Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir (5 page)

I did want it (and published it in fact in No.3), but the problems of the longer story had to be settled first. In October he wrote to me in Vienna from London:
‘Sally Bowles
has unexpectedly passed Edward Upward - so I am sending it to you. If you like it and want to publish, we must somehow get the consent of the original, who is at present abroad, otherwise the risk of an action is too great for us to take.’

The risk of a libel action was not the only problem as far as I was concerned. I was fascinated by it, and certainly didn’t think it was too frivolous for our magazine; but it was long, too long even by the standards of
New Writing
, and I certainly didn’t want to divide it into two. More than that, I was worried about the abortion episode, and was nervous whether our printers - in the climate of those days - would pass it. I explained my doubts to Christopher. He wrote back from Brussels in January 1937: ‘About Sally, you know I’m doubtful, though quite open to conviction. It seems to me that Sally, without the abortion sequence, would just be a silly little capricious bitch. Besides, what would the whole thing lead up to? And down from? The whole idea of the study is to show that even the greatest disasters leave a person like Sally essentially unchanged.’

After this sensible letter I luckily gave up the rather halfhearted attempt to persuade Christopher to cut Sally. Meanwhile, however, Jean Ross had given her permission, and
Sally Bowles
was published, with what struck me as considerable courage, fortified by the success they had had with 
Mr Norris Changes Trains
, as a separate little book by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth. It was eventually included in
Goodbye to Berlin
with the other pieces rescued from ‘The Lost’. One more of these pieces, ‘The Landauers’, was first printed in
New Writing.

In
Christopher and His Kind
Christopher makes a rather too generous acknowledgement to me: ‘Christopher would soon owe a great debt to John. His continuing demand for material forced Christopher to do what he was stupidly unwilling to do - publish the rest of his Berlin writings as disconnected fragments, suitable in length for the magazine, instead of trying to fit them into a stodgy plot-ridden story. Thus John became responsible for the informal form of
Goodbye to Berlin
.’

Some years later, in an interview in America, Christopher offered a rather more sophisticated apologia for this ‘informal form’. ‘The Lost’, he said,

would have been like Balzac’s
Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes -
very complicated, all sorts of absurd contrivances to bring it all together, hundreds of characters …. And then I fell upon the understanding that as far as I was concerned you can get just the same effect by little broken bits of something, that the gaps are not worth filling in, that’s all just plotting.

And so what I did was I took up all the broken bits and put them into
Goodbye to Berlin
just as slivers of something. And you got just the same effect, that you’ve met a whole world.

I have a distinct recollection that Christopher let me see what was left over from the operations, the pieces left on the cutting-room floor so to speak - and some of it was very fascinating - and I have never known whether he kept these fragments or destroyed them when he destroyed his diaries.

I
n the autumn of 1935 Heinz’s
permis de sejour
problems had become urgent again: he couldn’t get the Belgian authorities to grant him a longer stay after a visa he had obtained in Luxemburg lapsed. It so happened that Stephen and his ex-Guards friend ‘Jimmy Younger’ came to Brussels just at that time. They agreed to go to Portugal with Christopher and Heinz and try living
a quatre
out there. So at the beginning of December the four of them set sail in a Brazilian boat that would drop them in Lisbon on its way to Rio. On 17 December they reached the mouth of the Tagus, and within twenty-four hours had found a house they liked at Sintra, and stayed there for some months. The experiment of living
a quatre
did not last very long, but long enough for them all to get caught in a gambling fever at the Casino in Estoril. Christopher wrote to me in March:

The gambling rumours are, alas, true. But not under this roof. We go to Estoril, which is a taxi-ride, and so mildly, very mildly, deterrent. We don’t really do it very often but when we do we lose generously. Stephen parted with nearly twenty 
pounds, I believe. Worse, we have been dabbling in the occult sciences, at the house of two lady anthroposophists: Tarot pack, Rudolf Steiner and all that. I continue to like this place. It is very quiet, but is really beautiful, and it is so restful living in the country for a change. Of course, the future is as vague for us as for everybody else. But H. seems to have at any rate a certain hold here. There are very few Germans, good bad or indifferent, in this part of the country, so there is no alien problem and no one seems to care much. He loves the place, which is nice. I do wish you could come, but it is hardly on the aeroplane route: though you
can
fly here, and I can see the aerodrome where you would land if you did from this window.

