Christopher and His Kind (40 page)

Forster, as so often, has an air of being amused in spite of himself. Bob is gaining weight and grins as if he knows this and doesn't care. May, with her hair smooth like a Madonna's, smiles demurely; you would never guess that she can drink and tell dirty stories. Robin has Bob's grin and looks exactly like him. (When Christopher saw the Buckinghams for the first time after the war, in 1947, Bob told how funny May had looked, being blown down the passage of their house by the blast of a bomb. And both of them roared with laughter, as though they were actually watching her in this undignified situation. Bob had been decorated for his bravery during the Blitz.)

Cuthbert Worsley, a big blond bespectacled athlete, smiles more broadly than any of them. But it is a smile of intelligent courage, not of the optimism of mere good health. He has already seen what war is like, while serving with an ambulance unit in Spain. Joe Ackerley smiles enigmatically, by simply baring his teeth around the mouthpiece of his pipe. He has fought in World War I and been wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans. At forty-two, he is one of the handsomest men of his generation and one of its most obstinate pessimists. When he talks, his gloom has such charm that it cheers up everybody except himself. He thinks that life is altogether vile.

William Plomer is the only one who may possibly agree with Ackerley; but there is no way of knowing this. Up on the surface, as always, he is full of fun. In the rooms he rents here every summer, there are Victorian landscape paintings, with houses, trees, and a few cows. Or rather, that was how they used to be. Lately, some small figures, painted perfectly to scale, have begun to appear in the background amongst the trees, or looking out of the windows of the houses. William introduces them into the pictures with loving care; there is never a clash of colors or a brushstroke which calls attention to itself. These trespassers are so discreet that you scarcely notice them. If the landlady has noticed, she has never said anything about them to William.

*   *   *

When Christopher returned to London after this holiday, he decided to keep a record of the crisis:

The situation is so serious that I must force myself to be interested as well as merely horrified by it.

Beginning on August 20, he made fairly regular entries in his diary, right through to the end of September. (They are quoted from extensively in
Down There on a Visit.
)

These entries are actually more often about Christopher than about the political situation. His diary-keeping was a discipline designed to shame himself out of giving way to panic-depression, sloth, overdrinking, oversmoking, masturbation, and nervous pottering around. Another such discipline was his work on the prose section of
Journey to a War.
This would have been hard enough at any time. Transcribing the travel diary kept by Wystan and himself was boring toil, but it had to be done before he could edit and rewrite the diary as a coherent narrative. And, whenever his will weakened, there was an inner saboteur voice which asked: “What's the use of all this? Who'll want to read about your faraway out-of-date war when the bombs start falling on London?”

On his days of weakness, Christopher thought of the crisis as a jealous god which demanded his total attention and was angered by his efforts to work. He bought newspapers in a superstitious attempt to appease the god, feeling that the news would get worse if he missed one single edition; but he barely glanced at their headlines before throwing them away.

*   *   *

The crisis made Heinz seem more remote, although he continued to write letters and although John Lehmann had just brought back a first-hand account of him. John had gone to Berlin to visit Heinz; he was now working off his year of labor service, helping put up a building on the Potsdamerplatz. John reported that he appeared to be much tougher and more politically conscious than before his return to Germany. This glimpse of a new self-reliant Heinz was inspiring, but Christopher wasn't comforted by it. He thought how hopelessly isolated Heinz must be feeling, in the midst of his Nazi countrymen … But Heinz, after all his misfortunes, was to be marvelously fortunate. Not long after this, he would meet someone he could love and confide in—the girl he would eventually marry.

*   *   *

Christopher thought of Vernon, too. Vernon seemed even more remote than Heinz. He was a citizen of the New World which Christopher had begun to hope might be the homeland he had failed to find in Germany. But would he ever see Vernon or New York again? The crisis seemed more and more likely to end in war, and he couldn't leave England while it continued. Patriotism? Definitely not. This was largely apathy. He felt possessed by the crisis. It had become his world. He couldn't imagine himself living elsewhere, outside it.

