The Ballet of the Bombs: Isherwood’s camp remake of Dante’s rota of the Sodomites

Abstract

In 1954, Christopher Isherwood daringly defended ‘camp’ as an aesthetic concept in his fifth novel, The World in the Evening. Two years later he completed his sixth novel, The Forgotten, a mid-century American update of Dante’s Inferno. By casting his alter ego Chris as Dante, and his hustler friend Denny as Virgil, Isherwood not only queered but ‘camped up’ the underworld journey of the wayward pilgrim and his moral guide. En route to the Capital, Chris stops over at an artists’ colony located in a dormant volcano where three male dancers perform a ballet symbolizing the nuclear arms race. Their performance not only recalls bomb-themed ballets staged in the post-war period, but also evokes the round dance of the three Florentine Sodomites in Inferno canto 16. Isherwood’s comic send-up of Inferno canto 16 accords with his pioneering definition of ‘High Camp’ as a queer response to the aesthetics of classical ballet.

A desolate plain within a ruined city; a sinister shower of fallout from a wrathful blast; a scattered multitude forced to scurry over scorching ground without hope of shelter—Dante-poet’s panoramic view of the Sodomites in the innermost ring of the Seventh Circle flashes by in a series of horrified glances from the eyewitness viewpoint of Dante-pilgrim. With the wood of the Suicides behind him, the pilgrim pauses before stepping up onto a stone levee to cross the plain of the Violent Against God. He is out in the open again, no longer concealed by thorny branches. From his perilous new position at the edge of the plain, he takes in a scene of devastation more terrifying than anything discovered so far in Lower Hell.

At first glance, the vast sweep of the plain reminds Dante of an earthly desert, an expanse of sand as hot and barren as the Sahara (Inferno 14:13–15). But the Desert of the Sodomites is not just hot. With punitive force, it burns any foot pressed into it. Barren it must be, but not in a passive sense. With vengeful energy, it flings back any seed spilled upon it. Since the Sodomites are flung onto sand that is not merely infertile but actively hostile to fertility, they are never allowed to forget their rejection of God’s procreative order. The very locus of their damnation, sloping down towards the anus mundi, forces them to recall the anal target of their violently disordered desires. At the centre of their hyperactive girone lies a foul hole into which a boiling stream of corrupted blood perpetually falls.¹

Casting another glance over the scene—this time, upward—the pilgrim detects what looks like snow softly falling through the darkness. Flakes are certainly in the air, but not of the frozen kind. Nothing at ground level here ever cools down. The surface heat is supernaturally sustained by the production of white-hot cinders in the pyroclastic atmosphere of the desert, sparked by the lightning bolts of Divine Wrath. The cinders, in turn, ignite ‘fresh burning’ (Inferno 14:42) wherever they land.²

The pilgrim’s eyes search for survivors amid the fallout. Further glimpses pick out ‘many flocks of naked souls’ (Inferno 14:19), most of them running here and there and thrashing about as if dancing a tresca (Inferno 14:40).³ Are they partying on the sands? Competing in a Lupercalian fertility race? Kicking up their heels in a Dionysian frenzy? The orgiastic dynamism of the Sodomites only appears dance-like from afar. Up close, their movements look panicky, frenetic, joyless, consisting mostly of reflexive reactions to their hostile environment. While struggling to keep their feet away from the sand, they incessantly slap themselves with their ‘wretched hands’ (Inferno 14:41) in a vain effort to extinguish the cinders alighting on their skin. Their macabre movements give rise to a uniquely Dantean variation of the Dance of Death.

While the flamboyant dead perform their travesty of a pastoral quickstep, the burning flakes land with appalling steadiness ‘now here, now there’ (Inferno 14:41). In the apparent randomness of each tiny arson attack on their bodies, these souls, judged to have been Violent Against God, are doomed to experience a replay of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the first targets in the Old Testament war on postlapsarian urban culture. Even worse, they suffer an eternal prolongation of the genocidal instant when God rained down fire and brimstone on the Cities of the Plain (Genesis 19:24–25).

Dante’s reconnaissance of the desert war zone brings another scintillating biblical event to mind. If the immolation of the Sodomites is glimpsed from above—call it the Dove’s-eye view of the scene—their fire dance perversely commemorates the launch of the New Testament movement for World Peace as described in Acts 2:1–3:

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they [the disciples] were all with one accord in one place.

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.

From the shockingly comic viewpoint of the Saints, the apostolic foundation of the Church appears in a double exposure with the melee of disgraced ancients and apostates on the burning sand. Eerily visible through the Rain of Fire are the tongues of flame descending from Heaven on the Day of Pentecost (Costa 1989).

Dante’s pause at the edge of the desert does not last long. With Divine Wrath booming over scorched earth and Divine Peace blossoming in the Empyrean, the pilgrim’s imaginative effort to merge two flagrantly opposite views of eternity into a single apocalyptic vision is doomed to fail in the downward spiral of his journey. It exhausts his nascent prophetic powers. The two views are rent asunder like the veil of the temple, split-screened for an instant before the eternal horizon of the Pentecost fades to black behind the blaze of its infernal parody.

