Christopher and His Kind

by Christopher Isherwood

  Since his college days, Christopher had associated port with solemn toasts proposed and tedious anecdotes told by the elderly Others in curtained dining rooms. But at Oporto, where they landed for a few hours on the sixteenth, porto was simply a local wine which they drank out of doors in the midday sun; sickly-sweet, too warm, and too strong. Christopher boozily scribbled on a postcard to Kathleen: “The ship has a hole in her side.” Stephen found some vast metaphysical humor in this (true) statement and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks. Heinz laughed at Stephen’s laughter, with equal violence. Jimmy nursemaided them back on board.

  That evening, a party of silly Brazilian girls declared brightly, in Heinz’s presence, that they hated all Germans. Christopher got up and walked out of the lounge. He enjoyed making such gestures of righteous indignation but didn’t pause to consider how much Heinz must be embarrassed by them.

  * * *

  On the morning of December 17, their ship entered the estuary of the Tagus. By that evening, they had settled into the Hotel Nunes at Sintra, fifteen miles outside Lisbon. Here are Christopher’s first impressions, gathered during the next few days:

  Sintra is a large village composed chiefly of palaces, ruinous and to let. The overhanging cliffs are sprouting with fern-shaped trees and subtropical plants, like an enormous rock-garden. In the woods, one comes upon locked gateways, extravagantly sculptured, leading nowhere, and rococo summer-houses where an eighteenth century poet might find inspiration for the dullest of all tragedies in heroic couplets, with a prologue, epilogue, and fourteen acts.

  The castle of Pena is easily the most beautiful building any of us have ever seen. In fact, it has the immediate staggering appeal of something which is sham, faked, and architecturally wrong. It could hardly be more effective if it had been erected overnight by a film company for a super-production about the Middle Ages. Clamped on to the highest spike of rock on our local range of hills, its Moorish-Gothic-Renaissance towers and ramparts command a view of all this part of Portugal … Inside the castle are the touchingly shabby royal apartments, with their railway-carriage upholstery and uncomfortable beds. Copies of Country Life and other English Society magazines lie about on the tables, faded yellow and dated 1910. (The year the last king of Portugal was deposed.) In the billiard-room is a horse-racing game of the kind still found on seaside piers.

  Up here there is mist and thin rain. The sky has been gloomy ever since our arrival; still we have been busy and haven’t felt unduly depressed. Already we have found a house—not the house which we still hope one day to discover, but quite a nice cottage with a sitting-room, a dining-room, and five small bedrooms, furnished brightly but with a certain note of despair, as if for spinsters. The house is called Alecrim do Norte (which is the name of a kind of evergreen bush) and it is in San Pedro, a suburb of Sintra, higher up the hillside. It has a wonderful view, right down the valley to the sea.

  They moved into the cottage on December 21. Their landlady was a gray-haired, vigorous, tweedy Englishwoman who lived nearby. She had spent most of her life in Portugal and could tell them everything they needed to know about local merchants and food prices. As a matter of principle, she was determined that they shouldn’t be cheated. They undoubtedly were cheated, quite often; but Portuguese prices were so much lower than English that it hardly mattered. Indeed, it seemed to them that it was they who were doing the cheating. The landlady found them a cook and a maid—for tiny wages, which, she assured them, were well above standard. They had bad consciences about this—Jimmy especially—but nevertheless resigned themselves to being exploiters.

  By the beginning of 1936, they had all of them settled down to daily occupations. Stephen was working on a book (Forward from Liberalism) and a play (The Trial of a Judge). Jimmy was acting as his secretary, keeping the household accounts and supervising the servants. (Their cook cooked fairly well but fatalistically; when Jimmy found cause for complaint, she frustrated him by agreeing that the meal had turned out badly.) Heinz now had an assortment of creatures to look after—a black and white mongrel puppy, named Teddy, which made messes; six hens and a rooster; and some rabbits. He also kept the garden tidy. Christopher was trying to write Paul Is Alone. He was the least contented member of the household because his work wasn’t going well. So he wasted time indulging in anxiety, his chronic vice. As always, he had an excuse: Heinz’s situation in Portugal was far from secure. The German consulate in Lisbon knew the whereabouts of all Germans. Sooner or later, it would send Heinz an order to come and register for conscription. When he failed to do this, it would report him to the Portuguese police as a German whose citizenship might perhaps be taken away from him. Since Heinz didn’t even have the status of a Jewish or political refugee, the police might well decide to regard him as an ordinary criminal and expel him from the country … Christopher’s anxiety, however well-founded, didn’t help Heinz; it infected him and weakened his courage.

