Christopher and His Kind (23 page)

And no one ain't takin'.

And who does that

I'll bash him on his hat

Bash him on his smeller

Till it's flat.

Another of Heinz's songs was about a fight between Communist workers and the police, in the early 1920's. Two comrades take part in this fight and one of them is killed. So the other writes a letter, “with trembling hands,” to his dead friend's mother. The fight actually took place at a town called Leuna. But Heinz found it amusing, when singing this song, to change Leuna to
Leihhaus,
thus making the letter announce:

The cops shot your son. Now he's lying

In the pawnshop and will not return.

Although suffering from spasms of vertigo and blisters on his feet, Christopher was serenely happy in the company of the German Child and in his newly found confidence that he would now be able to write his novel.

Next day, they plodded downhill through seemingly endless ravines which brought them at last to the southernmost point of the island, Maspalomas. A tall slender lighthouse stood in what looked like a tiny patch of the Sahara desert, transplanted from across the water. That night they slept in a room with a hole instead of a window. The bed contained one—but only one—crab louse. It was beautiful, golden with a spot of black on it; quite different from the drab vermin which Christopher had sometimes hosted in Berlin. When they started off to catch their bus back to Las Palmas next morning, he left something in the bed which was even more exotic than the louse, a British hundred-pound note. He had been carrying it with him throughout this journey—“for emergencies,” he vaguely, evasively told himself. On this point, I lose psychological contact with the Christopher of those days. This refusal to rely exclusively on his traveler's checks, this clinging to “real” money, must have been a reflection of Kathleen's insular attitude when she and her parents toured Europe at the end of the nineteenth century … He remembered the note after he had walked only a few yards and rushed back to retrieve it from under the pillow.

*   *   *

On June 6, they left Gran Canaria for the island of Tenerife. Christopher felt that he would be able to work better there, with fewer distractions. Also, he wanted to “have” his novel—as a woman might wish to give birth to her child—under the auspices of a celebrated romantic place name. (He even considered putting “Tenerife, 1934” at the bottom of the last page. But, by the time the novel was finished, something had decided him not to. Maybe it was the fact that Forster had put anti-romantic “Weybridge” at the end of two of his novels. Wasn't “Tenerife” a trifle vulgar?)

They settled into a pension called the Pavillon Troika, near the village of Orotava. It was thrilling to know that you were living on the slopes of a volcano, twelve thousand feet high. They had seen it from the rock pedestal of El Nublo, towering above a cloud pedestal far out on the ocean. But, here, it was too close to be visible. Here, you were merely an atom of Gran Canaria's magnificent view. From the Pavillon Troika, all you could see, most of the time, were glimpses through warm rolling sea fog of farms on the lower mountainside and of the waves beneath them.

The pension was run by a middle-aged Englishman who dyed his hair a very dead black. He warmly approved of the relationship between Christopher and Heinz, but not of Christopher's occupation: “After all, old boy, I mean to say, will it matter a hundred years from now if you wrote that yarn or not?” He kept urging Christopher to make better use of his youth, while he still had it, by spending more time down at the beach, swimming. But the beach was dirty and too distant, and the Englishman's advice wasn't disinterested. He had a gramophone with a powerful loudspeaker which he would have liked to play from morning till midnight. Christopher had protested that he couldn't possibly work while this noise was going on, and had threatened to move out. So it was agreed that the music shouldn't start until four in the afternoon. The Englishman hoped that it would then lure customers in to enjoy the cocktail hour. It seldom did, for there were few potential customers.

Christopher wrote always in the garden. Beneath the spotted leaves of a rubber tree, with banana plants and hibiscus around him, he banged away at his little Corona. (A baby typewriter it would seem today—the skeleton of a baby, for you could look right through it, between the thin ribs of its keyboard. But it was astonishingly sturdy. He would be using it for another fourteen years.)

This was a period of contented absorption, measured in chapters, not weeks. The solving of a literary problem became a major event, but the excitement it caused him was introverted, since there was no one he could run to and read aloud a just-completed passage. Christopher wasn't about to expose his art to the philistine judgment of the Englishman; and Heinz would hardly have made a perceptive critic, even if Christopher had been writing in German.

