Christopher and His Kind (28 page)

Our landlady (“Claire l'audacieuse”) is gay talkative haggardly chic with waved greyish hair and darkened eyelids, in a sleeveless white satin blouse. She is amazingly generous, gets breakfast and cleans our rooms for nothing and is now washing all our clothes, for which she asks only the price of the soap.

Claire was a tragic figure. I think she must have been on the verge of starvation. For a while at least, she had nowhere to live and Christopher and Heinz discovered that she was sleeping in the kitchen of the flat without telling them. This was an intolerable situation; they had absolutely no privacy. At last, though feeling terribly guilty, they somehow got her to leave.

By the middle of October, the Ethiopian crisis was at its height. Italy had invaded the country and the League Assembly had voted to impose sanctions. Meanwhile, Heinz had been refused a six-month permit to stay in Belgium and his thirty-day permit had expired. Gerald arranged for his expulsion to be delayed from week to week, but it was obvious that a move must be made soon. Stephen was in Brussels with the young man who is called Jimmy Younger in
World within World,
and the two of them had agreed to come with Christopher and Heinz to Portugal. But they couldn't leave for at least another month—I forget why.

October 19.
Heinz has got spectacles, now. The oculist said to me: “His world is not our world, Monsieur. All his life, vertical lines have been practically invisible to him, while horizontals have appeared abnormally distinct. When he looks at a circle, he sees it as an oval but, since he has learned by experience that it is circular, he retransforms it into a circle within his brain.”

The other day, for the first time in his life, he went to bed with a whore. She had no breasts and wanted a hundred francs. It was not a success.

During November, Christopher finished writing
The Nowaks
and sent it to John Lehmann, who was going to publish it in his first issue of
New Writing,
the following spring. It would thus become the first fragment of
Goodbye to Berlin
to appear in print.

On December 10, Stephen, Jimmy, Christopher, and Heinz sailed from Antwerp on a Brazilian boat which would take them to Lisbon on its way to Rio.

TWELVE

At the time of sailing, Christopher felt lightheaded with relief. This voyage, at least, was going to be a holiday from worry about Heinz's permits. And the company of Stephen and of Jimmy Younger offered relief of another kind; they would help him decide what was to be done, when they had landed in Portugal and faced new problems. During Christopher's wanderings with Heinz, he had made all the decisions alone—grumbling to himself that this was a heavy burden he had to bear. He would have done better to realize that Heinz was no longer a boy and needed responsibility.

Jimmy Younger was ready to run their whole expedition, if they would let him. He had served in the Army and believed in getting things organized. His appearance was attractive: curly red-brown hair, sparkling yellow-brown eyes, big smiling teeth. He would call Stephen “yer silly thing!” and tell him, “Don't be so daft!” with a Welsh (Cardiff) accent. He was full of fun and the love of argument—left-wing political or just argument for its own sake. He used the jargon of a left-wing intellectual, but his own kind of intelligence was intuitive and emotional. He had a Welsh ear for the music of poetry and could genuinely appreciate the work of Spender, Auden, and their fellow poets. Telling Christopher about his first meeting with Stephen, he said: “That was when the curtain went up, for me.”

I remember the voyage in terms of opera, with the four of them relating to each other either as quartets, trios, or duets. As a quartet, their performance was directed toward the other passengers. Taking it for granted that nobody on board could possibly guess what they were really like, they amused themselves by behaving with deliberate oddness—exchanging private-joke signals, grimaces, and asides in full view and hearing of their audience.

The trio was between Stephen, Christopher, and Jimmy. It now seems to me that it was performed for Jimmy's benefit, to make him feel that Stephen and Christopher regarded him as one of themselves. They didn't, altogether, and Jimmy must have been aware that they didn't. But, perhaps, for the time being, it satisfied Jimmy's pride that they even made the effort to pretend.