  Meanwhile, their group diary kept up a lively patter, recording domestic events and encounters with the local inhabitants. Teddy had been cured of a tapeworm and got fat but continued to wet the carpet. Heinz, on being offered oysters at a Lisbon restaurant, insisted, with a curious Prussian pedantry, that there was a correct way of eating them which he must be shown before he could start. They all tried to show him, including the waiter, but Heinz was unimpressed. There was a correct way, he repeated, though obviously none of them knew it. So his oysters remained uneaten.

  As newcomers, they were objects of curiosity and got invited to parties by their neighbors. In Holland and in Belgium, Christopher and Heinz had lived surrounded by the tribe of the Emigration and had felt themselves part of it. (“We’ve elected you an honorary Jew,” a refugee had once told Christopher, as a joking compliment.) When refugees gathered together, there was much wit but no joy. Hitler always seemed invisibly present, just out of earshot; it was more like a conspiracy than a party. Here in Portugal, their hosts were mostly English, Scots, or Irish—refugees from nothing except the North European climate and the higher cost of living elsewhere. They were a gossipy, inquisitive, hospitable bunch of individualists, always on the lookout for new ears into which to whisper their elderly scandals.

  Several of them were preoccupied with what Christopher dismissively called “magic.” One lady painted spirit portraits and gave readings from the tarot cards. Another had prepared a large-scale map of Fairyland. Another had written down her adventures in a previous life, as a Syrian lad, during the Roman Empire.

  Stephen describes a meeting with members of this psychic fringe:

  I heard some rather odd fragments of conversation from the sofa on which Miss H. and Mrs. J. were sitting. Miss H. said in her matter-of-fact voice: “I really think it was very inconsiderate of him, especially when you prepared him a special high mass.” “Oh well,” said Mrs. J., “we can’t expect him to behave otherwise. The other day, when he was here, I had the most terrible two hours of my life. I had to think ahead of his thoughts all the time. It was very stiff going, particularly at the corners.”

  Meanwhile, Jimmy was having a conversation with Miss W. He said he thought there was going to be a war. “No,” she said, “not unless the ether is reactionary.” Jimmy took her to be referring to the British Broadcasting Corporation, so he assured her that our friend Mr. Ackerley of The Listener is quite advanced politically, though not as materialistic as one could wish.

  Some weeks later, Miss W. did a spirit portrait of Stephen. (Christopher thought it looked much more like his own brother Richard, whom Stephen anyhow slightly resembled.) She also gave Stephen a reading of the tarot cards. This was so discouraging that she became increasingly apologetic. The King of Cups was crossed by the Falling Tower, and then the Devil himself appeared, and then a heart pierced by three swords … When she had finished, Stephen, wanting to reassure her that he was a good sport and not discouraged, asked in a tone of mock-innocence: “Could we have a second game?” Miss W. winced slightly at the word bu
t didn’t seem offended. Later she assured him that he was destined to be one of the leaders of the new age, one of the truly great, and that she was proud to be the first person to tell him this. She was obviously less impressed by Christopher. But he got good marks for knowing Gerald Heard. To his surprise, she spoke of Heard with awe, as a master of the occult.

