Two tastes we had in common—a passion for cinema-going and an endless pleasure in walking about the London streets. Particularly, we were fascinated by the great lost decaying districts, where the fly-blown respectability of the lower middle class clings to its dreary outposts against the slums: Pimlico, Camden Town, West Kensington, Notting Dale. Then there were the areas dedicated to favourite novels: Sinister Street shed a glamour over Sinclair Road, Riceyman Steps lent atmosphere to Mount Pleasant; Wapping and Limehouse, at first glance so disappointing, achieved mystery and danger when seen through the Chinese spectacles of Thomas Burke. But for myself, at this time London was much more than a sociological pageant or a complex of literary associations. It was the only big city I really knew, and so it was a synthesis of all big cities; it fed my place-romanticism and my boundless dreams of travel. From the shapes of familiar buildings my fancy caught hints of Moscow, Budapest, Vienna; glancing down side streets, I had glimpses of Rio, Venice, New York. Chance meetings, faces seen for an instant from the top of a bus, a voice calling at night from a darkened house, could pigment the whole neighbourhood: henceforward, that square was indelibly evil; always, when I walked along this crescent, I should experience a slight but delicious nausea of sexual desire. Needless to say, I had initiated Philip into the cult of the ‘Other Town.’ On our walks, we found plenty of examples of the sinister and the ‘rats’—a notice: ‘Work done with cart and horses’; an illuminated sign over a Salvation Army meeting house down by the river: ‘Blood and Fire’; a strangely ecclesiastical-looking building standing among the railway lines on the way to Wembley, which we named ‘The Engines’ Chapel.’ This was the summer of the Wembley Exhibition. Whenever we had enough money, we visited the amusement park; preferably in the evenings, for darkness and the coloured lights made the switchbacks seem doubly thrilling. One of our games was to try and read aloud to each other from a newspaper while tearing up and down the slopes and whizzing round the curves of the Giant Racer: to do this continuously was almost impossible, because the speed took away your breath.
Towards the end of the Long Vac, I sold my motor-bicycle. In London traffic, it was merely dangerous; and I had ceased to get a neurotic pleasure out of being afraid of it. Once, skidding on a wet road, I had fallen off a few yards in front of a lorry (I remember the look of its starting-handle to this day) and had narrowly escaped the wheels. And, before this, there had been a humiliating trip to the New Forest, with two motorcycling school friends and their girl cousins. One of the girls had insisted on riding pillion behind me along a bumpy forest track; we had crashed, and she, not I, had been hurt. Everybody was very nice about the accident, but I noticed, or imagined, contemptuously pitying glances; and, two days later, received, at my own request, an urgent telegram from London, recalling me home. Philip did much to soothe my damaged self-esteem by assuring me that he, personally, wouldn’t dare to mount the A.J.S. for all the money you could offer; much less ride it through the streets. But I no longer needed his consolation. ‘War,’ for the moment, was at a discount. I had failed the Test, and knew it, and was, for the time being, comfortably and ignobly resigned.
So the motor-bicycle was succeeded by a small thick, strongly bound manuscript book: I had decided to keep a journal. It was to be modelled upon Barbellion’s Diary of a Disappointed Man. My chief difficulty was that, unlike Barbellion, I wasn’t dying of an obscure kind of paralysis—though, in reading some of my more desperate entries, you would hardly suspect it: ‘Too miserable to write any more …’ ‘All the same symptoms …’ ‘This is the end …’ By these outbursts, I meant, as a rule, simply that I was bored (a perfectly legitimate complaint, too often and too easily sneered at by elders, in the young), or that I couldn’t get on with Lions and Shadows. The private excitement which had inspired the earlier scenes was dying down. I was losing interest in my huge straggling narrative; already well over a hundred thousand words long. But somehow, it had got to be finished. I had talked about it so often and so endlessly to my family and friends: my prestige, my whole claim to be ‘a writer,’ was at stake. So I plodded on—encouraging myself by daily additions to the journal; all of which went to build up the new day-dream self-portrait—Isherwood the Artist.
