Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Christopher Isherwood
Title Page
Introduction
To the Reader
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Copyright
About the Author
Christopher Isherwood was born in Cheshire in 1904. He began to write at university and later moved to Berlin, where he gave English lessons to support himself. He witnessed first hand the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany and some of his best works, such as Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, draw on these experiences. He created the character of Sally Bowles, later made famous as the heroine of the musical Cabaret. Isherwood travelled with W. H. Auden to China in the late 1930s before going with him to America in 1939, which became his home for the rest of his life. He died on 4 January 1986.
ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
All the Conspirators
The Memorial
Mr Norris Changes Trains
Goodbye to Berlin
Prater Violet
The Condor and the Cows
The World in the Evening
Down There on a Visit
A Single Man
A Meeting by the River
Kathleen and Frank
Christopher and his Kind
My Guru and his Disciple
With Don Bachardy
October
With W. H. Auden
The Dog Beneath the Skin
The Ascent of F6
On the Frontier
Journey to a War
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
Lions and Shadows
An Education in the Twenties
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY
James Fenton
Introduction
W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice – Auden was the first of his group to publish, in the fourth section of his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, an autobiography of sorts. But a part of that impetus, he tells us, came from Isherwood:
So I sit down this fine September morning
To tell my story. I’ve another reason.
I’ve lately had a confidential warning
That Isherwood is publishing next season
A book about us all. I call that treason.
I must be quick if I’m to get my oar in
Before his revelations bring the law in.
The ‘Letter’ was finished by October 1936 and was published the following year, while Isherwood’s account of ‘An Education in the Twenties’ appeared in 1938. Neither author had, as yet, a large number of works to his name. Isherwood had two novels, for which he is hardly likely to be remembered (All the Conspirators and The Memorial), then his first abiding successes with Mr Norris Changes Trains and the story ‘Sally Bowles’. Goodbye to Berlin was still to be published.
So there was something cheeky about these two friends – these two occasional lovers – sitting down to write their accounts of how they came to be Poet and Novelist respectively. They seem to be laughing up their sleeves. Auden, for instance, in those lines, speaking of getting his oar in ‘Before his [Isherwood’s] revelations bring the law in’, is making a jocular reference to the damaging things Isherwood could conceivably be going to say about their homosexual (and therefore illegal) activities – a reference that the casual reader is unlikely to have picked up. One has to remember that, debonair though Auden’s tone is throughout the poem, he is writing only a generation after the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, who had died, a broken man, in 1900. The schoolmaster he mentions whose ‘moral character was all at sea’, or the one who ‘had to leave abruptly in a taxi’, could have been heading for the same kind of fate as Wilde: imprisonment and disgrace.
Of course, Isherwood was not about to spill the beans. Lions and Shadows is not a work of sexual revelation, except in those passages that recount the author’s clearly insincere (and unconsummated) heterosexual exploits, or when Auden’s general attitude to sex is vaguely adumbrated. The book is, rather, what its author says it is, an account of the education of a novelist. And as such it has a gripping story to tell, for all its insouciance of tone. More than that, it contains memorable portrayals of Auden (Hugh Weston), Spender (Stephen Savage) and Edward Upward (Allen Chalmers) – Upward who, though highly regarded by Isherwood and his circle, eventually allowed his novelistic talent to be placed under the supervision of the Communist Party, until the Communist Party, in 1948, seemed insufficiently Stalinist.
But Lions and Shadows is about the twenties rather than the thirties, and that engagement with Marxism and the party line was yet to come. Chalmers, in Lions and Shadows, is a rebel against what the school stands for, and what Cambridge stands for, and he is a rebel (of a comically uncertain kind) against the college ‘Poshocracy’ – the sport-loving, philistine set who hail from the better class of public school. He is a rebel not for any political reason, but because somehow, if you want to live the authentic life, rebellion is the way forward.
The attitude of the Repton sixth-formers, evoked in the first chapter, traces the roots of this irreverence to the fact that the Great War had just ended and the boys of the sixth had therefore just escaped conscription:
… suddenly, the universal profession of soldiering was closed to them; and the alternatives seemed vague and dull. So the Sixth-formers let things drift and didn’t much care. They regarded the school curriculum with benevolent amusement, broke bounds, ragged work and games, cut chapel, wrote daring love-poetry, strolled about the place in various forms of mild fancy dress or lolled round their study fires with their feet on the mantelpiece, smoking their pipes like grandfathers.
For those of us who attended the same school in later decades (in my case during the sixties), this short passage was profoundly fascinating. Repton in our day was always insisting on its traditions, yet here was a picture of its past life that had clearly been erased from the collective memory. So the boys had smoked pipes! And stuck their feet on the mantelpieces of their study fires! And cut chapel! It is a beguiling schedule of misdemeanours, ending with an account of a head-of-house listening, bored, to his housemaster droning on about house politics before, ‘with the utmost sang-froid’, falling asleep.
