If it meant leaving the Communist Party because of Tony, then so be it.
It is much best to accept the fact that I am not only a cad but that in the last resort I am prepared to act unscrupulously. If one accepts this, then there is quite a good working basis on which to adjust things as I don’t want to make people unnecessarily unhappy although I have done so without meaning to & would now even do so knowingly if I thought it was necessary to break away from the new bourgeois trap in which I am caught.
It’s a confused sentence. He’s sorry about hurting people’s feelings, he’s a ‘cad’, but at the same time he’d fight ‘unscrupulously’ against the ‘bourgeois trap’ of communism. Yet all the while he still believes in communism as an idea.
TONY CAME BACK from Spain in the late summer of 1937, and Stephen and Inez moved out of London to a cottage in Kent – perhaps to avoid him. Shortly after they’d arrived, Auden came to stay. He needed to talk about Spain.
Stephen described the background of the International Writers’ Congress, to which Wystan had intended to go but didn’t, because of visa problems. There had been a violent attack on André Gide for the book he’d written after his visit to the Soviet Union in 1935. Indeed, his Retour de l’URSS had divided most fellow-travellers from the rest of the Communist Party. Philip Toynbee, though for the moment he remained loyal, had written in his diary when the book came out: ‘We must, must do something about it – protest first against the Trotskist label attached so readily to critics. Then try to extort a reply from the Soviet Government. All this of course inside the party.’ Stephen had been shocked at the viciousness of the attack on Gide and the refusal to discuss the book itself. And they’d attacked him, too, over Tony. Was this the inevitable fate of all those who disagreed with the communists? Character assassination, rather than rational discussion?
Auden’s view was: ‘political exigence was never a justification for lies’. In spite of the complexity of Auden’s mind, or perhaps because of it, he often insisted on following the simplest of rules. It eliminated long moralistic arguments and much soul-searching; but to say ‘lying is wrong’ also struck at the heart of communist tactics.
One evening at the end of November 1937, Christopher turned up at Stephen’s flat in Hammersmith. ‘Stephen’s affairs are in a fine old tangle. The triangle has turned into a quadrangle.’ He’s referring to Stephen, Inez, Tony, plus an offstage lover of Inez. ‘Stephen said of himself: “I only really feel what my friends tell me I feel.” He’s worried about Inez and about Tony’s future. He even claims to have shed tears last night for an hour. But under all his remorse, he’s really laughing and naughty and very sly. A sly Shelley.’
To Christopher, there’d always been something absurd about Stephen’s marriage. Absurd, too, for Stephen to pretend he had emotions while simultaneously saying they were wished on him by his friends. Meanwhile in front of Christopher, Stephen played down his capacity to love a woman. He did not want to be deflated by a sardonic remark.
Isherwood was planning to leave the country with Auden. They’d take a boat to China and write a book about the war in Manchuria. Christopher’s life since Hitler came to power had been a restless shifting from country to country: Denmark, Holland, the Canaries, Portugal. His lover Heinz had been lured back to Germany and arrested and he was desperate. He did not want to live in England, the land of The Enemy.
In Shanghai they stayed with the British Ambassador. The late British Empire was hospitable. Auden had just won the King’s Medal for Poetry and they were important visitors. Of the two Auden seemed the more important, and this made Isherwood uncomfortable. ‘In China, I sometimes found myself really hating him – hating his pedantic insistence on “objectivity”, which was merely a reaction from my own woolly-mindedess. I was meanly jealous of him too. Jealous of his share of the limelight; jealous because he’ll no longer play the role of dependent, admiring younger brother.’
They visited the front line. Isherwood wanted to test himself. ‘If I was scared in China – far more often than Wystan – I, at least, didn’t show it. And, maybe, as taking those little risks was more difficult for me, I even displayed a kind of mild courage.’ This was a good reason for being there: to test how they’d behave when war came to Europe.
In Auden’s life there had been no equivalent, so far, to Heinz in Christopher’s or Tony in Stephen’s. Several times in the China adventure Auden became depressed by the thought that love might pass him by. He could observe love happen, he could briskly and cheerfully manage sex, but what about love? To love his neighbour as himself he could also manage, both as a Christian principle and as a vision of humanity. But love, in the sense of sex plus affection plus trust, hadn’t yet happened.
They came back via a boat to Vancouver then a train to New York. Auden liked this new city immediately. New Yorkers belonged to their city in a different way than Londoners belonged to London. Auden had never liked London, and literary London took for granted that he belonged there and held certain responsibilities. After all, London had created his reputation. By comparison, New Yorkers seemed to him free from the burden of expectations.
Over their return voyage across the Atlantic, he was in a bad state. ‘Wystan in tears,’ wrote Christopher in his diary, ‘telling me that no one would ever love him, that he would never have my sexual success. That flattered my vanity; but still my sadism wasn’t appeased. And, actually – believe it or not – when we got back to England I wouldn’t have him to stay the night, because I was jealous of him, and wanted to stage the Returning Hero act all to myself.’
Over the summer of 1938, Inez left Stephen; and although several times it seemed as if she’d come back, she didn’t.
Stephen was devastated, yet in his autobiography he writes that their separation was ‘the breaking up of something which had never been completely joined’. But if nothing had become ‘joined’, it was at least partly because he did not want it to. As he’d written to a friend soon after the wedding, ‘I believe I married really because I recognized in my wife someone who doesn’t want to become absorbed in someone else any more than I do.’
He’d suffered intensely to see that she was unhappy and to feel that he was the cause, yet her unhappiness lay beyond his capacity to cure. He hated this feeling and he did not know how to cope with it. As he wrote to Christopher: ‘I feel that people can’t exist without me. Also, I sometimes feel at the very mercy of people – that I cannot refuse any request they make; I now think that this is a [way] of being at the mercy of one’s feelings.’
Tony’s presence must surely have been one of the reasons why the marriage failed; yet this was not mentioned. Stephen felt loyal to Tony, and if Inez had ever suggested this constituted disloyalty to her, he would have become outraged. Jealousy hampered freedom, and freedom was the most important of all political ideas. Thus Tony remained offstage as Inez fled to Wales and Stephen stayed miserably in London. Perhaps Tony hoped that after the separation, he might rejoin Stephen.
Inez left him, not vice versa, so in a sense she seized the initiative. After she’d