When Christopher talked like this, most of his pupils would smile, finding him charmingly whimsical and so English. Only a few decided that he was being metaphysical and therefore listened with respect. Having listened, they would question him and then argue, taking his statements with absolute literalness, until he became tired and tongue-tied.
How could he possibly explain himself to these people? They wanted to learn English for show-off social reasons, or to be able to read Aldous Huxley in the original. Whereas he had learned German simply and solely to be able to talk to his sex partners. For him, the entire German language—all the way from the keep-off-the-grass signs in the park to Goethe’s stanza on the wall—was irradiated with sex. For him, the difference between a table and ein Tisch was that a table was the dining table in his mother’s house and ein Tisch was ein Tisch in the Cosy Corner.
* * *
Christopher had made up his mind that as soon as he was settled in Berlin he would start revising his novel, The Memorial. He had finished the first draft of it about six months before this. Since then, he had scarcely looked at it.
So now, every morning, with his manuscript under his arm, he walked along In den Zelten and sat down in one of its cafés; indoors if the weather was cold or wet, out of doors in his overcoat if it was mild. He didn’t come here merely because the room in his apartment was dark. To work in this public atmosphere seemed better suited to his new way of life. He wanted to be in constant contact with Germans and Germany throughout the day, not shut up alone.
With his manuscript in front of him, a tall glass of beer on his right, a cigarette burning in an ashtray on his left, he sipped and wrote, puffed and wrote. The beer, of course, was German: Schultheiss-Patzenhofer. The cigarette was a Turkish-grown brand especially popular in Berlin: Salem Aleikum. Bubi had introduced him to both, so the taste of the one and the smell of the other were magically charged. And how strange and delightful it was to be sitting here, with Turkish smoke tickling his nostrils and German beer faintly bitter on his tongue, writing a story in the English language about an English family in an English country house! It was most unlikely that any of the people here would be able to understand what he was writing. This gave him a soothing sense of privacy, which the noise of their talk couldn’t seriously disturb; it was on a different wave length. With them around him, it was actually easier to concentrate than when he was by himself. He was alone and yet not alone. He could move in and out of their world at will. He was beginning to realize how completely at home one can be as a foreigner.
The beer, taken in tiny doses, put Christopher into a state of gradually increasing relaxation which he found he could safely prolong for about two and a half hours. All this while, his pencil moved over the paper with less and less inhibition, fewer and fewer pauses. But then, somewhere in the middle of the fourth glass, his attention lost its grip upon his theme. He wrote lines which made him grin to himself, knowing, as he did so, that they wouldn’t seem so clever—maybe not clever at all—when he reread them later. He was getting a bit silly. He must stop. He picked up his papers, left the money for the waiter, and walked slowly home, thinking to himself: This is what freedom is. This is how I ought always to have lived.
* * *
And now he must wake Francis and tell him to dress for lunch. Francis seldom actually needed waking. Usually, Christopher would find him reading and smoking, propped on pillows, on the outer side of his bed. On the inner side, snuggled against the wall, the back of the head of a boy would be visible. And sometimes another boy would be asleep on the couch, under a pile of coats and rugs.
When Christopher entered the bedroom, Francis would give him a faintly embarrassed smile which was like a halfhearted apology for the untidiness of the room and of his life. Christopher had no wish to make Francis feel apologetic. But he had to admit to himself that this daily encounter did make him feel smug. He had been working all morning; Francis hadn’t.
In Down There on a Visit, Francis appears as a character called Ambrose and is described as follows:
His figure was slim and erect and there was a boyishness in his quick movements. But his dark-skinned face was quite shockingly lined, as if Life had mauled him with its claws. His hair fell picturesquely about his face in wavy black locks which were already streaked with grey. There was a gentle surprise in the expression of his dark brown eyes. He could become frantically nervous at an instant’s notice—I saw that; with his sensitive nostrils and fine-drawn cheekbones, he had the look of a horse which may bolt without warning. And yet there was a kind of inner contemplative repose in the midst of him. It made him touchingly beautiful. He could have posed for the portrait of a saint.
This is true to life, more or less, except for the last three sentences, which relate only to the fictitious part of Ambrose. Photographs of Francis at that time show that he was beautiful, certainly, but that he had the face of a self-indulgent aristocrat, not a contemplative ascetic. I can’t detect the inner repose. He could be surprisingly patient, however; he never minded being kept waiting if he had a drink to wait with. He seemed almost unaware of discomfort. If anyone complained of it, Francis would reprove him mildly for being “fussy.” Now and then, he had to spend a day in bed; he was an invalid, though an incredibly tough one. He was perhaps suffering from side effects of the treatment for syphilis which he was then undergoing at the Institute. This was a tedious process. Francis was weary of it, all the more so now that he had been told he was no longer infectious. The doctors had warned him against giving up the treatment prematurely, but he probably would, as soon as he left Germany and started to travel in countries with fewer medical conveniences.
It wasn’t long before Christopher realized that Francis harbored an aggression—usually well concealed but occasionally obvious—against all those who had never had syphilis. He appeared to feel that it was their self-righteousness and cowardice which had prevented them from having it, and that they therefore ought to have it, for the good of their souls. Perhaps, in his fantasies, he even imagined himself tricking such people into going to bed with infected partners.
Theoretically, Christopher rather sympathized with this attitude. He saw Francis as an unwitting missionary of the gospel of Homer Lane, trying to teach the world that prophylaxis is one of the Devil’s devices. Nevertheless, though he knew he was being priggish and squeamish, Christopher begged to be excused; he did want to defy the Devil but he didn’t want to do it by getting syphilis, if that could possibly be avoided. Francis tolerated Christopher’s squeamishness good-humoredly. No doubt he felt confident that syphilis would catch up with Christopher sooner or later, because of his sexual promiscuity.
They got along well together. Francis’s life was such that he seldom had the chance of talking to a fellow countryman who was like-minded in many respects. Christopher was eager to know everything that Francis could tell him about Berlin, including the weird idioms of Berlinerisch slang. Francis wasn’t really interested in Germany, however. He never felt truly at home, he said, except in the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean. It was there that he could pull himself together and work. Christopher, who had seen him only in an atmosphere of disorder and self-indulgence, was surprised to discover that he had a serious profession—although, admittedly, he practiced it by fits and starts. He was a trained archaeologist. He had directed archaeological digs in Palestine and elsewhere and written articles on his findings for scientific journals. Francis knew a vast amount about prehistoric Greece. He spoke of it often, with a quiet understated passion which Christopher found curiously moving. It was as if part of his mind dwelt continually in that world.
* * *
As the short winter afternoon began to darken, they would visit Karl Giese for coffee and gossip. The atmosphere of Karl’s sitting room had none of the Institute’s noble seriousness; it was a cozy little nest, lined with photographs and souvenirs.
In repose, Karl’s long handsome face was melancholy. But soon he would be gigg
ling and rolling his eyes. Touching the back of his head with his fingertips, as if patting bobbed curls, he would strike an It-Girl pose. This dedicated, earnest, intelligent campaigner for sexual freedom had an extraordinary innocence at such moments. Christopher saw in him the sturdy peasant youth with a girl’s heart who, long ago, had fallen in love with Hirschfeld, his father image. Karl still referred to Hirschfeld as “Papa.”
He told Christopher that all working-class boys who are homosexual have a natural urge to get themselves educated; therefore, they have to climb into the middle class. This was what Karl had done. Christopher felt shocked by his statement and didn’t want to admit that it was true. Why couldn’t a working-class boy become educated without acquiring bourgeois airs and graces? If his nature required him to be a queen, why couldn’t he be a working-class queen? The fact was that Christopher, the upper-class boy, was now trying to disown his class. Because he hated it, he despised the middle class for aping its ways. That left him with nothing to admire but the working class; so he declared it to be forthright, without frills, altogether on the path of truth. Karl had no such illusions.
One of Karl’s friends—the one Christopher liked best—was not only homosexual and fairly well educated but unashamedly proletarian. This was Erwin Hansen. He was a big muscular man with blond hair close-cropped, Army-style. He had been a gymnastic instructor in the Army; now he did various jobs around the Institute and was running to fat. He was good-humored, with rough and ready manners and pale roving blue eyes. He used to grin sexily at Christopher and sometimes pinch his bottom. Erwin was a Communist, so perhaps his unbourgeois behavior wasn’t altogether spontaneous but a part of his political persona.
Nearly all the friends who looked in on Karl in the afternoons were middle-class queens. They had a world of their own which included clubs for dancing and drinking. These clubs were governed by the code of heterosexual middle-class propriety. If two boys were sitting together and you wanted to dance with one of them, you bowed to both before asking, “May I?” Then, if the boy said yes, you bowed again to the other boy, as though he were the escort of a girl and had just given you his permission to dance with her.
Soon after Christopher’s arrival, Karl had given him a photograph of himself on which he had written: “From one who would like to be your friend.” The inscription was an appeal. Karl wanted to win Christopher away, before it was too late, from Francis—whom he regarded, with sad affection, as a hopeless case—and from what Francis represented: low life, drunkenness, scandals. Karl hoped to convert Christopher to a way of life more worthy of the Third Sex by introducing him to some nice boy with steady habits who had clean fingernails and wore a collar and tie. Christopher was touched by Karl’s concern for him. He really liked Karl, and respected everything about him but his respectability.
Like the young man with female breasts and everyone else who entered the domain of the Institute, Christopher had automatically become a museum specimen, subject to Hirschfeld’s diagnosis and classification. Karl told him, in due course, that Hirschfeld had classified him as “infantile.” Christopher didn’t object to this epithet; he interpreted it as “boyish.” You couldn’t call him a pretty boy—his head and his nose were too big—but he did look young for his age, with his fresh pink complexion, inherited from Kathleen, bright eyes, and glossy dark-brown hair flopping down over his right cheek. He also had a boyish grin, full of clean white teeth. Far better to be boyish, he thought, than effeminate. He could never join the ranks of Karl’s friends and play at nicey-nice third-sexism, because he refused utterly to think of himself as a queen. Wystan was much more mature than Christopher, in this respect. Labels didn’t scare him.
* * *
When night came, Christopher was off with Francis to the bars. Here Francis was, of course, a well-known figure. The boys’ version of his name was Franni. And since, in German, you can put the definite article before a friend’s name—thus making it into a title like that of a saga hero—they also often called Francis “Der Franni,” The Franni. Christopher and Wystan anglicized Franni into Fronny in their letters to each other. The name appears in several of Wystan’s poems, and the Fronny character is present, though unnamed, in the published version of The Dance of Death. He is one of the roles mimed by the Dancer. As the paralyzed patron of a boy bar, he is wheeled onto the stage, makes his will, orders drinks all round, and dies.
In the bars, Christopher used to think of Francis and himself as being like traders who had entered a jungle. The natives of the jungle surrounded them—childlike, curious, mistrustful, sly, easily and unpredictably moved to friendship or hostility. The two traders had what the natives wanted, money. How much of it they would get and what they would have to do to get it was the subject of their bargaining. The natives enjoyed bargaining for bargaining’s sake; this Francis understood profoundly. He was never in a hurry. Indeed, his patience outwore theirs. Francis bought them drinks but promised nothing, and the night grew old. “I never get the really attractive ones,” he used to say. “The ones I finish up with are the ones who haven’t anywhere else to sleep.” Actually, Francis didn’t care who he finished up with; he wasn’t much interested in making love. What did fascinate him—and what began, more and more, to fascinate Christopher, looking at it through Francis’s eyes—was the boys’ world, their slang, their quarrels, their jokes, their outrageous unserious demands, their girls, their thefts, their encounters with the police.