Christopher's duet with Heinz was more intimate than it had been for some time; being with Stephen and Jimmy made them very conscious of themselves as a couple. This didn't mean, however, that they had yet begun to criticize the other two. Heinz, who could now speak a hesitant basic English, also had a duet with Jimmy—of necessity, since they often found themselves alone together. The duet between Stephen and Christopher was long-established and had a continuity which bridged their separations; they discussed books and politics and abstract ideas and other authors, but very seldom the people they happened to be living with. There was no duet between Stephen and Heinz or between Christopher and Jimmy, perhaps because both Stephen and Christopher were afraid of being drawn into relationships which might have made them disloyal to each other. Christopher did eventually have a duet with Jimmy, but that was much later and under altered circumstances.

*   *   *

The quartet's conscious effort to enjoy itself produced a travel diary. Its entries were written in a tone of shipboard humor and were meant to be read aloud at once, before they could go stale. Here are a few excerpts:

Thursday, December 12, 1935.
[Written by Stephen]: On Tuesday, when we left Brussels for Antwerp, Gerald came to say goodbye to us, wearing a huge fur-lined coat with a skunk collar in which his chinless, thick-lipped, flat-nosed face nestled. He was wearing no jewelry, but there was such a smell of scent in the room after he had come in that I said, “What lady has been here with scent?” “I'm still here,” he answered, bridling a little. We all kissed him goodbye.

This boat is very old and goes very slowly. There are two lounges, one a drawing-room, very decorative, with a yellow-keyed grand piano, the other an Olde Tudor lounge, clawed over by five enormous electric fans, hanging from the ceiling like vampires. Here we read or write. In the other room, Jimmy strums on the piano and Heinz sings.

There is a fat woman, from Northern Ireland but half Belgian, who speaks several languages and is very taken by Jimmy.

21.00 hours. Same day. [Written by Christopher]: We are standing off Le Havre. The day has been dominated by the Irish-Belgian lady. “Oh, but you'd like Rio—you should see ut. If you've got an artistic 'eart—that is, heart—well, art and heart, I mean both—nature must speak to you there.” But she was shocked when Jimmy said he didn't like the Royal Family; she ordered him off to the gymnasium: “Away with you and shake up your liver!”

Later, Jimmy played the piano: “And the cares that hang around me through the week—seem to vanish like a gambler's lucky streak.”

Isherwood then asked Spender what he was thinking.

Spender: “I was thinking about the lucky streak. If I'd written that, I thought, I should have made it somehow terrible and terrific. And how boring, I thought to myself, that I can only write about things terrifically.”

At some time during the crossing of the Bay of Biscay (December 14–15)—calm at first, then rough; but not rough enough to make any of them actually seasick—the Irish-Belgian lady read their palms and told them their characters. Christopher reports this:

Stephen is self-willed, violently pursues his ideas and changes them frequently, listens to advice and has a nature of gold. Heinz is conceited, ambitious, and will succeed. Jimmy is Welsh—and therefore conceited—strong-willed and mad on girls. And I—ah, I am the kind of boy Madame has adored all her life: wherever I travel, whatever I do, I'll always remain real hundred per cent English—just a shy, modest, charming boy. The doctor then offered his palm, disclosing a toothpick which he had been gripping all through the meal like a dagger. She refused to say what she saw in it—it would shock us.

(The quartet made a joke out of pretending to wonder whether this doctor was really a doctor at all—because
Portuguese Doctor,
not simply
Doctor,
was printed above his cabin door. Might not this phrase have some quite other significance, as “Dutch wife,” “French letter,” and “Spanish fly” do?)

Heinz wanted to borrow a German book from the library and this led to the discovery that there is only one to be had—and that much mutilated. We then applied to the Germans, who told us that this boat was originally a German boat and that the Brazilian government seized it during the war. The guilty consciences of the Brazilians caused them, according to the white-haired German, to throw overboard all the German books in the library. The white-haired German is discreetly bitter—the thin-haired younger German less bitter and less discreet and his wife an idiotically sincere chatterbox who protests, very loudly in the lounge, that Germany Wants Peace—by which she means, as Stephen says, that Germany wants to grab everything without having to fight for it.

Since his college days, Christopher had associated port with solemn toasts proposed and tedious anecdotes told by the elderly Others in curtained dining rooms. But at Oporto, where they landed for a few hours on the sixteenth, porto was simply a local wine which they drank out of doors in the midday sun; sickly-sweet, too warm, and too strong. Christopher boozily scribbled on a postcard to Kathleen: “The ship has a hole in her side.” Stephen found some vast metaphysical humor in this (true) statement and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks. Heinz laughed at Stephen's laughter, with equal violence. Jimmy nursemaided them back on board.

