FIFTEEN
Wystan and Christopher spent the night of January 19 in Paris. They sailed from Marseilles two days later on the Aramis, a ship of the Messageries Maritimes line.
They were in the second class, and they found to their disgust that they had been given a cabin which was much too small and hadn’t even a table to write on. Wystan decided that they must transfer to the first class, despite the added expense.
However, just as they were going into the purser’s office to arrange this, they were hailed by a large fat man with peering spectacles: “Is one of you Auden?” He introduced himself as an admirer of Auden’s poetry and a rubber merchant. I will call him Mr. Potter.
Mr. Potter was an obviously first-class first-class passenger. It pleased him to display his authority. He spoke to the purser on their behalf and they were promptly given two much larger second-class cabins, one to sleep in, the other with two tables to write on, at no extra charge. In gratitude for this favor, Wystan and Christopher willingly became Mr. Potter’s captive audience:
He sees himself as a debunker, a buccaneer, a sixteenth-century pirate born out of his epoch. He tells his co-directors that what they need is the spirit of the merchant-adventurers. He hates the banks. He hates public companies, because they aren’t allowed to take risks. He particularly enjoys ragging the pompous U.S.A. businessmen. Somebody once cabled him from New York: “Believe market has touched bottom.” Potter cabled back: “Whose?” At board meetings he lies on a sofa—ostensibly because he once had a bad leg; actually because this position gives him a moral advantage. He and his colleagues tell each other dirty limericks and the very serious-minded secretary takes them all down in shorthand—because, as he once explained, he thought they might be in code.
Much less willingly, Wystan and Christopher also became the captive audience of a young man with whom they had to share their table in the second-class dining room. He was a rubber planter, returning from leave in England to a plantation near Singapore. I will call him White.
White showed us photos—men in shorts, with pipes; girls in shorts, with nauseatingly plump knees. An appalling atmosphere of suburban Surrey exuded from the album. Better face a thousand deaths in China than a fortnight of planters’ hospitality. Nothing he tells us about Malaya lessens our horror. Everyone joins the Territorials and there are tarantulas. (As I write this, White is doing his best to annoy and interrupt me by pacing up and down in front of my deck chair. Imagining that I’m writing a story, he says: “Their lips met in one long kiss.”)
* * *
They docked at Port Said on the morning of January 25. Francis, who was now living in Egypt, came down from Cairo to meet the ship. He seemed shakier and a bit shrunken but essentially unchanged.
Wystan and Christopher were eager to explore Port Said, being still under the spell of its legend as the sex capital of the world. Francis assured them that it was deadly dull. He suggested that they should drive back with him to Cairo and reembark on the Aramis early next morning at Port Tewfik, after she had passed through the Suez Canal.
Wystan and Christopher were disappointed in the pyramids. They looked messy and quite new; like the tip heaps of a quarry, Wystan said. But they were staggered by the Sphinx. It seemed so alive, so horribly injured, so malign. A passenger on the Aramis had told them that the ancient Egyptians must have psychically foreseen the future importance of America to the rest of the world; that was why they had placed the Sphinx facing westward. Back on the ship, a few days later, Wystan wrote a poem which declared that the Sphinx is “gazing for ever towards shrill America.” But then both he and Christopher were troubled by doubts. Did the Sphinx face westward? Strangely enough, neither of them could remember. Finally—after their return to London—Wystan asked someone at the Egyptian embassy. With the result that his revised version of the poem reads: “Turning/a vast behind on shrill America.”
In Cairo that evening, they drank with Francis at a street-side café. Every few moments, boys would thrust sex postcards, bow ties, lottery tickets, riding whips, and clockwork trains into their faces; now and then, an offered carpet or curtain would hide them from each other altogether and cut off their conversation, despite Francis’s screams at the vendors. He became his Greek self again, except that here he screamed in Arabic.
Later he took them to visit a friend who was a professor at the university. The professor told them tale after tale of Egyptian dishonesty, treachery, bribability, and self-sale. Both he and Francis spoke of the country’s corruption with disgust, but they would probably have been resentful if Wystan or Christopher had criticized it. Egypt was an addiction which only addicts had the right to despise.
