Christopher and His Kind

by Christopher Isherwood

  Heinz, somewhat dashed, explained what he really meant; but the mischief was done. Stephen couldn’t warm up again so quickly. “Oh—” was all he said. “That’ll be very nice.” Perhaps he didn’t take the invitation very seriously—at any rate, his tone implied that he didn’t. He and Jimmy began talking of something else. And Heinz retired, chilled and hurt, to feed the hens.

  March 8. Yesterday, Hitler denounced the Treaty of Locarno and sent troops into the Rhine Zone.

  We went to the Casino and gambled for a couple of hours. Heinz stayed on there, “waiting for a number to come up.”

  In the evening, our landlady invited us in to hear the news. This is what the last three years have been, I thought—going into strange houses to hear the wireless announce a disaster. Hitler’s shrill mad voice was relayed from a gramophone record. One had the feeling that he was dancing up and down on the tips of his toes.

  Heinz came in at half past three, having lost everything.

  Today it is pouring with rain. I haven’t been out. A letter from Bob Buckingham to say that Morgan has had the operation and is very weak. Worked on the Abinger Harvest review.

  On March 10, Christopher wrote to Kathleen enclosing a politely menacing note from Leonard Woolf:

  I hear a rumour that Methuens are publishing a book by you. I presume that this must be a mere rumour in view of the fact that you have agreed to give us the first offer of your next novel, and that you told me that you would probably be sending it to us to consider in the autumn?

  Christopher added:

  Clearly, it’s no use going on hedging with him; would you please ring up Curtis Brown and tell them I definitely wish them now to explain the whole situation to him? I am also writing to Woolf myself.

  “The whole situation” was that Christopher was suffering from pique. Although Mr. Norris had been well reviewed and had sold well, Virginia Woolf hadn’t invited him to meet her. Therefore, when other publishers approached him with offers, he had entered into an informal agreement with Methuen, the highest bidder. It was understood that they were to become his publishers as soon as he could get free from the Hogarth Press.

  No doubt, Virginia Woolf’s peculiar mental condition made her shrink from confronting Christopher, whom she may well have pictured to herself as a member of an aggressive, uncouth, hostile younger generation. Without question, Christopher behaved unprofessionally, childishly. Nevertheless, I sympathize with his hurt feelings.

  As things turned out, the Hogarth Press published three more of Christopher’s books. Meanwhile, he met Virginia several times and was even more fascinated by her than he had expected to be. It wasn’t until 1945, four years after her death, that he published his first book with Methuen, Prater Violet.

  March 15. Litvinov has said that war is inevitable. Gerald writes alarmingly from Brussels: Germans are being sent out of the country every day. Heinz is innocently busy with the rabbits. Where will he be in a month from now?

  Stephen and Jimmy left yesterday morning for Spain, where churches are being burnt and right-wing newspaper offices sacked. In the afternoon, I went down to the railway station to try to get an evening paper. As I passed the prison, a great deal of shouting and laughter was going on inside—it sounded more like a school during the lunch-interval. A dark jolly-looking unshaven man looked out of one of the small barred windows and asked me, in very good French, for a cigarette. I told him I hadn’t got one—I was sorry. “Just going for a walk?” he asked. “That’s right,” I said. “Well, enjoy yourself.” “Thank you.” We waved to each other politely. No guards were to be seen.

  On March 16, Auden arrived to begin working with Christopher on their next play, The Ascent of F6. Since the near-success or, at any rate, non-failure of “Dogskin,” Rupert Doone and his friend, the artist Robert Medley (who had designed the masks for The Dog), had been urging them to produce something else which could be staged by the Group Theatre. But Wystan and Christopher would have continued playwriting together in any case; it had now become a function of their friendship.

  Considering that F6 was written, revised, and typed out within one month, I assume that the two of them must have pre-planned it to some extent during a previous meeting which I can’t recall. But Wystan was anyhow an extraordinarily fast worker. Christopher, who was merely writing prose dialogue, had difficulty in keeping up with the pace of his verse production. Wystan’s first drafts were usually close to the final version. Christopher’s were crude beyond belief. (I remember how astonished Wystan was when he found one of them lying around and, to Christopher’s dismay, read it.) For Christopher was afflicted—as I now am to a far greater degree—by a species of laziness which made him have to force himself to write down something, anything, in order to “break the ground.” The resulting nonsense would then shame him into asking himself seriously what it was that he wanted to say.