But this first chapter of Lions and Shadows is not a denunciation of the ethos of a school. It is a portrait of a teacher who, given the attitudes of the boys, finds a way of engaging them, amusing them and impressing them, and getting them to work to some purpose. Many people complained about their public schools – and no doubt with good reason – but among those who hated their experiences in such institutions overall, it is quite normal to find that an exception is made for a certain gifted or exceptionally dedicated individual on the staff. The literature of the British school has notable examples of the genre – Goodbye, Mr Chips, The Browning Version and, for the girls (but at a much higher and more critical level), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. ‘Mr Holmes’, the history teacher, takes his place in this gallery. He is based on Graham Burrell Smith, of whom another of his pupils, W. B. Gallie, left an account (quoted by Peter Parker in his biography of the novelist) that largely corroborates Isherwood’s:
As a teacher of history S[mith] was a profound liberalizing influence. Very soon boys were talking of his ‘bombshells’, though an apter metaphor would have been ‘prickings’ – of almost any kind of pretentiousness and humbug, particularly nationalistic humbug […] The lesson would go forward, intensely interesting if never inspiring, until suddenly – the bomb would drop: something awf
ul about, say, the Protestant persecution of scientific thought, or the rise of British parliamentary institutions, or Nelson’s relations with the British admiralty, or the late nineteenth-century scramble for colonies. But as a teacher of history S[mith] was something more than an exorciser of Protestant or British prejudices: he taught us to see the complexity of every morally important political issue.
The role of Smith at the beginning of the book is given extra emphasis by an act of radical editorial trimming. As Parker points out in his biography, Lions and Shadows finds no place for Isherwood’s father, who was killed during the Great War; for his mother, who was still alive when it was written; or for his younger brother. The self-portrait is brutally cropped. What is important begins with a remarkable teacher (with whom Isherwood seems to have had a close, though most probably not sexual, relationship) and with a profound friendship with Upward. Indeed, we learn a great deal about what Isherwood and Upward wrote together, when creating their private world of Mortmere.
Isherwood no doubt would never have expressed it like this, since he was loyal to the idea of Upward’s genius, but there is something of a Moses figure about Upward: he beholds, but he does not actually reach, the Promised Land of authorship. He is precocious. He has a gift for the macabre, forging a style that Isherwood and he referred to as medieval surrealism. But the fantasy world that the two friends create is something they must in due course abandon, and, when they eventually both do so, it is Isherwood who finds his mature voice. The sterner judge of Mortmere is Upward, who, when pressed to publish ‘The Railway Accident’, the last of the Mortmere stories, would only do so under a pseudonym – in fact, the name Isherwood invented for him in Lions and Shadows.
‘He feels,’ wrote Isherwood, ‘that the kind of literature which makes a dilettante cult of violence, sadism, bestiality and sexual acrobatics is particularly offensive and subversive in an age such as ours – an age which has witnessed the practically applied bestiality of Belsen and Dachau.’ This is Upward’s view in 1949, two decades after the writing of ‘The Railway Accident’, but at a time when its author was still a devoted Stalinist. Note the use of the word ‘subversive’ in a pejorative sense. In the context of Lions and Shadows Upward’s own subversiveness, like that of Mr Holmes, had been considered a good quality.
The portrait of the child Auden, as Weston in Chapter Five, is as valuable in its way as Hazlitt’s account of his first meetings with Coleridge:
With his hinted forbidden knowledge and stock of mispronounced scientific words, portentously uttered, he enjoyed among us, his semi-savage credulous schoolfellows, the status of a kind of witch-doctor. I see him drawing an indecent picture on the upper fourth form blackboard, his stumpy fingers, with their blunt bitten nails, covered in ink: I see him boxing, with his ferocious frown, against a boy twice his size; I see him frowning as he sings opposite me in the choir, surpliced, in an enormous Eton collar, above which his great red flaps of ears stand out, on either side of his narrow scowling pudding-white face. In our dormitory religious arguments, which were frequent, I hear him heatedly exclaiming against churches in which the cross was merely painted on the wall behind the altar: they ought, he said, to be burnt down and their vicars put in prison.
Here, of course, we ought to remind ourselves that Isherwood claimed to have used a novelist’s licence in drawing his characters. Did Auden really, as a child at prep school, express these views – or did he express views like these? The latter seems to be a safer bet. Anyway, it was after Isherwood published this portrait that Auden saw, and was deeply shocked by, the aftermath of the attacks on churches in Spain. He came to hate this kind of talk.
For a long time, the poems published in Chapter Five were the only publicly available examples of Auden’s extraordinary juvenilia. And the picture of the very young Auden – though modified by others since – really has no rivals. Spender in due course added to it in his own autobiography, World within World (1951), in which Isherwood appears in his guise as The Novelist,
who, applying himself with an iron will to the study of material for his work, was determined to live the life of The Ordinary Man, going to the office in the train, dancing in dance halls at seaside resorts, dressing with a studied avoidance of every kind of distinctiveness, and so on. Isherwood, according to Auden, held no opinion whatever about anything. He was wholly and simply interested in people. He did not like or dislike them, judge them favourably or unfavourably. He simply regarded them as material for his Work. At the same time, he was the Critic in whom Auden had absolute trust. If Isherwood disliked a poem, Auden destroyed it without demur. Should he select one line for praise and condemn the rest, then Auden skillfully inserted this one line into a new poem. According to this principle, some of Auden’s early poems are composite constructions made out of fragments of parts of poems approved by Isherwood, and skillfully woven together.
