Two Gentlemen on the Beach Read online

  Two Gentlemen on the Beach

  MICHAEL KÖHLMEIER

  Translated by Ruth Martin

  Originally published as Zwei Herren Am Strand by Michael Köhlmeier © 2014 Carl Hanser Verlag, München

  First published in English in 2016 by

  HAUS PUBLISHING LTD.

  70 Cadogan Place,

  London

  SW1X 9AH

  www.hauspublishing.com

  English Translation Copyright © Ruth Martin 2016

  ISBN: 978-1-910376-46-1

  eISBN: 978-1-910376-47-8

  A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved.

  For Michael Krüger

  Little man: “I’ve got an umbrella.”

  “That’s a nice umbrella. Nice and big.”

  Little man: “But it’s not raining.”

  “True. You have an umbrella because it might rain. Seems like it’s going to, as well. Look at those black clouds!”

  Little man: “If it rains, I’m not going to put my umbrella up.”

  “Why not? I mean, you’ll get wet, and your umbrella can save you from getting wet, and when you’re wet, when you’re soaked through, you can easily get sick.”

  Little man: “I’m not putting my umbrella up because it’s new.”

  “Are you afraid it might get broken?”

  Little man: “If I don’t put it up, it won’t break.”

  “You’re right there. But then you might as well leave it at home.”

  Little man: “If I leave it at home, people will ask me if I don’t have an umbrella.”

  -Monika Helfer, Die Bar im Freien (The Outdoor Bar)

  PART ONE

  1

  On Christmas Day 1931, at around midday – so my father told me – a man was standing on the front steps of the house at 119 East 70th Street in Manhattan, New York. He had come to visit Mr Winston Churchill, who was residing there temporarily with his cousin.

  The visitor didn’t have an appointment. Neither the butler nor the nurse knew him, and in their eyes the fact that he claimed to be Charlie Chaplin marked him out as a dangerous lunatic. They threatened to call the police, and the butler finally fetched a Brown Bess musket – which, admittedly, was not in working order; it was one of a pair of mementos from the War of Independence that usually hung above the coat rack in the lobby. It was only when the man cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted as loudly as he could – which was not very loudly – through the crack in the door where he had jammed his knee: “Winston! Winston! It’s me, Charlie. I’m here, Winston! I came!” – and Churchill, who fortunately had a room on the ground floor, shouted back, as loudly as he could – which at that time was not very loudly, either – “Glad tidings you bring!” that he was permitted to enter.

  Churchill was sitting up in bed. In front of him was a pastry board that he was using as a writing tray, and on it were his handwritten notes, a fountain pen and some coloured pencils. In the corner stood an easel taller than a man, and a table covered in tubes, brushes, bottles and pots. There was a pile of books beside his pillow. His torso was bare, his left shoulder and the left half of his chest bandaged, and his arm and throat were yellow with old bruises.

  Chaplin recalled: “Tears spilled from his eyes.”

  Ten days previously, Churchill had been in an accident. Un usually for him, he had been alone, on foot, on 76th Street. On this surprisingly mild winter afternoon, he had been intending to cross Fifth Avenue and take a stroll through Central Park, where he was to meet Bernard Baruch, his friend and financial advisor, in the Museum of Natural History. The two of them – it was a long-standing arrangement that had been put off several times – were planning to take a look at the Star of India, the world’s largest sapphire, before dining together at Baruch’s apartment. Lost in thought, Churchill looked to the right, as he would have done in England, stepped out into the road, and was hit by a car and thrown onto the sidewalk. His shoulder, face, hip and left thigh were badly injured. The driver of the car that hit him, an Italian-born electrician, was the first on the scene, and it was he who went for an ambulance. Churchill was taken to nearby Lennox Hill Hospital, where they kept him for a week despite his protestations. The doctors also diagnosed a concussion: his balance was affected, rapid eye movement meant he was temporarily unable to see, and he was sick several times.

  A nurse’s indiscretion led to the press getting wind of the matter. The doctors unanimously refused to speak to the reporters, who avenged themselves by inventing things. One day the New York Times said that Churchill was doing well under the circumstances, sending best wishes from his sickbed to the kind electrician from Napoli who had taken such good care of him; the following day’s Wall Street Journal reported that Churchill was hovering between life and death. The New York Journal even suggested he would probably never walk again, and almost certainly never speak again – at any rate, it said, his political career was over. The reports were picked up by newspapers and radio stations all over the world. In London, the Dean of Westminster called on the cathedral’s congregation to pray for him.

  At that point, Chaplin was in Britain. Following the English premiere of City Lights at the Dominion Theatre in London at the end of February, he and his entourage had travelled across Europe, visiting Berlin, Munich, Venice, Vienna, Paris, and taking a limousine along the Atlantic coast to Aquitaine. He met his brother Sydney in the South of France and persuaded him to join the party. They crossed to Algiers on the newly-launched Italian luxury steamer Augustus, where they were received by another half a dozen friends, and finally drove through North Africa in a convoy of four rough-and-ready jeeps.