Christopher had his worst moments of depression when he was with the weak. In ordinary life, he enjoyed their company; they made him feel protective, especially when they were charming and young. But now he needed to be with the strong. All his close friends had strength of some kind and could transmit it to him.

Edward and Hilda Upward, Olive Mangeot, and Jean Ross drew strength from their Marxism. They were able to see the crisis calmly and ideologically as one phase of an evolving situation, which might further their cause. Therefore, though they hated and feared the prospect of war, they couldn't be hypnotized by it into helplessness.

Beatrix Lehmann had to be strong; it was a necessity of her life as an actress. She was constantly being forced to rise to occasions, deal with emergencies, become greater than herself. War might present itself to her as a new kind of emergency, an air raid during one of her performances. She would deal with that, too. In her humorous way, she was heroic.

Hector Wintle and Robert Moody (Lee, in
Lions and Shadows
) drew strength from their professional status. In peace or in war, under capitalism or Communism, doctors always know what they should be doing; and everybody agrees that they should be doing it. Into the world of Hector and Robert, the Enemy can only enter as a patient—even though he may have been bombing the hospital when he was shot down. Christopher admired and envied them. It was too late for regrets, but the thought kept arising: he might have been their colleague now.

Stephen's peculiar kind of strength lay in his emotional flexibility; faced with an emergency, he sometimes laughed, sometimes wept, always with violence. Stephen was rather proud of his ability to weep, and rightly so. A grown man who can shed tears without embarrassment is like a yogi who has learned to expel toxic matter from his body by consciously speeding up the peristaltic rhythm. He can eliminate many of life's poisons.

(People like Stephen are unusually well equipped to deal with danger. During the war, he was to join the Fire Service, which would have seemed to Christopher a terrible ordeal; not only because of the fires themselves but also the dizzyingly tall ladders you had to climb.)

As for Forster, I have already made clear what the nature of his strength was. A meeting with him never failed to restore Christopher's morale.

But it was from John Lehmann that Christopher got support of the most practical kind; thanks to John, he was able to start preparing his mind for the worst. Kathleen and Richard had now left London to visit some cousins in Wales. If war broke out, they would remain there and Kathleen's house would be closed. When that happened, said John, Christopher must come and share his flat with him. Already, they were planning a wartime life together. They had written to the Foreign Office, offering their services for propaganda work. (I cannot now believe that Christopher would have been able to stick at this for long.) Privately, he made one reservation: if Wystan offered him some other course of action, then he would probably go along with Wystan. But Wystan was still away, on holiday in Belgium.

*   *   *

This is an account of the final day of the crisis, September 28, taken partly from Christopher's diary, partly from
Down There on a Visit,
which contains added details, remembered, not invented:

The last shreds of hope are vanishing down the drain. Wilson came back from Berlin, snubbed. The German Army mobilizes this afternoon. Parliament meets, to introduce conscription. Chamberlain spoke last night, like a wet fish, saying: How dreadful, how dreadful.

London is all gas-masks and children screaming when they're fitted on. Everybody is enlisting or running away from town. Nanny is wonderful. She trots up and down stairs, with cups of Ovaltine.

Later.
I went to Victoria to meet Wystan, returning from Belgium. The boat-train was late. Newspapers appearing every 20 minutes. The station full of sailors, going down to join the mobilized fleet. A few women in tears. One ray of hope: Berlin denies their reported ultimatum to mobilize at 2 P.M. Stolid with misery, I chewed gum.

Wystan arrived at last, very sunburnt and in the highest spirits, wearing a loud, becoming check suit. “Well, my dear,” he greeted me, “there isn't going to be a war, you know!” For a moment, I thought he must have some stop-press information—but no. He had merely met a lady at the British Embassy in Brussels who could read cards, and she had told him that there will be no war this year.

Even as we drove away from the station, the placards appeared: Dramatic Peace Move. I yelled to the driver to stop—Wystan found my excitement a bit excessive—and we read how Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier, and Chamberlain are to meet in Munich tomorrow.