With the fallout of eternity drifting slowing through the air, the impetus of time is boldly accelerated at ground level. Infernal time flows like the River of Blood, surging relentlessly onward with violent ebullience to the brink of the Abyss. Stepping onto ‘one of the hard margins’ of Phlegethon (Inferno 15:1), the pilgrim follows the boiling current across the sands. Following his lead, I now leave the thickets of medieval apocalypticism behind and charge ahead through six hundred years to the radioactive clouds and bombed-out battlegrounds of the twentieth century. En route to Isherwood’s mid-century restaging of the dance of the Sodomites at the edge of a volcanic wasteland in Mexico, I shall briefly map out the recent reception-history of Dante’s allegory of violence through its impact on modern poets, playwrights, dancers, and artists.

Unfolding a modern inferno

Aerial bombardment during World War Two brought the vivid horrors of the Seventh Circle flaming back to the minds of mid-century modernists in the Anglo-American cultural vanguard, including T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Robert Rauschenberg. From the Blitz raids that repeatedly hit London at night in 1940–1941, to the single-blast nuclear attacks that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki on two momentous mornings in 1945, the fiery torment raining down from the sky compellingly evoked the disaster zone of Inferno 14–16. In the aftermath of the bombings, artists and authors were preoccupied with the Circle of Violence, the Rain of Fire, and the Dance of Death. Their modernizations of the Infernal Pentecost usually combined two of these motifs but rarely all three in a single work. As we shall see, Isherwood’s 1956 revisiting of this Dantean episode stands out as a satiric synthesis of all three components of the Poet’s prophetic vision of the desert.

Blanking out the charred Sodomites from the Circle of Violence, playwrights and dancemakers in the immediate wake of World War Two tended to evoke the fiery agonies of the Inferno without directly alluding to the specific details of damnation (including the intense irony of the contrapasso). Their dramatic strategy was to update the Dance of Death by historicizing rather than allegorizing the prospect of mass extinction. As a result, the moralized motions of Dante’s Violent were restaged without reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, on a strictly earthly plane against the backdrop of modern cities ruined by aerial bombardment. Radioactive fallout became the new Rain of Fire.

‘Japan to see Atomic Ballet’ ran the headline of a brief article in The New York Times on December 23, 1947 (6). Undeterred by radiation sickness, survivors of the Hiroshima bombing somehow found the energy to perform a dance testifying to their shattering experience of the blast and the medical agonies resulting from it. In the fifties, their choreographic critique of the Atomic Age was performed several times in America under the pacifist title ‘No More Hiroshimas’ (Haberman 1984).

Touring Britain at this time was a polemical verse drama with a far less peaceful ballet for the Atomic Age. The dramatist was labour activist Ewan MacColl. Reeling from news reports of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, MacColl dashed off the first draft of his play in late 1945 (MacColl 1948). Forbiddingly entitled Uranium 235, it was conceived as a left-wing entertainment for the grass-roots Group Theatre. Since God no longer moved ‘the sun and the other stars’ (Paradiso 33:145), the old cosmic dance clearly needed a new choreographer. Enter the Puppet-Master, a role played by MacColl himself. To sustain the Puppet-Master’s heterosexist fantasy that ‘the most enduring love story in the world’ was ‘the love of the proton for the neutron,’ MacColl reconceived his play as an allegorical masque in ten episodes tracing the ascendancy of Science over Religion. Popping up on cue in Episode IX (‘The Atom’) is Albert Einstein, a Vaudeville magician who steals the show by converting his pretty assistant Fräulein Mass into Energy. Herr Energy, no less. Hey presto! Girl changes into Boy, and fresh hell breaks loose in the subatomic gender system. After performing ‘The Ballet of Atomic Fission,’ the gruff Protons all behave like Hollywood gangsters, harassing their Neutron floozies. Cast as their bad-boy leader, Energy brings the episode to a close with a leap and a bound and ‘a loud explosion’ (MacColl 1948, 67–72).

On April 6, 1953, a leggy showgirl from the Sands (the hotel-casino in Las Vegas, not the desert in the Inferno) added her own scene to the Ballet of Atomic Fission on a Nevada mountain ridge called Angel Peak. Hovering in the sky behind her was the radioactive cloud from the detonation of an actual atomic bomb: the Dixie Shot (Wellerstein 2012).⁴ Her earnestly anagogic ‘Angel’s Dance’ was captured in a series of stills published in Parade magazine on June 28, 1953. In contrast to the Miss Atomic Bomb pageant back at the Sands, the Angel’s chaste pas de deux with the Bomb was innocent of Cold War machismo.⁵ It was a manifestly sacred dance. No Sodomites were harmed in the making of it. Like Dante’s St Lucy, whose timely intercession was staged on an ascetic elevation lit ‘by the dawn’s early light’ (Purgatorio 9:52), the dancer on Angel Peak offered mid-century Americans a reassuring vision of release from their deepest fears about the Bomb.⁶

In tandem with these performers, authors and visual artists were quick to experience a sparking of creativity in the destructive wake of wartime bombings and post-war bomb tests. Not surprisingly, the modernist poets who were most in tune with Dante’s apocalyptic Christianity were the most attentive readers of the Inferno. In their revisions of the Infernal Pentecost, they alluded directly to the Seventh Circle and the Rain of Fire while turning a blind eye to the dancing Sodomites.

