The World in the Evening

by Christopher Isherwood

  Though I thought about nothing but Sex, at that time, from morning to night, I got very little pleasure from the act itself. After so much anticipation, it came as an anticlimax, accompanied by impotence-fears, compulsive strain, and nausea. The smell of those hotel bedrooms was as nauseating to me as the smell of the operating-theatre to a patient going into surgery. I was literally sick with excitement. The only pleasant moment was right after the orgasm, when all the strain was over and I felt a huge relief.

  But the relief didn’t last more than a few minutes. It was followed by panic and guilt. I was terrified of venereal disease. If I caught it—as I was sure I should, sooner or later—I supposed I’d have to commit suicide. My whole life would be ruined. Morally, I was ruined anyhow, already. I’d betrayed Sarah and everything she stood for. Sarah had never taught me sexual puritanism—her mind was incapable of such dirtiness—but the possibility of her finding out what I’d been doing was too humiliating even to imagine. As for the Friends, I began to hate them and all their works. They were responsible for making me feel such an outcast. I tried to pose to myself as an honest rebel against their hypocritical smugness: they were secretly longing to behave just as I did, I told myself, only they hadn’t the nerve. I couldn’t hate Sarah—I still loved her very much—but I felt completely alienated from her. When my visits to London took place during a vacation, they were extra painful, because I had to come home from them to face Sarah in person. If she had even the faintest notion of what was happening to me, she never gave any hint of it; she was the same to me as always. Sometimes I longed to be able to confess everything to her; but, of course, that was unthinkable. I couldn’t even bring myself to tell Warren how I was feeling.

  All through that winter, Warren had kept promising me Paris. And then, in the spring, he suddenly got engaged to be married—to an English girl! Such disloyalty to his own principles was too fantastic to get angry about. I merely gaped at him, bewildered, when he told me the news, which he did with sheepish embarrassment. There was nothing much to be said, on either side. In due course, I bought him an unnecessarily showy wedding-present, a whole cabinet of table-silver. This embarrassed him even more, as I had subconsciously intended that it should. It was a kind of revenge.

  Warren had left me flat, without a mentor, in the middle of my initiation. But, Warren or no Warren, I knew I’d have to go to Paris. It was my only possible next move, the one door by which I could enter the future. I couldn’t stay in England and continue the old life with Sarah. It was nothing but a pretence, now. Everything had changed. If I went on pretending, I’d feel more and more guilty and ruin what was left of our relationship. So for Sarah’s sake as well as mine, I argued, I must go.

  I left England early in July, telling her vaguely that I wanted to improve my French. Sarah accepted this, as she accepted all my decisions. She seemed to have no anxiety whatsoever about my future; and had actually urged me, on several occasions, not to be in too much of a hurry to make up my mind what I wanted to do. What did she privately hope? That I’d go back to Philadelphia, enter the family business, get married, have children, become a Weighty Friend? I didn’t know. She who interfered with everybody else, and could scarcely watch anyone boil an egg without giving advice, never interfered with me.

  I said Goodbye to her tenderly, sick with misgivings, as though I were leaving for a war. Without knowing just what I expected to happen, I felt almost as if we’d never see each other again.

  Within two weeks, all these apprehensions had begun to seem as silly and unreal as the terrors of a past nightmare. Had I ever really thought of Paris as an initiation-symbol, a dreaded test of my manhood? I could hardly believe it. For now Paris was just Paris, a beautiful but completely matter-of-fact summer city, full of fascinating things to see and delicious things to eat, where people were delighted to help you spend your money. I felt as free as a bird. I could come and go as I wished. Nobody was watching, much less condemning me. In this town, you were allowed to enjoy yourself.

  Something strange had happened to me. It was as if I’d turned into another version of myself: Stephen-in-France. I’d never realized before that my inhibitions were so tightly identified with the words of the English language. This new Stephen chattered away without restraint—not the least ashamed of his accent and his bad grammar—and never hesitated to ask for anything he wanted.

