Christopher and His Kind

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Books by Christopher Isherwood

Copyright

 

TO DON BACHARDY

 

MY THANKS

to my brother Richard and to Don Bachardy, for the help they gave me while I was writing this book;

to John Lehmann, Stephen Spender, and Edward Upward, for letting me quote from their letters to me;

to Professor Edward Mendelson, literary executor of the estate of W. H. Auden, for letting me quote from Auden's unpublished writings;

to the Provost and Scholars of King's College, Cambridge, for letting me quote from E. M. Forster's letters to me;

to P. N. Furbank, Forster's biographer, for answering my questions about him;

to Rudolph Amendt, for answering my questions about pre-Hitler Berlin;

to Werner and Susanne Rosenstock, for giving me information about the life of Wilfrid Israel;

to Babette Deutsch, for permission to quote from her translation of Ilya Ehrenburg's poem “The Sons of Our Sons,” included in
A Treasury of Russian Verse,

edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky

C.I. July 1976

ONE

There is a book called
Lions and Shadows,
published in 1938, which describes Christopher Isherwood's life between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four. It is not truly autobiographical, however. The author conceals important facts about himself. He overdramatizes many episodes and gives his characters fictitious names. In a foreword, he suggests that
Lions and Shadows
should be read as if it were a novel.

The book I am now going to write will be as frank and factual as I can make it, especially as far as I myself am concerned. It will therefore be a different kind of book from
Lions and Shadows
and not, strictly speaking, a sequel to it. However, I shall begin at the point where the earlier book ends: twenty-four-year-old Christopher's departure from England on March 14, 1929, to visit Berlin for the first time in his life.

Christopher had been urged to come to Berlin by his friend and former schoolmate Wystan Hugh Auden—who is called Hugh Weston in
Lions and Shadows.
Wystan, then aged twenty-two, had been on a study holiday in Germany since taking his degree at Oxford.

While in Berlin, Wystan had met the anthropologist John Layard—Barnard in
Lions and Shadows.
Layard had once been a patient and pupil of Homer Lane, the American psychologist. He had introduced Wystan to Lane's revolutionary teachings, thus inspiring him to use them as a frame of reference for his poems. Wystan had now begun to write lines which are like the slogans of a psychiatric dictator about to seize control of the human race: “Publish each healer … It is time for the destruction of error … Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response … Harrow the house of the dead … The game is up for you and for the others … Love … needs death … death of the old gang … New styles of architecture, a change of heart.”

According to Lane-Layard:

There is only one sin: disobedience to the inner law of our own nature. This disobedience is the fault of those who teach us, as children, to control God (our desires) instead of giving Him room to grow. The whole problem is to find out which is God and which is the Devil. And the one sure guide is that God appears always unreasonable, while the Devil appears always to be noble and right. God appears unreasonable because He has been put in prison and driven wild. The Devil is conscious control, and is, therefore, reasonable and sane.

Life-shaking words! When Christopher heard them, he was even more excited than Wystan had been, for they justified a change in his own life which he had been longing but not quite daring to make. Now he burned to put them into practice, to unchain his desires and hurl reason and sanity into prison.

However, when
Lions and Shadows
suggests that Christopher's chief motive for going to Berlin was that he wanted to meet Layard, it is avoiding the truth. He did look forward to meeting Layard, but that wasn't why he was in such a hurry to make this journey. It was Berlin itself he was hungry to meet; the Berlin Wystan had promised him. To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.

At school, Christopher had fallen in love with many boys and been yearningly romantic about them. At college he had at last managed to get into bed with one. This was due entirely to the initiative of his partner, who, when Christopher became scared and started to raise objections, locked the door, and sat down firmly on Christopher's lap. I am still grateful to him. I hope he is alive and may happen to read these lines.

Other experiences followed, all of them enjoyable but none entirely satisfying. This was because Christopher was suffering from an inhibition, then not unusual among upper-class homosexuals; he couldn't relax sexually with a member of his own class or nation. He needed a working-class foreigner. He had become clearly aware of this when he went to Germany in May 1928, to stay with an elderly cousin who was the British consul at Bremen. He had no love adventures while there, but he looked around him and saw what he was missing. The Bremen trip isn't even mentioned in
Lions and Shadows
because Christopher was then unwilling to discuss its sexual significance. It is described in a novel written many years later,
Down There on a Visit,
but with too much fiction and too little frankness.

*   *   *

Christopher's first visit to Berlin was short—a week or ten days—but that was sufficient; I now recognize it as one of the decisive events of my life. I can still make myself faintly feel the delicious nausea of initiation terror which Christopher felt as Wystan pushed back the heavy leather door curtain of a boy bar called the Cosy Corner and led the way inside. In the autumn of 1928, Christopher had felt a different kind of nauseated excitement, equally strong and memorable, when, as a medical student, he had entered an operating theater in St. Thomas's Hospital to watch his first surgical operation. But the door of the operating theater, unlike that of the Cosy Corner, led him nowhere. Within six months, he had given up medicine altogether.

