Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir Read Online Free

only news that reached him from the outside world. ‘Is there going to be a war?’ he wrote in August. ‘This question may well be answered before you read it. Anyhow, I can’t judge anything from the scrappy paragraphs at the back of the Athens Messenger , whose leading articles are generally about Lord Byron, “Sir Codrington” or a French poet’s impressions of the Aegean. I don’t know how long we shall stay here. The heat obliterates all will, all plans, all decisions.’ But a fortnight later the decision to leave the island was taken. For a long time the dirt, the stinging flies, the bad water, the rowdy animal behaviour of the boys whom Francis had collected for his bed and for helping in the household chores, and the drunken sessions when the fishermen tied up at night, had been getting on Christopher’s nerves. Heinz had adapted himself, with his easy nature, more rapidly to the life on the island. He joked with the boys and the workmen, even managing to carry on a kind of pidgin conversation with them, with the aid of phrase-books. Christopher, who had a strong streak of jealousy in his makeup, got into moods when he imagined that everyone was making a pass at Heinz, and the sullenness this produced in him caused Heinz to retreat into sulkiness, and suggest that Christopher should send him back to Berlin. They left for Athens on the evening of 6 September without saying goodbye to Francis, and, with rows still smouldering between them, finally took a boat for Marseilles. The rows cleared, as they were bound to, and they spent more than two more weeks in France before crossing over to England. Somehow or other Christopher managed to get a tourist visa for Heinz, and they stayed at his mother’s house in Pembroke Gardens. One does not know if Christopher had already given Heinz the reckless advice to put Hausdiener (domestic servant) as his occupation in his passport, but in any case on  this occasion it caused no trouble. Heinz was introduced to many of Christopher’s friends, including my sister Beatrix to whom he became completely devoted. When the tourist visa expired, Heinz went back to Germany, though with many misgivings on Christopher’s part.

III
     
      

    A new chapter now unexpectedly opened in Christopher’s life. Very soon after Heinz’s departure, he had a telephone call from Jean Ross, whom he had met in Berlin as one of his fellow-lodgers in the Nollendorfstrasse for a time, when she was earning her living as a (not very remarkable) singer in a second-rate cabaret. She had not yet been immortalized as Sally Bowles, though Christopher must already have seen her as that character in his mind in the vast scenario of ‘The Lost’, out of which all his Berlin stories were eventually to be extracted and shaped.
    Jean Ross now told him that she had met ‘an absolutely marvellous man’ who was a film director and was looking for an Englishman who could help him with the script for a film he had contracted to do for Gaumont British. She got him to read  The Memorial , and he admired it and wanted to meet the author as soon as possible. The name of the film director was Berthold Viertel, an Austrian poet who had already directed a number of films in Hollywood. In no time at all they had met and discovered an affinity which went beyond the fact that Christopher  knew all about the situation in central Europe and could discuss the film with him in German. He was hired at once, in the place of Margaret Kennedy 2 who had had to drop out, and they started work with considerable excitement on Christopher’s part.
    I got to know Viertel very well at a rather later date when I was back from Vienna in London, but I shall not describe him in detail as Christopher has given a brilliant picture of him in  Prater Violet, where he appears as Dr. Friedrich Bergmann. He was short, stocky, emotional and explosive, very shrewd about the film