After supper, they often got mildly drunk and capered on the small marble dance floor in the patio. The Englishman told them wild tales of his life in the United States. He had jumped ship while working as a steward and had spent several years wandering around the country, lovemaking. He strongly advised Christopher and Heinz to go and do likewise.
* * *
On July 9, Christopher began a two-day holiday from his novel. He and Heinz set out to climb the volcano, the Pico de Teide. They had hired a guide, and two mules to carry food and blankets. Someone must have talked them into making the expedition so elaborate; it was still quite cheap but it wasn’t their style. At the last moment, they impulsively invited a young German, a schoolmaster on holiday, to come with them. He seemed pleasant enough. The back of his neck had an ugly Prussian look, it was red and stiff; and his face was prematurely lined, wooden, rather silly. But he had nice blue eyes.
They spent the night in a rest hut on the lava plateau which surrounds the cone of the Pico. After sunset, the temperature dropped sharply. The hut had a fireplace but no chimney; it filled with smoke when they started a fire. Their only light was from a pair of bicycle lamps.
Christopher was acutely aware of the altitude; it made him feel tense, apprehensive, slightly crazy. It seemed to affect the schoolmaster too, but differently. He became dogmatic and talked in slogans from Nazi propaganda: “A people must have a national ambition. It is natural for one people to wish to impose its culture upon all others.” When Christopher challenged him to define what he meant by German culture, he was unable to and shrugged the question off as irrelevant. None of this was really surprising. But Christopher, in his present state of mind, saw the schoolmaster as supernaturally sinister, transformed before his very eyes into a demon who threatened Heinz’s existence. No—it was even worse than that. For Heinz evidently couldn’t see the demonic aspect of the schoolmaster, regarding him as an ordinary human Nazi whose political opinions should be ignored, rather than spoil the enjoyment of this trip. Which meant that Heinz, being German, had within him a peculiarly German tolerance of Nazi ideas—a tolerance which could betray him into the demon’s power. Not only Heinz’s existence was threatened but his soul.
Next morning, panting in the thin air, they followed a fairly easy path up to the top of the cone. Hot sulphur fumed through greenish holes in its sides. When the guide held a lighted match to one of them, all the other holes began to fume more violently. And there was a place where you could hear a noise like the roaring of subterranean fire. As the sun rose, they stood silent in the enormous emptiness, looking out over fleecy cloud fields to where the guide had told them the coast of Africa lay. Then Heinz let out a great joyful yell and, using his walking stick for a brake, glissaded down the cone in a swirl of pumice dust. Without a smile or a word, his soul’s enemy took off in pursuit of him. Christopher descended more sedately, sulking. Since waking up that morning, he had avoided speaking to the schoolmaster and had urged Heinz not to speak to him either. Heinz had gone on doing so, greatly to Christopher’s annoyance. The schoolmaster seemed anyhow quite unaware of Christopher’s hostility.
Then followed the long downhill trail, on which Christopher felt glad that they had hired the mules, because he could ride one of them and thus isolate himself from Heinz and the schoolmaster. However, the decreasing altitude restored him gradually to sanity. By the time they reached the Troika, he had had to admit to himself that the demon was a human being after all, hateful but relatively powerless.
* * *
While Christopher was struggling to write his huge novel about the prototypes of the Lost, he had decided that it must be narrated in the third person, objectively, camera-wise. The camera would record only outward appearances, actions, and spoken words—no thoughts, no feelings, nothing subjective. In this kind of storytelling, the author is playing a game with the reader. The author gives him all the necessary objective data, challenging him to interpret it and guess what will happen next. The more often the reader misinterprets and guesses wrongly, the greater is the author’s success. This is the technique of the classic detective story.
But now Christopher was attempting an altogether different kind of novel, in which Mr. Norris wasn’t a prototype, wasn’t designed to demonstrate a concept. Here, he was a character in the simplest sense. Meeting him must be its own reward.