  * * *

  On January 18, Christopher wrote to Kathleen, thanking her for sending him the program of The Dog beneath the Skin. She had seen the first performance of it by the Group Theatre Company at the Westminster Theatre on January 12. (The regular run of the play began on January 30.) Auden had worked with its director, Rupert Doone, to cut and revise the script, during rehearsals. They had altered the ending—rightly, I now think—and taken out the Destructive Desmond episode—wrongly, I still think. At that time, Christopher grumbled over all the alterations, merely because he hadn’t been consulted in advance. But he must have understood, even then, that this would have been impossible. There was no time for an exchange of letters and the Group Theatre couldn’t have afforded long-distance telephone calls to Portugal.

  In the same letter, Christopher told Kathleen he had just heard from Bob Buckingham that Forster had had a bladder operation and that he would soon have to have another, much more serious. Before leaving for Portugal, Christopher had visited England from November 30 to December 5 and had spent a day with Forster. He now realized that Forster must have already known then that this ordeal was ahead of him and that the risk, in his own case, was (as the surgeon put it) above normal. Yet he had said nothing about this to Christopher, hadn’t even hinted at it, and had indeed appeared to be his usual lighthearted, amusing self. Later, after Christopher had written to him, he replied:

  Yes, I never told you I wasn’t well when we parted. There seemed so much to say and I was so happy seeing you.

  Christopher was tremendously moved. This, to him, was the authentic tone of the anti-heroic hero.

  * * *

  During January, they had two visitors, Humphrey Spender and Gerald Hamilton. Humphrey was with them, on and off, for several weeks, making a trip to Spain and then returning. He was worried about losing his hair and finally consented to undergo Heinz’s treatment; Heinz shaved him completely bald. Thereafter, Humphrey wore a beret when strangers were present, even indoors.

  Gerald stayed for a few days only, at a hotel in Sintra. (No doubt he had sinister business with some Portuguese government official.) Gerald’s code of cleanliness demanded the use of a bidet whenever he had been on the toilet. There was no bidet in his hotel room, so he unwisely hoisted himself onto the washbasin. It was unequal to his weight. The entire fixture was torn out of the wall and the bowl shattered, wounding him embarrassingly in the buttocks. Gerald left for Tangier to nurse them and also his hurt dignity—for nobody could help laughing at this unkind accident.

  On February 4, Stephen, Humphrey, Jimmy, Heinz, and Christopher paid a long-projected visit to the casino at Estoril, which Christopher calls “that almost legendary haunt of vice,” in the group diary:

  Of course it all seemed very harmless: two large modern rooms crowded with pink English tourists in dinner jackets and women in evening dress. Soon we were playing according to our respective natures: Stephen, with bulging blue eyes and angry lobster cheeks, played at the highest table madly but carefully, and won nearly four hundred escudos. Humphrey sneaked about, with his sly diffident smile, betting at all the tables and working up his unobtrusive gentlemanly little pile, two and a half escudos at a time. Jimmy, slightly more reckless but very domestic, was seated with his counters arranged before him primly, like knitting. Heinz, studious and bespectacled, played away in a corner, crossly, all by himself, betting only on numbers and in complete ignorance of the rules—he refused utterly to tell anybody whether he was winning or losing—keeping his counters clenched fiercely in his very hot hand. As for me, I prowled around the tables, imagining myself like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Lord Byron, or any of the characters in the novels of Balzac or Disraeli, paused to count my money, tried to think of systems, got rattled, apologized, and hoped that nobody else was winning, either. By the end of the evening, we had all lost except Humphrey, who admitted coyly to seventy escudos. We left soon after midnight.

  Next day, they woke up burning with gambling fever and certain that they would win. Too impatient to wait for the evening, they arrived at the casino when it opened at 3:30. The afternoon casino, with its blinds drawn to shut out the sunlight, was an altogether different world from the harmless-seeming tourist resort of the previous night.

  Only one table was being used and this was already full up. Not a single English tourist—their place was taken by a sinister clique of professional gamblers—a fat hairy unshaved man wearing greasy clothes powdered round the collar with scurf, a pig-jowled brute with a gold bracelet, a horrible old woman with long lank gray hair, who kept dipping for counters in a shabby midwife’s bag. The room was quite silent, except for the croupier’s voice; the play was rapid and underhanded. Several times, our winnings were simply grabbed. And when Stephen protested—his face like a scarlet indignant poppy, accusing history for all wars and wrongs—he was snarled at or brutally snubbed. In this atmosphere, we rapidly lost our money. At half past six, three very woebegone would-be bank-breakers crept into their taxi; the boys, more obstinate, stayed on to risk some last shillings and returned an hour later, giggling nervously, having lost all.

