Christopher and His Kind (24 page)

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Christopher set out to write what he called a “dynamic portrait.” He used this term to describe a novel whose interest depends on the gradual revealing of a character, rather than on action, crisis, and confrontation. What the action of such a novel does is to remove layer after layer of the “skin” of outer appearance—thus taking the reader inward from his first superficial impressions and too hastily formed judgments until he is face to face, at last, with the “real” individual. (This only means, of course, that aspect of the individual which the author has arbitrarily decided is the essential one.)

In those days, Christopher was fond of saying that what most interested him in writing fiction was to present the bizarre as though it were humdrum and to show events which are generally regarded as extraordinary forming the daily routine of somebody's life. He had chosen Norris for his first subject because, of all his Berlin characters, Norris was the most bizarre.

However, in the process of writing the novel, Christopher was seduced away from his original intention. Toward the end of it, he abandons Norris and his portrait for a whole chapter, while he takes the Narrator and some minor characters to Switzerland and involves them in an espionage intrigue. Here the bizarre is merely bizarre.

(I now realize that what seduced Christopher was his recent experience with the screenplay of
Little Friend.
This had shown him that he could invent situations in areas of life which were quite unknown to him; invent them without shame, although part of himself regarded this newly discovered faculty as being a kind of betrayal. Henceforth, from time to time, he would be unable to resist using it. It was so much fun.)

In his two novels about Berlin, Christopher tried to make not only the bizarre seem humdrum but the humdrum seem bizarre—that is, exciting. He wanted his readers to find excitement in Berlin's drab streets and shabby crowds, in the poverty and dullness of the overgrown Prussian provincial town which had become Germany's pseudo-capital. Forty years later, I can claim that that excitement has been created—largely by all those others who have reinterpreted Christopher's material: actresses and actors, directors and writers. Christopher was saying, in effect: “Read about us and marvel! You did not live in our time—be sorry!” And now there are young people who agree with him. “How I wish I could have been with you there!” they write. This is flattering but also ironic; for most of them could no more have shared Christopher's life in Berlin than they could have lived with a hermit in the desert. Not because of any austerities Christopher endured. Because of the boredom.

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Christopher finished the novel on August 12. I remember that he had to hurry to get his last page typed before the Englishman started the music. Christopher wrote in his diary:

The gramophone keeps reiterating a statement about Life with which I do not agree.

When he mailed the manuscript to the Hogarth Press, it was still called
The Lost.
But, not long before its publication in 1935, he decided to alter its title to
Mr. Norris Changes Trains.
This, too, was a title which he had originally thought of in German:
Herr Norris Steigt Um.
It was intended by Christopher to mean not only that Mr. Norris keeps changing trains—that is to say, keeps having to change countries in a hurry, to escape his creditors and the police—but also that he keeps changing allies and political affiliations, jumping from one bandwagon onto another.

When Stephen Spender heard of the new title, he protested in a letter:

The Lost
is an excellent title. The other is arty. Anything would surely be better and less Hogarth Pressy. It gives one a sense of earrings.

I still can't agree with Stephen. And I enormously regret that Christopher let himself be persuaded to make a change in the title of the American edition of the novel. Somebody in the office of William Morrow, his U.S. publisher, assured him that Americans always said “transfer” and therefore wouldn't understand what “changes trains” meant. Christopher knew nothing at that time about American idioms, so he took this extremely dubious statement for fact and offered an alternative,
The Last of Mr. Norris.
He thereby created the false impression that these are two different novels, one the sequel to the other. Which has led to much wearisome correspondence with readers, setting the record straight.

