Christopher and His Kind

by Christopher Isherwood

  And what did he want? Hirschfeld had rightly called him infantile. He wanted to go back into the world of his adolescent sexuality and reexperience it, without the inhibitions which had spoiled his pleasure then. At school, the boys Christopher had desired had been as scared as himself of admitting to their desires. But now the innocent lust which had fired all that ass grabbing, arm twisting, sparring and wrestling half naked in the changing room could come out stark naked into the open without shame and be gratified in full. What excited Christopher most, a struggle which turned gradually into a sex act, seemed perfectly natural to these German boys; indeed, it excited them too. Maybe because it was something you couldn’t do with a girl, or anyhow not on terms of physical equality; something which appealed to them as an expression of aggression-attraction between a pair of males. Maybe, also, such mildly sadistic play was a characteristic of German sensuality; many of them liked to be beaten, not too hard, with a belt strap. Of course it would never have occurred to any of them to worry about the psychological significance of their tastes.

  This rough athletic sexmaking was excellent isometric exercise. It strengthened Christopher’s muscles more than all his years of joyless compulsory games at school. He felt grateful to his partners for his new strength. There was much love in his contact with their sturdy bodies; love which made no demands beyond the pleasure of the moment.

  Christopher was delighted with his way of life and with himself for living it—so much so that he became bumptious, and actually wrote to a woman he knew in England, telling her: “I am doing what Henry James would have done, if he had had the guts.” The woman foolishly reported this statement to Christopher’s former literary mentor, an Irish authoress who had been a friend of his father, Frank, and whom Frank had nicknamed Venus. (See Kathleen and Frank.) Venus, a devout Jamesian, was not amused. She replied loftily: “Christopher has become either a silly young ass or a dirty young dog, and I am interested in neither animal.”

  Christopher wasn’t angry with Venus—she soon forgave him—and he wasn’t in the least abashed by her rebuke. But, before long, he began to feel that he had done enough exploring of his rediscovered adolescence. What he wanted now was a more serious relationship, expressed by a different kind of lovemaking.

  Since he no longer needed his former sex partners, he could afford to regard them objectively and to moralize over them. Wasn’t it basically wrong to hire other human beings to have sex with you? Weren’t you exploiting them, degrading them? Christopher had found it charming to watch Francis bargaining with the natives of the jungle. Francis himself didn’t have the ugliness of an exploiter because his own state of degradation put him on a level with the natives and made him sympathetically picturesque. But this was a colonial situation, nevertheless. The behavior of many Cosy Corner clients was ugly because it was sentimental. Not content with hiring the boys’ bodies—which was at least a straightforward commercial transaction—they sentimentally expected gratitude, even love, thrown into the bargain. Not getting either, they turned nasty, called the boys whores and begrudged the money they had spent on them. One of the least sentimental of the clients used to tell a story against himself: In the midst of a quarrel with a boy, he had heard himself exclaim: “I don’t give a damn about the money—it’s you I want!” He had involuntarily said what he had been wishing the boy would say to him.

  There was one thing the boys had to offer that very few clients wanted: their friendship. Most boys dreamed of a Friend—that sacred German concept. This friend would help them with money, of course, but he would also—and this was far more important to them—offer them serious interest, advice, encouragement. Sometimes, when a client had shown him unexpected kindness, a boy would put this concept into awkward words. The client might indulge him in his friendship talk, but as one indulges a sufferer from a terminal illness. From the average client’s point of view, these boys had no future; therefore, one couldn’t allow oneself to care what became of them.

  * * *

  During the Christmas season, a great costume ball was held in one of the dance halls of In den Zelten: a ball for men. Many of them wore female clothes. There was a famous character who had inherited a whole wardrobe of beautiful family ball gowns, seventy or eighty years old. These he was wearing out at the rate of one a year. At each ball, he encouraged his friends to rip his gown off his body in handfuls until he had nothing but a few rags to return home in.