In ‘Little Gidding’ (1942), T. S. Eliot famously projected his harrowing experience as a fire warden during the Blitz onto Dante’s wary passage across the desert of Violence (Eliot 1943, 33–35).⁷ The predawn timing of his rounds ‘Near the ending of interminable night’ (Eliot 1943, 33) serves as an apocalyptic cue for the Infernal Pentecost. A Nazi bomb falling through the night sky is transfigured into ‘the dark dove with the flickering tongue’ which ‘breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror’ (Eliot 1943, 37). Though Dante’s Sodomites are banished from the Anglican sanctuary of ‘Little Gidding,’ their flames still haunt Eliot’s literary memory. His mind’s eye turns towards the flames of the Seventh Cornice (Purgatorio 26:28–42) where the penitent Lustful, hoping to dance with the Blessed, practise the steps that will take them to Paradise. Projecting his soul into ‘that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer’ (Eliot 1943, 35), the Blitzed-out fire warden fancies himself blissed out among the poets of fin’amor (Miller 2005).⁸

With America bracing for war in 1940, W. H. Auden followed Eliot’s lead by contemplating God’s ‘horrible art of justice’ (Inferno 14:6) from the infernal viewpoint of Dante-pilgrim. In a sardonic verse epistle addressed to his friend Elizabeth Mayer on January 1, 1940, Auden hailed Dante as ‘That lean hard-bitten pioneer’ who had ‘spoiled a temporal career’ in the quest for justice in an unjust world (New Year Letter ll.165-66). Casting himself as a pioneering Dante for the new world, Auden resolved to brave the violence of war with an increasingly Christian yearning for peace. In his quiet return to the Church, he struggled to reconcile his old Berlin persona as an urbanely apostate sodomite with his New York identity as an aspiring Christian poet. ‘But poets are not celibate divines,’ he would remind art historian Edgar Wind in 1953: ‘Had Dante said so, who would read his lines?’ (Auden 1976b, 470).⁹

In The Age of Anxiety (1946), Auden’s perplexity at America’s rebellious indifference to divine justice found expression in the soliloquies of his alter-ego Quant. A Manhattan shipping clerk with a mythic view of history, Quant represents the power of intuition to see the big picture—a Dantean power desperately needed by war-weary humanity at the dawn of the Atomic Age. Questioning America’s nuclear triumphalism, Quant sets himself apart from his compatriots to deliver an edgy modern theodicy prompted by ‘the signs of a facetious culture’ in a Sodom-like metropolis twinned with Manhattan:

In what myth do their sages

Locate the cause of evil?

How are these people punished?

How, above all, will they end? By any natural

Fascination of frost or flood, or from the artful

Obliterating bang whereby God’s rebellious image

After thousands of thankless years spent in thinking about it,

Finally finds a solid

Proof of its independence? (Auden 1976a, 380–81)

Quant’s barrage of questions sparks a chain reaction of radical humanist meditations on ‘the artful / Obliterating bang’ of the first nuclear bomb, which was detonated at the Trinity test site in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. The theological code name for the test was assigned apparently without irony by Los Alamos Laboratory director J. Robert Oppenheimer. A world-changing outcome of the US Military’s Manhattan Project, the famous blast is construed by Quant with explosive Dantean irony as ‘solid’ proof of humanity’s rebellious break with divinity. While atomic energy is obviously associated with Quant through his nome parlante, which suggests ‘quantum,’ his monosyllabic name also rhymes with the Middle English pronunciation of Dante’s name, which was ‘Daunt’ (commonly spelled ‘Dant’).¹⁰ Auden, a learned devotee of Middle English poetry, would certainly have recalled the Wife of Bath’s audaciously learned shout-out to ‘the wise poete of Florence / that highte Dant’ in the Canterbury Tales (Chaucer 1965.71; Wife of Bath’s Tale, ll. 1125-26). As a quantitative-minded avatar of ‘Dant,’ Quant functions allegorically as Oppenheimer’s moral antitype in The Age of Anxiety. Given its Manhattan setting, Auden’s ‘Baroque Eclogue’ on the war years provided mid-century America with a strategically ‘artful’ alternative to the Manhattan Project.

On October 10, 1949, Life magazine published a photo-gallery of fashionable ‘high-brows,’ including a small arty portrait of Auden smiling sardonically over a garbage pail (Life 1949, 17). The cover of the same issue featured a full-page publicity shot of Oppenheimer in his iconic role as ‘America’s No. 1 Thinker on Atomic Energy.’¹¹ Posed Rodin-style with his right hand in a fist at his temple, he certainly looked the part. The iconic juxtaposition of the Thinker and the Trasher—the serious scientist who had unleashed the Bomb with self-divinizing righteousness and the comic satirist who had reduced it to an absurd ‘bang’ in a blasphemous rebellion against God—provided visual artists with a cue to modernize the Inferno for America in the throes of the Cold War. After the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been surveyed and photographed by the US Military, it was time for the cultural vanguard to survey the Circle of Violence again at ground level, to experience the Rain of Fire as a visible reality in the here and now. But the infernal vision would not be conveyed in the old medieval way, through the eyes of a terrified pilgrim on the margins of the scene. The scattered components of the scene would now be glimpsed through the powerful public lens of mass media photographers. Their images, ironically juxtaposed, would then be rendered allegorically significant by artists trained in modernist collage techniques.

