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Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie (1934)

‘It’s probably a gang. I like gangs.’
‘That’s a low taste,’ said Frankie absently. ‘A single-handed murder is much higher class.’
(Chapter 8)

‘Well, I was thinking more of illicitly imported drugs.’
‘You can’t mix up too many different sorts of crime,’ said Bobby.
(Chapter 8)

Frankie toyed for a minute or two with the idea of a homicidal bishop who offered sacrifices of clergymen’s sons, but rejected it with a sigh.
(Chapter 9)

‘I think George has broken your bed.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Bobby hospitably. ‘It was never a particularly good bed.’
(Chapter 10)

‘ Oh! Bobby, the whole situation is there – I know it is. If we could just get at the reason.’
(The essence of pretty much every detective story, Chapter 32)

Christie’s freestanding novels

It’s only when you have read a certain number of Agatha Christie novels that you come to appreciate how humorous they are, and often very funny. They are, essentially, comedies. In the last few pages everything is rounded off, all the loose ends are tied up, often with a smile or a heart-warming gesture, as in the famously charitable conclusion of ‘Murder on the Orient Express’.

‘Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?’ is a detective story which doesn’t feature either Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. In other words, it’s not part of a series but a standalone novel with one-off characters. Christie wrote about 20 of these.

My experience of them is that they’re immediately more fun than the series, certainly than the Poirot novels which I’ve started to find very limited. With Poirot Christie is constrained. There will be some sitcom-style humour based on the predictable behaviour of Captain Hastings (obtuse and slow on the uptake) and Poirot (pompous and overweening). Sooner or later Poirot will tell everyone that you need ‘order and method’, that you must employ ‘the little grey cells’, that he has ‘a little idea’, and his eyes will shine with that distinctive green glow as he stumbles across a plausible theory. But the very predictability of all this militates against delightful surprises.

Whereas in these ‘independent’ stories Christie was more free to let her imagination go and what it goes towards is frolicsome comedy, as per the hugely entertaining ‘The Secret of Chimneys’ and its sequel ‘The Seven Dials Mystery’, with their casts of preposterous toffs and fearless young ladies.

‘Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?’ is of this type and, like them, introduces us to another delightfully bold and resourceful young woman – in the ‘Chimney’s novels it was Lady Elaine ‘Bundle’ Brent, here it is Lady Frances ‘Frankie’ Derwent, daughter of the very grand Earl of Marchington. And there’s a keen young chap involved, Robert ‘Bobby’ Jones, son of the local vicar, a charmingly dim young man and ‘young golfing ass’.

Obviously there’s a convoluted murder mystery plot but the main joy of the book for me was these characters, their preposterous plans and their what ho! P.G. Wodehouse-style repartee.

‘Darling, you grow a moustache.’
‘Oh! I grow a moustache, do I?’
‘Yes. How long will it take?’
‘Two or three weeks, I expect.’
‘Heavens! I’d no idea it was such a slow process. Can’t you speed it up?’ (Chapter 10)

‘Now just listen quietly, Bobby, and try and take in what I’m going to say. I know your brains are practically negligible, but you ought to be able to understand if you really concentrate.’
(Chapter 10)

‘Look here, can’t I be there? I’ll put on a beard if you like.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Frankie. ‘A beard would probably ruin everything by falling off at the wrong moment.’

‘You came down by car. Lady Frances? No accident this time?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a pity to go in too much for accidents – don’t you?’
(Chapter 27)

So to begin with, and certainly in the opening third when Bobby and Frankie are drawn together by the murder and come up with wizard wheezes and jolly pranks to investigate it, lots of the scenes, moments and dialogue have a silly P.G. Wodehouse air.

‘My dear child, do remember that Bassington-ffrench knows you. He doesn’t know me from Adam. And I’m in a frightfully strong position, because I’ve got a title. You see how useful that is. I’m not just a stray young woman gaining admission to the house for mysterious purposes. I am an earl’s daughter and therefore highly respectable.’ (Chapter 10)

Later on things get a bit more serious, and there are occasional moments of almost adult seriousness. But these don’t last long – in the last quarter of the story the whole thing collapses into the most ridiculous melodrama, high speed car drives, an emergency plane flight, with a wonderfully unexpected and pantomime conclusion, and, finally, a long letter of confession from the murderer explaining in minute detail every conceivable loose end of the plot. With the result that:

‘Everything seems to have ended very fortunately,’ said Bobby. (Chapter 35)

Plot summary

Golf

It is 3 October and we are in the Welsh seaside town of Marchbolt. Dim young Bobby Jones is playing a round of golf on the local course, part of which runs alongside the cliffs, with the local doctor. Moments after he’s sliced a ball towards the cliffs he thinks he hears a cry and, when he and the doctor go to investigate, they discover that a man has fallen partly down the cliff. Scrambling down (it’s not a vertical cliff) they discover the man is badly injured, with a broken back. The doctor volunteers to go and get help leaving Bobby with the unconscious man.

The photo and last words

Bobby searches the man and finds the photo of a pretty woman in his pocket. At which point the unconscious man suddenly opens his eyes wide and says: ‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’ and dies. Soon afterwards another man appears on the clifftop, calls down, then scrambles down to join Bobby. He introduces himself as Roger Bassington-ffrench, claims to be walking round the area because he’s looking for a house down here.

