Christopher and His Kind

by Christopher Isherwood

  Christopher laughed and half agreed with them. Yes, he was partly responsible for the film’s sentimentality. (This had only become subtler, not less distasteful, through having been expertly glossed over by Viertel and his cameraman.) Then why didn’t Christopher feel ashamed and repentant? Because he now realized that, quite aside from his desire to earn money, he had needed psychologically to do a job like this; would need to again, from time to time. He, the arrogant dainty-minded private artist, needed to plunge his hands into a vulgar public bucket of dye, to get them dripping with it, to subdue his nature temporarily to it and do the best he was capable of under the circumstances. His friends apparently didn’t need this experience. He couldn’t quite explain to them why it was so important for himself. All he did know was that the making of Little Friend had been a new and absolutely necessary phase of his education as a writer.

  TEN

  On March 26, 1934, Christopher left London to rejoin Heinz in Amsterdam. Thus he symbolically rejected Kathleen’s England. But this short journey was to be only the first phase of his rejection. To remain in Amsterdam would be like lingering undramatically backstage after making your final exit. No, Heinz and he must go much farther away—far enough to impress that audience, partly real, partly imaginary, of which he was always conscious.

  Tierra del Fuego? The Seychelles? Tristan da Cunha? Lhasa? These were attractive chiefly because of their remoteness. If he could spend only one day in each, his place snobbery would be satisfied. He would be able to say, I have been there.

  Much more compelling were the two names which had haunted him since boyhood—Quito and Tahiti. The magic of Quito had almost nothing to do with Quito the place; Christopher had then no idea what it looked like. What excited him was the concept of a city poised at ten thousand feet above the equator, with days and nights of eternally equal duration and the round of seasons repeated every twenty-four hours: spring in the morning, summer at noon, autumn in the afternoon, winter at night. An earthly model of paradise—or of limbo, according to the way you thought of it.

  Tahiti was no mere concept to Christopher. He had seen many photographs of it and of its opposite island, Mooréa, whose wildly, magnificently scrawled skyline has the authority of a famous signature, guaranteeing this to be the world’s most dreamed-of landfall. Tahiti also offered you a dreamed-of manner of life; you could be a beachcomber there, like Gauguin.

  Quito would be rather difficult to reach. Tahiti was easy. A French boat could take you all the way there from Marseilles, via the Panama Canal. The ticket wasn’t too expensive. But, when Christopher inquired further, he was told—incorrectly, I now suspect—that there was a limit on the length of your stay, unless you were a French citizen. Also, that beachcombers were being deported.

  And where would Heinz and he go, after Tahiti? There was Western Samoa, with Stevenson’s home and grave; there was the bay in New Zealand where Katherine Mansfield spent her childhood summers; there was Thirroul in Australia, where Lawrence wrote Kangaroo. All these were sacred shrines for pilgrimage and also places where one might settle down and work. But Australia and New Zealand belonged to the Commonwealth, and Western Samoa was administered by New Zealand. Mightn’t they exchange lists of undesirable aliens with the British? Christopher’s fears were probably groundless, but he was now overanxious about such dangers.

  Then somebody suggested the Canary Islands; a compromise but an attractive one. They weren’t very far away but they did (in those days) seem adequately remote. At least Christopher would be able to think of himself as having escaped from Europe; politically the islands belong to Spain but geographically they are part of Africa.

  Early in April, Christopher and Heinz sailed on a Dutch boat from Rotterdam, by way of Vigo, Lisbon, and Funchal, to Las Palmas, the chief city of the Canaries, on the island of Gran Canaria. They stayed at the Towers Strand, a hotel built in Germanic-modern style beside the beach. Their room was a kind of hut on top of the building. It was ordinarily used by servants. They had been given it with apologies because the hotel was so full; but for them it was desirably private. They had the big flat roof to themselves to sunbathe on, with a view out over Las Palmas to a background of volcanic hills that formed the center of the island. Hot sunshine on the playa and the sea, rainclouds massed around the hills, cocks crowing and goats cropping on housetops, smoke blowing from ships’ funnels and laundry flapping in the sea wind, drunks huddled asleep against walls daubed with slogans presaging a civil war, which was then only two years ahead.