In the late fifties, pop artist Robert Rauschenberg took up the challenge of visualizing the horrors of Dante’s Hell. In his solvent transfer drawing for the sixteenth canto of the Inferno, the wavy flamelets descending on the burning plain in traditional illuminations of the canto are fused into a massive meteor burning through the atmosphere like a ballistic missile (‘Canto XVI: Circle Seven, Round 3, The Violent Against God, Nature, and Art’; Rauschenberg 1959–1960). In Rauschenberg’s ‘Canto XVI,’ the punishing fire seems to come from Man, not God. The Infernal Pentecost has been given a radically humanist makeover for the Atomic Age.

To celebrate the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth, Rauschenberg revisited the Circle of Violence in a photo collage published in Life on December 17, 1965 (46–49). Associate editor Frank Kappler provided a teaser for the artist’s wide-screen vision of Hell: ‘Like so many of his contemporaries, Rauschenberg views Hell not as a place devised for man in the afterlife, but as a condition created by man here and now’ (Kappler 1965, 45). Cast in the role of Dante-pilgrim, the reader is cued for the Big Reveal: ‘Turn the page and fold out to see A MODERN INFERNO’ (Kappler 1965, 45; cited by Smith 2016, 151).

The artist’s smudgy drawing of a falling meteor trailing its vapour across a desert wilderness has been replaced by the stark black-and-white photograph of a nuclear bomb explosion, the blinding radiance of its mushroom cloud rising from the grainy centre of the fourth panel of the foldout (Life 1965, 47). Instead of the shady forms of the Violent Against God, journalistic images of Adolf Eichmann, Joseph McCarthy, and other twentieth-century evildoers surround the radioactive cloud like historical detritus from the detonation of modernity.

Though Rauschenberg’s gay life in New York during the sixties was hardly a secret in gossipy art circles, the restless flocks of his ‘kind’ (as Christopher Isherwood would put it in the seventies) have mysteriously vanished from the representation of the violence of the here and now.¹² Where are the Kept Boys, the Closet Cases, the Drag Queens, the Homophiles? Rauschenberg’s omission of America’s increasingly visible Sodomites from the crowded design of his Modern Inferno is a telling sign of the unquestioned heterosexism of the mainstream readers to whom this particular issue of Life was clearly targeted, with its adjacent articles ‘Ecumenical Council Ends Its Task’ and ‘How College Girls Really Are.’ The lower half of a footprint, purportedly the artist’s own, was poignantly outlined in red on the paper plane of the desert, in his drawing to accompany Inferno canto 14 (‘Canto XIV: Circle Seven, Round 3, The Violent Against God, Nature, and Art’; Rauschenberg 1959–1960). This omen of his own damnation was the closest he ever came to acknowledging the prospect of modern gay visibility in his Dante illustrations. It now reads as a sign of his personal torment in the closeted fifties. He evidently could not risk fallout from the American public’s censorious reaction to gay visibility, triggered by the slightest hint of camp, in the gravely moral unfolding of his hellscape for the sixties.

Boom and doom

The Anglo-American gay novelist Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) met Robert Rauschenberg at a studio party in Venice, California, in 1978. The now uncloseted artist reminded Isherwood ‘so much’ of his friend Tennessee Williams ‘but louder, vulgarer.’ Embarrassed by his well-bred British impulse to recoil from American vulgarity, Isherwood corrected his first impression of the artist by stressing the good-humoured tone of their meeting: ‘We laughed a lot—I out of embarrassment. Rauschenberg said, “It’s wonderful how much you can do with laughter,” which made him seem suddenly very shrewd’ (Isherwood 2012, 576).¹³

Twenty-two years before his meeting with Rauschenberg, Isherwood had been working on a Dante project of his own from the ‘very shrewd’ viewpoint of a gay insider riding the wave of success in post-war America. The project was then (as now) largely forgotten, having been shelved by him in the late fifties as a puff piece too glibly amusing for publication as the work of a serious author. A satiric travelogue in the form of a confidential diary, the privately suppressed novel ironically anticipated Rauschenberg’s very public foldout in Life. It too was conceived as a mid-century American update of the Inferno.

The unique typescript that preserves it, now in the Isherwood Papers at the Huntington Library, contains a complete five-chapter roman à clef based on Isherwood’s 1954 road trip from Los Angeles to Mexico City with his partner Don Bachardy and their neighbours Jo and Ben Masselink. Its title page identifies the long-buried text, appropriately enough, as The Forgotten. Auden’s critique of Stephen Monk, the wimpy narrator of Isherwood’s previous novel The World in the Evening, had been at the back of Isherwood’s mind since April 1955, when he resolved to make his Dante-figure ‘more amusing, more outrageous, more despotic’ (Isherwood 1947–62, 94; entry for April 3, 1955). Finished in November 1956, his Dante novel was too ambitious a project to be dumped in Auden’s iconic garbage pail along with ‘all the signs of a facetious culture’ decried by Quant in The Age of Anxiety (Auden 1976a, 380). Densely allusive and highly playful, The Forgotten reads as a serious piece of modernist fiction from start to finish. A jeu d’esprit for the hellbent.

