Christopher and His Kind

by Christopher Isherwood

  Gerald Hamilton, in Mr. Norris and I, writes that “I was in touch with the leading German Communists, who alone, as a political party, represented my point of view on social matters.” That summer, he had been making speeches on his favorite reform projects at meetings sponsored by the Communists. The London Times heard of this and told him to resign from his job with them. So Gerald decided to look to the Left for a new paymaster. He must have “declared for Russia” by making some sort of statement to the press.

  I forget what kind of “champion athlete” Otto had become. Probably he had joined a local sports club and won a few races. His bursts of energy were always brief.)

  * * *

  In August, Christopher met Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann’s eldest son; this was his first contact with a member of that family. Klaus and Christopher took to each other from the start. They were to become intimate friends who seldom saw each other, for Klaus was always on the move.

  Like most other people who knew Klaus, Christopher supposed that it couldn’t be easy for him, as a writer, to be his father’s son. But Klaus was evidently able to accept Thomas, Nobel Prize and all; he didn’t waste his life shivering enviously in that huge paternal shadow. Nor did he affect the grandeur and alienated gloom of so many European literary men. His manner was easy, lively, witty; yet he was capable of caring deeply about his friends and the causes he believed in, and of fighting on their behalf. Christopher found this combination lovable. At the same time, far down beneath Klaus’s brightness, courage, apparent freedom from self-pity, there was an obstinate drive toward self-destruction. Christopher didn’t become fully aware of it until shortly before Klaus’s suicide in 1949.

  * * *

  On September 2, Stephen, who was still in London, phoned Kathleen to tell her that the Hogarth Press had accepted The Memorial. He must have wanted to let her have the pleasure of telegraphing the news to Christopher, which was truly considerate of him. Christopher was delighted, of course. But he soon managed to find grounds for renewed anxiety—in the devaluation of the British pound. Late in September, he wrote to Stephen:

  I have heard nothing more of The Memorial. Can it be that they are backing out of it owing to this crisis? All things are possible. The pound was at 15 but is better today. I am living chiefly on what I earn by going for morning walks with a German-American boy who says Yep and No, Sir.

  A few days after this, Christopher reports that the German-American boy, in the midst of some game, has

  stuck a pointed stick into my eyelid about a millimetre from my eye. I am bathing the wound now and eating grapes supplied by Frl. Thurau, who really is the world’s best landlady.

  A standard tableau—played many times previously and often to be replayed: Christopher sensually enjoying his role of martyr-invalid.

  Germany is pretty bloody. This Revolution-Next-Week atmosphere has stopped being quite such a joke and somehow the feeling that nothing really will happen only makes it worse. I think everybody everywhere is being ground slowly down by an enormous tool. I feel myself getting smaller and smaller … Gisa leaves tonight for Paris. She would like you to write to her and will send me or us both her address. It seems strange that that household has come to an end.

  Thus Gisa Soloweitschik, like Natalia Landauer, made a fortunate exit from the Berlin scene before the coming of Hitler. She settled with her parents in France, where she married a Frenchman. Gisa and her husband were still there after the war. Stephen kept in touch with her, but Christopher failed to do so.

  This job lasts till the end of October or possibly November. And then? Well, there is perhaps a vacancy in Hamilton’s new “Anglo-American News Agency,” which looks like being a pretty good hive of Bolshevik crooks … Did you say you had Mirsky’s book on Lenin? I should be awfully grateful if you’d send it sometime.

  I am depressed, but only up to a point. I spend most of the day laughing with Hamilton over his classic struggles with the bailiff.

  The visits of the bailiff were due to Gerald’s loss of his job with The Times. This had automatically put an end to his credit. His creditors were now trying to repossess the furniture and other valuables which he hadn’t paid for—that is to say, almost everything in his flat. I can’t remember if the “Anglo-American News Agency” ever actually came into being. Gerald obviously had to have a Communist-front organization of some sort, or at least a plan for one, before he could appeal to the Communist Party for financial help.