In later letters he writes: ‘All remains set fair in this garden of Eden …’ and ‘This country is marvellously beautiful, all wooded mountains and ruined baroque palaces, and the people are charming. We are looking round for a real house with a big garden. Already we have a small dog, a cock and six hens. Soon we are getting rabbits, and later a cockatoo, a peacock and a monkey. ’

The name of the small dog was Teddy, and he made messes, which Heinz never seemed to mind clearing up. In fact, he loved all the animals, and they were the centre of his life, as they had made his happiness in Tenerife. While Heinz played with them, Christopher struggled to write ‘Paul is Alone’, which he gave up in May, to concentrate on the book which, after many changes of scope, was to become
Lions and Shadows.
Wystan came over for a visit, and encouraged by what Christopher called the ‘non-failure’ of
Dog Skin,
they set about writing a new play,
The Ascent of F. 6,
which was to be more truly a collaboration than the earlier play.

In the middle of this a ‘politely menacing note’ arrived from Leonard Woolf: ‘I hear a rumour that Methuens are publishing a book by you. I presume that this must be a mere rumour in view of the fact that you have agreed to give us the first offer of your next novel, and that you told me that you would probably be sending it to us to consider in the autumn?’

But it
was
true that Christopher had signed up for a new novel with Methuen. He says in
Christopher and His Kind
that he had done it in a fit of pique because Virginia Woolf had not invited him to meet her. But with my experience of the way agents plotted to get promising authors away from the Hogarth Press who had started them off, I can almost hear Christopher being told that the Hogarth was far too small an outfit ever to do him justice in sales etc. and that he needed the expertise of a bigger and more powerful firm …. In any case he did publish
Lions and Shadows 
and
Goodbye to Berlin
with the Hogarth, on the technical grounds that neither of them was a novel. And by then he had met Virginia, and been utterly fascinated by her. By then, too, I was back at the Hogarth.

During those months in Portugal, Christopher spent a considerable amount of time and trouble in helping me in various ways with the future numbers of
New Writing.
He kept his friends up to the mark with their promises of contributions, and gave shrewd advice about pieces that were sent to us. He also gave unstinting advice about my own work. I had written a long short story about Vienna and he suggested various improvements. When I sent him the emended version, in July, he wrote me a long letter about what it still needed done to it.

I have already been carefully through the story twice. I think it is enormously improved, and obviously the Lane reader was an idiot to refuse it, as it is certainly one of the best contributions I have seen so far. At the same time, at the risk of making you quite desperate, I must say I should like you to rewrite it just once more! The idea is so extraordinarily good and rich and fruitful of suggestions that it should be worked out to the full and no pains spared to develop it. Already it has ceased to be merely an anecdote and become something symbolic, which of course is what you want; but I feel that, in following the working out of the fable, you haven’t paid enough attention to the characters. For instance, I don’t think Rains himself is clear enough. I should like him much more personal, even a bit satirized perhaps. And then his relations with Rudi are not made as interesting as they might be. I know you want to keep off the homosexual note; but surely it is just this kind of homosexuality, this semi-erotic interest in the working classes, which is so profoundly significant … unless you make the relationship between the two of them more vivid and lively, you hardly explain why Rains took so much trouble to find Rudi. And it is just this idea which contains the whole allegory which the story is meant, as I see it, to convey. Again, another frightfully important symbolic counter is the dead writer whose works Rains is investigating. You say that Rains’ attitude towards this writer was changed by his experiences in Vienna, but you don’t go into details. This seems to me a profoundly exciting idea, and one which goes to the roots of the whole business ….

He ended up by saying that ‘if you really worked out all the implications of this subject you would have ceased to write a short story and have written a short novel. Very well, so much the better. It is a novel, and the longer you make it the better it will be … .’

