Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir (2 page)

This book has been compiled almost exclusively from Christopher’s letters to me, and diary extracts by me made at the same time. Nearly all my letters to Christopher up to and including the duration of the war have disappeared. For the extracts I use I have relied on the typewritten copies which I kept myself. There are a few letters to Christopher after the war: these were found by Don Bachardy in their house after Christopher’s death, and were sent to me then. I include some of them towards the end of this book. Even so I must say that the later letters have many gaps in them, and therefore the information in them is lost for good.

I have had the great advantage of being able to use photographs of some of the drawings made by Don Bachardy from the life in Christopher’s last months. My special thanks go to Don Bachardy for the permission to use them.

I
n 
the early days of January 1931 I found myself as trainee manager in Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, rather to my surprise. I say ‘to my surprise’ because it all happened so fast. My parents had encouraged me, while I was at Cambridge, to set my sights for the future on the Foreign Office, in which members of our family had already had distinguished careers. I set myself to study French and German intensively, but when I came down from Cambridge a new idea turned up. My godmother Violet Hammersley had friends in the Prints and Drawings Department of the British Museum, and thought she could get me in. I had already started on a tour to acquaint myself with the main Continental museums where I could study their collections of drawings and water-colours, when something happened to alter the whole perspective of the future for me. My Cambridge friend Julian Bell, nephew of Virginia Woolf, had his first book of poems accepted by the Hogarth Press, and told Leonard and Virginia that he had a friend who also wrote poetry, which both he and George (Dadie) Rylands thought very promising. He also told them that I was interested in printing. 
At that moment the Woolfs were looking - not for the first time - for some young man they could train to manage the Press for them and eventually become their partner.

The result was that I prepared a first book of poems to submit to them, which was accepted more quickly than I expected. In his letter of acceptance Leonard cautiously hinted that they would be interested to sound me about joining them in the Press. As a fervent admirer of Virginia as a novelist already, this was very exciting to me, and my mother saw that working at the Press was something I wanted to do much more than becoming a Foreign Office or museum official. The question of a partnership could be left open for the time being. So before many days had passed, I had settled into the manager’s room in the basement at 52 Tavistock Square with dreams of a publishing future to rival my great-grandfather Robert Chambers’s.
¹

Only a month or two before I had come to know a young Oxford poet, Stephen Spender, through my sister Rosamond. Stephen told me about his close friends Wystan Auden and Christopher Isherwood. Christopher, who now lived in Berlin, had written a novel,
All the Conspirators
, which had been published by Jonathan Cape. Cape had, however, refused a second novel he had written called
The Memorial
, which was now in the hands of his agent, Curtis Brown, who was having some difficulty in finding a publisher for it. Stephen spoke of it with great enthusiasm, and when I had become part of the Hogarth Press I persuaded him to let me see a copy.

Stephen was a great maker of legends, and saw his most intimate friends and fellow-writers as a closely-knit, in fact heroic band who were out to create an entirely new literature. He wrote to me from Berlin: ‘There are four or five friends who work together, although they are not all known to each other. They are W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Edward Upward and I. I only know Christopher and Wystan Auden of the other three …. Whatever one of us does in writing or travelling or taking jobs, it is a kind of exploration which may be taken up by the other two or three.’ This may have been largely Stephen’s fantasy, but it was a potent stimulus to a young poet who had just taken up publishing.

As soon as I had read it, I felt the same enthusiasm, and decided to do my utmost to get Leonard and Virginia to take it on. They approached it with caution, and asked to see
All the Conspirators
before they made up their minds. Though Christopher and Stephen were filled with the direst forebodings, the result was positive, and
The Memorial
was accepted. It was published in February 1932.

I was naturally very keen to know more about the new author, and his plans for future work, and had asked Stephen to get him to write to me. A letter followed, dated 13 January, from his Berlin address in the Nollendorfstrasse:

Stephen tells me that you want me to write and let you know what I mean to do in the near future. At present I’m writing an autobiographical book, not a novel, about my education - preparatory school, public school and University. After this is finished I shall start a book about Berlin, which will probably be a novel written in diary form and semi-political. Then I have another autobiographical book in mind. And possibly a travel book. So you see, I have no lack of raw material! It is only a question of time and energy! … I am very glad that my novel is coming out so soon. I hope you will have more success with it than it deserves.

It seems fairly clear that the ‘autobiographical book’ must have been an early version of what, after many changes of title and scope, was eventually published as
Lions and Shadows,
but not until 1938. I must have written to him indicating a strong preference for the Berlin stories, because in his next letter he wrote: ‘I’m sure you’re perfectly right about the Berlin book. Unfortunately, however, I don’t feel nearly ready to write it yet. I should probably have to get away from Berlin first. Whereas the other book is all in my head already.’

I
 
first met Christopher when he came to London in August 1932: I had missed him when I was in Germany myself in the earlier summer.

