Christopher and His Kind (9 page)

I don't think that Jean stayed for more than a few months at the flat. Frl. Thurau was tremendously intrigued by her looks and mannerisms, her makeup, her style of dressing, and, above all, her stories about her love affairs. But she didn't altogether like Jean. For Jean was untidy and inconsiderate; she made a lot of extra work for her landladies. She expected room service and would sometimes order people around in an imperious tone, with English upper-class rudeness. Frl. Thurau preferred male lodgers, anyway.

Unlike “Isherwood” and Sally, Christopher and Jean didn't part forever when she left Berlin. Circumstances separated them for long intervals, but they continued to meet, as affectionate friends, throughout the rest of Jean's life. She died in 1973.

*   *   *

Through Stephen Spender, Christopher got to know another of his chief characters-to-be: Gisa Soloweitschik. She was a young Jewish girl who lived with her wealthy parents. Stephen had first met her in Switzerland, some years previously.

In
Goodbye to Berlin,
Gisa is called Natalia Landauer:

She had dark fluffy hair, far too much of it—it made her face, with its sparkling eyes, appear too long and too narrow. She reminded me of a young fox. She shook hands straight from the shoulder in the modern student manner. “In here, please.” Her tone was peremptory and brisk.

Natalia is presented as a bossy bluestocking, desperately enthusiastic about culture, sexually frigid and prudish. She takes “Isherwood” in hand immediately, deciding what books he must read, what concerts he must go to, what picture galleries he must visit. At first, “Isherwood” remains mockingly passive toward her attempts to run his life; then he counterattacks by introducing her to Sally Bowles. He does this to test Natalia, not Sally; for he knows in advance how Sally will behave. Sally, as usual, boasts about her lovers; and Natalia is prudishly shocked. She has failed Christopher's test. After this, he and Natalia become temporarily estranged.

In real life, Jean and Gisa never met, so there was no test. But I am sure Gisa could have passed it; she might even have made friends with Jean. Indeed, the Natalia character is a mere caricature of Gisa, as Stephen Spender pointed out to Christopher in a reproachful letter:

Gisa always seemed to me a very passionate character, childish in a way, more Russian almost than Jewish, generous and deeply interested in other people. The essential fact to me about your relationship with Gisa is that you talked to her continually about Otto. When you did this, tears of sympathy started into Gisa's eyes. Of course, the actual nature of the relationship was never discussed, but surely Gisa understood and deeply sympathized.

Since “Isherwood” in the novel is never emotionally involved with Otto or with anyone else, it would have been impossible for him to reveal such feelings to Natalia, and thereby give her a chance to show her own warmth and sympathy. Christopher himself was aware that he hadn't given the Natalia character enough warmth. He tried to make up for this toward the end of the story, when Natalia appears transformed by being in love.

In the same letter, Stephen reproached Christopher for his sneers at Natalia's culture worship: “After all, the Nazi attitude towards concerts and culture and Jews is in some respects like yours.”

It is true that Christopher was still, at that time, violently prejudiced against culture worship. This prejudice had been formed long before he came to Germany, while he was living in the world of the London studios, salons, and concert halls as secretary to the violinist André Mangeot (called Cheuret in
Lions and Shadows
). There he had grown to hate the gushings of concert audiences and the holy atmosphere of concerts.

But Christopher and the Nazis didn't see eye to eye. The Nazis hated culture itself, because it is essentially international and therefore subversive of nationalism. What they called Nazi culture was a local, perverted, nationalistic cult, by which a few major artists and many minor ones were honored for their Germanness, not their talent. The rest were condemned as alien and decadent and as representing the culture of the Jews. Christopher himself worshipped culture, but his was a very exclusive religion, to be shared only with fellow artists. No one, he said, should dare to praise a work of art unless he himself is a practicing artist. Christopher therefore condemned the vast majority of culture worshippers as being ignorant, presumptuous, and probably insincere—whether they were Jews or non-Jews was irrelevant.

Christopher outgrew this prejudice as he continued to publish books and began to acquire enthusiastic readers. It is not in human nature to condemn your own worshippers, even when they aren't fellow artists.