When they said goodbye to Francis that night, it was to be for the last time. He died in Egypt, in 1942.
* * *
They steamed southward, heading for Djibouti, Colombo, Singapore, Saigon, and, ultimately, Hong Kong; heading for the warm seas sacred to Conrad and to Maugham, with dolphins leaping before their bows and sparks of phosphorus in their wake. Wystan endured the voyage glumly, sometimes grumpily; he disliked being at sea, deplored the tropics, felt uprooted from his chilly beloved North. But Christopher, the place snob, found a new enchantment in each port of call. He was East of Suez!
Meanwhile, they had frequent talks with White and with Mr. Potter. White had now confessed to them that he was having an affair with the wife of a fellow planter who was a neighbor and close friend of his, in Malaya. The wife had told White that she had never dreamed love could be like this, “something wild and dangerous.” And White had discovered that she was his “complete physical, spiritual, and emotional counterpart.” The husband suspected nothing. White felt like a cad, but he couldn’t give her up. “If anyone were to tell me, ‘You oughtn’t to go on seeing her,’” White said, “I should scream and say, ‘Don’t be silly.’”
When asked why the two of them didn’t run away together, White explained that the world of rubber planting consisted only of Malaya and Ceylon; it was very small—everybody knew everybody—and very strict. A man who stole another man’s wife would be cut dead; he wouldn’t be able to show his face in the club or play rugger or tennis or go to dances. He would be obliged to give up his job. And there was nowhere else for a planter to go. Rubber planting was all White knew or cared about. He hated the prospect of returning to England and getting some other employment. His life would be ruined and so would hers.
Wystan and Christopher were now no longer bored by White. He fascinated them, because he had turned into a Maugham character. And they themselves had become characters in his story, by introducing him to Mr. Potter. For Mr. Potter had told them that he was planning to start some rubber plantations in Siam; and that he was on the lookout for an experienced planter who would be prepared to leave his present job and manage his plantations for him.
White and Mr. Potter henceforth met daily for deck games and bridge, throughout the rest of their time on board. If Mr. Potter had indeed offered him a managership, White didn’t tell them. But this might be due to discretion, or an unwillingness to admit, even to himself, that the future of his romance was now in his own hands. He and Mr. Potter left the ship together at Singapore … Had the impression made by Wystan’s poems on Mr. Potter started a chain reaction which would end in White’s lifelong happiness? Wystan and Christopher never knew.
* * *
On February 16, they reached Hong Kong. Both of them found the city hideous—which surprised me when I visited it in 1957 and thought it picturesque, to say the least. But no doubt Wystan and Christopher had been expecting something purely and romantically Oriental. They didn’t appreciate the clash of architectural styles in this Victorian-colonial fortress.
They were invited to formal dinner parties at which they met government officials and millionaires. Wystan was not charmed by the food or the company. “The oxtail soup wasn’t oxtail,” he wrote. “The women were cows and wore mermaid dresses; Sir Blank Blank, a squat red-faced toad, was reputed to have the Eighteenth Century Mind.” Speaking of the Japanese invasion of China, a businessman said to Christopher: “Of course, from our point of view, both sides are just natives.” A lady told him that a formerly respected member of Hong Kong society had been seen furtively eating dog at a Chinese restaurant on the mainland, and that the pet dogs owned by her friends kept disappearing. When Wystan and Christopher tried to find out about the journey which was ahead of them, they were given the kind of advice intended to scare novices: Never mix with a Chinese crowd or you’ll get typhus. Never go for a walk by yourselves or they’ll shoot you as spies.
