At the end of last year, at the end of Christmas week in fact,
Christopher Isherwood was dying in his 70s.
I'd known him fairly well in a way
that a great many people knew him fairly well.
He was very kind to me as a young man when I was about 25.
And I thought, oh, boy, I must be one of his best friends.
And then, I noticed that many other people regarded him
in just the same way.
He had a very wonderful way of seeming--
of being all attentive to what you were saying.
Once I noticed this when I was in a restaurant with him,
and there was a group of us speaking to him.
And I noticed that the way--
normally, when we're speaking to another person,
our eyes stray around a little.
We look at the person's mouth.
We look over their shoulder.
We're listening, but we don't give all our attention
to that person.
But Isherwood, when he was speaking to you,
devoted himself to you, whoever you were.
That was why we all thought we were his best friends.
[CHUCKLES]
I was very sad to hear that he was dying.
And I-- usually, I don't write a poem on an occasion like this
as I did.
I wrote this very soon.
And I recalled-- I'm making reference in this poem
to famous first page of his most famous book "The Berlin
Stories" where he's--
in 1933 or something like that-- oh, no, 1930,
earlier than that-- he's living in a rented room in Berlin.
"To Isherwood Dying."
"It could be, Christopher, from your leafed-in house
in Santa Monica where you lie and wait,
you hear outside a sound resume, fitful, anonymous, of Berlin
50 years ago.
As autumn days got late--
The whistling to their girls from young men
who stood in the deep dim street below dingy facades which
crumbled like a cliff.
Behind which, in a rented room, you
listened, wondering if by chance one might be whistling up
for you, adding unsentimentally, it could not possibly be.
Now, it's a stricter vigil that you hold.
And from the canyon's palms and crumbled gold,
it could be possibly you hear a single whistle call,
come out, come out into the cold.
Courting insistent and impersonal."