Christopher and His Kind (19 page)

Heinz sulked until they sailed and continued to sulk during the voyage, which took them through the Corinth canal and between the Lipari Islands and gigantic Stromboli, which they saw at dawn, smoking heavily. They were never alone together because they shared a cabin with four others. On deck, Heinz talked to a Swiss and Christopher to an Englishman, George Thomson, the translator of Greek classics.

Arriving at Marseilles on September 13, they wandered through the Old Port, down streets of stairs, and had their hats snatched by whores who were trying to entice them into the houses. When they advanced, the girls retreated; when they walked away, the girls advanced. At last, Christopher and Heinz gave up and walked away hatless. This adventure made them laugh together. Peace was instantly declared between them. Instead of parting next day in Paris, they spent a couple of weeks in the suburb of Meudon:

Once again, the French are preparing to say: Ils ne passeront pas. War is in the air. But we had our tiny room with the double bed and our ping-pong and meals, and were happy.

On September 30, Christopher took Heinz over to England. They stayed at Kathleen's house. The diary narrative breaks off here with the remark: “The atmosphere is chilly but polite.”

The chill was largely of Christopher's creation. He had told Kathleen that he and Heinz had met for the first time in France, only a few days earlier. This was because he didn't want her to know that Heinz had been with him in Greece and that they had been together for a long while in Germany. But, having told this silly lie, he had let drop—with a carelessness which was part of his aggression toward her—several references to things Heinz had done while they were on St. Nicholas. Kathleen hadn't commented on this, but she was hurt that he had lied to her. She had realized instantly that Heinz was a working-class boy and she treated him as such—though with such a faint nuance of patronage that Heinz was unaware of it and thought her kind and liked her. Christopher detected every microscopic slight and raged inwardly.

Heinz's tourist permit to stay in England expired and he went back to Germany. I am sure that he did this unwillingly. He and Christopher were on the best of terms again and he had thoroughly enjoyed himself in London, where several of Christopher's friends had been charming to him; Beatrix Lehmann and Humphrey Spender in particular. I am not so sure how Christopher felt. The strain of having to live with Heinz under Kathleen's eye spoiled much of his pleasure. Also he wanted to be alone for a while, free from the necessary friction of their relationship, to get on with his writing. He hated letting Heinz return to Berlin. Hitler was making warlike moves; he had just withdrawn from the League of Nations. But even the pessimists agreed that he wasn't ready to risk actual war yet. So Christopher resolved to get some more money somehow and to find a way of bringing Heinz over to England for a much longer period, perhaps for keeps.

NINE

One morning in the middle of October, just after Heinz's departure, Christopher got a telephone call from Jean Ross. I have no verbatim record of what she said. The best I can do is to report it in the style of Sally Bowles—which will be anachronistic, for Jean was now beginning to shed her Sally Bowles persona. Her way of expressing herself already showed the influence of her new London friends—left-wingers who were humorous but dedicated, sexually permissive but politically dogmatic.

“Chris darling, I've just met this absolutely marvelous man. He's simply brilliant. I adore him … No, you swine—we most certainly do not! He's
old
—at least sixty, I should think. I mean, I adore his
mind
 … You see, he's an Austrian, only he's a director in Hollywood. He's come here to direct a film … And, darling, this is what's so marvelous—
he wants you to write it!
 … Well, no, as a matter of fact, he didn't know who you were. But he's got to find a writer at once, and I've told him about you, how you're an absolute genius only a bit unrecognized, so far. He seems really quite interested. He wants to read something you've written … Yes, I know you're terribly busy with your novel but, after all, it can wait, can't it—I mean, you can just dash this thing off and then you'll be filthy rich … But,
Chris,
I
promised
him you would! Look, won't you at least send him a copy of your last novel—I never
can
remember its name … Yes, of course I've got one—I treasure it—only I lent it to someone and I've forgotten who … You won't? You old brute! Well, I'll tell you what—let's make a bargain, shall we? If I buy a copy myself, and you get this job—will you give me half your first week's salary?”