I did eventually follow this profound and sympathetic advice, and enlarged and re-wrote the story once more, and had it published as a novel under the title
Evil Was Abroad.
I have no recollection of what Christopher thought of the final version, but I was immensely touched and impressed by the trouble he took about it - more than I remember any editor taking with a work of mine, before or since.

Meanwhile, Hitler had taken the fatal decision to reintroduce conscription for German subjects, which caused almost hysterical anxiety in the Sintra household. They were well aware that the Germans knew exactly where in Portugal young subjects affected by the new decrees could be found. In the last days of June the blow fell. They came back from a lunch-party in Estoril to find a letter from the German Consulate on the hall table, instructing Heinz Neddermayer to report in the near future to get his orders for military service. The misery of the next few weeks was aggravated by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

It soon became clear to Christopher that the only hope of saving Heinz from return to Germany and military service was for him to change his nationality and become the subject of a country outside Europe, though even that was not necessarily safe. Many of their friends in Portugal told them that it was an illusory hope. Nevertheless, Christopher set in train the moves to obtain a Mexican passport for Heinz which ended so fruitlessly and ignominiously a few months later.

A large sum of money had to be obtained in order that various Mexican officials should be bribed. Christopher persuaded his rather reluctant mother to produce this money from family funds. He sent it to a lawyer Gerald Hamilton had found for him, who, Gerald said, could handle the Mexicans. From my own experience of Gerald’s habits, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that most of the money went into Gerald’s own pocket.

I was astonished by Christopher’s trust in Gerald, though he confesses he had grave doubts from time to time; he refused to admit to himself that Gerald was capable of diddling his closest friends. I am convinced that Christopher was his dupe all along, and that the various manoeuvres of alleged Mexican agents and the promises that were made to him that the passport would arrive any minute were eyewash. It is tragic to think that one of the most generous instincts in Christopher’s character, his loyalty to his friends, was taken such cynical advantage of.

When the Mexican conspiracy was started, Christopher’s mother insisted that he should leave Portugal and be nearer at hand in northern Europe. So they returned to Belgium, sad though Heinz was to leave all the animals and the garden life behind. I remember going to see them in Brussels at the end of September; we had not met for nearly fifteen months. I burst into his hotel bedroom, and was astonished to see Heinz lying in the big double bed and Christopher in a tiny camp-bed alongside. Heinz was not by any means a big man.

Early in 1937, Christopher went to Paris to see Wystan off to the Spanish War, and while he was there he discussed his problems with the writer James Stern and his wife Tania, whom he had met for the first time in Sintra. Tania, a very intelligent and practical person, suggested that it would do Heinz good psychologically if he were to learn a trade, and said she knew a silversmith who would be prepared to teach him. So, after some difficulty in getting a
permis deséjour
for Heinz, they moved to Paris. For Christopher the special attraction was the presence in Paris of Cyril Connolly, his American first wife Jean, and his friend-disciple Tony Bower. Cyril had already declared himself a keen admirer of
The Memorial
,
Mr Norris Changes Trains
and ‘The Nowaks’.

Christopher had not been in one of his best moods when I visited him in Brussels in September-October. I went to Brussels again, however, in January, and soon found that my fears of an obstacle having protruded itself in our friendship could be utterly discarded. We were as intimate as we had ever been, and whatever tension there had been in my imagination during the earlier visit had vanished like the morning mist. We talked and talked, all day and half the night, discussing the Heinz problem, the books and plays he was engaged on, Wystan’s imminent departure for Spain, Stephen’s marriage to Inez Pearn, and the future that now looked so rosy for
New Writing
with two numbers out and both successes. We went out in the evening to the bars and (mildly) debauched ourselves, still talking furiously all the time. In the morning, he gave me the typescript of ‘The North-West Passage’, in the last stages of its transformation into
Lions and Shadows
but not yet finished, and I retired to a café to read it. He was all keyed up to know my opinion, and I could report to him that I thought it was going to be one of his most original works.