At the Cosy Corner, Christopher met a youth whom I shall call Bubi (Baby). That was his nickname among his friends, because he had a pretty face, appealing blue eyes, golden blond hair, and a body which was smooth-skinned and almost hairless, although hard and muscular. On seeing Bubi, Christopher experienced instant infatuation. This wasn't surprising; to be infatuated was what he had come to Berlin for. Bubi was the first presentable candidate who appeared to claim the leading role in Christopher's love myth.

What was this role? Most importantly, Bubi had to be the German Boy, the representative of his race. (Bubi was actually Czech, but that could be overlooked since German was the only language he spoke.) By embracing Bubi, Christopher could hold in his arms the whole mystery-magic of foreignness, Germanness. By means of Bubi, he could fall in love with and possess the entire nation.

That Bubi was a blond was also very important—and not merely because blondness is a characteristic feature of the German Boy. The Blond—no matter of what nationality—had been a magical figure for Christopher from his childhood and would continue to be so for many years. And yet I find it hard to say why … John Layard would have encouraged me to invent an explanation, never mind how absurd it sounded. He would have said that
anything
one invents about oneself is part of one's personal myth and therefore true. So here is the first explanation which occurs to me: Christopher chose to identify himself with a black-haired British ancestor and to see the Blond as the invader who comes from another land to conquer and rape him. Thus the Blond becomes the masculine foreign
yang
mating with Christopher's feminine native
yin
 … This makes a kind of Jungian sense—but I can't by any stretch of the imagination apply it to the relations between Bubi and Christopher. Bubi had been, among other things, a boxer, so he must have been capable of aggression. But with Christopher he was gentle, considerate, almost too polite.

In addition to being able to play the German Boy and the Blond, Bubi had a role which he had created for himself; he was the Wanderer, the Lost Boy, homeless, penniless, dreamily passive yet tough, careless of danger, indifferent to hardship, roaming the earth. This was how Bubi saw himself and how he made Christopher and many others see him. Bubi's vulnerability, combined with his tough independence, was powerfully attractive and at the same time teasing. You longed to protect him, but he didn't need you. Or did he? You longed to help him, but he wouldn't accept help. Or would he? Wystan wasn't at all impressed by Bubi's performance as the Wanderer. Yet, largely to please Christopher, he wrote a beautiful poem about Bubi, “This Loved One.”

Throughout Christopher's stay in Berlin, Bubi spent a few hours with him every day. For Christopher, this was a period of ecstasy, sentimentality, worry, hope, and clock-watching, every instant of it essentially painful. Christopher wanted to keep Bubi all to himself forever, to possess him utterly, and he knew that this was impossible and absurd. If he had been a savage, he might have solved the problem by eating Bubi—for magical, not gastronomic, reasons. As for Bubi himself, he was the most obliging of companions; but there was nothing he could do, in bed or out of it, to make Christopher feel any more secure.

They went shopping together and bought Bubi small presents, mostly shirts, socks, and ties; he refused to let Christopher be extravagant. They ate wiener schnitzels and whipped-cream desserts at restaurants. They went to the zoo, rode the roller coaster at Luna Park, and swam in the Wellenbad, a huge indoor pool which had a mechanism for making waves. At the movies, they saw Pudovkin's
Storm over Asia
and Pabst's Wedekind film,
Pandora's Box.

The latter was highly educational entertainment for Christopher, as Wystan unkindly pointed out, since it shows the appalling consequences of trying to own someone who is naturally promiscuous. Christopher did indeed start to make a scene when Bubi broke a date with him. After being coached by Wystan, he painstakingly repeated a short speech which began:
“Ich bin eifersuechtig”
(I am jealous). Bubi listened patiently. Perhaps he even sympathized with Christopher's feelings; for he himself, as Wystan found out later, had a weakness for whores and would pursue them desperately, giving them all the money he had. He then answered at some length, laying his hand on Christopher's arm and speaking in a soothing tone. But Christopher's German was still scanty and he couldn't understand whatever lies Bubi was telling him.

All was soon forgiven, of course. When Christopher left for London, Bubi pulled a cheap gold-plated chain bracelet out of his pocket—probably an unwanted gift from some admirer—and fastened it around Christopher's wrist. This delighted Christopher, not only as a love token but also as a badge of his liberation; he still regarded the wearing of jewelry by men as a daring act, and this would be a constant reminder to him that he was now one of the free. When he got home, he displayed the bracelet challengingly. But his mother, Kathleen, wasn't shocked, only vaguely puzzled that he should care to wear anything so common.