Christopher wanted to make the reader experience Arthur Norris just as he himself had experienced Gerald Hamilton. He could only do this by writing subjectively, in the first person, describing his own reactions to and feelings about Hamilton; otherwise, his portrait of Mr. Norris wouldn’t be lifelike. He could, however, permit himself to invent as much dialogue, as many situations and additional characters as he needed. One does that even when one is telling a story to one’s friends which is allegedly true.
But the narration problem wasn’t to be so easily solved. Was Christopher claiming that the Narrator of this novel was, in every respect, himself? No. Most importantly, he wasn’t prepared to admit that the Narrator was homosexual. Because he was afraid to? Yes, that was one reason. Although his own life as a homosexual was lived fairly openly, he feared to create a scandal. He even hesitated to embarrass Kathleen. And there was Uncle Henry—if he were sufficiently shocked, he might cut off Christopher’s allowance.
There was a second reason, a literary one. Christopher doesn’t mention it in his diaries or letters of that period. But I think that, subconsciously at least, it must have influenced his decisions.
Christopher wanted to keep the reader’s attention concentrated on Norris; therefore, the Narrator had to be as unobtrusive as possible. The reader had to be encouraged to put himself in the Narrator’s shoes—to see with the Narrator’s eyes, to experience his experiences, to identify with him in all his reactions. For example, the Narrator is at a Beethoven concert, he sees and smells a juicy steak in a restaurant, he wakes in the night to feel his cheek being licked by the tongue of a non-venomous snake. The ordinary reader, being convinced of the Narrator’s ordinariness, will take it for granted that he is feeling pleasure in the first instance, appetite in the second, and terror and disgust in the third. The reader will share these feelings.
But suppose that the Narrator shows no pleasure in the music? Suppose that he shows disgust on seeing and smelling the meat? Suppose that he shows no fear of the snake and even starts to pet it? Suppose, in other words, that he proves himself to be a tone-deaf, vegetarian herpetologist? The ordinary reader may be repelled by, or sympathetic to, such a Narrator’s reactions, but he will never identify with him. He will always remain aware that the Narrator is an individual who is very different from himself.
This is what would have happened if Christopher had made his Narrator an avowed homosexual, with a homosexual’s fantasies, preferences, and prejudices. The Narrator would have become so odd, perhaps so interesting, that his presence would have thrown the novel out of perspective. It could no longer have been exclusively a portrait of Mr. Norris. The Narrator would have kept upstaging Norris’s performance as the star.
Christopher dared not make the Narrator homosexual. But he scorned to make him heterosexual. That, to Christopher, would have been as shameful as pretending to be heterosexual himself. Therefore, the Narrator could have no explicit sex experiences in the story. (“This sexless nitwit,” one reviewer was to call him.) The unlucky creature is, indeed, no more than a demi-character. It is as if Christopher has told him: “Don’t call any unnecessary attention to yourself; don’t get more involved with anybody than you absolutely have to.” There are moments in the novel at which some of the other characters seem actually aware of the Narrator’s demi-nature. When, for example, Helen Pratt calls him “a nice little chap,” it is with a strange contemptuous tolerance. She knows what she knows. But Christopher won’t allow her to say more.
Thus Christopher both acknowledged and disowned his kinship with the Narrator. In Mr. Norris, he expressed the ambivalence of his attitu
de by giving the Narrator his two superfluous middle names, William Bradshaw. They had always embarrassed him and, lately, he had grown to hate them because, joined to Christopher and Isherwood, they formed a tedious procession of ten syllables which wouldn’t fit into the allotted space on any of the official documents he was required to sign during his travels. In Goodbye to Berlin, and two later novels, he changed the Narrator’s name to Christopher Isherwood, saying to himself that William Bradshaw was a foolish evasion. But the evasiveness is in the Narrator’s nature, not in his name.
