The New Confessions (33 page)

Accommodation had proved no problem. Karl-Heinz encouraged Georg to rent me a room in his apartment for two pounds a month. But my other ambitions were harder to achieve. The “many films and plays” Karl-Heinz had referred to in his postcard certainly existed, and Karl-Heinz was in them, all right, but usually as a nonspeaking extra. He had profited from the postwar vogue for vast historical epics and he took me to see such films as
Anne Boleyn, Julius Caesar
and
The Trojan War
in which I felt I might be able to pick out his face in the swarming multitude. Currently, he was “resting,” he told me, ironing clothes and sewing on buttons in the costume department of the Schiller-Theater Nord.

I settled down quickly in the Pfau household. There were just the three of us. An old woman—Frau Mittenklott—came in the afternoon to clean and cook the enormous evening meal. What did I do? I wrote diligently to the studios and film companies. I wandered around the city. I drank beer and coffee, ate cake, sat in cold parks and listened to the bands. I received polite refusals from the studios and film companies, which Karl-Heinz translated for me. I started to learn German. After a month I cabled Sonia for more money. She sent ten pounds and a curt letter asking when she and Vincent would be sent for and reminding me that I had promised to be home for Christmas. The new baby was due, she added, in March and she would like—please—to be settled in her new home. I wrote back saying that things were going well and I was making progress, but my plans were taking slightly longer to realize than I had expected. I sent all my love to her and little Vince and asked her to borrow another ten pounds off her father.

I must be honest. I felt as if I were on holiday. Nineteen twenty-four had been such a disappointing year—steady impecuniousness, Vincent teething, no work—that I was glad to be away. I liked living in Georg Pfau’s inconvenient apartment. I enjoyed being abroad in a strange fascinating city. I strolled the clean wide streets, a happy alien among the incurious Berliners. I whiled away afternoons in shops and museums. I played at being a bohemian. I had a little money, I had a warm place to live and I had my entrancing fabulous dreams. Sonia, Vincent, the Shorrolds, Wee MacGregor, Faithfull, Super-Imperial, poverty and frustration seemed to have nothing to do with me now.

And there was Karl-Heinz. The strong affection that had grown up
between us in Weilburg quickly reestablished itself. When he was not working he would take me to bars and cafés, to films and plays. He took me to the west of the city, to the Kurfürstendamm; we patronized the Bluebird and El Dorado, the Westens, Café Wien and the Romanisches Café. Here was the artistic lively heart of Berlin, where I felt I truly belonged. The solid prosperous streets I had seen the morning I arrived were for the older generation and the rich bourgeoisie. Real life was in the west. In actual fact Stralauer Allee was inconveniently placed for the west end. It was a longish trip on the elevated electric railway to the Kurfürstendamm, and after the initial enthusiasm I decided to save money by staying at home. Karl-Heinz, however, went over three or four times a week, bringing back—through my bedroom en route for his own—a steady supply of Ottos, Klauses and Heinrichs. I kept a chamber pot beneath my bed to avoid disturbing him if I needed to go to the toilet, and I soon became accustomed to new introductions at breakfast time. Georg himself did not seem to mind these transient visitors, and after a while I began to suspect that he and Karl-Heinz were in some way “involved.” I asked Karl-Heinz about this, delicately.

“Oh, for sure,” he said. “Georg loves me. He lets me stay here for nothing. You know, one time a month, one time every six weeks, he asks me to give him a—what do you say?—a masturb.” He pumped one hand graphically.

“Ah.”

“Yes, it’s a cheap rent.”

I actually found the idea somewhat revolting, not because of anything associated with the act so much, but because Georg himself rather disgusted me. I liked him, and was most grateful for his hospitality, but there was no getting away from the fact that he was a horrible-looking person.

For example, I tried not to take breakfast at the same time as Georg since one morning when, buttering a fresh roll, I had looked across the table and my eye had been irresistibly caught by Georg’s big dense hairy nostrils. Like two old caves, I found myself thinking, thick with brambles, moss and ferns.… Just at that moment he removed his cigar from his mouth, and with smoke still curling and eddying around his face he took a huge cracking bite of salted cucumber. My gorge rose, my mouth flooded with saliva, I gagged and I had to run from the room.

