Christopher and His Kind

by Christopher Isherwood

  Christopher had grown accustomed to thinking of Hector as one of his least fortunate friends. For years, he had had to pore over textbooks, squeeze through examinations, and toil at St. Thomas’s Hospital amidst the squalor of moaning, messy patients. His heart had been weak, ever since an early attack of rheumatic fever, and he had been told that the twinges he felt in his fingers were symptoms of progressive rheumatoid arthritis which would probably cripple him. Hector was no tightlipped martyr. He complained unceasingly and most amusingly of his bad health, his lack of money, and his hatred of studying medicine. He was one of those rare beings who could make you thoroughly enjoy his misfortunes even while you were sympathizing with him. Christopher would listen to him by the hour and always feel the better for it; Hector’s plight made him grateful for Uncle Henry’s allowance and for his own irresponsible life. And Hector’s perseverance was inspiring. He had spent all his spare time steadily writing novels or pursuing girls. The novels, so far, had always been rejected; Hector, himself, had seldom been. The novels were well written but a bit forbidding; Hector was accessible, charming, and full of suave, plump sex appeal.

  Now, at last, he had finished with St. Thomas’s and was about to embark on his maiden voyage as a ship’s doctor. The ship—auspiciously named the Hector—was bound for China and Japan. For the first time in their long friendship, Christopher envied him. A few weeks from now, the Hector would actually, unbelievably, be entering Hong Kong harbor! Hector, with his own eyes, would behold that magic island—annexed to the empire of Somerset Maugham since its occupation by the characters of The Painted Veil. Hector himself, lounging at the rail in his white uniform, disdainfully regarding the junks and sampans with a frown of studied sophistication, would at that moment become an honorary Maugham character, a junior colleague of Dr. Macphail in Rain … Hector was entertained by Christopher’s fantasies, but being a realist, he was far more excited by the prospect of the affairs he hoped to be having with the ship’s female passengers.

  * * *

  On August 12, Christopher went to the Hogarth Press for his first encounter with John Lehmann. (If Leonard and Virginia Woolf were somewhere around, he didn’t get to meet them, much to his disappointment.) In his autobiographical book, The Whispering Gallery, John writes warmly about his reaction to Christopher: “It was impossible not to be drawn to him”; and humorously about Christopher’s supposed reaction to himself:

  The sense of alarm that seemed to hang in the air when his smile was switched off, a suspicion he seemed to radiate that one might after all be in league with the “enemy” …

  John’s intuition was correct. Christopher was suspicious of and on his guard against this tall handsome young personage with his pale narrowed quizzing eyes, measured voice which might have belonged to a Foreign Office expert, and extremely becoming, prematurely gray hair—a hereditary characteristic. Seated behind his desk, John seemed the incarnation of authority—benevolent authority, but authority, nonetheless. What Christopher didn’t, couldn’t have realized until they knew each other better was that this personage contained two beings whose deepest interests were in conflict: an editor and a poet. John the Editor was also in conflict with the policy of the Hogarth Press. For he was destined to become the great literary obstetrician of his own age, to bring the writing of the thirties to birth and introduce it to the world. The Woolfs belonged to the previous generation, and their press, despite its appearance of chic modernity, tended to represent the writing of the twenties and the teens, even the tens … Meanwhile, John the Poet simply wanted to write his poems, leading a life which would leave him free to do so and taking no more than a colleague’s friendly interest in the work of his contemporaries. He hated to waste precious time publishing books—even books by those he most admired—and he had no interest in exercising authority, however benevolent. The worst enemies of John the Poet were his friends, because they selfishly clamored to be published by him.