The young man who came into my office that morning struck me at once by an unexpected smallness - he was only five foot eight inches tall - and the disproportion of the large head and dominant nose to the rest of the body. His hair was worn short - I never knew him sport long hair - with a quiff coming over his forehead. His expression was remarkably boyish, and remained so as long as I knew him. There was a twinkle in his eye, which he seemed to be able to switch on and off like an actor. I did not see the characteristics that Auden describes in his pastiche-Lawrence poem a few years later (1937):

Who is that funny-looking young man so squat with a top-heavy head

A cross between a cavalry major and a rather prim landlady…

With your enormous distinguished nose and your great grey eyes

Only 33 and a real diplomat already Our guest ambassador to the mad …

But it was scarcely the occasion for such observations. I wrote of this first meeting in my diary:

It was impossible not to be drawn to him. I was attracted by the warmth of his nature, and by the quality which appealed to me so much in
The Memorial
, an exact feeling for the deeper moods of our generation with its delayed war-shock and conviction of the futility of the old pattern of social life and convention; his capacity - the pressure he was under in his imagination - to invent the most extravagant dream-situations of comedy for everyone he knew, evoked a response in that part of me that produced the dotty fantasy plays at Eton; and at the same time I had fallen under the spell of his Berlin legend, and yet for some months after our first meeting our relations remained rather formal: perhaps it was the sense of alarm that seemed to hang in the air when his smile was switched off, a suspicion he seemed to radiate that one might after all be in league with the ‘enemy’, a phrase which covered everything he had, with a pure hatred, cut himself off from in English life ….

In his later book,
Christopher and His Kind
, he commented amusingly on this description:

John’s intuition was correct. Christopher
was
suspicious of and on his guard against this tall handsome young personage with his pale narrowed quizzing eyes, measured voice which might have belonged to a Foreign Office expert, and extremely becoming, prematurely grey hair - an hereditary characteristic. Seated behind his desk, John seemed the incarnation of authority -benevolent authority, but authority, none the less. What Christopher didn’t, couldn’t have realized until they knew each other better was that this personage contained two beings whose deepest interests were in conflict, an editor and a poet.

Christopher then goes on to develop his theory about my character:

John the Editor was also in conflict with the policy of the 
Hogarth Press. For he was destined to bring the writing of the thirties to birth and introduce it to the world. The Woolfs belonged to the previous generation, and their Press, despite its appearance of chic modernity, tended to represent the writing of the twenties and the teens, even the tens …. Meanwhile John the Poet simply wanted to write his poems …. He hated to waste precious time publishing books - even books by those he most admired - and he had no interest in exercising authority, however benevolent. The worst enemies of John the Poet were his friends, who wanted him to publish their works.

It was in March 1929 that Christopher had set out on one of the crucial journeys of his life: to Berlin. In
Lions and Shadows 
he makes out that his chief reason was to get to know Layard, the disciple of Homer Lane, the American psychologist whose teachings were proving so exciting and revolutionary to Wystan and himself at the time; but in
Christopher and His Kind
he confesses that, though he did indeed want to meet Layard, far more important was to be introduced to the homosexual life of Berlin, of which Wystan had been giving him inflammatory accounts. He could hardly wait to be taken to such bars as The Cosy Corner, where he would be able to find Berlin boys who were ready to go to bed with foreigners, especially Englishmen, for a few marks pocket-money. He found one who suited him exactly almost at once, called Bubi, who became for him the incarnation of his dream of the ‘German Boy’ and the ‘Blond Foreigner’, who did everything he wanted in bed - chiefly by being just himself. A close attachment grew between the two of them, and though Bubi soon had to sail away from Berlin, they met again on various occasions later in Christopher’s life, and always with rapturous embraces. Christopher was fortunate in this first Berlin infatuation.

It was only after we met again, briefly, in Berlin at the end of 1932, that our letters began ‘Dear John’ and ‘Dear Christopher’. By that time I had left the Hogarth Press, perhaps as Christopher had foreseen, and gone to live in Vienna with the aim of immersing myself in poetry; though John the Editor was by no means dead. I returned to England for Christmas; and it was on my way back to Vienna that I decided to make a 
longer visit to Christopher in his Berlin stronghold.

Meanwhile my sister Beatrix and Christopher had met in Berlin. I cannot now remember why Beatrix was visiting Germany at that time; in any case she and Christopher immediately found a great deal in common, and became - and remained - close friends. I have a letter written from Nollendorfstrasse at the end of December, in which he says: ‘Beatrix is here. I like her most awfully. Yesterday we went to see
Faust.
Gründgens played Mephistopheles as a sinister sissy and crawled up Faust’s waistcoat like a caterpillar. It was an electrifying performance.’ He was in great spirits because in the earlier elections the Communists had taken the lead over the Nazis in the city, and rather with his tongue in his cheek had written in the same letter: ‘I shall not insult a Comrade with bourgeois Christmas Greetings, but a Revolutionary Salute for 1933 can do no harm. Rot Front.’

It was icily cold in Berlin, which seemed to me like a patient about to undergo an operation without any anaesthetic at all. I vividly remember a walk Christopher and I took one afternoon, muffled up to the eyes against the flaying wind. I wrote in my diary:

I noticed something I had not foreseen, an element, puzzling and deeply disturbing, that had been left out of the reporters’ reckonings of Right versus Left, reactionary capitalism versus the working-class movement, and so on. All over the city, especially in the middle-class residential and shopping districts, huge pictures of Hitler were displayed in the failing light in windows illuminated by devout candles. The crude likenesses of the Man of Germany’s Destiny, row upon row above us, were like altars dedicated to some primitive, irrational demon-cult.