Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir Read Online Free Page B

to settle for a while, and found a pension called the  Pavilion Troika near the village of Orotava. Christopher had a strong feeling that he could work on his novel there. He had abandoned his original attempt to make it a hold-all for all the Berlin characters he wanted to write about, and decided to concentrate on Gerald Hamilton as Arthur Norris. I think, but I am not certain, that he had read Proust by then; Mr Norris has unmistakable likenesses to the Baron de Charlus: both snobs, both given to special perversions, both homosexuals (though Christopher concealed Mr Norris’s homosexuality), with one important difference - Charlus was not a rogue, while Hamilton/Norris was a crook of the deepest dye. Christopher wrote to me at the end of June: ‘I think my novel ought to be finished in another month. It will be dreadfully short - I’m afraid not more than 45,000. I wonder if anybody will be prepared to publish a book of that length? When it is finished, I shall begin my other Berlin book at once: nearly the whole of it is already written.’ A week or two later he reported that the novel was ‘exactly three quarters done. I hope to finish it on the day War was declared in 1914. It is a sort of glorified shocker; not unlike the productions of my cousin Graham Greene.’
    In these letters he gives a vivid description of their life on the island:
         
    Here, amidst the flowers, our Rousseau life goes on.
    Heinz has just got me to cut off all his hair. He now looks like one of the boys in a Russian film. Every morning we retire to our tables in the banana grove. H. writes letters, making at least ten copies of each. Indeed, calligraphy is dignified by him to the position of an art. One is reminded of the monks in the Middle Ages. This place is a sort of monastery, anyhow. It is run by a German of the Goring-Roman Emperor type and an Englishman who dyes his hair. The Englishman loathes women so much that he has put a barbed wire entanglement across an opening in the garden wall, to keep them out. The celebrated peak is very seldom to be seen for clouds. We have to go up it before we leave, I suppose. Heinz wheedled me up to the top of an exceedingly high mountain on Grand Canary, from which we not only saw all the kingdoms of the world, but nearly fell into the middle of them. However, for the moment, he is  domesticated to a degree, and almost refuses to leave the garden, where he plays with the cats and dogs. As well as English we also study geography and I lecture him on the last fifteen years of European history out of Cole’s Intelligent Chaos.  We both eat a great deal and are immensely fat.
         
    I have a photograph of Heinz and Christopher in the garden, among the banana trees and the hibiscus and the flowers. They look very contented. Christopher is sitting cross-legged on the grass, smiling at something Heinz is leaning out of his deck-chair to show him among papers on the ground. And I think Christopher was happy at this time, working steadily at Mr Norris Changes Trains (which was still at this time called ‘The Lost’), once he had forced his landlord to agree not to play his gramophone until four in the afternoon.
    Mr Norris was finished on 12 August. They immediately set forth on a voyage of exploration among the smaller islands, then visited Gibraltar and Spanish Morocco, then by slow stages back to settle in Copenhagen. Christopher says he can’t remember why they chose Denmark, but it seemed to be a good choice as it was close to England, and most of the Danes spoke German, which made it easier for Heinz. They reached Copenhagen at the beginning of October, and there met Stephen Spender’s elder brother Michael and his wife Erica, who helped them to find a lodging and proved altogether good and sympathetic friends.
    A new development now occurred in Christopher’s literary career. Wystan Auden sent him a play they had both worked on in the