Klaus (5 page)

The sun was shining for the first time that month and Klaus’s spirits rose with it. He felt better than he had for days. Miki’s arrival had helped change his mood. Klaus was touched that the boy had sought him out. Of course he wanted money – it was rent after all – but Klaus persuaded himself there was affection there too. When the boy kissed him goodbye in the morning and said again, “you’re all right, Klaus,” he was able, almost, to persuade himself that the words were true.

He had an engagement: lunch with Mr Maugham at the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat. Yesterday he had thought he would let it slip, though he had found the English novelist sympathetic when they had met in New York during the war. That was soon after he had seen the film made from Maugham’s novel
Of Human Bondage
, starring Leslie Howard and Bette Davis. It hadn’t entirely convinced him; it wasn’t altogether plausible that the young man should have succumbed so completely to that monstrous woman. All the same he had noted in his journal that he found it interesting that, on the evidence of the movie – for Klaus hadn’t then read the novel – Maugham should have made this pathological submission to an inferior woman a symbol of the homosexual condition. For he had no doubts about Mr Maugham’s own sexuality; he was an unbridled Magician, and there was something demonic in his understanding of infatuation with an unsuitable object.

He took a train to Nice and then, unable to afford a taxi, a bus which deposited him at the bottom of the hill leading up to the villa. A butler wearing white gloves admitted him, and Klaus was conscious of the shabbiness of his suit and the fact that it hadn’t occurred to him to wear a tie. Then to his dismay he found there were other guests, an English couple, whose names he didn’t catch but they were Lord and Lady something, and a dark boy with loose lips who immediately gave him the eye. Not his type however, with willowy gestures which repelled. Very dry Martinis were served, and promptly at one o’clock the butler struck a gong to summon them to lunch. Klaus found himself beside Mr Maugham’s secretary-manager – former lover? procurer? – Alan Searle who talked about criminals he had known in an accent Klaus found hard to place. The food was bland – fish in a velvety sauce, followed by indifferent roast chicken. But the wine was good, though the supply was stinted. Maugham himself smoked, not only between courses, and picked at his food. Breaking a moment of silence, the English lady asked him what had been the happiest moment of his life.

“When I finally got rid of my wife,” he said, his stammer delaying the “finally” and the “got”, the last words “rid of my wife” emerging in a rush.

Klaus couldn’t think why he had been asked. He felt an imperative need for heroin. A popular American song of the twenties ran in his head: “I’m just a bird in a gilded cage.” That, surely, was Mr Maugham. He longed for the moment of departure, but, when the other guests were at last ready to leave, after coffee had been served and the two Pekingese provided with sugared biscuits, Alan Searle sidled up to him and said, “He’d like you to stay behind, he wants the opportunity to talk. Please do. It will give me an hour to myself.”

The willowy boy lingered too, but was abruptly dismissed by Mr Maugham.

“Find something with which to amuse yourself, if you’re capable of that. You might even read a book.”

He took Klaus by the arm and led him on to the terrace and then down some steps to the pool where there were chairs and a table under an awning.

Maugham said, “One of the misfortunes of human beings is that they continue to have sexual desires long after they are no longer sexually desirable. That won’t have struck you yet…”

His stammer had difficulty with “desires” and “desirable”.

“Are you intending to start another magazine?”

Klaus sighed and said, “It’s impossible.”

“Your New York one was good. I was happy to contribute to it, though my essay was perhaps a bit dry.”

“It was an honour to publish it,” Klaus said, and wondered how soon he could take his leave without causing offence. He didn’t like speaking about that magazine –
Decision
. He had started it with such high hopes and it had fizzled out so ignominiously.

“And the other Germany, of which you and your sister wrote? Will that be realised? Is it a country you could live in again?”

Klaus shook his head. Germany was tainted, he said; he couldn’t look anyone in the eye there without seeing guilt.

