Read Online Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir by John Lehmann - Free Book Online

return from China and their departure for America, Christopher and Wystan were occupied in finishing Journey to a War , for which purpose they retired to Brussels at the end of the year. They also saw the first night of On the Frontier at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, with Lydia Lopokova in the lead. Christopher writes of the occasion in Christopher and His Kind : ‘The first-night audience was friendly. It laughed whenever it could and treated the rest of the play with polite respect. On the Frontier wasn’t a harrowing disaster; it passed away painlessly.’ Equally, it was not a rousing success; less successful than either of its two predecessors. This, I think, was almost certainly because its theme was far too much of a reality in the minds of the audience at that particular moment in history to be dealt with in oblique fantasy: Munich was only a few weeks past.
    When Christopher thought of the plans for the coming return to America - which had now been fixed for 19 January -‘Vernon’ loomed large. But it would be wrong to think that this delectable image had blotted out the memory of Heinz. He thought of Heinz continually; but what could he do? He did persuade me to make a detour by Berlin the next time I drove from Vienna to London, and I succeeded in getting in touch with Heinz. I was able to report to Christopher that he seemed in good fettle, working off the year of Arbeitsdienst to which he had been sentenced by helping put up a new building on the Potsdamerplatz, much tougher and more reliant than before and without any rancour towards Christopher. Very soon after he met a girl he fell in love with and married. It was an encouraging meeting, and helped Christopher to slough off much of the guilt-feeling which had oppressed him. They continued to correspond until the war made it too difficult.
    Not unnaturally, the alarms and preparations for war which preceded Munich drove Christopher into a panic frenzy: he had been waiting for it to break out for five years, and here it was just round the corner, with gas-masks being issued and all. We became very close, seeing one another every day and feverishly discussing the news as the papers came out. I made enquiries about what we could do in war-time from friends in the Foreign Office, and we agreed that we would offer ourselves for propaganda work. ‘If we’ve got to have a war’, Christopher said, ‘I’m going to see we have a good war, anyway.’ His mother and his brother Richard left for Wales, and settled that if the war actually broke out they would stay there, and close the house in Pembroke Gardens. So I suggested that in that case he must come and share my flat with me; a proposal that, I think, pleased and touched him, to judge from what he wrote in Down There on a Visit. And then the meetings at Bad Godesberg and Munich happened, and France and Britain connived at the betrayal of the Czechs with Hitler and Mussolini. In the almost hysterical mood of relief that swept the country, some of us felt as much shame and foreboding as relief. As we read the latest editions of the evening papers, I said to Christopher bitterly: ‘Well, that’s the end of Europe as we wanted it’, and voiced the fear that unless further betrayals were imminent Munich could only mean the postponement of war and not its avoidance. And in an unguarded moment Christopher replied: ‘That doesn’t matter any more to me: I shall be in America.’
    But I find it difficult to believe, even at that moment, that he had decided to become an American citizen rather than make another, longer visit. He had said that when it came to the point he would be guided by Wystan’s decision; but I was not to know that Wystan had decided on emigration - if what he has since asserted is true.
    Whatever conclusion they had come to in their private talks, they had still to find the money for the journey. They therefore proposed to me that they