Christopher and His Kind

by Christopher Isherwood

  Sunday was a long day at the Nowaks. There was nowhere to go in this wretched weather. We were all of us at home … I was sitting on the opposite side of the table, frowning at a piece of paper on which I had written: “But, Edward, can’t you see?” I was trying to get on with my novel. It was about a family who lived in a large country house on unearned incomes and were very unhappy. They spent their time explaining to each other why they couldn’t enjoy their lives; and some of the reasons—though I say it myself—were most ingenious. Unfortunately, I found myself taking less and less interest in my unhappy family; the atmosphere of the Nowak household was not very inspiring.

  But here “Isherwood” is playing to the gallery. The novel he seems to be referring to, The Memorial, is described with willful inaccuracy—none of its characters are unhappy for “ingenious” reasons; they are bereaved and lonely and in need of love, as people often are on any social level. “Isherwood,” merely because he has moved to the Simeonstrasse, feels that he has broken with his bourgeois literary past. Anything written about the upper classes is simply not worth reading, he implies. The rich ought to be happy—that is the least they can be—since they are living on money they’ve stolen from the poor; if they are miserable, that’s just too tiresome. In any case, their lives can never be meaningful, as the lives of the Nowaks are—and as “Isherwood” ’s life is, now that he is living with them.

  Such was a side effect of Christopher’s political awakening. But Edward Upward can’t be blamed for it. He was utterly incapable of such silliness. And Christopher himself knew better, despite his occasional lapses. Indeed, I remember how, in the later thirties, he used to tell people that he had written about the Nowaks in order to debunk the cult of worker worship as it was being practiced by many would-be revolutionary writers.

  * * *

  As it turned out, Christopher didn’t stay much more than a month at the Simeonstrasse. His immediate reason for leaving was that Frau Nowak was being sent to a sanatorium; but he would have left soon in any case. Slumming had lost its novelty for him, and he and Otto were on bad terms. His next move, sometime in November, was to lodgings in the Admiralstrasse—number 38. This was in the neighboring district of Kottbusser Tor, also a slum. But Christopher now had a room to himself and was in comparative comfort. When he went to register with the police—you had to do this whenever you changed your address—they told him that he was the only Englishman living in that area. Christopher’s vanity was tickled. He liked to imagine himself as one of those mysterious wanderers who penetrate the depths of a foreign land, disguise themselves in the dress and customs of its natives, and die in unknown graves, envied by their stay-at-home compatriots; like Waring in Browning’s poem, or like Bierce, who vanished forever into Mexico.

  In the early stages of our friendship, I was drawn to him by the adventurousness of his life. His renunciation of England, his poverty, his friendship, his independence, his work, all struck me as heroic. During months in the winter of 1930, when I went back to England, I corresponded with him in the spirit of writing letters to a Polar explorer.

  Thus writes Stephen Spender, serio-comically, in his autobiography, World within World. Stephen had adopted Wystan and Christopher as his mentors while he was still at Oxford. Christopher had been eager to welcome Stephen as a pupil; he enjoyed preaching Lane-Layard to him and he briskly took charge of Stephen’s problems as a writer: “Don’t be put off by what any don says about Form. What does C.” (referring to an internationally famous scholar and critic) “know about Form? I tell you it is a good well-constructed piece of work. Isn’t that enough for you?”

  It was more than enough. Stephen responded in the spirit of wholehearted pupilship:

  How many years will it take before I can emerge from the waters at the point where you have emerged. It is as though I had to swim that rotten Channel. I have always been trying to build tunnels under it. Now I give up. I see it has got to be swum.

  After their meeting in Hamburg in the summer of 1930, Stephen began visiting Christopher in Berlin. Christopher let him have a glimpse of the rigors of the Simeonstrasse, and he was suitably impressed. (Writing to me more than forty years later, Stephen observed satirically: “This was your most heroic period of poverty and sacrificing everything to buying new suits for Otto.”) Stephen was naturally generous and also conscious that, compared to Christopher, he was well off. Christopher didn’t discourage this idea. He accepted money from Stephen and occasionally from Edward. Sometimes he paid it back, sometimes he didn’t. Stephen also showered him with books and other gifts.