“A pity,” Maugham said. “I spent two years of my youth in Heidelberg, you know. I discovered myself there and so I have always kept an affection for that Germany. It was the first place where I made friends who mattered to me. You understand?”

Yes, Klaus understood, but it was not something he thought he could speak of with this elderly Englishman who seemed on the brink of confidences which could only embarrass them both.

“Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. You know the quotation? What’s your opinion?”

Suddenly Klaus was close to tears. He remembered how when the magazine failed he had wished to die because he could no longer endure the mass of mediocrity and malice, and how writing down his long litany of complaint had somehow diverted him from the suicide he had that evening been planning. Now he felt that this wise old man understood him and had asked him here, not merely as a courtesy but because he had sensed, got wind of, his desperation and had something important to tell him.

“But can you divorce thought and feeling?” he said. “Make that clear distinction between them? Isn’t every thought a feeling too, every feeling a thought at least when you find words for it?”

“And so,” Maugham said, “tragicomedy… Of course, Faust is the great German myth, as both you and your father have realised. To sell your soul to satisfy your immediate desires. No Frenchman would do that without counting the cost, but then no Frenchman is a Romantic. Your father’s novel is remarkable. He must be very sure of himself to dare to bore the reader as he does. I would never have had the courage. But I preferred your
Mephisto
because it shows how easily a man may sell his soul, even for a low price. The Germans surrendered their souls to Hitler willingly, even eagerly, but how many of them really believed in his promises? They could do so only by suspending the critical and sceptical spirit. Yet they rushed to do that. You stood out against the mass delusion, but do you truly suppose that your words achieved anything?”

There was ancient malice in his voice, common sense in the words.

“No,” Klaus said, “I can’t believe that they did. But I couldn’t not have written them.”

“Has your novel been published in Germany?”

“You mean
Mephisto
? No, but I hope it may be soon.”

“It should be. Your compatriots – or should I say, your former compatriots? – need such books. I mean, books that open their eyes to the manner in which they surrendered to evil. Not, I fear, that people learn from books, or from experience. But they should be given the opportunity. You were in love once with the character you call Hendrik?”

“Yes,” Klaus said. He suddenly wanted to unburden himself.

“I thought so. Such hatred and contempt are born only from love that has turned sour.”

A cloud passed over the sun. The old man’s face darkened. Klaus thought he was looking into that cupboard under the stairs where unwanted memories are hidden away, but can’t be forgotten.

The willowy boy emerged from the house, descended the steps. He was wearing a dressinggown, which he slipped off without looking at either of them, and stood at the edge of the pool in ersatz leopard-skin trunks. He raised himself on his toes, then lay flat on his belly and pulled up first one leg, then the other, behind him.

Maugham said, “For many years I was ambitious to make a mark in the world. Now I regard that as futility. I still work every morning, but it is for my own amusement now, or simply because it is an occupation to stave off boredom. But I no longer look for applause.”

The boy stood up and dived into the water. When he surfaced he brushed his hair out of his eyes and looked towards Maugham. Or perhaps Klaus himself, he couldn’t be sure. Getting no response, he turned away, swam across the pool using the crawl stroke, climbed out and lay flat face-down on stone. The sun came out and the boy’s wet legs glistened.

“My nephew Robin left him here,” Maugham said. “He supposed I would be grateful. He was mistaken.”

Klaus said, “I’m afraid I must be off.”

He had in reality no reason to go, but he knew he couldn’t remain there a moment longer.

“You work in the morning,” he said, “for me the best time is late afternoon and early evening.”

Why did he always feel the need to make some excuse, offer some explanation?

“Just remember,” Maugham said, “nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all.”

Klaus looked at his watch.

“If I go now, I can just catch the next bus at the bottom of the hill.”

He thanked Maugham. They shook hands. As he turned out of the gate, he encountered Alan Searle. Searle was puffing, out of breath.

“You’re off then. Hope your little talk went all right. Is the old man alone?”

“He’s by the pool,” Klaus said. “The boy’s there, sunning himself.”

