Lions and Shadows

by Christopher Isherwood

  Mist and thin rain blew down the road to meet us, like the cold breath of the North itself. On the wall of a white farm, a heart had been cut out of living ivy. There were antlers above the farmhouse doors. The carts and fences and the shutters of windows were painted scarlet, as I had seen them, once, in a nursery book about Norway. Bill excited me by saying that this wasn’t the north of Britain, but the extreme southern province of the Norse kingdom. Near Wick, at a house where we stopped to fill the cooler with water, a bearded farmer showed us coins of Edward the Second and of Philip and Mary which he had dug out of his land; we walked out to the cliff edge to look at a Pictish broch. Long streamers of mucus flew out of the farmer’s nose and fluttered on the breeze; so that Bill and I had to keep dodging around him to windward, roaring with laughter. The lean agile old man seemed quite aware of the joke; he even appeared to be joining in the game and deliberately trying to hit us. Soon we were all three waving our arms, shouting, laughing and jumping about in a kind of rustic dance.

  Wick, entrenched behind its stone jetty, seemed a last outpost, a frontier fort against the savage, hostile sea. Exhausted gulls were blown down the main street, flapping weakly, like sheets of wet newspaper. The waves exploded like enormous shells, spattering the gleaming wet roofs. There was a first-aid station behind the pier. The inhabitants were curiously gentle, with soft intimate voices. ‘Come awake!’ said the chambermaid at the hotel, bringing our morning tea. The barber’s boy, at the shop where we went to be shaved, recited a hymn: “When I am sad, He makes me glad. He’s my friend.’ … It’s verra nice, that.’ ‘Ah,’ laughed one of the older customers, ‘ye’re too saft-hearted!’ The boy smiled and shook his head: ‘Would ye have hearts of iron, then; or what?’ Down at the harbour, Bill painted one of his best pictures: the doomed white houses shrinking back against the brown land, and one terrible wave, olive green with a hanging lip of foam, like a gigantic mountain, rolling in to engulf the town for ever.

  We drove on, across the misty bog-plains, striped black where the peat had been cut, in the direction of Cape Wrath. The coast was gashed into jagged fjords: under the cliffs, the water lay like ebony, with vivid jade shallows. The mountains were piled up in the west against an angry sunset. That night, we slept at Bettyhill, where the road turns south, along the shallow estuary, through dwarf birch forests, towards England.

  Bill talked of the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, but we both knew that we were going back. One always has to go back, I thought, at the end of these little escapades. You may give your familiar everyday self the slip easily enough; for several hours, your absence won’t be noticed, and if your car is fast and you can keep on the run you may even escape for a whole week. But, sooner or later, you will come to a halt; sooner or later, that dreary governess, that gloomy male nurse will catch you up; will arrive, on the slow train, to fetch you back to your nursery prison of minor obligations, duties, habits, ties. All at once, I felt deeply depressed and very tired. Bill, sympathetic as ever, prescribed a double whisky. But this time the cure didn’t work, and the two which followed it merely made me maudlin. ‘It’s no good,’ I told him. ‘I shall never try to run away again.’

  Back at home, in the depths of my reaction from the excitement of our Scotch journey, I remembered Lester’s advice. Suppose I really did become a doctor? The idea seemed as absurd as ever; and—for that very reason—attractive. ‘After all,’ I told Philip, ‘I’ve got to do something. I can’t be a tutor all my life. And I’m not such a fool as to imagine that I’ll ever make a living out of writing …’ (Needless to say, this wasn’t quite sincere.) Philip shrugged his shoulders. He was anything but encouraging: ‘Ah well, boy; I suppose you know best … I believe there are people who enjoy it … Shouldn’t have thought you would, somehow… But you never can tell …’ He plainly thought me a little mad. But Chalmers was surprisingly enthusiastic. Hadn’t Tchekhov been a doctor? It would be wonderful for getting copy: the ideal career for a novelist. What opportunities for hearing death-bed confessions, marital confidences; for tea-tabling the most horrible diseases and loathsome operations! ‘And at night, when the last patient has gone home, you’ll light your peculiar-looking green-shaded lamp in the surgery, and sit down to write your masterpiece. It’ll be called … let me see …’ To these day-dreams, I added others, more intimate: the beautiful doomed sufferer, the last clasp of the hot dry hand, the murmured name … Or, alternatively, the marvellous cure, the lifelong gratitude … Thus, with the aid of a little imagination, do one’s most fantastic projects become real.