  But the German Communists depended largely on Russian money, and here Gerald found himself up against hard-nosed professionals instead of the greedy, gullible amateurs he was used to. The Russians demanded results, and they were slow payers even after they had got them. According to Gerald, the German party officials often had to wait months for their salaries to come through. As Gerald’s financial disappointment in the party grew, he became more and more critical of it. Through his eyes, Christopher began to see its seamy side—its private feuds, its inefficiency, its bewildered efforts to follow the changing tactics dictated by Moscow.

  Christopher took it for granted that the Communists saw right through Gerald; that they valued him merely as a gentlemanly go-between whose appearance and fine manners would be helpful in their dealings with the gentlemen of the opposition. Still, Christopher couldn’t help feeling sentimentally shocked that the Party of the Workers could thus forget its proletarian ethics and stoop to use this unclean instrument.

  Amidst these doubts, Christopher was reading about Lenin with reverence and enthusiasm. Hence, he was capable of asking Stephen for the Mirsky book, alluding to “Bolshevik crooks,” and decorating his signature with a hammer and sickle, all in the same letter. He was what party dialectitions used, in those days, to call “unclear.”

  * * *

  That autumn, Jean got herself a theatrical job—a tiny one, but in a tremendous production: Max Reinhardt’s Tales of Hoffmann, which opened on November 28. This was one of the last great spectacles of the pre-Hitler Berlin theater and, in a sense, Reinhardt’s farewell to it. Christopher was to meet him and his family in their Californian exile, during the war.

  Of all the opera’s splendid stage pictures, the one most vivid in my memory is that of the Grand Canal in Venice, with a gondola traveling down it. In order to make the gondola appear to move, Reinhardt moved the set itself. The huge palace fronts swung slowly around as the gondola rounded a curve of the canal. The movement of the palaces caused a profound mechanical rumbling which was sometimes louder than the music but which nevertheless seemed part of the intended effect. It was magnificently sinister, like the tread of doom.

  In the course of the ball scene at the Venetian palace of the courtesan Giulietta, several pairs of lovers were carried onto the stage. Each pair reclined on a litter, locked in each other’s arms. These lovers were merely extras and few members of the audience can have paid any attention to their embraces, once they had made their entrance, for a dazzling corps de ballet was performing in the middle of the stage. But Christopher watched one pair of lovers intently, through opera glasses, until the end of the scene. Even so, he couldn’t be sure if what Jean had told him was true—that she had sex with her partner in full view of the audience at every single performance.

  * * *

  The Memorial was published on February 17, 1932. There were a few really favorable notices. The best of them was in the Granta. I remember how one reviewer remarked that he had at first thought the novel contained a disproportionately large number of homosexual characters but had decided, on further reflection, that there were a lot more homosexuals about, nowadays.

  * * *

  That spring, Francis returned to Germany. Soon after their reunion, he told Christopher that he didn’t want to stay cooped up in Berlin. He planned to take a house in the country, drink less, spend a lot of time out of doors, go to bed early, and be healthy. He urged Christopher to join him in this experiment. Christopher promised to think it over—he was inclined to say yes, for several r
easons. Seeing Francis again, he felt a renewed affection for him; there was no special person to keep him in Berlin, now that his affair with Otto had at last cooled off; living with Francis would be far cheaper than the Nollendorfstrasse, since he would only have to pay for his food; also, he had started work on an autobiographical book (which would one day become Lions and Shadows) and he knew that the dullness of the country would make it easier for him to concentrate on it.

  Francis had already engaged Erwin Hansen, Karl Giese’s friend from the Institute, as his cook and housekeeper and told him to find someone to help with the housework. So Erwin hired a boy named Heinz. On March 13, shortly before Francis, Erwin, and Heinz were due to leave for the country, Christopher and Heinz met. Meeting Heinz was what finally decided Christopher to go with them.

  It must surely have been Erwin who had arranged that they should live at Mohrin. Perhaps he had friends there. Perhaps his friends even owned the house which Francis was to rent. Only some such personal motives could explain his choice of that particular village out of so many almost identical others. Mohrin was northeast of Berlin, near what was then the Polish frontier. (Now it is inside Poland and is spelled Moryń.)

