Prater Violet

by Christopher Isherwood

  “All these people,” Bergmann continued, “will be dead. All of them … No, there is one…” He pointed to a fat, inoffensive man sitting alone in a distant corner. “He will survive. He is the kind that will do anything, anything to be allowed to live. He will invite the conquerors to his home, force his wife to cook for them and serve the dinner on his bended knees. He will denounce his mother. He will offer his sister to a common soldier. He will act as a spy in prisons. He will spit on the Sacrament. He will hold down his daughter while they rape her. And, as a reward for this, he will be given a job as bootblack in a public lavatory, and he will lick the dirt from people’s shoes with his tongue…” Bergmann shook his head sadly. “Too bad. I do not envy him.”

  This kind of talk had a strange effect on me. Like all my friends, I said I believed that a European war was coming soon. I believed it as one believes that one will die, and yet I didn’t believe. For the coming war was as unreal to me as death itself. It was unreal because I couldn’t imagine anything beyond it; I refused to imagine anything; just as a spectator refuses to imagine what is behind the scenery in a theatre. The outbreak of war, like the moment of death, crossed my perspective of the future like a wall; it marked the instant, total end of my imagined world. I thought about this wall from time to time, with acute depression and a flutter of fear at the solar plexus. Then, again, I forgot or ignored it. Also, just as when one thinks of one’s own death, I secretly whispered to myself, “Who knows? Maybe we shall get around it somehow. Maybe it will never happen.”

  Bergmann’s apocalyptic pictures of universal doom made the prospect of war more unreal than ever, and so they never failed to cheer me up. I suppose they worked like that for him, too; probably that was why he dwelt upon them so gleefully. And, while he was in the midst of the horrors, his glance around the room generally discovered a girl or woman who interested him, and diverted the stream of his imagination toward more agreeable subjects.

  His favorite was the manageress of the restaurant, a handsome blonde with a very sweet motherly smile, about thirty years old. Bergmann approved of her highly. “I have only to look at her,” he told me,” to know that she is satisfied. Deeply satisfied. Some man has made her happy. For her, there is no longer any search. She has found what we are all looking for. She understands all of us. She does not need books, or theories, or philosophy, or priests. She understands Michelangelo, Beethoven, Christ, Lenin—even Hitler. And she is afraid of nothing, nothing.… Such a woman is my religion.”

  The manageress would always have a special smile for Bergmann when we came in; and, during the meal, she would walk over to our table and ask if everything was all right. “Everything is all right, my darling,” Bergmann would reply; “thanks to God, but chiefly to you. You restore our confidence in ourselves.”

  I don’t know exactly what the manageress made of this, but she smiled, in an amused, kindly way. She really was very nice. “You see?” Bergmann would turn to me, after she had gone. “We understand each other perfectly.”

  And so, our confidence restored by das ewige Weibliche, we went back refreshed to tend the poor little Prater Violet, wilting in the suffocating atmosphere of our flat.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, in Berlin, the proceedings of the Reichstag Fire Trial continued through October, November and into the first weeks of December. Bergmann followed them passionately. “Do you know what he said yesterday?” he would frequently ask me, when I arrived in the morning for work. “He,” of course, was Dimitrov. I did know, having read the newspaper as eagerly as Bergmann himself, but I wouldn’t, for the world, have spoiled the performance which followed.

  Bergmann enacted the entire drama and represented all the characters. He was Dr. Buenger, the testy, embarrassed President of the Court. He was van der Lubbe, doped and apathetic, with sunken head. He was earnest, harassed Torgler. He was Goering, the straddling military bully, and Goebbels, lizardlike, crooked and adroit. He was fiery Popov and stolid Tanev. And, in the biggest way, he was Dimitrov himself.

  Bergmann actually became Dimitrov, with his furiously untidy hair, his grim ironic slit of a mouth, his large gestures, his flashing eyes.

  “Is the Herr Reichsminister aware,” he thundered, “that those who possess this alleged criminal mentality are today controlling the destinies of a sixth part of the world, namely the Soviet Union—the greatest and best land on earth?”