  Christopher to Kathleen, March 1:

  I think the life we are leading at present is far more satisfactory than anything we have tried before. The great thing is to be involved in one’s surroundings and we are involved already, even if only as bogus English colonists. The word has gone round that we are such nice boys; and nice boys are a rarity in this colony of ladies.

  However, Christopher, writing one day later in his own private diary, reveals that Stephen and Jimmy have already decided to leave Sintra in the middle of the month, for Spain, Greece, and Austria:

  It’s all very friendly and we are perfectly pleasant about it, but of course we all know that our attempt at living here together has been a complete flop. The schemes of taking another and larger house have been tacitly dropped.

  There had been some domestic friction—chiefly on account of Teddy, the puppy. Teddy was exclusively Heinz’s dog, but the others also had to live with the messes he made. And Heinz had his own peculiar way of handling a pet; if Teddy bit him, he would bite Teddy back, quite hard, so that he uttered nerve-jarring squeals. Christopher chose to regard Heinz’s behavior as admirably natural; he was simply treating Teddy as his equal. When Stephen and Jimmy called Heinz cruel, Christopher called them sentimental hypocrites. However, he later had to admit that

  Stephen and Jimmy have honestly done their best to get along with Heinz, who certainly can be maddening when he sulks. Although sharing the expenses for the animals, they now hardly dare look at them, for fear of precipitating another row.

  It now seems astonishing to me that Christopher should ever have supposed Stephen would stay at Sintra for long, Heinz or no Heinz. He was temperamentally restless and needed frequent changes of scene—they were probably helpful to his work. Christopher, in Stephen’s place, might have wandered about, too. Tied down by Heinz’s permit problems, he was inclined to envy Stephen and therefore accuse him of desertion.

  March 4. Yesterday, Stephen and Jimmy sneaked off to Estoril. They lost, between them, nearly five pounds.

  Today Gerald Hamilton has written, very pessimistic about the chances for Heinz’s future. I feel awfully depressed, but it’s no use moping—I must find someone in this country who can help us. Dogskin was advertised last Sunday as being in its last weeks. And the plague amongst the hens, which we thought was over, has broken out again. Another died today. Heinz is going off gloomily to gamble at Estoril. Still this cold miserable rainy and windy weather. Snow in the mountains. Floods everywhere.

  After supper, for no particular reason, my
spirits rose. Read aloud to Stephen and Jimmy out of Laurence Binyon’s The Young King, imitating various styles of hack Shakespearian acting. Stephen did the footsteps off, clank of armour, etc. We all laughed a lot. It was an evening of the kind I haven’t spent more than half a dozen times since Cambridge, when Edward Upward and I did this sort of thing nearly every night. The others went to bed but I sat up, quite cheerful, reading Abinger Harvest and feeling, without the least cause, that quite probably everything will turn out all right somehow, in the end.

  Then Heinz came in. He had won a thousand escudos. He was very uncertain whether to tell the others or not. If he does, he says, he must invite them to a celebration lunch, and he doesn’t want to because he has never really forgiven them for the Teddy row. I said he must do as he likes.

  March 5. Heinz did tell them, at breakfast. With his endless longing to be approved of and liked, he had planned his announcement and invitation as an important peace-gesture. But what actually happened was that Stephen asked “How much did you win last night?” “A thousand.” “Did you?” Stephen’s tone was cold and disapproving. He was instantly afraid that this success would make Jimmy anxious to visit Estoril again. “Perhaps,” said Heinz, “one day soon, I’ll invite you.” Stephen not unnaturally took this to mean that Heinz would invite him and Jimmy to go gambling at the Casino. “Well, we’re not going to,” he answered at once, rather crossly—before Jimmy should have a chance to say anything.