Playing the organ

Now the thing is Bobby is on very bad terms with his father the vicar (there are some broad comic scenes between the two of them as they fail to communicate and each fulminate against the other’s generation). Anyway, Bobby had promised to play the organ at tonight’s service which starts in ten minutes, and so he asks Bassington-ffrench if it’s OK to leave him with the body while he rushes off to church. ‘I say, would you mind awfully…’ etc. Bassington-ffrench says ‘Certainly old chap.’

Newspaper account and different photo

After the service Bobby goes home with his Dad, and dinner, sleep and next morning goes off to London. Here he reads an account in the newspaper which says police used the photo of a woman found on the dead man to identify her and ascertain that she is the sister of the dead man. She is a Mrs Leo Cayman and the dead man her brother, Alex Pritchard, recently returned from Siam. He had been out of England for ten years and was just starting upon a walking tour. What staggers Bobby is that the photo reproduced in the paper bears no relation to the photo he found in the dead man’s pocket.

The inquest

Bobby returns to Marchbolt to attend the inquest and sees the Mrs Cayman who claims to be Pritchard’s sister in the flesh, and is appalled all over again, that the sweet and innocent girl of the photo has somehow morphed into the shiny, over-made-up brass he is introduced to. She and her husband (Mr Cayman) ask if Pritchard had any last words, and Bobby, discombobulated by the occasion and her appearance, forgets Pritchard’s famous last words, and say no and they go away disappointed (or relieved).

Enter Frankie

It is at the inquest that he meets up with his childhood friend Lady Frances ‘Frankie’ Derwent who, in her modern feminist way, complains that she’s bored to death staying up at Derwent Castle with her Dad and you wouldn’t have kept her away from something interesting like an inquest even if you’d paid her.

Frankie gets Bobby to tell her what happened – the cry, the photo etc – at which point he remembers the dead man’s famous last words, and vows to write to the Caymans in London to relay them.

Two odd events

Over the next few days two notable events take place. First of all, Bobby gets a letter out of the blue from a company he’s never heard of offering him a job in Buenos Aires at a grand a year. This is an apparent golden opportunity but Bobby turns it down because he has promised his old pal, ‘Badger’ Beadon – a dim young man with a stammer – to go into the second-hand car business with him.

The incident is that he goes for a picnic in the countryside and nearly dies. He drinks deep from a bottle of beer which has been injected with morphine, passes out and would have died if not discovered by a passerby who calls the police and a doctor who pumps his stomach. He still needs to be hospitalised.

The duo investigate

Frankie visits Bobby in hospital and tells him her interpretation which is that someone is trying to murder him, and they agree there’s a big fat mystery which needs investigating. First thing is to find this Roger Bassington-ffrench. Enquiries (Frankie asks her Dad who knows all about the posh families of England) reveal a family of Bassington-ffrenches living at a place called Merroway Court near the village of Staverley, in Hampshire.

The staged car crash

Rather driving over to Hampshire and introducing herself to the Bassington-ffrenches, Frankie cooks up the preposterous idea of pretending to crash her car against the wall of the Merroway Court estate, and to arrange for a friend of hers, a young doctor, George Arbuthnot, to just happen to be passing, to rescue her from the wreckage, to carry her into the Court whose owners can hardly refuse a concussed young posh woman.

And so they carry out this ridiculous plan and it works. Pretending to be in a swoon Freddie is carried into the house (by George and a passing butcher’s boy) where Mrs Bassington-ffrench gives her a spare room to rest in. A day’s rest turns into a week or more and Frankie becomes genuine friends with the wife, Sylvia Bassington-ffrench, the husband, Mr Henry Bassington-ffrench, and his handsome brother, Roger Bassington-ffrench who comes to visit.

Over dinner one evening she confirms that this is the Roger Bassington-ffrench who came across Bobby at the cliff and volunteered to stand in for him. But the thing is, there’s nothing sinister, they’re all very open and friendly, no sign of any evil conspiracy.

Introducing Alan Carstairs

In the same conversation over dinner when she raises the mystery of the body at Marchbolt, Frankie runs off to her room to get the photo from the local newspaper to show her hosts. When shown the photo of the dead man, Sylvia says that the mystery dead man looks very like Alan Carstairs, a man they know who’s often travelling abroad for long periods. She (Sylvia) hasn’t heard from him for a while, presumes he’s gone off on another of his travels. Frankie goes to bed wondering how to find out more about this Alan Carstairs.

Dope

I was a bit misleading when I said the Bassington-ffrenches appear kosher and above board. Slowly Frankie realises that there is something amiss, which is the strange behaviour of the husband, Henry. She realises that he alternates between apathetic gloom and accelerated enthusiasm, and comes to realise that the wife, Sylvia, is afflicted by this change to his previously happy personality.

Slowly Frankie is attracted to the handsome, charming, intelligent brother, Roger, and eventually he shares his theory that his brother, Henry, is a ‘dope fiend’. Roger is convinced of it and links it with the recent establishment in a nearby old house, the Grange, of a nursing home run by a Canadian, a Dr Nicholson. Is Nicolson, a medical professional with access to morphine, somehow feeding Henry’s habit? And Nicholson is Canadian but so, according to Sylvia, is Alan Carstairs. Are the two facts linked?