  Then, as Goering, bull-necked, infuriated, he bellowed, “I’ll tell you what I’m aware of! I’m aware that you’re a communist spy who came to Germany to set the Reichstag on fire. In my eyes, you’re nothing but a dirty crook, who ought to be hanging on the gallows!”

  Bergmann smiled, a faint, terrible smile. Like a toreador, who never takes his eyes from the enraged and wounded bull, he asked softly, “You are very afraid of my questions, aren’t you, Herr Minister?”

  Bergmann’s face contorted, bulged, seemed to swell into an apoplectic clot of blood. His hand shot out. He yelled like a lunatic, “Get out of here, you crook!”

  Bergmann bowed slightly, with ironic dignity. He half turned, as if to withdraw. Then he paused. His eye fell upon the imagined figure of van der Lubbe. His hand was raised, slowly, in a great, historic gesture. He addressed all Europe:

  “There stands the miserable Faust.… But where is Mephistopheles?”

  Then he made his exit.

  “You wait!” Bergmann-Goering roared after the retreating figure. “You wait till I get you out of the power of this Court!”

  Another scene, which Dorothy and I would often persuade Bergmann to repeat, was the moment when van der Lubbe is cross-examined. He stands before his accusers, with his huge stooped shoulders and hanging hands, the chin sunken on the chest. He is scarcely human—a wretched, clumsy, tormented animal. The President tries to make him look up. He does not move. The Interpreter tries. Dr. Seuffert tries. There is no response. Then, suddenly, with the harsh authority of an animal trainer, Helldorf barks out, “Head up, man! Quick!”

  The head jerks up at once, automatically, as if in obedience to some deeply hidden memory. The clouded eyes wander around the courtroom. Are they searching for somebody? A faint gleam of recognition seems to flicker in them for a moment. And then van der Lubbe begins to laugh. This is really horrible, indecent, terrifying. The heavy body quivers and heaves with noiseless laughter, as if shaken by its death agony. Van der Lubbe laughs and laughs, silently, blindly, his mouth open and dribbling, like an idiot’s. Then, with equal suddenness, the paroxysm ceases. Again, the head falls forward. The grotesque figure stands motionless, guarding its secret, unapproachable as the dead.

  “Goodness!” Dorothy would exclaim, with a shiver. “I’m glad I’m not over there! It gives you the creeps, just to think about it. Those Nazis aren’t human.”

  “You are wrong, darling,” Bergmann told her, seriously. “That is how they wish you to imagine them, as unconquerable monsters. But they are human, very human, in their weakness. We must not fear them. We must understand them. It is absolutely necessary to understand them, or we are all lost.”

  Now that Bergmann had become Dimitrov, he was obliged to abandon a great deal of his cynicism. It was no longer in character. Dimitrov had to have a cause to fight for, to make speeches about. And the cause turned out to be Prater Violet.

  We were at work on the sequence in which Rudolf loses his future kingdom of Borodania through a palace revolution. A wicked Uncle deposes his Father and seizes the throne. Rudolf returns to Vienna, a penniless exile. He is now, in reality, the poor student he pretended to be at the beginning of the story. But Toni, naturally, refuses to believe this. She has been deceived once already. She has trusted him, she has loved him, and he has left her. (Unwillingly, of course; and only because his faithful chamberlain, Count Rosanoff, reminds him with tears of his duty to the Borodanians.) So Rudolf pleads in vain; and Toni angrily dismisses him as an impostor.

  We had been through the usual procedure. I had made my lazy, half
-hearted attempt at a first draft. Bergmann had put it aside with his brief grunt. And now, with his usual brilliance and wealth of gesture, he had gone over the story for the second time.

  But it didn’t work. I was feeling temperamental and sulky that day, chiefly because I had a bad cold. My conscience had driven me to Bergmann’s flat, and I felt that my sacrifice wasn’t being properly appreciated. I had expected to be fussed over and sent home again.

  “It’s no good,” I told him.

  Bergmann was belligerent at once. “Why is it no good?”

  “I’m afraid it just doesn’t interest me.”

  Bergmann gave a terrible snort. I seldom defied him like this. But I was in a thoroughly obstructive mood. I didn’t care if I got fired. I didn’t care what happened.