  Within a week, I had got to the point of confiding in my family. Within a fortnight, the thing was as good as arranged. It would be hardly possible, of course, to start until the autumn of next year; in the slight recoil from my first enthusiasm I was secretly rather glad of this respite. It would give me time to change my mind, supposing that anything were to happen in the interval. What kind of thing? Oh well, something wonderful, something that would alter the whole course of my life. A miracle, in fact? Yes—and why not? After all, everybody has the right to demand at least one miracle.

  Early in January, I got a letter from Messrs Jonathan Cape. Would I go round to see them at once? Mr Cape himself received me in his office. I forget what he looked like. Indeed, I was too dazed to notice or understand anything beyond the first unbelievable sentences: ‘Well, Mr Isherwood, I liked your book … There are just a couple of points I might make … We’ll ask the printers to indent the type in those passages … Would May be too late? We suggest ten per cent, royalties and an advance …’ I suppose I neither kissed his hand nor danced a jig before the typists. But I ran all the way to the tube station; and the massed bands were playing their loudest, and the streets were full of waving flags.

  7

  All the Conspirators duly appeared, as Mr Cape had promised, during the third week in May 1928. I was back at Beach View, with Chalmers, when the six advance copies arrived; every time he went out of the room, I kept furtively opening them and peeping at my name on the title pages. We both agreed that a copy should be sent to Mr Holmes, with a suitable inscription.

  Chalmers had left his job in Cornwall. He had spent the spring term tutoring a boy in the North of England: there had been plenty of spare time, and he had used it to write the longest and most elaborate of all our Mortmere stories, The Railway Accident. This is the last contribution either of us ever made to the literature of Mortmere. Mortmere seemed to have brought us to a dead end. The cult of romantic strangeness, we both knew, was a luxury for the comfortable University fireside; it could not save you from the drab realities of cheap lodgings and a dull, underpaid job. Gunball was a fair-weather friend; when your money ran short, he blandly left you in the lurch.

  But Chalmers needed Gunball, at all costs. I did not. That, as writers, was the essential difference between us. Chalmers had created Gunball out of his own flesh and blood; he could never afford to abandon him altogether; if he did so, he was lost. He was to spend the next three years in desperate and bitter struggles to relate Mortmere to the real world of the jobs and the lodging-houses; to find the formula which would transform our private fancies and amusing freaks and bogies into valid symbols of the ills of society and the toils and aspirations of our daily lives. For the formula did, after all, exist. And Chalmers did at last find it, at the end of a long and weary search, not hidden in the mysterious emblems of Dürer or the prophetic utterances of Blake, not in any anagram, or cipher, or mediaeval Latin inscription, but quite clearly set down, for everybody to read, in the pages of Lenin and of Marx.

  ‘Mr Christopher Isherwood,’ wrote Punch, ‘is either badly troubled with that kind of portentous solemnity which so often accompanies the mental growing pains of the very young, or else he has written his novel with his tongue in his cheek … Altogether, the book leaves behind it a faintly nasty taste …’ The Natal Advertiser, still more severe, considered that I had made a ‘bad start on the difficult paths of fiction.’ The Sun,
Sydney, was crushing: ‘If we must have Freudian and psychological novels, dealing with people’s insides …’ The Sphere and the Southport Guardian accused me of ‘cleverness.’ The Liverpool Post and Mercury recommended leniency on the grounds of my obviously extreme youth. The Morning Post and The Times Literary Supplement were politely encouraging. Mr H. I’A Fausset, in the Manchester Guardian, was kind and generous. I had practically no other Press notices at all. The book sold less than three hundred copies, and was duly remaindered and forgotten—until Sir Hugh Walpole, writing in the Sunday Times five years later, included it in a list of six novels which he considered to have been ‘unjustly neglected’ since the War.

