The World in the Evening

by Christopher Isherwood

  ‘Well, yes, I can imagine. With all your work.’

  ‘It isn’t the work that I mind. That’s good for me. It keeps me from thinking. You see, the trouble is, Stephen, I don’t really enjoy being a doctor. I’m not a bad one. As a matter of fact, I’m a lot better than average. I’ve got the talent for it, but no vocation. This isn’t what I wanted to do in life.’

  ‘What did you want?’

  ‘I wanted to be a writer. Isn’t that a laugh?’

  ‘Why is it a laugh?’

  ‘Because I can’t write. Vocation but no talent.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely sure. I found that out years ago. Oh, don’t worry, I’m not about to ask you to read my stuff. There isn’t any. It’s all burned.’

  ‘That’s too bad.’

  ‘Look, I’m not telling you this to get sympathy. I just want you to understand the situation. That’s my personal problem, and ordinarily I can handle it. It’s only when Bob needs help that I find I’m not on such firm ground myself. So then we’re both in trouble. And when I can’t help him and he turns to someone else, I get silly and jealous … Bob’s been going through a bad time lately. He told you all that, didn’t he?’

  ‘About being a conscientious objector?’

  ‘That’s only part of it. There’s this whole thing of having been brought up as a Quaker. You see, Bob adored his Father and Mother. They do seem to have been pretty wonderful people, in their own way. When he was a kid, he believed everything they believed, on trust. Then they died, and he was put into a Friends’ school, where the teachers weren’t quite as wonderful as his parents; so he despised them for not being, the way teenagers do sometimes, and it all went sour on him.’

  ‘He didn’t tell me any of that.’

  ‘No. I suppose he wouldn’t. He hardly ever mentions his parents, because they’re at the root of everything … Anyhow, he decided that Quakerdom stank. And he’s been trying to kid himself, ever since, that it never really meant anything to him. It’s been working inside him all these years and now it’s starting to act up. Just like with a lapsed Catholic … The difficulty is, we get into a violent fight whenever we discuss this because he resents what he thinks is my attitude towards the Quakes. Actually, he’d resent any attitude I took toward them. He doesn’t think I’ve got the right to have one.’

  ‘You don’t like them, do you, Charles?’

  ‘That’s what Bob thinks. He accuses me of sneering at them. But he’s quite wrong. I respect them. And I admire them in a lot of ways. They don’t sit nursing guilty consciences; they go right out and work their guilt off, helping people. They’ve got the courage of their convictions, and they mean exactly what they say, and they’ve found their own answers to everything without resorting to any trick theology. What I do hate about the Quakes, though, is their lack of style. They don’t know how to do things with an air. They’re hopelessly tacky. They’ve no notion of elegance.’

  ‘But that’s their great point, surely? They believe in plainness.’

  ‘Plainness doesn’t exclude elegance; it only makes it all the more necessary. Anyhow, “elegance” isn’t quite what I mean … In any of your voyages au bout de la nuit, did you ever run across the word “camp”?’

  ‘I’ve heard people use it in bars. But I thought—’

  ‘You thought it meant a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich? Yes, in queer circles, they call that camping, It’s all very well in its place, but it’s an utterly debased form—’ Charles’ eyes shone delightedly. He seemed to be in the best of spirits, now, and thoroughly enjoying this exposition. ‘What I mean by camp is something much more fundamental. You can call the other Low Camp, if you like; then what I’m talking about is High Camp. High Camp is the whole emotional basis of the Ballet, for example, and of course of Baroque art. You see, true High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is largely camp about religion. The Ballet is camp about love … Do you see at all what I’m getting at?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Give me some instances. What about Mozart?’

  ‘Mozart’s definitely a camp. Beethoven, on the other hand, isn’t.

  ‘Is Flaubert?’

  ‘God, no!’

  ‘And neither is Rembrandt?’

  ‘No. Definitely not.’

  ‘But El Greco is?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘And so is Dostoevsky?’

  ‘Of course he is! In fact, he’s the founder of the whole school of modern Psycho-Camp which was later developed by Freud.’ Charles had a sudden spasm of laughter. ‘Splendid, Stephen! You’ve really gotten the idea.’