  As pupil, Stephen had to endure Christopher’s moods, his hypochondria, his sulks, and his domestic crises; but he seemed content to do this as long as he could enjoy Christopher’s play-acting and dogmatic pronouncements. I can only suppose that Christopher’s performance was worth the trouble. Christopher seems to have had a remarkable power of dramatizing his predicament at any given moment, so that you experienced it as though you were watching a film in which you yourself had a part. Stephen possessed this power also, and soon he would begin to outshine his mentor. Which led to difficulties, later.

  Mentor and pupil must have made an arresting pair, as they walked the streets and parks of Berlin together. Stephen, at twenty-one, still fitted pretty well the description of him at nineteen, as Stephen Savage in Lions and Shadows:

  He burst in upon us, blushing, sniggering loudly, contriving to trip over the edge of the carpet—an immensely tall shambling boy with a great scarlet poppy-face, wild frizzy hair and eyes the violent color of bluebells. His beautiful resonant voice … would carry to the farthest corners of the largest restaurant the most intimate details of his private life.

  According to World within World, Christopher had:

  a neatness of the cuffs emphasized by the way in which he often held his hands extended, slightly apart from his body.

  (I myself think that Christopher had unconsciously copied this from the pose of a fighter in a Western movie who is just about to draw his guns.)

  His hair was brushed in a boyish lick over his forehead, below which his round shining eyes had a steadiness which seemed to come from the strain of effort … They were the eyes of someone who, when he is a passenger in an aeroplane, thinks that the machine is kept in the air by an act of his will … The mouth, with its deep vertical lines at the corners, was that of a tragi-comic Christ.

  The Pupil, striding along beside the brisk, large-headed little figure of the Mentor, keeps bending his beautiful scarlet face downward, lest he shall miss a word, laughing in anticipation as he does so. There are four and a half years between their ages and at least seven inches between their heights. The Pupil already has a stoop, as all tall people must who are eager to hear what the rest of the world is saying. And maybe the Mentor, that little tormentor, actually lowers his voice at times, to make the Pupil bend even lower.

  FOUR

  In December 1930, Christopher moved again—westward, from working-class into middle-class Berlin. His new room was in a flat at Nollendorfstrasse 17. The Nollendorfstrasse lay just south of the Nollendorfplatz, on which there were cafés and a big cinema. From the Nollendorfplatz, by way of the Kleiststrasse, you entered the West End of the city with its expensive shops. The zoo was there and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. (This church was fated to become a memorial twice over. When Berlin was rebuilt after World War II, it was left in its ruined state, as a reminder of the bombings.)

  The Nollendorfstrasse was neither elegant nor in good repair, but it was middle-class-shabby, not slum-shabby. It is described in Goodbye to Berlin:

  From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and secondhand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.
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br />   “Isherwood” sits looking out of the window. According to the time scheme of the novel, he has only just arrived in Germany. He is the detached foreign observer, getting his first impressions. “I am a camera,” he says to himself, “quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

  This phrase, I am a camera, was the title John van Druten chose for the play he made out of the novel, in 1951. Taken out of its context, it was to label Christopher himself as one of those eternal outsiders who watch the passing parade of life lukewarm-bloodedly, with wistful impotence. From that time on, whenever he published a book, there would always be some critic who would quote it, praising Mr. Isherwood for his sharp camera eye but blaming him for not daring to get out of his focal depth and become humanly involved with his sitters.

  In the next paragraph, “Isherwood” listens to the whistling of young men down in the street below. It is after eight o’clock, so all the house doors have been locked, according to regulation, and the men must whistle until their girls throw down a house key for them to enter with and come upstairs.

  Because of the whistling, I do not care to stay here in the evenings. It reminds me that I am in a foreign city, alone, far from home.

  “Isherwood” is playing to the gallery again. As little Mr. Lonelyheart, with nobody to whistle for him, he invites the sympathy of the motherly or fatherly reader. In real life, the whistling would only have worried Christopher on some occasion when a boy was whistling for him and he was afraid that Otto, who had a key, might show up unexpectedly and find them together and make a scene.

