Christopher and His Kind

by Christopher Isherwood

  But it was from John Lehmann that Christopher got support of the most practical kind; thanks to John, he was able to start preparing his mind for the worst. Kathleen and Richard had now left London to visit some cousins in Wales. If war broke out, they would remain there and Kathleen’s house would be closed. When that happened, said John, Christopher must come and share his flat with him. Already, they were planning a wartime life together. They had written to the Foreign Office, offering their services for propaganda work. (I cannot now believe that Christopher would have been able to stick at this for long.) Privately, he made one reservation: if Wystan offered him some other course of action, then he would probably go along with Wystan. But Wystan was still away, on holiday in Belgium.

  * * *

  This is an account of the final day of the crisis, September 28, taken partly from Christopher’s diary, partly from Down There on a Visit, which contains added details, remembered, not invented:

  The last shreds of hope are vanishing down the drain. Wilson came back from Berlin, snubbed. The German Army mobilizes this afternoon. Parliament meets, to introduce conscription. Chamberlain spoke last night, like a wet fish, saying: How dreadful, how dreadful.

  London is all gas-masks and children screaming when they’re fitted on. Everybody is enlisting or running away from town. Nanny is wonderful. She trots up and down stairs, with cups of Ovaltine.

  Later. I went to Victoria to meet Wystan, returning from Belgium. The boat-train was late. Newspapers appearing every 20 minutes. The station full of sailors, going down to join the mobilized fleet. A few women in tears. One ray of hope: Berlin denies their reported ultimatum to mobilize at 2 P.M. Stolid with misery, I chewed gum.

  Wystan arrived at last, very sunburnt and in the highest spirits, wearing a loud, becoming check suit. “Well, my dear,” he greeted me, “there isn’t going to be a war, you know!” For a moment, I thought he must have some stop-press information—but no. He had merely met a lady at the British Embassy in Brussels who could read cards, and she had told him that there will be no war this year.

  Even as we drove away from the station, the placards appeared: Dramatic Peace Move. I yelled to the driver to stop—Wystan found my excitement a bit excessive—and we read how Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier, and Chamberlain are to meet in Munich tomorrow.

  Later came the news of the super-scene in the Commons. Chamberlain’s voice breaks. Queen Mary in tears. Only the Communist Gallagher spoke up and said it was all a sell-out.

  * * *

  As far as Christopher was concerned—I won’t venture to speak for anybody else—this post-Munich autumn of 1938 was a period of relief disguised as high-minded disgust. Like all his friends, and thousands of other people, Christopher declared that England had helped betray the Czechs. He meant this. It seemed to him absolutely self-evident. Yet his dead-secret, basic reaction was: What do I care for the Czechs? What does it matter if we are traitors? A war has been postponed—and a war postponed is a war which may never happen.

  Wystan and Christopher were now intending to go back to the States, sometime in the near future. But they were in no hurry. First, they wanted to finish Journey to a War and see On the Frontier staged. The special visa they had got from the Americans in Shanghai made them feel all the more relaxed. Because of it, they would have no further formalities to go through. They could leave at short notice, whenever they decided to.

  * * *

  At the beginning of November, Christopher was invited by Lady Sibyl Colefax, one of the most celebrated arts-and-letters hostesses of the day, to a dinner party. Among the guests was Virginia Woolf. By now, she and Christopher had met several times. In her mid-fifties, Virginia was perhaps more beautiful than she had ever been. Her features had the nobility of a princess in a tragedy, a doomed princess who was nevertheless capable of saying, like the Duchess of Malfi: “I prithee, when were we so merry?” When Christopher saw her, she was full of wit and gossip and delicately malicious laughter.

