Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood Read Free Book Online Page B

now prefers to join the ranks of the dilettante nihilists, the bohemian outlaws, who believe in nothing, except their own ego, who exist only to kill, to torture, to destroy, to make everyone as miserable as themselves…”
    â€œIn other words, I’m a Nazi and you’re my father?”
    We both laughed.
    â€œI only try to analyze certain tendencies,” said Bergmann.
    â€œNevertheless,” he added, “there are times when I feel gravely worried about you.”
    Bergmann worried not only about me, but about the whole of England. Wherever he went, he kept a sharp lookout for what he called “significant phenomena.” A phenomenon, I soon discovered, could be practically anything. The fog, for instance. Like nearly all Middle-Europeans, he was convinced that fog was our normal weather throughout the year. I would have been sorry to disappoint him; and, as luck would have it, there were several quite thick fogs that winter. Bergmann seemed to imagine that they covered not only London but the entire island; thereby accounting for all our less agreeable racial characteristics, our insularity, our hypocrisy, our political muddling, our prudery and our refusal to face facts. “It is the English themselves who have created this fog. They feed upon it, like a kind of bitter soup which fills them with illusions. It is their national costume, clothing the enormous nakedness of the slums and the scandal of unjust ownership. It is also the jungle within which Jack the Ripper goes about his business of murder in the elegant overcoat of a member of the Stock Exchange.”
    We started making sightseeing excursions together. Bergmann showed me London: the London he had already created for himself in his own imagination the dark, intricate, sinister town of Dickens, the old German silent movies, Wedekind and Brecht. He was always the guide, and I the tourist. Whenever I asked where we were going, he would say, “Wait,” or “You will see.” Often, I think he hadn’t the least idea, until we actually arrived.
    We visited the Tower, where Bergmann lectured me on English history, comparing the reign of the Tudors to the Hitler regime. He took it for granted that Bacon wrote the Shakespearian plays, in order to make political propaganda, and that Queen Elizabeth was a man. He even had a further theory that Essex was beheaded because he threatened the Monarch with revelations of their homosexual intrigue. I had some difficulty in getting him out of the Bloody Tower, where he was inspired to a lurid reconstruction of the murder of the Little Princes, amazing the other visitors, who merely saw a stocky, shock-headed, middle-aged man pleading for his life to an invisible assassin, in German, with theatrical falsetto accents.
    At the Zoo, he identified a baboon, a giraffe and a dromedary with three of our leading politicians, and reproached them publicly for their crimes. In the National Gallery, he explained, with reference to the Rembrandt portraits, his theory of camera angles and the lighting of close-ups, so loudly and convincingly that he drew a crowd away from one of the official lecturers, who was naturally rather annoyed.
    Sometimes he persuaded me to go out with him at night. This, at the end of a long day, was very exhausting. But the streets fascinated him, and he never seemed tired or wished to return home. It was embarrassing, too. Bergmann spoke to anybody whose face happened to interest him, with the directness of a child; or he talked about them to me, like a lecturer, so that they were sure to overhear him. One evening, in the bus, there were two lovers. The girl was sitting just in front of us; the young man stood beside her, holding the strap. Bergmann was delighted with them. “See how he stands? They do not even look at each other. They might be strangers. Yet they keep touching, as if by accident. Now watch: their lips are moving. That is how two people talk when