Isherwood the artist was an austere ascetic, cut off from the outside world, in voluntary exile, a recluse. Even his best friends did not altogether understand. He stood apart from and above ‘The Test’—because the Test was something for the common herd, it applied only to the world of everyday life. Isherwood refused the Test—not out of weakness, not out of cowardice, but because he was subjected, daily, hourly, to a ‘Test’ of his own: the self-imposed Test of his integrity as a writer. This Test was much harder and more agonizing than the other, because it had to be kept absolutely secret: if you succeeded, there was no applause; if you failed, there was nobody to console.
Now that Isherwood had taken the vow of abstinence from the world (by which I meant, vaguely, that I should never again risk making a fool of myself socially, in public; as on that dreadful New Forest tour) it became natural to think of him as being a kind of invalid. And indeed this invalid role was only too fatally attractive. Hadn’t Kathy and Emmy been invalids? Didn’t Baudelaire die of a frightful disease? Had I ever been seriously ill, I should no doubt have been scared out of my mental bath-chair soon enough; but my health—apart from constipation and occasional touches of flu—was excellent. So it was quite easy for me to imagine myself subtly and incurably infirm. I remained so, off and on, for the next five years.
When October came, I was quite glad to be going back to Cambridge. The fag-end of the Long Vac. had been depressing enough. Wembley was closed, Philip, who had started work at the hospital, had less time to see me, and I was getting heartily bored with Isherwood and his journal of lonely struggle and suffering. I wanted to be amongst people again, to go to tea with the Poshocracy, to enjoy the comfort of my new and much nicer rooms. Chalmers, who had been up to visit me once or twice, was in high spirits. He had finished with History for good. This year, he was being allowed to read English for the second part of the Tripos. He was full of ideas for developing the ‘Hynd and Starn’ stories and breathing new life into the Other Town. We were going to open a monster offensive against the dons. Laily was to be persecuted, denounced, exposed; very soon, said Chalmers, he would find the University too hot to hold him.
Chalmers looked in on me an hour or two after my arrival at the college, while I was still unpacking. Nervously rubbing his hands together, smiling his conspirator’s smile, he told me: ‘Something very very nasty has happened.’
‘What?’
‘They’ve given me the haunted rooms.’
I laughed; but it was perfectly true. The rooms to which Chalmers had been moved in the Old Court, were the recognized property of the college ghost. I hurried along to inspect them. The sitting-room with its deep window-seats was light and even cheerful, for the wooden panelling had been covered with white paint. I was rather disappointed. I asked: ‘Where’s the bedroom?’ Chalmers opened the small narrow door of what I had supposed to be a built-in cupboard and showed me a flight of steps, tiny and very steep, leading up into pitch darkness: I mounted, bumping my head, and found myself in an attic bedroom, adjoining which was a minute empty boxroom or closet, already christened by Chalmers ‘the Oubliette.’ It was only the staircase, we were later told, that was haunted: sometimes heavy footsteps had been heard, climbing the stairs and stopping suddenly inside ‘the Oubliette’; sometimes the stairs were descended and there would be a sharp knock on the sitting-room door. Nothing had ever actually been seen. I need hardly add that, although Chalmers and I were frequently together in his sitting-room until midnight or even two o’clock in the morning, we never once heard any kind of sound which even our only-too-willing fancy could interpret as supernatural. Perhaps the Watcher in Spanish was too jealous to allow any rivals in his domain.
Chalmers at once began to tell me his latest discoveries and ideas a
bout the Rats’ Hostel and the Other Town: ‘The whole conception’s disgustingly quisb … We were on the wrong track, altogether. The Other Town has nothing whatever to do with Cambridge. That’s where we made our fatal mistake—trying to pretend that Cambridge was somehow romantic. You see, Cambridge isn’t romantic in the least: it’s loathsomely real and sordid. It’s absolutely solid—every stupid brick of it. No, no … I saw it all so marvellously clearly, last Vac: I was walking in the public park on a Sunday morning, just before lunch, and a voice said quite distinctly: “Nor was I indeed ignorant of the flowers and the vine …” The Other Town is miles and miles away from Cambridge; in fact, it couldn’t possibly be farther … Another thing: it isn’t a town at all—it’s a village, somewhere among the enormous downs, on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean …’
We wondered what the village should be called: ‘Rats’ Hall … Stoat Grange … Grangemere … Moatpool … Mortpool—sounds too much like Blackpool … What a pity Mortlake’s a real place … I’ve got it Mortmere!’