  Again this year the Bay was full of new faces. Lester had gone off with his tent; nobody seemed to know where. Tim had joined the Army and was in camp on Salisbury Plain. Muriel had left the sweetshop to be married. There was a different barmaid at the pub. But the changes did not depress me unduly, for, as usual, I found Chalmers’ company all-absorbing and sufficient. With our advancing years (I could remember the time when I thought twenty-five almost middle-aged) we seemed to have grown increasingly silly: our favourite game was to chase bits of toilet paper with walking-sticks over the downs. When the wind was in the right direction the toilet paper would sometimes provide us with a run of several miles; we followed it with yells and Starnese hunting-cries, whirling our sticks above our heads or flinging them, like javelins, at the quarry. In the evenings, after a visit to the pub to buy beer, biscuits and some packets of potato crisps, we would settle down with pencil and paper at the sitting-room table for ‘automatic writing.’ This amusement had nothing to do with spiritualism; you were merely required to put down, as fast as you could, the first words or sentences that came into your head. To reflect, to erase, to try to be literary, was cheating: we both cheated a good deal. Here are some of our results: Chalmers’ first:

  This is a tale of a man in Russian boots who pulled the arms off railway signals. Every morning he ate ensilage and prayed for the redemption of two very old cows who lived in the bath. You understand this coinage? I didn’t, but now, after having achieved, I acknowledged it all at once as the bogus synthesis of our most diurnal bugbear, to wit, the worship of the past. That’s to say, girls, anything that can be improperly be said to the old; old spades, old hair, old tools found in the boxroom under a ruined geyser. Well, when our Petrovitch of the hour fluked into the plumbers’ of his noman’s pellucid errand he was unconditionally met by the unvariegated stare of the counter-maid—the evening star is not current. Neuters are never happy. Watching all day the whey-sour sea vomiting on the broken esplanade. Weary whores in pale dream-brimmed straw hats, reminiscence of the randier eighties when disguise gave sauce and gust to forms now hackneyed and mawkish. Rubber statuary in gardens of ice-cream roses bearing every imprint of foot and belly. Kissing beneath the jangling clock before the cinema doors are opened. Plush seats unbarred between, mumbling hands convolved in calico. Steady, chaps, go slow. Where were we? This problem. How to present the never formulated in terms of the I never tried to formulate. Once more, whores feed on straw. Queerly, queerly. R.L.S. Soon.

  And mine (I should explain that I was suffering that evening from the effects of too much sunbathing):

  My black back streams with bleeding blood with blood with blood with blood. Victim of Nacktkultur, of cliffs, of degenerate parents, of schoolboy tiffs, all all gone. All gone. All gone. All gone. The tape-machine in the lounge couldn’t spool out the news fast enough. Then there was no news. None. For hours. I have eaten all the news. I have swallowed whole Mrs Pace, the railway disaster in Durham, the gift to the Exchequer. Writing here in the closed room by lamplight, with injured bowels, I represent all that is best in a modern consciousness already vitiated by the puppet-show, the dog-racing, the automatic organ. To be true, to be free, to be Proust, ah yes, ah no, ah, ah, far car, stop that, Trudy, drop it or I shoot. I am dying. Typical autoerotic impulse myth. I am dead. Specimen bogus statement of the pre-television age. Very, very important that the word I wanted here: decade, was censored for nearly twelve seconds. Why do I say twelve, not ten? Well, to explain that, boys, would be to write a history of my whole Cambridge life. Of the tea-shops and the hopeless longings for pleasure. Look here, we’ll face this. Am I a Catholic? Yes. Am I a conservative? Yes. Am I Life? Yes. Very well, enter into my kingdom. My back. Blood. All blood. Must end.

  Curiously enough, when we tried this game on Philip, it didn’t work at all. Perhaps his mind was too literal and too uninhibited; perhaps the trouble was that, unlike us, he played fair. All we got was a formidable list of girls who had attracted him since leaving school, with businesslike and quite unprintable comments.

  Philip had come down to stay with us for a weekend. It was too early in the year for many hotel visitors, so he had no opportunity to display his social prowess; but Chalmers and I got him drunk one night at the pub and egged him on to pursue one of the few available local ‘bits.’ The results were unsatisfactory; possibly because Philip’s complicated and showy technique of approach was wasted on a girl accustomed to the extremely direct advances of the village boys. He left for London next day, deeply disappointed. Chalmers, who had heard of a new job, travelled up with him for an interview.