There is another version of this character of The Novelist in Auden’s sonnet of that name (written in 1938):
Encased in talent like a uniform,
The rank of every poet is well known;
They can amaze us like a thunderstorm,
Or die so young, or live for years alone.
They can dash forward like hussars: but he
Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none think it worth to turn.
For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must
Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just
Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.
It seems to be about this same, ideal Isherwood. Or it seems to offer the real Isherwood an impossible ideal by which to live.
James Fenton, 2013
To the Reader
I had better start by saying what this book is not: it is not, in the ordinary journalistic sense of the word, an autobiography; it contains no ‘revelations’; it is never ‘indiscreet’; it is not even entirely ‘true.’
Its sub-title explains its purpose: to describe the first stages in a lifelong education—the education of a novelist. A young man living at a certain period in a certain European country, is subjected to a certain kind of environment, certain stimuli, certain influences. That the young man happens to be myself is only of secondary importance: in making observations of this sort, everyone must be his own guinea-pig.
Because this book is about the problems of a would-be writer, it is also about conduct. The style is the man. Because it is about conduct, I have had to dramatize it, or you would not get farther than the first page. Read it as a novel. I have used a novelist’s licence in describing my incidents and drawing my characters: ‘Chalmers,’ ‘Linsley,’ ‘Cheuret’ and ‘Weston’ are all caricatures: that is why—quite apart from the fear of hurt feelings—I have given them, and nearly everybody else, fictitious names.
C. I., September 1937
1
To look at, Mr Holmes was a short, stout, middle-aged man with reddish hair just beginning to get thin on the crown. He had closely folded, rather prim clergyman’s lips and a long astute pointed nose which was slightly crooked. His glance was cold, friendly and shrewd. When he had made a successful joke and the whole form was laughing, he would clasp his hands behind his back under his gown and look primly down his nose at his small neat brown shoes.
I can hear him now:
‘Napoleon the Third angled for war with the greatest a-acumen and subtlety. Unfortunately for himself, he was soon to discover the highly r-regrettable fact that you cannot serve both M-Mars and M-Mammon …’
He spoke quietly and deliberately, with an instant’s hesitation—too slight to be described as a stammer—in pronouncing certain words. These words usually occurred with increasing frequency towards the climax of one of his anecdotes or the spri
nging of one of his aphorisms, and as he said them he would screw his head comically to one side, as if ducking under some invisible obstacle. The head movement and the instant’s hesitation may have been the traces of a nervous tic: more probably they were quite deliberate. They produced a pleasingly pedantic effect which charmed many of us; and we often tried to imitate them. I sometimes catch myself trying the pseudo stammer on strangers, even today.
Almost everything Mr Holmes did or said contributed to a deliberate effect: he had the technique of a first-class clergyman or actor. But unlike most clergymen, he was entirely open and shameless about his methods. Having achieved his object—which was always, in one way or another, to startle, shock, flatter, lure or scare us for a few moments out of our schoolboy conservatism and prejudice—he would explain to us gleefully just how this particular trap, bait or bomb had been prepared. His behaviour thus became a parody of itself; and this continually disconcerted us. We liked the staff to have its mannerisms, of course—there was the Boss’s snort, Johnny’s roar, Jimmy’s wail; there were Hutchinson’s fancy waistcoats, Butcher’s sermons, Capel-Williams’ conversations with the grocer’s horse: all these, we knew, were genuine. We could laugh at them safely, wholeheartedly, unkindly, as spectators. We couldn’t laugh wholeheartedly at Mr Holmes, because even laughter would put us, we felt, under a kind of obligation to him; would, in some way, subtly involve us in his plans. Besides, we were never quite sure that he mightn’t be laughing at us.
Quiet, astute, disconcertingly witty, he was never widely popular. His brand of humour, and indeed his whole personality, was an acquired taste. A large percentage of his pupils bored him and he showed it, unobtrusively but most insultingly. He had arrived at our school a couple of terms after the end of the War. It was a difficult period for a new master, proposing to begin work on untraditional lines. The Sixth was still composed of boys who had only just missed being conscripted, potential infantry officers trained to expect the brief violent career of the trenches: they had outgrown their school life long before they left it. And now, suddenly, the universal profession of soldiering was closed to them; and the alternatives seemed vague and dull. So the Sixth-formers let things drift and didn’t much care. They regarded the school curriculum with benevolent amusement, broke bounds, ragged work and games, cut chapel, wrote daring love-poetry, strolled about the place in various forms of mild fancy dress or lolled round their study fires with their feet on the mantelpiece, smoking their pipes like grandfathers. There was a story of how Ponds, the head of our house, was visited by our house-master one evening for a serious discussion of house politics. The house-master, warming to his subject, talked and talked. Ponds, muscular, lazy, untidy and profoundly bored, agreed with every word: ‘Oh, quite definitely, sir …’ he kept repeating: ‘… yes, quite definitely …’ Presently, with the utmost sang-froid, he fell asleep.
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