Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir (3 page)

Christopher had booked me a room for one month, so that I was in Berlin not only when the more or less gaga Hindenburg nominated Hitler as Chancellor at the end of January, but also for the burning of the Reichstag on 27 February. No one is likely ever to know for certain who planned this coup, but it was not the pathetic and moronic van der Lubbe who stood trial for it.

I was in a bar near the Zoo when a friend who had been spending the evening at a cinema came in and told us ‘The Reichstag’s on fire!’ I followed him outside, and sure enough could see the glow of flames in the east against the black sky. The immediate result was that Hitler’s triumph was complete in the face of what was immediately labelled a Communist plot, and the Nazi terror was unleashed against the Communists and all the known opponents of the new regime who had not already sensed the way the wind was blowing and either gone to ground or emigrated. The press began to indulge in an orgy of Jew-baiting and sabre-rattling, and sickening stories circulated about the atrocities that were being committed in barracks and prisons against those who had been arrested. I had little doubt that most of them were true, particularly as they were exactly what had been threatened in innumerable rabid articles and pamphlets.

Christopher, who had many friends and contacts in the left-wing groups and their sympathizers, did what he could to help those in hiding and those in flight, including Gerald Hamilton (the prototype for Mr Norris). Foreigners who had no obvious affiliations were left alone, at any rate for the time being, but the frequenters of the boy-bars, many of which were being raided, passed some uneasy nights. The atmosphere became increasingly ominous, and at the beginning of April Christopher packed up a mass of his papers and letters and took them back to England, where he stayed for the rest of the month. He was still unwilling to pull up his roots, though he must have seen that the crisis could not be far off.

At that moment two things happened which made escape from Berlin much easier for Christopher. He received a bequest from an aunt who had just died, not a large bequest but very useful coming when it did. It made him feel that he could travel anywhere he liked in the world. At the same time his English friend Francis Turville-Petre reappeared in Germany. Francis (who was always known among their friends as ‘The Fronny’) was a disreputable homosexual who had enough money to make it simple for him to do whatever he pleased, to indulge his promiscuous tastes and live wherever he liked. Christopher was fascinated by him, though a little wary of his debauchery, and they first went off together to stay in the country together with Francis’s friend Karl Giese. A young Berlin boy called Heinz was brought in to help in the household, and as the visit went on Christopher found himself more and more attracted by Heinz, went to bed with him and gradually fell in love, Heinz taking the place of a by now more or less disgraced young man called Otto. I never met Fronny, and only knew him from Christopher’s talk and the fact that Wystan was writing a play about him, which started by being called
The Fronny,
then, when Christopher began to collaborate,
Where is Francis?,
and was eventually put on by the Group Theatre as
The Dog Beneath the Skin.

Fronny now decided to live in Greece, and bought a small island called St Nicholas, in the strait between Euboea and the mainland. There he began building a house for himself, and invited Christopher (with of course Heinz) to live there with him. Christopher was strongly taken by the idea, and accepted. It seemed as good a way out of the impossible Berlin situation as any other, though it left the further future very vague. He began a diary on the eve of their departure (13 May 1933): ‘It is a quarter past midnight and I have just finished packing. In eight hours I am going to leave Berlin, perhaps for ever.’ In
Christopher and His Kind
he rejects this attitude as being false, saying that he doesn’t believe he ever imagined the day on which he would leave Germany, and that it suggests a calm foresight of which he was incapable. But I am not convinced.