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On August 15, Christopher and Heinz began a week's tour of the three westernmost Canary Islands: La Palma, Gomera, and Hierro. This was sheer travel snobbery; the islands had little to offer but their remoteness and La Palma's claim to possess the largest extinct crater in the world. The length of the tour was made necessary by the intervals between visits of the coastal steamer. Still, they killed time happily, clambering up cinder cones, playing billiards in fondas, or lying in bed. Heinz was a good person to be bored with; he never blamed Christopher for his boredom. And they did meet two fascinating characters—tourist beggars of contrasting types—about whom Christopher later wrote a story called “The Turn round the World.”

Then, on September 6, they left the islands for the Spanish mainland. Landing at Cádiz, they took a bus to Algeciras, visited Gibraltar, and later crossed by steamer to Ceuta, in what was then Spanish Morocco. As Christopher came ashore down the gangplank, the hundred-pound note was picked from his pocket. There was nothing effective to be done about this, so he relieved his feelings by making a token fuss at the British consulate. The vice consul naturally thought it insane to carry such a sum of money around. Not being also a psychologist, he didn't find Christopher's insanity even the least bit interesting.

After this, there is a gap in Christopher's diary and a blank in my mind. Memory refuses to attach itself to the snapshots they took in Tetuán and in Xauen—then still thought to be dangerous because of the recent fighting between the Moors and the Spanish. I gaze at these glimpses of winding alleys and muffled figures and can remember only a visit to Tangier twenty years later, which was made unforgettably melodramatic by an initiation into hashish taking.

Having left Africa, they traveled north through Spain by way of Granada and Madrid. I forget what the reasons were which decided them to settle in Copenhagen, early in October. I suppose that, for the moment, there seemed nowhere else for them to go.

Thus ended Christopher's grand journey of home rejection and defiance of Nearly Everybody. What followed this was no longer defiant; just a succession of moves on a chessboard, compelled by a stronger opponent. In fact, a retreat.

ELEVEN

Writing to Stephen Spender from Copenhagen on October 9, 1934, Christopher reports that he and Heinz have met Stephen's elder brother, Michael, and his wife, Erica, by chance on the street and that Erica has been most kind to them. She has found them a flat in the same block as the Spenders', at Classensgade 65, and has helped them buy a few pieces of furniture and move into it.

One has to wait three or four months, as a foreigner, before applying for permission to remain in Denmark at all; and the authorities refuse to say in advance whether permission is likely to be granted. This rather disinclines me to buy anything for the flat which isn't absolutely necessary. Heinz is making meatballs in the kitchen and I am typing this in a very “dictator” room; quite bare except for a ventilator, a table, and a map of Europe.

Compared with his brothers, Michael appeared rugged and masculine and altogether less sensitive, but he had his share of the Spender good looks. Christopher had met him briefly before this and had then been inclined to accept Stephen's view of him. Stephen, the hyper-subjective, had made fun of Michael for having claimed that he had never in his life held a subjective opinion. Michael certainly was a pragmatic type of scientist who made a cult of efficiency and despised the lack of it in others. However, he was also aware of his own limitations and more modest than Stephen would admit. Christopher found Michael's conversation fascinating precisely because it was free of the subjective exaggerations in which he himself was so apt to indulge. It was a welcome change to listen to Michael's strictly objective stories of Greenland, which he had recently visited on some scientific mission.

One story I still remember because it is such an apt parable, applicable to any failure in understanding between two cultures:

An Eskimo, on being shown a photograph of Copenhagen harbor full of ships, was unimpressed and puzzled. He asked: “But how can people live in your town? They must all be starving. I see no fishing canoes.”

On the whole, Michael approved of Christopher, finding him less subjectively minded than most of Stephen's friends. This was because he had read
The Memorial
and had been impressed by its display of objective details—such as the names of musical pieces performed at Mary Scriven's concerts, the technical gossip of Maurice's friends about cars and motorbikes, the obscure places visited by Edward Blake in Asia Minor, the description by Eric of a bankrupt mining town in South Wales. Michael, with endearing innocence, took it for granted that Christopher knew what he was talking about; that he had produced these facts out of a vast store of knowledge. Christopher, like many other writers, was shockingly ignorant of the objective world, except where it touched his own experience. When he had to hide his ignorance beneath a veneer, he simply consulted someone who could supply him with the information he needed. Nevertheless, he accepted Michael's compliments gracefully.

