Christopher and His Kind
Here are my sticky notes from Christopher Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind (1976).
On borders:
[The train] approached the Belgian frontier through thick woods. Passportless rabbits were hopping about; visaless birds flew hither and thither, not even knowing which country they were in. They crossed into Belgium and back again, finding the grass and the trees no different.
On right-wing populism:
The emerging Nazi Party ... was announcing that it would stamp out homosexuality because "Germany must be virile if we are to fight for survival."
On what to do:
I think all a writer can do, the only completely revolutionary attitude for him today, is to try and create standards which are really civilized.
On a political near miss:
Earlier in 1929, the Reichstag Committee had finished drafting a Penal Reform Bill. According to this bill, consensual sex acts between adult males would no longer be crimes. ... The Bill had been presented to the Reichstag and seemed likely to be passed into law. Then, in October, came the U.S. Stock Market crash, causing a period of panic and indecision in Europe which was unfavourable to reform of any kind. The Reichstag postponed discussion of the Bill indefinitely.
On class:
He told Christopher that all working-class boys who are homosexual have a natural urge to get themselves educated; therefore they have to climb into the middle class. ... Christopher felt shocked by his statement and didn't want to admit that it was true. Why couldn't a working-class boy become educated without acquiring bourgeois airs and graces? If his nature required him to be a queen, why couldn't he be a working-class queen? The fact was that Christopher, the upper-class boy, was now trying to disown his class. Because he hated it, he despised the middle class for aping its ways. That left him with nothing to admire but the working class; so he declared it to be forthright, without frills, altogether on the path of truth.
On Berlin vs Paris:
Wasn’t Berlin's famous "decadence" largely a commercial "line" which the Berliners had instinctively developed in their competition with Paris? Paris had long since cornered the straight girl market, so what was left for Berlin to offer its visitors but a masquerade of perversions?
On England:
He didn't think of England as his family. And, much as he was often able to enjoy himself there, he continued to feel the old hostility. For him, it was still the land of The Others. And in rejecting [his male German lover], it had rejected him too.
While on a press junket:
They took benzedrine every morning to give them energy for these encounters, secconal every night to make them sleep. Wystan later made the use of uppers and downers part of his routine; he called it 'the chemical life.'