Mortmere it was; Mortmere it remained. A few days later, Chalmers began writing an account of the village which struck a mystical, almost religious note:
It has been said that Mortmere rectory does not seem to be the work of an architect, but to have grown as an oak grows, from the soil of the fields. There is scarcely a colour throughout the surrounding land that has not its counterpart in the garden and the rectory walls. In sunlight the blue-grey slates of the roof seem almost to reflect the leaves of the garden trees, much as the muddy village pond dimly reflects the elm-leaves that lift and dip above it. The red creepers obscuring the dull red walls, the lemon verbena that cloaks the trellised supports of the veranda, even the grey cowls and the chimneys, have an appearance of continuity with the surrounding country. Not only the rectory, but the smaller houses and cottages of the village have this strange likeness to living growths of the soil. The Rector of Mortmere once said that, if every building were to be transplanted during the night, he would scarcely notice the change when he woke in the morning …
The Rector, the Reverend Welken, was our first Mortmere character. Tall, very thin, with lank hair parted in the middle, he was once described as resembling a diseased goat. His beliefs were Anglican, and very high: he had, in fact, indulged his taste for ritual to a point bordering on magic, and his brain, in consequence, was a little turned. He had been guilty of moral offences with a choirboy and had later suffered severe pangs of conscience, persuading himself, at length, that, as a punishment for his crime, his dead wife was appearing to him in the form of a succubus. Welken was so much afraid that some of the other inhabitants of Mortmere might see the succubus that he deliberately spread a rumour that he was engaged in breeding angels in the belfry of Mortmere church. Finally, he actually began to perform a ritual of angel-manufacture, at which the choirboy assisted; and the original offence, incorporated in this ritual, became a mechanical and even distasteful duty. In ordinary life, the Rector was the mildest and most affable of men; particularly apt with classical quotations to suit every imaginable occasion. He was also a rather horrifyingly skilful amateur conjuror.
Welken’s most intimate friend was Ronald Gunball, a frank unashamed vulgarian, a keen fisherman, a drunkard and a grotesque liar. Gunball’s world was the world of delirium tremens: he saw wonders and horrors all about him, his everyday life was lived amidst two-headed monsters, ghouls, downpours of human blood and eclipses of the sun—and everything he saw he accepted with the most absolute and placid calm. His favourite comment in telling one of his own preposterous stories, was: ‘Of course, it didn’t surprise me in the least.’
Here is a typical fragment of a scenario (written much later) for a tea-party in the garden of Mortmere rectory. The ‘Hearn’ referred to is simply an observer from the outside world: ‘Hynd’ and ‘Starn’ fused into a single character:
(The maid hands the Reverend Welken a pot of shrimp paste which she has been unable to open. Welken opens it without effort—ostentatiously, Hearn thinks.)
GUNBALL (aside to Hearn): You might not think it, but the Rector’s one of the strongest men I’ve known. (Leaning forward, with an expression that suggests the pleased grimness of the story-teller.) They say that once on the pier at Bognor … You’ve seen those try-your-grip machines? (Smiling tentatively, as though wishing to assure Hearn in anticipation that the story is not intended as an insult to his intelligence.) He not only rang the bell but got half a crown back, into the bargain.
HEARN: Ha … (Then he notices certain facts about Gunball’s expression of face. It indicates (a) that Gunball realizes that his story will be taken as a joke, and (b) that he half hopes that Hearn will pretend to take it seriously.)
GUNBALL (With sudden zest, and a renewal of the ghost-story tone): You see what that would mean if it were true?
