Christopher and His Kind (39 page)

Then, in the International Settlement, they talked to a delegation of Japanese civilians, on a so-called fact-finding mission. These were either the blandest of hypocrites or the most childish of wishful thinkers. They declared that they loved the Chinese people and felt absolutely no bitterness toward them. This war was such a pity; it could have been avoided so easily, Japan's demands were very reasonable. They hoped that Wystan and Christopher had had no inconvenience while traveling. “Only from your aeroplanes,” Christopher answered, and got a seemingly hearty laugh.

*   *   *

They sailed from Shanghai on June 12. Their Canadian Pacific liner was comfortable and old-fashioned, with an open coal-burning fireplace in the lounge. Her name evoked the days of Victorian imperial megalomania:
Empress of Asia.

Two days later, they saw their first seaport on the Japanese coast. Christopher's immediate reaction was to exclaim: “Ibsen!” The psychological climate of the little town seemed Scandinavian; it looked so sad and drab and clean. The temple in its park made him think of a municipal office. He missed China's gaudy dirty picturesqueness. This was Nagasaki, seven years before the atomic bomb.

In Kobe, all the shops were lighted but the street lamps weren't—in case of air raids, they were told. But surely the Chinese were incapable of bombing Japan? The precaution seemed absurd; perhaps it was actually an attempt to encourage Japanese war-mindedness.

On the train to Tokyo, the car porter annoyed Wystan by flicking continually around his feet with brush and dustpan, collecting his cigarette ash. This was a vicious circle, since Wystan kept dropping it, out of more or less deliberate aggression. They were lucky enough to get a calming glimpse of benign Mount Fuji lit by the setting sun, before the night clouds closed around it. But, when they arrived in Tokyo:

A raving screaming mob with banners was seeing a troop train out of the station to the front. The sight so shocked poor Wystan that he dropped and broke his only pair of glasses, and so will travel blind to New York. [Wystan, being nearsighted, would still be able to read, however.]

They spent the night of June 17–18 at the Imperial Hotel. I have a memory connected with this which I suspect. It isn't recorded in Christopher's diary and it is rather too symbolic to be strictly true:

While Christopher is sitting waiting for Wystan in the lobby of the hotel, next morning, he witnesses a ceremonious meeting between two officers in uniform, a Nazi and a Japanese—the Berlin–Tokyo Axis personified. They exchange Nazi salutes, then bow Japanese-style, then shake hands. They are standing beneath a big chandelier; and, as they greet each other, the chandelier begins to sway. It is Christopher's first, very slight, earthquake.

That afternoon, they sailed from Yokohama, bound for Vancouver. Christopher had never before seen the farewell ritual of throwing one end of a paper streamer from the ship to the shore, thus linking yourself for a few last moments with someone you are leaving behind. As the ship began to move, Christopher suddenly imagined Heinz standing down there on the dock, the streamer pulling tight between them, then snapping … The experience was almost physically painful.

*   *   *

The North Pacific was cold, even now at midsummer, and very calm. They got glimpses of the Aleutian Islands. Beyond these, there was a pale frore brightness in the sky which suggested the gleam of the icecap. Somebody died on board and was buried at sea. I remember flowers being scattered at the end of the ceremony—happy-landing flowers collected from the staterooms, already faded. They floated away behind the ship, on the smooth gray surface of the water, far far to westward. They were out of sight before they sank.

This eventless ten-day voyage was an ideal opportunity for physical and mental convalescence. Both Wystan and Christopher had suffered from dysentery throughout their journey. While they were staying with the Clark-Kerrs, Christopher's stomach cramps had once made him roll on the bedroom floor grunting with pain and jerking his body like an opening and shutting jackknife. Later, in England, he was told by the doctor that his intestines still retained souvenirs of China, at least twenty kinds of internal parasite.