  Through John, Christopher got to know his sisters, Rosamond, Beatrix, and (slightly) Helen. Rosamond, like John, was prematurely gray; this gave her the glamour of an eighteenth-century lady with powdered hair. Kathleen later described Rosamond in her diary as “disturbingly beautiful.” I find the description odd. To Christopher, it seemed that Rosamond wore her beauty modestly and with humor, as though she were embarrassed at being overdressed. She was equally modest and humorous about the enormous success of her novel Dusty Answer, which had been published in 1927. A famous French writer had said to her, “Thank you, madame, for existing”; Rosamond laughed as she quoted this, and added apologetically that the French version was far superior to her English original. Christopher hadn’t cared much for Dusty Answer, but he could conscientiously say, “Thank you, madame,” for her Invitation to the Waltz, which had appeared that year. Since praise of one’s latest novel is always the sweetest, their friendship got off to a good start. But Rosamond remained within the world of her marriage and her country home. It was Beatrix who was to form a much closer friendship with Christopher when she entered his Berlin world that autumn.

  * * *

  In the middle of August, Edward Upward came to spend a weekend with Christopher at Kathleen’s house. Christopher had seen him in Berlin at the beginning of April, on his way back from a tour in Soviet Russia. Edward hadn’t returned from his trip an uncritical raving Russophile; he was too British for that. But Christopher knew that he had been profoundly moved. What he had glimpsed in Russia lay much deeper than any visual impressions of Lenin’s tomb and the Red Square and the parades. It was the implication of the revolution itself for the rest of the world, including England. Instead of dwelling on the huge triumphant events of 1917, Edward’s imagination had been stirred by the drama of a revolution’s tiny hidden beginnings. This was what he had already conveyed in his extraordinary short story called “Sunday.”

  “Sunday” is the monologue of a downtrodden office employee—actually Edward, during a schoolmastering job at Scarborough—who, as he talks to himself about his fears of his employers and the system they represent, gradually gathers courage and enters into a new affirmative, aggressive mood:

  It is mad to be content to hate every external danger, to be an ostrich, to accept any explanation which minimises the importance of material gains or losses, to fail to try to find a real solution … Don’t flatter yourself that history will die or hibernate with you; history will be as vigorous as ever but it will have gone to live elsewhere … with people who are not content to suppress misery in their minds but are going to destroy the more obvious material causes of misery in the world …

  What made “Sunday” so intensely exciting to Christopher was Edward’s declaration that “history”—the force of revolutionary change—is at work everywhere, even in the dullest, stuffiest, most reactionary of settings, such as this seaside resort. Edward’s message was: “Politics begin at home.” You don’t have to hover nervously on the outskirts of some publicized foreign battleground, like Berlin. Just ask the way to a certain café in your own town. Behind it, you will find a small club where Communist meetings are held. Go inside. That is the first step which the downtrodden employee, the discontented schoolmaster, must take, if he wants to become one of those with whom history has gone to live:

  At first he may be regarded with suspicion, even taken for a police spy. And quite naturally. He will have to prove himself, to prove that he isn’t a mere neurotic, an untrustworthy freak. It will take time. But it is the only hope. He will at least have made a start.

  Christopher was thrilled by the austerity of Edward’s tone. He was also chilled—more so than he would admit to himself. Did he already know that he would never take the street to that café?

  What he did know was that the bond between Edward and himself was as strong as it had ever been. He had only to read “Sunday” to realize that. Edward might be forced, by the logic of his convictions, to condemn certain writers whose style he had admired, on the ground that their ideas derive
d from a decayed social class. But the effort to find one’s own appropriate style, to sharpen the instrument of one’s language—that Edward could never condemn. To do so would be against his nature. And no Communist comrade would ever come as close to him as Christopher came in their discussions of the problems of style; for, at heart, the party-liner must dismiss such problems as secondary, and the study of them, if persisted in, as ultimately escapist. Edward would never be able to feel that. The style of “Sunday” proved it. “Sunday” was as essentially Upward as anything he had ever written.

  Christopher also knew—but I cannot say how consciously, at that time—that his ambiguous position as an outsider, a non-joiner, was valuable to Edward; it was something which Edward would have to reckon with, for the rest of his life. He might be forced to condemn Christopher but he could never absolutely disown him. And their relationship, embarrassing though it might sometimes be to Edward, was going to help Edward see his own beliefs in a truer perspective.

