Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood Read Free Book Online Page A

laugh. Christopher found his coarseness bracing and sympathetic. But Henry was also a snob and a Fascist. He adored the titled ladies of Roman society, amongst whom he spent most of the winter, and praised Mussolini for having made Italy more comfortable for foreign visitors like himself. Christopher had to keep his mouth shut, project sparkling interest, and smile flatteringly at this aging beauty—it was as if he were a courtier of Queen Elizabeth I. And yet, from time to time, despite all Christopher’s efforts, Henry would capriciously fail to pay up. As he had on this occasion.
    Thus Christopher was reminded that he wasn’t a free spirit, as he liked to think, but a captive balloon. Coming down to earth with a humiliating bump, in an evil humor and suffering from one of his sore throats, he found himself in the midst of a domestic battle. His brother Richard, now eighteen, had been making an attempt to assert himself and prove to their mother, Kathleen, that she couldn’t go on treating him as a schoolboy. Richard’s attempt was clumsy—in order to avoid being sent back to the tutor who was cramming him for Oxford, he had pretended that he had found himself a job. But Kathleen’s reaction, when she discovered he was lying, was clumsier: “If your father was alive,” she told him, “you wouldn’t dare behave like this!” The two of them were victims of a classic situation, forced to become enemies against their will. Christopher must surely have understood this, and known that it was his duty to play the affectionate peacemaker and help them work out a new way of living with each other. But, instead, he sided with Richard against Kathleen.
    So there were bitter sessions in which he revenged himself on the tired tearful woman for all the humiliations he had endured at the hands of others. He accused her of having tried to wreck his life and of being now determined to wreck Richard’s. She had tried to turn Christopher into a Cambridge don, he said, to gratify her selfish daydream of the kind of son she wanted him to be. And since he had foiled her, by getting himself thrown out of college, she was trying to turn Richard into an Oxford don, against his will.
    Christopher told her coldly and aggressively about his life in Berlin. He made his acts of homosexual love sound like acts of defiance, directed against Kathleen. I don’t think Kathleen was shocked. What he described was totally unreal to her. How could there be real sex without women? All she was aware of was the hate in his voice. So she wept and wrote in her diary that this was the end of “the nice era of peace.” She was obstinate, willfully stupid, and maddeningly pathetic. Yet, in the midst of her misery, she never yielded a single point. It wasn’t even that she thought she was in the right. When Christopher called in John Layard and he talked to her with his usual bluntness, she agreed meekly that she had made many mistakes. Layard impressed her favorably. She referred to him in her diary as “very striking and unusual.” But she wasn’t about to change her attitude—she was incapable of changing—as Christopher now began to realize.
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    At length, a letter arrived from Henry Isherwood, who was somewhere abroad. Kathleen described it by saying that “Henry did the heavy uncle in grand style”—which I take to mean that he advised Christopher to stop wasting time in Berlin, settle down in London, and get a job. Henry never did pay that quarter’s allowance. Three weeks later, he sent Christopher fifteen pounds which he had won at Monte Carlo, making it clear that this was to be regarded as an advance on the next quarter. This episode was typical of Henry’s queenly arrogance. Christopher excused it, as always. He couldn’t take Henry seriously enough to be angry with him.
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    A few days after