The mental souvenir was odder than these. For some months after leaving China, he had a recurrent dream of being in an air raid. But the air raid—or whatever it represented—was always pleasantly exciting, never terrifying. Without being able to interpret this dream exactly, he became aware that he had now lost much of his neurotic fear of “War” as a concept. A very little exposure to danger will go a long way, psychologically; he had learned from it that his fear in China had been a healthy fear which he needn't be ashamed of. He now no longer dreaded that he would behave worse than most other people in a crisis, though he didn't expect to behave better. This self-knowledge would influence his future decisions, making him less inclined to worry how the world might judge them.

*   *   *

The entrance to Vancouver harbor was superb; and the immigration official said, “Welcome to Canada!” To Christopher, who had come to regard all such officials in Europe as his natural enemies, this formal tourist-conscious greeting had a cheering novelty; the New World seemed full of good will. And the Canadian Pacific train obligingly stopped to let them stroll around and admire the Great Divide and Lake Louise. The country was vast, magnificent, cold, clean, and empty, yet with a reassuring Scottish snugness of oatmeal, cream, rich wholesome food.

Then down into the United States at Portal, North Dakota—a dismaying contrast. The hot shabby prairie was blowing itself away in clouds of dust. And the prices in the dining car shocked them. Driving through Chicago after dark, they hoped for glimpses of gangsters but were shown only a flower shop which had supplied wreaths for their funerals. On the last leg of the ride to New York, the landscape became stately with cliffs and the broadening Hudson. Then they arrived and found themselves in a station built like an oversized Roman temple. Wystan said, “We ought to be wearing togas.”

Waiting to greet them was George Davis, novelist and literary editor of a fashion magazine and their friend already; they had met him in London the year before. Small, plump, handsome, sparkling, he gaily stuffed into their pockets the wads of dollar bills he had earned for them by selling their travel articles to his own magazine and others. Utterly at their disposal as host, guide, and fulfiller of all their desires, he was there to make them feel that New York was a theatrical performance staged expressly for them and that everybody in this city had been yearning for their arrival. He never left them for long throughout the nine days' wonder of their visit.

George's showmanship created a delirium of impressions. The Rainbow Room, balanced on a fountain jet of lights shot skyward, sixty-five stories high. (Perhaps it was there that Christopher first heard, “Jeepers, creepers, where'd ya get those peepers?” which would become as magic for him as the long-ago songs of Berlin, when he had found a boy to dedicate it to.) Maxine Sullivan in Harlem swing-singing “Loch Lomond” into a live darkness of black faces and white eyeballs. Coney Island on the Fourth of July, crammed to the water's edge. A Bowery dive where a fight broke out and the bartender vaulted the bar with a club and they were hurried away as the police drove up with screaming sirens. (George apologized profusely, saying he'd never known such a thing to happen there before. But Wystan and Christopher took it all for granted; it was exactly what the movies had taught them to expect of New York.)

They were interviewed and photographed. They were taken to parties and introduced to celebrities: Maxwell Anderson, Muriel Draper, Orson Welles, Kurt Weill and his wife, Lotte Lenya (whom George would later marry). They took Benzedrine every morning to give them energy for these encounters, Seconal every night to make them sleep. Wystan later made the use of uppers and downers part of his routine; he called it “the chemical life.”

George also offered to make sexual introductions for them. “All right,” said Christopher, half in joke. “I want to meet a beautiful blond boy, about eighteen, intelligent, with very sexy legs.” Such a boy was instantly produced; he was almost too suitable to be true. I will call him Vernon.

Christopher reacted to Vernon much as he had reacted to Bubi, on his first Berlin visit. Both were infatuations based on a fantasy; only, this time, Christopher was looking for the American, not the German, Boy. The earlier infatuation had been stronger but less serious, and it had owed a great deal of its strength to difficulty in communication. This time there was no language barrier and a lot more for the two of them to talk about; Vernon really was intelligent and eager to educate himself. He was also good-natured, tough, and independent. He radiated health and physical energy. Comparing him with those exquisite but remote, almost otherworldly-looking attendants at the Shanghai bathhouse, Christopher found him wonderfully human-smelling, muscular, hairy, earthy.

