The Berlin Stories Read online

  The Berlin Stories

  Christopher Isherwood

  Introduction by Armistead Maupin

  Preface by Christopher Isherwood

  A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

  Contents

  Introduction by Armistead Maupin

  About This Book

  Mr Norris Changes Trains

  Goodbye to Berlin

  Introduction

  Several years ago, on a break from the Berlin Film Festival, my husband Christopher and I took our friend Ian McKellen on a pilgrimage to Nollendorfstrasse 17, the address made mythic by Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. It was a bitter winter night, stinging with sleet, but we were heartened to find the street much as the writer had described it: “Cellar-shops . . . under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades . . . houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.” A brass plaque, rendered in Ger-man and tagged with graffiti, marked the apartment house where Isherwood had lived in the early 1930s, sometimes down the hall from the model for his best-known creation, Sally Bowles. Across the street, on the side of another house, a pink neon sign was bleeding its message into the black-and-white landscape — GAY INTERNET CAFÉ — prompting Ian to smile in tender appreciation. “Perfect,” he murmured. “Absolutely perfect.”

  I knew what he meant. It was lovely to see that seventy-five years after Isherwood had lived on this “deep solemn massive street,” young men were still coming here to tell stories and look for love. The writer had come here himself because “Berlin meant boys,” all those decades ago, and the boys were back in town, proclaiming their desires in unapologetic neon. In the course of Isherwood’s life two holocausts — one brought on by fascism, the other by a deadly virus — had decimated the people he called his tribe, yet we were still here, still riding a wave of change that Isherwood himself had helped to set in motion. That neon sign was as much his legacy as his writing.

  A small confession: I found my way to The Berlin Stories the way many readers of my generation did — through the 1972 movie musical Cabaret. (Isherwood, unlike his less cheeky Berlin compatriots Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden, was not widely taught in American schools in the 1960’s, especially in the South.) As a young gay man who’d recently defected to San Francisco, I was stunned to find echoes of my new life in this film about another city and another time. Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles reminded me of some my own new women friends: daffy and wounded and falsely naughty and refreshingly nonchalant about homosexuality. And the Michael York character — the Isherwood figure, I learned — was so winsome and virile and gorgeous that I wanted to be him, going so far as to buy a sleeveless sweater like the one he wore in the movie.

  So I went straight to the source and plunged into the old New Directions “paperbook” of The Berlin Stories — that black-and-white cover with the Brechtian piano player — where I was willingly led astray by Isherwood’s cast of charlatans and rent boys and all-seeing landladies in the last days of the Weimar Republic. The novel, as it turned out, was actually two novels, both told in the first person. The first of them, The Last of Mr. Norris (1935)*, was narrated by a young writer named William Bradshaw — Isherwood’s two middle names, unsubtly enough. The second novel, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), while still presented as a work of fiction, was told in the voice of someone called Christopher Isherwood. This was perhaps the first step in a long journey toward ever more candid self-disclosure that would occupy Isherwood for the rest of his days. The well- examined life would become his obsession — and, some would say, his great gift to literature.

  I admit to a certain frustration upon encountering the Bradshaw/Isherwood narrator in The Berlin Stories. While his voice was seductive in its elegant economy, his eye was always turned towards the Others; his own life, particularly his sex life, was a blank. “I am a camera with its shutter open,” he tells us, “quite passive, recording, not thinking.” He meant simply that he was new in town and absorbing everything around him, but he would come to think of those first four words as “infamous” after they were popularized as the title of John van Druten’s stage adaptation of the novel. From that point on, lazy critics would have a far-too-handy shorthand for analyzing his work.