“Ah good,” Searle said. “I’m pleased to hear it. Willie doesn’t like to be left alone. Except when he’s working of course.”

He had sailed to America with Tomski only a few months after his release from the clinic. He wasn’t abandoning the anti-Nazi struggle, and yet part of him accused himself of doing precisely that. It was nonsense. He was a writer and he could carry on his war in words either side of the Atlantic. Moreover, Erika had secured an agent who would arrange a lecture tour for the pair of them. That was how they could immediately best serve the cause – by telling Americans the truth about what was happening in Germany and persuading them that they could not stand apart from the assault on democracy and civilisation.

So why did he feel like a deserter?

Because, even with the streets of American cities still bearing witness to the number of men whom the Depression had left without work, the US yet seemed to him a land of endless possibility, free of the gnawing anxiety you couldn’t escape in Europe.

Journalists and photographers met the ship. As Thomas Mann’s son he was news. A reporter from the New York Post asked him about his love life. Klaus looked him in the eye and recognised him as “one of us”. He can read what there is between me and Tomski, he thought, and in reply referred first to his broken engagement to Pamela and then in vague terms to an attachment to a girl in Switzerland – in reality Annemarie who had been Erika’s lover off and on for years.

“So you see,” Tomski said as soon as they were alone, “even in the Land of the Free, you can’t speak honestly.”

Later that night Tomski was still sulky. He made a scene. They had their first quarrel. It was absurd: Tomski was no more able openly to confess to their relationship than he could… In a few days he would be going home to his parents, whom he hadn’t seen for the three years he had been in Europe, and he certainly wasn’t going to tell them that he had travelled to the States with his lover, a thirty-year-old German called Klaus. And yet Klaus understood the boy’s resentment. They ought to have been able to say what they were. Instead, he found himself making excuses.

“If I confessed to being what I am nobody would listen to what I have to say about Hitler and the Nazis. They would dismiss me as a degenerate.”

“Is that what you think we are?” Tomski said.

“You know it’s not. Please don’t be silly.”

The quarrel went on for hours, and Klaus was the more hurt because he knew that Tomski knew his argument was ridiculous. He wondered if Tomski really wanted to find an excuse to break with him.

A couple of years later – he couldn’t remember exactly when – he had a similar conversation with Chris in California.

“You don’t understand,” Klaus said. “I’m not ashamed of being homosexual. It’s my nature and that’s all there is to it. But I’m not militant, I don’t need to shout it from the rooftops…”

“And you weren’t ashamed to pretend?” Chris said.

“Yes, to some extent I was ashamed. I don’t like telling lies. But I’d come to America not as a refugee – though I suppose I was that too – but to try to tell the American people what the Nazis are really like and to tell them that they also must one day be ready to go to war against the Brown Plague. It wasn’t a popular message then, you know. Indeed it still isn’t. What chance would I have had of being heard if I had announced that I was a homosexual and that the boy standing beside me was my lover? We all have to pretend.”

“Not me,” Chris said. “I made a resolution long ago that I am never going to deny what I am. I’m not going to submit to the heterosexual dictatorship.”

Even then Klaus wondered if Chris revealed his homosexuality to the studio bosses in Hollywood. But he didn’t mention his doubts. The truth was he admired Chris’s defiant attitude and often wished he could match it. But then he thought: we’re different, our position, if not condition, is different. Chris has renounced the political struggle and become a pacifist. How, he asked me, could he fire a gun at a German soldier when that soldier might be Heinz, who had been compelled to return to Germany because attempts to get him another passport had failed, who had been sentenced to a prison term on account of his relations with Chris and was, he believed, now in the army?

So perhaps in their incompatibility they were both right. He couldn’t argue against the position Chris had adopted, but he didn’t think Chris justified in condemning his.

Was it then or another day they had talked about Maugham?

No matter. He recalled the conversation as the bus carried him away from the Villa Mauresque and the sun slid behind a cloud and it began to rain again.