  * * *

  Christopher’s landlady at the Nollendorfstrasse, Frl. Meta Thurau, appears as Frl. Lina Schroeder in both Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin. Of all the chief characters in the two books, this one is least distorted from its original.

  All day long she goes paddling about the large dingy flat. Shapeless but alert, she waddles from room to room, in carpet slippers and a flowered dressing-gown pinned ingeniously together, so that not an inch of petticoat or bodice is to be seen, flicking with her duster, peeping, spying, poking her short pointed nose into the cupboards and luggage of her lodgers. She has dark, bright, inquisitive eyes and pretty waved brown hair of which she is proud. She must be about fifty-five years old.

  When Frl. Thurau read this description many years later, in a German translation, she objected to nothing except the statement that she “waddled.” Like many thousands of other middle-class victims of the inflation, Frl. Thurau had known wealthier days and still felt a sour amusement at finding herself forced to do menial, unladylike work. (“If you were a German woman of your class,” Christopher once said severely to Kathleen when he was angry with her, “you’d probably be running a brothel, right at this moment!”) Poor Frl. Thurau would have been far better off with a brothel than she was with her flatful of sleazy lodgers—Bobby the bartender, Frl. Kost the streetwalker, Frl. Mayr the out-of-work Nazi-minded jodlerin. They were all of them apt to get behind with the rent.

  Frl. Thurau and Christopher took to each other from the start. On her side, this was because she decided that he was what she called a real gentleman, someone who wouldn’t damage the furniture or throw up on the carpet and who would pay his rent on time. She addressed him, coyly and courteously, as “Herr Issyvoo.” Christopher found Frl. Thurau sympathetic, even adorable, for a reason which he could never explain to her: she strongly resembled a character in his childhood mythology—Beatrix Potter’s Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, the hedgehog-lady who does laundry for the other animals in her neighborhood.

  Frl. Thurau would brew cups of coffee or tea and chat with him at any hour of the day. She was fond of exclaiming against the depraved state of Berlin’s moral life, but in practice she was nearly unshockable. She had a low opinion of Otto because she regarded him as a parasite who lived off Christopher; but she never objected to what they did together in her flat. She slept on a sofa in the central living room and could therefore hear almost everything which went on in the neighboring bedrooms. When Christopher looked in to say good morning to her, after having enjoyed himself with more than usual energy and noise, she would roll her eyes and say archly, “How sweet love must be!” As for Frl. Kost, Frl. Thurau only disapproved of her profession when she was angry with Frl. Kost for some other reason. An establishment like Frl. Thurau’s, where you could do just as you pleased sexually, was described by Berliners as being sturmfrei (storm-free).

  * * *

  I wish I could remember what impression Jean Ross—the real-life original of Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin—made on Christopher when they first met. But I can’t. Art has transfigured life and other people’s art has transfigured Christopher’s art. What remains with me from those early years is almost entirely Sally. Beside her, like a reproachful elder sister, stands the figure of Jean as I knew her much later. And both Sally and Jean keep being jostled to one side of my memory to make way for the actresses who have played the part of Sally on the stage and on the screen. These, regardless of their merits, are all much more vivid to me than either Jean or Sally; their boldly made-up, brightly lit faces are larger than life.

  (Sally Bowles’s second name was chosen for her by Christopher because he liked the sound of it and also the looks of its owner, a twenty-year-old American whom he met in Berlin in 1931. The American thought Christopher treated him with “good-humored condescension”; Christopher thought the American aloof. Christopher wasn’t then aware that this young man was in the process of becoming a composer and novelist who would need nobody’s fiction character to help him make his second name famous. His first name was Paul.)

  Studying early photographs of Jean—that long thin handsome white face, that aristocratic nose, that glossy dark hair, those large brown eyes—I can see that she was full of fun and quite conscious of herself as a comic character. Once, a few years later in London, she told Christopher that she was going over to Ostende for the weekend. He asked: “Why on earth—?” She answered, with her brilliant grin: “So I can come back here and be the Woman from Ostende.” I wouldn’t care to risk letting Sally say that line. If a fiction character is allowed to play-act so self-consciously, there is a danger that the mask may stick to its face. It may lose its identity altogether.

