Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir (7 page)

‘The Poets’ made their return journey via North America, having, by a lucky fluke got open visas for the USA while they were in Shanghai. After a brief glimpse of Japan, they sailed from Yokohama to Vancouver, Christopher amazed at the welcoming attitude of the immigration officials, whom, as a class, he had, after his European experiences, come to consider prime examples of the ‘enemy’. They headed for New York, where they found George Davis, novelist and literary editor, awaiting them. George Davis was, it seemed to them, a miracle worker, providing them at once with everything they asked for, including dollars from their travel articles which he had already sold. He produced an even greater miracle for Christopher, by finding for him exactly the kind of American boy he had dreamed of. In
Christopher and His Kind
he says he asked, recklessly, for ‘a beautiful blond boy, about eighteen, intelligent, with very sexy legs’. In a trice, the boy was produced, full of admiration for the Englishman who had just returned from exotic adventures. Christopher calls him ‘Vernon’, and in the excitement of arriving in New York became infatuated with him. He became the representative ‘American Boy’ in Christopher’s mind, as Bubi had so many years before become the ‘German Boy’ for him. From the moment of first meeting, ‘Vernon’ occupied the place in Christopher’s emotional life that had been left vacant when Heinz had been wrested from him. When he returned to England, ‘Vernon’ continued to haunt him, and became the image, the symbol of the America he thought more and more of returning to. Auden has left it on record that he and Christopher decided to live in America definitively during this visit; but though that may have been true of Wystan, the impression I had of Christopher’s state of mind during the following months of Munich and after does not lead me to believe that he was anything like as decided.

On 17 July they reached London after the ‘nine days’ wonder’ of their visit to New York. They were just in time to see Beatrix in her one-night-only performance in the Group Theatre production of Cocteau’s
La Voix Humaine.

O
ne of the first things Christopher did was to drive down with me to the Isle of Wight, where my mother was staying in my godmother Violet’s Totland Bay house while Violet was away in France. I had thought that during the drive Christopher would be able to tell me all about his adventures in China, but what in fact happened was that I encouraged him to tell me more of the great fantastic serial, of the utmost obscenity and ingenuity, which he had begun during our evenings together the year before; and once he had started there was no stopping him: episode after episode rolled out in the wildest flow of invention as if it had all been prepared and clear in his mind long before. It could never have been written down, at any rate in those days, but I was staggered by the storytelling skill he put into this anarchic fantasy, more extravagant than anything in the Mortmere saga. Alas, that was the last occasion I was ever to listen to it, though he could have started it again at any moment. Nor was there any reason why it should ever end - his own private soap opera.

That corner of the island was full of nostalgic memories 
for both of us. Before the war, right up to 1915, the whole Lehmann family had taken its summer holidays at Totland, and Beatrix and I had explored the heather downs and Alum Bay together. For Christopher, Freshwater Bay, only a few miles away, was partly the scene of the action of
All the Conspirators
and the visits of Edward Upward, Wystan Auden and Hector Wintle [a friend of Isherwood’s from Repton] way back in the twenties.

I have various pictures of him in my memory during that week-end, though an excellent photograph of him on the cliff-walk, with the sea foam just visible far below in the camera’s finder, looking absurdly boyish, chubby and grinning, was ruined in the developing. Other pictures of him come to mind with extraordinary vividness: one, of him pacing up and down the tiny lawn of Violet’s house, with a glimpse of the Solent through the trees, discussing China with me or debating the title for his Berlin book; another, of him sitting at the lunch-table, or after dinner in the little drawing-room, endlessly lecturing my mother - to her fascination and delight - in the gentle, bright persuasive way that was his own patent for young or old disciples, explaining China, discussing what he had seen in America, describing Wystan and the lives of his friends, blissfully ignoring the indiscretions that I saw popping up like cowpats in his path - but just, it seemed by a miracle, avoiding them.

We set off, almost as soon as we arrived and I had introduced Christopher to mother, for a long walk over the downs. We discussed everything in the world that interested us - really the first chance to do so since February. Chiefly, the plans for the Hogarth Press, which I had by then rejoined, plans for
New Writing
and of course our own books. Christopher revealed himself again as a masterly describer of his unfinished and unbegun novels. I had not been so fascinated, listening to his description of the next novel, to be founded on the years of exile with Heinz, since I heard him describe, in a low
lokal
in Antwerp, with the utmost vividness, the never finished novel ‘Paul is Alone’. Perhaps it was because the story was so alive in all its details before he put pen to paper that the novels seemed sometimes so boring 
to him when he came to the hard work of writing them down.

I told him how, in the first two holidays of the war, Beatrix and I had convinced ourselves that we had spotted German spies as we clambered over the heather, and lying out of sight (we thought) on our bellies in the hollows, tracked their movements for hours together. We kept our discoveries a secret from our two elder sisters and our parents - perhaps because we felt that they’d laugh at us. This delighted Christopher, who kept on urging me to remember more and added some fantastic strokes from his own imagination.

During the few months that elapsed between their return from China and their departure for America, Christopher and Wystan were occupied in finishing
Journey to a War
, for which purpose they retired to Brussels at the end of the year. They also saw the first night of
On the Frontier
at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, with Lydia Lopokova in the lead. Christopher writes of the occasion in
Christopher and His Kind
: ‘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.’ Equally, it was not a rousing success; less successful than either of its two predecessors. This, I think, was almost certainly because its theme was far too much of a reality in the minds of the audience at that particular moment in history to be dealt with in oblique fantasy: Munich was only a few weeks past.