  Churchill and Chaplin had already met twice that year: in London after the film premiere – it was a meeting Chaplin didn’t care to recall – and more or less by chance in September, in Biarritz. And they had found the time to be alone together and conduct long conversations, about which they maintained absolute silence. This made the English journalists, renowned for their curiosity, livid and inclined to speculation. The sympathetic ones claimed the two of them were planning a film project, while others hinted that the artist and the politician were mixed up in some shady stock-market deal, and the malicious ones scented some kind of Jewish conspiracy. For a time, the society pages of the British newspapers were full of gossip about this odd couple, though no “reliable” information was to be found there. The protagonists had sworn a scout’s-honour oath not to tell anyone about their walks and talks together.

  Churchill also travelled a lot that year, staying in France and Germany. He had spent the autumn at home at Chartwell, his country house, which looked out over the Weald of Kent. There he had found himself “in the best possible mood,” as he wrote to the architect Philip Tilden, even though his political career seemed to have reached its end: he had once again fallen out with the Conservative leadership, and had not been considered for any political office following the October election. “I intend to make a lot of money as an author,” he wrote – and you can almost hear the commanding tone in his voice. “This is where my talent and my vocation lie. I will go down in history as a writer, not a politician.” It is true that at this point – he was fifty-eight – the greater part of his income came from the columns and articles he wrote for newspapers and magazines all over the world, and the royalties from his books (which included The World Crisis, his four-volume history of the 1914–1918 war, and My Early Life, the memoirs of his youth, both of them bestsellers). Now he had a new project: the biography of his ancestor John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, who had succeeded in uniting the powers of Europe against the political hegemony of the Fren
ch King Louis XIV at the start of the eighteenth century. Rehabilitating the duke, who had fallen out of favour with historians, had been a dream of his as a young man. When Churchill set off for America in December, he had already dictated and corrected two hundred pages.

  Chaplin meant to stay in London over Christmas, and return to the warmth of California in the New Year. The papers said the film star was planning a Christmas party for the orphans of the Hanwell Schools, where he himself had spent the loneliest and most bitter part of his childhood. He had paid the schools a visit, and had been overwhelmed by the love with which the boys and girls received him – “and not as a Hollywood star, but as one of their own”, he told a reporter. (In all likelihood, this was reported accurately.) When he heard about Churchill’s accident, he cancelled his attendance at the Christmas party at short notice, and booked a crossing to New York.

  Chaplin mistrusted the horror stories. He knew from experience how much a certain kind of journalist enjoyed spreading lies in order to inflict pain on a once-celebrated personality. He was not overly worried for Churchill’s life, nor even for his physical health. But he was fearful about his state of mind.

  All of this I heard from my father.

  2

  My father had encountered Chaplin and Churchill as a child, both of them in our small town, and both at the same time; they had paid attention to him, spent time with him and praised him. Later on I would like very much to talk about this in greater detail. They were my father’s idols in his youth and early adulthood; he could just as well imagine becoming a clown as a statesman. But what he became was a civil servant in the commune’s food standards department, checking the milk from the surrounding farms, taking beer samples and measuring the sugar content of beet syrup.

  After my mother’s death, my father and I lived alone, a long way from any of our friends. When someone rang the doorbell we would remain sitting, silent and motionless, at the kitchen table. We got through the activities of the day as if we were parts of a machine for producing melancholy. (My first full-length performance – which wasn’t until my late twenties – was actually entitled The Melancholy Machine: a man does his housework; everything goes wrong. I copied the face from Buster Keaton, the audience roared with laughter.) Then my father started drinking, and right from the start he drank a lot. One night I wrapped my arms around the unconscious man and dragged him into the bedroom, taking off his overcoat, jacket and shoes by the bed. At breakfast I said I didn’t want to live any more. He cried, and stopped drinking.

  After leaving school my father had wanted to study history, but the war had come between him and his plans. Now he intended to make up for what he had missed. During the worst period of his life, Churchill had saved himself by writing the biography of the First Duke of Marlborough; my father wanted to save himself – and me – by writing the biography of Churchill. I was just starting school when he began. He told me about his work, and explained why he was doing it. When a person is very sad, he said, it is advisable for him to find some distraction from himself. There are a few very gifted people, he went on, who manage to pretend they’re someone else: they look at themselves, shake their heads or nod their approval, and they take themselves seriously, but not too seriously; in this way they manage to get over their sadness without coming to any harm. But most people, he said, can only ever see themselves as just themselves – which is no wonder, because you are yourself, after all. These people can’t pretend they’re someone else. They have no choice but to pretend someone else is them. And that isn’t so very difficult, my father said. It works best if you tell another person’s life story. Churchill told the First Duke of Marlborough’s life story; my father was going to tell Churchill’s.

