Prater Violet (6 page)

“In other words, I'm a Nazi and you're my father?”

We both laughed.

“I only try to analyze certain tendencies,” said Bergmann.

“Nevertheless,” he added, “there are times when I feel gravely worried about you.”

Bergmann worried not only about me, but about the whole of England. Wherever he went, he kept a sharp lookout for what he called “significant phenomena.” A phenomenon, I soon discovered, could be practically anything. The fog, for instance. Like nearly all Middle-Europeans, he was convinced that fog was our normal weather throughout the year. I would have been sorry to disappoint him; and, as luck would have it, there were several quite thick fogs that winter. Bergmann seemed to imagine that they covered not only London but the entire island; thereby accounting for all our less agreeable racial characteristics, our insularity, our hypocrisy, our political muddling, our prudery and our refusal to face facts. “It is the English themselves who have created this fog. They feed upon it, like a kind of bitter soup which fills them with illusions. It is their national costume, clothing the enormous nakedness of the slums and the scandal of unjust ownership. It is also the jungle within which Jack the Ripper goes about his business of murder in the elegant overcoat of a member of the Stock Exchange.”

We started making sightseeing excursions together. Bergmann showed me London: the London he had already created for himself in his own imagination the dark, intricate, sinister town of Dickens, the old German silent movies, Wedekind and Brecht. He was always the guide, and I the tourist. Whenever I asked where we were going, he would say, “Wait,” or “You will see.” Often, I think he hadn't the least idea, until we actually arrived.

We visited the Tower, where Bergmann lectured me on English history, comparing the reign of the Tudors to the Hitler regime. He took it for granted that Bacon wrote the Shakespearian plays, in order to make political propaganda, and that Queen Elizabeth was a man. He even had a further theory that Essex was beheaded because he threatened the Monarch with revelations of their homosexual intrigue. I had some difficulty in getting him out of the Bloody Tower, where he was inspired to a lurid reconstruction of the murder of the Little Princes, amazing the other visitors, who merely saw a stocky, shock-headed, middle-aged man pleading for his life to an invisible assassin, in German, with theatrical falsetto accents.

At the Zoo, he identified a baboon, a giraffe and a dromedary with three of our leading politicians, and reproached them publicly for their crimes. In the National Gallery, he explained, with reference to the Rembrandt portraits, his theory of camera angles and the lighting of close-ups, so loudly and convincingly that he drew a crowd away from one of the official lecturers, who was naturally rather annoyed.

Sometimes he persuaded me to go out with him at night. This, at the end of a long day, was very exhausting. But the streets fascinated him, and he never seemed tired or wished to return home. It was embarrassing, too. Bergmann spoke to anybody whose face happened to interest him, with the directness of a child; or he talked about them to me, like a lecturer, so that they were sure to overhear him. One evening, in the bus, there were two lovers. The girl was sitting just in front of us; the young man stood beside her, holding the strap. Bergmann was delighted with them. “See how he stands? They do not even look at each other. They might be strangers. Yet they keep touching, as if by accident. Now watch: their lips are moving. That is how two people talk when they are very happy and alone, in the darkness. Already they are lying in each other's arms in bed. Good night, my dears. We shall not intrude upon your secrets.”

Bergmann talked to taxi-drivers, to medical students in bars, to elderly colonels returning from their clubs, to clergymen, to Piccadilly tarts, to the boys who hung around the medallion of W. S. Gilbert on the Embankment. Nobody seemed to mind, or even to misunderstand his intentions. I envied him his freedom—the freedom of a foreigner. I could have done the same thing, myself, in Vienna or Berlin. With a foreigner's luck, or intuition, he nearly always succeeded in picking out the unusual individual from the average type: a constable who did water colors, a beggar who knew classical Greek. And this betrayed him into a foreigner's generalizations. In London, all policemen paint, all the scholars are starving.

*   *   *

THE YEAR was drawing to an end. The newspapers were full of optimism. Things were looking up; this Christmas was to be the greatest ever. Hitler talked only of peace. The Disarmament Conference had broken down. The British Government didn't want isolation; equally, it didn't want to promise military aid to France. When people planned their next summer's holiday in Europe, they remembered to add, “If Europe's still there.” It was like the superstition of touching wood.

