Christopher and His Kind

by Christopher Isherwood

  * * *

  On August 24, Forster and his friend, Bob Buckingham, arrived; also Brian Howard and his friend, Toni. (Since I have just used the word “friend” twice in one sentence, this is a good place to comment on it. Admittedly, it is ambiguous. In Christopher’s case, for example, it had to cover his relationships with Upward, Forster, Auden, and Heinz—each one of which differed greatly from the others in character. Nevertheless, when a male friendship includes sexual love, I dislike referring to either of the friends as a “lover” or a “boyfriend.” Except in the plural, “lover” suggests to me a one-sided attachment; “boyfriend” always sounds condescending and often ridiculously unsuitable. So I shall go on using “friend” and try to show what the word means when applied to any given pair of people.)

  On August 27, Forster and Bob, Brian and Toni, Stephen Spender (who had appeared unexpectedly the day before), Klaus Mann, and Gerald Hamilton all went with Christopher and Heinz to The Hague, where Gerald had arranged a birthday lunch in a restaurant for Christopher. (Christopher’s birthday was the twenty-sixth but he had become accustomed in childhood to celebrating one day later, because the twenty-seventh was the birthday of his Grandfather John.) Soon after their arrival, a rainstorm forced them to take shelter in the nearest public building. It happened to be the Gevangenpoort prison, now a museum. This was an emergency which demanded all Gerald’s art as a host. He had to entertain his guests without benefit of alcohol or even chairs, amidst a depressing display of antique torture instruments.

  This all-male party was oddly assorted. Gerald himself sparkled with jokes to which he wasn’t quite attending; he had an air of nervously expecting the police to appear. Stephen simmered with sly giggles, aware of the Joke behind the jokes yet also basically inattentive, perhaps because he was composing a poem. Klaus Mann, charming and civilized, with his quick eager speech, talked pessimistically but cheerfully about the times they were living in. (He had described his latest book, Flucht in den Norden, to Christopher with a grin as “oh, another prewar novel.”) Brian Howard’s dark, heavy-lidded, keenly searching and testing eyes missed no nuance of the situation but were made restless by his need for a drink and his anxiety lest Toni should say something gauche. Handsome Bavarian blond Toni, ill at ease in his expensive clothes, was only anxious not to offend, also in need of a drink, and enjoying himself least of anyone present. Forster, beaming through his spectacles, was probably enjoying himself most, since Bob Buckingham was with him. They kept exchanging glances full of fun and affection. Bob’s thick-featured broad face was made beautiful by its strength and good nature. Heinz had felt drawn to him immediately and it seemed to Christopher that they had a kind of resemblance, due to their working-class kinship. He himself was feeling unusually happy.

  After his return to England, Forster wrote:

  As for Amsterdam, my only objection to it is that I had no time there whatever alone with you. There was nothing I wanted to imbibe or impart, still it would have been an additional enjoyment. After all, we are both of us writers, and good ones.

  I think you did realize how much we both liked Heinz.

  This was the first of Forster’s letters which began “Dear Christopher” and which was signed “Morgan.”

  * * *

  Gerald, the ever punctual, ever polite, used to say that Brian Howard had “the manners of a very great genius”—by which he meant that Brian was unreliable, unpunctual, noisy, and quarrelsome in public, apt to get drunk or doped—and that he didn’t have the talent which would have excused such behavior. Here, Gerald—who hadn’t much literary taste—was wrong. Brian did have talent as a poet. What was inexcusable was that he used it so seldom. His self-indulgence was babyish; he was one of the most fascinating and dangerous babies of his generation. If you flattered yourself that you could wean him away from babyhood, he was delighted to let you try, for as long as your patience held out. But you couldn’t complain later that he hadn’t warned you you’d fail—and maybe end by acquiring his vices, into the bargain. Indeed, he warned Christopher, that would-be healer: “What you must realize, my dear, is that you can never understand someone like me—someone who’s devoted his entire life to pleasure.” Brian contrived to pronounce the word “pleasure” in a tone which brought a chill to Christopher’s spine and suggested the grimmest austerities of the medieval monks.

  Christopher had enough sense not to get too involved with Brian personally, but for a while it seemed that circumstances might throw him and Heinz together with Brian and Toni as a foursome. Toni had been refused permission to live in England—on the ground that he had associated with a drug addict during a previous visit—so now he and Brian, like Christopher and Heinz, were looking for a country where they could settle.

