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

having him as a visitor. Christopher also got along well with Herr Nowak, a sturdy little furniture remover who called him Christoph and slapped him on the back. Grete he found tiresome but endearingly silly. He had done his best to make friends with Lothar and had, several times, tried addressing him with the familiar du (thou). Working-class men would call each other du even when they were strangers. Herr Nowak had said du to Christopher from the beginning, though Frau Nowak had told him that it was no way to speak to a gentleman. But Lothar had quietly snubbed Christopher by replying to him with the formal Sie (you). The flat was uncomfortable, certainly; there was nowhere to put anything down. But, as far as Christopher was concerned, the discomforts were easily bearable, like those of a camping trip which could be brought to an end whenever he wished.
    I doubt if Christopher managed to do any writing while he was with the Nowaks. True, there is a passage in Goodbye to Berlin:
    Sunday was a long day at the Nowaks. There was nowhere to go in this wretched weather. We were all of us at home … I was sitting on the opposite side of the table, frowning at a piece of paper on which I had written: “But, Edward, can’t you see? ” I was trying to get on with my novel. It was about a family who lived in a large country house on unearned incomes and were very unhappy. They spent their time explaining to each other why they couldn’t enjoy their lives; and some of the reasons—though I say it myself—were most ingenious. Unfortunately, I found myself taking less and less interest in my unhappy family; the atmosphere of the Nowak household was not very inspiring.
    But here “Isherwood” is playing to the gallery. The novel he seems to be referring to, The Memorial, is described with willful inaccuracy—none of its characters are unhappy for “ingenious” reasons; they are bereaved and lonely and in need of love, as people often are on any social level. “Isherwood,” merely because he has moved to the Simeonstrasse, feels that he has broken with his bourgeois literary past. Anything written about the upper classes is simply not worth reading, he implies. The rich ought to be happy—that is the least they can be—since they are living on money they’ve stolen from the poor; if they are miserable, that’s just too tiresome. In any case, their lives can never be meaningful, as the lives of the Nowaks are—and as “Isherwood” ’s life is, now that he is living with them.
    Such was a side effect of Christopher’s political awakening. But Edward Upward can’t be blamed for it. He was utterly incapable of such silliness. And Christopher himself knew better, despite his occasional lapses. Indeed, I remember how, in the later thirties, he used to tell people that he had written about the Nowaks in order to debunk the cult of worker worship as it was being practiced by many would-be revolutionary writers.
    *   *   *
    As it turned out, Christopher didn’t stay much more than a month at the Simeonstrasse. His immediate reason for leaving was that Frau Nowak was being sent to a sanatorium; but he would have left soon in any case. Slumming had lost its novelty for him, and he and Otto were on bad terms. His next move, sometime in November, was to lodgings in the Admiralstrasse—number 38. This was in the neighboring district of Kottbusser Tor, also a slum. But Christopher now had a room to himself and was in comparative comfort. When he went to register with the police—you had to do this whenever you changed your address—they told him that he was the only Englishman living in that area. Christopher’s vanity was tickled. He liked to imagine himself as one of those mysterious wanderers who penetrate the depths of a foreign land, disguise themselves in the dress and customs of its natives, and die in unknown