  Stephen-in-France didn’t waste any time with shy furtive glances; he didn’t blush and mutter: ‘I wonder if—I mean—that is—would you care to—?’ He asked right out for Sex; and got it immediately. On my second evening in Paris, I picked up—or rather, was picked up by—a blonde, half-Polish girl named Marie. Marie was a sweet, good-natured person, whose attitude toward me was realistic but not particularly mercenary. That I got her, and not one of the other girls I met later, was a big piece of beginner’s luck.

  Marie didn’t care to drink much, or sit up late in bars. She liked steamer trips on the Seine, excursions to Fontainebleau, movies and huge meals. And she really loved going to bed. In her arms, I slowly relaxed and stopped worrying about myself. ‘Don’t kiss so quick,’ she used to tell me. ‘You kiss like a little bird; peck, peck, peck. Slowly, now. You see? Isn’t that much better? No—not yet. Don’t be in such a hurry. You wish to catch a train? Stupid, we have the whole night.’ And so, for the first time in my life, I began to enjoy the physical act. I actually cried with pleasure, sometimes, because it was so beautiful, so natural, so warm, so kind, so silly. In the middle of it, we would laugh together like children. Warren, despite all his lectures, had somehow never gotten it through my head that Sex was meant to be fun.

  From the first, Marie had made it clear to me that she had other men friends beside myself. She wasn’t coy or bitchy, and she never discussed them in a way that would make me jealous; it was just that she didn’t want me to get any wrong ideas about our relationship. I understood this and was grateful for her tact; otherwise I might quite easily have fallen in love with her.

  Even as it was, I got a nasty jolt when, toward the end of August, Marie told me she was leaving Paris. Now, for the first time, she explained that she had a lover, a real lover, who was ‘serious’ and would marry her. The lover was captain of a merchant ship, a good bit older than herself; they had been going together for several years. He had always known about the life she was leading, and didn’t object, as long as he was obliged to be at sea. But now he could afford to retire and buy a farm, and he was sending for her.

  The news made me sentimental. Marie and I spent a farewell night together, and I wished her happiness with tears in my eyes. ‘You ought to marry too,’ she told me, ‘Don’t wait too long. You’re a sweet boy. You’ll make a good husband. The woman who gets you will be lucky.’

  ‘No, Marie,’ I answered, feeling sorry for myself and somehow rather noble, ‘You only say that because you’re so good. I’m not. You don’t really know me. I don’t think I’ll ever marry.’ I kissed her on the forehead as though she were already the captain’s wife, and pressed an envelope into her hand. ‘Don’t open this till you get on the train’. The envelope contained a wad of thousand-franc bills. Another wedding-present!

  Marie left me with many solicitous parting instructions: how much I ought to pay my girls, which bars to avoid, how to deal with various kinds of confidence-trick and blackmail, which places were safest for hiding my money. She even nominated her successor, a friend of hers named Annette, whom she guaranteed to be honest.

  Annette was honest, all right, but she was dull and not my type. I’d soon stopped seeing her and tried a whole series of other girls, seldom sleeping with anybody more than two or three times. I grew bored and restless. It wasn’t often that I found a girl amusing enough to spend even one day with, and I had no other friends. I took to sitting for hours in big cafés like the Dôme and the Rotonde, sipping pernod and trying to look interesting and habituated, in the hope that some writer or artist would come up and talk to me. I longed to be invited
to enter the real Parisian bohemia, which I vaguely imagined as a kind of aesthetic paradise where Joyce and Gertrude Stein were eternally united in communion with Picasso, Stravinsky and Cocteau, and encircled by the legendary creatures of the Russian Ballet. But nothing of the kind happened. Partly, no doubt, because I looked sulky rather than interesting; partly because nearly all of the artists and writers had gone south for the summer. The city belonged to the foreign visitors; and the only people who spoke to me were touts selling dope or dirty pictures.

  Boredom made me careless. I forgot all Marie’s instructions, visited the bars she’d warned me against, and carried far too much money in my pockets. One evening in September, at a place near the Place Pigalle, I was given a Mickey Finn. I woke up next morning in the Police Station without a centime. I had a splitting headache and I must have been dumped in some gutter, for my clothes were filthy. This adventure made me unreasonably indignant. Paris had betrayed me, I felt. It had treated me like a common tourist. The city wasn’t friendly, as I’d imagined. It was a nest of cheap cold-blooded crooks. I suddenly hated it. Two days later, I’d left for Germany.

