Lions and Shadows

by Christopher Isherwood

  Nor sunshine on the weir’s dull dreamless roar

  Can change me from the thing I was before,

  Imperfect body and imperfect mind

  Unknowing what it is I seek to find.

  I know it: yet for this brief hour or so

  I am content, unthinking and aglow,

  Made one with horses and with workmen, all

  Who seek for shelter by a dripping wall

  Or labour in the fields with mist and cloud

  And slant rain hiding them as in a shroud.

  THE ROOKERY

  When we were half asleep we thought it seemed

  Stiller than usual; but no one dreamed

  That aught was wrong until we came downstairs

  And looked, as we had done these many years,

  At the huge wall of elms that flanked the lawn

  And shouted every time a wind was born.

  Someone cried ‘Look!’: we crowded to the pane:

  Their tops still glittering from last night’s rain,

  They swayed a little, and upon their boughs

  Swung to and fro each black untidy house

  The rooks had made in some past century,

  And mended every springtime. But no rook

  Showed dark against the early sky, or shook

  Down twigs, or cawed; a hungry fledgling’s cry,

  Waiting a breakfast that would never come,

  Was all we heard; the world seemed stricken dumb.

  ‘The rooks have gone, have gone …’ We said no word;

  But in the silence each one’s thought was heard.

  Six months later—this was July 1926—Weston came down to stay with me at the seaside. I see him striding towards me, along Yarmouth Pier, a tall figure with loose violent impatient movements, dressed in dirty grey flannels and a black evening bow-tie. On his straw-coloured head was planted a very broad-brimmed black felt hat.

  This hat I disliked from the start. It represented, I felt, something self-conscious and sham, something that Oxford had superimposed upon Weston’s personality; something which he, in his turn, was trying to impose upon me. He wore it with a certain guilty defiance: he wasn’t quite comfortable in it; he wanted me to accept it, with all its implications—and I wouldn’t. I will never, as long as I live, accept any of Weston’s hats. Since that day, he has tried me with several. There was an opera hat—belonging to the period when he decided that poets ought to dress like bank directors, in morning cutaways and striped trousers or evening swallowtails. There was a workman’s cap, with a shiny black peak, which he bought while he was living in Berlin, and which had, in the end, to be burnt, because he was sick into it one evening in a cinema. There was, and occasionally still is, a panama with a black ribbon—representing, I think, Weston’s conception of himself as a lunatic clergyman; always a favourite role. Also, most insidious of all, there exists, somewhere in the background, a schoolmaster’s mortar-board. He has never actually dared to show me this: but I have seen him wearing it in several photographs.

  The black hat caused a considerable sensation in the village where I was staying. The village boys and girls, grouped along the inn wall by the bus stop, sniggered loudly as we got out of the bus. Weston was pleased: ‘Laughter,’ he announced, ‘is the first sign of sexual attraction.’ Throughout the journey, he had entertained our fellow passengers and embarrassed me furiously by holding forth, in resonant Oxonian tones: ‘Of course, intellect’s the only thing that matters at all … Apart from Nature, geometry’s all there is … Geometry belongs to man. Man’s got to assert himself against Nature, all the time. … Of course, I’ve absolutely no use for colour. Only form. The only really exciting things are volumes and shapes … Poetry’s got to be made up of images of form. I hate sunsets and flowers. And I loathe the sea. The sea is formless …’

  But however embarrassing such statements might be to me, when uttered in public vehicles, they never for a moment made me feel—as I should have felt if a Poshocrat had been speaking—that Weston himself was a sham. He was merely experimenting aloud; saying over the latest things he had read in books, to hear how they sounded. Also they were a kind of substitute for small talk: for Weston, in his own peculiar way, made strenuous attempts to be the model guest. He really wanted every minute of the visit to be a success—on the highest intellectual plane. I was touched and flattered to discover, bit by bit, that he admired me; looked up to me, indeed, as a sort of literary elder brother. My own vanity and inexperience propelled me into this role easily enough: nowadays I should think twice about assuming such a responsibility—for Weston, who was as lazy as he was prolific, agreed without hesitation to any suggestion I cared to make; never stopping to ask himself whether my judgment was right or wrong. If I wanted an adjective altered, it was altered then and there. But if I suggested that a passage should be rewritten, Weston would say: ‘Much better scrap the whole thing,’ and throw the poem, without a murmur, into the waste-paper basket. If, on the other hand, I had praised a line in a poem otherwise condemned, then that line would reappear in a new poem. And if I didn’t like this poem, either, but admired a second line, then both the lines would appear in a third poem, and so on—until a poem had been evolved which was a little anthology of my favourite lines, strung together without even an attempt to make connected sense. For this reason, most of Weston’s work at that period was extraordinarily obscure.