  September 1. Dinner with Brian and Toni. They have now heard from Ireland and it seems doubtful whether it’s worth going there, as there is an exchange of alien lists with England. Brian wants to go to Portugal, buy a ruined palace, and keep hens and goats and grow oranges. Toni keeps making objections and warns Brian in advance that he won’t clean the shit off the goats. Brian got angry with him and alarmed that his lack of enthusiasm would put us off. Actually, I don’t want to go unless we can get Gerald or Stephen to come with us.

  September 6. Last night we went out with Brian and Toni and sat in the cafe by the Concert Hall. The boys played billiards. Brian discussed the various fittings of the cafe, piece by piece—the lamps, the vases, the ornaments—and described the artistic pedigree of each: sham Louis XIV, bastard Oriental mixed with Second Empire, pre-war arty German (balls on strings) etc, etc. He knows a good deal about the history of bad taste and was very amusing.

  Christopher’s diary also describes a teatime scene in the lounge of a hotel where Christopher and Brian are sitting together. Brian produces from his pocket a twist of paper containing some white powder. “Do you know what this is, my dear?” he says aggressively and very loudly, to embarrass both Christopher and the other guests. “Take a good look at it—no, it isn’t salt, my dear, and it isn’t sugar, my dear, it’s cocaine, my dear, COCAINE!” He sniffs ostentatiously at the powder as he explains that this isn’t good cocaine, however. “Good cocaine is sparkling white, so dazzling that you can’t look at it.” Continuing to sniff, he tells Christopher that cocaine “gathers in a knot in the chest and is like ozone,” that hashish “is like toffee, it makes you feel like the gateway to Hell,” and that heroin “spreads like a stone flower from the stomach to the legs and the arms.” Christopher asks him to describe his sensations at this moment. He answers: “Imagine yourself partly a wonderful calm Venetian palace in the sunshine and partly Joan of Arc.”

  And then there was another evening on which they had all been out together. Having said good night to Brian and Toni, Christopher and Heinz walked at a leisurely pace down the street toward their lodgings. Meanwhile, Brian ran down a parallel street, waited for them at the next corner, and jumped out at them, with his black furry greatcoat over his head. They screamed, first with surprise, then with laughter, as he chased them … In retrospect, this seemed to Christopher to have been a beautifully imaginative act of affection. “How many other people we know,” he asked himself, “would have cared for us enough to do that?”

  (Brian and Toni did go to Portugal, in October of that year. But they didn’t stay long. Christopher and Heinz saw little of them when they, too, came to Portugal later.)

  * * *

  On September 12, Christopher and Heinz went to the Belgian consulate in Rotterdam and made another attempt to get Heinz a permit to stay in Belgium. Again they were refused; Gerald Hamilton had, in fact, accomplished nothing for them. Returning disgusted and depressed to Amsterdam, they found a letter from a friend suggesting that they should try for the permit at the Belgian consulate in Luxembourg. One could get into Luxembourg without any formalities.

  On September 14, they entered Luxembourg, went to the Belgian consulate there, and were given a thirty-day permit for Heinz
within five minutes. Next day, they took a bus trip through what is called the Luxembourg Switzerland, a hilly region of forests, which Christopher imagined as looking like the country of Ruritania in The Prisoner of Zenda. At Echternach, the bus made a detour across the frontier into Germany and back. Their driver assured them that the German officials wouldn’t ask for passports. Some passengers were nervous and preferred to remain behind and be picked up on the return journey, but Christopher and Heinz couldn’t resist the adventure. At a café just inside Germany, they were allowed to get out of the bus and spend a quarter of an hour drinking beer and writing postcards. A young man in S.S. uniform was sitting there, but he seemed as unreal and theatrical as the Jew-Hate placard nailed to the wall. They mailed a postcard to Gerald but the shock which they had intended it to give him was neutralized, because they arrived in Brussels before the card did.