  “It’s such a bore,” I said brutally. “It’s so completely unreal. It has no relation to anything that ever happened anywhere. I can’t believe a word of it.”

  For a whole minute, he didn’t answer. He paced the carpet, grunting. Dorothy, from her seat at the typewriter, watched him nervously. I expected a major volcanic eruption.

  Then Bergmann came right up to me.

  “You are wrong,” he said.

  I looked him in the eye, and forced a smile. But I didn’t say anything. I wouldn’t give him an opening.

  “Totally and principally wrong. It is not uninteresting. It is not unreal. It is of the very greatest interest. It is highly contemporary. And it is of enormous psychological and political significance.”

  I was startled right out of my sulks.

  “Political?” I laughed. Why, really, Friedrich! How on earth do you make that out?”

  “It is political.” Bergmann swept into the attack. “And the reason you refuse to see this, the reason you pretend it is uninteresting, is that it directly concerns yourself.”

  “I must say, I…”

  “Listen!” Bergmann interrupted, imperiously. “The dilemma of Rudolf is the dilemma of the would-be revolutionary writer or artist, all over Europe. This writer is not to be confused with the true proletarian writer, such as we find in Russia. His economic background is bourgeois. He is accustomed to comfort, a nice home, the care of a devoted slave who is his mother and also his jailer. From the safety and comfort of his home, he permits himself the luxury of a romantic interest in the proletariat. He comes among the workers under false pretenses, and in disguise. He flirts with Toni, the girl of the working class. But it is only a damn lousy act, a heartless masquerade…”

  “Well, if you like to put it in that way.… But what about…?”

  “Listen! Suddenly Rudolf’s home collapses, security collapses. The investments which built his comfortable life are made worthless by inflation. His mother has to scrub doorsteps. The young artist prince, with all his fine ideas, has to face grim reality. The play becomes bitter earnest. His relation to the proletariat is romantic no longer. He now has to make a choice. He is declassed, and he must find a new class. Does he really love Toni? Did his beautiful words mean anything? If so, he must prove that they did. Otherwise…”

  “Yes, that’s all very well, but…”

  “This symbolic fable,” Bergmann continued, with sadistic relish, “is particularly disagreeable to you, because it represents your deepest fear, the nightmare of your own class. In England, the economic catastrophe has not yet occurred. The pound wavered, but it did not utterly fall. Inflation still lies ahead of the English bourgeoisie, but you know in your heart that it is coming, as it came to Germany. And, when it comes, you will have to choose.…”

  “How do you mean, choose?”

  “The declassed intellectual has two choices. If his love for Toni is sincere, if he is loyal to his artistic traditions, the great liberal-revolutionary traditions of the nineteenth century, then he will know where he belongs. He will know how to align himself. He will know who are his real friends and his real enemies.” (My eye caught Dorothy’s. She was watching us blankly, for Bergmann, as he usually did when excited, had started to talk German.) “Unfortunately, however, he does not always make this choice. Indeed, he seldom makes it. He is unable to cut himself free, sternly, from the bourgeois dream of the Mother, that fatal and comforting dream. He wants to crawl back into the economic safety of the womb. He hates the paternal, revolutionary tradition, which reminds him of his duty as its son. His pretended love for the masses was only a flirtation, after all. He now prefers to join the ranks of the dilettante nihilists, the bohemian outlaws, who believe in nothing, except their own ego, who exist only to kill, to torture, to destroy, to make everyone as miserable as themselves…”

  “In other words, I’m a Nazi and you’re my father?”

  We both laughed.

  “I only try to analyze certain tendencies,” said Bergmann.

  “Nevertheless,” he added, “there are times when I feel gravely worried about you.”

  Bergmann worried not only about me, but about the whole of England. Wherever he went, he kept a sharp lookout for what he called “significant phenomena.” A phenomenon, I soon discovered, could be practically anything. The fog, for instance. Like nearly all Middle-Europeans, he was convinced that fog was our normal weather throughout the year. I would have been sorry to disappoint him; and, as luck would have it, there were several quite thick fogs that winter. Bergmann seemed to imagine that they covered not only London but the entire island; thereby accounting for all our less agreeable racial characteristics, our insularity, our hypocrisy, our political muddling, our prudery and our refusal to face facts. “It is the English themselves who have created this fog. They feed upon it, like a kind of bitter soup which fills them with illusions. It is their national costume, clothing the enormous nakedness of the slums and the scandal of unjust ownership. It is also the jungle within which Jack the Ripper goes about his business of murder in the elegant overcoat of a member of the Stock Exchange.”