  Over, in any case, were the days of his pastoral simplicity. Since our meetings at Christmas, Weston’s literary tastes had undergone a violent revolution. Hardy and Edward Thomas were forgotten. Eliot was now the master. Quotations and misquotations were allowed, together with bits of foreign languages, proper names and private jokes. Weston was peculiarly well equipped for playing the Waste Land game. For Eliot’s Dante-quotations and classical learning, he substituted oddments of scientific, medical and psycho-analytical jargon: his magpie brain was a hoard of curious and suggestive phrases from Jung, Rivers, Kretschmer and Freud. He peppered his work liberally with such terms as ‘eutectic,’ ‘sigmoid curve,’ ‘Arch-Monad,’ ‘ligature,’ ‘gastropod’; seeking thereby to produce what he himself described as a ‘clinical’ effect. To be ‘clinically minded’ was, he said, the first duty of a poet. Love wasn’t exciting or romantic or even disgusting; it was funny. The poet must handle it and similar themes with a wry, bitter smile and a pair of rubber surgical gloves. Poetry must be classic, clinical and austere.

  I got very tired of the word ‘austere’ in the course of the next few days: I began to wonder whether it didn’t, as a rule, mean simply ‘pompous’ or ‘priggish.’ At this time, Weston was a warm admirer of the works of Edwin Arlington Robinson: Robinson, it appeared, was very austere indeed. We nearly had a serious quarrel over:

  The forehead and the little ears

  Have gone where Saturn keeps the years

  a couplet which he particularly liked, but which I thought, and still think, unintentionally very funny.

  ‘Austerity’ was also mixed up with Weston’s feelings about the heroic Norse literature—his own personal variety of ‘War’-fixation. Naturally enough, he had been brought up on the Icelandic sagas; for they were the background of his family history. On his recommendation, I now began, for the first time, to read Grettir and Burnt Njal, which he had with him in his suitcase. These warriors, with their feuds, their practical jokes, their dark threats conveyed in puns and riddles and deliberate understatements (‘I think this day will end unluckily for some, but chiefly for those who least expect harm’): they seemed so familiar—where had I met them before? Yes, I recognized them now: they were the boys at our preparatory school. Weston was pleased with the idea: we discussed it a good deal, wondering which of our schoolfellows best corresponded to the saga characters. In time, the school-saga world became for us a kind of Mortmere—a Mortmere founded upon our preparatory-school lives, just as the original Mortmere had been founded upon my life with Chalmers at Cambridge. About a year later, I actually
tried the experiment of writing a school story in what was a kind of hybrid language composed of saga phraseology and schoolboy slang. And soon after this, Weston produced a short verse play in which the two worlds are so confused that it is almost impossible to say whether the characters are epic heroes or members of a school O.T.C.

  In the intervals of all this talk, we bathed, got mildly drunk at the village pub and sang hymns to the accompaniment of Weston’s banging on the piano in our lodgings. Weston, despite the apparent clumsiness of his large pudgy hands, was a competent pianist. He could never resist the sight of a piano, no matter whether it was in the refreshment room of a German railway station or the drawing-room of a strange house: down he would sit, without so much as taking off his hat, and begin to play his beloved hymn tunes, psalms and chants—the last remnants of his Anglican upbringing. When he had finished the keyboard would be littered with ash and tobacco from his huge volcano-like pipe. He smoked enormously, insatiably: ‘Insufficient weaning,’ he explained. ‘I must have something to suck.’ And he drank more cups of tea per day than anybody else I have ever known. It was as if his large, white apparently bloodless body needed continual reinforcements of warmth. Although this was the height of the summer, he insisted, if the day was cloudy, on having a fire in the sitting-room. At night he slept with two thick blankets, an eiderdown, both our overcoats and all the rugs in his bedroom piled upon his bed.