  September 19. We moved in here yesterday evening, a second-floor flat overlooking the Boulevard Adolphe Max (number 22). The living-room has fish-net curtains, huge sideboards covered with silver cake-dishes and fancy ashtrays, a pair of sofa dolls, two table lamps whose silk shades are the skirts of ballerinas—the kind used in brothels—six large and small photos of Clark Gable and six of Ramon Novarro, a miniature aeroplane propellor supporting a whole bunch of snaps, good-looking young airmen mostly (one of them signed: “pour Claire, 1’audacieuse”), and a grandfather clock (whose chime I have had stopped) with weights like small artillery shells. The bedroom has a handsome white bath, a dangerous gas-heater for the water, and a big painting of Leda with her swan.

  Our landlady (“Claire l’audacieuse”) is gay talkative haggardly chic with waved greyish hair and darkened eyelids, in a sleeveless white satin blouse. She is amazingly generous, gets breakfast and cleans our rooms for nothing and is now washing all our clothes, for which she asks only the price of the soap.

  Claire was a tragic figure. I think she must have been on the verge of starvation. For a while at least, she had nowhere to live and Christopher and Heinz discovered that she was sleeping in the kitchen of the flat without telling them. This was an intolerable situation; they had absolutely no privacy. At last, though feeling terribly guilty, they somehow got her to leave.

  By the middle of October, the Ethiopian crisis was at its height. Italy had invaded the country and the League Assembly had voted to impose sanctions. Meanwhile, Heinz had been refused a six-month permit to stay in Belgium and his thirty-day permit had expired. Gerald arranged for his expulsion to be delayed from week to week, but it was obvious that a move must be made soon. Stephen was in Brussels with the young man who is called Jimmy Younger in World within World, and the two of them had agreed to come with Christopher and Heinz to Portugal. But they couldn’t leave for at least another month—I forget why.

  October 19. Heinz has got spectacles, now. The oculist said to me: “His world is not our world, Monsieur. All his life, vertical lines have been practically invisible to him, while horizontals have appeared abnormally distinct. When he looks at a circle, he sees it as an oval but, since he has learned by experience that it is circular, he retransforms it into a circle within his brain.”

  The other day, for the first time in his life, he went to bed with a whore. She had no breasts and wanted a hundred francs. It was not a success.

  During November, Christopher finished writing The Nowaks and sent it to John Lehmann, who was going to publish it in his first issue of New Writing, the following spring. It would thus become the first fragment of Goodbye to Berlin to appear in print.

  On December 10, Stephen, Jimmy, Christopher, and Heinz sailed from Antwerp on a Brazilian boat which would take them to Lisbon on its way to Rio.

  TWELVE

  At the time of sailing, Christopher felt lightheaded with relief. This voyage, at least, was going to be a holiday from worry about Heinz’s permits. And the company of Stephen and of Jimmy Younger offered relief of another kind; they would help him decide what was to be done, when they had landed in Portugal and faced new problems. During Christopher’s wanderings with Heinz, he had made all the decisions alone—grumbling to himself that this was a heavy burden he had to bear. He would have done better to realize that Heinz was no longer a boy and needed responsibility.

  Jimmy Younger was ready to run their whole expedition, if they would let him. He had served in the Army and believed in getting things organized. His appearance was attractive: curly red-brown hair, sparkling yellow-brown eyes, big smiling teeth. He would call Stephen “yer silly thing!” and tell him, “Don’t be so daft!” with a Welsh (Cardiff) accent. He was full of fun and the love of argument—left-wing political or just argument for its own sake. He used the jargon of a left-wing intellectual, but his own kind of intelligence was intuitive and emotional. He had a Welsh ear for the music of poetry and could genuinely appreciate the work of Spender, Auden, and their fellow poets. Telling Christopher about his first meeting with Stephen, he said: “That was when the curtain went up, for me.”

  I remember the voyage in terms of opera, with the four of them relating to each other either as quartets, trios, or duets. As a quartet, their performance was directed toward the other passengers. Taking it for granted that nobody on board could possibly guess what they were really like, they amused themselves by behaving with deliberate oddness—exchanging private-joke signals, grimaces, and asides in full view and hearing of their audience.

  The trio was between Stephen, Christopher, and Jimmy. It now seems to me that it was performed for Jimmy’s benefit, to make him feel that Stephen and Christopher regarded him as one of themselves. They didn’t, altogether, and Jimmy must have been aware that they didn’t. But, perhaps, for the time being, it satisfied Jimmy’s pride that they even made the effort to pretend.

