Christopher and His Kind

by Christopher Isherwood

  July 4. A lovely day again, enjoyed sitting in the pretty little sitting-room, opening on to the gay little garden and the wide ever-changing view. Heinz in and out with the chickens. Anna in attendance with food, and Christopher too. It is really the most domestic life they have had and now it is all threatened … Fairly encouraging but necessarily expensive news from Gerald Hamilton … Heinz joined us for tea. He does not speak unless spoken to. In some way difficult to explain how or why, he tones in with Christopher’s life wonderfully well. They divide everything and every evening Heinz makes up “our accounts” and asks C just what he has spent during the day; and their personal and household expenditure is all entered. If only there wasn’t this constant worry, on Heinz’s account, over their plans.

  Meanwhile, in his diary, Christopher was writing about Kathleen:

  It is amazing—the barrier, even now, between us. Mostly of shyness. But, in getting older, she seems to have got heavier and harder. I’d imagined myself falling on her neck, appealing to her to forget and forgive the past, to regard Heinz as her son—but all that, in her presence, seems merely ridiculous. She is infinitely more broadminded, more reasonable, than she was in the old days—I like talking to her, in fact I talk to her better and more amusingly than to anyone else; but the ice is never really broken. To Heinz she is pleasant, gracious, chatty. She treats him—in a perfectly nice way—like one of the servants.

  * * *

  Kathleen left Portugal on July 10, for England. That same day, Heinz went to stay briefly with an English couple who were relatives of the landlady. This move had been arranged by Christopher in a mood of panic. By now, he had almost persuaded himself that the Nazis at the consulate would take the trouble to kidnap Heinz and put him on board a German ship. He had written in his diary: “Every time the doorbell rings, we jump out of our skins.” Meanwhile, as the neglected chickens ran about the garden in confusion, telegrams and telephone calls darted back and forth between Christopher and Gerald, producing nothing but promises that Heinz would somehow get his problems solved before too long.

  However, a few days later, sanity reappeared in the person of William Robson-Scott. He was touring Portugal and paid a visit to Christopher, whom he had known since the Berlin days. There was something toughly resilient in William’s makeup. He could bend before storms without breaking. His hair was short and vigorous, like grass clinging to the edge of a cliff. He laughed with nervous violence, turning red in the face and pressing his hands between his knees. Temperamentally mild and polite, he stated his opinions almost apologetically, but with fearless frankness. When the occasion demanded, he would become imperious in an old-fashioned British way, brushing difficulties aside like insects. (Christopher borrowed some of William’s mannerisms for the character called Peter Wilkinson, Otto Nowak’s lover, in Goodbye to Berlin. In real life, William and Otto never even met.)

  When the Nazis came into power, William was teaching at the University of Berlin. The daily confrontation between him and his students must have been ironically comic. Here was a roomful of young Germans being lectured to by a seemingly typical representative of the ruling class of England—Germany’s natural ally, according to Mein Kampf. It was to be presumed that he regarded himself as belonging to a master race born to rule the “lesser breeds without the Law.” Hitler admired this attitude and taught his followers to imitate it. However, William’s students soon became aware that their professor, far from being an ally, regarded Nazi Germans as the very lowest of the lesser breeds. William made this clear to them, in his nonchalant style, over and over again. Some of the students were outraged and walked out of the classroom. Complaints were made to the university authorities. These reached the ears of an older Englishman, a colleague of William’s in the English department. This Englishman was a joker. When told that William ought to be dismissed, he said: “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you. Might create international tension. You see, the fact is, the fellow’s a cousin of the King of England.” Incredibly enough, the Germans believed this. William suddenly found himself being treated with mysterious respect. Later, he discovered the joke. So did the Germans. They were not amused. William had to resign.

  William could offer Christopher no practical advice, but his mere presence was immensely reassuring. Christopher simply couldn’t picture kidnappers arriving to carry off Heinz, now that William was on the premises. And, if they did come, William would refuse to acknowledge their existence. “Nonsense!” he would snort, and they would disappear like a disease which has been un-thought by a Christian Science practitioner.