At odd moments, he gave Heinz lessons in English, geography, and modern history. While Christopher worked, Heinz kept himself occupied, writing long letters to his friends and playing with the Englishman's puppy and the many cats. With his genius for communication, he somehow made the gardener's boy and the old woman who cooked the meals understand a mixture of German, English, and Greek, laced with occasional words of Spanish. His head was now toothbrush-bristly all over. Christopher had cropped Heinz's hair at his own request. The Englishman had told him that this would promote hair growth and Christopher had encouraged Heinz to believe it because he found bristles sexy.

After supper, they often got mildly drunk and capered on the small marble dance floor in the patio. The Englishman told them wild tales of his life in the United States. He had jumped ship while working as a steward and had spent several years wandering around the country, lovemaking. He strongly advised Christopher and Heinz to go and do likewise.

*   *   *

On July 9, Christopher began a two-day holiday from his novel. He and Heinz set out to climb the volcano, the Pico de Teide. They had hired a guide, and two mules to carry food and blankets. Someone must have talked them into making the expedition so elaborate; it was still quite cheap but it wasn't their style. At the last moment, they impulsively invited a young German, a schoolmaster on holiday, to come with them. He seemed pleasant enough. The back of his neck had an ugly Prussian look, it was red and stiff; and his face was prematurely lined, wooden, rather silly. But he had nice blue eyes.

They spent the night in a rest hut on the lava plateau which surrounds the cone of the Pico. After sunset, the temperature dropped sharply. The hut had a fireplace but no chimney; it filled with smoke when they started a fire. Their only light was from a pair of bicycle lamps.

Christopher was acutely aware of the altitude; it made him feel tense, apprehensive, slightly crazy. It seemed to affect the schoolmaster too, but differently. He became dogmatic and talked in slogans from Nazi propaganda: “A people must have a national ambition. It is natural for one people to wish to impose its culture upon all others.” When Christopher challenged him to define what he meant by German culture, he was unable to and shrugged the question off as irrelevant. None of this was really surprising. But Christopher, in his present state of mind, saw the schoolmaster as supernaturally sinister, transformed before his very eyes into a demon who threatened Heinz's existence. No—it was even worse than that. For Heinz evidently couldn't see the demonic aspect of the schoolmaster, regarding him as an ordinary human Nazi whose political opinions should be ignored, rather than spoil the enjoyment of this trip. Which meant that Heinz, being German, had within him a peculiarly German tolerance of Nazi ideas—a tolerance which could betray him into the demon's power. Not only Heinz's existence was threatened but his soul.

Next morning, panting in the thin air, they followed a fairly easy path up to the top of the cone. Hot sulphur fumed through greenish holes in its sides. When the guide held a lighted match to one of them, all the other holes began to fume more violently. And there was a place where you could hear a noise like the roaring of subterranean fire. As the sun rose, they stood silent in the enormous emptiness, looking out over fleecy cloud fields to where the guide had told them the coast of Africa lay. Then Heinz let out a great joyful yell and, using his walking stick for a brake, glissaded down the cone in a swirl of pumice dust. Without a smile or a word, his soul's enemy took off in pursuit of him. Christopher descended more sedately, sulking. Since waking up that morning, he had avoided speaking to the schoolmaster and had urged Heinz not to speak to him either. Heinz had gone on doing so, greatly to Christopher's annoyance. The schoolmaster seemed anyhow quite unaware of Christopher's hostility.

Then followed the long downhill trail, on which Christopher felt glad that they had hired the mules, because he could ride one of them and thus isolate himself from Heinz and the schoolmaster. However, the decreasing altitude restored him gradually to sanity. By the time they reached the Troika, he had had to admit to himself that the demon was a human being after all, hateful but relatively powerless.

*   *   *

While Christopher was struggling to write his huge novel about the prototypes of the Lost, he had decided that it must be narrated in the third person, objectively, camera-wise. The camera would record only outward appearances, actions, and spoken words—no thoughts, no feelings, nothing subjective. In this kind of storytelling, the author is playing a game with the reader. The author gives him all the necessary objective data, challenging him to interpret it and guess what will happen next. The more often the reader misinterprets and guesses wrongly, the greater is the author's success. This is the technique of the classic detective story.