Dinner with Dr Nicholson

Dr Nicholson and his wife come for dinner. Nicholson is very domineering and asks inconvenient questions about Frankie’s crash. Frankie notes how his little wife, Moira, watches her husband with anxiety. Not only this but she learns that on the day Bobby was poisoned (the poisoned beer) Roger Bassington-ffrench has a solid alibi, he was at a children’s party at Staverley, but Nicholson was away, supposedly at a conference in London. And his car is a dark-blue Talbot, of a model seen near the scene of Bobby’s would-be poisoning. And, as said above, he has access to morphia. So lots of fingers point at the big, domineering Dr N.

Bobby the chauffeur

So Frankie has got as far as starting to suspect that the body on the cliff was not ‘Pritchard’ but the body of this Alan Carstairs who was snooping around the suspicious Dr Nicholson and his so-called nursing home and so was bumped off. So she writes to Bobby in London and tells him to come and collect her in a family car and dressed as a chauffeur with a fake moustache – which he does, arriving the next day impersonating Edward Hawkins, chauffeur to Lady Frances Derwent.

The Anglers’ Arms

Bobby puts up at the local inn The Anglers’ Arms, gets chatting to the landlord and barmaid who both tell him about mysterious goings-on up at ‘nursing home’ in the old Grange. They tell of a young woman who escaped, was tracked down and dragged back, screaming for help.

So Bobby goes up to the Grange for a midnight explore. He finds an unlocked door in the walls surrounding the grounds. Wandering along a path he comes across none other than the young woman depicted in the original photograph he found on Pritchard’s body! He recognises her, and identifies himself and she confirms all his worst fears by saying she fears for her life, and is terrified, but when he offers to rescue her, she shoos him away and runs back towards the house. At which point he hears other feet, men somewhere in the grounds, and does a runner.

The Grange

Next day Frankie phones him at the inn and tells him, in his guise as the chauffeur, that she wants to be driven to London. Roger half-asks to be given a lift into London and pays close attention to her response, and to Bobby when he turns up in the car – enough to make the reader suspect that he (Roger Bassington-ffrench) is onto her and her subterfuge.

Mrs Rivington

The Bassington-ffrenches had told Frankie that they met this chap Alan Carstairs when he was brought to dinner by the Rivingtons. So once arrived in London, and having pooled the results of their investigations so far, Bobby and Frankie look up Rivingtons in the phone directory and decide that Bobby should go to visit the poshest sounding ones. He will do this adopting another disguise, impersonating a solicitor from her father’s posh firm of solicitors, Messrs Spragge, Spragge, Jenkinson and Spragge.

(All these disguises, plus several more to come, and then the multiple disguises which turn out to be central to the whole plot, make the thing feel more and more like a pantomime or fairy story.)

With wild improbability the first household Bobby tries, where he is admitted by a parlour maid to see a Mrs Rivington, turns out to be exactly the right one. Yes, it was they who took Carstairs down for dinner with the Bassington-ffrenches where Carstairs asked a lot of questions about a chap in the neighbourhood, a Dr Nicholson… Aha! So things continue to focus in on Dr Nicholson and his so-called nursing home about which the locals have such a bad opinion and where Bobby met a terrified inmate!

Stop now

This summary takes us to about half way through the novel and, as with my other Christie summaries, I’m going to stop here while we’re still in the exploratory phase, while Frankie and Bobby are in the first half of their detective act and before there are any big revelations – so as not to spoil the plot for anyone planning to read it. But here’s a pretty strong clue:

‘All sorts of things happen at the Grange,’ she said. ‘Queer things. People come there to get better – and they don’t get better – they get worse.’ As she spoke, Bobby was aware of a glimpse into a strange, evil atmosphere. He felt something of the terror that had enveloped Moira Nicholson’s life for so long. (Chapter 18)

Or is it? Read the rest of this ludicrous but hugely entertaining novel to find out.

Cast

In order of appearance:

Robert ‘Bobby’ Jones – well-meaning upper-class twit of the Bertie Wooster type
Dr Thomas – who Bobby’s playing golf with when they discover the body: ‘a middle-aged man with grey hair and a red cheerful face’
The dying man – has a photo in his pocket
The stranger on the cliff – Roger Bassington-ffrench, claims he’s in the area looking for a house
The Reverend Thomas – Bobby’s disapproving father
Mrs Roberts – cook at the Vicarage
Lady Frances Derwent aka Frankie – daughter of Lord Marchington, lives up at Derwent Castle – frightfully posh and privileged: ‘Father gives me an allowance and I’ve got lots of houses to live in and clothes and maids and some hideous family jewels and a good deal of credits at shops’
Mr Leo Cayman – comes down to attend the coroner’s inquest with his wife…
Mrs Cayman – ‘her heavy make-up, her plucked eyebrows, those wide-apart eyes sunk in between folds of flesh till they looked like pig’s eyes, and her violent henna-tinted hair’
Mr Owen – estate agent from Wheeler & Owen, House and Estate Agents, with whom Bobby and Frankie check Roger Bassington-ffrench’s story that he was house hunting
Inspector Williams – local copper
Badger Beadon – dim young man with a stammer who persuades Bobby to go into the second-hand car business with him
Dr George Arbuthnot – gloomy young friend of Frankie’s who she persuades to help her with the fake crash ‘stunt’
butcher’s boy – cycling by and so helps give authenticity to the crash story
Mrs Sylvia Bassington-ffrench – mistress of Merroway Court far from Wales, near the village of Staverley in Hampshire – nervous and unhappy because of her husbands’ distraction / drug problem
Mr Henry Bassington-ffrench – ‘a big man, heavy jowled, with a kindly but rather abstracted air’; ‘now sit twitching nervously, his nerves obviously on edge, now sunk in an abstraction from which it was impossible to rouse him’; ‘With the thought of morphia suddenly the explanation of Henry Bassington-ffrench’s peculiar eyes came to her, with their pin-point pupils. Was Henry Bassington-ffrench a drug fiend?’
Tommy Bassington-ffrench – their boisterous 7-year-old son
their butler
Roger Bassington-ffrench – Henry’s handsome brother i.e. Sylvia’s brother-in-law, ‘a tall, slender young man of something over thirty with very pleasant eyes’
Dr Jasper Nicholson – head of a new nursing home set up in the old Grange, only 3 or 4 miles from the Bassington-ffrench place at Merroway Court – ‘a big man with a manner that suggested great reserves of power. His speech was slow, on the whole he said very little, but contrived somehow to make every word sound significant’
Moira Nicholson – small and attractive and absolutely terrified of her husband who she’s convinced is trying to murder her
Thomas Askew – landlord of the local pub, the Anglers’ Arms, where Bobby stays for a few nights while he’s pretending to be Frankie’s chauffeur
Mrs Edith Rivington – posh lady living in Tite Street, London who Frankie and Bobby track down and who tells them she knew Alan Carstairs the traveller, and took him down to the Bassington-ffrench place for dinner