When Christopher thought of the plans for the coming return to America - which had now been fixed for 19 January -‘Vernon’ loomed large. But it would be wrong to think that this delectable image had blotted out the memory of Heinz. He thought of Heinz continually; but what could he do? He did persuade me to make a detour by Berlin the next time I drove from Vienna to London, and I succeeded in getting in touch with Heinz. I was able to report to Christopher that he seemed in good fettle, working off the year of
Arbeitsdienst
to which he had been sentenced by helping put up a new building on the Potsdamerplatz, much tougher and more reliant than before and without any rancour towards Christopher. Very soon after he met a girl he fell in love with and married. It was an encouraging meeting, and helped Christopher to slough off much of the guilt-feeling which had oppressed him. They continued to correspond until the war made it too difficult.

Not unnaturally, the alarms and preparations for war which preceded Munich drove Christopher into a panic frenzy: he had been waiting for it to break out for five years, and here it was just round the corner, with gas-masks being issued and all. We became very close, seeing one another every day and feverishly discussing the news as the papers came out. I made enquiries about what we could do in war-time from friends in the Foreign Office, and we agreed that we would offer ourselves for propaganda work. ‘If we’ve got to have a war’, Christopher said, ‘I’m going to see we have a good war, anyway.’ His mother and his brother Richard left for Wales, and settled that if the war actually broke out they would stay there, and close the house in Pembroke Gardens. So I suggested that in that case he must come and share my flat with me; a proposal that, I think, pleased and touched him, to judge from what he wrote in
Down There on a Visit.
And then the meetings at Bad Godesberg and Munich happened, and France and Britain connived at the betrayal of the Czechs with Hitler and Mussolini. In the almost hysterical mood of relief that swept the country, some of us felt as much shame and foreboding as relief. As we read the latest editions of the evening papers, I said to Christopher bitterly: ‘Well, that’s the end of Europe as we wanted it’, and voiced the fear that unless further betrayals were imminent Munich could only mean the postponement of war and not its avoidance. And in an unguarded moment Christopher replied: ‘That doesn’t matter any more to me: I shall be in America.’

But I find it difficult to believe, even at that moment, that he had decided to become an American citizen rather than make another, longer visit. He had said that when it came to the point he would be guided by Wystan’s decision; but I was not to know that Wystan had decided on emigration - if what he has since asserted is true.

Whatever conclusion they had come to in their private talks, they had still to find the money for the journey. They therefore proposed to me that they should collaborate on another travel book, and that it should be called
Address Not Known
, and be published by the Hogarth Press. They arrived one morning at the Hogarth offices in Mecklenburgh Square and signed the contract. At the same time Wystan agreed to let the Hogarth publish his next book of poems - this was part of the plot Christopher and I had hatched to make the Hogarth the main publishing house for all of us. I gave Wystan a cheque from my private funds, not large, but it solved the most urgent financial problems for him. But
Address Not Known
was never written; and when Wystan’s new book of poems was announced in Hogarth advance publicity some time later, T.S. Eliot wrote a polite letter to inform me that Faber had contractual rights to it. Over a good-tempered lunch he convinced me that he was right. In gentlemanly fashion Faber paid me back what I had advanced to Wystan, and that was the end of the grand plot. I felt a bit of a fool, but I think that Christopher had acted in ignorance of the true situation. I am not sure that the same could be said of Wystan, who sent me a remarkably irritating cable from New York saying that he was helpless to sort things out.

There was one other matter, entirely personal, in which I did what I could to extricate Christopher from an erotic tangle in which he had quite recklessly involved himself. During the months before their departure he was besieged by a large number of young men whose one idea was to have an affair with the celebrity who had written the Berlin stories. Christopher did nothing to discourage them, revelling in his success, and got himself in so deep with at least one of them that he more or less promised to take him to New York. How this was to be squared with ‘Vernon’ I never gathered, but he appealed to me - I knew and liked the young man - to help him get out of the mess. This uncomfortable task I took on, as best I could, and earned Christopher’s gratitude but no one else’s.

A
fter many, and rather tearful, goodbyes as the boat-train left London, they sailed, on 19 January as planned, on the French liner the
Champlain.
They almost immediately ran into storms, and arrived in New York in a blizzard, and Christopher’s enthusiasm for the New World plummeted: what greeted them was so starkly different from the picture they had been building up all the time in their minds, in spite of the presence of their friends to welcome them. Christopher never took to New York, as he had hoped, but Wystan, in the first few months, had the transforming experience of meeting the young man, Chester Kallman, who was to remain his closest friend for the rest of his life. Wystan and Christopher took an apartment together on East 81st Street, but Christopher was already dreaming of California. At the beginning of May he and ‘Vernon’ set off for the Golden West in a long-distance bus, so that they could see as much of America as possible on the way. Just before he left, he sent me his first long letter:

As soon as I’m in Hollywood, I plan to write a piece for you about New York. I have quite a lot to say about it.

Oh God, what a city! The nervous breakdown expressed in terms of architecture! The skyscrapers are all Father-fixations. The police-cars are fitted with air-raid sirens, specially designed to promote paranoia. The elevated railway is the circular madness. The height of the buildings produces visions similar to those experienced by Ransom in
F. 6,
which reminds me that 
F. 6
is being done, quite grandly, sometime in August. We have written a new ending, and, altogether, I hope it may be a real success.

This was not the first time, nor the last, that they wrote a new ending: they never seemed to get it to their liking, or their changing view of its intention. He went on:

I myself am in the most Goddamawful mess. I have discovered, what I didn’t realize before, or what I wasn’t till now, that I am a pacifist. And now I have to find out what that means, and what duties it implies. That’s one reason why I am going out to Hollywood, to talk to Gerald Heard and Huxley. Maybe I’ll flatly disagree with them, but I have to hear their case, stated as expertly as possible. And I have to get ready to cope with the war situation, if or when it comes.