In the opening sentence of his fictional diary, Isherwood’s eponymous narrator Chris replaces ‘our life’ (nostra vita) from the famous opening line of the Commedia—‘In the middle of the journey of our life’ (Inferno 1:1)—with a sardonic reference to Life magazine:

I was at home (I suppose) here in Los Angeles, talking long distance on the phone to the Religious Editor of Life magazine. They wanted me to go to Hell for them, right away. ‘We’d like you to be there Thursday night at latest.’ (Isherwood 1956)

Because of the fall of man, as Dante understood the divine plan, the span of our sinful lives had been grimly measured out for us. It was only ‘three score years and ten’ (Psalms 90:10). Now, with the rise of America, the will of God has yielded to a higher power—the Zeitgeist-shaping power of Life’s editor-in-chief Henry Luce. In the media-hallowed ‘American Century’ (Luce 1941, 61), We, the People have ‘our’ collective life transformed into the material details of an ideally prosperous (though superficial) lifestyle which is then mediated to us through photojournalism as the triumphant signifier of ‘our’ modern reality. Scholarly readers of the Inferno would get the other mordant joke hidden in the scheduling of Chris’s on-site assignment: Dante-pilgrim begins his descent into Hell on Holy Thursday in 1300.

By casting himself as Dante-tourist, and his amoral hustler friend Denny as Virgil, Isherwood embarked on an audacious queering of the underworld journey of the pilgrim and his moral guide.¹⁴ En route to the capital, the travellers stop over at an artists’ colony on an eccentric millionaire’s estate on the side of a dormant volcano. Envisioned as ‘art hell’ (Isherwood 1947–1962, 100), the colony is known to its pampered denizens as Los Olvidados or ‘The Forgotten’: an ironic allusion to the title of Luis Buñuel’s 1950 surrealist film about slum kids in post-war Mexico City.¹⁵ At first, Los Olvidados recalls the wooded enclave of Limbo in the First Circle. By the end of the visit, the estate corresponds more closely to the desert of the Violent in the Seventh Circle.

Daringly and, as far as I can tell, for the first time in the queer reception history of Dante’s Commedia, Isherwood brought the Sodomites back into play in a modern staging of the Infernal Pentecost.¹⁶ Setting his Mexican remake of Inferno 14–16 in a volcanic hollow against the backdrop of a blackened lava field, Isherwood restored the three apocalyptic motifs of the Sodomite cantos (the Circle of Violence, the Rain of Fire, the Dance of Death) in Chris’s eye-witness account of a camped-up theatrical production designed to intensify his harrowing experience of art hell. The dramatic restoration might have produced merely a clever modernization of a medieval horror show, a facile result that Isherwood himself had been prepared to dismiss from the beginning of his Dante project. The resulting scene, however, proved to be much more than a slick Inferno parody. The novelist’s experimental transposition of the Infernal Pentecost into the key of High Camp resulted in an admonitory re-enactment of the dance of the Sodomites that was simultaneously preposterous and profound. Its profundity lay in its preposterous lightness as an entertainment, a lightness that paradoxically compelled engagement with the deepest fears and heaviest concerns of the public who were sold Life’s post-war vision of nostra vita. Strategically anti-Life, the scene from art hell was designed to be politically as well as aesthetically transgressive. Not only was the dance of the Sodomites revived on the Los Olvidados stage as a blatant send-up of the nuclear triumphalism of Luce’s American Century. It was also reconceived as an outrageously ‘Un-American Activity’ in defiance of the heteronormative conformism of the McCarthy Era.

At a talent show attended by Chris on his final night at the colony, three male dancers perform a ballet symbolizing the rapid development of nuclear warheads during the transitional period from World War Two to the Cold War. In an intertextual commentary on their performance, I argue that the Ballet of the Bombs not only mocks the pacifist message of atomic ballets actually staged in the post-war period but also plays for laughs—turns into a showbiz gag—the homophobic spin that Dante’s moral commentators traditionally put on the wheeling dance of the three Sodomites in Inferno 16.¹⁷ In contrast to Rauschenberg’s tragic panorama of ‘a Modern Inferno’ in Life magazine, Isherwood’s comic send-up of Inferno 16 is camp to its very core. As I show, the design of the dancers’ movements, costumes, and verses strongly accords with Isherwood’s pioneering notion of ‘High Camp.’