  Isherwood was not, as the camera metaphor suggested, a detached or clinical observer; he was as fully engaged as a writer could be, both with his work and his readers. The problem for him was an ethical one: the need not to lie. Time spent with Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute for Sexual Research (not to mention in bed with working-class boys) had radicalized the young Christopher about his newfound identity. It would have stuck in his craw, he later explained, to make Bradshaw/Isherwood heterosexual. On the other hand, a homosexual narrator would have been unthinkable in those days and would have distracted severely from the other portraits of Berliners on the fringes of society. So our hero ends up a neutered observer, alone in his room at night while randy youths in the street whistle up to their girlfriends to throw down their keys. In real life, of course, some of those whistles were meant for Isherwood.

  The author examines all of this and more in Christopher and His Kind, a 1976 memoir that serves as a fascinating companion volume to The Berlin Stories. Here, through the eyes of a wry and self-effacing septuagenarian, we learn the full story of Isherwood’s four years in Berlin. He tells us, for instance, that his reasons for moving in with strapping, young Otto Nowak and his family in Goodbye to Berlin were not financial but romantic and that Otto’s mother knew of their relationship and was not in the least shocked. This revisionist approach to his own material, far from diminishing the power of the original, offers a singular glimpse into the working process of a novelist, the ways in which remembered events are altered or erased altogether in service of privacy or vanity or the story itself. Few writers have ever been so generous with their trade secrets, so willing to undercut their own well-honed mythology in the name of telling the truth.

  In the end, The Berlin Stories can withstand anyone’s scrutiny, even Isherwood’s. These trenchant, funny, heartbreaking vignettes of a city already doomed to fascism still dazzle us today, thanks to the author’s abiding fascination with the particular and the personal. He is also that rarest of creatures, an esteemed “literary” writer who refuses to inflict upon his readers a single word he does not need or mean. Make no mistake, the raw simplicity of these pages took work, but Isherwood was always too much of an artist — and a gentleman — to let it show. He understood instinctively that crisp, unhysterical prose would best contain the horrors unfolding around him, that understatement, in such a brash and gaudy setting, would pack a more powerful punch.

  I met Christopher Isherwood by chance at a Hollywood cocktail party in 1978 when he was in his mid seventies. My first novel was only months away from publication, so I screwed up my courage and asked him to read it. The blurb he so graciously provided likened my work to that of Dickens, though he could not have overlooked how strongly I’d been influenced by The Berlin Stories. While set in San Francisco in the seventies, my story also involved an apartment house with a motherly landlady and her one-of-everything tenants, a microcosm of the freewheeling society that contained it. What’s more, my title — Tales of the City — intentionally echoed The Berlin Stories in its suggestion that the city itself was the main character of the piece. I’d even been so brazen as to name one of my characters Bradshaw — just for luck, I suppose.

  Once I’d come to know him, Isherwood proved as vivid in life as he had been on the page. I still picture him in blue jeans and loafers, bouncing on his heels like a schoolboy, his brambled eyebrows cavorting as he tells a story. Like many young queers of that era, I regarded him as a sort of spiritual
grandfather. (He used the term queer himself, way back then, explaining with a conspiratorial wink that “it embarrasses our oppressors.”) He’d been officially out of the closet for at least five years — ever since a memoir called Kathleen and Frank — and had landed on the shores of his happy ending in Santa Monica with the artist Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior. This was the man he’d described in the closing paragraph of Christopher and His Kind, “the ideal companion to whom you can reveal yourself totally and yet be loved for what you are, not what you pretend to be.” To see those two together, still blissful after twenty-five years in their house above the sea, was to imagine a happy ending for yourself.

  In 1985, for the Village Voice, I spoke to Isherwood and Bachardy for what would prove to be the writer’s last inter-view. Though struggling with cancer himself, he offered fighting words to the legions of young men already dying of AIDS. “They’re told by their relatives that it’s God’s will and all that sort of thing. And I think they have to be very tough with themselves and really decide which side they’re on. You know, fuck God’s will. God’s will must be circumvented if that’s what it is.” It was just that kind of straight talk that made Isherwood so loved. It embarrassed some of his more “discreet” Hollywood friends (most of them younger than he) but it was a battle cry for some of us — and for once, miraculously, it was coming from an elder. More than anyone of his generation, Isherwood reminded us that gay self-respect came with its own noble lineage.