  Through William, Christopher met his friends James Stern the writer and his wife, Tania. The Sterns wanted to rent a house and spend several months in the neighborhood. Christopher was immediately drawn to both of them and it was agreed that they should share Alecrim do Norte with him and Heinz.

  Christopher found Jimmy Stern sympathetic because he was a hypochondriac like himself (though with far more reason); because he grumbled and was humorous and skinny and Irish; because his brainy worried face was strangely appealing; because he had been a steeplechase rider in Ireland, a bartender in Germany, and a cattle farmer on the South African veldt; because he was terrified of snakes and had been bitten by one (he implied that it had followed him around patiently until his attention was distracted by watching a rare bird); because he had written a book of extraordinary short stories, called The Heartless Land.

  As for Tania, she was one of the most unaffected, straightforward, sensible, and warmhearted women Christopher had ever encountered. She was also one of the most beautiful: small, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and with a body as beautiful as her face. She was a physical-culture expert and taught a system of exercises invented by herself. When she looked at you, she seemed aware of all the faults of posture which betrayed your inner tensions; but you never felt that she found them repulsive or even absurd. She was ready to help you correct them, if you wanted her to.

  Tania was a German who had lived for some time in Paris before she married Jimmy. She had two brothers who were Communists and who had barely managed to escape from Nazi Germany. She herself had no fear of the Nazis when they were no longer on their home ground. She suggested going with Heinz to their consulate and demanding to know exactly what would happen to him if he refused to obey their conscription order. She was sure that there was nothing they could do, except threaten. “But what if they take his passport away?” Christopher asked. “We won’t bring it with us,” said Tania, laughing. Her plan seemed outrageously daring and yet practical. Christopher was three quarters convinced by her assurance. Besides, his anxiety ached for the relief of a showdown—to know something, anything, definite after all these months. Heinz, who adored Tania, would have gone with her fearlessly. However, Jimmy, quite rightly I think, refused to allow her to get herself involved.

  Christopher asked himself: Why shouldn’t I go with Heinz to the consulate? He had to answer: I am afraid. Not of those officials, but of how he would behave. He was afraid of being questioned about his relations with Heinz, of losing his nerve, of being reduced to impotent rage, of being unable to play the scene through to a finish. That was why he had let Frl. Pohly go with Heinz to the consulate at Las Palmas for him. He couldn’t forget that confrontation at Harwich.

  Sometimes, Jimmy would shut himself up in his room for a whole day or more, seeing nobody but Tania. But his sensitive nerves and spells of melancholy created no tension in the household. Christopher wrote in his diary: “Jimmy’s jumpiness is quite without venom towards the outside world. He is much too busy hating his father to have any malice left over for us.” And Tania took everything in her stride. She devoted herself to Jimmy yet found sufficient time to be with Christopher and Heinz and also very efficiently managed the housekeeping. This seemed—in the short run at least—a perfectly workable arrangement and I believe that—had the run been long—they might all have lived together in harmony for months or even years.

  * * *

/>   On July 18, Franco started the revolt in Morocco which spread at once to Spain itself and became the Civil War.

  July 28. Here I am, on the granite verandah of Dr. Olavo’s house in the Beira Alta, looking out over the vines and olive woods of the Mondego Valley. Behind those mountains, across the Spanish frontier, they are fighting.

  We have sat up each night until past two o’clock listening to the wireless—and although the news was better yesterday, it doesn’t seem at all certain yet that the Fascists will be beaten.

  Not that Dr. Olavo doubts this for an instant. He stabs an accusing finger, swallows his Madeira, springs to his feet: “Never shall they win! Never! I understand the mentality of these generals. Ah, these butchers, these monsters, these analphabetics—they would dare to assault the noble great-hearted generous Spirit of Democracy—very well, I defy them!”

  Certainly he defies them. He is astonishingly incautious. From this house you can see the property of his brother, the former minister of war, who was murdered during the putsch which put the present regime into power. And yet Olavo is not merely free, his opinions are tolerated; he even has an important post in the civil administration. As I told him, he’s lucky not to be living in Italy or Germany.

