De Brits-Amerikaanse schrijver Christopher Isherwood werd geboren op 26 augustus 1904 in Disley in het graafschap Cheshire in Engeland. Zie ook mijn blog van 26 augustus 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Christopher Isherwood op dit blog.
Uit: Goodbye to Berlin
“One was in favour of sending her to a sanatorium at once. Another thought she was too far gone to be worth sending at all-and told her so.
Another assured her that there was nothing serious the matter: she merely needed a fortnight in the Alps. Frau Nowak listened to all three of them with the greatest respect and never failed to impress upon me, in describing these interviews, that each was the kindest and cleverest professor to be found in the whole of Europe.
She returned home, coughing and shivering, with sodden shoes, exhausted and semi-hysterical. No sooner was she inside the flat than she began scolding at Grete or at Otto, quite automatically, like a clockwor doll unwinding its spring.
“You mark my words-you’ll end in prison! I wish I’d packed you off to a reformatory when you were fourteen. It might have done you some good. . . . And to think that, in my whole family, we’ve never had anybody before who wasn’t respectable and decent!”
“You respectable!” Otto sneered: “When you were a girl you went around with every pair of trousers you could find.”
“I forbid you to speak to me like that! Do you hear? I for- bid youl Oh, I wish I’d died before I bore you, you wicked, unnatural child!”
Otto skipped around her, dodging her blows, wild with glee at the row he had started. In his excitement he pulled hideous grimaces.
“He’s mad!” exclaimed Frau Nowak: “Just look at him now, Herr Christoph. I ask you, isn’t he just a raving madman? I must take him to the hospital to be examined.’
This idea appealed to Otto’s romantic imagination. Often, when we were alone together, he would tell me with tears in his eyes:
“I shan’t be here much longer, Christoph. My nerves are breaking down.”
Christopher Isherwood (26 augustus 1904 – 4 januari 1986)