  When he had gone, I sat alone in my seaside lodgings and felt sorry: despite the fact that my most precious books were full of nicotine stains and dirty thumb-prints, that a hole had been burnt in my overcoat with a lighted cigar, and that I could hardly venture to show my face in the pub, since Weston had been practically turned out of it for loudly quoting the most lurid lines of Webster and Tourneur. With or without his hat, Weston was a most stimulating companion; and his short visit had excited and disturbed me profoundly. He had given me a badly needed shaking-up. Inevitably, I compared him with Chalmers. When Chalmers and I were together there were, and had always been, certain reticences between us: parts of our lives were common ground, other parts were not—and these, by mutual consent, we respected and left alone. The same thing was true of my other friends, Philip, the Cheurets, Eric. But Weston left nothing alone and respected nothing: he intruded everywhere; upon my old-maidish tidyness, my intimate little fads, my private ailments, my most secret sexual fears. As mercilessly inquisitive as a child of six, he enquired into the details of my dreams and phantasies, unravelled my complexes and poked, with his blunt finger, the acne on my left shoulder-blade, of which, since the age of eighteen, I had been extravagantly ashamed. I had found myself answering his questions, as one always must answer, when the questioner himself is completely impervious to delicacy or shame. And, after all, when I had finished, the heavens hadn’t fallen; and, ah, what a relief to have spoken the words aloud!

  Weston’s own attitude to sex, in its simplicity and utter lack of inhibition, fairly took my breath away. He was no Don Juan: he didn’t run round hunting for his pleasures. But he took what came to him with a matter-of-factness and an appetite as hearty as that which he showed when sitting down to dinner. I don’t think that, even in those days, he exaggerated much: certainly, his manner of describing these adventures bore all the marks of truth. I found his shameless prosaic anecdotes only too hard to forget, as I lay restlessly awake at night, listening to the waves, alone in my single bed.

  But one doesn’t inherit a nonconformist conscience for nothing; and Weston had stirred up mine with a vengeance. During the next three or four months, I suffered all the acute mental discomfort of a patient who has been deserted by his psycho-analyst in the middle of the analysis: I couldn’t bear to see anybody—either Chalmers or Philip or the Cheurets; and Weston least of all. I ran away from them to a cottage in Wales, where I sat at the window, looking down the road towards the mountains or trying to read the first volume of Proust. It rained without stopping. The stream at the bottom of the garden was like dark foam-flecked stout. The clouds were piled upon the hill like damp heavy bedclothes. I wrote in my journal: ‘I am alone.’ At the end of four days, I could stand it no longer and returned to London, where I bought a small Browning automatic pistol and made a will, leaving everything to Chalmers and requesting him to burn my manuscripts and diaries unread. Philip showed me how to use the pistol, with a certain professional relish: ‘Better not try the heart, boy. Too risky. Stick it in your mouth, that’s the best way—but, for God’s sake, be careful: if you tilt it too far back, you’ll probably only be paralysed for life; and if it’s too far forward, the odds are you’ll just lose an eye or your sense of smell, or you mightn’t even do any damage at all … Far better get a nice big army revolver and blow the top of your head clean off …’ He knew perfectly well, of course, that I’d never have the nerve to do it. Even my family showed no undue alarm on receiving dark hints of what was locked away upstairs in my playbox. They knew me too well: everybody knew me too well—that was my supreme humiliation. In my journal, I raged extravagantly against myself, as the fawning spaniel, the born parasite, the masochistic self-confessor, the public lavatory that anyone might flush. But I’d astonish them yet, I swore. Yes, from that very instant, the change would begin. Screwing the cap to my fountain-pen, rising from my chair, shutting the bureau, I turned the handle of my sitting-room door and opened it solemnly into the New Life. Descending the staircase of the dining-room I was Christopher Isherwood no longer, but a satanically proud, icy, impenetrable demon; an all-knowing, all-pardoning saviour of mankind; a martyr-evangelist of the tea-table, from whom the most atrocious drawing-room tortures could wring no more than a polite proffer of the buttered scones. Exquisite politeness was the most important feature of the new technique. At supper, instead of sitting cross and glum, I mildly surprised my family by helping the ladies into their chairs, offering to carve the joint, chatting amiably about the weather and the trees in the parks. How were they to know that a sword transfixed my entrails, that blood dripped steadily from my mental hair-shirt? An aunt, who happened to be staying in the house, remarked how well I was looking: my trip to Wales, she added, certainly seemed to have done me good.

