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

would drop them in Lisbon on its way to Rio. On 17 December they reached the mouth of the Tagus, and within twenty-four hours had found a house they liked at Sintra, and stayed there for some months. The experiment of living a quatre did not last very long, but long enough for them all to get caught in a gambling fever at the Casino in Estoril. Christopher wrote to me in March:
         
    The gambling rumours are, alas, true. But not under this roof. We go to Estoril, which is a taxi-ride, and so mildly, very mildly, deterrent. We don’t really do it very often but when we do we lose generously. Stephen parted with nearly twenty  pounds, I believe. Worse, we have been dabbling in the occult sciences, at the house of two lady anthroposophists: Tarot pack, Rudolf Steiner and all that. I continue to like this place. It is very quiet, but is really beautiful, and it is so restful living in the country for a change. Of course, the future is as vague for us as for everybody else. But H. seems to have at any rate a certain hold here. There are very few Germans, good bad or indifferent, in this part of the country, so there is no alien problem and no one seems to care much. He loves the place, which is nice. I do wish you could come, but it is hardly on the aeroplane route: though you can fly here, and I can see the aerodrome where you would land if you did from this window.
         
    In later letters he writes: ‘All remains set fair in this garden of Eden …’ and ‘This country is marvellously beautiful, all wooded mountains and ruined baroque palaces, and the people are charming. We are looking round for a real house with a big garden. Already we have a small dog, a cock and six hens. Soon we are getting rabbits, and later a cockatoo, a peacock and a monkey. ’
    The name of the small dog was Teddy, and he made messes, which Heinz never seemed to mind clearing up. In fact, he loved all the animals, and they were the centre of his life, as they had made his happiness in Tenerife. While Heinz played with them, Christopher struggled to write ‘Paul is Alone’, which he gave up in May, to concentrate on the book which, after many changes of scope, was to become Lions and Shadows. Wystan came over for a visit, and encouraged by what Christopher called the ‘non-failure’ of Dog Skin, they set about writing a new play, The Ascent of F. 6, which was to be more truly a collaboration than the earlier play.
    In the middle of this a ‘politely menacing note’ arrived from Leonard Woolf: ‘I hear a rumour that Methuens are publishing a book by you. I presume that this must be a mere rumour in view of the fact that you have agreed to give us the first offer of your next novel, and that you told me that you would probably be sending it to us to consider in the autumn?’
    But it was true that Christopher had signed up for a new novel with Methuen. He says in Christopher and His Kind that he had done it in a fit of pique because Virginia Woolf had not invited him to meet her. But with my experience of the way agents plotted to get promising authors away from the Hogarth Press who had started them off, I can almost hear Christopher being told that the Hogarth was far too small an outfit ever to do him justice in sales etc. and that he needed the expertise of a bigger and more powerful firm …. In any case he did publish Lions and Shadows  and Goodbye to Berlin with the Hogarth, on the technical grounds that neither of them was a novel. And by then he had met Virginia, and been utterly fascinated by her. By then, too, I was back at the Hogarth.
    During those months in Portugal, Christopher spent a considerable amount of time and trouble in helping me in various ways with the future numbers of New Writing. He kept his friends up to the mark with their promises of contributions, and gave shrewd advice about pieces that were sent to us. He also gave unstinting advice about my own work. I