  I felt the tug of that lineage just this morning when I asked Don Bachardy about the dolphin clock that Isherwood mentions on the second page of Goodbye to Berlin. Contemplating his landlady’s “unnecessarily solid, abnormally heavy” knickknacks, the writer asks slyly: “What becomes of such things? How could they ever be destroyed? They will probably remain intact for thousands of years; people will treasure them in museums. Or perhaps they will merely be melted down for munitions in a war.” The clock, as irony would have it, eventually survived a bomb blast with barely a scratch and, even more ironically, ended up in Isherwood’s hands. He tells us in his 1954 preface to The Berlin Stories that his former landlady — by then in her seventies — had presented this sturdy object to her famous tenant on a recent visit to Nollendorfstrasse. “It stands now on my writing table in a Californian garden — and I like to think it will survive me, and anything that may be dropped on this neighborhood, in the near or distant future.”

  “So what did you want to know about it?” Bachardy asked when I spoke to him this morning.

  “Is it still there?” I asked. “Do you still have it?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s on Chris’s desk. I’m looking at it now.” He paused as if to emphasize the final irony. “It will probably end up at the Huntington.”

  That joke about museums had been right on the nose.

  Armistead Maupin

  San Francisco

  California

  June, 2008

  * The title given to Mr Norris Changes Trains on its American publication. [Ed.]

  About This Book

  From 1929 to 1933, I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to other parts of Germany and to England. Already, during that time, I had made up my mind that I would one day write about the people I’d met and the experiences I was having. So I kept a detailed diary, which in due course provided raw material for all my Berlin stories.

  My first idea, immediately after leaving Berlin in 1933, was to transform this material into one huge tightly constructed melodramatic novel, in the manner of Balzac. I wanted to call it The Lost. This title, or rather its German equivalent, Die Verlorenen, seemed to me wonderfully ominous. I stretched it to mean not only The Astray and The Doomed — referring tragically to the political events in Germany and our epoch — but also “The Lost” in quotation marks — referring satirically to those individuals whom respectable society shuns in horror: an Arthur Norris, a von Pregnitz, a Sally Bowles.

  Maybe Balzac himself could have devised a plot-structure which would plausibly contain the mob of characters I wanted to introduce to my readers. The task was quite beyond my powers. What I actually produced was an absurd jumble of subplots and coincidences which defeated me whenever I tried to straighten it out on paper. Thank Goodness I never did write The Lost!

  Just the same, all of these characters had grown together, like a nest of Siamese twins, in my head, and I could only separate them by the most delicate operations. There was a morning of acute nervous tension throughout which I paced up and down the roof of an hotel in the Canary Islands, shaping the plot of Mr Norris and discarding everybody and everything that didn’t belong in it. This was in May, 1934. A few days later, I set to work on the novel, sitting in the garden of a pension at Orotava on Tenerife. The pension was run by a happy-go-lucky Englishman, who used to laugh at my industry and tell me I ought to go swimming, while I was still young. “After all, old boy, I mean to say, will it matter a hundred years from now if you wrote that yarn or not?” Relentlessly, at four o’clock every afternoon, he would start playing records at full blast through the loudspeaker on the patio, hoping to attract wandering tourists in for a drink. They seldom came, but the jazz tunes always put an end to my day’s work. On August 12, I noted in my diary: “Finished Mr Norris. The gramophone keeps repeating a statement about Life with which I do not agree.” I remember how I raced through that last chapter with one eye on my watch, determined to get finished before the racket started.

  Mr Norris was published in 1935. In England, the book bore its correct name: Mr Norris Changes Trains; but the American publisher, William Morrow, found this obscure — so I changed it to The Last of Mr. Norris, a title which should be followed by a very faint question mark.†

  Next I wrote the story of Sally Bowles, and it appeared as a small separate volume in 1937. Three other pieces — The Nowaks, The Landauers and Berlin Diary: Autumn 1930 — were published in issues of John Lehmann’s New Writing. Finally, the complete Goodbye to Berlin was published in 1939.