  * * *

  On an earlier occasion, when Christopher had been asked by the Woolfs to tea, he had stayed on, at Virginia’s suggestion, to supper, remaining happily under her spell, hardly talking at all, just watching her and listening and laughing. Then suddenly, at about ten o’clock, he remembered with a start of dismay that a young man must already be waiting for him at a hotel near Croydon Airport—from which they were due to fly, next morning, on a romantic two-day visit to Paris. Christopher had hardly expected the young man to agree to make this trip and regarded him as a conquest to be proud of. Yet Christopher had absolutely forgotten his existence for several hours and was now actually sorry to have to leave Virginia. Could any hostess earn a sincerer tribute? She wasn’t aware of the situation, of course. Indeed, she doesn’t seem to have been much aware of Christopher himself. In her diary, referring to the Colefax dinner party, she describes him as though he were still a stranger:

  Isherwood and I met on the doorstep. He is a slip of a wild boy: with quicksilver eyes: nipped; jockeylike. That young man, said W. Maugham, “holds the future of the English novel in his hands.”

  (The jockey impression was probably made, as Robert Craft has guessed, by Christopher’s small stature and “bantam-weight, somewhat too short legs, and disproportionately, even simianly long arms.” “Wild” seems flattering, applied to timid cautious Christopher. The adjective “nipped” is the most apt, in my opinion; it is confirmed by Keith Vaughan’s verdict, about ten years later: “a dehydrated schoolboy.”)

  Maugham was at this party. So was Max Beerbohm, plump but fragile, with red-ringed pouched blue eyes. He was only ten years older than Virginia but seemed helplessly becalmed in the past. Christopher could think of no remark which would blow wind into his sails. Maugham, at nearly Beerbohm’s age, was still briskly cruising the present. Maugham and Christopher already knew each other slightly; they had had lunch together at Maugham’s club. His dark watchful bridge player’s eyes intimidated Christopher; also his stammer, which somehow made you feel that you were stammering, not he. But, behind the grim, vigorously lined mask of the face, Christopher was aware of a shy warmth, to which he was eager to respond. He would be honored to adopt Maugham as his Uncle Willie, if only Maugham would let him.

  Having got rather drunk at dinner, Christopher decided to improve their relations. But the drink had been sufficient only to interfere with his timing; it didn’t steady his nerves. He interrupted what Maugham was telling his semicircle of listeners, with a fatally tactless opening line: “Mr. Maugham, on the boat to China, last winter, we had an experience which was exactly like one of your stories—”

  From then on, all was nightmare. Christopher heard his own thickened stumbling voice trying to describe the characters of Mr. Potter and White and explain the dramatic significance of their meeting. But he kept leaving out important details; the anecdote simply would not come to a point. Breaking off abruptly, he excused himself and hurried from the room. As he was about to let himself out of the house, a parlormaid came forward, offering a pen. She asked him to sign Lady Colefax’s guestbook. With a shaking hand, he scrawled his signature, putting so much pressure on the pen that it snapped in half. Then he fled, never to return.

  (I have described what I remember Christopher felt. But his disgrace can’t have been as total as he supposed. Perhaps Maugham found his awkwardness touching and sympathetic. In any case, it must have been after Christopher’s exit that Maugham made that remark about him to Virginia Woolf. And Maugham continued to praise Christopher’s work to other people on many occasions. Though he never quite became Uncle Willie, he was a helpful, hospitable, and outspoken friend to Christopher for the rest of his life.)

  * * *

  On the Frontier opened at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, on November 14. Maynard Keynes was its sponsor. Keynes, that aristocrat of Bloomsbury and the Stock Exchange, referred to economics as though they were a branch of academic philosophy, quite unrelated to mere money. It seemed indelicate to remember
the fact that his financial know-how had made his college, King’s, the richest of the Cambridge colleges and had funded the building of this theater.

  Keynes’s wife, the former Lydia Lopokova, was the play’s leading lady. As before, Doone directed, Britten composed, Medley designed.

  Rupert had to cope with the usual problems. When he asked the electricians to create the effect of an offstage torchlight procession, he was told that this was forbidden by the fire regulations. “Ridiculous!” cried Rupert. “All I want is lights that flicker.” “Can’t have them.” “But I must have them!” “Can’t have them.” Deadlock. Then someone murmured: “Course, we might do the orphanage being burnt in Ghosts.” This proved to be exactly what Rupert had been asking for … Although Britten had written music for the song “Industrialists, bankers, in comfortable chairs—” Wystan insisted that it must be sung to the air “Sweet Betsy from Pike.” Britten was rather hurt but gave way with a good grace … Medley’s divided set, “The Ostnia-Westland Room,” was so striking that the whole audience applauded it when the curtain rose.

