by Gore Vidal
Art and sex: the two themes intertwine in Isherwood’s memoirs but in the first volume we do not know what the sex was all about: the reticences of the Thirties forbade candor. Now in Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood has filled in the blanks; he is explicit about both sex and love. Not only did the Poet and the Novelist of that era lust for boys, there is some evidence that each might have echoed Marlowe’s mighty line: I have found that those who do not like tobacco and boys are fools.
“The book I am now going to write will be as frank and factual as I can make it, especially as far as I myself am concerned.” Then the writer shifts to the third person: “At school, Christopher had fallen in love with many boys and been yearningly romantic about them. At college he had at last managed to get into bed with one. This was due entirely to the initiative of his partner, who, when Christopher became scared and started to raise objections, locked the door and sat down firmly on Christopher’s lap.” For an American twenty-two years younger than Christopher, the late development of the English of that epoch is astonishing. In Washington, D.C., puberty arrived at ten, eleven, twelve, and sex was riotous and inventive between consenting paeds. Yet Tennessee Williams (fourteen years my senior) reports in his Memoirs that neither homo- nor heterosexuality began for him until his late twenties. On the other hand, he did not go to a monosexual school as I did, as Isherwood and his kind did.
Isherwood tells us that “other experiences followed, all of them enjoyable but none entirely satisfying. This was because Christopher was suffering from an inhibition, then not unusual among upper-class homosexuals; he couldn’t relax sexually with a member of his own class or nation. He needed a working-class foreigner.” Germany was the answer. “To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.” Auden promptly introduced him to the Cosy Corner, a hangout for proletarian youths, and Christopher took up with a blond named Bubi, “the first presentable candidate who appeared to claim the leading role in Christopher’s love myth.”
John Lehmann’s recently published “novel” In the Purely Pagan Sense overlaps with Isherwood’s memoirs not only in time and place but in a similar sexual preoccupation. “I was obsessed,” writes Lehmann’s narrator, “by the desire to make love with boys of an entirely different class and background….” This desire for differentness is not unusual: misalliance has almost always been the name of the game hetero or homo or bi. But I suspect that the upper-middle-class man’s desire for youths of the lower class derives, mainly, from fear of his own class. Between strongly willed males of the Isherwood-Auden sort, a sexual commitment could lead to a psychic defeat for one of the partners.
The recently published memoirs of Isherwood’s contemporary Peter Quennell (The Marble Foot) describe how an upper-class heterosexual English writer was constantly betrayed by women of his own class. Apparently, Quennell is much too tender, too romantic, too…well, feminine to avoid victimization by the ladies. A beautiful irony never to be understood by United Statesmen given to the joys of the sexual majority is that a homosexualist like Isherwood cannot with any ease enjoy a satisfactory sexual relationship with a woman because he himself is so entirely masculine that the woman presents no challenge, no masculine hardness, no exciting agon. It is the heterosexual Don Juan (intellectual division) who is the fragile, easily wounded figure, given to tears. Isherwood is a good deal less “feminine” (in the pre-women’s lib sense of the word) than Peter Quennell, say, or Cyril Connolly or our own paralyzingly butch Ernest Hemingway.
Isherwood describes his experiments with heterosexuality: “She was five or six years older than [Christopher], easygoing, stylish, humorous….He was surprised and amused to find how easily he could relate his usual holds and movements to his unusual partner. He felt curiosity and the fun of playing a new game. He also felt a lust which was largely narcissistic….” Then: “He asked himself: Do I now want to go to bed with more women and girls? Of course not, as long as I can have boys. Why do I prefer boys? Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move. And boys can be romantic. I can put them into my myth and fall in love with them. Girls can be absolutely beautiful but never romantic. In fact, their utter lack of romance is what I find most likeable about them.” There is a clear-eyed normality (if not great accuracy) about all this.
