PARTISAN REVIEW
debt of gratitude which a whole generation owes him because he
has helped them to make for themselves a more hopeful attitude to–
wards life, does not make
him
a better writer than those great talents
which have devoted their lives to producing an effect of profound
spiritual and physical discouragement. One cannot complain that
the greatest talents are those which are most bound up with the val–
ues of a civilization which is falling to pieces.
When I went to Berlin, in 1930, Christopher !sherwood-whom
I saw nearly every day there-was not the successful writer and per–
sonality he has subsequently become. He was comparatively poor,
and almost unrecognized. He had published one novel
All the Con–
spirators,
which had been remaindered, and was working on a second,
The Memorial.
During the years when I was often in Berlin, he lived
in various parts of the town, of which the best was in the neighbor–
hood of the Nollendorfplatz, and the worst that of the Hallesches
Tor, an area of slum tenements. He lived very poorly, scarcely ever
spending more than 60 pfennigs (about eightpence) on a meal. Dur·
ing this time, when I had meals almost every day with him I ate
such things as horseflesh, lung soup and other kinds of food, which for
some years ruined my digestion, as they had long ago ruined his.
Very soon my relationship with Christopher fell into a routine.
I would leave my own bed sitting room, situated in the slightly more
luxurious Motzstrasse, walk along the shabby-grand streets whose
walls were covered with concrete images of German eagles, their
beaks falling off, and their feathers decaying into grimy scales, to
the Nollendorfplatz, and then go to the little street leading out of the
Nollendorfstrasse, where Christopher had a room. When I had
climbed up two or three flights of stairs whose inner walls had the
color and the over-sweet damp odor of an old cardboard box, and
when I had rung the front door bell of the flat where Christopher
had his room, and when that door was opened by Christopher's land–
lady, Fraulein Thurau, with pendulous jaws and breasts, the watch–
dog of the Herr Ishyvoo world, I had entered the scene of Christo–
pher's novels. Fraulein Thurau with a
«Guten Tag, Herr Spender,"
of
a cordial kind which recognized that I was one of those rare friends
of Christopher whom she did not reckon a robber, a blackmailer or
a wastrel, perhaps even that I was a "good influence," would add
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