  While they were both away, and without the least warning, Miss Chichester died. She had served my tea, that afternoon, as usual. I had noticed nothing odd in her manner or her movements. Only, as she set the tea-pot on the table she had remarked: ‘My sister’s arriving today,’ and, pausing at the door, had added: ‘I hope you’ll be comfortable.’ This, I realized later, had been her admirably restrained, heroic farewell. For she had known what was coming; had wired, as I heard afterwards, that morning, to her married sister on the mainland to join her at once. The sister, a rosy-cheeked, elderly lady in the prime of health, had entered Miss Chichester’s sitting-room to find her stretched on the sofa, unconscious. Before midnight, Miss Chichester was dead.

  I have had many landladies since that day, some of them excellent, and a few of them remarkable; but not one of them—not even my beloved Fri Schroeder—could rival Miss Chichester in tact. Unfortunately, I couldn’t show my respect by attending her funeral because I had no clothes with me except the flannels I stood up in: the only tribute I could pay to her memory was to stay indoors during the ceremony—in accordance with that curious superstition which demands that a house shall not be left empty while the mourners are away at the graveyard.

  When I got back to London, I had Weston to stay. He had finished with Oxford now, and was going off in the autumn to Berlin to improve his German. He had brought with him to show me the typescript of a story written by an undergraduate he had got to know during his last year at the University: ‘He’s mad,’ said Weston, by way of preface: ‘I think it’s very good indeed.’

  The story—which turned out later to be part of a large, loosely constructed novel—described a young man’s visit to the home of some male and female cousins. The young man is almost incredibly shy, gauche, tactless and generally neurotic; and his social shortcomings are exaggerated by contrast with the elegance, beauty and grace of his hosts. They appear to him as beings from another world; and his hopeless adoration of them fills him with self-hatred and despair. The cousins, on their side, are amused by the young man; they make fun of him, lightly, without malice; exposed to their unconsciously cruel mockery, he suffers tortures of humiliation—culminating in an extraordinary scene, in which, being unable to understand the simple mechanism of a folding card-table, he breaks down altogether and bursts into tears.

  Having finished it, I agreed with Weston: indeed the story was not quite like anything else I had ever read. True, its grammar was awful, its dialogue stilted and its style naive—but it did something to you; you accepted the absurd situations without question; you really cared about the problems of the blundering, tormented young man. The hero was so absorbingly interested in himself, in his own sensations and in eve
rybody who came into contact with him that you couldn’t help sharing his interest. In fact, the experience was so vivid as to be quite painful. You blushed for him, you squirmed at his every faux-pas; you wanted, simultaneously, to kick and protect and shake him.

  A few weeks later, Weston arranged a meeting with the author. He burst in upon us, blushing, sniggering loudly, contriving to trip over the edge of the carpet—an immensely tall, shambling boy of nineteen, with a great scarlet poppy-face, wild frizzy hair, and eyes the violent colour of bluebells. His name was Stephen Savage.

  In an instant, without introductions, we were all laughing and talking at the top of our voices. Savage, as I was later to discover, had this kind of effect upon nearly everybody he met; in his company you naturally began to shout, if only in order to make yourself heard at all. Savage himself was noisy without effort. His beautiful resonant voice—inherited from a professionally political father—would carry to the farthest corners of the largest restaurant the most intimate details of his private life. Not that anything in his life could be properly described as private: he shared his experiences, like a banquet, with his friends. In any and every sort of company he would relate, with the same perfect simplicity, the circumstances of a quarrel, the inner history of his family or the latest developments of a love affair. He inhabited a world of self-created and absorbing drama, into which each new acquaintance was immediately conscripted to play a part. Savage illuminated you like an expressionist producer, with the crudest and most eccentric of spot-lights: you were transfigured, became grandiose, sinister, brilliantly ridiculous or impossibly beautiful, in accordance with his arbitrary, prearranged conception of your role. And soon—such is the hypnotic mastery of the born régisseur—you began to live up to his expectations. In Savage’s presence, people frequently behaved with an extravagance quite foreign to their everyday natures. I have seen several, who were otherwise quiet and reserved, shed tears, pray, perform exotic dances or seize each other by the hair; one eminently respectable lady was even moved to attack her husband with a knife.