“It's a deal!” Christopher told her, laughing. He had long since lost faith in Jean's many moneymaking schemes. He dismissed this conversation from his mind.

Two days later, Jean called him again, breathless: “Darling—I bought your book and I gave it to him and”—here her voice became hushed with amazement—“he thinks it's
good!
”

What had actually happened was that the director, Berthold Viertel, leafed casually through
The Memorial
until he came to the scene in which Edward Blake tries unsuccessfully to kill himself. (A friend had once described his own suicide attempt to Christopher. This scene was based upon it.) Having read it, Viertel declared: “This I find clearly genial”—pronouncing the word as English but meaning it as the German
genial,
“gifted with genius.” And that was that. Viertel read no further. Christopher, already as good as hired sight unseen, was invited to come for an interview.

(After performing this momentous act of introduction, with all its short- and long-term consequences for Christopher, Jean seems to have disappeared temporarily from his life. Perhaps she went abroad somewhere. I can't remember if Christopher kept his promise to give her half of his first week's salary. I am pretty sure that she would have held him to it. I hope she did.)

*   *   *

Berthold Viertel appears as Friedrich Bergmann in the novelette called
Prater Violet,
which was published twelve years later:

The gray bushy head, magnificent and massive as sculptured granite … the big firm chin, the grim compressed line of the mouth, the harsh furrows cutting down from the imperious nose … the head of a Roman emperor … but the eyes were the dark mocking eyes of his slave.

I couldn't help smiling as we shook hands, because our introduction seemed so superfluous. There are meetings which are like recognitions—this was one of them. Of course we knew each other. The name, the voice, the features were inessential, I knew that face. It was the face of a political situation, an epoch. The face of Central Europe.

This passage really only refers to Christopher's sense of recognition, not Viertel's. Yet, under the circumstances, Viertel's sense of recognition must have been much stronger and more exciting than Christopher's. While Christopher merely recognized in Viertel “the face of Central Europe,” Viertel recognized in Christopher—from that very first moment, I believe—the exceedingly odd kind of individual his temperament required as a working companion.

The film which Viertel had agreed to direct was to be based on a novel by the Austrian writer Ernst Lothar, called
Kleine Freundin,
Little Friend. It is about a small girl whose parents are becoming estranged; this makes her so unhappy that she tries to kill herself. (Which may explain why the suicide scene in
The Memorial
caught Viertel's attention.) The girl's suicide attempt is unsuccessful but it reunites the parents, the girl, and her puppy. This old-fashioned sentimental theme had been modernized but not at all desentimentalized by the introduction of Freudian symbols and dreams. (In
Prater Violet,
the film which is being produced is an unashamedly corny musical comedy set in pre-1914 Vienna. Christopher persuaded John van Druten, who was a master of pastiche and parody, to invent its plot for him.)

Since
Little Friend
features a nymphet, the studio (Gaumont-British) had typecast Margaret Kennedy, authoress of
The Constant Nymph,
as its scriptwriter. My impression is that Miss Kennedy wrote an entire screenplay on her own; her name appears, above Christopher's, on the credit list of the film. Christopher never met her. Viertel did meet her, but there seems to have been no true marriage of their minds; he later described her as “a crocodile who wept once in her life a real tear”—i.e.,
The Constant Nymph.
Fortunately for both of them, Miss Kennedy was obliged to withdraw from their collaboration almost at once, because she had to devote herself to the production of her own play
Escape Me Never!
(It became a hit early in 1934, starring Elisabeth Bergner.) So Viertel had had to get himself another writer.

Crocodile or no crocodile, a successful self-assured professional would never have suited Viertel as a working companion. He needed an amateur, an innocent, a disciple, a victim. He needed someone he could teach—“I am an old Jewish Socrates”—someone with whom he could share the guilt of creating this film, someone to whom he could truthfully say, as he said to Christopher: “I feel absolutely no shame before you; we are like two married men who meet in a whorehouse.”