Perhaps it was later, after Maugham had visited Chris in California in connection with his novel
The Razor’s Edge
, which was being made into a film. People said the main character, Larry Something who travels East in search of spiritual wisdom, was based on Chris. Sometimes he denied it indignantly, “He’s such a twerp, that Larry, a ridiculously romanticised figure and anyway he’s hetero, even if it’s obvious the old man was in love with him. Actually that makes it worse because he lacked the honesty and courage to admit it.” Sometimes he giggled and said, “Well, if the old boy did model him on me, he botched the job.”

All the same Chris was fond of Maugham, whom he referred to often as “darling Willie”. He had reason to be grateful to him, Klaus remembered, for Maugham had once been heard to say, “That young man holds the future of the English novel in his hands,” which delighted Chris naturally, even if it again reduced him to giggles. “Such a responsibility. I’m afraid I’ll drop it,” he said.

Anyway Chris reported that on one of these occasions Maugham had come close to tears as he said, “The tragedy of my life is that I have pretended I was three-quarters normal and only a quarter queer whereas really it was the other way round from the start…”

“Actually, “Chris said, “I don’t believe he’s even a quarter hetero. The old darling’s lived a lie all his life. No wonder he’s unhappy.”

Perhaps it was after the death of his lover and companion Gerald – Alan Searle’s predecessor – that Maugham had come out with this anguished confession. But how else could he have lived, granting his ambition? He had been twenty or so, hadn’t he, when Wilde was sent to prison, and he knew very well that he walked a dangerous path and that people wouldn’t have staged his plays or bought his books if they had known him to be as he was. In any case Chris had danced on the same tightrope. You had to read between the lines in his Berlin books and that earlier novel,
The Memorial
, which Klaus loved, to know that he was queer. In the Berlin stories he had even lent his boyfriend Otto, Heinz’s predecessor, to another character, a weedy and neurotic Englishman. Klaus had actually been more open in some of his own novels, though not
Mephisto
.

Then Chris, with that outspoken frankness which, even after he had known him for years, still took Klaus by surprise, because it seemed to him so un-English, said, “Your father’s the same, isn’t he?”

Difficult to explain that this was a misconception, difficult because of the kernel of truth which both Klaus and Erika had long recognised. But it was wrong all the same, and not only because the Magician truly loved Mielein, as well as needing her, and theirs was a happy marriage, unlike what he had learned of Maugham’s.

The Magician had sublimated the homoeroticism which therefore played a bigger part in his work and perhaps his imagination than in his daily or conscious life. He kept his blond boys in his heart, perhaps, but at a distance. Not even kisses. The furthest he had gone with the other Klaus (Heuser) was admitted in a letter addressed to both Erika and Klaus to whom he gave his childhood name Eissi: “I call him ‘Du’,” he said of Hauser, “and at parting pressed him to my heart with his express consent.” Then mischievously he added, “Eissi is requested to step back and not disturb my circles. I’m already old and famous, and why should the two of you alone be permitted to sin?” But there was of course no sin, except in his imagination, and as for the warning, it was superfluous. Young Hauser hadn’t been Klaus’s type. This teasing, self-teasing, restraint, was very different from Mr Maugham, who had come close to giving himself away only in one novel,
The Narrow
Corner
which was, unsurprisingly, Klaus’s favourite among those of his books which he had read. In fact the Magician had made his position clear in a table of qualities or attributes he had once drawn up. Klaus had it by heart:

Certain words in the first column flew like arrows to Klaus’s heart: death, barren, vagabond, pessimism… But in truth that column described him precisely. He’d known that for a long time. As for the qualities listed in the other column, he might lay claim only to “commitment, duty”. Surely the tenacity of his opposition to the Brown Plague and the little rat Hitler proved that entitlement?

The bus deposited him in the square in front of the railway station. Half-an-hour to wait before the next train back to Cannes. He made for the bar, quickly from old habit surveyed it, found no one to interest him, and ordered a whisky-and-soda.

