Christopher wasn’t seriously afraid that Wystan would be killed in battle. The government would probably insist on his making propaganda for them, rather than fighting. Still, Byron and Brooke had died by disease, not weapons, and a war-zone is full of potential accidents.

This was a solemn parting, despite all their jokes. It made them aware how absolutely each relied on the other’s continuing to exist.

Their friendship was rooted in schoolboy memories and the mood of its sexuality was adolescent. They had been going to bed together, unromantically but with much pleasure, for the past ten years, whenever an opportunity offered itself, as it did now. They couldn’t think of themselves as lovers, yet sex had given their friendship an extra dimension. They were conscious of this and it embarrassed them slightly — that is to say, the sophisticated adult friends were embarrassed by the schoolboy sex partners. This may be why they made fun, in private and in print, of each other’s physical appearance; Wystan’s ‘stumpy immature fingers’ and ‘small pale eyes screwed painfully together’; Christoper’s ‘squat’ body and ‘enormous’ nose and head. The adults were trying to dismiss the schoolboys’ sex-making as unimportant. It was of profound importance. It made the relationship unique for both of them.

On January 13, Christopher saw Wystan off on the train. Wystan had a bad cold but was otherwise cheerful. His only anxiety was about his luggage, which had been sent ahead, by mistake, to the Franco-Spanish frontier. He was afraid that it was lost forever. Luckily, he was wrong.

- Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and his Kind

- The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

- Stevie Smith

- I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette

Bohemia Lies By the Sea, Anselm Kiefer

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

- Nobel Banquet Speech, William Faulkner

If she went to Alan now it would be like detaching one of these cut-outs of a woman, and  forcing it to walk separately from the rest, but once detached from the unison, it would reveal that it was a mere outline of a woman, the figure design as the eye could see it, but empty of substance, this substance having evaporated through the spaces between each layer of the personality. A divided woman indeed, a woman divided into numberless silhouettes, and she could see this form of Sabina leaving a desperate and lonely one walking the streets in the quest of hot coffee, being greeted by Alan as a transparently young girl he had married ten years before and sworn to cherish, as he had, only he had continued to cherish the same young girl he had married, the first exposure of Sabina, the first image delivered into his hands, the first dimension, of this elaborated, complex and extended series of Sabinas which  had been born later and which she had not been able to give him. Each year, just as a tree puts forth a new ring of growth, she should have been able to say: ‘Alan, here is a new version of Sabina, at it to the rest, fuse them well, hold on to them when you embrace her, hold them all at once in your arm, or else, divided, separated, each image will lead a life of its own, and it will not be one but six, or seven, or eight Sabinas who will walk sometimes in unison, by a great effort of synthesis, sometimes separately, one of them following a deep drumming into the the forests of black hair and luxurious mouths, another visiting Vienna-as-it-was-before-the-war, and still another lying beside an insane young man, and still another opening opening maternal arms to a trembling frightened Donald. Was this the crime  to have sought to marry each Sabina to another mate, to match each one in turn by a different life?

- A Spy in the House of Love, Anaïs Nin

- Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson

first we must find out what we are

I

do not know myself

No sooner have I discovered something

than I begin to doubt it

and I have to destroy it again

What we do is just a shadow of what we want

to do

and the only truths we can point to

are the ever-changing truths of our own

existence

I do not know if I am hangman or victim

for I imagine the most horrible tortures

and as I describe them I suffer them myself

There is nothing that I could not do and every-

thing fills me with horror

And I see that other people also

suddenly change themselves into strangers

and are driven to unpredictable acts

A little while ago I saw my tailor

a gentle cultured man who liked to talk philo-

sophy

I saw him foam at the mouth

and raging and screaming attack with a cudgel

a man from Switzerland

a large man heavily armed

and destroy him utterly

and then I saw him

tear open the breast of the defeated man

saw him take out the still beating heart

and swallow it

Marat, Peter Weiss

Two men shift a pile of rocks from one side of the stage to the other, over and over, again and again. An act so illogical, so tedious, so boring that you almost forget who made these men shift the rocks, and why they are made to do it; to break their humanity, to lose our attention. It’s a theatrical dare to see who will get bored first: the men, the actors, or the audience. It reminds us that dying in a concentration camp could be tedious, as well as horrific. A process of quotidian tasks that becomes more difficult, until, mentally or physically, you can’t do them can’t do them anymore. And however many ways the two men keep themselves strong, their captors try to weaken them, pit their own humanity against each other. What is remarkable is that each man chooses his own death, and until that moment there is still humour and pathos and lust and the suspense that comes from hope. And afterwards – still hope.

Focus Theatre & B Sharp
Bent
by Martin Sherman
Directed by Pete Nettell
Venue: Belvoir St Downstairs Theatre, 25 Belvoir St, Surry Hills
Dates: Thursday 18 February – Sunday 14 March, 2010

- Christopher Isherwood, Christopher Isherwood