As described in Chris’s diary in The Forgotten, the Ballet of the Bombs functions as a pyrrhic antimasque for a masque-like drama on left-wing pacifist themes. The deadpan entertainment seems to parody the deadly earnest homiletics of a nuclear cabaret like Uranium 235. Here is the passage—an extended parodic scene worth unpacking at length:

The drama opens with a prologue spoken by a veiled figure, in the very early dim embryonic light of a dawn beginning to be felt through blotched night clouds by a shore at flood tide, or maybe under water:

Neglectfully electing urgent utterance

Because cause was, duly and dully delightful,

Speaking to spooks, supposed surprise

Superfluous since soon somebody special—¹⁸

But no doubt this is mere stage fright or limbering-up, because when the drama does begin, it makes quite painfully prosaic sense. There is a ballet, with voices. The principal figures are the Atom Bomb, in red tights; the Hydrogen Bomb, in yellow tights; and the Cobalt Bomb, in blue tights. The Atom Bomb sings:

I am Alpha and Omega, first and last;

They exploded me from the top of a mast.

I made a big flash and my masters were happy

So they took me and dropped me on Nagasaki.

Then the Hydrogen Bomb (coming downstage and winking at the audience):

Get a load of that guy—thinks he’s a Big Shot!

Well, confidentially, he ain’t so hot.

I blew up Bikini with a great big boom

And started a vogue for a swimming costume.¹⁹

Whereupon the Cobalt Bomb, after doing some high jumps with heavy percussion accompaniment, breaks in:

It’s doubtful if me you will even get to hear

’Cause when I go off, you just won’t be there.

So relax and quit fussing about segregation—

There ain’t going to be no next generation!

But they don’t get away with it, of course. Voices among the audience start to protest. The Peoples of the World—led by Guess Who—will not tolerate the Bombs and their capitalistic manipulators. A young factory worker with a hammer and a young female peasant with a sickle leap onto the stage and threaten them with their weapons of Peace, and the Bombs shrink into the background and— big laugh!—explode harmlessly with tiny detonations like cap pistols. (Isherwood 1956, 85–86)

‘Guess Who’ is, of course, Karl Marx—the unnameable boogieman of the era. His deus ex machina mission is to lead ‘the Peoples of the World’ (i.e., the audience) onto the stage in a peace march against ‘the Bombs and their capitalistic manipulators.’ Though the Los Olvidados artistes think of themselves as avant-garde radicals, their idea of an experimental drama is distinctly passé. As a celebrity guest at Los Olvidados, Chris must maintain a straight face while suppressing his gay impulse to pan the show as a fifties throwback to the agitprop theatre of the thirties (Mendelson 1988, 542).²⁰

Entering in the chronological order of their military development, the Bombs stand tall for a moment at centre stage in impudent readiness for their showdown with Marx. Their humiliating end is nigh. Before meeting their doom in the Marxist coup de théâtre, the Bombs perform a cabaret act boasting of their power to destroy the world with ‘a great big boom.’ The éclat of their technological Totentanz explodes the fourth wall, fusing their scene-stealing solos into a direly modern dance to the music of time.

Enacted in their flippant ballet is the relentlessly accelerating passage of time in the Nuclear Age. After the Prologue has ghosted the audience by ‘speaking to spooks,’ the Atom Bomb flashes before them in the role of Time Past. His exultant quatrain reminds them of their powerlessness before his US Military ‘masters’ after the 1945 bombing of Nagasaki. Next in line, the Hydrogen Bomb presents himself as Time Present. With a wink at the audience, he boasts that his predecessor’s ‘Big Shot’ status now belongs to him. A modern Miles Gloriosus, he invites applause for his booming success in the ongoing series of tests on Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific (DeGroot 2005, 118–22, 150–51).²¹ Finally the Cobalt Bomb, a superweapon still in development, leaps on stage as Time Future. His arrival rachets up the audience’s anxieties with a rumble of heavy percussion. Why bother worrying about segregation (or any other pressing social issue) when ‘there ain’t going to be no next generation’?

But the show must go on—even if it is a bad one. Now is the time to stop the Capitalist war machine with a Communist takeover of the World Stage. Cue the Triumph of the Hammer and Sickle. Brandishing these revolutionary symbols as ‘weapons of Peace,’ a factory lad and a farmgirl march forth as an ideal pair of comrades bound for heterosexual bliss in the workers’ paradise. As the audience rises in solidarity with them, the big bad Bombs shrink into the background. Their cap-pistol detonations are hailed as a comic ending: ‘big laugh!’

But who’s laughing?

Not Chris. At the turn of the fifties, when the momentous parados of the Cold War coincided in America with the fizzling finale of McCarthyism, Isherwood felt the collective suspense of Auden’s Age of Anxiety slipping into nightmarish paranoia at the prospect of nuclear annihilation. By the middle of the decade, with The Forgotten splutteringly launched, his mood had not lightened. On a Dantean scale of depression, his personal sense of doom grew even darker during the boom years. Tragic mindfulness faded into cynical irony; purgatorial empathy into infernal spite.