  Berlin was a complete contrast. Outwardly, it was graver, stiffer and more formal; inwardly, it was far more lurid and depraved. For a runaway Puritan, it was a more congenial refuge than Paris, because it recognized Vice, and cultivated it in all its forms with humourless Prussian thoroughness. In Berlin, it wasn’t enough merely to want Sex; you were expected to specialize, to ask for a teen-age virgin, a seventy-year-old woman, a girl with a whip and high boots, a transvestite, a policeman, a pageboy or a dog. There were various kinds of brothels and bars to supply your needs. And, in case you couldn’t make up your mind what you wanted, there was a Museum of Sexual Science where you could study photographs of hermaphrodites, sadists’ torture-instruments, fantasy-drawings by nymphomaniacs, female underwear worn by officers beneath their uniform, and many other marvels. The Director of the Museum, a highly respectable and strictly scientific old professor, seemed a little disappointed that I had no ‘special tastes’. He regarded me reproachfully through his pebble glasses, ran his fingers through his untidy white hair, and finally diagnosed my case as ‘infantilism’.

  I had tried conscientiously to get into the spirit of the Berlin night-life, which, at that time, still had some of the lunatic public shamelessness of the inflation-period. At first, I’d been shocked, disgusted, and rather intrigued; these self-consciously perverse antics were certainly a change from my simple pleasures with Marie. But they soon got very tiresome. I could never quite believe that anybody really enjoyed them; except, perhaps, a few exhausted old men whose appetites needed a drastic whetting. To me, these bars were like the Sex Museum; you only had to visit them once. At the end of the tour, you had seen everything, and that was that. There was nothing more they could teach you.

  Nevertheless, it was a Berlin girl named Trude who had completed my initiation, by giving me gonorrhoea. The moment when I woke up, one morning, and discovered what was the matter with me wasn’t at all as I had pictured it in my imagination; it wasn’t in the least horrifying; it was even quite comic. Trude, who was lying in bed with me, laughed and said we had the Kinderkrankheit, the Children’s Disease. She didn’t apologize, but she took me at once to a doctor. It was as if we had been going off to get married. For the first time, we had a genuine relationship, we were in this together, and I felt warmly toward her in a way I’d never felt before. At the doctor’s office we were separated, however, and put, respectively, into a male and a female waiting-room. (Trude explained to me that this was done for the sake of propriety, because the doctor only handled V.D. patients.) My waiting-room was full of people: plump middle-aged men who might be shopkeepers or government officials, factory operatives in their working-clothes, picturesque individuals who were probably actors, boys of college age. Some looked gloomy, some cheerful, some prim and severe, some easy-going and dissolute, some innocent and pure and even saintly. It amused me to think that this was the one thing we all had in common.

  The treatment itself certainly wasn’t amusing: the disinfectant burned so much, the first time, that I yelled. But it was quite successful. And, at the end of two weeks, I was cured not only of the infection but of the last of my fears. This, after all, was an ailment like any other. Millions of people had had it, would have it; it was part of the human condition. Instead of becoming an outcast, I’d shared a common experience. I wasn’t branded with the mark of Cain. I wouldn’t have to commit suicide. I could go back home.

  Back to what? I didn’t know. My attitude toward the future was quite passive. I supposed vaguely that it would present me, sooner or later, with an occupation. Perhaps I’d write something or try translating. Perhaps I’d join an expedition to South America or the Arctic, or get myself psycho-analysed. I didn’t really care. If anybody or anything could manage to interest me—which I privately doubted—then I was ready to be interested.

  Standing alone at the rail, as the boat crossed the Channel toward England, I felt wonderfully old; wearily mature, calmly disillusioned. I decided that I must be very kind to Sarah, and to everyone else I met. Very kind and patient and understanding. Because, after all, it wasn’t other people’s fault that they hadn’t had my experiences. How could they be expected to know, even dimly, what it was like to be me?