Then Isherwood moves from the personal to the general and notes the lunatic pressure that society exerts on everyone to be heterosexual, to deny at all costs a contrary nature. Since heterosexual relations proved to be easy for Isherwood, he could have joined the majority. But he was stopped by Isherwood the rebel, the Protestant saint who declared with the fury of a Martin Luther: “even if my nature were like theirs, I should still have to fight them, in one way or another. If boys didn’t exist, I should have to invent them.” Isherwood’s war on what he has called, so aptly, “the heterosexual dictatorship” has been unremitting and admirable.
In Berlin Isherwood settled down with a working-class boy named Heinz and most of Christopher and His Kind has to do with their life together during the time when Hitler came to power and the free and easy Berlin that had attracted Isherwood turned ugly. With Heinz (whose papers were not in order), Isherwood moved restlessly about Europe: Copenhagen, Amsterdam, the Canary Islands, Brussels. In the end Heinz was trapped in Germany, and forced to serve in World War II. Miraculously, he survived. After the war, Isherwood met Heinz and his wife—as pleasant an end as one can imagine to any idyll of that neo-Wagnerian age.
Meanwhile, Isherwood the writer was developing. It is during this period that the Berlin stories were written; also, Lions and Shadows. Also, the collaboration with Auden on the last of the verse plays. Finally, there is the inevitable fall into the movies…something that was bound to happen. In Lions and Shadows Isherwood describes how “I had always been fascinated by films….I was a born film fan….The reason for this had, I think, very little to do with ‘Art’ at all; I was, and still am, endlessly interested in the outward appearance of people—their facial expressions, their gestures, their walk, their nervous tricks….The cinema puts people under a microscope: you can stare at them, you can examine them as though they were insects.”
Isherwood was invited to write a screenplay for the director “Berthold Viertel [who] appears as Friedrich Bergmann in the novelette called Prater Violet, which was published twelve years later.” Isherwood and the colorful Viertel hit it off and together worked on a film called Little Friend. From that time on the best prose writer in English has supported himself by writing movies. In fact, the first Isherwood work that I encountered was not a novel but a film that he wrote called Rage in Heaven: at sixteen I thought it splendid. “The moon!” intoned the nutty Robert Montgomery. “It’s staring at me, like a great Eye.” Ingrid Bergman shuddered. So did I.
It is hard now for the young who are interested in literature (a tiny minority compared to the young who are interested in that flattest and easiest and laziest of art forms: the movies) to realize that Isherwood was once considered “a hope of English fiction” by Cyril Connolly, and a master by those of us who grew up in World War II. I think the relative neglect of Isherwood’s work is, partly, the result of his expatriation. With Auden, he emigrated to the United States just before the war began, and there was a good deal of bitter feeling at the time (they were clumsily parodied by the unspeakable Evelyn Waugh in Put Out More Flags). Ultimately, Auden’s reputation was hardly affected. But then poets are licensed to be mad, bad, and dangerous to read, while prose writers are expected to be, if not responsible, predictable.
In America Isherwood was drawn first to the Quakers; then to Vedanta. Lately, he has become a militant spokesman of Gay Liberation. If his defense of Christopher’s kind is sometimes shrill…well, there is a good deal to be shrill about in a society so deeply and so mindlessly homophobic. In any case, none of Isherwood’s moral preoccupations is apt to endear him to a literary establishment that is, variously, academic, Jewish/Christian, middle-class, and hetero
sexual. Yet he has written some of his best books in the United States, including the memoir at hand and the novels A Single Man and A Meeting by the River. Best of all, he still views the world aslant despite long residence in Santa Monica, a somber place where even fag households resemble those hetero couples photographed in Better Homes and Gardens, serving up intricate brunches ’neath the hazel Pacific sky.
What strikes me as most remarkable in Isherwood’s career has not been so much the unremitting will to be his own man as the constant clarity of a prose style that shows no sign of slackness even though the author is, astonishingly, in his seventies. There is a good deal to be said about the way that Isherwood writes, particularly at a time when prose is worse than ever in the United States, and showing signs of etiolation in England. There is no excess in an Isherwood sentence. The verbs are strong. Nouns precise. Adjectives few. The third person startles and seduces, while the first person is a good guide and never coy.
