Lions and Shadows

by Christopher Isherwood

  But when Philip, who obviously found Platt’s presence a little cramping, suggested that we should dine together that evening, I made an excuse and declined. I wasn’t strong enough to face him alone—yet.

  The medical school had stimulated me in one direction, at any rate. No sooner had I joined it than I began to write a new novel. Every afternoon, about tea-time, when lectures were over for the day, I hurried eagerly home to my manuscript. During those autumn months I wrote like mad, as I had never written before, without hesitation, without pausing to correct, forgetting all my inhibitions, my neurotic etcher’s neatness, intent only upon discharging my load of ideas. This was to be only a rough draft, of course. I simply wanted to get the bare outlines of the story down on paper, before they changed and became blurred again.

  The novel was to be called A War Memorial, The War Memorial, or perhaps simply The Memorial. It was to be about war: not the War itself, but the effect of the idea of ‘War’ on my generation. It was to give expression, at last, to my own ‘War’ complex, and to all the reactions which had followed my meeting with Lester at the Bay. Its private title (most novels have private titles) was of course, War and Peace. Like Tolstoy, I would tell the story of a family; its births and deaths, ups and downs, marriage, feuds and love affairs—all ‘The Eternals,’ as Chalmers used, rather acidly, to call them, were to be stuffed into sixty thousand words. No more drawing-room comedies for me. I was out to write an epic; a potted epic; an epic disguised as a drawing-room comedy.

  The worst of all epics, except the very greatest, is that their beginnings are so dull. Either the writer is going a long way back in time and doesn’t know his stuff, or there are wearisome interrelationships to be disentangled and explained, or you have got to plough through the hero’s childhood, which is almost certain to be a bore. Therefore epics, I reasoned, should start in the middle and go backwards, then forwards again—so that the reader comes upon the dullness half-way through, when he is more interested in the characters; the fish holds its tail in its mouth, and time is circular, which sounds Einstein-ish and brilliantly modern.

  But if you are to go backwards in Time, surely that means an ‘I remember’ digression—a remedy infinitely worse than the original fault? Yes, it does; as long as you stick to the idea of writing a continuous narrative. But why should the narrative be continuous? Why not write the story in self-contained scenes, like a play; an epic in an album of snapshots? First snapshot: a group of men and women drinking cocktails in nearly modern dress, the fashions of the year before last. Second snapshot: an Edwardian tea-party. What charming, funny costumes! But, hullo—wait a minute! We seem to recognize some of the figures. That young girl in the enormous hat; surely she’s the smart Eton-cropped woman of forty with the well-preserved figure? Yes, she is! And now, here’s the third snapshot: the dresses still look queer, it’s immediately postwar. Looking at it carefully, you can see what ten years have done to these men and women. Some of them have disappeared altogether from the earlier scene; and that little boy in the foreground has nearly grown up. The final, fourth snapshot (dated the present day) is, at first sight, something of a disappointment: it is, to all intents and purposes, identical with number one. But that only shows the exquisite subtlety of our method; because, if you look at these faces more closely, there is all the difference in the world. It is the difference made by knowledge. In the first snapshot, we saw these people merely as casual acquaintances: here they are our intimate friends. With the eyes of friends, we look deeply into their faces, reading, in Time’s cipher, everything which is secretly written there. And this sends us back to the first snapshot. With how much more interest we examine it now! Every attitude, every gesture, seems charged with meaning, with reference to things past, with presage of things to come. And so we go through our album once again. And again and again and again. There is no reason, theoretically, why you should ever stop reading this kind of book at all.

  I had planned to finish the first draft of The Memorial before the end of the medical school term. And I did finish it, after a fashion: the last twenty pages were a mere scribble. I put it away in a drawer—without even reading through it—and hurried off to take the terminal chemistry exam. I need hardly add that I came out bottom of the list.

  Weston returned from Germany to spend Christmas at home. He was full of stories of Berlin, that astonishing vicious yet fundamentally so respectable city, where even the nightlife had a cosy domestic quality and where the films were the most interesting in Europe. Also, it seemed, cigars were incredibly cheap. Weston had one continually in his mouth: he now looked more than ever like an exceedingly dirty millionaire.

  But the most important experience of Weston’s Berlin visit had had nothing to do with Germany or the Germans at all. One evening, in a café, he had got into conversation with a stranger, an Englishman named Barnard. This Mr Barnard—himself an anthropologist and a most remarkable man from all accounts—had first told Weston about the great psychologist, Homer Lane. Barnard had been a patient and pupil of Lane’s, and now, since the master’s death, he was one of the very few people really qualified to spread Lane’s teachings and carry on his work. In Weston, he had found an intelligent listener who became, overnight, an enthusiastic disciple.

  Every disease, Lane had taught, is in itself a cure—if we know how to take it. There is only one sin: disobedience to the inner law of our own nature. The results of this disobedience show themselves in crime or in disease; but the disobedience is never, in the first place, our own fault—it is the fault of those who teach us, as children, to control God (our desires) instead of giving Him room to grow. The whole problem, when dealing with a patient, is to find out which of all the conflicting things inside him is God, and which is the Devil. And the one sure guide is that God appears always unreasonable, while the Devil appears always to be noble and right. God appears unreasonable because He has been put in prison and driven wild. The Devil is conscious control, and is, therefore, reasonable and sane.

  Conventional education (I am paraphrasing Barnard’s own words, from a letter Weston once showed me) inverts the whole natural system in childhood, turning the child into a spurious adult. So that later, when the child grows up physically into a man, he is bound to try to regain his childhood—by means which, to the outside world, appear ever more and more unreasonable. If the conscious mind were really the controlling factor, God would remain in prison, the world would become a bedlam in a few generations, and the race automatically die out. So diseases and neuroses come to kill off the offenders or bring them to their senses. Diseases are therefore only warning symptoms of a sickness of the soul; they are manifestations of God—and those who try to ‘cure’ them without first curing the soul are only serving the Devil. The disease of the soul is the belief in moral control: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, as against the Tree of Life.

  Lane, as will be seen from the above, had a good deal in common with D. H. Lawrence—particularly in Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious. Lawrence, like Lane, exclaimed against the conception of the ‘right’ kinds of feeling invented by professional moralists—meekness and forbearance and consideration for others—as opposed to the ‘wrong’ kinds of feeling—anger and hatred and rebelliousness. Both of them were horrified by the ideal of self-sacrifice. Self-sacrificing, Barnard had told Weston, only means, in the last analysis, the sacrifice of others to yourself: it is the subtlest and most deadly form of selfishness. One of the greatest evils of our civilization is the invention of the idea of pity. Pity, consciously induced, loveless and sterile, is never a healer, always a destroyer. Pity frustrates every attempted cure. If you find yourself beginning to pity anyone who is ill or in trouble, said Barnard, you cannot help him: you had far better abandon him altogether.

  Lane’s practice seemed to have been as sensational as his preaching. He detested the conventional pomposities of the psychologist: the solemn consulting-rooms and the shaded lights. If his patients needed it, he to
ok them to night clubs, or tearing about the countryside in his car. A timid retiring young man he knocked down, to make him hit back. A child of rich parents who was ‘difficult’ and smashed all his expensive toys became quite normal as soon as he had been allowed to play with his own excrement. Lane laughed hygiene and antisepsis to scorn (this item had particularly appealed to Weston): for how could you possibly contract blood-poisoning if you were pure in heart?

  Weston had assimilated all these ideas with his customary zest and ease, adding to them a touch of extravagance which was peculiarly his own. His whole vocabulary, I found, was renovated and revised to include the new catchwords. We hadn’t been together a quarter of an hour before he was reproving me for harbouring a ‘death-wish.’ I had admitted to feeling ill:

  ‘You’ve got to drop all that,’ said Weston. ‘When people are ill, they’re wicked. You must stop it. You must be pure in heart.’

  ‘What nonsense!’ I retorted. ‘How can I stop it? There’s nothing the matter with my heart. It’s my tonsils.’

  ‘Your tonsils? That’s very interesting …’ Weston’s consulting-room manner was excessively irritating: ‘I suppose you know what that means?’

  ‘Certainly. It means I’ve caught a chill.’

  ‘It means you’ve been telling lies!’

  ‘Oh, indeed? What have I been telling lies about?’

  Weston looked down his nose; provokingly mysterious. I could have kicked him: ‘You’re the only person who can answer that!’

  After this, Weston gave me a whole catalogue of ailments and physical defects, with their psychic causes: if you refused to make use of your creative powers, you produced a cancer, instead; excessive obstinacy—a refusal to ‘bend the knee’—found expression in rheumatism of the joints; deafness and short sight were attempts to shut out the exterior world (‘Oh, yes, I know,’ Weston interrupted, before I had time to say anything suitably sarcastic, ‘that’s how I have to pay for being an introvert … Stephen’s different. You know why he’s so tall? He’s trying to reach Heaven!’ …), deformities, producing a lop-sided body, were the result of a struggle between instinct and will; consumption represented a desire to return to early childhood, because the lungs are the first organs used by the new-born baby; epilepsy went even farther back—it was an attempt to become an angel, and fly.

  And how, I asked, somewhat acidly, were all these misfortunes to be avoided? Quite simply, Weston replied—by being pure in heart. Even today, I am uncertain whether it was Barnard or Weston himself who was originally responsible for this annoying and priggish-sounding phrase. At any rate I could suggest no better one, and very soon, I, too, began to use it freely. The pure-in-heart man became our new ideal. He represented, indeed, our picture of Lane himself. He was essentially free and easy, generous with his money and belongings, without worries or inhibitions. He would let you brush your teeth with his toothbrush or write with his fountain-pen. He was a wonderful listener, but he never ‘sympathized’ with your troubles; and the only advice he ever gave was in the form of parables—stories about other people which you could apply to your own problems, if you liked. He was entirely without fear: therefore he could never catch an infectious disease. And without sexual guilt: therefore he was immune from syphilis. Above all, he was profoundly, fundamentally happy.

  Needless to say, I didn’t accept the Lane gospel without a great deal of conscious and subconscious resistance. There was plenty in it to sneer at, and, in Weston’s presence, I sneered. But when Weston had returned to Berlin and I was left alone, with the prospect of another medical school term ahead of me, I began to think things over seriously, with reference to my own life. And the more I thought, the more dissatisfied I became.

  I hadn’t advanced an inch, really, since those Cambridge days. ‘Isherwood the Artist’ was still striking an attitude on his lonely rock. But his black Byronic exile’s cloak failed to impress me any longer. I knew what was inside it now—just plain, cold, uninteresting funk. Funk of getting too deeply involved with other people, sex-funk, funk of the future. I was eternally worrying about what was going to happen to me—in 1930, in 1940, in 1950; eternally building up defences against attacks which were never launched. Why had I ever become a medical student? Largely, I had to admit, because of a vague, hardly defined fear—a fear that somehow, somewhere, I should one day be isolated and trapped, far from the safety of the nursery and Nanny’s apron, and compelled to face ‘The Test.’ And I had thought of the career of medicine as being essentially safe: people respected your status: if there was a war, you didn’t have to fight. With a medical degree in my pocket, I had fancied, I could face the world. Well, perhaps I could. But was that going to make things any easier for myself? Did I really want to sham my way through life, impressing other people, perhaps, but knowing myself for a coward, at heart? Of course I didn’t. Besides, what was going to happen to my work? As long as I remained a sham, my writing would be sham, too.

  Weston, needless to say, had told Barnard all about me, and about my doings. And Barnard (who, as I later discovered, had very little use for the woes and waverings of young literary neurotics) was said to have commented: ‘The only thing which interests me about Isherwood is the way he cleared out from Cambridge … Perhaps there’s something in him after all.’ What was I to make of this—the Master’s only utterance with regard to myself? Did it mean that I ought to give up the medical school? I felt increasingly convinced that it did. I thought of writing direct to Barnard and asking his advice: but Weston had already warned me that Barnard never advised anybody. He only asked: ‘What do you want to do, yourself?’ And when I asked myself what I did want to do, the answer was certainly clear enough: I want to leave. At the same time, I was only too painfully aware how disingenuous these self-examinations had become. Naturally, I wanted to leave the medical school. Who wouldn’t want to wriggle out of difficult uncongenial work? If everybody were to argue like this, would anyone ever qualify for any professional career at all? Besides, as I had said to myself so often before, I had got to settle down, somehow. I had got to earn my living. I had made my bed, and now, by all reasonable standards, I must lie on it.

  But here, Lane and Barnard promptly interrupted: ‘Reasonable? Aha, we were expecting that word! Isn’t the Devil always reasonable? Didn’t we warn you? Have you forgotten your lesson already—that the way to salvation always lies through acts of apparent madness and folly? What you call the voice of Reason is only the voice of Fear. You’re afraid—afraid to trust in your deepest instincts, afraid to take the plunge! Don’t flatter yourself even, that the world is on your side. The world really despises those who conform to its standards. The world is the first to applaud those who dare to break free! We know what you want, all right! The voice of your heart has told us already. You want to commit the unforgivable sin, to shock Mummy and Daddy and Nanny, to smash the nursery clock, to be a really naughty little boy. Well, why not start? Time’s getting on. It’s your only hope for ever growing up, at all. If you stick to your safe London nursery-life, you never will grow up. You’ll die a timid shrivelled Peter Pan. At present, you’re exactly seven years old. Never mind! There’s still time. In 1942, if you start growing now, with luck, you’ll come of age!’

  And so the internal struggle continued—to its inevitable conclusion. Early in January I made my decision. I told my family that I wanted to leave the medical school at once. My family, patient but bewildered as ever, agreed sadly in principle, requesting only that I should stay on until the summer: ‘After all, it’s been paid for.’ I compromised: I would leave at Easter, at the end of the coming term.

  And what then? First of all I must leave England altogether—the break with the old life must be complete, this time—and I must talk to Barnard. I’d go to Berlin. Weston had already invited me to visit him there. Perhaps I’d stay on right through the summer. But this was plan-making, and plan-making, by the new rules, was wicked, like all other forms of worrying about the future. I shoul
d have to await the further commands of the inner voice. As luck would have it, I had just unearthed a forgotten War Loan certificate worth close on fifty pounds. One could consider it, if one liked, as the first-fruits of purity of heart. I have often wondered, since then, how Lane expected people to obey the inner voice when they hadn’t any ready cash.

  Now that I was virtually a free man, I could afford to regard the medical school with very different eyes. Indeed, I was actually glad to be back, to breathe again the rotten-egg smells of the lab. Platt I greeted like a brother. He was sallower than ever—for he had been working hard all through the Christmas holidays—and stockily self-confident: he had passed out top in the terminal exams. I didn’t tell him of my decision. It would only have shocked him, and might even have damaged slightly his cast-iron morale.

  I told the Cheurets, of course; and Chalmers and the Easts and Bill Scott and Stephen Savage, and finally Philip. For Weston I kept the news as a surprise, when we met in Berlin. The Cheurets were astonished but entirely uncritical: they had long ago ceased to pass judgment on the eccentricities of their friends. Chalmers wrote from the school at which he was working: he approved of this, as of every other anarchic, irrational act, but was inclined to mistrust the brief sketch I had given him of the Homer Lane philosophy—he had lost none of his old dislike of cults. The Easts were simply amused: ‘Bisherwood’s off again!’ Bill, rather unexpectedly, disapproved: he had nothing against my leaving the medical school, and what I told him about Lane interested him deeply (he was an ardent admirer of D. H. Lawrence); but he had a violent and, as it seemed to me, purely mystical prejudice against Berlin: ‘You’re the very last person who ought to go there, Christopher. It isn’t the right sort of place for you at all …’ On being pressed to explain what he meant, he would only repeat: ‘It’s a bad place … I can feel it …’ I had the greatest respect for Bill’s intuitions, and might have taken this one more seriously had not Bill admitted that he himself had never been in Berlin in his life. (Nevertheless, looking back, I can see clearly what he did mean: and, certainly, in a sense, he was right. I must refer my readers, here, to my novel, Mr Norris Changes Trains!) As for Stephen Savage, he was as enthusiastic as I could wish. Viewed from his super-dramatic standpoint, my departure was an act of unparalleled daring, personal integrity and moral courage. At the end of half an hour he had succeeded in making me feel every kind of prig, fool and sham. It was overwhelming to be believed in by Stephen: it was like being hugged by an enormous bear.