His job too was unsettling and its associations were always with him, like a smell of onions. Georg was an insect breeder, hence all the boxes
and mesh cages in his rooms; hence also the eerie buzzing of invisible dynamos and the high temperature in the flat (plump stoves and parafin heaters constantly burning). He bred bait for fishermen (maggots), silkworms for the silk industry and butterflies for lepidopterists. He provided a steady stream of crunchy grasshoppers for the reptile house and the snakepit in the zoological gardens. Recently, however, he had been in demand by the film industry. If you needed a shade-dappled clearing frothing with butterflies, Georg Pfau was your man. If you wanted bumblebees visiting flowers in an Alpine meadow, Georg would lay on hundreds of the fluffy little workers. He did most of his work for one particular studio called Realismus Films Verlag that specialized in grim low-life melodramas and that regularly required encrusted flypapers, humming heaps of ordure and infested hovels. In one Realismus film, Georg told me with pride, he could get through a thousand bluebottles. He was known in the industry as the Fly Man—
der Fliegenmann
.

Georg was a taciturn but placid bloke who seemed entirely happy with his life. His profession occupied most of his time. His pleasures were cigars (he smoked from rising in the morning and stubbed out his last butt when he switched off his bedside light), food—Frau Mittenklott’s gargantuan suppers—and his monthly masturb at the hand of Karl-Heinz. I worked with him for a while as his assistant when my funds began running low. I would parcel up dead butterflies and send them off to collectors, or take seething trays of maggots to fishing-tackle shops. One day we went out to the vast UFA studios at Tempelhof. A scene was being shot where the heroine (played by Nita Jungman, I think) was to be awakened by a butterfly landing on her nose. Georg carried a large jam jar busy with cabbage whites, while I lugged a hefty zinc-lined wooden box containing a block of ice wrapped in straw. One had to admire his technique. Georg encouraged his insects to act by chilling them, as it were, to the bone. The skill, the expertise, lay in knowing just how cold a butterfly or bluebottle had to be before it would do what was required. Not cold enough and it would just take off and fly away; too cold and it would simply die or fall numbed to the ground.

I watched Georg at work with real fascination. Nita Jungman slept; the cameras turned three feet from her face. Georg reached into his icebox where he had been chilling a butterfly. The freezing befuddled insect sat on his blunt fingertips, wings opening and closing very slowly. Georg took a sip from his cigar, pursed his loose lips together and blew a thin gentle jet of smoke onto the butterfly. The creature, irritated, could just manage a groggy two-foot flight. One hoped, naturally, it would
head for the alluring peak of Nita Jungman’s pretty little retroussé nose. It was all a matter of nice calculations of correctly chilled, thus unenergetic, butterfly, and direction and velocity of cigar smoke goad. On this particular day Georg got it right three times with five butterflies. The entire studio broke into applause. Georg himself was proudest of a scene that you will probably remember in Heinrich Bern’s
Deception
. In it Georg persuaded a large housefly to visit every feature of the villain’s face (Rex Ermeram in his greatest role) by using the ice trick and by laying on with a pinpoint a tiny path of honey from demonic eyebrows to hooked nose, from leering lips to saber scar. Georg once told me, with passionate earnestness, that the single most important factor in any German man’s life was the freedom to smoke undisturbed in every corner of his house.

And so 1924 ended and I was still in Berlin, poorer and no further on with my career. In the New Year, Sonia wrote begging me to return for the birth of our second child and informing me of the shocking news that her father had secured me a position in his old pharmaceutical supplies company as trainee salesman. It was just at this time that I started work at the Hotel Windsor. I sent most of my first week’s pay home, said prospects were improving (I did not specify) and that the baby, if a boy, should be called Adam, and if a girl, Emmeline, after my mother.

I had not been entirely idle. Karl-Heinz and I had translated my script of
Love’s Sacrifice
and so far it had received only two rejections. Karl-Heinz said he would like to play the hero and I instantly agreed. Thus simply a professional association was added to our friendship, which was to survive the most hazardous traumas and ordeals.

Karl-Heinz too was knowing more success. He had acted in his first billed role as a shrewd detective investigating the disappearance of a lodger in a boarding house (I can recall nothing more of this film, which is remarkable only as Karl-Heinz’s debut). On screen he had an enticing, eye-catching impact. There was something latently unruly about him, a sense of good behavior only just being preserved with considerable effort. The
Jahrbuch der Filmindustrie 1925
described him as “a most interesting find.” More offers of work came in. Karl-Heinz lent me money, some of which I sent on to Sonia.