  Forster to Christopher, July 30:

  I am rattled by the news from Spain this evening and feel I am saying farewell to you and Heinz. You know those feelings and can discount them: the last parting is never when or as one supposes. I had been planning to come to Portugal in the autumn. Now all seems impossible.

  This nightmare that everything almost went right! I know that you have it over the Communist failure in Germany. As a matter of fact, one’s activities (and inactivities) must have been doomed for many years. I’d throw in my hand if all these metaphors weren’t nonsense: there’s nowhere to throw one’s hand to.

  Dear me, Amsterdam was good. We often talk of it. I can’t believe it was only last year—two big wars since, two operations on myself, and so on, place it on another planet.

  Christopher to Stephen, August 11:

  About Spain, you can imagine how I feel; if they win this time, it’s the end. The end, even, of the British Empire, you’d think; and yet the majority of the British colony here are screaming against the Spanish government and praying for the rebels.

  The other evening, we had a picnic with Mr. and Mrs. T. and Mrs. Y. and a really violent and embarrassing argument started, Mrs. T. pro-govt and Mrs. Y. pro-reb. Mrs. Y. kept exclaiming, “But I tell you, they’re just a lot of dirty Communists and they murder women and burn churches; and the others are our sort, I mean, I can’t argue, but one feels they’re clean and they’ve kind of been to a sort of decent school, if you know what I mean.”

  I like both of them very much as women and they’ve both been decent to Heinz since all this wretched business with the Consulate, but all the same I find I avoid going to see Mrs. Y. now. The papers here are hundred percent pro-reb, so we get no reliable news. I feel awfully depressed.

  THIRTEEN

  Kathleen’s diary reference to “necessarily expensive news” from Gerald Hamilton suggests that Christopher had prepared her, while she was still in Portugal, for a financial shock. Christopher later joked to his friends that he had done this by gradual stages, in the manner of a Victorian announcing someone’s death to a relative: “There’s been an accident. Yes, he’s hurt. Rather badly, I’m afraid. No, he’s in no pain. Not now … You must try to be brave.” What Kathleen had to try to be brave about was that Heinz’s change of nationality was going to cost, approximately, one thousand pounds.

  It is possible that Christopher had been too tactful in breaking this news and that Kathleen had returned to England supposing that he had exaggerated or that the crisis wasn’t immediate. But now came the outbreak of war in Spain. The mails from Portugal were held up. Instead of vaguely worded letters from Christopher, Kathleen got a peremptory cable in which he told her to write directly to Hamilton’s lawyer in Brussels and arrange to send him the money. The lawyer answered Kathleen in a tone which she describes as “pretty cool,” by which she means insolently casual. He would accept Heinz as a client on receipt of the money. But he refused to guarantee that any naturalization papers could be obtained with it or that such papers, if obtained, would prove to be valid.

  Kathleen turned for help to her cousin and adviser, Sir William Graham Greene. “Cousin Graham” held an important post at the Admiralty. He was a friend of Winston Churchill and an uncle of Graham Greene the novelist.

  Through the clear eyeglasses of this honorable worldly-wise man, Kathleen began to see the situation in an even more sinister light:

  I feel more and more that there is something very shady behind it all. The lawyer might even in the end double-cross us.

  This gangsterish expression sounds comic, coming from Kathleen. She must have felt that she already had one foot in the underworld.

  August 13. A cable came from Christopher who, following my suggestion, is coming back. It is impossible to get anything settled at this distance, specially with the posts taking so long.

  August 18. Letter from Christopher. They have left Portugal and are now in Belgium, at Ostende. I’m sorry, as Christopher will now see Gerald Hamilton before coming home. I also have suspicions about the lawyer.

  August 21. Christopher arrived in time for lunch, having spent last night at Dover with William Plomer; he had also seen E. M. Forster, who is down there with his mother. In the afternoon, Cousin Graham came to talk over the Belgium, Ecuador, Brazil possibilities with Christopher.