Vernon himself certainly wasn't infatuated, but I think he was attracted. Christopher, at that particular moment, could easily be regarded as a romantic figure, just returned from dangerous exotic adventures and worthy of this young city dweller's admiration and envy.

Vernon was tired of New York and longed to leave it; Christopher, who would be forced to leave it within a few days, had fallen under its spell. However, its spell was now largely Vernon's, the American Boy's. The American Boy is also the Walt Whitman Boy. And the Walt Whitman Boy is, by definition, a wanderer. So Christopher found it natural to indulge in daydreams of a future wander-comradeship with Vernon in the Whitman tradition:

We two boys together clinging,

One the other never leaving,

Up and down the roads going, North and

South excursions making …

Auden has left it on record, in an interview given to the BBC many years later, that it was during this first visit to New York that he and Christopher decided to return and settle in the States for good:

I would say that I felt the situation in England for me was becoming impossible. I couldn't grow up. That English life … is for me a family life, and I love my family but I don't want to live with them.

I don't remember that Christopher was so positive in making up his mind to emigrate, at that time. But then, Christopher's feelings about England were different from Wystan's. He didn't think of England as his family. And, much as he was often able to enjoy himself there, he continued to feel the old hostility. For him, it was still the land of the Others. And in rejecting Heinz, it had rejected him too.

(Not until after the Second War, when England had ceased to be imperial and had become a minor power with a cosmopolitan population, did Christopher begin to love it, for the first time in his life. It had turned into the kind of country he had always wanted it to be.)

Besides, Christopher had moved, or been moved, around so much already that another change of country would have far less emotional significance for him than it would have for Wystan. So it was for Wystan to decide. His own attitude was passive. If Wystan chose to emigrate, then he would too. Despite their occasional frictions, he felt closer to Wystan than ever. While nearly all of his other friends were gradually withdrawing from him, into long-term relationships or careers or both, life seemed to be binding the two of them together.

SIXTEEN

Wystan and Christopher got back to London on July 17—to find that this was the evening when Beatrix Lehmann would give a one-night-only performance of Cocteau's
La Voix Humaine.
(In the English-language production by the Group Theatre, it was called
The Telephone.
) They were lucky indeed not to have missed this—it was one of her most daringly imaginative stage images. Transforming herself into a sort of Laocoön, she made the telephone cord seem to writhe around her body like a serpent of jealousy which would end by killing her. When Christopher talked to her afterwards, she told him that she had caught sight of them in the middle of the performance. She had supposed them to be still in China, and the joyful shock had nearly startled her out of her character.

*   *   *

Toward the end of July, Christopher went to stay with John Lehmann and his mother at Totland Bay on the Isle of Wight. This was a place of nostalgia for John, who had spent his holidays there as a child, and for Christopher, who had worked on
All the Conspirators
at nearby Freshwater Bay and been visited there by Edward and Wystan and Hector Wintle. The landscape of the Past remained almost unaltered, with its smells of sea salt and pines and sunburned turf. But the Present was already within the shadow of the immediate Future, in which a showdown with Hitler over Czechoslovakia was surely unavoidable.

*   *   *

During August, Christopher was in Ostende and in Dover. He went to Ostende with Jimmy Younger. The two of them had started a duet of their own which was independent of Christopher's friendship with Stephen. Memory of their life at Sintra had drawn them together. It was important to both of them that Jimmy had known Heinz, had even had sex with him on one occasion. But Jimmy and Christopher each declared that the other had changed for the better, since those days. Jimmy admitted that he had sometimes hated Christopher. Christopher remembered how, in his diary, he had viciously referred to “Jimmy's primly-composed rabbit-mouth and the thick inflamed nape of his neck.” Christopher now found him desirable as well as companionable. They made love often, with the warmth of friendly affection.

*   *   *

At Dover were Forster, Bob and May Buckingham and their small son Robin, Cuthbert Worsley, Joe Ackerley, William Plomer. I have the snapshots Christopher took of them, then. It seems poignant to me, now, that they are all smiling, under that growing war threat of which they must all, except Robin, be continually aware. But doesn't one always smile when one is photographed on holiday?