Giro and rota

How does the Ballet of the Bombs fit into the Dantean design of The Forgotten? This section seeks to answer that question via an intertextual leap to the summit of Mount Purgatory followed by a deep dive back into the Inferno. As a Dantean satirist of mid-century American culture, Isherwood does not invent the scenario for the Bombs out of thin air. He infernalizes their sacrilegious performance, grounds it in the moral depths of the Seventh Circle of Hell as a prelude to regaining ‘the hope of the heights’ (Inferno 1:54) on Mount Purgatory. By projecting Dante’s sacred monte onto the mountain colonies of Los Alamos and Los Olvidados, the novelist opens up the possibility of a psychotherapeutic telos for the narrator’s harrowing road trip. The purgatorial impetus behind the Inferno novel is first articulated by Isherwood on 3 April 1955 (Isherwood 1947–1962, 95): ‘The journey to “Mexico” is somewhat of a modern Dante’s visit to Purgatory. It is a warning to the visitor.’

If the Ballet of the Bombs, with its red, yellow, and blue costumes, recalls any dance scene in Dante, it is the colourful show glimpsed by the pilgrim during the festival of the Church Triumphant on the summit of Mount Purgatory:

Three ladies came dancing in a ring [giro]

near the right wheel [rota]. The first was so red

that she would hardly be noticed in a fire;

the second looked as if her flesh and bones

were made of emerald; the third

seemed as white as driven snow. (Purgatorio 29: 121–26)

The purgatorial pas de trois is performed by the Theological Virtues, whose perfect harmony recreates (even as it replaces) the interlinked dance of the three Graces on Mount Parnassus. Their conversionary giro serves as the model for a round dance performed in tandem by their four sisters, the Philosophical Virtues (Purgatorio 29: 130-132).²² All seven dancers embody divine powers activating and sustaining the cyclical order of the Dantean universe. They are not figures representing Dante’s personal ‘virtues’ in an ethical or psychological sense. Their superhuman influence pervades the universe—a point driven home to the pilgrim when the ladies of the second chorus declare themselves to be ‘stars in heaven’ (Purgatorio 31:106). For their descent to earth as blessed peacemakers, they have assumed the form of amorous nymphs or caroling ladies—a far cry from men in tights pretending to be nuclear weapons.

The Theological Virtues make no pretence of looking powerful. They exhibit the truth of divine empowerment simply by showing their true colours: white for Faith; green for Hope; red for Charity. These are angelic hues. The first reflects the dazzling whiteness of the angel pilot on the purgatorial passenger ship (Purgatorio 2: 22-39); the second recalls the green wings of the angels in the Valley of the Princes (Purgatorio 8: 28-30); and the third reveals the flaming ardour of the Seraphim beyond the chastening fire of the Seventh Cornice (Purgatorio 27: 55-60; cf. Paradiso 11: 37). Surpassing any transfigurative effect achievable with theatrical costuming or makeup, the intensity of their colouration is a sign of divine energy infused into their very ‘flesh and bones’ (Purgatorio 29:124). Heavenly power-dressing is paradoxical. It requires no clothes. As a radically strange nakedness, it exposes theological truths through hyperbolic deceptions. Faith appears so white that she could be mistaken for driven snow; Hope, so green that her whole body rivals an emerald; Charity, so red that she would disappear against a background of flame. The colour-coding of their bodies sets them apart from the uniform costuming of their less exalted sisters, whose imperial purple robes (power-dressing in an earthly sense) evoke the Stoic wisdom of Ancient Rome.

The wise measures of the first chorus guide the cyclical performance of the second, revealing how the amorous energy flowing through Creation before the Fall still flows through Eden and the World from the three-in-one activity of the Trinity, the source of divine love, and thence back to God through the many routes of the active life guided by philosophical principles. In the Latin West, the Trinity’s mystical merry-go-round was called the Circumincessio; in the Greek East, the Perichoresis. By turning the invisible dynamics of the Godhead into visible revolutions beside the right wheel of Beatrice’s chariot, the Theological Virtues show Dante how the eternal transmission of love from the Trinity is transmitted in turn to the nine angelic choruses whose intellectual revolutions spin the celestial wheels.

The giro of the Theological Virtues finds its infernal counterpart (and gendered opposite) in the rota of the three butch Sodomites near the cascade of Phlegethon. Like Faith, Hope, and Charity, the shades in this all-male trio are naked in a strange way. Charred by the Rain of Fire, they have lost any trace of natural human colour by the time Dante catches sight of them. Their posthumous hue is darker than any shade of cadaverous decay or spectral erasure.

Leaning away from the River of Blood towards the teetering edge of the levee, Dante looks down on the desert as the three Sodomites rush into view, and they, in turn, cast their cruisy gazes back up at him in a mesmerizing ocular alliance. Before any words are exchanged, they join hands in a whirling ‘wheel’ (Inferno 16:21) to distinguish themselves from the free-range scholars and clerics running around on the sand beyond them. The members of this improvised rota (a noun that may have denoted a political ‘ring’ in medieval Tuscan)²³ initially remind Dante of wrestlers competing in the nude on the sands of an ancient arena:

As champions, naked and anointed, are accustomed

to do, spying their grasp and vantage, before they

come to blows and thrusts at one another:

thus, wheeling [rotando], each directed his visage

toward me… (Inferno 16:22–26).