Just before Christmas, Bergmann and I went down to Brighton for the day. It was the only time we ever left London together. I remember this as one of the most depressing experiences of my life. Behind high clouds of white fog, the wintry sun made a pale splash of gold, far out on the oyster-gray surface of the Channel. We walked along the pier and stopped to watch a young man in plus-fours with a fair mangy mustache, who was hitting a punch-ball. “He can't ring the bell,” I said. “None of them can ring it,” Bergmann answered somberly. “That bell will never ring again. They're all done for. Finished.” Coming back in the Pullman car, the sea air made us both doze. I had a peculiarly vivid nightmare about Hitler Germany.

First of all, I dreamed that I was in a courtroom. This, I knew, was a political trial. Some communists were being sentenced to death. The State Prosecutor was a hard-faced, middle-aged, blonde woman, with her hair twisted into a knot on the back of her head. She stood up, gripping one of the accused men by his coat collar, and marched him down the room toward the judge's desk. As they advanced, she drew a revolver and shot the communist in the back. His knees sagged and his chin fell forward; but she dragged him on, until they faced the judge, and she cried, in a loud voice, “Look! Here is the traitor!”

A girl was sitting beside me, among the spectators. In some way, I was aware that she was a hospital nurse by profession. As the prosecutor held up the dying man, she rose and ran out of the courtroom in tears. I followed her, down passages and flights of steps, into a cellar, where there were central-heating pipes. The cellar was fitted with bunks, like a barracks. The girl lay down on one of them, sobbing. And then several youths came in. I knew that they belonged to the Hitler Jugend; but, instead of uniforms, they wore bits of bear-skin, with belts, helmets and swords, shoddy and theatrical-looking, such as supers might wear in a performance of “The Ring.” Their partly naked bodies were covered with acne and skin rash, and they seemed tired and dispirited. They climbed into their bunks, without taking the least notice of the girl or of me.

Then I was walking up a steep, very narrow street. A Jew came running down toward me, with his wrists thrust into his overcoat pockets. I knew that this was because his hands had been shot off. He had to hide his injuries. If anybody saw them, he would be recognized and lynched.

At the top of the street, I found an old lady, dressed in a kind of uniform, French “horizon blue.” She was sniveling and cursing to herself. It was she who had shot off the Jew's hands. She wanted to shoot him again; but her ammunition (which was, I noticed with surprise, only for a .22 rifle) lay scattered on the ground. She couldn't collect it, because she was blind.

Then I went into the British Embassy, where I was welcomed by a cheerful, fatuous, drawling young man, like Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster. He pointed out to me that the walls of the entrance hall were covered with post-impressionist and cubist paintings. “The Ambassador likes them,” he explained. “I mean to say, a bit of contrast, what?”

Somehow, I couldn't bring myself to tell this dream to Bergmann. I wasn't in the mood for one of his elaborate and perhaps disagreeably personal interpretations. Also, I had a curious suspicion that he had put the whole thing, telepathically, into my head.

*   *   *

ALL THESE MONTHS, there hadn't been a single word from Chatsworth.

His silence was magnificent. It seemed to express the most generous kind of confidence. He was giving us an absolutely free hand. Or perhaps he was so busy that he had forgotten about us altogether.

I think he must have written
Prater Violet
on the first leaf of his 1934 calendar. For January had barely begun before we started to get telephone calls from the studio. How was the script coming along?

Bergmann went down to Imperial Bulldog to see him, and came back in a state of considerable self-satisfaction. He gave me to understand that he had been exceedingly diplomatic. Chatsworth's stock rose. He was no longer a vulgarian, but a man of culture and insight. “He appreciates,” said Bergmann, “how a director needs time to follow his ideas quietly and lovingly.” Bergmann had told the story, no doubt with a most lavish display of gesture and intonation, and Chatsworth had seemed very pleased.