  We started making sightseeing excursions together. Bergmann showed me London: the London he had already created for himself in his own imagination the dark, intricate, sinister town of Dickens, the old German silent movies, Wedekind and Brecht. He was always the guide, and I the tourist. Whenever I asked where we were going, he would say, “Wait,” or “You will see.” Often, I think he hadn’t the least idea, until we actually arrived.

  We visited the Tower, where Bergmann lectured me on English history, comparing the reign of the Tudors to the Hitler regime. He took it for granted that Bacon wrote the Shakespearian plays, in order to make political propaganda, and that Queen Elizabeth was a man. He even had a further theory that Essex was beheaded because he threatened the Monarch with revelations of their homosexual intrigue. I had some difficulty in getting him out of the Bloody Tower, where he was inspired to a lurid reconstruction of the murder of the Little Princes, amazing the other visitors, who merely saw a stocky, shock-headed, middle-aged man pleading for his life to an invisible assassin, in German, with theatrical falsetto accents.

  At the Zoo, he identified a baboon, a giraffe and a dromedary with three of our leading politicians, and reproached them publicly for their crimes. In the National Gallery, he explained, with reference to the Rembrandt portraits, his theory of camera angles and the lighting of close-ups, so loudly and convincingly that he drew a crowd away from one of the official lecturers, who was naturally rather annoyed.

  Sometimes he persuaded me to go out with him at night. This, at the end of a long day, was very exhausting. But the streets fascinated him, and he never seemed tired or wished to return home. It was embarrassing, too. Bergmann spoke to anybody whose face happened to interest him, with the directness of a child; or he talked about them to me, like a lecturer, so that they were sure to overhear him. One evening, in the bus, there were two lovers. The girl was sitting just in front of us; the young man stood beside her, holding the strap. Bergmann was delighted with them. “See how he stands? They do not even look at each other. They might be strangers. Yet they keep touching, as if by ac
cident. Now watch: their lips are moving. That is how two people talk when they are very happy and alone, in the darkness. Already they are lying in each other’s arms in bed. Good night, my dears. We shall not intrude upon your secrets.”

  Bergmann talked to taxi-drivers, to medical students in bars, to elderly colonels returning from their clubs, to clergymen, to Piccadilly tarts, to the boys who hung around the medallion of W. S. Gilbert on the Embankment. Nobody seemed to mind, or even to misunderstand his intentions. I envied him his freedom—the freedom of a foreigner. I could have done the same thing, myself, in Vienna or Berlin. With a foreigner’s luck, or intuition, he nearly always succeeded in picking out the unusual individual from the average type: a constable who did water colors, a beggar who knew classical Greek. And this betrayed him into a foreigner’s generalizations. In London, all policemen paint, all the scholars are starving.

  * * *

  THE YEAR was drawing to an end. The newspapers were full of optimism. Things were looking up; this Christmas was to be the greatest ever. Hitler talked only of peace. The Disarmament Conference had broken down. The British Government didn’t want isolation; equally, it didn’t want to promise military aid to France. When people planned their next summer’s holiday in Europe, they remembered to add, “If Europe’s still there.” It was like the superstition of touching wood.

  Just before Christmas, Bergmann and I went down to Brighton for the day. It was the only time we ever left London together. I remember this as one of the most depressing experiences of my life. Behind high clouds of white fog, the wintry sun made a pale splash of gold, far out on the oyster-gray surface of the Channel. We walked along the pier and stopped to watch a young man in plus-fours with a fair mangy mustache, who was hitting a punch-ball. “He can’t ring the bell,” I said. “None of them can ring it,” Bergmann answered somberly. “That bell will never ring again. They’re all done for. Finished.” Coming back in the Pullman car, the sea air made us both doze. I had a peculiarly vivid nightmare about Hitler Germany.