After my summary stops

Inspector Hammond – copper in Chipping Somerton
John Savage – millionaire who (allegedly) made a will leaving his fortune to Mrs Rose Templeton then, depressed by a medical diagnosis of cancer, killed himself with an overdose
Mr Elford – lawyer who drew up John Savage’s will
Rose Chudleigh – cook at Tudor Cottage who witnessed John Savage’s will – ‘a bovine-looking woman of ample proportions, with fish-like eyes and every indication of adenoids’
Albert Mere – gardener, who also witnessed the will (now deceased)
Gladys – parlourmaid to Mrs Templeton, who discovered John Savage dead in bed

Books and films and plays

As usual in any Christie novel, there are knowing references to the genre of detective stories and to the clichés of the genre as found in books and novels.

‘I mean, it isn’t like – “Tell Gladys I always loved her”, or “The will is in the walnut bureau”, or any of the proper romantic Last Words there are in books.’ (Chapter 5)

‘Oh! but murderers are always frightfully rash. The more murders they do, the more murders they want to do.’
‘Like The Third Bloodstain,’ said Bobby, remembering one of his favourite works of fiction.
(And the premise of Christie’s entire novel, ‘Murder is Easy’ – Chapter 7)

Frightfully sweet of Frankie to bring him all these flowers, and of course they were lovely, but he wished it had occurred to her to bring him a few detective stories instead. He cast his eye over the table beside him. There was a novel of Ouida’s and a copy of ‘John Halifax, Gentleman’ and last week’s Marchbolt Weekly Times. He picked up ‘John Halifax, Gentleman’. After five minutes he put it down. To a mind nourished on ‘The Third Bloodstain’, ‘The Case of the Murdered Archduke’ and ‘The Strange Adventure of the Florentine Dagger’, ‘John Halifax, Gentleman’ lacked pep.
(Chapter 7)

Also, I wonder whether Christie wrote a novel which didn’t include at least one tip of the hat to the most famous detective of them all, Mr Holmes.

‘The thing is – what to do next,’ she said. ‘It seems to me we’ve got three angles of attack.’
‘Go on, Sherlock.’
(Chapter 8)

As I’ve mentioned, these references do several things. Far from guiltily acknowledging the novels’ indebtedness to various detective story tropes, they emphasise them, and so actively emphasise the story’s artificiality and bookishness.

‘Your hands are more loosely tied than mine. Let’s see if I can get them undone with my teeth.’ The next five minutes were spent in a struggle that did credit to Bobby’s dentist.
‘Extraordinary how easy these things sound in books,’ he panted. ‘I don’t believe I’m making the slightest impression.’
(Chapter 28)

This does at least two things: 1) It loosens the text’s relation to reality. I mean the heightening of the artificiality brings the stories closer to melodrama and panto and so makes you less likely to hold them to strict standards of verisimilitude.

2) And (I appreciate this may be another way of rephrasing point 1) they make you more prepared to believe utter tosh, preposterous coincidences, outrageous accidents and lucky breaks. They all transport you into the world of Faerie. Towards the end of the narrative, the increasingly mad, helter-skelter speed of events reminds the characters (and the reader) of some kind of mad fantasy.

‘Good,’ said Bobby. ‘Let’s take an air taxi.’
The whole proceedings were beginning to take on the fantastic character of a dream.
(Chapter 33)

Or, indeed, Hollywood.

‘It was rather fun seeing you all get worked up about Nicholson. He’s a harmless old ass, but he does look exactly like a scientific super-criminal on the films.’
(Chapter 30)

As it happens, this novel contains more references to plays and drama than any of the others I’ve read and at one point the characters reflect at length on the fact that they seem to be caught in someone else’s play.

