was an authority on Jewish religious law. Moritz Robinson, a pop-eyed man with a moustache, nervous as a rabbit, had been active in working-class education in Austria. His wife and daughter were in Sweden and were coming out to join him: he felt sure they’d be torpedoed on the way over. He always expected the worst and couldn’t sleep without taking dope.
Otto Rosenberg was the best English-speaker in the group, but with the worst accent. He had been a great drinker, and liked to boast of this, which annoyed Caroline. His manners were formal to the verge of parody. I believe he had been a chartered accountant. He was proud of his humor. A specimen: Rosenberg was having an argument with a French Negro, about politics. The Negro told him, “You’re the blackest pessimist I have ever met.” “And you, my dear Sir,” Rosenberg came back at him, “are the blackest optimist.”
Betty Schloss had the largest behind in the world. She was a schoolteacher who had lost her husband in the last war. She adored children and animals, but was tactless, gauche and bossy with adults. She was quite a competent biologist. While she was passing through Spain on her way to Lisbon and the USA, someone had slammed the train door on her finger, crushing it to pulp. It had been twenty-four hours without medical attention and had had to be amputated.
Then there was Alfred Seidemann, the philosopher—an extraordinary-looking man, lopsided, with a great melon-head, huge teeth and the saddest eyes I have ever seen. He had been a pupil of Husserl.115 He and Mr. Caro and I had a number of very interesting religious-philosophical discussions. Seidemann would expound Hegel to us. Certain categories were his special property. Evil, for instance. If anybody mentioned the word, Seidemann would make a gesture of the kind with which old theatergoers recall Sarah Berhardt. “Ah—Evil …!” Or he would interrupt excitedly: “Excuse me—I have done a great deal of work on this subject. The Problem of Evil … Ah, yes …”
Josef Luitpold Stern was a poet. The Poet, one might say. What a wonderful little prima donna! What fine dark eyes, what coquetry, what Viennese charm! He was so childlike, so archly innocent. “Please? May I speak?” he would ask. He agreed to everything: “Oh, very fine!” He had organized chains of libraries in Vienna, and printed his own poems, distributing them himself, very cheap, in paper booklets, for the workers. He had considerable talent, as far as I could judge, for the Whitmanesque, free-verse style. He also played the violin, not very well, to Elizabeth Porter’s piano accompaniment. Like Dr. Duncker, he had cataract, but it would be operable. He never referred to this; just as he refused absolutely to accept help from his son, who was in the U.S. and had a job. He had a great deal of pride.
Jacob Walcher had been active for years in the German Communist Party. He wasn’t a Jew, but his “freundin,”116 Hertha, was a Jewess: she’d been secretary to Rosa Luxemburg. They had lived together a long time, scorning marriage as “bourgeois,” and Hertha had only become Mrs. Walcher for form’s sake, a year or two ago, when they were getting ready to leave for the U.S. Jacob was a big burly man with dark, sparkling, merry eyes. On the Spanish frontier, the officials were turning back non-Jews into France and the hands of the Gestapo. Jacob, with his life in deadly danger, calmly gave his name, as Jacob Israel Walcher, and got let through. Hertha had been at a sanatorium with consumption. She’d been discharged, but had to be very careful and rest up a lot. Jacob waited on her devotedly.
That leaves one or two unmentioned, chiefly because I had less contact with them. Richard Goetz was another Viennese, very intelligent, with Mephistophelean eyebrows, who wrote and delivered lectures in an almost incredibly florid but correct English. He and Rosenberg were great friends, exchanging their bitter coffee-house jokes. John Hannek was sympathetic, but I saw him least of all the group. A tall, bony man, he had the rare reputation of loyalty to his Viennese friends and bravery in coming to their help, although he wasn’t himself a Jew. Then there were the Sheldons (that wasn’t their real name, but they had Americanized it), a Czechoslovak couple, who had come to the U.S. from Europe, via Ecuador. Mrs. Sheldon was very sexy and attractive, and both Rosenberg and Goetz had hot pants for her. A bitchy ingenue. Karel, her husband, was fattish and stupid looking. They had more money than the others and had brought a lot of clothes with them which they kept changing and displaying with a stupid lack of tact. I often felt irritated by them and was glad when they left. Finally, there was a really neurotic middle-aged Viennese woman named Rita Willfort. She would, no doubt, have made a lot of mischief in the group with her sharp tongue—but, thank goodness, she got a job in Massachusetts and left after a couple of weeks.