  Jean was more essentially British than Sally; she grumbled like a true Englishwoman, with her grin-and-bear-it grin. And she was tougher. She never struck Christopher as being sentimental or the least bit sorry for herself. Like Sally, she boasted continually about her lovers. In those days, Christopher felt certain that she was exaggerating. Now I am not so certain. But when Julie Harris was rehearsing for the part of Sally in the American production of I Am a Camera, John van Druten and Christopher discussed with her the possibility that nearly all of Sally’s sex life is imaginary; and they agreed that the part should be played so that the audience wouldn’t be able to make up its mind, either way. Julie achieved an exquisite ambiguity in her delivery of such lines as:

  I had a wonderful, voluptuous little room—with no chairs. That’s how I used to seduce men.

  One never knew exactly what she meant by “seduce.”

  John van Druten’s Sally wasn’t quite Christopher’s Sally; John made her humor cuter and naughtier. And Julie contributed much of herself to the character. She seemed vulnerable but untouchable (beyond a certain point), quickly moved to childlike delight or dismay, stubbornly obedient to the voices of her fantasies; a bohemian Joan of Arc, battling to defend her way of life from the bourgeoisie. In the last scene but one, the battle appeared to be lost; Julie was about to go back to England in the custody of her domineering mother, defiant but defeated. In token of her humiliation, she wore a frumpy expensive British coat which her mother had made her put on. She looked as miserable as Joan of Arc must have looked when she was forced to stop dressing as a man. Then, in the last scene, Julie entered in the costume she had worn throughout most of the play—a black silk sheath with a black tam-o’-shanter and a flame-colored scarf, the uniform of h
er revolt. Seeing it, one knew, before she spoke, that her mother had retired routed from the battlefield. The effect was heroic. Bohemia had triumphed. The first-night audience cheered with joy. Julie became a star. And the play became a hit, because of her.

  The leading male character in the play is called Christopher Isherwood. In dealing with his sex life or, rather, the lack of it, John used a scene from the novel. Sally asks Christopher if he is in love with her. He answers, “No.” Sally replies that she is glad he isn’t, “I wanted you to like me from the first minute we met. But I’m glad you’re not in love with me. Somehow or other, I couldn’t possibly be in love with you.” The “somehow or other” may be taken to suggest that Sally knows instinctively that Christopher is homosexual—or it may not. As for Christopher, he once says vaguely that he has wasted a lot of time “hunting for sex,” but he doesn’t say which kind.

  In the film of I Am a Camera, Christopher gets drunk and tries to rape Sally. She resists him. After this, they are just good friends. In the musical play Cabaret, the male lead is called Clifford Bradshaw. He is an altogether heterosexual American; he has an affair with Sally and fathers her child. In the film of Cabaret, the male lead is called Brian Roberts. He is a bisexual Englishman; he has an affair with Sally and, later, with one of Sally’s lovers, a German baron. At the end of the film, he is eager to marry Sally. But Sally reminds him of his lapse and hints that there may be others in the future. Brian’s homosexual tendency is treated as an indecent but comic weakness to be snickered at, like bed-wetting.

  In real life, Jean and Christopher had a relationship which was asexual but more truly intimate than the relationships between Sally and her various partners in the novel, the plays, and the films. Jean moved into a room in the Nollendorfstrasse flat after she met Christopher, early in 1931. Soon they were like brother and sister. They amused each other greatly and enjoyed being together, but both of them were selfish and they often quarreled. Jean never tried to seduce him. But I remember a rainy, depressing afternoon when she remarked, “What a pity we can’t make love, there’s nothing else to do,” and he agreed that it was and there wasn’t. Nevertheless, on at least one occasion, because of some financial or housing emergency, they shared a bed without the least embarrassment. Jean knew Otto and Christopher’s other sexmates but showed no desire to share them, although he wouldn’t have really minded.