  He learned English for this reason alone; he could read and write it, but he never spoke it well. When he came home from the office, he would read and study: he read late into the night; he read while I played beside him with my blocks; he read while I did my homework; he read while I cooked and piled stew onto our plates; he studied while he hung up the laundry, and while he did the ironing. He wasn’t striving for any particular academic standard, but by the end of his life his historical knowledge would have put some university professors to shame.

  Our town had more theatres and cinemas than other places did, and comedy was everywhere. My father thought he and his son were too lonely and laughed too little. He suggested going to the theatre or the cinema twice a week. I saw my first Chaplin film

  – Limelight – and my first clowns – Alfredo Smaldini, Arminio Rothstein (alias Habakuk), and the incomparable Charlie Rivel. I was interested in clowns, and my father said being a clown was a noble profession. He got me books full of biographies of famous comics, sketches, and instructions for pantomimes, and I tried to act out the numbers. We had some great evenings together. He would tell me what he had read, and what he was thinking of writing, and I would show him the comic turns I’d thought up. He laughed at my clowning like I had never seen him laugh before. We both laughed a lot during that time. I could imagine writing a biography of Charlie Chaplin when I grew up, just as he was – still, several years later – writing a biography of Winston Churchill.

  I became a history and literature teacher at a selective school. At the weekends I performed as a clown, at first with a female colleague, and then alone. Later, when I gave up my teaching job and worked full-time as a clown, I had a life-sized puppet.

  In autumn 1974, my father took part in a symposium in Aachen to mark Winston Churchill’s 100th birthday. He was in the audience at the town hall when Mr William Knott – “The very private private secretary to a very prime prime minister” – was interviewed on stage by the journalist and Churchill biographer Sebastian Haffner. After the event, which took place in the hall where Churchill had received the Charlemagne Prize in 1956, my father approached this contemporary of Churchill’s, a nondescript-looking man who seemed at once secretive and extroverted, caught him by the sleeve and addressed him in very formal English. Evidently the questions he asked were so original that Mr Knott was actually pleased to have been ambushed in this manner, and moreover accepted an invitation to lunch and a stroll the following day.

  This encounter led to a correspondence that lasted a decade, until William Knott’s death, with each of them writing two or three times a week, their letters frequently running to almost ten pages.

  I gave these papers (more than 1000 pages) and a few photocopied documents to the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, where they can be viewed from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday.

  3

  There was a reason that Chaplin and Churchill told nobody – not even their closest friends – about their “talk-walks”, as the agile Chaplin called them, or “duck-walk-talks” in the corpulent Churchill’s self-deprecating version of the phrase: namely, because they were talking about suicide.

  They didn’t linger on other matters. They had too few common interests and too many divergent views. They took short cuts, bypassing polite chit-chat, skirting around personal matters that didn’t relate to their subject, and picking up again where their exchange of views had left off months, or sometimes years, previously. They discussed motives and techniques for taking one’s own life, and contemplated the things that famous suicides had suffered and felt during the last days and hours of their lives: Vincent van Gogh, Seneca, Ludwig II of Bavaria, Lord Lyttleton, Hannibal and Jack London (whom Chaplin had known personally – London had given him the idea for The Gold Rush). They analysed their own states of mind in comparison with these examples. They were at all times aware that they needed consolation; they liked to complain to their nearest and dearest (both of them had a tendency towards pathos and weepiness) that they had been in need of consolation their whole lives. (To the astonishment of both men, they discovered that long before they had met, each of them had wanted to write a short essay on this notion. Though neither was aware of the other’s intention, they had both been encouraged in this by T.S. Eliot. Th
e famous poet, who was also plagued by depression, was planning an alphabet of consolation for the magazine The Criterion, in which Chaplin and Churchill’s pieces would have appeared alongside each other. For some reason, nothing came of it.)

  After just one meeting, they made a pact to see each other at least once a year, and walk together for at least two hours. Neither of them was a great walker, and they only paid attention to nature with its birds, flowers, scents and colours when it aligned with their aesthetic aims – Chaplin when he was in front of the camera, showing its effect in the Tramp’s face, and Churchill when he was planning the garden at Chartwell, like a three-dimensional painting, accessible to all the senses, a thing of his own creation. During their walks, they forced themselves to pay attention to nature and regard it as something requiring neither their assistance nor their judgement, though – as they confessed to themselves, half amused, half dismayed – they couldn’t articulate what they actually meant by nature. Once, as they were walking up a steep, narrow path through the Malibu Hills, they stopped beside a bush loaded with small, blood-red fruit. When, after several minutes, neither of them had said anything, Chaplin wondered aloud what the reason for their reverent silence was. Churchill replied, self-consciousness. Chaplin mused that they probably still had a long path ahead of them. At which Churchill turned and looked at the hills, with their covering of wispy grass, then turned back and nodded in the direction they were going, before commenting on the look and the nod: “This is our path! This one! Just to weaken your metaphor.” One could only afford metaphors when they didn’t concern the whole.