  A few days after my arrival in London, Elizabeth wrote again to Cecilia:

  ‘This isn’t really another letter; just a postscript to my last. There’s something I must put down, and fix for myself, while the first impressions are sharp.

  ‘Since I wrote to you last week, Adrian has, almost literally, come to life!

  ‘It’s uncanny. Let me describe him.

  ‘He’s very slender and quite tall (I used to imagine him rather small, but I see now that that was absurdly wrong) with a heavy fringe of fair hair, and dark eyes. He has a fresh complexion and the appearance of being delicate; but he isn’t. He’s surprisingly strong. You can picture him controlling an enormous frantic horse. At the same time, there’s a kind of magic air of vagueness about him; he’s like a child lost in a fairy-story forest. In repose, his face looks lost and sad, so that people long to help him in some way. That’s his charm, and that’s what makes him dangerous; because you couldn’t. You could no more help him (psychologically, I mean) than you could help an animal. If you tried, you’d probably get bitten. Oh yes, he’s very much on his guard.

  ‘I’ll put it in another way. Adrian’s like the young man you sometimes see in a bookshop, wandering about aimlessly but with a kind of repressed excitement. If the shop-assistant asks what he wants, he starts guiltily and mutters: “Oh, nothing, thanks. I’m just looking round.” And yet, all the while, he’s searching—unconsciously, almost. If only one could guess what the right book was, and put it where he’d find it for himself! If you did guess, and offered it to him directly, he’d be furious. He’d turn and run out of the shop.

  ‘Adrian affects a bored, languid tone, especially when he’s talking to his elders. But his eyes give him away. They fairly burn with eagerness; and he knows this, he’s ashamed of it and keeps looking down at the carpet to hide them. He says languidly: “Of course, one can’t possibly read Meredith nowadays.” And, really, he’s imploring you to contradict him; to make some tremendous, definite statement. To utter the final, wonderful Word about Life and Art. And one does so wish one could! That’s how the Young seduce us, always. You’re seduced by your own vanity into playing the prophet. Then they see through you, and they never forgive you. And, after all, why should they?

  ‘Where I’ve been wrong about Adrian is that I’d imagined him very lively on the surface—lots of noise and jazz and wildness—and inside, empty, lost, despairing. No, no—that’s the conventional stock character: the Orphan of the Saxophone Age. My Adrian’s far more interesting. On the surface, this polite, guarded boredom; this self-protective vagueness. And inside—flashing out of him at moments—a really startling joy,
a marvellous, pure silliness and fun. I want to do a scene where he and the girl go to the Zoo together, to talk over their problems, very serious and adult. And, suddenly, he’s a little boy. He jumps about, he shouts, he pulls faces at the monkeys. It’s incredible!

  ‘I don’t imagine any of this will make much sense to you, Cecilia darling. I’m still rather incoherent, I’m afraid, when I think about Adrian. But it has helped me, enormously, to write this down.

  ‘That’s one of the worst problems of this tantalizing occupation. You think out a character, quite coldly and objectively, with the top of your mind. He’s just a dummy, so then you pray for him to come to life. But if, by some miracle, he does, you find yourself losing all control of him. You’re infatuated, possessed. You have to struggle to get out of his clutches; to stand back and take a good calm look at him.

  ‘I can see I shall have to be very objective about Adrian. And I’d better start at once, before it’s too late!’

  Is that really the way you saw me, Elizabeth? How absurd, how wonderful of you. Oh, if only we could be reading this now, together! I can just hear you laughing over it.

  How I wish I’d written down my first impressions of you! What can I remember?

  Sarah took me upstairs to your flat right away, as soon as I’d arrived. I was tired and I didn’t particularly want to meet you just then, but she insisted. When you called to us to come in, she opened the door with a dramatic sweep and announced ‘Here he is!’ I was terribly embarrassed. I was sure we were interrupting you in the middle of your work. But you were charming. You offered us sherry. You said, ‘I don’t suppose I can tempt you, Sarah?’ And Sarah said, ‘Oh, but you most certainly can! This is a great occasion!’