Is the Isherwood manner perhaps too easy? Cyril Connolly feared that it might be when he wrote in Enemies of Promise (1938): “[Isherwood] is persuasive because he is so insinuatingly bland and anonymous, nothing rouses him, nothing shocks him. While secretly despising us he could not at the same time be more tolerant….Now for this a price has to be paid; Herr Issyvoo” (Connolly is contemplating Isherwood’s Berlin stories) “is not a dumb ox, for he is not condemned to the solidarity with his characters and with their background to which Hemingway is bound by his conception of art, but he is much less subtle, intelligent and articulate than he might be.” Isherwood answered Connolly: “In conversation, Isherwood…expressed his belief in construction as the way out of the difficulty. The writer must conform to the language which is understood by the greatest number of people, to the vernacular, but his talent as a novelist will appear in the exactness of his observation, the justice of his situations and in the construction of his book.”
Isherwood has maintained this aesthetic throughout a long career. When he turned his back on what Connolly termed Mandarin writing, he showed considerable courage. But the later Isherwood is even better than the early cameraman because he is no longer the anonymous, neutral narrator. He can be shocked; he can be angry.
In Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood wonders what attitude to take toward the coming war with Germany. “Suppose, Christopher now said to himself, I have a Nazi Army at my mercy. I can blow it up by pressing a button. The men in the army are notorious for torturing and murdering civilians—all except one of them, Heinz. Will I press the button? No—wait: Suppose I know that Heinz himself, out of cowardice or moral infection, has become as bad as they are and takes part in all their crimes? Will I press that button, even so? Christopher’s answer, given without the slightest hesitation, was: Of course not.” That is the voice of humanism in a bad time, and one can only hope that thanks to Christopher’s life and work, his true kind will increase even as they refuse, so wisely, to multiply.
The New York Review of Books
DECEMBER 9, 1976
On Prettiness
In the fifteenth century the adjective “pretty” joined the English language (derived from the Old Teutonic noun pratti or pratta, meaning trick or wile). At first everyone thought the world of pretty. To be a pretty fellow was to be clever, apt, skillful; a pretty soldier was gallant and brave; a pretty thing was ingenious and artful. It was not until the sixteenth century that something started to go wrong with the idea of prettiness. Although women and children could still take pleasure in being called pretty, a pretty man had degenerated into a fop with a tendency to slyness. Pretty objects continued to be admired until 1875 when the phrase “pretty-pretty” was coined. That did it. For the truly clever, apt, and skillful, the adjective pretty could only be used in the pejorative sense, as I discovered thirty years ago while being shown around King’s College by E. M. Forster. As we approached the celebrated chapel (magnificent, superb, a bit much), I said, “Pretty.” Forster thought I meant the chapel when, actually, I was referring to a youthful couple in the damp middle distance. A ruthless moralist, Forster publicized my use of the dread word. Told in Fitzrovia and published in the streets of Dacca, the daughters of the Philistines rejoiced; the daughters of the uncircumcised triumphed. For a time, my mighty shield was vilely cast away.
In the last thirty years the adjective pretty has been pretty much abandoned, while the notion of beauty has become so complex that only the dullest of the daughters of the uncircumcised dares use it. Santayana was the last aesthetician to describe beauty without self-consciousness; and that was in 1896. As a result, we now live in a relativist’s world where one man’s beauty is another man’s beast. This means that physical ugliness tends to be highly prized on the ground that it would be not only cruel, but provocative for, let us say, a popular performer to look better than the plainest member of the audience. This is democracy at its most endearing; and only a beauty or a Beaton would have it otherwise.
