THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
would have happened to me if I were alone. In fact, in his own
neighborhood, Christopher had trained most of the shop-people to
spring into automatic, swift silent action so soon as he appeared at the
shop door, as though he were a human switch and they machines upon
electric rails. When a certain grocer refused to respond in this man–
ner, Christopher meted out revenge. He bought all his groceries at
a store a few doors away, had them packed as bulkily as possible, and
thus laden, would walk very slowly, bowed down with his groceries,
past the erring grocer's shop, hoping thus to break his spirit.
It may seem that there was an inconsistency about our extreme
economies and the purchase of the sweets. This is quite true. But
I think that Christopher regarded the sweets as, in their way, another
penance, an excess ruining his teeth which had a small spiritual
significance in his domain of heaven and damnation. What he would
have regarded as inexcusable would have been a "balanced diet," for
at this time Auden .and he were in full revolt against all forms of hy–
giene. In any case, iced coffees and toffee had an exorbitant place in
our budgets, and once Christopher said to me when he was com–
plaining about money:
"If
I could suddenly see now in front of me
the Niagara of iced coffees which I have drunk during the past year,
then I would understand where all my money goes."
Eating our toffees, we would then, if the weather were fine, take
a train to the Grunewald where we would walk among the pine
trees or along the pleasant shores of the lake. We walked a great
deal in Berlin, and my memory of the stories which Christopher told
me are mingled with the sandy Grunewald, and the wide, gray streets
of
B~rlin.
Although Berlin was ugly, it had the saving grace of being
fantastic, and, moreover, it was not unpleasant. It was one of the
few towns in Europe where Spring came right into the city marching
in two columns of plane trees down the Kurfiirstendamm.
When we had got out of the train and were walking through
the Grunewald with the flat, white, almost Moroccan modernist
houses gleaming through the brown-green trees, and with the almost
naked bathers lying on the flint-gray grass-the relentlessly handsome
German youths with their arms round their doughy girls-Christopher
talked. He told me the plot of
his
novel- The Lost-and day after
day against the background of the pine-trees, the lakes, or the streets,
I witnessed that strange transformation taking place in his mind,
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