Every morning—while I and my pupils ploughed through grammar, correcting exercises, reading aloud from the Reader’s Digest, or drilling with verbs and consonants (“You’re a Yank yourself, yelled Yetta”)—Caroline would be sitting in her office with Elizabeth Porter. What did they do? Not very much, said Elizabeth. A few checks were signed, a few letters were dictated, but the main business of the day was gossip. Caroline was an artist at it. No one knew better than she how to make the most trivial interview (the ordering of the dinner, for instance, or a discussion with Caro about getting him some new shoes) into the occasion for solemn generalizations about the universe, sex, time and God, all illustrated by anecdotes of Caroline’s life in Baltimore, her work at Antioch College as Dean of Women, or her relief work in Russia and Germany, during the famine and the civil war. She was such a ham, but you had to admire her—even at her most theatrical. The tears poured down her cheeks whenever she spoke of suffering or want. Needless to say, Caroline’s act appealed strongly to the “little Maggie” part of me,117 and I soon began playing up to it. I took to coming into her office and announcing solemnly, “Caroline—I have a concern.” And it wasn’t long before I was murdering grammar in the best Quaker style: “Caroline, is thee driving to Haverford this morning?” “Does thee know about Mr. Seidemann’s extra blankets?” “Does thee mind if I telephone from thy room?”
What did Elizabeth think of her, and of me? Elizabeth was a bit of a marvel. She sat very erect at her desk, took the dictation, listened for the hundredth time to the anecdotes, tapped out the letters—and at five o’clock slipped upstairs to her tiny room and her private life. She collected miniature china figures of animals. She wrote letters. She had girlfriends, and a boyfriend no doubt, in Ohio—where she and Caroline had first met. She giggled with Rachel: they had all sorts of intimate jokes.
Of course, I was quite the little rooster in this hens’ barnyard. And that is what makes it so difficult for me to write fairly about Caroline. I get mad when I think how she treated those girls, and I get soft when I remember how extravagantly she flattered me—at any rate, to begin with. (“See if you can’t do something with her,” Rachel appealed to me once, at a moment of crisis, several months later, “you’ve got pants on.”) But, when all is said, Caroline was a marvellous woman. She worked all day and half the night—chiefly, no doubt, because she wasted so much time—but, at least, she kept going till she dropped.
Like all hysterics, she was everlastingly appealing to the norm. “In a perfectly natural and normal way,” “She’s so wholesome,” “Oh, they were a splendid pair of kids—so straight …”: such were her favorite expressions. And in this she was a true Quaker. She believed passionately in marriage, that dogma and first article of faith among Friends. Caroline had had two great romances in her life. The first was with a young man to whom she actually got engaged: he died of TB. The second—while she was doing relief work in Germany—was with a fellow worker, the husband of a friend. She had nursed him through a bad illness, and one day, when he was convalescent again, he had come into her office and declared his love. “It wasn’t strength,” Caroline would tell you very solemnly, “that saved me from going over to him and taking him in my arms. But it was a very hot day, and I had undone some of my clothes. I couldn’t move. …” It was ridic
ulous, of course, but it was also painful and disconcerting to hear her talk like this. After such a life of devotion, energy, real insight—was she, well over fifty, only another sex-starved spinster; the kind they make jokes about? Hadn’t her career of self-dedication been somehow more its own reward? The refugees, watching Caroline, were not dismayed, however: to them, the spectacle was perfectly comprehensible: an old maid needs a lover. If she had one, she would calm down.
An almost daily caller at the house was Susan Dewees. Susan was a big sandy-haired gaunt woman with a grim Dutch face, who knew all the Haverford answers. She was secretary of the Meeting, but could just as well have been holding down some big executive job. If anybody wanted to know anything—from the time the next bus left for Chester to the name of the man Eliza Fry married—they would ask Susan. Susan took the workshop under her wing as a matter of course. And, as a matter of course, Caroline resented her interference—though, in practice, she relied on Susan a great deal.