  Some memories of the visit: Wystan writing indoors with the curtains drawn; Christopher writing out in the garden, with his shirt off in the sunshine … Wystan insisting on scrambling up a steep part of the Sintra hills, saying that they must get themselves into the mood of the mountaineers in their play; this was accompanied by laughter, lost footings, slitherings, and screams … Christopher and Heinz taking Wystan to see the horrible old afternoon gamblers at Estoril, thus inspiring him to write “Casino” (“Only their hands are living—”) … Wystan and Christopher sitting side by side on a sofa, posing for Heinz’s camera, as Wystan murmured a quotation from Yeats: “Both beautiful, one a gazelle.”

  It was then that Ernst Toller, the dramatist, poet, and revolutionary, came with his wife to stay at Sintra for a few days.

  Toller I liked extremely; he reminds me very much of Viertel. When we talked about Hitler, he simply couldn’t bring himself to utter the words Mein Kampf. First he said, “Mein Krampf,” and then, “His book.”

  Thus Toller met Wystan, who, only three years later, would write his epitaph.

  April 17. Wystan left by train today, taking with him the manuscript of our new play. I have really enjoyed his visit very much, and this month, because he has been here and we have worked more or less continuously, has seemed much brighter than the last.

  Wystan hasn’t changed in the least. His clothes are still out at the elbows, his stubby nail-bitten fingers still dirty and sticky with nicotine; he still drinks a dozen cups of tea a day, has to have a hot bath every night, piles his bed with blankets, overcoats, carpets, and rugs; he still eats ravenously—though not as much as he once did—and nearly sheds tears if the food isn’t to his taste; he still smokes like a factory chimney and pockets all the matches in the house. But although I found myself glancing nervously whenever he picked up a book, fiddled with the electric light cord, or shovelled food into his mouth while reading at meals; although I was often very much annoyed by his fussing and by the mess he made—still I never for one moment was more than annoyed. I never felt opposed to him in my deepest being—as I sometimes feel opposed to almost everyone I know. We are, after all, of the same sort.

  This explains why the collaboration was such a success. I can’t imagine being able to work so easily with any of my other friends. Fundamentally, Wystan and I are exceedingly polite to each other.

  Our respective work on this play was fairly sharply defined. Wystan did act one, scene one; the dialogue between Ransom and his mother in act one, scene three; the dialogue between Ransom and the Abbot in act two, scene one; Ransom’s monologue in act two, scene two; the whole of act two, scene four; all songs and choruses, the speeches by the A.’s, and all other speeches between the scenes. We interfered very little with each other’s work. The only scene on which we really collaborated was the last. It was understood, throughout, that Wystan’s specialty was to be the “woozy” and mine the “straight” bits.

  “Woozy,” in their private jargon, meant grandiloquent, lacking in substance, obscure for obscurity’s sake. It described the style of the kind of verse plays they despised. Wh
en Christopher uses the word here, however, he isn’t suggesting any criticism of Wystan. Certainly, Wystan loved grandiloquence, but he used it to say something substantial. An ardent solver of puzzles, he found it amusing to be obscure; but he insisted that he always provided clues to his meaning which the reader could find if he looked carefully enough.

  Actually, no part of The Dog or F6 can properly be described as “straight,” i.e., realistic. The prose scenes which Christopher wrote are full of surreal parody, satire, and pastiche; the characters are like figures in cartoons. Even the subtitling of F6 as “a tragedy” implies that its authors are mocking the established theatrical values.

  Much of what Christopher called Wystan’s wooziness was essentially religious in content. Wystan’s mother was a deeply devout Christian—unlike Christopher’s Kathleen, whose Christianity was chiefly inspired by her urge to conform socially—and Wystan was still under his mother’s influence. He now outwardly supported Marxism, or at any rate didn’t protest when it was preached, but this was halfhearted and largely to humor Christopher and a few other friends. Christopher was of course aware of Wystan’s Christian leanings. He made fun of them, in order not to have to take them seriously, which might have led to a quarrel. “When we collaborate,” he wrote, “I have to keep a sharp eye on him—or down flop the characters on their knees; another constant danger is that of choral interruptions by angel-voices.”