* * *
On February 28, they left Hong Kong by river boat for Canton. Their wanderings around China during the next three and a half months are recorded in Journey to a War. Here are a few impressions which come to me when I try to resmell, retaste, rehear, and resee that experience:
The sweetly perfumed smell of the dust—said to be poisonous because the wind blew it from the family grave mounds which occupied part of every peasant’s land; some people wore masks to protect themselves from it. The taste of two kinds of tea—either very faint, clear water with a pale green sprig floating; or strongly fishy, dark brown. The pig squeal of wheelbarrows with unoiled wheels, “because the squeal is cheaper.” The clatter of mah-jongg players’ tiles in the inns at night. Blue-clad figures dotted all over a landscape—men in blue, women in blue, children in blue—whichever way you looked. And smiles, smiles all around you—did it cost them no effort to keep their mouths in that position? Your face ached from smiling back.
Despite some wild rides in chauffeured cars, I remember transportation as slowness. Slow trains, days late already, that stopped suddenly for hours on end, then restarted suddenly without the slightest warning; they would have left you stranded in the back of nowhere if you’d strayed too far away from them. Painfully slow hikes along cobbled roads as narrow as garden paths. Slow plodding through the rain on little furry horses. Slow careful descents in carrying chairs of nearly vertical mountain trails, when even your own terror was in slow motion. Being carried in chairs and pulled in rickshaws created a physical relationship which both Wystan and Christopher found indecent. Man has no right to make such use of manpower, they said. When their feet hurt sufficiently, they swallowed their scruples. On such occasions, the very toughness and willingness of their carriers and pullers shamed them—all the more so, if one of those lithe erect figures turned and showed, as sometimes happened, that the youthful trunk supported an aged wrinkled face.
* * *
When the two of them were traveling, they caused much curiosity and laughter. Wystan had a woolen cap and an immense shapeless topcoat, with carpet slippers to appease his corns. Christopher had a beret, a turtleneck sweater, and oversized riding boots which gave him blisters. Wystan dressed in the way that was natural to him. Christopher was in masquerade as a war correspondent.
He may have looked the part—correspondents can be a bit absurd—but he must often have betrayed his amateur status by his nervousness. The threat of air raids kept him keyed up, especially when he was on a train. If they were ordered to leave it and take cover, he couldn’t restrain himself from hurrying. Wystan never hurried. At Tungkwan, when their train had to pass a place where some Japanese guns were mounted on the opposite side of the Yellow River, Christopher was the one who took precautions; he insisted on opening the window lest its glass should be blown in by an explosion.
Christopher was always more apt to be troubled by the threat of danger than by danger itself. When he first saw an air raid, he felt awe rather than fear—awe followed by exhilaration. He was awed by being in the presence of absolute, impersonal hostility. These planes had come simply to destroy.
The searchlights criss-crossed and suddenly there they were, flying close together and high up. It was as if a microscope had brought into focus the bacilli of a fatal disease.
Then, as the antiaircraft guns crashed out, the tracer bullets shot upward, buildings flamed, and the punching concussions of the bombs made Christopher catch his breath, he was aware only of a violent physical excitement; “something inside me was flapping about like a fish.” He describes the spectacle as “wrong, an insult to Nature” but admits that it was also “as tremendous as Beethoven.”
On such occasions, Wystan would say: “Nothing’s going to happen, I know it won’t, nothing like that ever happens to me.” His bland irrational assurance irritated Christopher. Yet Christopher did find an equally irrational sense of safety in their being together. Their relationship seemed at all times more real than their surroundings—this country and this war. So much so that he could almost imagine they were invulnerable—just as Martians are sometimes said to be, in tales about their visits to our world.
* * *
Were the two of them ever in serious danger of being killed? Two or three times, perhaps. A shell might just possibly have hit their compartment when the train was passing Tungkwan; the Japanese often fired on the trains, though they seldom did them much damage. Then there was a daytime air battle over Hankow which Wystan and Christopher watched lying on their backs on the lawn of the British consulate. (This was Wystan’s idea, to avoid getting a stiff neck.) During the battle, some sort of missile did hit the ground quite close to them. And then there was their visit to the front, at Han Chwang. The Chinese started to bombard the Japanese lines and the Japanese fired back. Wystan and Christopher were told by their hosts that they must leave. As they were crossing a large empty field, just behind the trenches, several Japanese planes appeared and circled low overhead. The soldier who was escorting Wystan and Christopher urged them to lie down, although there was absolutely no cover. They were now subject to the whim of the Japanese pilots and might well have been machine-gunned. But all that happened was that Wystan took photographs, telling Christopher: “You look wonderful, with your great nose cleaving the summer air.” After which he shuffled his carpet slippers impatiently, wanting to ignore the planes and hurry on to the village where their lunch was waiting.
* * *
This Chinese journey was the longest continuous confrontation which Wystan and Christopher were ever to have in the course of their lives. Here they were, nakedly exposed to each other, day after day. But they only became conscious of this when there was friction between them.
Wystan accused Christopher of sulking whenever his will was crossed. Christopher’s despotism and sulks sometimes irritated Wystan. But more often he endured them good-naturedly and with humor, as he had been enduring them for years:
Who is that funny-looking young man, so squat with a top-heavy head,
A cross between a cavalry major and a rather prim landlady,
Sitting there sipping a cigarette?
If absolutely the whole universe fails to bow to your command,
How you stamp your bright little shoe,
How you pout,
House-proud old landlady.
At times I could shake you.
(These are extracts from a poem—basically affectionate in tone—which Wystan had written in a book he gave Christopher, the year before. The book was D. H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers; hence Wystan’s imitation of Lawrence’s style.)
Wystan was well aware of the sinister side of Christopher’s character, and he didn’t deny that it fascinated him more than it repelled him. Christopher writes that “Wystan once told me, almost admiringly, that I was the cruellest and most unscrupulous person he had ever met.” It seems to me that Wystan was incapable of cruelty but that he had a streak of masochism in him which could invite it from others.
After their return to England, Christopher wrote in his diary:
In China I sometimes found myself really hating him—hating his pedantic insistence on “objectivity,” which was really a reaction from my own woolly-mindedness. I was meanly jealous of him, too. Jealous of his share of the limelight; jealous because he’ll no longer play the role of dependent, admiring younger brother. Indeed, I got such a physical dislike of him that I deliberately willed him to get ill; which he did.
Then, in New York and on the Atlantic crossing, we had these extraordinary scenes—Wystan in tears, telling me that no one would ever love him, that he would never have my sexual success. That flattered my vanity; but still my sadism wasn’t appeased. And actually—believe it or not—when we got back to England I wouldn’t have him to stay the night, because I was jealous of him and wanted to stage the Returning Hero act all by myself … Of course, I’m well aware that these confessions sound far worse than they are. My essential feeling for Wystan is untouched by all this, and will remain so.
Most of their arguments in China were games which they played with each other, to pass the time. It was only when they got onto metaphysics that they ceased to be playful. Then Christopher’s “woolly-mindedness” clashed with Wystan’s “pedantic objectivity,” as Christopher declared passionately that he knew he hadn’t got a soul.
According to Christopher’s diary:
The more I think about myself, the more I’m persuaded that, as a person, I really don’t exist. That is one of the reasons why I can’t believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My “character” is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my “feelings” are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli.
Christopher did well to call himself woolly-minded. All he has actually stated here is that he can’t believe in his own individuality as something absolute and eternal; the word “soul” is introduced, quite improperly, as a synonym for “person.”
A year later, when Christopher was in California, he would have long talks on this subject with Gerald Heard. (Gerald Heard and Chris Wood, together with Aldous and Maria Huxley, had left England for the States in April 1937.) As the result of his talks with Gerald and with Gerald’s friend and teacher, the Hindu monk Prabhavananda, Christopher would find himself able to believe—as a possibility, at least—that an eternal impersonal presence (call it “the soul” if you like) exists within all creatures and is other than the mutable non-eternal “person.” He would then feel that all his earlier difficulties had been merely semantic; that he could have been converted to this belief at any time in his life, if only someone had used the right words to explain it to him. Now, I doubt this. I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.
But, although Christopher wasn’t yet aware that he needed such a belief, he may have been feeling the need subconsciously. This would explain his recently increased hostility toward what he thought of as “religion”—the version of Christianity he had been taught in his childhood. Perhaps he was afraid that he would be forced to accept it, at last, after nearly fifteen years of atheism.
When Christopher raged against religion, Wystan would laugh and say, “Careful, careful, my dear—if you keep going on like that, you’ll have such a conversion, one of these days!” If Christopher did indeed hate Wystan at moments, it was because of the smugness of Wystan’s Christian dogmatism.
During their arguments, Christopher sometimes invoked the example of Forster: Morgan, he said, was incapable of having any truck with “such Fascist filth.” I wonder, now, if Wystan then believed what he stated in a letter to Christopher many years later, in explanation of Forster’s declared agnosticism: “As I see him, Morgan is a person who is so accustomed to the Presence of God that he is unaware of it; he has never known what it feels like when that Presence is withdrawn.” If Wystan did already believe this in 1938, he wisely kept his mouth shut. I can imagine the yell of protest Christopher would have uttered, on hearing such an outrageous accusation against his Master.
* * *
On May 25, they reached Shanghai. This was the last stop on their Chinese journey. They had been invited by the British ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, and his wife, to stay at their house in the International Settlement. The four of them had first met in Hong Kong and again in Hankow. Archie was a big handsome humorous Scot, a pipe smoker with a collection of thirty-two pipes to choose from. Tita Clark-Kerr was a beautiful tiny blond Chilean, who read detective stories.
The house, with its columns and clipped lawns, its vases and lacquered screens, its Chinese servants in lemon silk jackets, was every inch a Residence. Archie and Tita didn’t even pretend to feel at home in it. Their daytime lives were lived almost entirely in public, passing from one diplomatic or social duty to another, while many sharp eyes and ears interpreted their least gesture and lightest word. No doubt, it gave them some slight relaxation to entertain two guests who weren’t official personages. Archie referred to Wystan and Christopher as the Poets, and the Poets did their best to reciprocate by behaving as poetically as good manners permitted. Still, it was a strain. And, all too often, when they had got Archie to themselves in his study and were laughing and joking, a secretary would enter to announce that it was time he left for some conference. Then the tall doors would be thrown open, an order would be barked out, the guard on the staircase outside would crash to attention, and Archie, now His Excellency, would slowly, gravely descend the stairs. Before their very eyes, he became the British Empire.
Within the International Settlement, the two extremes of the human condition almost touched each other. Here were the mansions and the banks, the elegant shops, the luxury restaurants, and the nightclub at the top of a tower, from which guests had watched the Japanese attack on the outer city, a few months earlier. And here were the refugee camps and the dozens of factories in which children were being literally worked to death by their employers. The refugees were packed into huts with triple tiers of shelves: one shelf for each family to cook, eat, and sleep on. The perimeter of the Settlement was guarded by a mixed force of foreign troops, confronting the Japanese troops who guarded their conquered territory of deserted ruins.
All this Wystan and Christopher dutifully inspected, described, photographed. They had seen ugly sights during their Chinese journey—wounded soldiers stranded at railway stations, without medical aid, some of them stinking of gas gangrene; mutilated corpses after an air raid. But misery in Shanghai seemed more miserable than elsewhere, because its victims were trapped between their Western or Chinese exploiters and their Japanese conquerors, without any apparent hope of escape.
Toward the end of their visit, Wystan and Christopher began taking afternoon holidays from their social consciences in a bathhouse where you were erotically soaped and massaged by young men. You could pick your attendants, and many of them were beautiful. Those who were temporarily disengaged would watch the action, with giggles, through peepholes in the walls of the bathrooms. What made the experience pleasingly exotic was that tea was served to the customer throughout; even in the midst of an embrace, the attendant would disengage one hand, pour a cupful, and raise it, tenderly but firmly, to the customer’s lips. If you refused the tea at first, the attendant went on offering it until you accepted. It was like a sex fantasy in which a naked nurse makes love to the patient but still insists on giving him his medicine punctually, at the required intervals.
Every evening, when they met Archie and Tita for pre-dinner cocktails, Archie would ask what they had been doing that afternoon. If they had been to the bathhouse, they had to invent something. Archie accepted their lies without comment, but a certain gleam in his eye made them wonder if he was playing a game with them. Probably, they said to each other, they were followed whenever they went out, as a routine security measure, and a police report of their movements was placed on Archie’s desk. Of one thing they felt certain: if Archie did know about the bathhouse, he wouldn’t be in the least shocked.
* * *
Wystan and Christopher had deliberately kept their travel plans vague, choosing one route rather than another as local circumstances suggested. Having now decided that they wanted to return to England by way of New York, they went to the U.S. authorities in Shanghai to ask for transit visas. It never occurred to them that they would have the least difficulty in getting these.
But it so happened that the official on duty that day was in a bad humor. He had just been harassed by an obstinate flock of White Russians who wanted to emigrate to the States and wouldn’t take nyet for an answer. Having dismissed them with understandable but unnecessary brusqueness, he turned impatiently to Wystan and Christopher. They told him their business. He answered that they should have applied for the visas in England before they started. Could they prove to him that it was absolutely necessary for them to pass through New York? No? Then let them cross Canada and sail home from Halifax, as British subjects should.
As they turned to leave, frustrated and furious, the official ungraciously asked them what they were doing in Shanghai. Perhaps he suspected them of being undesirables who should be deported from the Settlement. Delighted at this chance to hit back at him, they replied demurely: “Staying with the British ambassador.”
Tableau. The official’s manner changed with indecent suddenness. They were granted special visas which allowed them to visit the States as many times as they cared to, during the next twelve months.
* * *
The ship on which they were to cross the Pacific would call at three ports in Japan. So now they were about to visit what they had come to regard as an enemy country. In China, the Japanese had been the Enemy, the bomb droppers, and as such non-human. They had seen only two at close quarters, as human beings—both of them prisoners. One was a loutish, pathetically scared youth, tied up with rope like a parcel. All they could do for him was to put a cigarette between his lips. The other was an ex-schoolmaster who answered questions in English with a sad natural dignity.
Then, in the International Settlement, they talked to a delegation of Japanese civilians, on a so-called fact-finding mission. These were either the blandest of hypocrites or the most childish of wishful thinkers. They declared that they loved the Chinese people and felt absolutely no bitterness toward them. This war was such a pity; it could have been avoided so easily, Japan’s demands were very reasonable. They hoped that Wystan and Christopher had had no inconvenience while traveling. “Only from your aeroplanes,” Christopher answered, and got a seemingly hearty laugh.
* * *
They sailed from Shanghai on June 12. Their Canadian Pacific liner was comfortable and old-fashioned, with an open coal-burning fireplace in the lounge. Her name evoked the days of Victorian imperial megalomania: Empress of Asia.
Two days later, they saw their first seaport on the Japanese coast. Christopher’s immediate reaction was to exclaim: “Ibsen!” The psychological climate of the little town seemed Scandinavian; it looked so sad and drab and clean. The temple in its park made him think of a municipal office. He missed China’s gaudy dirty picturesqueness. This was Nagasaki, seven years before the atomic bomb.
In Kobe, all the shops were lighted but the street lamps weren’t—in case of air raids, they were told. But surely the Chinese were incapable of bombing Japan? The precaution seemed absurd; perhaps it was actually an attempt to encourage Japanese war-mindedness.
On the train to Tokyo, the car porter annoyed Wystan by flicking continually around his feet with brush and dustpan, collecting his cigarette ash. This was a vicious circle, since Wystan kept dropping it, out of more or less deliberate aggression. They were lucky enough to get a calming glimpse of benign Mount Fuji lit by the setting sun, before the night clouds closed around it. But, when they arrived in Tokyo:
A raving screaming mob with banners was seeing a troop train out of the station to the front. The sight so shocked poor Wystan that he dropped and broke his only pair of glasses, and so will travel blind to New York. [Wystan, being nearsighted, would still be able to read, however.]
They spent the night of June 17–18 at the Imperial Hotel. I have a memory connected with this which I suspect. It isn’t recorded in Christopher’s diary and it is rather too symbolic to be strictly true:
While Christopher is sitting waiting for Wystan in the lobby of the hotel, next morning, he witnesses a ceremonious meeting between two officers in uniform, a Nazi and a Japanese—the Berlin–Tokyo Axis personified. They exchange Nazi salutes, then bow Japanese-style, then shake hands. They are standing beneath a big chandelier; and, as they greet each other, the chandelier begins to sway. It is Christopher’s first, very slight, earthquake.
That afternoon, they sailed from Yokohama, bound for Vancouver. Christopher had never before seen the farewell ritual of throwing one end of a paper streamer from the ship to the shore, thus linking yourself for a few last moments with someone you are leaving behind. As the ship began to move, Christopher suddenly imagined Heinz standing down there on the dock, the streamer pulling tight between them, then snapping … The experience was almost physically painful.
* * *
The North Pacific was cold, even now at midsummer, and very calm. They got glimpses of the Aleutian Islands. Beyond these, there was a pale frore brightness in the sky which suggested the gleam of the icecap. Somebody died on board and was buried at sea. I remember flowers being scattered at the end of the ceremony—happy-landing flowers collected from the staterooms, already faded. They floated away behind the ship, on the smooth gray surface of the water, far far to westward. They were out of sight before they sank.
This eventless ten-day voyage was an ideal opportunity for physical and mental convalescence. Both Wystan and Christopher had suffered from dysentery throughout their journey. While they were staying with the Clark-Kerrs, Christopher’s stomach cramps had once made him roll on the bedroom floor grunting with pain and jerking his body like an opening and shutting jackknife. Later, in England, he was told by the doctor that his intestines still retained souvenirs of China, at least twenty kinds of internal parasite.
The mental souvenir was odder than these. For some months after leaving China, he had a recurrent dream of being in an air raid. But the air raid—or whatever it represented—was always pleasantly exciting, never terrifying. Without being able to interpret this dream exactly, he became aware that he had now lost much of his neurotic fear of “War” as a concept. A very little exposure to danger will go a long way, psychologically; he had learned from it that his fear in China had been a healthy fear which he needn’t be ashamed of. He now no longer dreaded that he would behave worse than most other people in a crisis, though he didn’t expect to behave better. This self-knowledge would influence his future decisions, making him less inclined to worry how the world might judge them.
* * *
The entrance to Vancouver harbor was superb; and the immigration official said, “Welcome to Canada!” To Christopher, who had come to regard all such officials in Europe as his natural enemies, this formal tourist-conscious greeting had a cheering novelty; the New World seemed full of good will. And the Canadian Pacific train obligingly stopped to let them stroll around and admire the Great Divide and Lake Louise. The country was vast, magnificent, cold, clean, and empty, yet with a reassuring Scottish snugness of oatmeal, cream, rich wholesome food.
Then down into the United States at Portal, North Dakota—a dismaying contrast. The hot shabby prairie was blowing itself away in clouds of dust. And the prices in the dining car shocked them. Driving through Chicago after dark, they hoped for glimpses of gangsters but were shown only a flower shop which had supplied wreaths for their funerals. On the last leg of the ride to New York, the landscape became stately with cliffs and the broadening Hudson. Then they arrived and found themselves in a station built like an oversized Roman temple. Wystan said, “We ought to be wearing togas.”
Waiting to greet them was George Davis, novelist and literary editor of a fashion magazine and their friend already; they had met him in London the year before. Small, plump, handsome, sparkling, he gaily stuffed into their pockets the wads of dollar bills he had earned for them by selling their travel articles to his own magazine and others. Utterly at their disposal as host, guide, and fulfiller of all their desires, he was there to make them feel that New York was a theatrical performance staged expressly for them and that everybody in this city had been yearning for their arrival. He never left them for long throughout the nine days’ wonder of their visit.