‘Isn’t it odd?’ she said. ‘We seem, somehow, to have got in between the covers of a book. We’re in the middle of someone else’s story. It’s a frightfully queer feeling.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Bobby. ‘There is something rather uncanny about it. I should call it a play rather than a book. It’s as though we’d walked on to the stage in the middle of the second act and we haven’t really got parts in the play at all, but we have to pretend, and what makes it so frightfully hard is that we haven’t the faintest idea what the first act was about.’
Frankie nodded eagerly.
‘I’m not even so sure it’s the second act – I think it’s more like the third. Bobby, I’m sure we’ve got to go back a long way… And we’ve got to be quick because I fancy the play is frightfully near the final curtain.’
(Chapter 20)

Actually there were another 15 chapters to go, but you get the idea. It comes as no surprise that when the baddy is revealed, he writes a long letter explaining every detail of the plot, and merrily signs himself:

‘Your affectionate enemy, the bold, bad villain of the piece…’ (Chapter 34)

If it hadn’t already, with this final flourish the novel transforms itself into pure panto. But by this stage of the novel, all those references to corny detective novels, movie clichés and stage melodramas have softened us up so much that we don’t care. And that’s at least part of their function.

Credit

‘Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1934 by the Collins Crime Club.

Related reviews

Agatha Christie reviews
1930s reviews

Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood (1939)

In the introduction to the 1954 edition which combines Goodbye to Berlin with Mr Norris Changes Trains, Isherwood describes the background to his Berlin stories. He lived almost continuously from 1929 to 1933 in Berlin, scraping a living as an English tutor and trying to fit in his writing. Realising that the social crisis he saw around him and the colourful characters he was meeting were solid gold material, Isherwood kept a detailed diary of everyone he met and everything he saw.

Initially he planned to create a huge sprawling masterpiece of interconnected stories in the manner of Balzac, but found it impossible to manage. So in 1934 he had the brainwave of writing solely about the larger-than-life crook and con-man he called Mr Norris and wrote that novel quite quickly, from May to August 1934, in the garden of a pension at Orotava in Tenerife. The other extended stories were published in magazines over the next few years, and then he drew them together into one volume, Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1939

Goodbye to Berlin

Goodbye To Berlin immediately signals its differences from Mr Norris Changes Trains. The main one is that the first-person narrator is not named William Bradshaw but Christopher Isherwood. Partly this is because the ‘novel’ seems much closer to being an actual diary. It gives rise to his landlady, Fraulein Schroeder’s, famous mispronunciation of his name, Herr Issyvoo.

The most famous lines in Goodbye To Berlin are the often-quote statement the narrator makes about being as blank and affectless as a camera.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

This has been interpreted and reinterpreted as the basis for an entire aesthetic, of the 1930s combination of man and technology, and so on. On a simpler interpretation, it flags up that the book will basically be a diary of things that happen, with little attempt to shape them into narratives. This became clear to me after reading the very long prose text of Journey To A War by Isherwood which really is a long, detailed transcription of a diary. Reading that made me see the diary just beneath the skin of this book. Hence it is not one sutained narrative but four or five sections, each of which chronicles his relationship with a particular group of people, namely the demi-mondaine Sally Bowles, the dirt poor Nowak family, the rich Landauer family, and his gay buddies Peter and Otto on holiday in the Baltic.

In other words, the famous ‘I am a camera’ lines can be read, not as a manifesto, but as an excuse.

The most important difference, though, between Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye To Berlin is that this book is a lot less funny than its predecessor. In fact it opens on a note of gloom and melancholy which I found it hard to shake off thereafter. Thus Fraulein S loves telling Herr Issyvoo about all his predecessors in the rented rooms, about their foibles and habits. This makes the narrator see himself as just another in an endless procession of meaningless lives.

How much food must I gradually, wearily consume on my way? How many pairs of shoes shall I wear out? How many thousands of cigarettes shall I smoke? How many cups of tea shall I drink and how many glasses of beer? What an awful tasteless prospect! And yet – to have to die… A sudden vague pang of apprehension grips my bowels and I have to excuse myself in order to go to the lavatory.

Not very cheerful, is it? Anyway, the other tenants of Fraulein Schroeder’s boarding house are:

Bobby, the barman at the Troika
Fraulein Mayr, ‘a music-hall jodlerin’ past her prime, with ‘a bull-dog jaw, enormous arms and coarse string-coloured hair’ who is addicted to tea and tarot cards, she is a Nazi
Fraulein Kost, ‘a blonde florid girl with large silly blue eyes’, a prostitute

The first chapter is very bitty. We are introduced to these characters, the narrator swings by the Troika bar and discovers how empty and sad it is until a small group walks in at which point it comes to life with the band suddenly playing and the cigarette boy hurrying over to their table. Or he comes across Frauleins Mayr and Schroeder lying on their tummies with their ears to the floor listening to the woman in the flat downstairs having a furious row with a man she’s contacted via a dating agency.

Sally Bowles

Things perk up in chapter two where we meet Sally Bowles.

She was dark enough to be Fritz’s sister. Her face was long and thin, powdered dead white. She had very large brown eyes which should have been darker, to match her hair and the pencil she used for her eyebrows… She was really beautiful, with her little dark head, big eyes and finely arched nose – and so absurdly conscious of all these features.

She is nineteen, been in Berlin two months, came out with a friend who promptly found a rich man who swept her off to Paris. Now Sally sings (badly) in a seedy bar, where Christopher’s friend, Franz Wendel, takes him to see her. She invited Chris for tea. She tells her life story, mother was the Lancashire heiress to a mill fortune, married a feisty businessman, so her real name is double-barrelled, Jackson-Bowles, she got herself expelled from her posh school and Daddy encouraged her to go to London to learn acting. She likes telling him all about this and flows straight into telling him about her numerous love affairs and the man she spent the night with last night.