  * * *

  Christopher to Forster, May 12 and May 23:

  I love Portugal. The people are charming. They lean over the wall when we are having meals in the garden and wish us a good appetite. But how they do sing! The two maids sing in harmony, very old folk-songs with hundreds of verses, until I have to ask them to stop as I can’t hear myself write. And the farmer, ploughing with oxen just beyond the garden wall, sings a song to the oxen which lasts all day.

  The Ascent of F6 is about an expedition up a mountain and attempts to explain why people climb them … Which brings me to T. E. Lawrence. I am awfully glad you are editing his letters and hope you’ll write a long introduction. Please don’t expect our F6 to cast a dazzling light on the subject. I only say the play’s about him for shorthand-descriptive purposes. The whole conflict is entirely different and much clumsier, as it seems to have to be on the stage. It’s only about Lawrence in so far as the problem of personal ambition versus the contemplative life is concerned.

  Heinz is very well. Having finished the big house for the ducks and chickens, he is now building a skyscraper for rabbits. It is very high indeed and we fear it may fall over in a gale. Meanwhile, I study the Portuguese irregular verbs and occasionally go over and take a peep into the wardrobe, groan, and hastily shut the door again. The reason I groan is because there are thirteen books in there waiting to be reviewed for The Listener. (You needn’t tell Joe this.)

  We have a new friend, a very nice Lisbon advocate named Dr. Olavo. We visit him on Sundays. Scrambling into his chair, he rests his chins on his chest, his chest on his stomach, and his stomach on his thighs; then he dangles his little legs high above the ground, orders whiskey and soda, and regards me with anticipation, waiting for me to compose a sentence in French about Liberty, of which we both approve. The sentence is never forthcoming, but it doesn’t matter much. The whiskey is followed by tea, which is followed by Madeira cognac and light port. A French poet arrives and talks about Verlaine. The ladies come in. Then suddenly Heinz, whom everybody has forgotten, says very carefully and slowly: Voulez-vous une cigarette, Monsieur? And we all laugh and applaud for several minutes.

  Christopher urged Forster to come out to Sintra and convalesce there, but Forster didn’t feel strong enough to make the journey. Then Uncle Henry wrote suggesting that Christopher should take him on a tour of Portugal in August. Christopher begged Kathleen to dissuade Henry from this plan, and she evidently did. It had now been arranged that Kathleen herself would visit them at the end of June.

  May 29. Today, on the way downstairs to lunch, comes the dazzling, irrevocable decision—not to write Paul Is Alone at all. It is quite clear; all I’d planned was a daydream. I knew nothing about any of the characters.

  Now I’m going to get on with my book of autobiographical fragments—entitled perhaps Scenes from an Education.

  Contents, provisionally, as follows: Three Years at the Bay. In the Day Nursery. Medical. Berlin Diary, autumn 1930. Sally Bowles. Pension Seeadler. The Nowaks. Berlin Diary, winter 1932–33. On the Island. O.K. for Sound.

  Christopher was thus proposing to take nearly all of his Berlin material (“Pension Seeadler” became On Ruegen Island) and add to it “O.K. for Sound” (Prater Violet), “On the Island” (Ambrose), and three fragments which would ultimately appear in Lions and Shadows. He probably didn’t realize how huge this book would have been.

  The final draft of Sally Bowles was finished on June 21. Christopher at first referred to it slightingly in his letters to friends, saying that he doubted if a story as “trivial” as Sally’s belonged among his other Berlin pieces, which were all fundamentally serious. Sally might well have retorted that at worst she was no more trivial than Otto Nowak. (The Nowaks had now appeared in New Writing and had been praised by some serious left-wing critics.) But Christopher would have replied that Otto was a victim of the politico-economic conditions under which he was living and that victims can never be regarded as trivial, especially when they are proletarian; whereas Sally wasn’t a victim, wasn’t proletarian, was a mere self-indulgent upper-middle-class foreign tourist who could escape from Berlin whenever she chose. Christopher’s scruples now seem absurd to me; a touch of triviality was exactly what the book needed. But in those days his attitude to his own writings was complicated by the left-wing standards he imposed on them.