  Christopher went to the ball with Francis. He had dressed himself in some clothes lent him by a boy from the Cosy Corner—a big sweater with a collar and a pair of sailor’s bell-bottomed trousers. It gave him an erotic thrill to masquerade thus as his own sex partner. A little makeup applied by Francis took the necessary five years off his age; the effect was so convincing that a friend of Karl Giese, who didn’t know Christopher, later protested to Karl that Francis had really gone too far—bringing a common street hustler into this respectable social gathering.

  The respectability of the ball was open to doubt. But it did have one dazzling guest: Conrad Veidt. The great film star sat apart at his own table, impeccable in evening tails. He watched the dancing benevolently through his monocle as he sipped champagne and smoked a cigarette in a long holder. He seemed a supernatural figure, the guardian god of these festivities, who was graciously manifesting himself to his devotees. A few favored ones approached and talked to him but without presuming to sit down.

  Veidt had appeared in two films dealing with the problems of the homosexual; hence the appropriateness of his presence at this ball. The first of these films was Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), produced in 1919. Performances of it had often been broken up by the Nazis. In Vienna, one of them had fired a revolver into the audience, wounding several people. The second film, Gesetze der Liebe (Laws of Love), was produced in 1927. This was, in many respects, a remake of Anders als die Andern.

  Christopher had been shown one of these films at the Institute, or perhaps both, I can’t be sure. Three scenes remain in my memory. One is a ball at which the dancers, all male, are standing fully clothed in what seems about to become a daisy chain. It is here that the character played by Veidt meets the blackmailer who seduces and then ruins him. The next scene is a vision which Veidt has (while in prison?) of a long procession of kings, poets, scientists, philosophers, and other famous victims of homophobia, moving slowly and sadly with heads bowed. Each of them cringes, in turn, as he passes beneath a banner on which “Paragraph 175” is inscribed. In the final scene, Dr. Hirschfeld himself appears. I think the corpse of Veidt, who has committed suicide, is lying in the background. Hirschfeld delivers a speech—that is to say, a series of subtitles—appealing for justice for the Third Sex. This is like the appearance of Dickens beside the corpse of Jo, in Bleak House, to deliver the splendid diatribe which begins: “Dead, your Majesty…”

  * * *

  Early in the New Year of 1930, Francis left Berlin, en route for warmer southern lands. So now Christopher was quite alone with the Germans.

  THREE

  On February 6, 1930, Christopher wrote to Stephen Spender:

  I’m very apathetic here. It’s all so pleasant and I have utterly lost any sense of strangeness in being abroad. I even don’t particularly care when I see England again. And when I read in my diary about my life at home, it’s like people on the moon.

  Two weeks later, he was back in London. The cause of his unforeseen return was Henry Isherwood, Christopher’s elder uncle. Henry was the only member of the family who could be described as wealthy; he had inherited the Isherwood estates and money when his father died in 1924. Soon after this event, Christopher had decided to become Uncle Henry’s favorite nephew; and he had done so instantaneously, by making it clear to Henry that they had the same sexual nature. Henry’s brothers and sisters had always known about his homosexuality and had made unkind jokes behind his back, of which he was well aware. So Henry was delighted to discover a blood relative who shared his tastes—u
sing the slang expressions of his generation, he referred to himself as being “musical” or “so.”

  Once they had reached this understanding, it hadn’t been hard for Christopher to introduce a benevolent idea into Henry’s head. Since Henry was separated from his wife after a childless marriage; since, as a good Catholic, he couldn’t remarry; since, being what he was, he didn’t want to; since the estates were entailed and Christopher was the heir presumptive—why shouldn’t Christopher be given a small allowance now, at a time of life when he really needed the money?

  Christopher was proud of the diplomacy he had employed to achieve this objective. He boasted of it to his friends. They envied him and weren’t in the least shocked; in his shoes, they said, they would have done the same thing. I suspect that Henry saw through Christopher’s amateur maneuvers from the start and was amused by them. When young, he himself had squeezed money from his father at every opportunity.

