Christopher and His Kind (37 page)

The Spanish government's travel permits were delayed, however; so the delegation's departure date kept being postponed. At length, Wystan and Christopher decided not to wait any longer. They confirmed their bookings for the voyage to China.

I believe that the delegation did go to Spain eventually and that Rose Macaulay did manage to drive all the way down to Barcelona in her little car.

*   *   *

The night before Wystan and Christopher left, a goodbye party for them was held in a studio. Most of their friends were there. Hedli Anderson sang. A concertina was played. People danced. Forster and Bob Buckingham enjoyed the party but thought the wine cup vile. There were strained relations between certain guests. I remember Brian Howard starting one of his fights with the words, “I refuse to allow my friend to be insulted by the Worst Painter in London,” but I can't remember who the Worst Painter in London was.

*   *   *

Next morning, January 19, 1938, Wystan and Christopher left on the boat train for Dover. Some of the daily newspapers had sent cameramen to record their exit. Christopher grinned eagerly at the lenses and, in one pose, put his arm round Wystan's shoulder. Wystan looked noncommittal and bored.

FIFTEEN

Wystan and Christopher spent the night of January 19 in Paris. They sailed from Marseilles two days later on the
Aramis,
a ship of the Messageries Maritimes line.

They were in the second class, and they found to their disgust that they had been given a cabin which was much too small and hadn't even a table to write on. Wystan decided that they must transfer to the first class, despite the added expense.

However, just as they were going into the purser's office to arrange this, they were hailed by a large fat man with peering spectacles: “Is one of you Auden?” He introduced himself as an admirer of Auden's poetry and a rubber merchant. I will call him Mr. Potter.

Mr. Potter was an obviously first-class first-class passenger. It pleased him to display his authority. He spoke to the purser on their behalf and they were promptly given two much larger second-class cabins, one to sleep in, the other with two tables to write on, at no extra charge. In gratitude for this favor, Wystan and Christopher willingly became Mr. Potter's captive audience:

He sees himself as a debunker, a buccaneer, a sixteenth-century pirate born out of his epoch. He tells his co-directors that what they need is the spirit of the merchant-adventurers. He hates the banks. He hates public companies, because they aren't allowed to take risks. He particularly enjoys ragging the pompous U.S.A. businessmen. Somebody once cabled him from New York: “Believe market has touched bottom.” Potter cabled back: “Whose?” At board meetings he lies on a sofa—ostensibly because he once had a bad leg; actually because this position gives him a moral advantage. He and his colleagues tell each other dirty limericks and the very serious-minded secretary takes them all down in shorthand—because, as he once explained, he thought they might be in code.

Much less willingly, Wystan and Christopher also became the captive audience of a young man with whom they had to share their table in the second-class dining room. He was a rubber planter, returning from leave in England to a plantation near Singapore. I will call him White.

White showed us photos—men in shorts, with pipes; girls in shorts, with nauseatingly plump knees. An appalling atmosphere of suburban Surrey exuded from the album. Better face a thousand deaths in China than a fortnight of planters' hospitality. Nothing he tells us about Malaya lessens our horror. Everyone joins the Territorials and there are tarantulas. (As I write this, White is doing his best to annoy and interrupt me by pacing up and down in front of my deck chair. Imagining that I'm writing a story, he says: “Their lips met in one long kiss.”)

*   *   *

They docked at Port Said on the morning of January 25. Francis, who was now living in Egypt, came down from Cairo to meet the ship. He seemed shakier and a bit shrunken but essentially unchanged.

Wystan and Christopher were eager to explore Port Said, being still under the spell of its legend as the sex capital of the world. Francis assured them that it was deadly dull. He suggested that they should drive back with him to Cairo and reembark on the
Aramis
early next morning at Port Tewfik, after she had passed through the Suez Canal.