Caroline, who was basically inefficient, hysterical, intuitive, was in the awkward position of being ground between the two most methodical, efficient and unemotional women in the district: the other was Hertha Kraus. Hertha was a German Jewess, a Quaker, with whom Caroline had worked on relief projects in Germany, twenty years before. She had come to the U.S. some time back and was now on the staff at Bryn Mawr College, teaching economics. If Susan Dewees could have run a big business corporation, Hertha could have run the United States—as a dictatorship. She was a whale of a girl, with breasts like an Alpine meadow, and a great pouchy purple face surrounded by nondescript hair like sofa stuffing, worn in a sawed-off bob. She talked wheezily and precisely, with a high-class British accent, out of the pit of her stomach, which was about ten thousand feet below. Hertha, as a sideline to her teaching, was placement director to the workshop—which, being translated out of Quakerese, meant that she was supposed to find the refugees jobs. And she did; you had to admit that. However, her methods were certainly a bit high-handed. She was quite liable to make all arrangements behind Caroline’s back—and the first we would hear of them would be when Mr. Schmidt walked into the office and announced he was leaving for Iowa that evening. And then Caroline would hit the ceiling, and the telephone wire between Bryn Mawr and the workshop would soon be glowing dull red, with occasional green flashes.
But Hertha was by no means the biggest thorn in Caroline’s flesh. Hertha at least was efficient. The boys and girls at the Quaker headquarters in town, 20 South 12th Street, interfered just as much, and were the laziest, stupidest, most muddleheaded crew you could have feared to find. Two of them used to come out and visit us regularly—Rebecca Timbres and Katherine Hanstein. I quite liked Timbres, who was a trained nurse and had been in Russia with her husband on some project when he died of typhus. She was a big woman with eyeglasses who made herself look like an elephant by unwisely wearing light blue. Hanstein was rather pretty and rather a bitch. Mesdames Timbres and Hanstein used to interview the members of our group for hours on end, taking pocketbooks full of notes, to determine what kind of a job they were most suited for. Hertha didn’t waste any time determining; she got the job and rammed the refugee into it, cutting off a foot here and a nose there, to make him fit. So Timbres and Hanstein were popular, while Hertha was disliked, admired and feared.
The objective of the Cooperative College Workshop—and I quote—was not only to improve its clients’ knowledge of the English language and American educational technique, but also to help them adjust themselves to the American Way of Life. The A.W. of L. was our specialty, and it meant just exactly what Caroline happened to want it to mean at any given moment. I used to get mad at her about this—especially when the American Way clashed with the British; as for example, over the question of cutting up meat before you eat it—but the strange and disconcerting fact remained that most of our group had practically no table manners, either American, British, German or Chinese. The German-Jewish intellectual (and I’m generalizing from all my experience, not merely that of the workshop) has bad manners for two reasons: at home, he was waited on hand and foot by his womenfolk, while he and his friends discussed philosophy and politics; abroad, or in concentration camps, he learnt to grab whatever he could get. The result was that the people who came to Haverford had to be drilled in the most elementary consideration for each other. We had to make rules that the vegetable dishes must be passed around the table, not snatched back and forth, and that people mustn’t make “long arms” for what they wanted. They had even to be told to keep their chins out of the soup.
Caroline made a tactful speech to them one day on the subject, suggesting that these customs were specifically “American,” but this defeated its own object, because the refugees took her at her word, and accepted the intended rebuke as an interesting piece of anthropological information. They even wrote letters to their friends, describing the American table etiquette as though it were part of the mores of a South Sea island, complicated, fetishistic and quaint. And, this being their attitude, they naturally regarded it as unimportant. Were they thick skinned? Yes, they were. Also, they were pretty arrogant, down underneath, as every immigrant is. They thought America silly. They were Europeans, representatives of the senior culture. It was quite understandable. I think, too, that they didn’t really grasp much of what Caroline told them. She spoke very fast, with an accent which became more and more southern as she warmed up. Oddly enough, after all these years, she hadn’t mastered the art of speaking English to foreigners.