I had posh women friends like that at university and for a while afterwards. Once it’s clear that you’re not going to make a pass at them – that you are neuter – they treat you like a pet and enjoy seeing if they can shock you – letting you stay while they get dressed and made up for a party for example – and you enjoy finding out whether you are shocked by what they say or do.

Now, about a hundred years since those days, and as the father of a teenage daughter the same age as Sally, I can see her behaviour as nerves and self-consciousness and an endless fishing for compliments and reassurance. I see her as pathetic and in need of help.

It initially seems as if Berlin is going to really focus on this one central figure in the same was Norris focused on Norris, but Sally Bowles is a lot less interesting or funny as a character. There is something sad about her from the start, and she’s just not funny. She mistakes flirting and talking about her lovers for having something interesting to say.

In other ways the book feels secondary. For example, he describes a little New Year’s Eve party at Fraulein Schroeder’s which includes Sally (who’s now moved in) then they move on to a big dance hall with phones on the tables, then he gets really drunk and wakes up in a bed full of paper streamers. The point is this is a pale echo or repetition of the far more vividly written and funnier New Year’s Eve party which occurs early in Norris and which climaxes with the narrator discovering Mr Norris on his hands and knees polishing the knee-length boots of his Mistress who is brandishing a whip!

Now that was something, that was surprising, impressive and very funny. Here the characters just get drunk and Sally ends up sleeping with her piano accompanist, Klaus, and then bragging about it next day to Chris, as she brags about all her conquests to her pet.

Then Klaus decamps to London where he’s got a good job orchestrating music for the movies and a few weeks later Sally gets the inevitable letter from him saying they must part because he’s fallen in love with the most marvellous English society lady and Fraulein Schroeder is scandalised, and Christopher listens loyally while Sally whines and smokes and the reader is bored.

They meet Clive, a big, fabulously rich American, who drinks half a bottle of scotch before breakfast and is full of grand plans. (This event is tied to a specific date when they watch the big state funeral of Weimar politician Hermann Müller, which took place in March 1931.)

If this is 1931, that new year’s even party must have been seeing in 1931. In which case Christopher is not the same character as William Bradshaw, because we saw William attend a completely different new year’s even 1931 party with Mr Norris. Just saying.

After getting their hopes up that he could take them on a round the world fantasmagoria of a travel, Clive does a bunk, Still he leaves some money and he bought Chris some nice shirts.

Sally discovers she’s pregnant. Fraulein Schroeder knows someone who knows an abortionist. It’s a fairly up-class deal, she’s signed into a rest home with a medical notes that she’s too ill to have a baby. Chris visits every day. The couple of days after the operation she’s very low. Bit depressing.

Chris goes to the Baltic, stays a month of more to write. When he comes back Sally has moved out of Frl Schroeder’s and into quite a swanky flat in a modernist block she shares with a girlfriend. She’s more distant, and vague about men. She is, basically, a prostitute, makes money by having sex with men, all the time telling herself she’s going to get her big break and be an actress. They argue. They aren’t friends any more, or not in the same way.

A con-man visits Chris and tries to extract money from him. When Chris says no, the con tells him he does a sideline in face cream for actresses, and out of malice Chris gives him Sally’s address. A few days later she phones to say she was wined and dined and then screwed out of all her money by a beastly conman. Oh dear. Chris goes round and hears the full story, and admits he sent her. They call the police who find the whole thing hilarious. But to their surprise they’re asked to come and identify the conman a week or so later, they’ve spotted him in a restaurant. Christopher instantly sees him and, after a moment’s hesitation, points him out to the cops. Then goes away feeling disgusted and swears he’ll never do anything like that again.

A few days later Sally pops round to tell him the end of the story. She had to identify him and he was terribly upset, said: ‘I thought you were my friend’. Amazingly, he turned out to be just 16 years old, so would have had to be tried in Juvenile Court but instead the doctors certified him and he was sent to a home.

Christopher never saw Sally again. A little later he gets a postcard from Paris, then a brief one-liner from Rome, then that was that. This ‘story’ is his tribute to her and their friendship. But it’s not a story, is it? It’s a series of diary entries written up a bit.

On Rügen Island (May 1931)

According to Wikipedia:

Rügen is Germany’s largest island by area. It is located off the Pomeranian coast in the Baltic Sea. Rügen is 31.9 miles from north to south and 26.6 miles east to west. Its coast is characterized by numerous sandy beaches, lagoons (Bodden) and open bays (Wieke), as well as peninsulas and headlands. In June 2011 UNESCO awarded the status of a World Heritage Site to the Jasmund National Park, famous for its vast stands of beeches and chalk cliffs.

It is to this idyllic and beautiful island that Christopher comes in the summer of 1931 to work on his novel. He’s sharing a holiday house with two others, an Englishman named Peter Wilkinson, about his own age and a German working-class boy from Berlin named Otto Nowak, aged sixteen or seventeen years old.

Peter is the fourth child of an immensely rich Englishman with a big house in Mayfair and a country seat. His sisters are marrying aristocracy while his brother is a successful explorer. Peter is the neurotic failure of the family, who went to Oxford but dropped out, had several nervous breakdowns. He’s been through several expensive psychoanalysts in England and then decided to try one in Berlin, which brings him here.