  Goodbye indeed! During those years that followed, the Berlin I’d known seemed as dead as ancient Carthage. But 1945 came at last, and V-E Day. That summer, New Directions was getting ready to republish Mr Norris and Goodbye to Berlin in one volume, The Berlin Stories. While I was correcting the proofs, a letter, the first in seven years, reached me from Heinz, my closest “enemy” friend, telling how he had fought in Russia and later been taken prisoner by the Americans. After the fighting was over, the authorities at his POW camp had more or less allowed him, and a number of others, to run away, and had later forwarded his mail to his home address, marked “Escaped”! As I read and reread this letter, the feeling began to work through me painfully and joyfully, like blood through a numbed leg, that Berlin — or, at any rate, the Berliners — still existed, after all.

  Then, in the summer of 1951, John van Druten decided that he could make a play out of Sally Bowles. His adaptation, I Am a Camera, was written with his usual skilled speed, and was ready for production that fall. When I arrived in New York to sit in on rehearsals, I had first to go to a studio and be photographed, for publicity, with our leading lady, Julie Harris. I had never met Miss Harris before. I hadn’t even seen her famous performance in The Member of the Wedding.

  Now, out of the dressing-room, came a slim sparkling-eyed girl in an absurdly tart-like black satin dress, with a little cap stuck jauntily on her pale flame-colored hair, and a silly naughty giggle. This was Sally Bowles in person. Miss Harris was more essentially Sally Bowles than the Sally of my book, and much more like Sally than the real girl who long ago gave me the idea for my character.

  I felt half hypnotized by the strangeness of the situation. “This is terribly sad,” I said to her. “You’ve stayed the same age while I’ve gotten twenty years older.” We exchanged scraps of dialogue from the play, ad-libbed new lines, laughed wildly, hammed and hugged each other, while the photographer’s camera clicked. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I was dumbfound
ed, infatuated. Who was she? What was she? How much was there in her of Miss Harris, how much of van Druten, how much of the girl I used to know in Berlin, how much of myself? It was no longer possible to say. I only knew that she was lovable in a way that no human could ever quite be, since, being a creature of art, she had been created out of pure love.

  As I watched those rehearsals, I used to think a good deal — sometimes comically, sometimes sentimentally — about the relation of art to life. In writing Goodbye to Berlin, I destroyed a certain portion of my real past. I did this deliberately, because I preferred the simplified, more creditable, more exciting fictitious past which I’d created to take its place. Indeed, it had now become hard for me to remember just how things really had happened. I only knew how I would like them to have happened — that is to say, how I had made them happen in my stories. And so, gradually, the real past had disappeared, along with the real Christopher Isherwood of twenty years ago. Only the Christopher Isherwood of the stories remained.

  I’d never thought about this situation before, because it had never seemed to have any particular significance. If my past was artificial, at least it had been entirely my own — until now. Now John, Julie and the rest of them had suddenly swooped down on it, and carried bits of it away with them for their artistic use. Watching my past being thus reinterpreted, revised and transformed by all these talented people upon the stage, I said to myself: “I am no longer an individual. I am a collaboration. I am in the public domain.”

  After the play had opened successfully on Broadway, I went to England. This was my third visit since the end of the war; and this time, I knew, I must go over to Germany as well. It was a definite obligation — but how I dreaded it! I dreaded meeting the people I’d known and facing the fact that there was practically nothing I could do to help them. I dreaded seeing familiar places in ruins. Though my mind was made up, my unconscious still protested: I developed symptoms of duodenal ulcer, and nearly broke my leg on a staircase. Throughout the flight from London, I expected a crash, and was almost disappointed when we landed safe at Tempelhofer Feld in a mild snowstorm — “a psychosomatic snowstorm, obviously,” one of my friends commented, later.