However, this didn't alter the fact that our script was still a torso, or, at best, a living body with mechanical limbs. The final sequence, the whole episode of Toni's revenge on Rudolf with its happy ending, was still wishfully vague. Neither of us really liked the idea of her masquerade, in a blonde wig, as the famous opera singer. Not all Bergmann's histrionics, no amount of Freudian analysis or Marxian dialectic could make it anything but very silly.

And perhaps Chatsworth hadn't been so impressed, after all. Because now we started to have visits from Ashmeade. His approach was extremely tactful. It opened with what appeared to be a purely social call. “I happened to be passing,” he told us, “so I thought I'd look in. Are you and Isherwood still on speaking terms?”

But Bergmann wasn't deceived. “The Secret Police are on our footprints,” he said gloomily. “So … Now it begins.”

Two days later, Ashmeade returned. This time, he was more frankly inquisitive. He wanted to know all about the last sequence. Bergmann went into his act; he had never been better. Ashmeade looked politely dubious.

Next morning, early, he was on the phone. “I've been thinking it over. I've just had an idea. Suppose Toni knew all the time that Rudolf was the Prince? I mean, right from the beginning.”

“No, no, no!” cried Bergmann in despair. “Definitely not!”

When their conversation was over, he was furious. “They have given me this fashionable cretin, this elegant dwarf to sit on my back! Have we not enough burdens already? Here we are, breaking our heads off fighting for Truth!”

His anger, as always, subsided into philosophic doubt. He could never dismiss any suggestion, however fantastic, without hours of soul-searching. He groaned painfully. “Very well, let us see where this leads us. Wait. Wait. Let us see … How would it be if Toni…?”

Another day was lost in speculation.

Ashmeade was indefatigable. Either he telephoned, or he came to visit us, every day. He never minded being snubbed, and his ideas abounded. Bergmann began to entertain the blackest suspicions.

“I see it all. This is a plot. It is a clear sabotage. This diplomatic Umbrella has his instructions. Chatsworth is playing with us. He has decided not to make the picture.”

I was inclined to agree with him; and I couldn't altogether blame Chatsworth, either. No doubt, Bergmann's methods were leisurely. Perhaps they were conditioned by habits formed in the old silent days, when the director went into the studio and photographed everything within sight, finally revising his story in the cutting room by a process of selection and elimination. I was seriously afraid that Bergmann would soon reach a state of philosophic equilibrium, in which all possible solutions would seem equally attractive or unattractive, and that we should hang poised in potentiality, until the studio stopped sending us our checks.

Then, one morning, the telephone rang. It was Chatsworth's private secretary. (I recognized the voice which had introduced me to
Prater Violet,
on that last day of what I now looked back to as the pre-Bergmann period of my life.) Would we please both come to the studio as soon as possible, for a script conference?

Bergmann was very grim as he heard the news.

“So. Finally. Chatsworth assumes the black cap. This is the end. The criminals are dragged into court to hear the death sentence. Never mind. Good-bye, Dorothy, my darling. Come, my child. We shall march to the guillotine together.”

*   *   *

IN THOSE DAYS Imperial Bulldog was still down in Fulham. (They didn't move out to the suburbs until the summer of 1935.) It was quite a long taxi ride. Bergmann's spirits rose as we drove along.

“You have never been inside a film studio before?”

“Only once. Years ago.”

“It will interest you, as a phenomenon. You see, the film studio of today is really the palace of the sixteenth century. There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women, there are incompetent favorites. There are great men who are suddenly disgraced. There is the most insane extravagance, and unexpected parsimony over a few pence. There is enormous splendor, which is a sham; and also horrible squalor hidden behind the scenery. There are vast schemes, abandoned because of some caprice. There are secrets which everybody knows and no one speaks of. There are even two or three honest advisers. These are the court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace, and tear their hair privately, and weep.”

“You make it sound great fun.”

“It is unspeakable,” said Bergmann, with relish. “But to us all this does not matter. We have honorably done our task. Now, like Socrates, we pay the penalty of those who tell the truth. We are thrown to the Bulldog to be devoured, and the Umbrella will weep a crocodile tear over our graves.”