*   *   *

In
Goodbye to Berlin,
Natalia Landauer has a cousin, Bernhard Landauer. Bernhard helps to run the department store which is owned by Natalia's father. The original of Bernhard Landauer was Wilfrid Israel. Wilfrid Israel and Gisa Soloweitschik weren't related to each other. Their families had no business connections. Wilfrid did, however, help to run a department store founded by his own family. It was one of the biggest in Berlin.

Wilfrid was tall, pale, dark-eyed, soft-spoken, precise in his speech, a smiler who seldom laughed. He looked young for his age. When Christopher met him in 1931, he was thirty-two years old.

As Bernhard in the novel, his profile is described as “over-civilized, finely drawn, beaky”:

He smiled and his face was masked with exhaustion: the thought crossed my mind that he was perhaps suffering from a fatal disease.

Again and again, Bernhard is presented as being tired, apathetic. He is evidently quite able to meet the obligations of his important executive job, but he regards it with weary irony. He even confesses to “Isherwood” that the store itself seems unreal to him at times, perhaps part of an hallucination from which he is suffering. This may not be meant literally, but Bernhard certainly is expressing a sense of the meaninglessness of his business life and of himself as a businessman. And he goes much further. When “Isherwood” asks him if he thinks there will be a Nazi Putsch or a Communist revolution, he answers that the question seems to him “a little trivial.” He produces a letter from a fanatical anti-Semite, threatening him with death, and remarks that he gets three or four such letters a week. “Isherwood” exclaims: “Surely you'll tell the police?” Bernhard smiles another of his tired smiles:

My existence is not of such vital importance to myself or to others that the forces of the Law should be called upon to protect me …

a reply which suggests apathy rather than courage.

I am quite sure that these aspects of Bernhard's character weren't invented, that they were founded on Christopher's observation of Wilfrid in real life. But a very different Wilfrid appears in
World within World.
Stephen tells how, when the two of them were walking together on Ruegen Island, during a summer holiday in 1932, Wilfrid surprised him

by outlining a plan of action for the Jews when Hitler seized Germany—an event which he seemed to anticipate as certain. The Jews, he said, should close their businesses and go out into the streets, remaining there, as a protest, and refusing to go home even if the Storm Troopers fired on them. It was only such a united action, within a hopeless situation, which would arouse the conscience of the world.

This was no mere theoretical talk. Less than a year later, when Hitler came to power, Wilfrid began to show himself capable of great courage and firmness of purpose. Wilfrid's mother had been English and he himself had been born in England. He was a British subject and could therefore leave Germany and settle in England whenever he chose to do so. Instead, he chose to remain in Berlin for seven more years. As it became increasingly clear that no concerted action could be taken against the Nazis by the Jews or by any other group, Wilfrid concentrated on more limited objectives, including the defense of the department store itself, for as long as that might be possible.

The store, like all other Jewish stores, was boycotted from time to time. Wilfrid himself was threatened, arrested, cross-examined, and (I have heard) temporarily imprisoned. Nevertheless, though repeatedly ordered to do so, he refused to dismiss his Jewish employees. He even refused to placate the authorities by making the token gesture of flying the swastika flag over the store building. Meanwhile, he worked to arrange the emigration of as many Jews as possible to foreign countries. A Jew could often be released from a concentration camp on condition that he emigrated immediately. But someone else would have to find the money for this because his own property would have been confiscated already. At length, in 1939, the firm of Israel was taken over by non-Jews; it was the last of its kind to change hands. Wilfrid thus lost most of his power to help others. Just before the outbreak of war, his friends persuaded him to leave for England.

*   *   *

I can understand why Wilfrid chose to discuss his problems as a Jew with Stephen rather than with Christopher. Stephen's parentage was partly Jewish as well as Anglo-German; Wilfrid may well have felt more akin to him. But Stephen must have told Christopher about their conversation. And Christopher, before the time came to write about Wilfrid, must have heard at least something of his defiance of the Nazis.