  What became evident in performance was that Wystan and Christopher had made their two villains, Valerian and the Leader, more entertaining, more sympathetic even, than any of the other characters. The play was overbalanced by Valerian’s charm and humor and the Leader’s clowning. The tragic love story, despite its beautiful verse, seemed a tiresome interruption. Ernest Milton, who played the Leader, had the reputation of being the only actor in England who could say “gold” as a four-syllable word: “goo-oo-oo-oold.” He was alleged to have done so in Timon of Athens. They were willing to believe this, though they hadn’t the nerve to ask him for a demonstration. They both reveled in his larger-than-life gestures and intonations.

  The first-night audience was friendly. It laughed whenever it could and treated the rest of the play with polite respect. On the Frontier wasn’t a harrowing disaster; it passed away painlessly.

  At the end, Wystan had been asked to make an appeal from the stage, for aid to the children of Spain. His speech began with one of those nonsensical utterances which sometimes become legendary. They are produced by speakers who are trying to talk about two different subjects simultaneously—in this case, the play and the children. Wystan had evidently intended to say that worse things were happening in the outside world at that moment than anything they had been shown in the play. What he did say was: “As you all know, worse things have been happening in the audience tonight than on the stage.” This was the biggest laugh of the evening.

  * * *

  Wystan and Christopher went to Brussels in mid-December and were there with a few friends until the end of the first week of January 1939. While there, they finished work on Journey to a War.

  The date of their departure for New York was now fixed; they were to sail on January 19. This would be the first anniversary of their departure for China. I suspect that Christopher chose the French liner Champlain because she happened to be sailing on that day. I know that he deliberately left Los Angeles on January 19, 1947, when he was making his first return visit to England, after the war. Christopher liked to bet on his luck, so to speak, by beginning a journey or a writing project on the anniversary of a previous one which had turned out well. He also kept a lookout for omens. He had thought he had a favorable one when he noticed that their lodgings in Brussels were inside the map square F6.

  This omen deceived him, however. While in Brussels, he caught clap, for the first time in his life. In those pre-penicillin days, the treatment was painful; when the doctor washed out his urethra with strong stinging disinfectant, he yelled. But he was cured again before Christmas. Wystan refers to Christopher and his clap in “The Novelist”:

  And in his own weak person, if he can,

  Dully put up with all the wrongs of Man.

  In “Rimbaud,” another sonnet written at that time, Wystan refers to a domestic accident of his own: the radiator in his room had burst and he had had to sit writing in his overcoat. Forster, on being told of their troubles, wrote back:

  My life is a watercolor rendering of yours: a burst water-pipe instead of a radiator, cough and cold instead of clap.

  * * *

  Wystan introduced Christopher to the psychic lady at the British embassy who had told him, during his earlier visit, that there wouldn’t be a European war in 1938. The lady read Christopher’s palm and saw the letter H in it. This letter, she said, was of great importance in his life. Christopher was impressed. Apart from the obvious reference to Heinz, there was Vernon, whose real name also began with an H. (Christopher was even more impressed when, in 1940, he reflected that he was now in Hollywood; that he had met Heard again and, through him, Huxley; that he had embraced Hinduism; that he was living on Harratt Street; that he had just written a screenplay based on the novel Rage in Heaven by James Hilton!)

  * * *

  Perhaps Wystan and Christopher had lingered in Brussels to shorten their English goodbye-saying as much as was decently possible. When Christopher did return to London, his days were filled with farewell lunches, drinks, dinners, parties, lovemakings. Kathleen’s diary records his many social engagements—rather wistfully, for she herself wasn’t able to see much of him. My own memory records nothing. Christopher must have found this gradual parting painful and therefore chosen to forget it.

  Did he think of himself as a deserter? He had left England often enough before this and for indefinite periods, with only a vague intention of returning some day or other. He couldn’t have known definitely yet that he would want to stay in the States; he might well find that he couldn’t take root there. Certainly, his closer contact with his friends during the Munich crisis—the feeling that they were all in the same sinking boat—had made it harder for him to leave them, this time. But I doubt if any of his real friends reproached him for it. They had grown used to thinking of him as a chronic wanderer.