That evening, a party of silly Brazilian girls declared brightly, in Heinz's presence, that they hated all Germans. Christopher got up and walked out of the lounge. He enjoyed making such gestures of righteous indignation but didn't pause to consider how much Heinz must be embarrassed by them.

*   *   *

On the morning of December 17, their ship entered the estuary of the Tagus. By that evening, they had settled into the Hotel Nunes at Sintra, fifteen miles outside Lisbon. Here are Christopher's first impressions, gathered during the next few days:

Sintra is a large village composed chiefly of palaces, ruinous and to let. The overhanging cliffs are sprouting with fern-shaped trees and subtropical plants, like an enormous rock-garden. In the woods, one comes upon locked gateways, extravagantly sculptured, leading nowhere, and rococo summer-houses where an eighteenth century poet might find inspiration for the dullest of all tragedies in heroic couplets, with a prologue, epilogue, and fourteen acts.

The castle of Pena is easily the most beautiful building any of us have ever seen. In fact, it has the immediate staggering appeal of something which is sham, faked, and architecturally wrong. It could hardly be more effective if it had been erected overnight by a film company for a super-production about the Middle Ages. Clamped on to the highest spike of rock on our local range of hills, its Moorish-Gothic-Renaissance towers and ramparts command a view of all this part of Portugal … Inside the castle are the touchingly shabby royal apartments, with their railway-carriage upholstery and uncomfortable beds. Copies of
Country Life
and other English Society magazines lie about on the tables, faded yellow and dated 1910. (The year the last king of Portugal was deposed.) In the billiard-room is a horse-racing game of the kind still found on seaside piers.

Up here there is mist and thin rain. The sky has been gloomy ever since our arrival; still we have been busy and haven't felt unduly depressed. Already we have found a house—not
the
house which we still hope one day to discover, but quite a nice cottage with a sitting-room, a dining-room, and five small bedrooms, furnished brightly but with a certain note of despair, as if for spinsters. The house is called Alecrim do Norte (which is the name of a kind of evergreen bush) and it is in San Pedro, a suburb of Sintra, higher up the hillside. It has a wonderful view, right down the valley to the sea.

They moved into the cottage on December 21. Their landlady was a gray-haired, vigorous, tweedy Englishwoman who lived nearby. She had spent most of her life in Portugal and could tell them everything they needed to know about local merchants and food prices. As a matter of principle, she was determined that they shouldn't be cheated. They undoubtedly
were
cheated, quite often; but Portuguese prices were so much lower than English that it hardly mattered. Indeed, it seemed to them that it was they who were doing the cheating. The landlady found them a cook and a maid—for tiny wages, which, she assured them, were well above standard. They had bad consciences about this—Jimmy especially—but nevertheless resigned themselves to being exploiters.

By the beginning of 1936, they had all of them settled down to daily occupations. Stephen was working on a book
(Forward from Liberalism)
and a play
(The Trial of a Judge).
Jimmy was acting as his secretary, keeping the household accounts and supervising the servants. (Their cook cooked fairly well but fatalistically; when Jimmy found cause for complaint, she frustrated him by agreeing that the meal had turned out badly.) Heinz now had an assortment of creatures to look after—a black and white mongrel puppy, named Teddy, which made messes; six hens and a rooster; and some rabbits. He also kept the garden tidy. Christopher was trying to write
Paul Is Alone.
He was the least contented member of the household because his work wasn't going well. So he wasted time indulging in anxiety, his chronic vice. As always, he had an excuse: Heinz's situation in Portugal was far from secure. The German consulate in Lisbon knew the whereabouts of all Germans. Sooner or later, it would send Heinz an order to come and register for conscription. When he failed to do this, it would report him to the Portuguese police as a German whose citizenship might perhaps be taken away from him. Since Heinz didn't even have the status of a Jewish or political refugee, the police might well decide to regard him as an ordinary criminal and expel him from the country … Christopher's anxiety, however well-founded, didn't help Heinz; it infected him and weakened his courage.