  * * *

  Late in May, Christopher wrote to Forster, telling him that Heinz and he had made friends with some of the young islanders:

  They sit out under the palm trees until two o’clock in the morning, talking about painting, or meet in each other’s rooms to listen to the Kreutzer Sonata, like undergraduates.

  They had also made friends with a Swiss lady, Frl. Leonora Pohly, whom they had first met “wandering about the mountains at sunrise, with her arms full of flowers.” She reminded Christopher of a cocker spaniel, with her curly red hair hanging around her ears and her warm eager doggy nature. She came to visit them every day and was always anxious to advise and help them. On being told as much as she could be told of Heinz’s difficulties at Harwich, she had insisted on going with him to the German consul and explaining that “domestic servant” was a misleading description of his profession. Christopher wasn’t present at the interview and I can’t now remember what was said, but Heinz came away with his passport altered from Hausdiener to Sprachstudent (student of languages).

  This was the Consul’s own extraordinary choice. He might as well have written “Archdeacon.” However, now that Heinz is a language student, he has decided to learn languages, any languages, the more the better. He stops the guests in the corridor and says, beaming all over his face, in Spanish: “My friend is very ill.” This is so far his only Spanish sentence. It gives rise to misunderstandings, as you may imagine.

  * * *

  On May 23, Christopher told his diary: “I am stuck. I can’t write The Lost.”

  The Lost had become Christopher’s title for the novel about Berlin on which he kept trying to work. He had originally thought of this title in German, loving the solemn rolling sound of Die Verlorenen. He applied it to his subject matter with at least three separate meanings. It meant “those who have lost their own way”—that mass of Germans who were now being herded blindly into the future by their Nazi shepherds. It meant “the doomed”—those who, like Bernhard Landauer, were already marked down as Hitler’s victims. And, in a lighter, ironic sense, it meant “those whom respectable Society regards as moral outcasts”—Sally Bowles the “lost” girl, Otto Nowak the “lost” boy, and Mr. Norris, who has committed the unpardonable crime of having been found out.

  Confronted by all his characters and their stories, Christopher was like an official who is called upon to deal with a crowd of immigrants and their belongings. They wait, absolutely passive, to be told where they are to live and what their jobs will be. The official regards them with growing dismay. He had imagined that he could cope with them all, somehow or other. Now he is beginning to realize that he can’t.

  Christopher had already made one plan for accommodating his immigrants—it was as follows:

  Peter Wilkinson, newly arrived in Germany, has been invited to a party at the Wannsee villa of the Landauers, whom he has never met. He arrives early and has to kill time by wandering along the beach of the lake. Here he is picked up by Otto Nowak, who takes him into the woods and seduces him. He then goes to the party and meets the Landauers, Sally Bowles, her boy friend Klaus, and Baron von Pregnitz, a homosexual official in the German government. Sally finds Peter sympathetic and decides to rent one of the rooms in his landlady’s flat. Bernhard Landauer falls in love with Sally and/or Klaus—which means that he will soon be needing Peter as a go-between. The Baron is snobbishly drawn to Peter because he is a young Englishman of good family. (The favorable im
pression Peter makes upon everybody at the party is chiefly due to his extraordinary state of elation, caused by his adventure with Otto. Usually he is taciturn and inhibited; now he seems witty, charming, even sexually attractive.)

  Peter has made an appointment to meet Otto later that evening, at the brothel run by Olga. While waiting for Otto, Peter gets acquainted with Mr. Norris, who has come there to receive one of his erotic whippings. Norris takes no particular interest in Peter until Peter happens to mention that he knows Baron von Pregnitz. Norris has been trying for some time to get an introduction to the Baron, whom he hopes to interest in selling German military secrets to the French. So now his attitude to Peter becomes suddenly cordial … Thus, Christopher had contrived to pack all his characters into one structure. But there were far too many of them and the packing was too tight. They couldn’t move without getting in each other’s way.