Christopher and Heinz travelled via Prague, Vienna and Budapest, then boarded a river steamer for Belgrade, where they caught the train for Athens. Francis met them there, and the next day they crossed over to the island. They had visited me in Vienna, and as Christopher was obviously attracted by it, I tried to persuade them to stay, perhaps even to settle there. But in vain: the call of the Balkans, of which Christopher had a romantic dream, was too strong. Perhaps, when they discovered how primitive living conditions were on St Nicholas and how crushing the Aegean sun was after north Germany, they wished they had. At any rate the Greek interlude was not an unmitigated success, and their discomfort and restlessness emerge pretty obviously from their letters. Christopher wrote in July: ‘It is as hot as hell. 
I write when Heinz makes me. Otherwise I lie on my bed and read detective stories. We are still in tents. The house won’t be ready till the end of August. I’d leave almost at once if I knew where. Do write as soon as you get this.’ He had also begun to worry about the danger of war breaking out, an anxiety that stayed with him during all his subsequent travels, fuelled by the alarmist reports which he read in Claud Cockburn’s
The Week -
almost the only news that reached him from the outside world. ‘Is there going to be a war?’ he wrote in August. ‘This question may well be answered before you read it. Anyhow, I can’t judge anything from the scrappy paragraphs at the back of the
Athens Messenger
, whose leading articles are generally about Lord Byron, “Sir Codrington” or a French poet’s impressions of the Aegean. I don’t know how long we shall stay here. The heat obliterates all will, all plans, all decisions.’ But a fortnight later the decision to leave the island was taken. For a long time the dirt, the stinging flies, the bad water, the rowdy animal behaviour of the boys whom Francis had collected for his bed and for helping in the household chores, and the drunken sessions when the fishermen tied up at night, had been getting on Christopher’s nerves. Heinz had adapted himself, with his easy nature, more rapidly to the life on the island. He joked with the boys and the workmen, even managing to carry on a kind of pidgin conversation with them, with the aid of phrase-books. Christopher, who had a strong streak of jealousy in his makeup, got into moods when he imagined that everyone was making a pass at Heinz, and the sullenness this produced in him caused Heinz to retreat into sulkiness, and suggest that Christopher should send him back to Berlin. They left for Athens on the evening of 6 September without saying goodbye to Francis, and, with rows still smouldering between them, finally took a boat for Marseilles. The rows cleared, as they were bound to, and they spent more than two more weeks in France before crossing over to England. Somehow or other Christopher managed to get a tourist visa for Heinz, and they stayed at his mother’s house in Pembroke Gardens. One does not know if Christopher had already given Heinz the reckless advice to put
Hausdiener
(domestic servant) as his occupation in his passport, but in any case on 
this occasion it caused no trouble. Heinz was introduced to many of Christopher’s friends, including my sister Beatrix to whom he became completely devoted. When the tourist visa expired, Heinz went back to Germany, though with many misgivings on Christopher’s part.

A
new chapter now unexpectedly opened in Christopher’s life. Very soon after Heinz’s departure, he had a telephone call from Jean Ross, whom he had met in Berlin as one of his fellow-lodgers in the Nollendorfstrasse for a time, when she was earning her living as a (not very remarkable) singer in a second-rate cabaret. She had not yet been immortalized as Sally Bowles, though Christopher must already have seen her as that character in his mind in the vast scenario of ‘The Lost’, out of which all his Berlin stories were eventually to be extracted and shaped.

Jean Ross now told him that she had met ‘an absolutely marvellous man’ who was a film director and was looking for an Englishman who could help him with the script for a film he had contracted to do for Gaumont British. She got him to read 
The Memorial
, and he admired it and wanted to meet the author as soon as possible. The name of the film director was Berthold Viertel, an Austrian poet who had already directed a number of films in Hollywood. In no time at all they had met and discovered an affinity which went beyond the fact that Christopher 
knew all about the situation in central Europe and could discuss the film with him in German. He was hired at once, in the place of Margaret Kennedy
²
who had had to drop out, and they started work with considerable excitement on Christopher’s part.

I got to know Viertel very well at a rather later date when I was back from Vienna in London, but I shall not describe him in detail as Christopher has given a brilliant picture of him in 
Prater Violet,
where he appears as Dr. Friedrich Bergmann. He was short, stocky, emotional and explosive, very shrewd about the film world with a nice line in wit of his own. He was proud of his poetry, prouder than of any of the films he had directed, and much regretted that it was hardly known outside his own country. His wife, Salka, and his children were in California and so not involved in the bust-up in Austria that was taking place at that time, though in
Prater Violet
Christopher makes Dr Bergmann deeply preoccupied with it. He was not homosexual, nor did he realize that Christopher was until after the film had been finished, though the way Christopher reacted to some of his remarks about sexual habits must have made him a little suspicious. Christopher introduced him to Beatrix, whom he used later in
The Passing of the Third Floor Back
and also fell in love with. I found him a marvellous conversationalist and a most stimulating companion to be with.