We made excursions to schools and colleges in the neighborhood, and were lectured and conducted around and given meals. And, on Sundays, there was “open house” for five o’clock tea. The neighbors came in and talked till we dropped, and the samovar (brought back by Caroline from Russia) had to be filled and refilled. Sunday was always the hardest day. I suffered a lot, personally, from the prevailing Philadelphian Anglophilia: my accent was considered just too cute for anything.
Then, on Friday evenings, there were lectures—on municipal government, civil liberties, and suchlike. The lectures were arranged by a very nice couple named Watson—both teachers at Haverford College—who had four sons, one of them a C.O., another just about to join the army. The lecturers had one thing in common; they didn’t know how to lecture. Only the smallest percentage of our group understood one word they were saying. I sat there rigid with boredom and just offered it all up to the Lord. Or furtively wrote letters and offered them up instead.
I haven’t yet mentioned Caroline’s dog Pete. Pete was a Boston bull: elderly, lame and very scrappy. He had poked out one of his eyes when jumping out of a car into a bush, to attack another dog. Pete and Caroline had a really extraordinary and beautiful relationship. She claimed that he knew a hundred words of English. She spoke to him without gestures, very quietly, and he always seemed to understand. If she told him to, he would run upstairs, or into the office, or into the kitchen. He would climb on to a certain chair, or exchange it for another. When Caroline was talking to Pete, or to children, her whole manner changed. She was very gentle; humble, almost. One felt that she really regarded Pete as an old friend, with affection, and, oddly enough, without sentimentality. Pete’s reaction to her treatment was all the more remarkable because, as I say, he was such a violent tempered, hysterical little dog, apt to snap at anybody when excited. Pete always came to the meeting we held after breakfast, and it seemed somehow right that he should be there, although he frequently sneezed and snorted and fidgeted throughout the silence. “He’s such a funny little dog,” Caroline used to say of him, apologetically.
When I first came to Haverford, I made up my mind to avoid as far as possible making contacts outside the circle of the workshop and the Meeting. My life was going to be quite difficult enough, anyhow, without the distraction of being reminded that I had other tastes and interests. However, Teddy le Boutilliere, who kept the Country Book Shop at Bryn Mawr, heard where I was and called me up; so I had to go and see him. He was
an old friend of Fritz Prokosch, and had once entertained Auden after a lecture. He and his friend Jimmy Quail knew the Mortmere part of Lions and Shadows almost by heart, and had had private jokes based on it for years. This would have softened any author—and, anyhow, I grew very fond of Teddy, and of Una, his wife, a large, beak-nosed Englishwoman, who drawled, and was funny and kind. They had two small boys, and lived in a beautiful old farmhouse near Phoenixville. The army had established a listening post for planes in the backyard. I visited them often, but always somewhat against my better judgment, because they spent their time trying (successfully) to persuade me that this Quaker stuff didn’t suit me at all, and that I should snap out of it and be my age and get drunk.
Here are the chief events of our life at the workshop, that fall:
Sometime in November, we got a Russian housekeeper named Tanya Korbett.118 She was an art historian by profession, and not at all the right person for the job: she was scared of asking any of the group to do anything, and got into quite a lot of trouble in consequence. Caroline soon turned against her. She had a rather charming face, monkeyish, not pretty. She played the piano fluently, but with a heavy insensitive touch. I think she had spent too much time in German universities. That’s never good for Russians. It takes the edge off their intuition, which is their chief asset. The thoroughness of true German scholarship they can never acquire. So they become dogmatic and obtuse—and, if you question their sources of information, annoyed.
Toward the end of November, Mrs. Furtmueller died. Dr. Tatnall, a gaunt red-haired young man who was related to Susan Dewees, had said she would have to be moved to hospital next day, and she was dreading this. That night, he gave her a big shot of morphia. Maybe it was a merciful overdose, and done deliberately. She passed out easily and quietly, sitting up in bed with a book in her lap. Carl found her dead. The shock was terrible, for he had only been told that afternoon that there was any danger. He came out of the room and met Caroline in the passage. She described the scene to me later. “He looked at me with those tragic eyes of his. Then he said, ‘Caroline—ich habe solche Angst …’119 I took him in my arms.”
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 35