  I believe that what Christopher then experienced was only the natural apprehension one feels before taking any big step: Isn’t this all a terrible mistake?

  * * *

  Although the Champlain wasn’t going to sail until next day, Wystan and Christopher had arranged to take the boat train to Southampton in the late afternoon of January 18 and spend that night on board. This was possibly another excuse to cut the partings short—particularly Christopher’s parting from Kathleen and Richard.

  I have written very little about the relations between Christopher and Richard in the years since Christopher left Berlin. There is very little to write. The brothers remained intimate, but within narrow limits. Christopher would tell Richard anything about himself that Richard cared to ask, but their private conversations were brief; they took place chiefly in the bathroom, while Christopher was shaving. They seldom went out together alone. They almost never visited Christopher’s friends. It seems to me now that, if Christopher had involved Richard more deeply in his life, he would have upset the delicate balance of his improved relations with Kathleen. And Richard didn’t really want to be involved. He was a very private person, though full of curiosity about others. He preferred to be with Christopher’s friends only when they came to the house, and then ask questions about them after they had gone.

  On October 7, 1938, Kathleen had become seventy years old. Up to then, Christopher had remained vague about her age. I can still remember the shock which the news gave him; she always looked much younger than she was. He told her jokingly that no doubt her youthfulness was due to his never having treated her as an old lady; this was his way of apologizing for his past unkindnesses.

  Kathleen and Christopher both cried a little when they said goodbye. The thought that they might not see each other again was in their minds. But Christopher’s departure for China may well have seemed gloomier to Kathleen than this one, for then he was going into some danger. A young man Christopher had grown very fond of came with him in the taxi to Waterloo Station. On the way there, he gave Christopher a keepsake—the cork from his
first bottle of champagne—over which more tears were shed. Forster, who had come to see them off, asked Christopher, “Shall I join the Communist Party?” I am sure Christopher’s answer was no, but I forget the reason he gave. Probably the conventional one: You can be more useful outside it. In any case, Forster’s question was less than half serious. The departing, like the dying, are credited with psychic wisdom; you feel you ought to ask them something.

  It was sad, sad as dying, to leave these loved ones behind. But neither Wystan nor Christopher wanted to admit that this was in any sense a death or that they were the objects of a wake. As the boat train pulled out of the station and they need wave no longer, Christopher felt a quick upsurge of relief. He and Wystan exchanged grins, schoolboy grins which took them back to the earliest days of their friendship. “Well,” said Christopher, “we’re off again.” “Goody,” said Wystan.

  * * *

  Now, on board the Champlain, they were really alone together, as they hadn’t been since the China journey. In Brussels, there had always been other people in the background. In London, they had been leading public lives.

  Wystan was embarrassed by Christopher’s public self—the Isherwood who would put an arm around his shoulder when cameras or other eyes were watching. Isherwood was good at self-exposure; he knew all the tricks of modesty and never boasted except in private. (When he did boast, mostly about his sex life, it was with a vulgarity which showed that he was truly Uncle Henry’s nephew.) Wystan was shyer and more fastidious; this sometimes had the odd effect of making his public self seem aggressive, dogmatic, arrogant. (It was only much later, in America, that he began to love and be loved by his audiences.) In public, Wystan and Christopher were as polite to each other as mere acquaintances. If Wystan disagreed strongly with something Christopher had said, a furrow would appear between his eyes and his mouth would begin to twitch. But he never contradicted Christopher when strangers were present.

  Now, communication between them was reestablished. This, to Christopher at least, meant an unaccustomed freedom. Alone with Wystan, he was able, literally, to speak his mind—to say things which he hadn’t known were in it, until the moment of speaking. One morning, when they were walking on the deck, Christopher heard himself say: “You know, it just doesn’t mean anything to me any more—the Popular Front, the party line, the anti-Fascist struggle. I suppose they’re okay but something’s wrong with me. I simply cannot swallow another mouthful.” To which Wystan answered: “Neither can I.”