  I have forgotten the technicalities involved in becoming a citizen of these countries, but I am fairly sure that, in Heinz’s case, certain documents could only be obtained by bribery. For example, you might have to have a certificate declaring that you had been a resident of the country for a large number of years, or that you had served in its armed forces—when, in fact, you hadn’t. Such certificates could of course be proved false if a hostile official chose to investigate your past, at any time in the future.

  Belgium was too near Nazi Germany. In the event of a German invasion, Heinz might find himself in worse danger with a Belgian passport than without one. Under the new Nazi laws, the penalty for attempting to change your nationality was a long term of imprisonment; it could even be death. So Christopher was now making up his mind to emigrate with Heinz to some country in Latin America. From there, he said to himself, they would perhaps later be able to make a second emigration—to the United States.

  During these conferences with Kathleen and Cousin Graham, Christopher had mixed feelings. He was suspicious of Gerald, on this as on so many occasions, and of the lawyer also because he was Gerald’s ally. Yet, after all, it was the lawyer who was taking the risks. How could he be expected to send written guarantees which might one day be used as evidence against him? Christopher didn’t want Kathleen to be swindled; but he felt out of place siding with her against Gerald and the lawyer. If they were lawbreakers, well, so was he. He liked and respected Cousin Graham. But, whenever Heinz’s name was mentioned, Christopher was all too aware of Graham’s self-restraint. He was making an effort not to show his disapproval of this imprudent and costly relationship in which Christopher had got himself involved. As for Kathleen, her exaggerated concern about the money as money irritated Christopher. Whatever happened, he fully intended to pay it back to her. So, if he was prepared to risk losing it for nothing, what right had she to make such a fuss? Deep down, his attitude toward her was sadistic. Let her suffer a bit of anxiety and embarrassment, as a punishment for her condescending attitude to Heinz.

  Christopher finally prevailed upon Kathleen to send the money to a bank in Brussels, through which it could be paid to the lawyer. Having done this, he left to rejoin Heinz at Ostende. Early in September, he wrote to tell Kathleen that the lawyer had now established connections with some officials at the Mexican legation in Brussels. Getting Mexican nationality for Heinz through them would be “abso
lutely legal, foolproof, and aboveboard” and it could be done in about two and a half months. (Christopher was merely repeating the lawyer’s assurances. He knew nothing at first hand.)

  In the middle of September, Christopher and Heinz moved from Ostende back to Brussels. At the end of the month, Christopher went over to England for six days. Richard supplies a glimpse of him at the station as he was leaving again for Belgium, giving a performance as a left-wing prig—probably to entertain Richard:

  You asked the young man at the bookstall if he had a copy of the Daily Worker. He said decidedly, No, he didn’t stock it. You said, You should, you’re a worker. To which he replied virtuously, It’s people who don’t like work who read that paper.

  Christopher had now returned to work on an earlier project of his: the story of his life from the end of his schooldays to his departure for Berlin. At that time he planned to call it The Northwest Passage—a title which is explained in its fifth chapter:

  The truly strong man, calm, balanced, aware of his strength, sits drinking quietly in the bar; it is not necessary for him to try and prove to himself that he is not afraid, by joining the Foreign Legion … leaving his comfortable home in a snowstorm to climb the impossible glacier … [He] travels straight across the broad America of normal life. But “America” is just what the truly weak man, the neurotic hero, dreads. And so … he prefers to attempt the huge northern circuit, the laborious terrible northwest passage …

  From Christopher’s and Wystan’s point of view, the Truly Weak Man was represented by Lawrence of Arabia, and hence by their character Michael Ransom in F6.

  In 1937, the American author Kenneth Roberts published a best-selling adventure novel, Northwest Passage. So Christopher had to call his book by a different name, and decided on Lions and Shadows.

  * * *

  At the end of October, Christopher reports to Kathleen that an official of the Mexican legation in Brussels has left for Mexico City, taking with him the necessary documents on Heinz’s case and seven hundred pounds, for which the lawyer has a receipt. Heinz will receive his naturalization papers before the end of November, at the Mexican consulate in Antwerp. “In the meantime,” Christopher adds, “we are taking steps to get an actual letter from the Legation, acknowledging the whole transaction officially and promising specific time-limits.” (This letter was never forthcoming.)