  Christopher couldn’t have afforded to live in Berlin without Henry’s allowance. Henry had promised to pay it every three months. Christopher was expected to reciprocate by writing to him regularly and by dining with him when they were both in London. Writing the letters was a weary task, because Henry had to be thanked for his bounty over and over again, and reassured that he was the Model Uncle. The dinners were more fun, because you could get drunk. Henry demanded to be told every detail of Christopher’s sex life; Christopher obliged, exaggerating wildly. Then Henry described his guardsmen and other favorites. “Oh, he’s what I call a tearer—a regular tearin’ bugger, don’t you know?” He had once paid a young man not to wash himself for a month. “At the end of the month, he came to see me and he smelt exactly like a fox! Delicious!” Henry waved his beringed hands and uttered his harsh parrot laugh. Christopher found his coarseness bracing and sympathetic. But Henry was also a snob and a Fascist. He adored the titled ladies of Roman society, amongst whom he spent most of the winter, and praised Mussolini for having made Italy more comfortable for foreign visitors like himself. Christopher had to keep his mouth shut, project sparkling interest, and smile flatteringly at this aging beauty—it was as if he were a courtier of Queen Elizabeth I. And yet, from time to time, despite all Christopher’s efforts, Henry would capriciously fail to pay up. As he had on this occasion.

  Thus Christopher was reminded that he wasn’t a free spirit, as he liked to think, but a captive balloon. Coming down to earth with a humiliating bump, in an evil humor and suffering from one of his sore throats, he found himself in the midst of a domestic battle. His brother Richard, now eighteen, had been making an attempt to assert himself and prove to their mother, Kathleen, that she couldn’t go on treating him as a schoolboy. Richard’s attempt was clumsy—in order to avoid being sent back to the tutor who was cramming him for Oxford, he had pretended that he had found himself a job. But Kathleen’s reaction, when she discovered he was lying, was clumsier: “If your father was alive,” she told him, “you wouldn’t dare behave like this!” The two of them were victims of a classic situation, forced to become enemies against their will. Christopher must surely have understood this, and known that it was his duty to play the affectionate peacemaker and help them work out a new way of living with each other. But, instead, he sided with Richard against Kathleen.

  So there were bitter sessions in which he revenged himself on the tired tearful woman for all the humiliations he had endured at the hands of others. He accused her of having tried to wreck his life and of being now determined to wreck Richard’s. She had tried to turn Christopher into a Cambridge don, he said, to gratify her selfish daydream of the kind of son she wanted him to be. And since he had foiled her, by getting himself thrown out of college, she was trying to turn Richard into an Oxford don, against his will.

  Christopher told her coldly and aggressively about his life in Berlin. He made his acts of homosexual love sound like acts of defiance, directed against Kathleen. I don’t think Kathleen was shocked. What he described was totally unreal to her. How could there be real sex without women? All she was aware of was the hate in his voice. So she wept and wrote in her diary that this was the end of “the nice era of peace.” She was obstinate, willfully stupid, and maddeningly pathetic. Yet, in the midst of her misery, she never yielded a single point. It wasn’t even that she thought she was in the right. When Christopher called in John Layard and he talked to her with his usual bluntness, she agreed meekly that she had made many mistakes. Layard impressed her favorably. She referred to him in her diary as “very striking and unusual.” But she wasn’t about to change her attitude—she was incapable of changing—as Christopher now began to realize.

  * * *

  At length, a letter arrived from Henry Isherwood, who was somewhere abroad. Kathleen described it by saying that “Henry did the heavy uncle in grand style”—which I take to mean that he advised Christopher to stop wasting time in Berlin, settle down in London, and get a job. Henry never did pay that quarter’s allowance. Three weeks later, he sent Christopher fifteen pounds which he had won at Monte Carlo, making it clear that this was to be regarded as an advance on the next quarter. This episode was typical of Henry’s queenly arrogance. Christopher excused it, as always. He couldn’t take Henry seriously enough to be angry with him.