Later came the news of the super-scene in the Commons. Chamberlain's voice breaks. Queen Mary in tears. Only the Communist Gallagher spoke up and said it was all a sell-out.

*   *   *

As far as Christopher was concerned—I won't venture to speak for anybody else—this post-Munich autumn of 1938 was a period of relief disguised as high-minded disgust. Like all his friends, and thousands of other people, Christopher declared that England had helped betray the Czechs. He meant this. It seemed to him absolutely self-evident. Yet his dead-secret, basic reaction was: What do I care for the Czechs? What does it matter if we are traitors? A war has been postponed—and a war postponed is a war which may never happen.

Wystan and Christopher were now intending to go back to the States, sometime in the near future. But they were in no hurry. First, they wanted to finish
Journey to a War
and see
On the Frontier
staged. The special visa they had got from the Americans in Shanghai made them feel all the more relaxed. Because of it, they would have no further formalities to go through. They could leave at short notice, whenever they decided to.

*   *   *

At the beginning of November, Christopher was invited by Lady Sibyl Colefax, one of the most celebrated arts-and-letters hostesses of the day, to a dinner party. Among the guests was Virginia Woolf. By now, she and Christopher had met several times. In her mid-fifties, Virginia was perhaps more beautiful than she had ever been. Her features had the nobility of a princess in a tragedy, a doomed princess who was nevertheless capable of saying, like the Duchess of Malfi: “I prithee, when were we so merry?” When Christopher saw her, she was full of wit and gossip and delicately malicious laughter.

*   *   *

On an earlier occasion, when Christopher had been asked by the Woolfs to tea, he had stayed on, at Virginia's suggestion, to supper, remaining happily under her spell, hardly talking at all, just watching her and listening and laughing. Then suddenly, at about ten o'clock, he remembered with a start of dismay that a young man must already be waiting for him at a hotel near Croydon Airport—from which they were due to fly, next morning, on a romantic two-day visit to Paris. Christopher had hardly expected the young man to agree to make this trip and regarded him as a conquest to be proud of. Yet Christopher had absolutely forgotten his existence for several hours and was now actually sorry to have to leave Virginia. Could any hostess earn a sincerer tribute? She wasn't aware of the situation, of course. Indeed, she doesn't seem to have been much aware of Christopher himself. In her diary, referring to the Colefax dinner party, she describes him as though he were still a stranger:

Isherwood and I met on the doorstep. He is a slip of a wild boy: with quicksilver eyes: nipped; jockeylike. That young man, said W. Maugham, “holds the future of the English novel in his hands.”

(The jockey impression was probably made, as Robert Craft has guessed, by Christopher's small stature and “bantam-weight, somewhat too short legs, and disproportionately, even simianly long arms.” “Wild” seems flattering, applied to timid cautious Christopher. The adjective “nipped” is the most apt, in my opinion; it is confirmed by Keith Vaughan's verdict, about ten years later: “a dehydrated schoolboy.”)

Maugham was at this party. So was Max Beerbohm, plump but fragile, with red-ringed pouched blue eyes. He was only ten years older than Virginia but seemed helplessly becalmed in the past. Christopher could think of no remark which would blow wind into his sails. Maugham, at nearly Beerbohm's age, was still briskly cruising the present. Maugham and Christopher already knew each other slightly; they had had lunch together at Maugham's club. His dark watchful bridge player's eyes intimidated Christopher; also his stammer, which somehow made you feel that you were stammering, not he. But, behind the grim, vigorously lined mask of the face, Christopher was aware of a shy warmth, to which he was eager to respond. He would be honored to adopt Maugham as his Uncle Willie, if only Maugham would let him.

Having got rather drunk at dinner, Christopher decided to improve their relations. But the drink had been sufficient only to interfere with his timing; it didn't steady his nerves. He interrupted what Maugham was telling his semicircle of listeners, with a fatally tactless opening line: “Mr. Maugham, on the boat to China, last winter, we had an experience which was exactly like one of your stories—”