Erica Spender was a German girl with a somewhat boyish attractiveness. She was full of temperament, fun, and aggression and made tactlessly frank remarks. She regarded the Christopher–Heinz relationship with an amused horror. Once she said to Christopher: “When I see the two of you walking down the street together, buttoned up in your overcoats, I think: My God, they must bore each other to death, how can they
bear
it?” He didn't take offense, for her interest in them was at least genuine. The three of them became friends.

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When Christopher was a child, he had thought of Copenhagen as the capital of Hans Andersen Land. As an adult, he was still under Andersen's spell. (In conversation, he even maintained, more than half seriously, that “The Little Mermaid” is a more profound and true-to-life tragedy than
Madame Bovary
or
Anna Karenina.
) But, now that he was actually in Copenhagen, he saw it merely as the capital of Denmark. Its connection with Andersen seemed to be only through relics and historical landmarks. Maybe if Christopher had been alone and had had a love affair with a young Dane, he would have rediscovered the Andersen magic, sparkling somewhere deep down in the modern boy's collective unconscious.

From a practical point of view, Copenhagen was a good place for them to live. German was a second language there; all educated people spoke it to some extent, so Heinz was less of a foreigner. The foodstuffs—butter, milk, eggs, fish, and meat—were extraordinarily appetizing, and now Christopher and Heinz could cook for themselves. The city was clean, and bright with blond Scandinavian heads. That particular winter happened to be mild; there were many days of sunshine. It was only when icy rain or snow gusts drove down the Classensgade that Christopher felt the awful melancholia of the North.

At the beginning of November, Auden sent Christopher the manuscript of a play called
The Chase.
He had developed it from an earlier play written by the two of them,
The Enemies of a Bishop.
Auden asked for suggestions and Christopher was eager to make them, especially since
The Chase
was almost certainly going to be produced by Rupert Doone's Group Theatre. The Group Theatre had already produced Auden's
The Dance of Death
in February of that year, with Doone himself in the leading role.

During the weeks that followed, Christopher's correspondence with Wystan about the play became a collaboration. Christopher outlined some new scenes and some revisions of existing scenes. A few he wrote himself, others he asked Wystan to write. Wystan always enjoyed being set such tasks; they were a challenge to his immense creative powers. I can't remember that he ever refused or ever failed to produce what had been asked for.

Christopher's diary, November 24:

Every day I go out to buy the milk, sneaking round the corner to look at the posters.
Krigs Fare
(War Danger) and so forth. The Danish papers take a sadistic delight in exaggerating every new alarming report.

Why am I in such an awful funk? Partly of course because I don't want to die. Much more because I dread the Army itself—like going back to school again—and I dread leaving Heinz. But it is the waiting which is so awful. The little money I have would stop if war were declared. We should never be allowed to stay here. In the end, I know, I should have to return to England.

Heinz said to me this morning, “You seem to have no interest for anything any more. You're making me as miserable as you are yourself. If war comes, it'll come.”

There was, in fact, no major political crisis in Europe just then. But Christopher and all his fellow worriers in that war-doomed period were like patients with a terminal disease—apt to become acutely aware of their condition from time to time, even if there were no symptoms of it to remind them.

His diary entry continues:

I have failed to do my duty. My place is in England with the Communists. I am a deserter and a potential traitor.

A letter from Edward Upward, earlier that year, reveals that Christopher has written to Olive Mangeot in the same tone:

Olive showed me your letter in which you said something about being silently judged. Of course that's all trash, because—though Marx may not have said it—each of us helps the revolution best by using his own weapons. And your best weapon is obviously writing. It's my misfortune that I have to fight as a fifth-rate teacher.