HEARN (amiably): I must confess I don’t—
GUNBALL (very suggestively): It would mean that he must have put half a crown into the machine …
Gunball also featured in a story by Chalmers called The Little Hotel. Reynard Moxon chose him as the ideal manager for his hotel, which was really a brothel for necrophiles. Gunball, never in the least inquisitive, remained quite insensitive to the ludicrously sinister atmosphere of the establishment and the unpleasant appearance of the guests: he found nothing strange in the behaviour of Mr Aneurin, who paid for his room by handing the porter a diamond ring. Indeed, Hynd himself (who had been duped by Moxon into taking the job of reception clerk) might not have discovered the true purpose of the hotel until it was too late, had he not happened to catch a glimpse of a kind of sedan-chair being carried through the fog towards the tradesmen’s entrance, and, running back to the museum of which he was supposed to be curator, found that the Egyptian mummies were missing from their case.
The Little Hotel had nothing to do with Mortmere; and Reynard Moxon wasn’t, originally, a Mortmere character. We invented him for the benefit of a friend named Percival. Percival was an enthusiastic person, always gushing over some newly discovered teacher or master. This term, it was a Dutchman. The Dutchman, whom we never saw, was a rather sinister figure: he read philosophy, was an anthroposophist, and kept white mice. Percival quoted his every word with the utmost admiration and awe: we got very tired of hearing about him. The climax was reached when, one day, Percival informed us, not without malice, that he had just told the Dutchman about our Watcher in Spanish, and that the Dutchman had dismissed the whole idea as ‘childish and silly.’ Naturally we were furious—with ourselves, chiefly, for having ever confided our ‘blagues’ to a third person: we decided that Percival must be taught a lesson. We, too, would have a sinister, omniscient friend. A few days later we began describing to Percival the first encounter with our new acquaintance, Reynard Moxon. No, he wasn’t exactly an undergraduate, or a don; he had nothing, officially, to do with the University at all; but he preferred to live near Cambridge—for certain reasons. We had met him walking along the river bank, rapidly, looking deadly pale, in an opera hat and a light overcoat with black silk facings. Touching Chalmers abruptly on the wrist with his gloved forefinger, he had asked, in the tone of a man who is accustomed to being obeyed, for the exact time, and, on hearing that we neither of us possessed a watch, had nodded and seemed pleased. Later, we said, he had invited us to his house, to drink sherry and inspect his collection of diamonds. The gullible Percival believed all this and was deeply impressed; but when Chalmers, carried away by his own improvisation, went on to describe how Moxon kept a cat in a birdcage and a canary flying free about the room, and when I added that he owned a large black serpent which accompanied him on rambles after dark, Percival began to smile reproachfully and murmured, in his deep musical tones: ‘Do you know, I believe you’re ragging me?’
Henceforward, we kept Moxon to ourselves. He appeared in two new Hynd and Starn stories—The Javanese Sapphires and The Garage in Drover’s Hollow. The Javanese sapphires have come into Gunball’s possession in a typicall
y ‘Starnese’ manner:
That they really had been given him on the jetty at Portsmouth by an elderly man who, scarcely a minute later, boarded the paddle-steamer for the Isle of Wight, I didn’t for an instant doubt. Such things frequently happen to my friend, who, by his bland and robust exterior, appears to awaken some species of temporary mania in many of those who encounter him, especially while travelling. The desire to startle him has led a number of total strangers to present Gunball with gold watches, cheques, handbags, clockwork bombs, paralytic babies or live ferrets. But never, on any occasion, have these extravagancies achieved their object …
Gunball, of course, has talked about the gems to everybody in the town, and Starn is nervous for their safety. His worst fears are confirmed when, a few days later, he thinks he catches a glimpse of Moxon sauntering past the house:
I knew that my instincts could not have so deceived me. Nor should I easily forget that nonchalant yet rapid stride, the scarcely visible limp, the wooden action of the pointed shoulders, the inert hand carelessly flashing with its five diamond rings …
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