Peter appears to be in a gay relationship with Otto who, however, torments him by going out by himself every night to flirt with girls in the nearby small town and reeling back drunk to another argument. This long section or short story appears to be a diary recording of the day-by-day activities, sunbathing during the day, Otto and Peter arguing and occasionally having actual fights every night, while Christopher stays out of it and gets his work done.

Creeping in at various points are the Nazis. They meet a ferret-faced Nazi enthusiast who says types like Otto can’t be reformed but should be sent to a labour camp. He points out that one of the beaches (Hoddensee) is full of Jews. It is good to be back among ‘real Nordic types’. Christopher and Peter like going in the evenings to the nearby town of Baabe, although it is full of Nazi youths.

Peter and Christopher go for a row on the sea. Peter asks Christopher what should he do. Only at this point does it emerge that Peter is paying Otto to stay, to be with them, to be his partner. Anyway, it’s hypothetical, when they get back to the house the landlord tells them Otto’s caught the train. He’s ransacked Peter’s room, nicked a couple of ties, three shirts and two hundred marks.

Peter tells Christopher he’ll go back to England, not that he gets on with any of his family. Christopher sees him off then feels lonely in the holiday chalet without the two bickering lovers. He packs up and returns to Berlin.

The Nowaks

Not only does Christopher meet Otto again back in Berlin, he ends up renting a ‘room’ in the cramped, squalid, noisy, smelly apartment of this very working class Berlin family, not unlike George Orwell staying with working folk in the north of England. Herr Nowak the furniture remover, Frau Nowak the worn harassed mother who chars, Otto who thinks he’s a communist, 20-year-old Lothar who’s started going round with Nazis and pudgy 12-year-old Greta.

They live in a cramped, draughty, smelly two-roomed attic five flights up a block in a warren of slums in Wassertorsrasse. It’s never quiet, harassed Frau Nowak makes a dinner of mashed lung, boiled potatoes and brown bread. In the evenings he hangs around the Alexander Casino with rough trade like Piep or Gerhardt. Slowly the smell and the poverty and the arguments, especially between Otto and his poor mother, wear him down. He tells them he’s leaving. On his last afternoon Otto and mother have such a shouting match that Otto retires to his room and tries to cut his wrists.

Some time later, around Christmas, Christopher pays a visit. He can’t believe how squalid, dirty and noisy the street is. Frau Nowak is so ill she’s been sent to a sanatorium. They haven’t paid the bill so the electricity’s been cut off. Lothar and Otto don’t go home very much.

Otto persuades Christoph – they all call him Christoph – to accompany him out to the sanatorium to see his mother. This is a genuinely weird and hallucinatory sequence for Frau Nowak shares a room with three other women, one of whom is a skinny bright-eyed wreck who takes a shine to Christoph, the other is a plump 18-year-old who takes a shine to Otto, and the six of them spend a surreal deranged day together, walking in the grounds, then back to the room to dance to a gramophone and then sit listening to Frau Nowak’s reminiscences as it gets dark and nobody turns on the light and black-eyed skinny trembling Erna puts her wasted arm round Christoph and draws his mouth down for a feverish kiss. Like a horror story. Eventually the nurse comes to say visiting hours are over and Otto and Christoph get back to the coach which is take them back into town.

The Landauers

It is October 1930. In other words, before the events of the Sally Bowles section. In other words Goodbye to Berlin isn’t a continuous narrative but a collection of stories or reminiscences in non-chronological order.

Christopher had been given in England a letter of introduction to the rich, Jewish Landauer family. He takes it up and meets 18-year-old Natalia Landauer, dining several times with her and her mother, before going out to the cinema etc. They are a wealthy, happy, civilised family. On one occasion he has dinner with the father and a cousin as well as Frau and Natalia. The father is intelligent, stayed in London 35 years earlier and did what we’d call sociological research on London slums (so that would be about 1896, year of the bleak novel A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison).

The cousin, Bernhard, is incredibly polite, formal, correct, civilised, intelligent, speaks fluent English. Christoph calls on him at his luxury apartment, exquisitely furnished, immaculate luncheon. A few days later calls on him at the vast department store the Landauers own in the centre of Berlin. Bernhard is a beguiling character, one of several in this character-led book.

Christopher makes the experiment of introducing fastidious and tightly-disciplined Natalia Landauer to Sally Bowles at a restaurant. It goes wrong immediately as Sally apologises for being late because

‘I’ve been making love to a dirty old Jew producer. I’m hoping he’ll give me a contract–but no go, so far….’

Christopher kicks her under the table but it is too late, Natalia has gone rigid. Sally breezes on, nattering about the film business but all her stories involve adultery, sex or drugs (funny how little changes in that business) for an excruciating further 20 minutes before the date breaks up. Natalia walks briskly away. From that moment dates the decline in his friendship with her.

Bernhard rings up Christopher and asks if he wants to come to a secret destination. He calls round in his chauffeur-driven car and they drive along a stretch of motorway out to the Wannsee to an astonishingly luxurious built right by the shore, built by Bernhard’s father in 1904. His mother was English, Jewish, she became more interested in Jewish culture and studied Hebrew even as her cancer got worse until the pain was so severe she killed herself. All this and more Bernhard tells him over dinner and as they walk out to the shore in the darkness. The conversation gets bad-tempered when Bernhard explains he is experimenting with himself, he hasn’t had a private conversation with anyone about anything for ten years, he wanted to try it out. Christopher doesn’t enjoy being a guinea pig.