The remarkable thing was that, whereas he had only despised and loathed the little rat, the Magician, while describing him as “a catastrophe, no doubt about that”, had nevertheless made the effort to understand him, declared that was “no reason to find him uninteresting as character and destiny” – as a phenomenon also, of course. Klaus had been shocked when he first read that essay and found his father calling the little rat “Brother Hitler”. How could he? Well, first because he had been able to say “Where I am, there is Germany,” and, being German, he could not deny Hitler’s Germanity. It was something we all had in common, no matter how horrifying the realisation might be. But there was more to it than that. The man was a disaster, certainly, with his unfathomable resentment and his festering vindictiveness, but he was also a failed artist, and therefore in a sense indeed his Brother. The young Hitler had been the half-baked Bohemian in his garret or Viennese dosshouse, with his basically-I’m-too-good-for-ordinarywork, and his sense of being reserved for something special, indefinable, which, if he had expressed it then, would have had those around bursting out in derisive laughter. This rejection, common to that experienced by so many young artists who feel on the cusp of greatness but are recognised by nobody, fed his rage against the world, his ferociously anxious need to justify himself, his urge to compel the world to accept him at his own valuation, to subject itself to him, to satisfy his dream of seeing those who had spurned him now prostrate before him. Lost in fear, admiration and a wild besotted love. Moreover, the Magician had insisted, Hitler’s insatiable drive for compensation for the miseries he had endured, his inability ever to be content with what he had achieved, and the need to proceed ever further and more dangerously on the path he had chosen, these too were attributes of the artist. “There is a lot of Hitler in Wagner,” the Magician had once said to Klaus during the war. “The rejection of reason and bourgeois ethics, and the incapacity for irony – irony which is the saving grace of the intellect.” If the Magician was right, Hitler was the artist’s shadowself, the dark side of the moon.

And of course the will to self-destruction. Only Klaus felt no need to pull down the whole world with him. No
Götterdämerung
for him, an overdose would do the trick. He went to the bar and asked for another whisky.

Light was fading when he was back in Cannes. The poignant loneliness of dusk. It was Miki’s night with his girl again. No point in going to the Zanzi, and indeed good reason not to: Probyn might be there. He couldn’t face that. He found another bar, a place on the terrace. There was a German couple at the next table. How strange to hear his language spoken here, spoken confidently, as if the war was so far behind them all, a mere parenthesis in history. The waiter brought him his whisky and a soda siphon. He took out his notebook and wrote:

“Albert’s faith in Communism had been absolute, his conversion as abrupt and complete as St Paul’s on the road to Damascus. One day he had been lost, and not only because his girlfriend had walked out on him because, she said, he believed in nothing and stank of petit-bourgeois failure; the next it was as if he stood on the bluff of a hill, gazing across the river and a landscape with classical ruins like a Poussin painting towards the golden light of a new dawn, the Promised Land. It was in a mood of exhilaration that he had accepted an invitation to the First Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow. (The invitation had itself come as a surprise because he had published so little, but the editor of an exiles’ magazine published in Amsterdam had recommended him.) What he found there was what he longed to find: a dynamic faith. It was marvellous to observe the joyful determination and zest with which the ordinary Soviet citizens participated in the collective effort to build Socialism. Literature in the USSR was not, as it was in the west, the occupation of a dilettante minority, a diversion for the bourgeoisie. On the contrary! It was recognised and promoted as an integral part of this vast creation of a New Society, a comprehensive scheme which appealed no less to the public imagination and general interest than the enactment of the Five-Year Plan and the reorganisation of Soviet agriculture into collective farms. The Conference offered a magnificent demonstration of this national concern for Literature. All its sessions were attended by workers, private soldiers and peasants who engaged with intelligence and enthusiasm in discussions about modern poetry and the role of the theatre and the cinema under Socialism. Albert felt his heart swell with joy. Tears of happiness came to his eyes.”