Christopher and His Kind (36 page)

Arising out of the imagined question to Gerald, there was another which Christopher now began to ask himself. Am
I
guilty? Did I do all I might have done to save Heinz? He thought how Brian Howard, for example, would have behaved. Instead of becoming helpless with misery and obeying the lawyer's instructions, Brian would have risked taking Heinz with him on the Brussels train. And, if Brian hadn't had Christopher's luck at the Belgian frontier, he would have fought to the very end—demanding to see the British consul, telephoning the Foreign Office, throwing himself at the Grand Duchess's feet. How noble Brian's recklessness seemed! Why had Christopher failed to rise to the occasion? I'm not a man of action, he said to himself. But it wasn't quite as simple as that.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, he worked on
Lions and Shadows,
finishing that draft of it. William Robson-Scott came to stay with him at the Hotel du Vallon. Christopher felt so grateful for the moral support which William's mere presence gave him that he dedicated the book to William when it was published.

Heinz's trial was held in the middle of June. Christopher's name appeared in the transcript of the proceedings, incorrectly spelled. “The English citizen Ischervood, who unfortunately cannot be brought to justice,” was accused of having committed reciprocal onanism with the prisoner in fourteen foreign countries and in the German Reich. The judge observed that, since he was ignorant of the various penalties for the prisoner's crime in these other countries, he would have to punish him according to German law. This remark may or may not have been meant as a joke, but its tone does suggest that the attitude of the court was relatively unhysterical, un-Nazi. Heinz got what was in those days considered a light sentence: six months in prison, to be followed by a year of labor service for the state and two years in the Army.

During the trial, Christopher had been mercifully ignorant of the greatest danger which had threatened Heinz. Instead of being sentenced to a fixed term in a regular prison, Heinz might easily have been sentenced to an indefinite term in a concentration camp, as many homosexuals were. In camp, Heinz would have been treated as an outcast of the Reich who differed from a Jew only in having to wear a pink triangle on his clothes instead of a yellow star. Like the Jews, homosexuals were often put into “liquidation” units, in which they were given less food and more work than other prisoners. Thus, thousands of them died.

After Heinz had been sentenced, all Christopher could do for him was to send him letters so discreetly worded that they were no more than tokens and to provide him, through the German lawyer, with cigarettes and with food that was better than the regulation prison fare. There was no hope, now, of the two of them being able to see each other before 1941, when Heinz finished his military service, and very little hope that he would be allowed to leave Germany, even then.

*   *   *

In July, Christopher was living at Kathleen's house in London. He had been hired to work on a screenplay based on a story by Carl Zuckmayer. I remember almost nothing about it, except that it was set in Austria. Ludwig Berger was to direct it.

Since the dialogue was being written in English, one of their first problems was: What kind of British dialect is the best equivalent to the speech of Austrian peasants? Should there, for example, be a suggestion of West Country, or Yorkshire, or Highland Scots? The question was referred to the producer, Alexander Korda. Berger asked him, in German: “What do the peasants speak?” and received the lapidary answer: “Little.”

The film was never made.

*   *   *

In August, Wystan and Christopher went to Dover together and stayed there until the middle of September. They had rooms in a house on the harbor, 9 East Cliff. The gulls which nested in the cliff face behind the house kept up a frantic squawking. Christopher found it cheerful and absurd, but Wystan called it “sad like work” in the poem about Dover which he wrote during their visit. It was then that Christopher finished the final draft of
Lions and Shadows
and they wrote the first draft of their new play,
On the Frontier.
In a sense, it was about the Heinz situation: lovers who are separated by a frontier. But when Wystan wanted to write a ballad describing Christopher's life with Heinz and their parting, Christopher objected absolutely. Having read “Miss Gee,” Christopher hated to imagine his private tragedy being retold in the heartless comic style of the Auden ballads. Nothing that Wystan said could convince him that this one would be different. A year or so later, Christopher withdrew his veto, fearing that he might have aborted a masterpiece. Wystan, however, said he had now forgotten all his ideas for it.