  Olive Mangeot (Madame Cheuret in Lions and Shadows) had become a Communist, largely through Edward’s influence. She was now separated from her husband, André, and lived with her elder, nearly grown-up son, Fowke. Her younger son, Sylvain, continued to live with André. Olive’s transformation from an apolitical bohemian to a seller of the Daily Worker and an active member of various left-wing groups had produced no noticeable change in her personality. She was still her easygoing, relaxed yet energetic self. It was said that her method of weaning “the unclear” away from Trotskyism was positively soothing. On the rare occasions when Olive couldn’t clarify the muddled minds of “the trotters,” she applied what she called “Mother’s painless purge,” with the result that they found themselves separated from the group, feeling bewildered perhaps but without any hard feelings toward her.

  From this time onward, Christopher saw Olive very often, whenever he was in England. She provided a club for him and his friends to which he brought nearly all his new acquaintances. Kathleen was rightly jealous of Olive’s influence over Christopher, but she didn’t really understand its nature. Olive was, in a sense, a mother figure in Christopher’s life and, as such, a rival to Kathleen. But she was totally undemanding and unpossessive and she never tried to influence him in any direction. They simply loved each other and were profoundly at ease together. Olive, he knew, would never disown him, no matter what he did. He had put her doubly into The Memorial—in the characters of Margaret Lanwin (Olive as she then was) and of Mary Scriven (Olive as she might be in later life).

  * * *

  In September, Wystan came to London for a few days. It must have been during this visit that he took Christopher to meet Gerald Heard and his friend, Chris Wood.

  Gerald Heard was then a prominent figure in the British intellectual world. He knew most of the leading scientists and philosophers personally and he gave BBC radio talks explaining the latest findings of science in popular language. He was interested, agnostically, in the investigations of the Society for Psychical Research but wasn’t prepared to say that they had found definite evidence of survival after death. He had written several books on evolution and prehistory and one which was called Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes. Gerald himself obviously gave thought to what he wore, and would sometimes dress in a style which was slyly exotic. He was a slim, clean-shaven man in his early forties, with a melodious, faintly Irish accent. Christopher had never met anybody quite like him. He was witty, playful, flattering, talkative as a magpie, well informed as an encyclopedia, and, at the same time, life-weary, meditative, deeply concerned, and in earnest. Christopher’s instinct told him at once that Gerald wouldn’t be impressed by talk about Communism; here was a man to whom political systems and theories were irrelevant and of minor importance.

  Chris Wood was about ten years younger than Gerald; handsome, shy but friendly, rich. He dressed simply, in clothes which were of good material but often shabby. He insisted on cycling about London, despite the ever increasing traffic. He could be capriciously extravagant, buying musical boxes and watches of exquisite design; then tiring of them and giving them away to his friends. He had recently bought a telescope—no doubt because Gerald talked so much about astronomy—but he only used it, now and then, to look into other people’s windows and try to read letters lying on their desks. He played the piano well but with an obstinate determination to remain an amateur. He also wrote short stories which showed considerable talent but shook his head firmly when Christopher told him he should publish them. He had a pilot’s license and had flown as far as Berlin. Gerald often went flying with him. Chris praised Gerald’s fearlessness on these and other occasions. He told how Gerald had climbed to the top of a high building under construction, while it was still a skeleton of girders, in order to interview the steeple jacks about the dangers of their profession.

  Chris and Gerald had one of the flats in a new luxury block just off Oxford Street. (Richard remembers that Christopher described it to him, with envious irony, as “the last thing in tasteful modernity—they have a cat which tones in perfectly with the furnishings.”) Its elegance seemed to inspire a certain guilt in both of them. Chris expressed this by behaving as though he were staying in a hotel suite for which he felt no responsibility and which he might vacate in a day or two. Gerald disclaimed his responsibility in a subtler manner, by giving you to understand that he wasn’t sharing the place with Chris but merely visiting it for a while as Chris’s guest. When you came to see Chris, Gerald didn’t welcome you like a co-host; he remained somewhere out of sight. Later he might pop his head unexpectedly around the door into the living room with an amused gleam in his eye, murmur something polite, and disappear again.