Then why is this aspect of Wilfrid left out of the portrait of Bernhard? Even though the novel had to end in 1933 with “Isherwood” 's departure from Berlin, there could have been a final scene with Bernhard in which his future attitude to the Nazis is foreshown; in which, perhaps, “Isherwood” realizes that he has misunderstood and underestimated Bernhard from the beginning, and feels guilty. Instead, “Isherwood” 's final scene with Bernhard—it is set in the spring of 1932—ends on a note of escapism. Bernhard has been talking about China, saying that in Peking he felt at home for the first time in his life. “Isherwood” suggests that he go back there. The suggestion sounds slightly contemptuous; it seems to equate Peking with the culture worship which “Isherwood” despises. For Bernhard is a culture devotee like Natalia, though an infinitely more sophisticated one. Bernhard replies calmly yes, he will go to Peking, but on condition that “Isherwood” comes with him as his guest and that they start that very evening. “Isherwood” makes excuses. He takes Bernhard's offer as a joke, anyway. It is only much later, after Bernhard is dead, that “Isherwood” becomes convinced that the offer was serious, after all. “I recognize it as Bernhard's last, most daring, and most cynical experiment upon us both.” In other words, Bernhard has played an inverted form of Russian roulette, in which five of the chances are death and only the sixth chance an escape from death into a faraway land—a land where he can believe in his own existence.

Christopher was accustomed to say that he never wrote about people he didn't like—because, when he disliked someone, he simply didn't find him interesting. This was a show-off remark, typical of Christopher in his arrogant mood. Christopher did find Wilfrid intensely interesting, despite the fact that there was a great deal of hostility between them. Nevertheless, his hostility may well have prevented him from seeing and describing Wilfrid as a hero.

He is sympathetic, charming. But his gestures, offering me a glass of wine or a cigarette, are clothed in arrogance, the arrogant humility of the East.

“Isherwood” stresses the “Oriental” aspect of Bernhard. In this case, the epithet seems to refer to the Chinese. But Christopher had a prejudice, at that period in his life, against another Oriental race, the Hindus. He found something repellent—that is to say, personally disturbing—in Hindu humility and passivity and the arrogance he felt that it concealed. As a matter of principle, he sided with the Hindus against the British raj and agreed that they had every right to treat their English conquerors with arrogance. Still, he identified instinctively with the English. And so he found deeply disturbing the picture of himself confronted by one of these humble-arrogant figures, a Hindu, or a Wilfrid—someone who “knew” about life and whose knowledge might be superior to his. “He is not going to tell me what he is really thinking or feeling, and he despises me because I do not know.” This prejudice of Christopher's, I now realize, sprang from fear—fear of the unknown something which the Hindus knew, the something which he might one day have to accept and which might change his life. As a kind of mock-Hindu, Wilfrid aroused that prejudice.

Earlier in their relationship, there has been a brief, inconclusive showdown between “Isherwood” and Bernhard. “Isherwood” accuses him of showing hostility by adopting this mock-humble attitude. “Actually, you're the least humble person I ever met.” Bernhard replies with “Oriental” obliqueness:

I wonder if you are right … I think not altogether. But partly … Yes, there is some quality in you which attracts me and which I very much envy, and yet this very quality also arouses my antagonism.

Bernhard sums himself up by adding: “I'm afraid that I am a quite unnecessarily complicated piece of mechanism.” Which may be taken to imply that he thinks “Isherwood” quite unnecessarily crude.

There is an enigmatic remark in a letter written by Christopher to Stephen Spender in November 1932. After telling Stephen that he has seen Wilfrid lately but only once, Christopher adds: “He is kind. But he condemns me in his heart.” What did Christopher think Wilfrid condemned him for? I believe Christopher suspected that Wilfrid was a severely repressed homosexual and that, as such, he condemned Christopher for his aggressive frankness about his own sex life. If Christopher did indeed suspect this, it would have been characteristic of him to be extra frank with Wilfrid, in order to jolt him into frankness about himself.

In the novel, it seems to be implied that what Bernhard is hiding is a romantic attachment to “Isherwood.” The shared trip to China which Bernhard proposes is made to sound like an elopement. Whether Wilfrid was or wasn't homosexual is neither here nor there. Of one thing I am certain, he wasn't in love with Christopher. I therefore find the hint contained in the novel offensive, vague as it is, and I am embarrassed to know that Wilfrid read it.