Dover's chief charm for Christopher was that it was a place of transit: channel steamers coming and going, travelers arriving and departing, all of them in a hurry. He watched them and felt relaxed because he wasn't in a hurry and didn't have anywhere to go. These anxious people seemed to belong to another life—the life he had been leading up to the time of Heinz's arrest.

*   *   *

Earlier that summer, Faber and Faber and Random House—the British and American publishers of their plays and Auden's poems—had offered them a contract to write a travel book about any Asian country or countries they chose to visit. (Maybe this idea had been suggested to the publishers by the pseudo-Asian setting of
F6
!) Wystan and Christopher would probably have chosen China anyway, because of its exotic appeal. If they had hesitated at all, it was because mere sightseeing seemed dilettante and escapist in the crisis atmosphere of the late thirties. Then their minds had been made up for them by the Japanese Army. It had invaded southward from Peking in early July and had attacked Shanghai a month later. China had now become one of the world's decisive battlegrounds. And, unlike Spain, it wasn't already crowded with star literary observers. (How could one compete with Hemingway and Malraux?) “We'll have a war all of our very own,” said Wystan. They planned to leave England toward the end of the year.

*   *   *

From Christopher's diary, October–November:

Heinz is always the last person I think of at night, the first in the morning.

Never to forget Heinz. Never to cease to be grateful to him for every moment of our five years together.

I suppose it isn't so much Heinz himself I miss as that part of myself which only existed in his company.

I had better face it. I shall never see him again. And perhaps this is the best for us both.

What should I feel, now, if, by some miracle, Heinz was let out of Germany? Great joy, of course. But also (I must be absolutely frank) I should be a little bit doubtful; for what, really, have I to offer him? Not even a proper home or a place in any kind of social scheme.

There are times—in publishers' offices, at cocktail parties—when the little patent leather devil of success whispers in my ear: “He travels furthest who travels alone!” I wish I could accept this or any other consolation, however base.

This existence in London is having a curious and bad effect on me. I am getting ludicrously ambitious. I want to be known, flattered, talked about; to see my name in the papers. And, the worst of it is, I can. It's all so cheap and easy.

Here, alone, I am at any rate stronger. I want, above all, to be strong—to give protection like a tree. This isn't mere conceit. It is part of my deepest nature.

In this mirror of a diary, Christopher reveals a few frank glimpses of himself. The rest is posing.

His instinct to stop himself moping, no matter how, was a healthy one. His moping wasn't of the smallest use to Heinz. Far better to indulge his vanity as a celebrity or to entertain himself with other people's worries by advising them about their love troubles or their literary work—this is what he calls giving protection like a tree. Never mind if he thus forgot Heinz altogether for an hour or two; the alternative was to play the unhealthy game of self-accusation, to dwell on the past and ask himself unanswerable questions. For example: Had some part of his will consented to Heinz's arrest? Had his helpless behavior, that last morning in Luxembourg, concealed a cold decision to let the police set him free from Heinz and his problems? Those moments of mysterious joy which came to him sometimes—why did they make him feel guilty? Wasn't it because this joy was joy in his new freedom? And then there was that old persisting question: Should he ever have taken Heinz out of Germany? Was Heinz now cursing him for this in his prison cell?

(Fifteen years later, when Christopher next saw Heinz, in Berlin, Heinz assured him that he wouldn't, for anything, have missed their travels together. But Heinz was then speaking with the maturity and generosity of an extraordinarily lucky survivor who had served in the German Army on both the Russian and the Western fronts and come out of the war with a whole skin. He alone had the right to blame Christopher. It had never occurred to him to do so.)

