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

Christopher’s arrival in London, Wystan had to undergo an operation for a rectal fissure. His announcement of this, on a postcard, was characteristically terse. It ended with a T. S. Eliot quotation: “Pray for Boudin.” Christopher went up to Birmingham twice to be with him, before leaving England.
    Wystan suffered from the aftereffects of this operation for several years. They inspired him to write his “Letter to a Wound,” which forms part of The Orators.
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    Christopher went back to Berlin on May 8, having told Kathleen that he could never live in her house again. According to her diary, “he begged that I should refuse to have him again even if he suggested coming.” He did come back, but not until ten months later. And, of the next three and a half years, he was to spend only five months in England.
    The only good which came of this unhappy visit was that Christopher and Richard became intimate. Up to that time, they had been almost strangers, because of the rareness of their meetings and the seven-year age gap between them. Richard had been dreading Christopher’s return from Berlin, since he felt sure Christopher would agree with Kathleen that he must go back to his hated tutor. So, when Christopher disagreed with her and sympathized with his point of view, Richard was correspondingly grateful. Before the visit was over, they had become friends. Richard was often rash and childish in his dealings with the outside world, but the eyes with which he observed it were searching and mature and his comments were as candid as Layard’s. Christopher realized, with surprise and pleasure, that he had a brother to whom he could tell absolutely anything about himself without shame.
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    During his years in Germany, Christopher kept a diary. As he became aware that he would one day write stories about the people he knew there, his diary entries got longer. They later supplied him with most of the material which is used to create period atmosphere in Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin.
    After those two books had been written, Christopher burned the diary. His private reason for doing this was that it was full of details about his sex life and he feared that it might somehow fall into the hands of the police or other enemies.
    Christopher’s declared reason for burning his Berlin diary was unconvincing. He used to tell his friends that he had destroyed his real past because he preferred the simplified, more creditable, more exciting fictitious past which he had created to take its place. This fictitious past, he said, was the past he wanted to “remember.” Now that I am writing about Christopher’s real past, I sadly miss the help of the lost diary and have no patience with this arty talk. The Berlin novels leave out a great deal which I now want to remember; they also falsify events and alter dates for dramatic purposes. As for the few surviving letters written at that time by Christopher and his friends to each other, they usually have no dates at all. I get the impression that their writers regarded letter dating as something beneath their dignity as artists—something bank clerkly, formal, and mean-spirited. My most reliable source of information proves, ironically, to be the diaries of Kathleen, whom Christopher was trying to exclude from his Berlin life altogether. Kathleen picked up scraps of news from friends who had visited him there and from his occasional grudging letters. I bless her for having recorded them.
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    It was probably in May 1930, soon after Christopher’s return from London, that he met the youth who is called Otto Nowak in Goodbye to Berlin. He was then sixteen or seventeen years old.
    Otto has a face like a very ripe peach. His hair is full and thick, growing low on his forehead. He has small sparkling eyes, full of naughtiness, and a wide disarming grin, which is much too