  Sally Bowles faced another obstacle to its publication. When Christopher asked Jean’s permission, she hesitated; she was afraid that the abortion episode—which wasn’t fictitious—would shock her family, with whom she was now on good terms. Christopher had to consider if it could be cut out of the story. It couldn’t, he decided, for the abortion is the moment of truth which tests Sally and proves that no misfortune, however drastic, can shock her out of her fantasy world … However, Jean ended by giving her permission, unconditionally. Since Sally Bowles was too long for New Writing, John Lehmann got the Hogarth Press to publish it, as a small separate volume, in 1937. Its instant popularity made Christopher realize that it would also have to be part of Goodbye to Berlin.

  June 26. Yesterday, at last, it happened.

  Coming back from a lunch party in Estoril, we found the envelope from the German Consulate on the hall table. Heinz is to report some time in the near future to get his orders for military service.

  At present, my only reaction is a fierce warm sick feeling. My thoughts scamper round inside my head like scared hens.

  What on earth shall we do? To go to the Consulate means, most likely, getting the passport confiscated. To bolt seems equally futile. Can Gerald help us? I doubt it.

  June 29. We went to see Dr. B.S., the famous Lisbon lawyer. A large round-faced man, with round glasses and round, cold, not unkindly eyes. No, he said, he was sorry—it was all quite hopeless: Heinz couldn’t possibly be naturalized without doing his military service first. “The best advice I can give him is to return to Germany.”

  I came out into the street feeling stunned. It was absurd, of course, to be so upset. What else had I expected? But, of course, secretly, I’d been hoping. Back to lunch at the T.’s. Mrs. T. was extremely kind; Mr. T. a bit uncomfortable—why shouldn’t Heinz go back? Everything seemed to be slipping away down into a bottomless black drain. It is an awful moment when the absolute confidence of childhood—“Nanny’d never let that happen to me”—is shaken. I was probably in a high fever. So absolutely doomed did I feel, wandering up and down the hot sunlit streets, that it even seemed strange that we were still allowed at liberty. Going into the post-office, I tried to send a telegram to Gerald, but no words
would come. We ordered ginger beer but couldn’t drink it. Later we did telegraph.

  That evening, we interviewed Olavo, who was very elastic and bright. He waved the difficulty aside. He would make all enquiries, be responsible for everything. We were not to worry. Heinz couldn’t be extradited. He, Olavo, would prevent it. We returned home soothed.

  The next day, Kathleen’s ship docked at Lisbon. This is from her diary:

  Christopher came on board and all was well as he managed all the getting through the customs and the tipping and had a taxi waiting. It was all winding roads with trees through great wide stretches of country and the castle at the top of Sintra dominating the view … And then the Villa Alecrim do Norte. It seemed all rather Italian. And the two Portuguese maids did too … Steps from the front door descend to the cheerful little colour-washed sitting-room. Away and away miles and miles of wild open undulating country, away to blue hills, changing lights, a train winding across the country … otherwise, the bees buzzing over the flowers and perfect stillness (but for the maids, who chatter and do not work much).

  Poor Christopher. One of the usual upheavals has just arisen again, re Heinz and the possibility of conscription … C, after supper, to telephone to Hamilton in Brussels, who it is supposed could assist over changing Heinz’s nationality … My room all white and green, and that marvellous open view, like one used to get at Wyberslegh. It is all most attractive.

  The diary continues with descriptions of sightseeing tours taken with Christopher and of meetings between Kathleen and members of the British colony in Lisbon. Kathleen was welcomed warmly by them, as an elderly lady of distinction. Her presence at Alecrim do Norte made the Christopher–Heinz relationship suddenly respectable, as Christopher had foreseen that it would. There are, however, very few references to Heinz in Kathleen’s diary. Here is the only extensive one: