Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

by Christopher Isherwood

  Buck Lane really was a lane, with high hedgerows overarched by big trees. Down at the bottom end, it ran into a Negro district, where there were small charming ramshackle houses noisy with dogs and children and Saturday night drunks. Old Railroad Avenue—so-called because the tracks had once run along it—was the Mason-Dixon Line. Above this, the houses were large and grand: the homes of discreetly prosperous Quakers and other esteemed Philadelphian burghers. The Meeting House was there, too. Number 824 belonged to a Mr. Bigelow, one of the proprietors of The Saturday Evening Post. The shares in the Post, once worth a goldmine, had slumped—and now old Mr. Bigelow, somewhat weak in the head, lived in a little apartment in town with his son. His house, which the AFSC had rented for our hostel, was a biggish, undistinguished mansion, built around the beginning of the century. It still contained quite a lot of valuables—old cabinets and clocks, collector’s pieces of china, first editions, etchings by Blampied, Pennell and Muirhead Bone. (Their safety was one of Caroline’s most constant sources of anxiety.) Behind the house there was a big lawn separated by a thick hedge from the playground of the community center—and from the “common” which made Haverford look like an English village.

  I was introduced to Rachel Garner, the fourth member of our staff, who cooked for the group. Rachel was a big soft girl with strong wholesome legs, who belonged to the Church of the Brethren, and had a raucous upstate Pennsylvania accent. She was older than Elizabeth but much more of a child. She cried for what she wanted and bossed her helpers around the kitchen, getting impatient if they didn’t understand her “Dutch” brogue.

  I was to sleep at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Yarnall, right around the corner, at 605 Railroad Avenue. Mr. William Yarnall was a little old gentleman, close on eighty, half crippled by arthritis, very pink and clean, with hair cut in a short fringe like a Japanese doll. He shuffled about the house, lowering himself into chairs with exquisite difficulty and skill. All his movements were in weirdly slow motion—reminding me of the growth of plants “speeded up” by the movie camera. For example, he would take a whole morning to hammer three nails into a chair, persisting, with an incredible patience, until they were well and truly driven in. He was amused by his own helplessness, and joked about it. He lived in placid, hourly expectation of death. As I left the house and said, “See you later,” he would reply, significantly but without the least melodrama, “I hope so, Ishy.”

  Mrs. Yarnall was portly, with three chins, a figure like a small sofa, pretty white hair, lively satirical eyes behind pince-nez. I loved them both dearly. But there was little I could do for either of them, except bring them gossip. Sometimes I felt like the parent bird returning to the nest—I couldn’t disappoint them; there simply must be a worm. “How I wish,” I exclaimed one day, “I had some really awful piece of scandal to tell you!” They didn’t know quite how to take this.

  Mrs. Yarnall tended her husband all day long—washing him, dressing him, getting him downstairs, feeding him, getting him back up again. (There was a special lift for raising him out of a chair, without which he was practically immovable—you slipped your forearm under his and gripped him around the biceps.) During the night, he had to be helped out of bed to urinate. She seldom slept for long.

  Also staying at the Yarnalls’ were two of the group members. (824 Buck Lane hadn’t enough rooms for everybody, and several refugees were guests of the neighbors.) Frederick Caro had been a judge in Berlin. He had a beautiful head, not unlike Goethe’s, but without Goethe’s heaviness and pomposity. His eyes were very light blue; the eyes of a mystic introvert. He spoke English well, carefully choosing his words, and expressing himself with a genuine, touching humility. He worried terribly about his wife and two little girls, who were in occupied Belgium. He seemed the perfect type of liberalistic public servant under the German Republic: a permanently saddened man, the victim of profound philosophical doubts. He told us, half jokingly, that he was supposed to be descended from the famous Rabbi Loew, who made the legendary Golem.110

  Jacob Picard made a good companion for him. He was a lawyer by profession, a poet by vocation—really talented, I believe—from the region of Lake Constance: hollow cheeked, an aristocratic Jewish Dante. Unlike Caro, he was merciless toward the Nazis. He was skeleton thin, grey haired, spectrally elegant, startlingly funny when he put on a derby hat and clowned for the children. He suffered from a complication of nervous tics. Caroline said that he had once been a great ladies’ man. He had a daughter, in England.

  I had come to Haverford, I told myself, as a sort of invisible monk: my spiritual life was to be neither seen nor heard. As I had a room to myself, I should be able to meditate without difficulty, at any rate night and morning. There wasn’t to be a moment’s relaxation on the job. If I got exhausted, I merely had to lie down and go to sleep. Otherwise, constant alertness, every minute of the day. It sounded so simple.

  On arrival, as a physical protest against the move from California, I’d developed a violent cold. I took a somewhat masochistic pleasure in ignoring it and going into Philadelphia to assist at a party for refugees organized by some Quaker ladies of the city. All evening long, a self-satisfied martyr, I played musical chairs—which most of the refugees hated as much as I did—handed coffee and cakes, and made polite conversation to several hundred people, most of whom no doubt, I infected.

  On days when the refugees seemed particularly tiresome or repulsive, I would play a game with myself. Every one of them, I would say, is the Lord. Let me recognize Him beneath these preposterous disguises. He is Martin Gleisner, the bouncing ex-dancer and Wandervogel,111 perpetually plucking at my sleeve to grab my attention away from the others; he is Mr. Haas, the botanist with the spectacles, the wiglike hair, the disgusting breath; he is rat-toothed Klaus Berger, who habitually tries to dodge his share of the housework. Each one of them has a word for me, a message to be decoded, an intelligence test presented in the form of a tiresome request. Don’t let me be deceived. Let me detect significance in all they say and do. I am not teaching them, I am being taught. This isn’t a dreary chore, it is a fascinating game.

  Meeting on Sunday mornings, I found quite valuable, despite all the talking. And Rufus Jones—the uncrowned Quaker “pope”—was a really good speaker. Of course, his utterances were completely against the Friends’ creed of inspiration: they were obviously prepared beforehand, beautifully composed and richly furnished with the biblical and poetic quotations which Rufus seemed able to unwind endlessly from the immense spool of his memory. Despite his great age, he was head and shoulders above anybody else at Meeting, both as an orator and a scholar. The Joneses were very kind to me while I was at Haverford—treating me like an old friend because of our meeting in 1938, on board the Empress of Asia, when Auden and I were crossing from Japan.

  Before Meeting, from ten to eleven, we had an adult bible class, at which various people spoke. This class was organized by Wroe Alderson, who lived with his wife and three children further down Buck Lane. Wroe was an advertising and marketing expert who worked for the Curtis Publishing Company. He was a stocky broad-shouldered man with short vigorous grey hair, smiling grey eyes, a cauliflower ear (from wrestling at college), a lazy drawling voice and a good-natured mailbox mouth. He read Gerald’s books and was the one person in Haverford with whom I could talk quite freely about mystical religion. He was a convinced Quaker—having joined the Society of Friends about five years before—and was therefore regarded with slight suspicion as a newcomer by ultraconservative Haverford. He talked a great deal in Meeting, not well.

  On Monday evenings, Wroe and I formed the habit of driving over to Pendle Hill (the Quaker training center) to attend Dora Willson’s gospel class. Dora Willson was a Swiss lady married to an American Friend. She spoke English with a faint, attractive lisp. She had a thin, grey-eyed, ascetic face and a somewhat angular figure. Sometimes she looked dowdy, sometimes quite beautiful. Wroe, who had a bit of a crush on her, called her jokingly “the Pendle Hill Madonna.”
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  Dora Willson was a pupil of [H. B.] Sharman and used his technique in her classes—leading rather than teaching, referring every problem to the text, insisting that we try to imagine ourselves reading it for the first time, never speaking of “Christ,” but always of “Jesus” or “this individual,” and demanding our individual opinion, not something we’d read in a book. Bill Rahill, from La Verne, was one of the students, and I soon got to know others. I used to look forward to these Pendle Hill sessions extremely. It was like a weekly visit to the theater or the movies. And, for the first time, very dimly, I caught glimpses of an extraordinary figure moving behind the inaccuracies, contradictions and propaganda of the gospel story.

  Meanwhile, the pattern of our daily life at the workshop stabilized itself. We breakfasted at 8:15, washed up the dishes, and had about twenty minutes’ silent meeting, at 9:00 or a quarter after. Then some members of the group would go over to Haverford College (only three or four minutes’ walk away) and sit in on lectures—most of them were planning to take teaching jobs later, themselves. They were pedagogues of the strict, mid-European kind, and they had much to learn about American teaching methods and American students. The informality shocked them a good deal, at first.

  I was giving individual English lessons—five or six a day. I wasn’t the only English teacher, but most of the others—volunteers from Bryn Mawr College, Haverford and the neighborhood—were very uncertain about keeping their teaching appointments; and the schedule had to be switched around all the time. The only other teacher who showed up regularly nearly every evening in the week—and this after a hard day of office work—was Leah Cadbury. Leah was a lively spinster in her fifties (about Caroline’s age) who had a naughty-harmless way of flirting with her male pupils. At 5:00, the whole group went to the Meeting House, where they had lessons in phonetics under Mr. Severinghaus, a relative of Henry Time and Life Luce, and one of the best language teachers I have ever met. This gave me an opportunity of doing my evening sit, before dinner, which was at 6:30.

  It wasn’t an unpleasant life. According to work hours, it wasn’t even exacting—but I found myself curiously tired. The Pennsylvanian fall, which was coming to an end in unbelievable tints of flaring canary-yellow, gold, vermilion and crimson, seemed to sap my vitality. And the job, if conscientiously done, demanded a concentration which was unlike anything I’d ever atttempted before. The lessons were not really lessons, they were psychiatric sessions. You had to give all your time, confidence, faith, courage, to these badly rattled middle-aged people whose lifeline to the homeland had been brutally cut, and whose will to make a new start in the new country was very weak. The giving wasn’t confined to lesson times. From the moment I entered the house in the morning until I left it at night, I was open to attack. “Excuse me for disturbing you, Mr. Isherwood.” “That’s what I’m here for, Herr Seidemann.” And then came the problem. If I was lucky, it was just a request to clear up some grammatical point. More likely, however, it would be a discussion of Shakespeare’s meaning in Measure for Measure; or a letter to be translated; or a legal document to be explained; or a whole short story to be criticized. And out of these conversations came life stories, confessions of fears and inhibitions and failures, and the endless demand for reassurance. (Nearly all the group were agnostics or freethinkers, and they were greatly curious about, and puzzled by, the Quaker philosophy.) To meet this demand consistently was a task worthy of someone infinitely more disciplined than myself. I failed, five days out of six.

  These failures had a curiously close relation to the regularity, or otherwise, of my personal life. I was able to check this again and again. If I missed meditating, or telling my beads, I was just that much less efficient next day. Sometimes, I had really bad breaks, when I flew right off the handle and barked at the refugees like a drill sergeant, or said something really inexcusable. (“You put me at a disadvantage,” I once told Mr. Berger, who had been dodging the dish washing, “I’m not a storm trooper and this isn’t a concentration camp—unfortunately.”) Most of the time, I was just in a bad, grumpy mood. Outbursts of temper, signs of impatience, a tendency to dogmatize—these were the symptoms of weakness which my pupils soon learnt to expect. They played up to them and on them with all the impudence and tact of their race.

  I write as if I didn’t like the refugees. In fact, I was extremely fond of them. And, even considered as a random collection of people, they were absorbingly interesting. I had my favorites, of course; and also my black sheep. The black sheep changed from time to time: a psychologist would have watched with curiosity this shifting focus of resentment in myself.

  To begin with the favorites. There was the Amann family—Paul and Dorothy, and their children, Peter and Eva. They were Viennese. Mr. Amann was a little sandy-haired ferrety man with very bad breath, who had worked as a schoolteacher. He was a writer and translator. After Hitler’s coming, he had taken his family to settle in France. His wife was a big dark untidy woman, very good-natured and soft. She worked as a dressmaker, and sang Tyrolean folk songs to the accompaniment of a lute. Some of the songs were dirty and very funny: I used to make her repeat them over and over again, until I ached with laughing. Both Peter and Eva were pretty children, although Peter, who was light blond, had a large nose. He was thirteen, Eva about ten.

  Then there was the Duncker couple, non-Jews. Dr. Duncker was elderly. He had cataract. It had been operated once, but badly, and now there was nothing to be done for him. It was heartbreaking to see how he struggled to learn English while his eyesight lasted; and how he and his wife corrected each other’s mistakes with ferocious, loving irritability. He had taught in the Marxist Workers’ School in Berlin. He was a passionate Marxist, but his real hero was the anarchist, Prince Kropotkin.112 Sometime in the previous year, the Dunckers’ adored only son had come to Swarthmore College to take a research job: he was a brilliant scholar. And then, suddenly, without any apparent reason, he had committed suicide.

  Hermann and Gretl Eberhart113 weren’t Jews, either. They were a youngish couple who had been in trouble with the Brandenburg Nazis right from their student days, before Hitler came to power, because they were communists. Hermann was very good-looking, in the German intellectual manner, with a high forehead, dark eyes, bad teeth and a very clear incisive voice. He was a trained speaker, with plenty of courage, ideas and drive, a good deal of egotism and vanity, and very theoretical. Gretl was blonde, fair skinned, plumpish, with a good figure. Sometimes she looked rather beautiful. She had lovely sparkling light blue-green eyes.

  These two had been right through the war in France. Hermann had joined the British army; Gretl had gone into a concentration camp. When they were at liberty again and nearly penniless, they had lived for a while in Marseille. A Polish Jewess whom they knew had had a baby girl named Jeanette. The child was born crippled, suffering from Little’s Disease; her legs were curled up under her body. When the mother discovered this, she went into hysterics and declared that Jeanette was no child of hers, it was impossible that she could have given birth to such a monster. She refused to see Jeanette or have her in the house. It was then that the Eberharts decided to adopt her. The French doctor who examined her assured them that there was no hope—but, as Hermann said, “We might easily have had a child like that, ourselves.” They brought Jeanette over to America. A surgeon in New York had operated twice—once cutting through the abdomen to the spine, once cutting the tendons to release the feet. And now Jeanette could stagger along, supported under the armpits, and it was hoped she’d recover entirely. She was a very gay child, but mentally backward—like all children suffering from this disease. Gretl looked after her with enormous patience and a great deal of scientific skill. She had been trained as a teacher of backward children, and had worked with them many times before.

  Carl Furtmueller and his wife arrived somewhat later than the others. Carl had been a school inspector in Vienna: in fact, he was Mr. Amann’s boss. He was a big, heavy, slow-moving man, white h
aired already, but still full of vigor. His wife looked like an old woman. She had been terribly sick in a Spanish prison, where the two of them were interned. Caroline told me, soon after their arrival, that the doctor didn’t expect Mrs. Furtmueller to live long. She had cancer of the lung. Furtmueller didn’t know this.

  Ernst Jurkat was another non-Jewish refugee. A pale, fair-haired, bespectacled little shrimp of a man with a big adam’s apple, quite young. When you looked at him more closely, you saw that he was muscular and tough. He had bad teeth, no chin, a long nose and immense boyish charm. His grey eyes behind his glasses were courageous and serene. He was an expert on statistics, and had worked in Berlin at a government institute which dealt with trade and economics. When the Nazis took over, Ernst stayed at his job. But at night he went home and printed pamphlets, inciting the nation to revolt against Hitler. The penalty for this kind of illegal work was to be beheaded, facing up toward the axe. Ernst lasted quite a long time—until shortly before the outbreak of war. One day, while he was at his office, his wife called him on the phone and gave him the prearranged signal. The Gestapo were watching his home. Ernst always carried his passport in his pocket, so there was nothing to take with him but his hat. He got out of Berlin by tram, found his way down to the Swiss frontier and dodged over the line in the twilight, when the guards can’t see so well to shoot and the searchlights don’t help much. The Nazi consulate at Bern hadn’t been advised of his escape, and he was able to walk boldly in and get money and permits to go to France. In Paris, he offered his services to the Second Bureau,114 on condition that they smuggle his wife out of Germany to join him. This the French did. During the war, he had fought in the French army. He was now badly worried about his wife and child, who were still interned in France. The wife was Jewish.