  No. No No. It was hopeless. As long as I remained at home, I could never expect to escape from my familiar tiresome, despicable self. Very well, then: I would leave home. I would start all over again, among new people, who didn’t know me. I would never see any of my old friends again—well, at any rate, not for ten years. I would go to Mexico, to Paris, to a mining village in Wales. Perhaps I would grow a beard. (I sketched one to a photograph of myself, with my fountain-pen: the effect was disappointing.) But one thing, at least, was quite certain now: I really would go—even if it was no farther than the next street.

  My family, as usual, was reasonable, sympathetic and prepared to be helpful, if allowed. I had planned my departure as the first of a series of staggering surprises—‘he was next heard of leading a revolution in Albania … a year passed without news; then, by purest chance, a mutual friend caught sight of him, for an instant, on the quayside at Lisbon, wearing the uniform of the Spanish Foreign Legion … Seven months later, came a letter on the notepaper of a little Dutch hotel in Shanghai …’ and so on. But, needless to say, within twenty-four hours of my decision, the scheme was being discussed round our drawing-room hearth as the mildest and most respectable of domestic adventures: ‘We must try and find a nice bed-sitting-room … perhaps somewhere near the river … oughtn’t to give more than thirty shillings …’ And the neighbours were told: ‘Christopher’s decided to set up on his own for a little … better able to concentrate … naturally, at his age, one likes to be independent … bachelor’s quarters …’

  Since my leaving Cambridge, my family had been giving me an allowance of one hundred and fifty pounds a year, in addition to the pound a week sporadically earned at the Cheurets (who were now away on holiday in the south of France): so that I was very comfortably off, as long as I continued to live re
nt and board free, at home. Now, of course, I should have to look out for a full-time job. But what kind of a job? What—after twelve years at school and university, with well over a thousand pounds spent on my education—was I really qualified to do? Nothing whatever. As a result of my performance in the Tripos, I hadn’t even the necessary credentials for schoolmastering—that last refuge of the unsuccessful literary man. Still, teaching of some kind it would have to be. Parents on the look-out for a private tutor were not so particular, I was told. I put down my name on the books of the scholastic agents, Messrs Gabbitas and Thring.

  If one were an eccentric dilettante of leisure and means, one might well take up this form of job-hunting as a sport, simply for the pleasure of prying into strange houses, studying at close quarters the habits of the rich, the neurotic, the silly and the mad, and getting fascinating glimpses of the astonishing tangles in which so many of our English upper-class families contrive to involve themselves and to live. The private tutor is, socially, a cross between a doctor and a domestic servant; and the future employer (almost always the lady of the house) will often speak to him with a freedom undreamed of when addressing her friends and equals: ‘I’d better tell you straight away, Mr Isherwood: things are very difficult for me, just at present … at first you may find it rather strange … My husband has curious moods …’ ‘Of course, Douglas—that’s my eldest boy—is a great anxiety to me in many ways … Oh, Mr Isherwood, isn’t alcohol a terrible scourge? It’s been the curse of our family for generations …’ ‘You’re Church of England, I suppose? Yes … Naturally … Well, I shall want you to help me struggle against certain influences … You see, my husband’s mother is a very strict Catholic …’ These, and even more intimate confidences, the applicant must be prepared to listen to; tactfully, sympathetically, without the flicker of an eyelid. It is unwise to offer much comment. I once lost a job by brightly admitting that our own family skeletons bore a close resemblance to those displayed before me by a wealthy worried lady in Belgravia. Best of all is the grave silent all-comprehending nod. But don’t be too solemn. Your interviewer is looking for someone who will amuse, as well as discipline, her children. Above all, air no educational theories: they are not welcome in the best houses. A very effective line is: ‘Look here, Mrs Smith—will you let me talk to your son for five minutes, alone? Then, when I’ve gone, I want you to ask him if he’d like to have me for a tutor. It’s no good whatever giving the boy a tutor he dislikes from the start.’ The beauty of this is that Mrs Smith, utterly disarmed by your frankness, will almost certainly insist on engaging you, even if her son protests that he has never met anybody so unpleasant in his whole life.