Then, just before I finished my stint as Ulrich Pfau’s replacement, events began to move and my life to change. It was March and I was impatient for spring. I had been in Berlin for over four months and was feeling oppressed by its near-gray massiness. Karl-Heinz’s modest success
made me conscious of my own frustrated stasis. I was in a bad mood, further irritated by a letter from Sonia that morning informing me that my second son had been born ten days previously and that his name was to be Hereford. Apparently there had been Herefords in the Shorrold family “for centuries.” (I quote. “You’ve heard of Hereford the Wake,” Vincent Shorrold proudly said to me later; “we go right back to him.”) As I paced up and down outside the Windsor I grew steadily more depressed. “John James Todd,” I said to myself, “accompanied by his two sons, Vincent and Hereford.” No, really, it was too appalling! Again I suspected the sly influence of Vincent Shorrold.

Just before my shift was up, at about four o’clock, a taxi pulled up in front of the hotel. I opened the door and Karl-Heinz got out. He was wearing a fawn overcoat with a fur collar. He put on sunglasses and warmed his hands on my blazing coat.

“Most amusing,” I said.

“We have a drink when you finish,” he said. “I’ve got a present for you. See you at the English Bar.”

The English Bar was on the Unter den Linden, in the passageway. It bore no resemblance at all to any hostelry in England, but Karl-Heinz thought it was a treat for me. When I arrived he was in the middle of a meal. He was still wearing his coat. I ordered a half liter of pilsner.

“Like the coat,” I said.

“You want some?” He pointed at his plate. “I pay?”

“What is it?”

“Smoked ham cooked in champagne. Delicious. With a radish sauce.”

“Tempting, but no thanks. What are we celebrating?”

“I got a job. Fantastic. Realismus Films. A. E. Groth directing.
Diary of a Prostitute
. I’m getting …”he considered it. “Five hundred dollars.”

“Are you the prostitute?”

“And I got one present for you.” He smiled and handed over a book wrapped in brown paper. “It’s by the same fellow as in Weilburg. You know—Rousseau.”

I read
Julie, or The New Héloïse
in two days with an effort directly proportional to my mounting dismay and disappointment. The turgid rhetoric, the lachrymose posturing, the relentless rhapsodies, were bitterly disillusioning after the never-to-be-forgotten exhilaration of
The Confessions
. For a landmark in the history of human artistic endeavor,
and the signal for everthing we know as Romanticism to begin, it was extraordinarily hard going.

I find it hard now to explain why I did certain things then. I was only twenty-six years old, but the war had provided me with several lifetimes of experience. I was constantly on the verge of brilliant ideas, or at least I felt I was, and that feeling can sometimes be as important as the ideas themselves. So why, after that reaction to the book, did I decide to adapt it as a film? I had no honest explanation. It simply seemed the right thing to do. So I did it.

I wrote the script of
Julie
in seventeen days. I updated it to the present but kept the essential simplicity of the story. Saint-Preux—sensitive, melancholy, heart driven—is tutor to the beautiful young blond Julie, who lives in an idyllic château. They fall in love. Julie and Saint-Preux independently confide in Julie’s friend Claire (sprightly, dark) and she makes sure that the two soon know of their mutual passion. Overwhelmed by their feelings, Julie yields herself to Saint-Preux. They make love. Then Julie is stricken with remorse and guilt. She recoils from Saint-Preux and, distraught, marries an old codger called Baron Wolmar (her father’s initial choice.) Saint-Preux, suicidal, heads for the fleshpots of Paris. In despair, he decides against taking his life when he receives a letter from Julie saying that even though she is married, Saint-Preux will always be close to her heart.

Wolmar—prudent, sagacious, a philosopher of the human spirit—who knows of Julie’s past relationship with her former tutor, invites him (Saint-Preux is on the verge of nervous collapse) to come and live in their household. It is a profound and tormenting trial, but somehow Julie and Saint-Preux remain virtuous. The Baron Wolmar announces he is going on a long journey and leaves the two behind. Julie and Saint-Preux suffer a terrible ordeal of temptation and frustration, but Julie does not succumb, she remains faithful. Then, tragically, she has a fatal accident. On her deathbed she informs Saint-Preux that she has always loved him. Cut to Saint-Preux’s stricken face. Julie dies. The end.