  ‘I don’t know if I have or not. It seems such an elastic expression.’

  ‘Actually, it isn’t at all. But I admit it’s terribly hard to define. You have to meditate on it and feel it intuitively, like Lao-tze’s Tao. Once you’ve done that, you’ll find yourself wanting to use the word whenever you discuss aesthetics or philosophy or almost anything. I never can understand how critics manage to do without it.’

  ‘I must say, I can hardly see how the Friends would apply it.’

  ‘Naturally you can’t. Neither can I. That’s because Quaker Camp doesn’t exist, yet. Some tremendous genius will have to arise and create it. Until that happens, it’s as unimaginable as Rimbaud’s prose poems would have been to Keats.’

  ‘Does Bob think the Quakers need High Camp?’

  ‘He does in his heart, but he won’t admit it. He can’t criticize them or discuss them objectively, at all; he can only love them or hate them. He’s in a classically schizoid predicament. His conscience is split right down the middle. You know, I really believe he’s unable to think about anything except in relation to a conflict of loyalties. He has to do everything on principle … It’s only on principle that he stays with me, really.’

  ‘You must know that isn’t true, Charles.’

  ‘Yes, I do. Of course. I’m starting to talk nonsense. Sorry.’

  ‘Bob loves you very much. Even I can see that.’

  ‘Oh, I know. And I love him very much.’ Charles sighed. ‘But it isn’t that simple … The trouble is, I can’t seem to take Bob for granted. I’m always trying to understand him. And, of course, I’m the one person who can’t, ever. If I did, that’d be another kind of relationship. We wouldn’t feel the way we do about each other.’

  ‘Does Bob try to understand you?’

  ‘Gracious, no! He only tries to make me into what he wants me to be. All this respectability of mine drives him frantic. Medical etiquette. The bedside manner. Horse and buggy humour. Talking to the Dolgelly ladies about the weather. Sometimes he makes an effort to play along with it for a while, and then he gets furious with himself and me too. He’d like for us to march down the street with a banner, singing ‘we’re queer because we’re queer because we’re queer because we’re queer’. That’s really what we keep fighting about. And the idiotic part of it is, I’m actually on his side, and he knows it.’

  ‘He’s quite a crusader, isn’t he?’

  ‘That’s just it. He needs an heroic setting. The best part of him just isn’t functioning here, at all. He ought to be involved in some political movement, or storming barricades. Then he’d be completely alive.’

  ‘You don’t call the Navy an heroic setting, do you?’

  ‘The Navy’s a very old-fashioned and occasionally very dangerous kindergarten. If Bob goes back into it, it’ll do its best to turn him into a loyal anti-crusading five-year-old moron.’

  ‘Then you think he’d be better off in prison, as an objector?’

  ‘Of course he would. But there, my attitude’s completely selfish, I admit. I’m so deathly afraid of losing him for keeps
. After an experience like that, he probably wouldn’t need me any more. I can’t see him coming back here and settling down again.’

  Charles walked over to the window and stood there, looking out. ‘All that dogwood!’ he muttered. ‘Horrible sickly stuff. Like whipped cream.’ He turned back toward the room. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if I lost Bob. Before I knew him, I was such a mess … I’m no crusader. I’m sick of belonging to these whining militant minorities. Everybody hates them, and pretends not to. And they hate themselves like poison. You know something funny? My Father’s name was Klatnik. He changed it. I used to tell myself that I’d change it back when I grew up. But I never did, of course. I found excuses not to. I didn’t have the guts.’

  ‘Well, for that matter,’ I said, trying to get Charles out of this mood, ‘I belong to a minority, myself. One of the most unpopular.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m rich.’

  Charles gave a sort of scornful grunt.

  ‘You think that’s nothing?’ I said. ‘Till you’ve had a lot of money, you just don’t know what guilt is.’

  ‘I dare say that’s absolutely true.’ Charles became more cheerful at once. ‘You must tell me all about it, some time. I had an uncle who was rich. He spent his whole life explaining why he couldn’t give us more money. He actually shed tears while he was doing it, too. He died of a broken heart.’

