A Shameless Old Reprobate

In 1977 I interviewed Christopher Isherwood about his memoir, Christopher and His Kind. During the interview he said how much he regretted burning the diaries he had kept while living in Berlin in the early 1930s. Why? Because, he told me, they gave a much truer picture of his past than the two novels he based upon them. Instead of being an observer, in the diaries he appeared as a participant, cruising bars in search of ‘boys’, which was why he’d gone to Berlin in the first place. It was okay to admit this now, but in those days you simply couldn’t risk such compromising material falling into the wrong hands. So up in smoke they went.

That Isherwood was gay had been common knowledge for years in 1977. But in 1935, when Mr Norris Changes Trains appeared, there must have been many readers who wondered what the narrator, a clean young Englishman called William Bradshaw, was doing in a latter-day Sodom like Weimar Berlin. He’s supposed to be giving English lessons, which can’t bring in much because his digs are pretty squalid. Perhaps he’s just slumming, with a view to writing about it later, like George Orwell. Bradshaw’s credentials – he’s one of the ‘Suffolk Bradshaws’ – are established by Mr Arthur Norris, his fellow-passenger in the third- class compartment of a train bound for Berlin. Despite the rather obvious wig he’s wearing and teeth ‘like broken rocks’, Norris could also pass for a gentleman – albeit one who’s fallen on hard times (why else is he travelling third class?). He says he’s ‘of independent means’ but his CV, we later learn, reads like a criminal charge sheet. Peripatetic – Bradshaw is astonished to learn how much he has travelled – Norris has been a conman, swindler, pornographer, pimp and double agent. He once spent eighteen months in Wormwood Scrubs for blackmail. No wonder he practically has a seizure when an officious German frontier policeman scrutinizes his passport. Bradshaw feels protective towards Mr Norris, whose gaudy past he’s unaware of, little realizing that the artful dodger has already marked him down as a dupe. A friend of his called Helen, a hard- boiled journalist, tries to warn him off. ‘Don’t trust him an inch,’ she says, adding that Norris’s ‘disgusting mouth’ reminds her of a toad’s. ‘I suppose I’ve got a weakness for toads,’ says Bradshaw, who’s determined to give this shameless old reprobate the benefit of the doubt. He doesn’t turn a hair when Norris declares that ‘it is the privilege of the richer but less mentally endowed members of the community to contribute to the upkeep of people like myself’. Isherwood later admitted he’d originally intended to write ‘a kind of shocker, not unlike those of my cousin, Graham Greene’. In fact Mr Norris, like the man himself, is a pithy mixture of the picaresque and the louche. Bradshaw, who reminds me of the ‘innocents abroad’ that Eric Ambler wrote about in the 1930s, gets caught up in a rather complicated plot to betray the German Communist Party, which ‘Comrade’ Norris, unlikely as it seems, professes to support. Also mixed up in this plot is an equivocal Junker called Kuno, an Anglophile who enjoys adventure stories for boys and asks, rather wistfully, after the Horse Guards. Why not become his secretary, says Norris. Bradshaw declines on the plausible grounds that he would find his duties ‘too heavy’. In Berlin Isherwood lived near the Hirschfeld Institute, a pioneering sex clinic specializing in aberrations that was later sacked by a Nazi mob. The clinic would, I feel sure, have welcomed Norris as a case study. We soon learn that he never leaves home without a large bottle of ‘deliciously refreshing’ Coty perfume. He powders his nose, applies face cream and sometimes resorts to make-up – ‘I feel I need a dash of colour this morning; the weather’s so depressing.’ But despite a taste for garish silk undies he’s not a drag queen. The kiss of the whip, wielded by a ‘severe’ young dominatrix, is what he craves, and he doesn’t give a damn who knows it. If anything, says Bradshaw, being caught in flagrante ‘seems to add spice’ to his enjoyment. Meanwhile the shades of the prison house were beginning to close upon Berlin. Visiting him there in 1932 Isherwood’s friend John Lehmann compared the city to ‘a patient about to undergo an operation without anaesthetic’. In a rare passage of reportage Isherwood endorsed this grim diagnosis:

Berlin was in a state of civil war. Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon. Knives were whipped out, blows were dealt with spiked rings, beer mugs, chair-legs or leaded clubs; bullets slashed the advertisements on the poster columns, rebounded from the iron roofs of latrines. In the middle of a crowded street a young man would be attacked, stripped, thrashed, and left bleeding on the pavement; in fifteen seconds it was all over and the assailants had disappeared.