  Christopher’s duet with Heinz was more intimate than it had been for some time; being with Stephen and Jimmy made them very conscious of themselves as a couple. This didn’t mean, however, that they had yet begun to criticize the other two. Heinz, who could now speak a hesitant basic English, also had a duet with Jimmy—of necessity, since they often found themselves alone together. The duet between Stephen and Christopher was long-established and had a continuity which bridged their separations; they discussed books and politics and abstract ideas and other authors, but very seldom the people they happened to be living with. There was no duet between Stephen and Heinz or between Christopher and Jimmy, perhaps because both Stephen and Christopher were afraid of being drawn into relationships which might have made them disloyal to each other. Christopher did eventually have a duet with Jimmy, but that was much later and under altered circumstances.

  * * *

  The quartet’s conscious effort to enjoy itself produced a travel diary. Its entries were written in a tone of shipboard humor and were meant to be read aloud at once, before they could go stale. Here are a few excerpts:

  Thursday, December 12, 1935. [Written by Stephen]: On Tuesday, when we left Brussels for Antwerp, Gerald came to say goodbye to us, wearing a huge fur-lined coat with a skunk collar in which his chinless, thick-lipped, flat-nosed face nestled. He was wearing no jewelry, but there was such a smell of scent in the room after he had come in that I said, “What lady has been here with scent?” “I’m still here,” he answered, bridling a little. We all kissed him goodbye.

  This boat is very old and goes very slowly. There are two lounges, one a drawing-room, very decorative, with a yellow-keyed grand piano, the other an Olde Tudor lounge, clawed over by five enormous electric fans, hanging from the ceiling like vampires. Here we read or write. In the other room, Jimmy strums on the piano and Heinz sings.

  There is a fat woman, from Northern Ireland but half Belgian, who speaks several languages and is very taken by Jimmy.

  21.00 hours. Same day. [Written by Christopher]: We are standing off Le Havre. The day has been dominated by the Irish-Belgian lady. “Oh, but you’d like Rio—you should see ut. If you’ve got an artistic ’eart—that is, heart—well, art a
nd heart, I mean both—nature must speak to you there.” But she was shocked when Jimmy said he didn’t like the Royal Family; she ordered him off to the gymnasium: “Away with you and shake up your liver!”

  Later, Jimmy played the piano: “And the cares that hang around me through the week—seem to vanish like a gambler’s lucky streak.”

  Isherwood then asked Spender what he was thinking.

  Spender: “I was thinking about the lucky streak. If I’d written that, I thought, I should have made it somehow terrible and terrific. And how boring, I thought to myself, that I can only write about things terrifically.”

  At some time during the crossing of the Bay of Biscay (December 14–15)—calm at first, then rough; but not rough enough to make any of them actually seasick—the Irish-Belgian lady read their palms and told them their characters. Christopher reports this:

  Stephen is self-willed, violently pursues his ideas and changes them frequently, listens to advice and has a nature of gold. Heinz is conceited, ambitious, and will succeed. Jimmy is Welsh—and therefore conceited—strong-willed and mad on girls. And I—ah, I am the kind of boy Madame has adored all her life: wherever I travel, whatever I do, I’ll always remain real hundred per cent English—just a shy, modest, charming boy. The doctor then offered his palm, disclosing a toothpick which he had been gripping all through the meal like a dagger. She refused to say what she saw in it—it would shock us.

  (The quartet made a joke out of pretending to wonder whether this doctor was really a doctor at all—because Portuguese Doctor, not simply Doctor, was printed above his cabin door. Might not this phrase have some quite other significance, as “Dutch wife,” “French letter,” and “Spanish fly” do?)

  Heinz wanted to borrow a German book from the library and this led to the discovery that there is only one to be had—and that much mutilated. We then applied to the Germans, who told us that this boat was originally a German boat and that the Brazilian government seized it during the war. The guilty consciences of the Brazilians caused them, according to the white-haired German, to throw overboard all the German books in the library. The white-haired German is discreetly bitter—the thin-haired younger German less bitter and less discreet and his wife an idiotically sincere chatterbox who protests, very loudly in the lounge, that Germany Wants Peace—by which she means, as Stephen says, that Germany wants to grab everything without having to fight for it.