Christopher was an amateur, in both senses of the word. A lover of movies since childhood, he was also eager to learn the craft of film writing and prepared to begin at the beginning. Why shouldn't he play the humble novice? It caused him no pain to do so, for his arrogance as a novelist was wrapped protectively around his ego. Viertel was subtle enough to understand this. He addressed the Novelist as “Master,” in the humorous tone of a fellow artist whose embarrassment mocks his sincere admiration. Meanwhile, he trained the Filmwriter with the impatient patience of a craftsman who has to make the best of a slow-witted apprentice.

Viertel chose to regard Christopher as an innocent, and used to call him Alyosha Karamazov. Viertel fancied himself as a wise old Lucifer, and this role demanded its opposite, the young unfallen angel who still had illusions about Heaven. Lucifer benevolently despises this angel but sentimentally envies him … Christopher wasn't an innocent but he could be infantile, which was the next best thing. He could take the pressure off crises in their film work by displaying such babylike dismay that he made Viertel laugh at him and cheer up and get a new idea.

As a disciple, Christopher attended closely to the way Viertel talked, trying to memorize his vocabulary and mannerisms. This was part of Christopher's instinctive functioning as a writer. He often caught himself studying someone without having been conscious that he or she was a model for a prospective fiction character. No doubt, Christopher's show of attention flattered Viertel and deceived him; the truth was that Socrates's opinions were of minor interest to his disciple. Christopher saw Viertel as the kind of intellectual who takes his intellectualism too seriously and thus becomes the captive of his own opinions. He could be dazzlingly witty, grotesquely comic, but never silly, never frivolous. Comparing him with Forster and Auden and Upward, and seeing the vast difference between Viertel and them, Christopher said to himself that only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.

When I say that Viertel needed a victim, I mean a willing victim and a victim who could thrive on victimization. My theory is that Viertel's ideal victim could only have been a male homosexual—and not just any male homosexual but one who, like Christopher, was able to enjoy both the
yang
and the
yin
role in sex. If the relationship between Viertel and himself had been sexual, however, their collaboration wouldn't have worked; sex would have been a complication. If the victim had been a woman, Viertel would have regarded her sexually, to some extent, even if they hadn't been lovers. If the victim had been a heterosexual man, he would probably have hated submitting to Viertel's will, regarding it as a humiliation and a threat to his masculinity. But Christopher didn't think of submission in those terms; it was simply the
yin
role, which he enjoyed playing precisely because he knew himself equally able to play
yang.

Therefore, Christopher suffered relatively little emotional wear and tear during those weeks of work on
Little Friend.
I am not claiming that he always kept his awareness of the
yang-yin
balance; indeed, I am going to describe some occasions when he lost it. But he managed pretty well.

From Viertel's point of view, one of Christopher's greatest assets was that he spoke Viertel's native language with sufficient fluency. Viertel's English was fluent, too, but he needed the release of being able to slip back into German when he was tired. And he loved making satirical asides to Christopher in public which no one else present was likely to understand. Best of all, Christopher was able to read his German poems. He had published two volumes of them, as well as a novel. Viertel thought of himself as a poet, first and foremost, and it was depressing for him to find himself almost without an audience in England, the land of poets. Once, when a friend told Christopher, in Viertel's presence, that a critic had referred to him as one of the most brilliant younger English novelists, Viertel exclaimed to Christopher demandingly, like a child: “And now tell him about
me!
”

Viertel's public persona was that of a Roman emperor; but, in the intimacy of their working hours, Christopher saw him as

an old clown, shock-headed, in his gaudy silk dressing-gown; tragi-comic, like all clowns, when you see them resting backstage after the show.

Although he looked much older than his age, forty-eight—and had done so even as a young man, to judge from photographs—he was inspiringly vigorous and could work all day and half the night, if necessary. Nevertheless, he was a semi-invalid with a diabetic condition which caused him to eat ravenously and to suffer acute hunger pangs if he was kept waiting for meals. For the same reason, he was subject to storms of rage and black frosts of despair, from which, however, he could recover within seconds. He seemed to carry his own psychological “weather” around with him. In his company you were so powerfully aware of it that you scarcely noticed if the day was cold or warm, wet or fine.