  Christopher never worked out in detail what the action of this novel would be. All I have is his description of its projected ending:

  Peter has returned to England after a row with Otto. He is miserable. One evening, he is asked out to dinner at the house of some aunts. Their chatter drives him to such a point of desperation that he feels he must get in touch with Otto at once. There is only one place where he can ring up—at Olga’s. He slips off into another room, carefully closes the door, and gives the number.

  Meanwhile, at Olga’s, a drunken party is going on. Otto has already gone out. (He is, in fact, going to his death—for he is murdered that night by his enemies in another street gang.) A drunken boy picks up the receiver and, half as a joke, half through stupidity, holds a conversation with Peter, saying that he is Otto. Finally, when Peter realizes that he isn’t, the boy hangs up the receiver. The book ends with Otto lying dead in the snow under the girders of the overhead railway.

  * * *

  There is one other note about The Lost in Christopher’s diary:

  The link which binds all the chief characters together is that in some way or other each one of them is conscious of the mental, economic, and ideological bankruptcy of the world in which they live. And all this must echo and reecho the refrain: It can’t go on like this. I’m the Lost, we’re the Lost.

  This sounds like a “method” stage director instructing his leading lady, Sally Bowles, to be aware of the world’s mental, economic, and ideological bankruptcy as she lights her cigarette. Christopher often wrote such memos to himself—half serious, half satirical—when he was trying to arrive at a literary decision; they helped him make up his mind. Here he is poking fun at his own love of concepts. In the novel as he has been planning it, the chief characters are really prototypes created to demonstrate his concept of the Lost. However, you can’t demonstrate all the aspects of a concept if you haven’t enough prototypes; and Christopher was now being forced to admit that he couldn’t get all of his prototypes into one novel. He was therefore forced to ask himself: “How can I call my novel The Lost if I don’t fully explain what I mean by ‘lost’?” To which the shockingly simple answer was: “You can’t.”

  But Christopher wouldn’t at first accept this answer. He was still under the spell of his sonorous conceptual title. He went on thinking of his novel as The Lost even after he had decided to make it exclusively the story of Mr. Norris, casting out Sally Bowles, the Landauers, the Nowaks, and many minor characters.

  It has been my experience that the embryos of novels tend to start their growth as interlocked Siamese twins or triplets, which can only be separated by the most delicate surgery. I remember a long morning during which Christopher paced the hotel roof, back and forth, back and forth, performing this surgery inside his head and freeing Norris from the stranglehold of his brothers and sisters. Having done so, he quickly sketched out a first chapter.

  Then, at the beginning of June, he and Heinz took a bus into the hills and spent three days exploring them on foot. From the bottom of an extinct crater, now fertile farmland, they scrambled slowly up to its rim and made their way along dizzy ridges to the pedestal of a sheer and sinister-looking rock called El Nublo, The Cloudy One. Seemingly unclimbable, it had lately been climbed by a party of Nazi tourists, who had planted their swastika flag on its top. The flag had been blown away already, but the flagpole remained.

  On such occasions, Heinz was at his most lovable and his most German—not the German Boy but the German Child; a child out of Grimm’s fairy tales, setting forth innocently into the unknown. He was astounded by everything he saw. He laughed delightedly. He sang. His favorite wander song can be translated as follows:

  My journey I’m makin’

  With five pennyworth of fat bacon

  Which I love to chew on

  And no one ain’t takin’.

  And who does that

  I’ll bash him on his hat

  Bash him on his smeller

  Till it’s flat.

  Another of Heinz’s songs was about a fight between Communist workers and the police, in the early 1920’s. Two comrades take part in this fight and one of them is killed. So the other writes a letter, “with trembling hands,” to his dead friend’s mother. The fight actually took place at a town called Leuna. But Heinz found it amusing, when singing this song, to change Leuna to Leihhaus, thus making the letter announce:

  The cops shot your son. Now he’s lying

  In the pawnshop and will not return.

  Although suffering from spasms of vertigo and blisters on his feet, Christopher was serenely happy in the company of the German Child and in his newly found confidence that he would now be able to write his novel.