  ‘I bet you were horrible to him.’

  ‘We certainly were! We didn’t regard him as a human being, at all. We treated him as a sort of golden monster. So he turned into one. All ghoul and a yard wide … Look, I must go. I’ve got another patient to see.’ Charles tapped the cast with his finger. ‘How’s this whited sepulchre?’

  ‘Not too bad. Except for the stink.’

  ‘Stink?’ Charles bent down and sniffed at it. ‘My poor friend, you call that stinking? Wait till you’ve been in it another two months. Nobody will be able to come near the house. Loathsome worms and beetles will crawl out of it. Buzzards and vultures will assemble and sharpen their beaks. And then, one morning, it’ll crack wide open and the most gorgeous butterfly, all dazzling white, will emerge and spread its wings and flutter away over the treetops.’

  ‘And that’ll be me?’

  ‘That’ll be you, Brother. Never fear.’ Charles laughed and patted me on the shoulder. Then, as he walked over to the door, he added: ‘Don’t get any wrong ideas about Bob and me and that argument. If I made it sound like a big drama, I didn’t mean to. It’s like what they used to say about Austria: the situation’s desperate but not serious. The whole thing’ll simmer down in a day or two, you’ll see. Actually, Stephen, if we do have any more fights, it’s you who’s going to bear the brunt of them, from now on. We’ve been needing someone to act as umpire. And you’re the heaven-sent victim. You can’t run out on us. I’m certainly glad you threw yourself under that truck.’

  ‘It was a pleasure,’ I said. ‘For you, I’d break one of my necks, any time.’

  Bob reappeared two days later, bringing with him a pile of records and a box of radio valves, tools, wire and mechanical parts. ‘Just another service of your friendly neighbourhood Dog People,’ he told me, grinning. He worked all morning, installing a record-player and a radio beside my bed and a loud-speaker in a corner of the room. I couldn’t help suspecting that this was his way of showing me that he didn’t want any renewal of our previous conversation. During this visit he talked very little. As he worked, he whistled softly to himself as though he were alone, and only broke off now and then to explain briefly to me what he was doing, in a gruff matter-of-fact voice.

  After this, he came to see me fairly often. Sometimes he seemed to have nothing to say at all. He was capable of vast but vaguely expectant silences, during which he would sit looking at me with his mouth slightly open until I got embarrassed and started to chatter about anything that came into my head. Sometimes—especially after he had been playing tennis or getting a work-out at the College gym—he would be as noisy and silly as a teen-age boy, walking around the room on his hands or hiding under the bed and grabbing at Gerda’s ankles, as if the exercise had released him for a while from his tensions. And there were other times when he would talk freely and naturally, telling me funny stories of his life in the Navy or asking me questions about places I’d been to. But our talk never again got really intimate. Charles had been wrong there, apparently. Bob didn’t seem to want to confide in me any more; or maybe his quarrel with Charles had somehow made that impossible for him.

  What struck me chiefly about him, always, was his quality of loneliness; and this was even more apparent when he and Charles came to visit me together. When, for example, Bob was fixing our cocktails, his slim figure with its big shoulders bending over the bottles would look strangely weary and solitary, and he seemed suddenly miles away from either of us. He was like a prospector preparing a meal in the midst of the wilderness.

  The cocktails gave me an added reason to look forward to their visits, for these were the only times I ever got a drink. Charles and Bob would come on evenings when Sarah and Gerda were away in Philadelphia, and they always arrived with a bag of ice-cubes, a shaker and several bottles of liquor. Once, they also brought a load of Bob’s paintings and held what Charles described as ‘Bob’s first one-dog show’. The paintings certainly weren’t primitives, as Charles had called them; but Bob had told the truth when he said that he painted in various styles. Some of them were severe abstractions made up of rectangles in pure colour, like Mondrian’s. Others suggested a gloomy disorganized impressionism; they were muddy and scratchy. And there were a few gay, surprisingly humorous landscapes which owed a lot to Dufy and Matisse. None of them were very distinguished, but, as revelations of Bob’s mental condition, they were most interesting. I thought I could see in them the conflict between Bob’s birthright Quakerism and Charles’s ‘High Camp’. Perhaps the creation of ‘Quaker Camp’ would be the only possible solution to Bob’s problems, both as a human being and a painter.