Dazed with drink, smiling to himself, lighting cigarette after cigarette with shaky hands, arguing obstinately with the boys about nothing in indistinct German, Der Franni meandered from bar to bar, waiting for the moment when he would feel ready to go home and sleep. It was characteristic of Christopher that he would accompany Francis every evening on his Journey to the End of the Night, yet always leave him one third of the way through it, going home quite sober at ten, with or without a bedmate, so as to wake up fresh in the morning to get on with his novel. Seldom have wild oats been sown so prudently.
* * *
For Christopher, the Cosy Corner was now no longer the mysterious temple of initiation in which he had met Bubi; Berlin was no longer the fantasy city in which their affair had taken place. Their affair had been essentially a private performance which could only continue as long as Wystan was present to be its audience. Now the performance was over. Berlin had become a real city and the Cosy Corner a real bar. He didn’t for one moment regret this. For now his adventures here were real, too; less magical but far more interesting.
The Cosy Corner (Zossenerstrasse 7) and most of the other bars frequented by Francis and Christopher were in Hallesches Tor, a working-class district. Such places depended on their regular customers. They were small and hard to find and couldn’t afford to advertise themselves, so casual visitors were few. Also, many homosexuals thought them rough and felt safer in the high-class bars of the West End, which only admitted boys who were neatly dressed.
In the West End there were also dens of pseudo-vice catering to heterosexual tourists. Here screaming boys in drag and monocled, Eton-cropped girls in dinner jackets play-acted the high jinks of Sodom and Gomorrah, horrifying the onlookers and reassuring them that Berlin was still the most decadent city in Europe. (Wasn’t Berlin’s famous “decadence” largely a commercial “line” which the Berliners had instinctively developed in their competition with Paris? Paris had long since cornered the straight girl-market, so what was left for Berlin to offer its visitors but a masquerade of perversions?)
The Berlin police “tolerated” the bars. No customer risked arrest simply for being in them. When the bars were raided, which didn’t happen often, it was only the boys who were required to show their papers. Those who hadn’t any or were wanted for some crime would make a rush to escape through a back door or window as the police came in.
Nothing could have looked less decadent than the Cosy Corner. It was plain and homely and unpretentious. Its only decorations were a few photographs of boxers
and racing cyclists, pinned up above the bar. It was heated by a big old-fashioned iron stove. Partly because of the great heat of this stove, partly because they knew it excited their clients (die Stubben), the boys stripped off their sweaters or leather jackets and sat around with their shirts unbuttoned to the navel and their sleeves rolled up to the armpits.
They were all working class and nearly all out of work. If you chose to describe them as male prostitutes (Pupenjungen) you had to add that they were mostly rank amateurs, compared with the more professional boys of the West End. They were greedy but not calculating, temperamentally unable to take thought for the morrow. When they stole they stole stupidly and got caught. Although it would have been in their own interests to have their clients fall in love with them, they did nothing to encourage this. If you mooned over them they became bored and soon began to avoid you. Beyond keeping their hair carefully combed, they showed few signs of vanity. They didn’t seem able to picture themselves as objects of desire. Their attitude was an almost indifferent “take me or leave me.” Their chief reason for coming to the bars was of course to get money, but they also came because this was a club where they could meet other boys and gossip and play cards. Often, if you wanted one of them to join you at your table, he would tell you to wait until he had finished his game.
Christopher’s relations with many of the boys soon became easy and intimate. Perhaps they recognized and were drawn to the boyishness in him. He felt a marvelous freedom in their company. He, who had hinted and stammered in English, could now ask straight out in German for what he wanted. His limited knowledge of the language forced him to be blunt and he wasn’t embarrassed to utter the foreign sex words, since they had no associations with his life in England.