Read Christopher Isherwood: A Personal memoir for Free Online

fellow-lodgers, pupils, etc.’
    I did want it (and published it in fact in No.3), but the problems of the longer story had to be settled first. In October he wrote to me in Vienna from London: ‘Sally Bowles has unexpectedly passed Edward Upward - so I am sending it to you. If you like it and want to publish, we must somehow get the consent of the original, who is at present abroad, otherwise the risk of an action is too great for us to take.’
    The risk of a libel action was not the only problem as far as I was concerned. I was fascinated by it, and certainly didn’t think it was too frivolous for our magazine; but it was long, too long even by the standards of New Writing , and I certainly didn’t want to divide it into two. More than that, I was worried about the abortion episode, and was nervous whether our printers - in the climate of those days - would pass it. I explained my doubts to Christopher. He wrote back from Brussels in January 1937: ‘About Sally, you know I’m doubtful, though quite open to conviction. It seems to me that Sally, without the abortion sequence, would just be a silly little capricious bitch. Besides, what would the whole thing lead up to? And down from? The whole idea of the study is to show that even the greatest disasters leave a person like Sally essentially unchanged.’
    After this sensible letter I luckily gave up the rather halfhearted attempt to persuade Christopher to cut Sally. Meanwhile, however, Jean Ross had given her permission, and Sally Bowles was published, with what struck me as considerable courage, fortified by the success they had had with  Mr Norris Changes Trains , as a separate little book by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth. It was eventually included in Goodbye to Berlin with the other pieces rescued from ‘The Lost’. One more of these pieces, ‘The Landauers’, was first printed in New Writing.
    In Christopher and His Kind Christopher makes a rather too generous acknowledgement to me: ‘Christopher would soon owe a great debt to John. His continuing demand for material forced Christopher to do what he was stupidly unwilling to do - publish the rest of his Berlin writings as disconnected fragments, suitable in length for the magazine, instead of trying to fit them into a stodgy plot-ridden story. Thus John became responsible for the informal form of Goodbye to Berlin .’
    Some years later, in an interview in America, Christopher offered a rather more sophisticated apologia for this ‘informal form’. ‘The Lost’, he said,
         
    would have been like Balzac’s Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes - very complicated, all sorts of absurd contrivances to bring it all together, hundreds of characters …. And then I fell upon the understanding that as far as I was concerned you can get just the same effect by little broken bits of something, that the gaps are not worth filling in, that’s all just plotting.
    And so what I did was I took up all the broken bits and put them into Goodbye to Berlin just as slivers of something. And you got just the same effect, that you’ve met a whole world.
         
    I have a distinct recollection that Christopher let me see what was left over from the operations, the pieces left on the cutting-room floor so to speak - and some of it was very fascinating - and I have never known whether he kept these fragments or destroyed them when he destroyed his diaries.
         

V
        
    I n the autumn of 1935 Heinz’s permis de sejour problems had become urgent again: he couldn’t get the Belgian authorities to grant him a longer stay after a visa he had obtained in Luxemburg lapsed. It so happened that Stephen and his ex-Guards friend ‘Jimmy Younger’ came to Brussels just at that time. They agreed to go to Portugal with Christopher and Heinz and try living a quatre out there. So at the beginning of December the four of them set sail in a Brazilian boat that