  * * *

  A few days after Christopher’s arrival in London, Wystan had to undergo an operation for a rectal fissure. His announcement of this, on a postcard, was characteristically terse. It ended with a T. S. Eliot quotation: “Pray for Boudin.” Christopher went up to Birmingham twice to be with him, before leaving England.

  Wystan suffered from the aftereffects of this operation for several years. They inspired him to write his “Letter to a Wound,” which forms part of The Orators.

  * * *

  Christopher went back to Berlin on May 8, having told Kathleen that he could never live in her house again. According to her diary, “he begged that I should refuse to have him again even if he suggested coming.” He did come back, but not until ten months later. And, of the next three and a half years, he was to spend only five months in England.

  The only good which came of this unhappy visit was that Christopher and Richard became intimate. Up to that time, they had been almost strangers, because of the rareness of their meetings and the seven-year age gap between them. Richard had been dreading Christopher’s return from Berlin, since he felt sure Christopher would agree with Kathleen that he must go back to his hated tutor. So, when Christopher disagreed with her and sympathized with his point of view, Richard was correspondingly grateful. Before the visit was over, they had become friends. Richard was often rash and childish in his dealings with the outside world, but the eyes with which he observed it were searching and mature and his comments were as candid as Layard’s. Christopher realized, with surprise and pleasure, that he had a brother to whom he could tell absolutely anything about himself without shame.

  * * *

  During his years in Germany, Christopher kept a diary. As he became aware that he would one day write stories about the people he knew there, his diary entries got longer. They later supplied him with most of the material which is used to create period atmosphere in Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin.

  After those two books had been written, Christopher burned the diary. His private reason for doing this was that it was full of details about his sex life and he feared that it might somehow fall into the hands of the police or other enemies.

  Christopher’s declared reason for burning his Berlin diary was unconvincing. He used to tell his friends that he had destroyed his real past because he preferred the simplified, more creditable, more exciting fictitious past which he had created to take its place. This fictitious past, he said, was the past he wanted to “remember.” Now that I am writing about Christopher’s real past, I sadly miss the help of the lost diary and have no patience with this arty talk. The Berlin novels leave out a great deal which I now want to remember; they also falsify events and alter dates for dramatic p
urposes. As for the few surviving letters written at that time by Christopher and his friends to each other, they usually have no dates at all. I get the impression that their writers regarded letter dating as something beneath their dignity as artists—something bank clerkly, formal, and mean-spirited. My most reliable source of information proves, ironically, to be the diaries of Kathleen, whom Christopher was trying to exclude from his Berlin life altogether. Kathleen picked up scraps of news from friends who had visited him there and from his occasional grudging letters. I bless her for having recorded them.

  * * *

  It was probably in May 1930, soon after Christopher’s return from London, that he met the youth who is called Otto Nowak in Goodbye to Berlin. He was then sixteen or seventeen years old.

  Otto has a face like a very ripe peach. His hair is full and thick, growing low on his forehead. He has small sparkling eyes, full of naughtiness, and a wide disarming grin, which is much too innocent to be true. When he grins, two large dimples appear in his peach-bloom cheeks … Otto moves fluidly, effortlessly; his gestures have the savage, unconscious grace of a cruel elegant animal … Otto is outrageously conceited … Otto certainly has a superb pair of shoulders and chest for a boy of his age—but his body is nevertheless somehow slightly ridiculous. The beautiful ripe lines of the torso taper away too suddenly to his rather absurd little buttocks and spindly, immature legs. And these struggles with the chest-expander are daily making him more and more top-heavy.

  This is how Otto is described by “Christopher Isherwood,” the narrator of the novel. The fictitious Isherwood takes the attitude of an amused, slightly contemptuous onlooker. He nearly gives himself away when he speaks of “the beautiful ripe lines of the torso.” So, lest the reader should suspect him of finding Otto physically attractive, he adds that Otto’s legs are “spindly.” Otto’s original in life had an entirely adequate, sturdy pair of legs, even if they weren’t quite as handsome as the upper half of his body.