Wystan and Christopher were disappointed in the pyramids. They looked messy and quite new; like the tip heaps of a quarry, Wystan said. But they were staggered by the Sphinx. It seemed so alive, so horribly injured, so malign. A passenger on the
Aramis
had told them that the ancient Egyptians must have psychically foreseen the future importance of America to the rest of the world; that was why they had placed the Sphinx facing westward. Back on the ship, a few days later, Wystan wrote a poem which declared that the Sphinx is “gazing for ever towards shrill America.” But then both he and Christopher were troubled by doubts.
Did
the Sphinx face westward? Strangely enough, neither of them could remember. Finally—after their return to London—Wystan asked someone at the Egyptian embassy. With the result that his revised version of the poem reads: “Turning/a vast behind on shrill America.”

In Cairo that evening, they drank with Francis at a street-side café. Every few moments, boys would thrust sex postcards, bow ties, lottery tickets, riding whips, and clockwork trains into their faces; now and then, an offered carpet or curtain would hide them from each other altogether and cut off their conversation, despite Francis's screams at the vendors. He became his Greek self again, except that here he screamed in Arabic.

Later he took them to visit a friend who was a professor at the university. The professor told them tale after tale of Egyptian dishonesty, treachery, bribability, and self-sale. Both he and Francis spoke of the country's corruption with disgust, but they would probably have been resentful if Wystan or Christopher had criticized it. Egypt was an addiction which only addicts had the right to despise.

When they said goodbye to Francis that night, it was to be for the last time. He died in Egypt, in 1942.

*   *   *

They steamed southward, heading for Djibouti, Colombo, Singapore, Saigon, and, ultimately, Hong Kong; heading for the warm seas sacred to Conrad and to Maugham, with dolphins leaping before their bows and sparks of phosphorus in their wake. Wystan endured the voyage glumly, sometimes grumpily; he disliked being at sea, deplored the tropics, felt uprooted from his chilly beloved North. But Christopher, the place snob, found a new enchantment in each port of call.
He was East of Suez!

Meanwhile, they had frequent talks with White and with Mr. Potter. White had now confessed to them that he was having an affair with the wife of a fellow planter who was a neighbor and close friend of his, in Malaya. The wife had told White that she had never dreamed love could be like this, “something wild and dangerous.” And White had discovered that she was his “complete physical, spiritual, and emotional counterpart.” The husband suspected nothing. White felt like a cad, but he couldn't give her up. “If anyone were to tell me, ‘You oughtn't to go on seeing her,'” White said, “I should scream and say, ‘Don't be silly.'”

When asked why the two of them didn't run away together, White explained that the world of rubber planting consisted only of Malaya and Ceylon; it was very small—everybody knew everybody—and very strict. A man who stole another man's wife would be cut dead; he wouldn't be able to show his face in the club or play rugger or tennis or go to dances. He would be obliged to give up his job. And there was nowhere else for a planter to go. Rubber planting was all White knew or cared about. He hated the prospect of returning to England and getting some other employment. His life would be ruined and so would hers.

Wystan and Christopher were now no longer bored by White. He fascinated them, because he had turned into a Maugham character. And they themselves had become characters in his story, by introducing him to Mr. Potter. For Mr. Potter had told them that he was planning to start some rubber plantations in Siam; and that he was on the lookout for an experienced planter who would be prepared to leave his present job and manage his plantations for him.

White and Mr. Potter henceforth met daily for deck games and bridge, throughout the rest of their time on board. If Mr. Potter had indeed offered him a managership, White didn't tell them. But this might be due to discretion, or an unwillingness to admit, even to himself, that the future of his romance was now in his own hands. He and Mr. Potter left the ship together at Singapore … Had the impression made by Wystan's poems on Mr. Potter started a chain reaction which would end in White's lifelong happiness? Wystan and Christopher never knew.

*   *   *

On February 16, they reached Hong Kong. Both of them found the city hideous—which surprised me when I visited it in 1957 and thought it picturesque, to say the least. But no doubt Wystan and Christopher had been expecting something purely and romantically Oriental. They didn't appreciate the clash of architectural styles in this Victorian-colonial fortress.