Next day Christopher is driven back into Berlin and dropped off by the chauffeur. He doesn’t speak to Bernhard for six months. Then Bernhard phones him up and invited him out there again. Christopher has cut his foot on some tin at the beach and it has got infected. He imagines it will be a little convalescence so doesn’t bother to dress and so is cross when the car arrives at the house and he discovers it is a posh party like something from The Great Gatsby.

They are waiting for the results of a referendum about the government. Christopher looks around at all these people and thinks they’re doomed.

It’s nine months before he sees Bernhard again. He’s been in effect hiding because he became really hard-up, that’s why he was forced to move in with the Nowaks and live in poverty. They banter in that detached way. Bernhard looks dreadful, overworked. Christopher recommends a holiday in Italy. Bernhard jokes about a trip to China, would he like to come with him to China, now, tonight? Christopher thinks this is a joke and makes a joke about having to wait for his clean linen to be returned from the laundry, but later he comes to think it was a totally serious proposal.

Christopher returns to England for a while, returns to Berlin in Autumn 1932, tries to contact Bernhard a couple of times, but is told he is away on business. Then Hitler is elected, the Reichstag burns down, the Jewish boycott includes the Landauer department store. Christopher leaves Germany for good in May 1933, for Prague. At a restaurant he overhears two fat German business men gossiping and one of them mentions Bernhard is dead. ‘Heart failure’, the kind of heart failure you get with a bullet through it, the kind of heart failure lots of Jews are getting in Nazi Germany.

Christopher’s thoughts and reactions are not recorded, we are left to imagine them and it is a complex imagining because theirs was a complex and strange relationship.

Berlin diary (winter 1932-3)

The text finally comes clean and turns into pure diary, the format which underlay it all the time.

His diary records miscellaneous memories as the political crisis deepens, as Christopher meets up with friends, sits in restaurants, the climate of fear intensifies.

One of his pupils, Herr Krampf, a young engineer, recalls the starvation at the end of the last war. Another, a police chief, announces he is taking up a post in America but worries about his wife who is too ill to make the trip. He goes to the funfair at the end of Potsdamerstrasse and watches the utterly fake, staged matches. Even though they know they’re staged the crowd still bets and argues about the outcome. These people will believe anything. He sees three SA men viciously attack a stranger in the street, beating him to the ground and poking out his eye with their spiked flagpoles. Another time he sees a Nazi fighting with two Jews who’d been kerb-crawling.

Fritz Wendel takes him on a tour of ‘debauched’ bars including one with performers dressed up as women. Christopher finds it tawdry and tacky but this, ironically, is precisely the subject matter people think of when they think of his Berlin stories even though they’re not about that kind of cabaret-nightclub decadence at all. Some American college boys are plucking up the courage to go in. When Fritz tells them the entertainment consists of men dressing as women, they say, ‘What? You mean queer?’

‘Eventually we’re all queer,’ drawled Fritz solemnly, in lugubrious tones. The young man looked us over slowly. He had been running and was still out of breath. The others grouped themselves awkwardly behind him, ready for anything – though their callow, open-mouthed faces in the greenish lamp-light looked a bit scared.
‘You queer, too, hey?’ demanded the little American, turning suddenly on me.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘very queer indeed.’

In fact the really queer thing about Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin is how very, very unqueer they are.

The Nazis come to power, people are beaten up in the streets, publishers are closed down, Jews in all walks of life are arrested and dragged off. When Fritz takes Christopher to a ‘communist’ bar in a cellar, they all pretend to be confident of the future, assuring him this Nazi period in power is just a flash in the pan, but the reader knows they are doomed to lose and lose badly.

The book ends with these scattered, ominous fragments and Christopher’s final confession that, a few short years later (as he wrote), he can barely believe any of it actually happened.

The jarring image

Isherwood’s got a gift for the sudden, startling image, described crisply and clearly. Maybe he got it from Auden:

Birds call with sudden uncanny violence, like alarm-clocks going off.

Yesterday morning I saw a roe being chased by a Borzoi dog, right across the fields and in amongst the trees. The dog couldn’t catch the roe, although it seemed to be going much the faster of the two, moving in long graceful bounds, while the roe went bucketing over the earth with wild rigid jerks, like a grand piano bewitched.

‘It’s only a short time…’ sobbed Frau Nowak; the tears running down over her hideous frog-like smile. And suddenly she started coughing – her body seemed to break in half like a hinged doll.

Old Muttchen had a cold, they said. She wore a bandage round her throat, tight under the high collar of her old-fashioned black dress. She seemed a nice old lady, but somehow slightly obscene, like an old dog with sores. She sat on the edge of her bed with the photographs of her children and grandchildren on the table beside her, like prizes she had won.

Herr Landauer was a small lively man, with dark leathery wrinkled skin, like an old well-polished boot.

When Herr Nowak’s 12-year-old daughter runs to greet him:

Bending, he picked her up, carefully and expertly, with a certain admiring curiosity, like a large valuable vase.

Erna is in the sanatorium:

She had immense, dark, hungry eyes. The wedding-ring was loose on her bony finger. When she talked and became excited her hands flitted tirelessly about in sequences of aimless gestures, like two shrivelled moths.