  Next day, they plodded downhill through seemingly endless ravines which brought them at last to the southernmost point of the island, Maspalomas. A tall slender lighthouse stood in what looked like a tiny patch of the Sahara desert, transplanted from across the water. That night they slept in a room with a hole instead of a window. The bed contained one—but only one—crab louse. It was beautiful, golden with a spot of black on it; quite different from the drab vermin which Christopher had sometimes hosted in Berlin. When they started off to catch their bus back to Las Palmas next morning, he left something in the bed which was even more exotic than the louse, a British hundred-pound note. He had been carrying it with him throughout this journey—“for emergencies,” he vaguely, evasively told himself. On this point, I lose psychological contact with the Christopher of those days. This refusal to rely exclusively on his traveler’s checks, this clinging to “real” money, must have been a reflection of Kathleen’s insular attitude when she and her parents toured Europe at the end of the nineteenth century … He remembered the note after he had walked only a few yards and rushed back to retrieve it from under the pillow.

  * * *

  On June 6, they left Gran Canaria for the island of Tenerife. Christopher felt that he would be able to work better there, with fewer distractions. Also, he wanted to “have” his novel—as a woman might wish to give birth to her child—under the auspices of a celebrated romantic place name. (He even considered putting “Tenerife, 1934” at the bottom of the last page. But, by the time the novel was finished, something had decided him not to. Maybe it was the fact that Forster had put anti-romantic “Weybridge” at the end of two of his novels. Wasn’t “Tenerife” a trifle vulgar?)

  They settled into a pension called the Pavillon Troika, near the village of Orotava. It was thrilling to know that you were living on the slopes of a volcano, twelve thousand feet high. They had seen it from the rock pedestal of El Nublo, towering above a cloud pedestal far out on the ocean. But, here, it was too close to be visible. Here, you were merely an atom of Gran Canaria’s magnificent view. From the Pavillon Troika, all you could see, most of the time, were glimpses through warm rolling sea fog of farms on the lower mountainside and of the waves beneath them.

  The pension was run by a middle-aged Englishman who dyed his hair a very dead black. He warmly approved of the relationship between Christopher and Heinz, but not of Ch
ristopher’s occupation: “After all, old boy, I mean to say, will it matter a hundred years from now if you wrote that yarn or not?” He kept urging Christopher to make better use of his youth, while he still had it, by spending more time down at the beach, swimming. But the beach was dirty and too distant, and the Englishman’s advice wasn’t disinterested. He had a gramophone with a powerful loudspeaker which he would have liked to play from morning till midnight. Christopher had protested that he couldn’t possibly work while this noise was going on, and had threatened to move out. So it was agreed that the music shouldn’t start until four in the afternoon. The Englishman hoped that it would then lure customers in to enjoy the cocktail hour. It seldom did, for there were few potential customers.

  Christopher wrote always in the garden. Beneath the spotted leaves of a rubber tree, with banana plants and hibiscus around him, he banged away at his little Corona. (A baby typewriter it would seem today—the skeleton of a baby, for you could look right through it, between the thin ribs of its keyboard. But it was astonishingly sturdy. He would be using it for another fourteen years.)

  This was a period of contented absorption, measured in chapters, not weeks. The solving of a literary problem became a major event, but the excitement it caused him was introverted, since there was no one he could run to and read aloud a just-completed passage. Christopher wasn’t about to expose his art to the philistine judgment of the Englishman; and Heinz would hardly have made a perceptive critic, even if Christopher had been writing in German.

  At odd moments, he gave Heinz lessons in English, geography, and modern history. While Christopher worked, Heinz kept himself occupied, writing long letters to his friends and playing with the Englishman’s puppy and the many cats. With his genius for communication, he somehow made the gardener’s boy and the old woman who cooked the meals understand a mixture of German, English, and Greek, laced with occasional words of Spanish. His head was now toothbrush-bristly all over. Christopher had cropped Heinz’s hair at his own request. The Englishman had told him that this would promote hair growth and Christopher had encouraged Heinz to believe it because he found bristles sexy.