PARTISAN REVIEW
going often to concerts. When a girl friend of ours explained that
she was a student of
Art
History, he looked at her vaguely and said
in a dreamy voice: "Oh, yes, Art, that must be wonderful." This
insistence on dealing with everyone and everything on the level of
personalities was perhaps exaggerated, but it was remarkable how
frequently Christopher pricked the bubble of people's self-esteem and
reduced them to a giggling bundle of confessed weaknesses and de–
Sires.
Christopher is the only person I have known who showed people
up in a way that made them seem more and not less sympathetic to
themselves. He had insight into what people wanted from life, which
usually had a disconcerting simplicity: the simple thing they wanted
and the simplicity they were. I always misunderstood people because
I believed what they wanted me to believe about them, whether or
not this was sympathetic to me. Thus on the first occasion when we
met Sally Bowles I thought she was sophisticated and pretentious, as
she sat on a little "pouf," and, whilst drinking Fritz's black coffee in
his sitting room talked with an incredible air of knowing everything
about every subject from politics to literature to the most intimate
details of the non-success of her love affair on the previous night, al–
ways with the same detachment. When I told Christopher my re–
action to her, he said: "No. When she talks like that she just wants
someone to throw a cushion at her head," and before long not only
was he throwing cushions at her head but she was at the center of his
universe living at Fraulein Thur.au's. Her absurdities had ceased to
be pretentious and had become really absurd.
A considerable part of Christopher's conversation was-at that
time-taken up with fantasies of what he would do with the world
if he were dictator: the clothes he would make women wear, how he
would change the climate of the British Isles, the politicians and
political leaders whom he would have put in the Zoo, and so on. This
fantasy corresponded to the fantasies of a surrealist revolution to
be found in Auden's
The Orators.
At one time, when Christopher and
I were having a holiday at Sellin, I myself thought seriously of
writing a novel about one of those emperors or princes who are
called to become dicator late in life, long after they have given up
all thought of power.
If
I had not been so ignorant of all experience
of history, and also of life, I would probably have done so.
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