  Since Wystan was primarily Gerald’s friend, the two of them would withdraw to Gerald’s room for abstruse scientific conversation, leaving Chris and Christopher alone together. Thus they quickly became intimate. It may even have been at their first meeting that Chris coyly asked Christopher if he had been at the Hirschfeld Institute on such and such a date. Christopher couldn’t be sure but thought it was probable. Chris then told him that this was the day on which he had visited the Institute and had very briefly glimpsed, going up the staircase, the most attractive young man he had ever seen in his life. Chris implied that this young man might have been Christopher. He also implied that Christopher, as Chris now saw him, was sadly inferior to that glimpse. Therefore, the attractive young man was either an untraceable stranger whom Chris could never hope to meet again; or he was Christopher, in which case he didn’t exist … Chris cherished frustrations of this sort. He would gloat over the impossibility of finding the delicious marmalade which he had had for breakfast when he was six. The young man on the staircase was to become a private joke between Chris and Christopher for many years.

  What struck you, when you saw Gerald and Chris together, was a kind of family resemblance which was psychological rather than physical. It was expressed in certain gestures and intonations—carefully unemphatic, fastidiously understated. They stood side by side and looked at you like a pair of smiling conspirators. William Plomer somehow caught the effect they produced—on Christopher, at any rate—when he said, “I like their dry eyes and voices.”

  * * *

  Christopher had met William Plomer through Stephen Spender, who had previously introduced him to some of Plomer’s poems and his stories about South Africa and Japan. Christopher admired the work and soon he began to admire Plomer himself even more. He was a big man with big round glasses and the look of a benign muscular owl. His descriptions of people were witty and exact; once, he called someone “an art lout.” He seemed to take everything lightly. Then, beneath the malice and fun, you became aware of an extraordinary strength—a strength which lent itself to others; it was hard to feel depressed or sorry for yourself in his presence. You also became aware that his fun was that of a person who was capable of intense private suffering. Therefore, it would never seem trivial under any circumstances. He would have been wonder
ful in a lifeboat with the survivors of a shipwreck. Ten years later, it would be said of him that he was an ideal companion in an air raid.

  On September 14, Christopher wrote a postcard to Stephen—who must have been out of town for a day or two:

  Yesterday evening, Plomer and I visited an opium-den. Today he is taking me to see E. M. Forster. I shall spend the entire morning making-up.

  I have only the dimmest memory of the alleged opium den. I think it was a pub somewhere in the dockland area, frequented by local Chinese and visiting Asian seamen. Plomer liked to keep the outskirts of his life hidden in an intriguing fog of mystery; now and then he would guide you through the fog to one of his haunts, with the casualness of a habitué. No doubt, opium was obtainable there, but I am sure that he and Christopher didn’t smoke any … By “making-up” I suppose Christopher merely meant that he would try in every way to look and be at his best for this tremendous encounter.

  It was tremendous for Christopher. Forster was the only living writer whom he would have described as his master. In other people’s books he found examples of style which he wanted to imitate and learn from. In Forster he found a key to the whole art of writing. The Zen masters of archery—of whom, in those days, Christopher had never heard—start by teaching you the mental attitude with which you must pick up the bow. A Forster novel taught Christopher the mental attitude with which he must pick up the pen.

  Plomer had been able to arrange this meeting because Forster had read The Memorial—at his suggestion, probably—and had liked it, at least well enough to be curious about its author. (Thenceforward, Christopher was fond of saying, “My literary career is over—I don’t give a damn for the Nobel Prize or the Order of Merit—I’ve been praised by Forster!” Nevertheless, Christopher’s confidence in his own talent easily survived the several later occasions when Forster definitely didn’t like one of his other books or when he praised books by writers whom Christopher found worthless.)