Sir Cecil Beaton’s latest volume of diaries has now been published in the seventy-fourth year of a life devoted to the idea of beauty in people, clothes, decor, landscape, and manners. To the extent that Sir Cecil falls short of beauty in his life and work, he is merely pretty. But that is not such a bad thing. Quite the contrary. Sir Cecil…no, I think we had better call him Beaton, in honor of his own creation as opposed to the Queen’s. Beaton is the oldest if not the last of a long line of minor artists who have given a good deal of pleasure to a good many people. He is a celebrated photographer. Unfortunately, I cannot judge his pictures because all photographs tend to look alike to me in their busy flatness. For half a century photography has been the “art form” of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages? I was pleased to note in Beaton’s pages that Picasso thought the same.
It is as a designer for the theatre that Beaton is at his best. But then clothes and sets are in the round, not flat upon the page. Beaton is absolutely stage-struck, and so wonderfully striking in his stage effects. There is no sense of strain in his theatre work except, perhaps, when he acts. Years ago I saw him in a play by (I think) Wilde. Like an elegant lizard just fed twenty milligrams of Valium, Beaton moved slowly about the stage. The tongue flicked; the lips moved; no word was audible.
Now we have Beaton’s written words; and they are most vivid: contents of diaries kept from 1963 to 1974. The mood is often grim. He does not like getting old. He has also not learned that, after fifty, you must never look into a mirror whose little tricks you don’t already know in advance. The same goes for eyes. At the Rothschild place in Mouton, he takes a good look at himself in a strange mirror. He is rewarded for his recklessness:
I was really an alarming sight—wild white hair on end, most of the pate quite bald: chins sagging with a scraggly tissued neck: pale weak eyes without their former warmth. But this could not be me!
More somber details are noted. Finally, “How could I make the effort to dress myself up in picturesque clothes and try to be attractive to a group of highly critical people?” I am sure that he managed.
The Parting Years is a haphazard collection of pages taken at what seems to be random from a number of diaries. No attempt has been made to link one thing to another. He arrives in New York to design a production of La Traviata. Alfred Lunt is the director. It is all very exciting. But, for the reader, the curtain never goes up. How did the production go? Who sang? There are numerous odd lacunae:
Oliver Lyttleton, whose desire to amuse has increased with the years to the extent that he is a real bore, made one funny joke. The evening was a great success.
But what was the joke? On second thoughts, perhaps that is Beaton’s strategy. In Orlando, Virginia Woolf never allowed us to hear the brilliant dialogue of Alexander Pope.
Beaton is a good travel-writer. He has a sharp eye for those horrors of tra
vel that delight the sedentary reader far more than set descriptions of beautiful or even pretty places. South America in general and Poland in particular do not get high marks. The first is too steep; the second too flat. But Beaton is quite as strict with things English. The cathedrals get a thorough going-over. “Exeter Cathedral, more squat than Salisbury, but original and successful, with a frieze of carvings on the façade.” Next term if Exeter C. joins wholeheartedly in house-games there is no reason why that squatness can’t be trimmed down. On the other hand, poor “Wells Cathedral did not look its best. It has a certain character but is not really impressive as a creative expression of devotion.” Wells C. might do better at a different school.
Beaton is too much the stoic to strike too often the valetudinarian note. But when he does, the effect is chilling. He looks at himself with the same cold eye that he turns upon slovenly Wells Cathedral.
I don’t really feel that I am ever going to come into my own, to justify myself and my existence by some last great gesture. I am likewise certain that nothing I have done is likely to live long after me.
This is no doubt true. Yet one cannot help but admire a man in his seventies who still makes a living by his wits in the world of theatre and fashion where Americans with hearts of stone and egos of brass dominate (“I put up with Americans willingly only when I am on business bent”).
Beaton never ceases to be interested in seeing new places, meeting new talent. He checks out The Rolling Stones at the beginning of their fame. He takes up the town’s new artist, David Hockney. Meanwhile, he continues to make the rounds of the old from Picasso to Coward. He almost always has something shrewd to say—except of famous hostesses. They get elaborate bread-and-butter-letter eulogies best left unpublished. Beaton is most generous with the young. But then, it is always easier to prefer the young to one’s contemporaries. Witness: