Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

past, and which seemed likely to be put on by the Group Theatre. He and Wystan now began a collaboration on the play through letters, until Wystan himself suddenly appeared by aeroplane, and they were able to work side by side. They agreed to call it Where is Francis? though the eventual title The Dog Beneath the Skin appears to have been the suggestion of Rupert Doone, the producer.
    The Auden-Isherwood plays do not, however, concern me in this narrative, as I never had anything to do with them, nor did the Hogarth Press. I enjoyed and admired Dog Skin (as we used to call it telegraphically amongst ourselves), The Ascent of F. 6  rather less, and On the Frontier scarcely at all.
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    3    The novelist, author of  The Constant Nymph.

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    W hile in Copenhagen, Christopher worried himself to distraction about the danger of war. This worry was enormously heightened by Hitler’s declaration in the middle of March that conscription was to be introduced in Germany in defiance of the Versailles Treaty. The result was that if Heinz remained abroad without registering he became automatically a criminal in the eyes of German law; and if Christopher encouraged him to remain abroad he was making himself responsible for his criminality. Heinz was an Aryan, and could not therefore throw himself on the mercy of the various organizations that were trying to help the Jews who were fleeing from Germany. It was in this situation that Christopher began seriously thinking of finding a way of Heinz changing his nationality. Unfortunately the only person who appeared to have the right contacts to explore such possibilities was Gerald Hamilton.
    Meanwhile difficulties cropped up about staying in Denmark. They moved to Brussels. The acute stage of their retreat from one European country to another had begun.  Owing to the problems of having Heinz’s permis de sejour for Belgium renewed while he was actually in Belgium, they moved over the border into Holland and found acceptable lodgings in Amsterdam, Emmastraat 24, where Heinz had stayed after the Harwich debacle. There was something about Amsterdam that calmed and reassured, and they seem to have been happy there - or at any rate as happy as people in their situation could be.
    At the beginning of July I went over to Amsterdam to stay with them, not only because Christopher was always urging me to visit them, wherever they were, but also because I had urgent business to discuss with Christopher. We had for some time been planning a literary magazine, and had talked about it whenever we met and in our letters. The main idea was that it should be the magazine to publish the writings of our generation and our sympathizers, i.e. the contributors who had appeared in New Signatures and New Country , 3 but should also be international. I was convinced that in many countries of Europe there were new writers who felt just as we felt about the rising tide of fascism that seemed to be threatening the whole Continent, and had a similar desire to bridge the gulf between the well-educated middle classes and the still less articulate, less privileged working classes. I had met many of them in my wanderings, and already knew and admired their works. I even entertained the hope that such writers could be found in Soviet Russia, green as I was about the stifling conditions under which modern Russians worked. But I wanted to avoid writing whose whole point was to prove a political moral, such as was already appearing in Left Review.  Christopher agreed with me whole-heartedly about this: it was a new imaginative literature we wanted to find. We also agreed that our magazine should provide a place for those long short stories, too long for magazines such as the London Mercury , which were often published on the Continent but were at the same time too short for English publishers of novels. It was here