*   *   *

Everybody who knew Christopher and some who had only read his work had heard, by this time, about Heinz's arrest. Christopher's widowerhood lent glamour to his image. If Christopher had been parted from a wife, a few sympathetic girls would have been touched by his plight and asked themselves: “Couldn't I make him happy again?” In Christopher's case, the sympathizers were young men who asked the same question. He encouraged them all to try. He preferred to have two or three affairs running concurrently; in that way, he felt less involved with any particular individual. The young men didn't resent this; they were no more deeply involved than Christopher. In nearly every case, the affair would come to an end without hard feelings and leave only pleasant memories.

Christopher brought some of these young men to Kathleen's house. Kathleen describes one of them in her diary as “a dear little thing, very spruce, as if he came out of a bandbox,” and another as “a nice little thing with gentle manners and a charming voice and interested in music and literature.” Despite the condescension in her tone, it is clear that she approves. She finds them entirely suitable for Christopher. They are gentlemen, not working-class; Englishmen, not undesirable aliens. They can be relied on not to involve him in scandal or undue expense.

*   *   *

Toward the end of November, Christopher was invited to join a delegation which was to visit Spain and declare the solidarity of left-wing artists and intellectuals with the Spanish government. Several well-known people, including Jacob Epstein, Rose Macaulay, and Paul Robeson, had already accepted the invitation. Christopher explained that he would be unable to join because he was starting for China with Wystan in the near future. But the lady who had organized the delegation swept this objection aside.
She
would be leaving almost immediately, she said, and only staying a few days. She would get him back to England with plenty of time to spare.

Wystan was to be invited also. Christopher wanted to discuss the question with him before giving an answer. He hated the prospect of group travel with celebrated companions, most of them strangers and some probably egomaniacs. He expected Wystan to agree with him. Wystan did, but felt that he himself ought to go. So Christopher said that of course he would come too: “The old war-horse will never again desert its mate.”

The lady organizer was a forceful character. She was rumored to have sent white feathers to several young men who had failed to volunteer for the International Brigade. She was certainly on the lookout for any lack of team spirit among the delegates. At one of their meetings, a delegate suggested that each of them should say what it was that he or she was most interested in seeing, while they were in Spain. The organizer interrupted severely: “I don't think we need waste any time discussing
that.
We all want to go to the front.” When she announced her plans for their transportation to Barcelona, Rose Macaulay said brightly: “You needn't bother about me. I'll just run down there in my little car.” The organizer gave a snort of disapproval at such individualism and of scorn at the notion that you could behave like a tourist when you were in a theater of war.

Christopher happened to mention that he would need TABC shots before going to China. The organizer knew a distinguished biologist who was a supporter of the United Front and would therefore inoculate him without charge. Christopher's shots would be fired, so to speak, in the battle against Fascism.

When I went for my inoculation today, Dr. G. was busy with his white mice. He was transplanting a tumor. The tumor is dissected out of a dead mouse and bits of it are inserted into living mice with a cannula. All the mice will die. But if you grafted the same tumor on to another race of mice—the black ones—it wouldn't grow. This particular tumor was called “tumor 15” and it has been kept alive already for two years.

Christopher suspected that the hypodermic with which he was injected was also used on the mice; anyhow, the biologist kept it in the same drawer with the cannula and with a big piece of chalk and a rag which he used to wipe the blackboard when lecturing to students. But this was no time for squeamishness—this critical but still hopeful phase of the Civil War: Teruel had just been taken from the rebels. The biologist's dirty untidy lab seemed much better suited to the mood of wartime emergency than some nice clean clinic.

Christopher now began to assume the airs of a soldier on the eve of departure for the front. This was chiefly to impress his young men—some of whom were destined for far more dangerous adventures, three or four years later. They were duly impressed.

One night, when Christopher was with Forster and other friends, somebody told him he ought to make a will. A piece of paper was produced. Christopher, rather drunk and enjoying this semi-heroic scene, scribbled a couple of sentences, leaving everything to Kathleen and Richard. Forster was one of the witnesses to the document. After its signing was over, he was asked: “Why don't
you
go to Spain, Morgan?” He replied: “Afraid to,” in his mild cheerful voice. His simplicity rebuked Christopher's posturing, but without a hint of malice.