  As a very young man, Christopher had read Turgenev and Chekhov and had yearned romantically for the steppe, the immense land ocean which stretches east, unbounded, to the Ural Mountains and then endlessly on across Siberia. At Mohrin, he was actually on the edge of that ocean. But the ocean seemed less inspiring, here, than it had seemed in London, ten years earlier. God, it was flat.

  All the houses of all these villages had double windows, to keep out the cold of the long, terrible winters. Now the spring was beginning—a short poignant episode of awareness, between the numbness of the snow and the stupor of the summer heat. In the spring you might become fully conscious for a few weeks, look around you and decide to leave this village forever—or fall in love with someone you had known all your life and stay here with him until you died. The poplars had new leaves and the lilac was coming into bloom. The ice was cracking on the Mohrinersee, the dull little local lake; it would be stored in cellars to refrigerate food during the hot months ahead. Showers of rain followed each other. The snow had melted into mud. You could work at home and then walk around the lake, and then have a few drinks at the inn, and then come back home. Or you could omit the lake, or the inn. Or you could drink first and walk later. That was the extent of your choice. Whenever you stepped out of doors, after the first week, it was with the certainty that you would never meet anybody whose face you didn’t recognize. This was a place where, to use a favorite expression of Frl. Thurau’s, “the foxes say goodnight to each other.”

  As soon as Francis realized that Christopher and Heinz were going to bed together, he announced that Christopher must pay half of Heinz’s wages. Christopher agreed to this with more amusement than indignation; it was the way Francis was. He said nothing to Heinz. But Erwin, who thought that Francis was being stingy and who was anyhow a bit of a mischief-maker, told Heinz what had happened. Heinz went outside the house and burst into tears. It was his declaration of love.

  Christopher had no hesitation in falling in love with Heinz. It seemed most natural to him that they two should be drawn together. Heinz had found his elder brother; Christopher had found someone emotionally innocent, entirely vulnerable and uncritical, whom he could protect and cherish as his very own. He was deeply touched and not in the least apprehensive. He wasn’t yet aware that he was letting himself in for a relationship which would be far more serious than any he had had in his life.

  Heinz was a slim boy of about seventeen with large brown eyes. His nose had been broken with a brick wielded by one of his age mates when he was still a child; it had a funny but attractive dip in the middle. Heinz had some difficulty in breathing through it. This nose, together with his big protruding lips, round head, and close-curling hair, gave him a somewhat Negroid appearance. He was delighted when Christopher called him Nigger Boy, and he used to repeat the nickname to himself, chuckling. His face was young and good-natured, with a wide grin, when he was happy. When he wasn’t, it became older and you saw the grim sullenness of the peasant. He hadn’t at all the air of a city dweller. He only looked at ease dressed in working clothes, a thick magenta sweater and a cap with a shiny peak, which he wore on one side of his head; in his best suit, he seemed disguised and self-conscious.

  Heinz’s father was alive but Heinz seldom saw him. He had no brothers or sisters, no girlfriend, no particular boyfriends. He lived with his grandmother, an old lady who looked exactly as he would look in his seventies. The grandmother had a basement flat which she kept so hot that you began to sweat when you entered it. If anyone suggested opening a window, she would growl, “I don’t heat for the street.”

  * * *

  Francis soon got tired of Mohrin and began going off to Berlin for long weekends, taking Erwin with him. Thus Christopher found himself keeping house with Heinz. This was a kind of happiness which he had never experienced before; he now realized that he had always desired it. Unlike Otto, or any of the boys he had known from the bars, Heinz actually enjoyed work for work’s sake. No lover, however literary, could have shared Christopher’s work with him. But Heinz did the next best thing; while Christopher wrote, Heinz collaborated with him indirectly by sweeping the floors, tidying up the garden, cooking the meals. Whenever Christopher had written while Otto was nearby, he had been conscious of Otto’s restlessness and boredom and had felt responsible for it. His effort to go on writing became an assertion of his will against Otto’s, although Otto was probably unaware that he was interfering with Christopher’s work; he merely wanted attention. As for Heinz, he was certainly quite unaware how much he was helping Christopher. This odd pair, enjoying these few days of privacy and occupation with pauses for eating and making love, were absurdly like the most ordinary happily married heterosexual couple.