But now Christopher was attempting an altogether different kind of novel, in which Mr. Norris wasn't a prototype, wasn't designed to demonstrate a concept. Here, he was a character in the simplest sense. Meeting him must be its own reward.

Christopher wanted to make the reader experience Arthur Norris just as he himself had experienced Gerald Hamilton. He could only do this by writing subjectively, in the first person, describing his own reactions to and feelings about Hamilton; otherwise, his portrait of Mr. Norris wouldn't be lifelike. He could, however, permit himself to invent as much dialogue, as many situations and additional characters as he needed. One does that even when one is telling a story to one's friends which is allegedly true.

But the narration problem wasn't to be so easily solved.
Was
Christopher claiming that the Narrator of this novel was, in every respect, himself? No. Most importantly, he wasn't prepared to admit that the Narrator was homosexual. Because he was afraid to? Yes, that was one reason. Although his own life as a homosexual was lived fairly openly, he feared to create a scandal. He even hesitated to embarrass Kathleen. And there was Uncle Henry—if he were sufficiently shocked, he might cut off Christopher's allowance.

There was a second reason, a literary one. Christopher doesn't mention it in his diaries or letters of that period. But I think that, subconsciously at least, it must have influenced his decisions.

Christopher wanted to keep the reader's attention concentrated on Norris; therefore, the Narrator had to be as unobtrusive as possible. The reader had to be encouraged to put himself in the Narrator's shoes—to see with the Narrator's eyes, to experience his experiences, to identify with him in all his reactions. For example, the Narrator is at a Beethoven concert, he sees and smells a juicy steak in a restaurant, he wakes in the night to feel his cheek being licked by the tongue of a non-venomous snake. The ordinary reader, being convinced of the Narrator's ordinariness, will take it for granted that he is feeling pleasure in the first instance, appetite in the second, and terror and disgust in the third. The reader will share these feelings.

But suppose that the Narrator shows no pleasure in the music? Suppose that he shows disgust on seeing and smelling the meat? Suppose that he shows no fear of the snake and even starts to pet it? Suppose, in other words, that he proves himself to be a tone-deaf, vegetarian herpetologist? The ordinary reader may be repelled by, or sympathetic to, such a Narrator's reactions, but he will never identify with him. He will always remain aware that the Narrator is an individual who is very different from himself.

This is what would have happened if Christopher had made his Narrator an avowed homosexual, with a homosexual's fantasies, preferences, and prejudices. The Narrator would have become so odd, perhaps so interesting, that his presence would have thrown the novel out of perspective. It could no longer have been exclusively a portrait of Mr. Norris. The Narrator would have kept upstaging Norris's performance as the star.

Christopher dared not make the Narrator homosexual. But he scorned to make him heterosexual. That, to Christopher, would have been as shameful as pretending to be heterosexual himself. Therefore, the Narrator could have no explicit sex experiences in the story. (“This sexless nitwit,” one reviewer was to call him.) The unlucky creature is, indeed, no more than a demi-character. It is as if Christopher has told him: “Don't call any unnecessary attention to yourself; don't get more involved with anybody than you absolutely have to.” There are moments in the novel at which some of the other characters seem actually aware of the Narrator's demi-nature. When, for example, Helen Pratt calls him “a nice little chap,” it is with a strange contemptuous tolerance. She knows what she knows. But Christopher won't allow her to say more.

Thus Christopher both acknowledged and disowned his kinship with the Narrator. In
Mr. Norris,
he expressed the ambivalence of his attitude by giving the Narrator his two superfluous middle names, William Bradshaw. They had always embarrassed him and, lately, he had grown to hate them because, joined to Christopher and Isherwood, they formed a tedious procession of ten syllables which wouldn't fit into the allotted space on any of the official documents he was required to sign during his travels. In
Goodbye to Berlin,
and two later novels, he changed the Narrator's name to Christopher Isherwood, saying to himself that William Bradshaw was a foolish evasion. But the evasiveness is in the Narrator's nature, not in his name.