It was in the middle of the film-work that Christopher made another attempt to get Heinz into England. Almost everything went wrong. Heinz had been furnished with letters of invitation from Christopher’s mother and Christopher himself, as well as a respectable sum of money. The letters were not meant to be seen by the immigration officials, but Heinz, driven into a corner by their questioning, produced them: his fatal passport description as
Hausdiener
was in front of them. Christopher, who had come down to meet the boat with Wystan, was accused of trying to deceive ‘His Majesty’s Immigration Service’ who were not convinced that Heinz intended to work in the Isherwood household, and his own letter to Heinz was described as ‘the sort of letter a man might write to his sweetheart’. In fact, they guessed 
the score at once, and Heinz was sent back to Germany by the next boat. He could obviously never attempt to land in England again: it was a total disaster.

In his shame and misery Christopher was extremely unwilling to tell his friends about this scene at Harwich, though I feel that he must have written to me in Vienna, however briefly, as I was in a potential situation of the same sort, though it did not come to the boil until a few years later when Hitler annexed Austria to the German Reich. In any case the letter, if it was ever written, has disappeared. Fearing, with all too good reason, that Germany would introduce conscription, Christopher’s basic aim during the next few years was to get Heinz out of Germany and settle with him somewhere beyond the reach of the Nazis. The first stop was Amsterdam. Once he had found a place for Heinz there he became much lighter-hearted, and went back to London and the final stages of the making of the film with a new determination to enjoy them. He felt he was learning an immense amount about the film world that he had always longed to know, and his obsessive war-fears receded into the background for the time being. Only now and then did he worry about Heinz’s isolation, and he tried on one occasion to get me to visit him and report (paying all my expenses), but I couldn’t leave Vienna at that moment, and his anxiety soon subsided.

Once he had rejoined Heinz in Amsterdam, the great debate about plans for where they were to go next - and for longer and further away - began again. Quito? Tahiti? The Seychelles? Tristan da Cunha? They rehearsed them, and many other places, and found objections to them all of one sort or another. In the end they decided to try the Canary Islands; not as far from Europe as Christopher would have liked, but being nearly part of Africa (in spite of belonging to Spain) perhaps remote enough. So, in April, they set sail from Rotterdam and reached Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria. They spent the next weeks in wandering about the islands, and had the luck to find a German consul who was willing to alter the disastrous 
Hausdiener
in Heinz’s passport to
Sprachstudent
(student of languages). In the end, in June, they chose Tenerife as the most suitable place to settle for a while, and found a pension called the 
Pavilion Troika near the village of Orotava. Christopher had a strong feeling that he could work on his novel there. He had abandoned his original attempt to make it a hold-all for all the Berlin characters he wanted to write about, and decided to concentrate on Gerald Hamilton as Arthur Norris. I think, but I am not certain, that he had read Proust by then; Mr Norris has unmistakable likenesses to the Baron de Charlus: both snobs, both given to special perversions, both homosexuals (though Christopher concealed Mr Norris’s homosexuality), with one important difference - Charlus was not a rogue, while Hamilton/Norris was a crook of the deepest dye. Christopher wrote to me at the end of June: ‘I think my novel ought to be finished in another month. It will be dreadfully short - I’m afraid not more than 45,000. I wonder if anybody will be prepared to publish a book of that length? When it is finished, I shall begin my other Berlin book at once: nearly the whole of it is already written.’ A week or two later he reported that the novel was ‘exactly three quarters done. I hope to finish it on the day War was declared in 1914. It is a sort of glorified shocker; not unlike the productions of my cousin Graham Greene.’