George’s showmanship created a delirium of impressions. The Rainbow Room, balanced on a fountain jet of lights shot skyward, sixty-five stories high. (Perhaps it was there that Christopher first heard, “Jeepers, creepers, where’d ya get those peepers?” which would become as magic for him as the long-ago songs of Berlin, when he had found a boy to dedicate it to.) Maxine Sullivan in Harlem swing-singing “Loch Lomond” into a live darkness of black faces and white eyeballs. Coney Island on the Fourth of July, crammed to the water’s edge. A Bowery dive where a fight broke out and the bartender vaulted the bar with a club and they were hurried away as the police drove up with screaming sirens. (George apologized profusely, saying he’d never known such a thing to happen there before. But Wystan and Christopher took it all for granted; it was exactly what the movies had taught them to expect of New York.)
They were interviewed and photographed. They were taken to parties and introduced to celebrities: Maxwell Anderson, Muriel Draper, Orson Welles, Kurt Weill and his wife, Lotte Lenya (whom George would later marry). They took Benzedrine every morning to give them energy for these encounters, Seconal every night to make them sleep. Wystan later made the use of uppers and downers part of his routine; he called it “the chemical life.”
George also offered to make sexual introductions for them. “All right,” said Christopher, half in joke. “I want to meet a beautiful blond boy, about eighteen, intelligent, with very sexy legs.” Such a boy was instantly produced; he was almost too suitable to be true. I will call him Vernon.
Christopher reacted to Vernon much as he had reacted to Bubi, on his first Berlin visit. Both were infatuations based on a fantasy; only, this time, Christopher was looking for the American, not the German, Boy. The earlier infatuation had been stronger but less serious, and it had owed a great deal of its strength to difficulty in communication. This time there was no language barrier and a lot more for the two of them to talk about; Vernon really was intelligent and eager to educate himself. He was also good-natured, tough, and independent. He radiated health and physical energy. Comparing him with those exquisite but remote, almost otherworldly-looking attendants at the Shanghai bathhouse, Christopher found him wonderfully human-smelling, muscular, hairy, earthy.
Vernon himself certainly wasn’t infatuated, but I think he was attracted. Christopher, at that particular moment, could easily be regarded as a romantic figure, just returned from dangerous exotic adventures and worthy of this young city dweller’s admiration and envy.
Vernon was tired of New York and longed to leave it; Christopher, who would be forced to leave it within a few days, had fallen under its spell. However, its spell was now largely Vernon’s, the American Boy’s. The American Boy is also the Walt Whitman Boy. And the Walt Whitman Boy is, by definition, a wanderer. So Christopher found it natural to indulge in daydreams of a future wander-comradeship with Vernon in the Whitman tradition:
We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going, North and
South excursions making …
Auden has left it on record, in an interview given to the BBC many years later, that it was during this first visit to New York that he and Christopher decided to return and settle in the States for good:
I would say that I felt the situation in England for me was becoming impossible. I couldn’t grow up. That English life … is for me a family life, and I love my family but I don’t want to live with them.
I don’t remember that Christopher was so positive in making up his mind to emigrate, at that time. But then, Christopher’s feelings about England were different from Wystan’s. He didn’t think of England as his family. And, much as he was often able to enjoy himself there, he continued to feel the old hostility. For him, it was still the land of the Others. And in rejecting Heinz, it had rejected him too.
(Not until after the Second War, when England had ceased to be imperial and had become a minor power with a cosmopolitan population, did Christopher begin to love it, for the first time in his life. It had turned into the kind of country he had always wanted it to be.)
Besides, Christopher had moved, or been moved, around so much already that another change of country would have far less emotional significance for him than it would have for Wystan. So it was for Wystan to decide. His own attitude was passive. If Wystan chose to emigrate, then he would too. Despite their occasional frictions, he felt closer to Wystan than ever. While nearly all of his other friends were gradually withdrawing from him, into long-term relationships or careers or both, life seemed to be binding the two of them together.