Free Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood

graves, envied by their stay-at-home compatriots; like Waring in Browning’s poem, or like Bierce, who vanished forever into Mexico.
    In the early stages of our friendship, I was drawn to him by the adventurousness of his life. His renunciation of England, his poverty, his friendship, his independence, his work, all struck me as heroic. During months in the winter of 1930, when I went back to England, I corresponded with him in the spirit of writing letters to a Polar explorer.
    Thus writes Stephen Spender, serio-comically, in his autobiography, World within World. Stephen had adopted Wystan and Christopher as his mentors while he was still at Oxford. Christopher had been eager to welcome Stephen as a pupil; he enjoyed preaching Lane-Layard to him and he briskly took charge of Stephen’s problems as a writer: “Don’t be put off by what any don says about Form. What does C.” (referring to an internationally famous scholar and critic) “know about Form? I tell you it is a good well-constructed piece of work. Isn’t that enough for you?”
    It was more than enough. Stephen responded in the spirit of wholehearted pupilship:
    How many years will it take before I can emerge from the waters at the point where you have emerged. It is as though I had to swim that rotten Channel. I have always been trying to build tunnels under it. Now I give up. I see it has got to be swum.
    After their meeting in Hamburg in the summer of 1930, Stephen began visiting Christopher in Berlin. Christopher let him have a glimpse of the rigors of the Simeonstrasse, and he was suitably impressed. (Writing to me more than forty years later, Stephen observed satirically: “This was your most heroic period of poverty and sacrificing everything to buying new suits for Otto.”) Stephen was naturally generous and also conscious that, compared to Christopher, he was well off. Christopher didn’t discourage this idea. He accepted money from Stephen and occasionally from Edward. Sometimes he paid it back, sometimes he didn’t. Stephen also showered him with books and other gifts.
    As pupil, Stephen had to endure Christopher’s moods, his hypochondria, his sulks, and his domestic crises; but he seemed content to do this as long as he could enjoy Christopher’s play-acting and dogmatic pronouncements. I can only suppose that Christopher’s performance was worth the trouble. Christopher seems to have had a remarkable power of dramatizing his predicament at any given moment, so that you experienced it as though you were watching a film in which you yourself had a part. Stephen possessed this power also, and soon he would begin to outshine his mentor. Which led to difficulties, later.
    Mentor and pupil must have made an arresting pair, as they walked the streets and parks of Berlin together. Stephen, at twenty-one, still fitted pretty well the description of him at nineteen, as Stephen Savage in Lions and Shadows:
    He burst in upon us, blushing, sniggering loudly, contriving to trip over the edge of the carpet—an immensely tall shambling boy with a great scarlet poppy-face, wild frizzy hair and eyes the violent color of bluebells. His beautiful resonant voice … would carry to the farthest corners of the largest restaurant the most intimate details of his private life.
    According to World within World, Christopher had:
    a neatness of the cuffs emphasized by the way in which he often held his hands extended, slightly apart from his body.
    (I myself think that Christopher had unconsciously copied this from the pose of a fighter in a Western movie who is just about to draw his guns.)
    His hair was brushed in a boyish lick over his forehead, below which his round shining eyes had a steadiness which seemed to come from the strain of effort … They were the eyes of someone who, when he is a passenger in an aeroplane, thinks that the machine is kept in the air by an act of his will … The