  Then Francis and Erwin would return, bringing with them one or more boys from the Berlin bars. By now, Francis and Heinz had taken a rooted dislike to each other. Francis found fault with Heinz at every opportunity; Heinz became sullen in his presence. Christopher retaliated by being unpleasant to Francis’s boys. This didn’t create any serious hostility between Francis and Christopher; each understood the other’s motives too well. Francis had asked Christopher to come with him to Mohrin on the assumption that their life there would be a dialogue between two intimate friends, with Erwin and other employees kept in the background, on an inferior level. Christopher had violated what Francis regarded as an unspoken agreement by treating Heinz as an intimate. Francis felt betrayed, and Christopher didn’t blame him.

  As the weeks passed, Francis and his household caused a scandal in the village, merely by being themselves. Someone denounced them to the police. Erwin the diplomatist prevented an official inquiry from being made. But it became obvious that they would all have to leave before long.

  Meanwhile, Stephen Spender arrived in Berlin and came out to pay them a short visit. Christopher had tried hard to discourage him from doing this, but Stephen had seemed unconscious of Christopher’s attitude. He hated having Stephen and Stephen’s camera invade the scene of his love affair with Heinz. Clicking that camera, Stephen seemed to mock and expose you, even while he flattered you by his piercing curiosity. Jealously, almost superstitiously, Christopher feared that Stephen would somehow alter his image in Heinz’s eyes and make Heinz unable to go on loving him. (It was Stephen, not Christopher, who ought to have said, “I am a camera,” in those days. Now we survivors can feel nothing but gratitude to him for his tireless clicking. He saved so many bits of our youth for us.)

  Stephen soon left Mohrin, however, and there was no open quarrel. When he had gone, Christopher felt immediate relief from his own fears and aversion. He even regretted the loss of Stephen’s lively company and wrote to him in the normal tone of friendship, describing the humors and horrors of country life. In view of Christopher’s ambivalent attitude
, these letters now ring shockingly false.

  Early in July, they were together again, back at Sellin on Ruegen Island, with Heinz and with Stephen’s younger brother, Humphrey. During this holiday, there was less tension between them—largely because of Humphrey’s presence. Humphrey was a charming, easygoing, friendly young man. Like Stephen, he was a photographer—soon to become professional—but he was definitely not a camera. Christopher never thought of him as a menace to his relationship with Heinz. Humphrey would never invade anybody’s privacy.

  He did, however, once ask Christopher an unusual personal question; it was while the two of them were out walking alone together. Humphrey said suddenly, “You speak German so well—tell me, why don’t you ever use the subjunctive mood?” Christopher had to admit that he didn’t know how to. In the days when he had studied German, he had left the subjunctive to be dealt with later, since it wasn’t absolutely essential and he was in a hurry. By this time, he could hop through the language without its aid, like an agile man with only one leg. But now Christopher set himself to master the subjunctive. Very soon, he had done so. Proud of this accomplishment, he began showing it off whenever he talked: “Had it not been for him, I should never have asked myself what I would do if they were to—” etc., etc. Humphrey was much amused.

  SIX

  On August 4, 1932, Christopher began another visit to England. It was to be made memorable by some old friends and by some new ones. His first few days there were spent chiefly with Jean Ross—who had now left Germany for good—or with Hector Wintle, his friend since their schooldays at Repton and, for a short while, his fellow medical student. (Hector is called Philip Lindsay in All the Conspirators and Philip Linsley in Lions and Shadows; the slight alteration was made because some libel-conscious lawyer feared that the repetition of the original surname might annoy the novelist Philip Lindsay. As far as I know, Mr. Lindsay neither read Christopher nor cared what he wrote.)