* * *
Christopher set out to write what he called a “dynamic portrait.” He used this term to describe a novel whose interest depends on the gradual revealing of a character, rather than on action, crisis, and confrontation. What the action of such a novel does is to remove layer after layer of the “skin” of outer appearance—thus taking the reader inward from his first superficial impressions and too hastily formed judgments until he is face to face, at last, with the “real” individual. (This only means, of course, that aspect of the individual which the author has arbitrarily decided is the essential one.)
In those days, Christopher was fond of saying that what most interested him in writing fiction was to present the bizarre as though it were humdrum and to show events which are generally regarded as extraordinary forming the daily routine of somebody’s life. He had chosen Norris for his first subject because, of all his Berlin characters, Norris was the most bizarre.
However, in the process of writing the novel, Christopher was seduced away from his original intention. Toward the end of it, he abandons Norris and his portrait for a whole chapter, while he takes the Narrator and some minor characters to Switzerland and involves them in an espionage intrigue. Here the bizarre is merely bizarre.
(I now realize that what seduced Christopher was his recent experience with the screenplay of Little Friend. This had shown him that he could invent situations in areas of life which were quite unknown to him; invent them without shame, although part of himself regarded this newly discovered faculty as being a kind of betrayal. Henceforth, from time to time, he would be unable to resist using it. It was so much fun.)
In his two novels about Berlin, Christopher tried to make not only the bizarre seem humdrum but the humdrum seem bizarre—that is, exciting. He wanted his readers to find excitement in Berlin’s drab streets and shabby crowds, in the poverty and dullness of the overgrown Prussian provincial town which had become Germany’s pseudo-capital. Forty years later, I can claim that that excitement has been created—largely by all those others who have reinterpreted Christopher’s material: actresses and actors, directors and writers. Christopher was saying, in effect: “Read about us and marvel! You did not live in our time—be sorry!” And now there are young people who agree with him. “How I wish I could have been with you there!” they write. This is flattering but also ironic; for most of them could no more have shared Christopher’s life in Berlin than they could have lived with a hermit in the desert. Not because of any austerities Christopher endured. Because of the boredom.
* * *
Christopher finished the novel on August 12. I remember that he had to hurry to get his last page typed before the Englishman started the music. Christopher wrote in his diary:
The gramophone keeps reiterating a statement about Life with which I do not agree.
When he mailed the manuscript to the Hogarth Press, it was still called The Lost. But, not long before its publication in 1935, he decided to alter its title to Mr. Norris Changes Trains. This, too, was a title which he had originally thought of in German: Herr Norris Steigt Um. It was intended by Christopher to mean not only that Mr. Norris keeps changing trains—that is to say, keeps having to change countries in a hurry, to escape his creditors and the police—but also that he keeps changing allies and political affiliations, jumping from one bandwagon onto another.
When Stephen Spender heard of the new title, he protested in a letter:
The Lost is an excellent title. The other is arty. Anything would surely be better and less Hogarth Pressy. It gives one a sense of earrings.
I still can’t agree with Stephen. And I enormously regret that Christopher let himself be persuaded to make a change in the title of the American edition of the novel. Somebody in the office of William Morrow, his U.S. publisher, assured him that Americans always said “transfer” and therefore wouldn’t understand what “changes trains” meant. Christopher knew nothing at that time about American idioms, so he took this extremely dubious statement for fact and offered an alternative, The Last of Mr. Norris. He thereby created the false impression that these are two different novels, one the sequel to the other. Which has led to much wearisome correspondence with readers, setting the record straight.
* * *
On August 15, Christopher and Heinz began a week’s tour of the three westernmost Canary Islands: La Palma, Gomera, and Hierro. This was sheer travel snobbery; the islands had little to offer but their remoteness and La Palma’s claim to possess the largest extinct crater in the world. The length of the tour was made necessary by the intervals between visits of the coastal steamer. Still, they killed time happily, clambering up cinder cones, playing billiards in fondas, or lying in bed. Heinz was a good person to be bored with; he never blamed Christopher for his boredom. And they did meet two fascinating characters—tourist beggars of contrasting types—about whom Christopher later wrote a story called “The Turn round the World.”
