Camp Camouflage: The Art of Espionage in Mr. Norris Changes Trains

When W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood vacationed with Stephen Spender and Otto Nowak off the north German coast in the summer of 1931, it might have seemed an unlikely place for both to explore the ramifications of espionage. And yet, it was here where both would conceive of works that dealt—either obliquely or overtly—with the subject. Auden, for one, joined the group “rather unwillingly,” “shut[ting] himself up in his bedroom with the blinds pulled down,” writing what the former imagined to be The Orators (Isherwood 1976: 81). Before this trip, both Isherwood and Auden spent part of the final years of the 1920s in Germany, sometimes together and sometimes not, inspired by its “richly deserved reputation for sexual permissiveness and for the diversity of its sexual underworld”; Norman Page even presents a convincing argument that it was Isherwood’s “spiritual homeland” (Page 1998: 8). But, as Page argues, “with sex and money went politics,” and reflections on sexuality—particularly sexual expression—in the works of Isherwood and Auden (both gay men) were often haunted by the potentiality of violence as a tool to suppress political expression (Page 1998: 30). Auden witnessed a violent clash between communists and police in 1930 that not only anticipated the violence to come but also reinforced the cost of being either political or social outsiders. In response, The Orators understandably centered on “the rhetorical subjugation of humanity’s sexual, group and survival instincts” (Gay 1968: 129). It also, arguably, set the tone for his collection Poems (1933), where Monroe Spears argues that one of his main tropes becomes “the Spy” or “the Secret Agent” (Spears 1963: 129). And while Auden began to explore the relationship between politics, espionage, and sexuality through production of The Orators at Rügen, Isherwood contemplated his own middlebrow homage to the sexual and political milieu of Weimar: the novel Mr. Norris Changes Trains (Harker 2013: 181). And, while I will here primarily argue that Isherwood’s contribution is a uniquely proficient example of the phenomenon, The Orators provides another small exemplar of the importance espionage as a trope would offer for exploring the political risks of self-expression.
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