  It was probably the difficulty of making suitable and tactful comments on the pictures that caused me to drink more than usual, that night. Anyhow, I passed out cold. I woke, a couple of hours later, to find that Charles and Bob had left, taking the paintings with them. The lights were still burning. On the table beside my bed, there was a note from Charles, in very unsteady, straggling handwriting:

  ‘So sad we had to lose our favourite patient. Here’s the latest X-ray photograph of you. Things don’t seem to be working out too well. Frankly, I’m alarmed. Suggest you see a specialist.’

  This puzzled me, until I looked down at the cast. Bob had drawn all over it in charcoal, continuing the lines of my body and turning them into a kind of hermaphroditic mermaid, with fantastic sexual organs.

  A short while later, Sarah and Gerda arrived back home and came up to say Goodnight.

  ‘There’s quite a chill in the air,’ Sarah told me. ‘Most unseasonable. Be sure to keep yourself very carefully covered, Stephen dear.’ In my still drunken state, this advice struck me as so funny that I had a hard time fighting back the giggles. As soon as Sarah had left the room, I pushed down the bedclothes and showed Gerda the drawing.

  ‘Pfui!’ she exclaimed, laughing. ‘So eine Schweinerei! But this is clever, no? It is something like Picasso, I find.’

  We agreed, regretfully, that it had to go, however. So Gerda wiped the cast clean with a wet face-cloth.

  It was at this time of night that Gerda and I had our longest talks. One night, that same week, I had told her the whole story of my meeting with Elizabeth. ‘And that reminds me,’ I added, when I’d finished. ‘I keep forgetting to order you that copy of The World in the Evening. I’ll ask Sarah to get one, first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you, Stephen’—Gerda was obviously embarrassed—‘but this is not necessary. Already I get one. From a library in Philadelphia.’

  ‘You have? Have you started it yet?’

  ‘Oh, yes.
Since a long time. Now I have read all.’

  ‘But you never told me.’

  ‘No … I want, several times, to speak of this. But then I hesitate. You see, Stephen, I must be very sincere—’

  ‘Of course. You mean, you didn’t like it?’

  Gerda shook her head unwillingly but firmly. ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘There’s no need to be sorry.’

  ‘It is very well written, I am sure. In a foreign language, one cannot judge about such things—’

  ‘I quite realize that. That wasn’t why I wanted you to read it. But can’t you tell me what it was you didn’t like?’

  Gerda, I could see, was really distressed. ‘I think it is better when we do not speak more about this,’ she said.

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’ In spite of myself, I couldn’t help feeling slightly irritated. ‘Why in the world shouldn’t we?’

  ‘Because I hurt your feeling. I cannot talk coldly, as a critic. Not to you. You love Elizabeth. To you, this is personal.’

  ‘Now, really, Gerda! Do you honestly imagine that anything you, or anybody else could say would alter the way I feel about her?’

  ‘No. I did not mean this. But you may be angry with me, perhaps. For this I should be very sorry.’

  ‘You know that’s nonsense. Go ahead and say whatever you want to. We’ve started this, now. We can’t just stop and pretend it hasn’t been mentioned.’

  ‘Very well, Stephen—’ Gerda hesitated, then continued with a kind of desperation. ‘These people in the book—they are not like any people I have known. I do not understand them.’

  ‘What don’t you understand about them?’

  ‘I do not understand how they can talk in this way. They talk always about their feeling, about love. But I do not think, really, that they have any feeling at all.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because they seem not to care for what happens in the world outside. They are in this beautiful house, with these beautiful speeches and feelings. They make each other happy and unhappy. But it is like a game. Without heart, and so clever. They are quite safe, really. They are comfortable, in spite of all. They weep and are sad. But then the servants bring them tea.’