They were invited to formal dinner parties at which they met government officials and millionaires. Wystan was not charmed by the food or the company. “The oxtail soup wasn't oxtail,” he wrote. “The women were cows and wore mermaid dresses; Sir Blank Blank, a squat red-faced toad, was reputed to have the Eighteenth Century Mind.” Speaking of the Japanese invasion of China, a businessman said to Christopher: “Of course, from our point of view, both sides are just natives.” A lady told him that a formerly respected member of Hong Kong society had been seen furtively eating dog at a Chinese restaurant on the mainland, and that the pet dogs owned by her friends kept disappearing. When Wystan and Christopher tried to find out about the journey which was ahead of them, they were given the kind of advice intended to scare novices: Never mix with a Chinese crowd or you'll get typhus. Never go for a walk by yourselves or they'll shoot you as spies.

*   *   *

On February 28, they left Hong Kong by river boat for Canton. Their wanderings around China during the next three and a half months are recorded in
Journey to a War.
Here are a few impressions which come to me when I try to resmell, retaste, rehear, and resee that experience:

The sweetly perfumed smell of the dust—said to be poisonous because the wind blew it from the family grave mounds which occupied part of every peasant's land; some people wore masks to protect themselves from it. The taste of two kinds of tea—either very faint, clear water with a pale green sprig floating; or strongly fishy, dark brown. The pig squeal of wheelbarrows with unoiled wheels, “because the squeal is cheaper.” The clatter of mah-jongg players' tiles in the inns at night. Blue-clad figures dotted all over a landscape—men in blue, women in blue, children in blue—whichever way you looked. And smiles, smiles all around you—did it cost them no effort to keep their mouths in that position? Your face ached from smiling back.

Despite some wild rides in chauffeured cars, I remember transportation as slowness. Slow trains, days late already, that stopped suddenly for hours on end, then restarted suddenly without the slightest warning; they would have left you stranded in the back of nowhere if you'd strayed too far away from them. Painfully slow hikes along cobbled roads as narrow as garden paths. Slow plodding through the rain on little furry horses. Slow careful descents in carrying chairs of nearly vertical mountain trails, when even your own terror was in slow motion. Being carried in chairs and pulled in rickshaws created a physical relationship which both Wystan and Christopher found indecent. Man has no right to make such use of manpower, they said. When their feet hurt sufficiently, they swallowed their scruples. On such occasions, the very toughness and willingness of their carriers and pullers shamed them—all the more so, if one of those lithe erect figures turned and showed, as sometimes happened, that the youthful trunk supported an aged wrinkled face.

*   *   *

When the two of them were traveling, they caused much curiosity and laughter. Wystan had a woolen cap and an immense shapeless topcoat, with carpet slippers to appease his corns. Christopher had a beret, a turtleneck sweater, and oversized riding boots which gave him blisters. Wystan dressed in the way that was natural to him. Christopher was in masquerade as a war correspondent.

He may have looked the part—correspondents can be a bit absurd—but he must often have betrayed his amateur status by his nervousness. The threat of air raids kept him keyed up, especially when he was on a train. If they were ordered to leave it and take cover, he couldn't restrain himself from hurrying. Wystan never hurried. At Tungkwan, when their train had to pass a place where some Japanese guns were mounted on the opposite side of the Yellow River, Christopher was the one who took precautions; he insisted on opening the window lest its glass should be blown in by an explosion.

Christopher was always more apt to be troubled by the threat of danger than by danger itself. When he first saw an air raid, he felt awe rather than fear—awe followed by exhilaration. He was awed by being in the presence of absolute, impersonal hostility. These planes had come simply to destroy.

The searchlights criss-crossed and suddenly there they were, flying close together and high up. It was as if a microscope had brought into focus the bacilli of a fatal disease.

Then, as the antiaircraft guns crashed out, the tracer bullets shot upward, buildings flamed, and the punching concussions of the bombs made Christopher catch his breath, he was aware only of a violent physical excitement; “something inside me was flapping about like a fish.” He describes the spectacle as “
wrong,
an insult to Nature” but admits that it was also “as tremendous as Beethoven.”