Then, on September 6, they left the islands for the Spanish mainland. Landing at Cádiz, they took a bus to Algeciras, visited Gibraltar, and later crossed by steamer to Ceuta, in what was then Spanish Morocco. As Christopher came ashore down the gangplank, the hundred-pound note was picked from his pocket. There was nothing effective to be done about this, so he relieved his feelings by making a token fuss at the British consulate. The vice consul naturally thought it insane to carry such a sum of money around. Not being also a psychologist, he didn’t find Christopher’s insanity even the least bit interesting.
After this, there is a gap in Christopher’s diary and a blank in my mind. Memory refuses to attach itself to the snapshots they took in Tetuán and in Xauen—then still thought to be dangerous because of the recent fighting between the Moors and the Spanish. I gaze at these glimpses of winding alleys and muffled figures and can remember only a visit to Tangier twenty years later, which was made unforgettably melodramatic by an initiation into hashish taking.
Having left Africa, they traveled north through Spain by way of Granada and Madrid. I forget what the reasons were which decided them to settle in Copenhagen, early in October. I suppose that, for the moment, there seemed nowhere else for them to go.
Thus ended Christopher’s grand journey of home rejection and defiance of Nearly Everybody. What followed this was no longer defiant; just a succession of moves on a chessboard, compelled by a stronger opponent. In fact, a retreat.
ELEVEN
Writing to Stephen Spender from Copenhagen on October 9, 1934, Christopher reports that he and Heinz have met Stephen’s elder brother, Michael, and his wife, Erica, by chance on the street and that Erica has been most kind to them. She has found them a flat in the same block as the Spenders’, at Classensgade 65, and has helped them buy a few pieces of furniture and move into it.
One has to wait three or four months, as a foreigner, before applying for permission to remain in Denmark at all; and the authorities refuse to say in advance whether permission is likely to be granted. This rather disinclines me to buy anything for the flat which isn’t absolutely necessary. Heinz is making meatballs in the kitchen and I am typing this in a very “dictator” room; quite bare except for a ventilator, a table, and a map of Europe.
Compared with his brothers, Michael appeared rugged and masculine and altogether less sensitive, but he had his share of the Spender good looks. Christopher had met him briefly before this and had then been inclined to accept Stephen’s view of him. Stephen,
the hyper-subjective, had made fun of Michael for having claimed that he had never in his life held a subjective opinion. Michael certainly was a pragmatic type of scientist who made a cult of efficiency and despised the lack of it in others. However, he was also aware of his own limitations and more modest than Stephen would admit. Christopher found Michael’s conversation fascinating precisely because it was free of the subjective exaggerations in which he himself was so apt to indulge. It was a welcome change to listen to Michael’s strictly objective stories of Greenland, which he had recently visited on some scientific mission.
One story I still remember because it is such an apt parable, applicable to any failure in understanding between two cultures:
An Eskimo, on being shown a photograph of Copenhagen harbor full of ships, was unimpressed and puzzled. He asked: “But how can people live in your town? They must all be starving. I see no fishing canoes.”
On the whole, Michael approved of Christopher, finding him less subjectively minded than most of Stephen’s friends. This was because he had read The Memorial and had been impressed by its display of objective details—such as the names of musical pieces performed at Mary Scriven’s concerts, the technical gossip of Maurice’s friends about cars and motorbikes, the obscure places visited by Edward Blake in Asia Minor, the description by Eric of a bankrupt mining town in South Wales. Michael, with endearing innocence, took it for granted that Christopher knew what he was talking about; that he had produced these facts out of a vast store of knowledge. Christopher, like many other writers, was shockingly ignorant of the objective world, except where it touched his own experience. When he had to hide his ignorance beneath a veneer, he simply consulted someone who could supply him with the information he needed. Nevertheless, he accepted Michael’s compliments gracefully.
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