Norris takes Bradshaw to a Party meeting at which he dilates on the crimes of British imperialism in the Far East, where he lived for a time. Presiding over it is Bayer, a charismatic figure who is based on Willi Münzenberg, described by the historian David Caute as ‘a genius without rival in the creation and manipulation of [Communist] front organizations’. Though he welcomes the two Englishmen, Bayer is clearly sceptical about their commitment to the Cause. Later he tells Bradshaw that Norris is an informant for the French Secret Service. Furious at being duped, Bradshaw confronts Norris. But so practised at dissembling is his quarry that they end up having supper together. It’s a farewell meal because Norris, who knows just how far to go, is about to do yet another bunk – to Mexico, because ‘the countries of Europe are nothing more or less than a collection of mousetraps’. As always, his survival instincts are correct. But he’s reckoned with- out his sinister, limpet-like secretary, Schmidt, who is wise to all his wheezes and exacts a high price for his silence. ‘They are doomed’, concludes Bradshaw, ‘to walk the Earth together.’ Willi Münzenberg also lived to fight another day, escaping Germany on the night of the Reichstag fire. Bayer is not so lucky. Helen says his corpse was seen at the Spandau barracks, adding, with grim levity, ‘Funny thing, his left ear was torn right off . . .’ Isherwood had mixed feelings about both the novel and its reception. At the time he complained to his mother that reviewers treated it as a comedy, overlooking the tragedies it depicted. Later he shouldered much of the blame himself, describing it as ‘a heartless fairy-story about a real city in which human beings were suffering the miseries of political violence and near-starvation’. However that might be, it persuaded Somerset Maugham that Isherwood ‘held the future of the English novel in his hands’. Cyril Connolly, though he deprecated Isherwood’s vernacular style, called him ‘a hope of English fiction’. Even Anthony Powell, no fan of Auden, to whom the book was dedicated, or indeed of Isherwood himself, admitted in his Journals ‘how immensely taken’ he was with Mr Norris: ‘I must have sold several copies by insisting how good it was.’ Isherwood, whose full name was Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood, drew from life, so no prizes for guessing who his narrator is based on. But what about Mr Norris? – who some people have compared to Proust’s character Charlus but who I think has more in common with Evelyn Waugh’s immortal scapegrace Captain Grimes, ‘always in the soup and always climbing out again’. Reviewers didn’t speculate about his identity at the time, but for sixty years or more it’s been an open secret that he’s a projection of Gerald Hamilton (1890–1970), who later claimed that he made Christopher Isherwood, and not the other way round. Like Mr Norris, Hamilton came into a small fortune at an early age. And like Norris, he soon squandered it. Determined to live in the style to which he had become accustomed, he began ‘fishing in troubled waters’, the phrase Norris uses to explain the shifts by which he has lived ever since. Isherwood called Hamilton ‘Dickensian’. He was, as John Lehmann put it, ‘good copy’. In and out of prison for several years after 1916, for offences such as indecency, embezzlement and fraud, Hamilton somehow became sales representative for The Times in Germany, which is how Isherwood met him. Singularly ugly, with a face like a plateful of mortal sins, he had the gift of the gab, which Isherwood faithfully captures. In Berlin, he at one point shared a flat with the self-styled ‘wickedest man in the world’, Aleister Crowley, a ménage you couldn’t make up. Meanwhile Isherwood had fallen for a German youth called Heinz, who was destined to become cannon fodder now that the Nazis were in power. Determined to set up home with his beloved, Isherwood went hither and thither trying to find a safe haven for them both. In England the most he could get for Heinz was a temporary tourist permit, blaming this on bureaucratic homophobia. Then in 1936, while they were staying in Portugal, Heinz’s call-up papers arrived. If only he could change his nationality . . . Cue Gerald Hamilton, now living in Brussels. Isherwood appealed to him for help and Hamilton recommended a dodgy English lawyer working in Brussels called Salinger. Yes, said Salinger, he could arrange a Mexican passport for Heinz, but it would cost £1,000 (about £85,000 today). Isherwood borrowed the money from his mother and hoped for the best. Instead, a series of mishaps ensued, resulting in the arrest of Heinz by the Gestapo and the loss of Isherwood’s money. Heinz and Isherwood would not meet again for fifteen years, by which time the German, who survived prison and service on the Eastern Front, was a happily married family man. Hamilton’s charge sheet lengthened in 1940 to include internment under Regulation 18B with the likes of Sir Oswald Mosley. After the war he continued to live on his wits, writing three autobiographies, in the first of which he quoted Dante: ‘I have appeared vile in the eyes of many.’ But Isherwood forgave him his trespasses. ‘I don’t give a damn whether he swindled us,’ he later wrote. ‘But I do remember all the fun we had together. He had a very cosy personality and an animal innocence, you felt he was only acting according to his nature.’ Isherwood was not alone in exonerating him. A photograph taken on his eightieth birthday shows Hamilton being toasted by a group that includes Lady Antonia Fraser, James Pope-Hennessy and the Spectator’s literary editor, Mark Amory.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 83 © Michael Barber 2024