The pilgrim’s unexpected arrival in their disaster zone has prompted them to approach him with ‘petitions’ (Inferno 16:29) like a coalition of concerned citizens. At the risk of provoking his contempt, they urge him to consider their shameful position below him, to acknowledge their wretchedness as an outrage against himself as a Florentine military veteran, and to join their ring as a strategic ally and amorous recruit (not as a competitor, despite their resemblance to wrestlers). Their engaging show of comradeship ironically corresponds to the activities of heroic spirits in Virgil’s Elysium (Aeneid 6:642–44). Feet beating down on sand, naked bodies wrestling and dancing, voices hauntingly raised in song—these Virgilian motifs are direly repeated by Dante in his relocation of the Elysian dancers to the Desert of the Sodomites.

Though the Poet ironically projects the homoerotic image of oiled athletic male nudes onto the scorched bodies of Sodom’s ‘champions,’ the pilgrim soon realizes that they are not ancient Romans or Greeks. When their performance is in full swing, the ringleader introduces himself as Jacopo Rusticucci and his two comrades as Guido Guerra (‘Guy War’) and Tegghiaio Aldobrandi (Inferno 16: 34–45). All three are recently deceased Florentine Guelfs, reputedly honourable compatriots who may well have known Dante personally during their earthly lives.

If their wrestling is a deceptive act, can the same be said of their dancing? If dancing is perceived as a free-willed activity—as it typically was by medieval Christian moralists—the fire-compelled motions of the Sodomites hardly constitute the performance of a dance in any sacred or profane sense. The rota of the ‘champions,’ however, is a special case. Observed by Dante at close hand, the temporary formation and revolutionary momentum of their ring betray their collective will to put on a brave show for their spellbound compatriot. The once-only performance starts off vocally as an infernal parody of a courtly carola, complete with the choral chanting of a refrain. No doubt their seductive turn on the barren sand is a homoerotic parody of the Carol of Love from the Roman de la Rose (ll. 777–1278), the ring-dance of male-female couples in the Garden of Delight to which Lady Reason ruefully compares the destructive turning of Fortune’s wheel (l. 7173).²⁴

With impressive agility the three Sodomites launch the muscular part of their act by performing seven different movements. First, they join hands to form ‘a single wheel’ (Inferno 16:21). Then they eye each other’s ‘hold’ (Inferno 16:23) to determine their relative strengths in a staged power struggle for the role of choragus or ringleader, a position evidently won by Jacopo who swiftly gains an ‘advantage’ over his comrades as their spokesman (Inferno 16:23). Next, seeking to draw Dante down from his protected position into their dangerous circle, they redirect their faces towards him with an intense collective gaze (Inferno 16:25–26). After that, they synchronize their footsteps to ‘travel continually’ (Inferno 16:27) in one direction around the circumference of their ring. While revolving, they twist their necks around in the opposite direction to maintain their ocular hold on Dante (Inferno 16:26).

Correctly intuiting that the last two movements would be impossible for living human bodies to perform at the same time, Robert Hollander has proposed that the trio must hold their wheel formation in place while they step up and down ‘like joggers at a stoplight’ in order to keep their eyes pinned on the pilgrim (Alighieri 2000, 304).²⁵ Alternatively, they might be imagined as whipping their heads around rapidly to restore their focus on Dante’s face—a motion reminiscent of the ballet technique known as ‘spotting,’ which permits dancers to perform multiple pirouettes without feeling dizzy. But these sensible solutions to the choreographic crux are ruled out by the poet’s explicit insistence on the continual wheeling of the trio in one direction and the concomitant straining of their necks in the opposite direction. They must be capable of rotating their heads a full 360 degrees, which would put them in the same demonically possessed league as Regan from The Exorcist.

Without the need for Hollywood special effects, the head-spinning crux can be solved in a distinctively Dantean way by taking into account the re-corporealization of the damned after death. The creation of posthumous air-bodies by their souls permits them to move in shockingly fluid ways that are impossible for living mortals (like the pilgrim) because of the solidity of earthly flesh. If the False Prophets circling continually around the fourth bolgia can move their feet forward with their heads permanently twisted backward an eerie 180 degrees (Inferno 20:12), then Dante’s agonizing addition of another 180 degrees to the twisted necks of the Sodomites should place no great strain on the reader’s imagination.

As a negative symbol of the celestially peaceful giro of Faith, Hope, and Charity, the rota of Guido, Tegghiaio, and Jacopo devolves into a viciously alluring performance which must be halted if the pilgrim is to progress beyond the vortex of their immoral gravity on the plain of Violence. For a moment he is tempted to fall in with them by falling off the embankment. As soon as the three party-minded Guelfs realize that their prospective recruit is too afraid of the fire to follow through on his amorous impulse to ‘embrace them’ on the sand (Inferno 16:51), they ‘break the wheel’ (Inferno 16:86). Though the Virtues also stop wheeling, their one-time performance in Eden heralds Dante’s entry into the heavenly dance perpetually sustained by ‘the Love that moves the sun and the other stars’ (Paradiso 33:145). The Infernal rota, by contrast, merely looks like an amorous spin-off from the cosmic dance. Its alluring energy seems comradely at first, and then seductive, and in its final moments even angelic, but only from Dante-pilgrim’s morally unstable perspective. From Dante-poet’s morally unwavering view of the scene sub specie aeternitatis, the sudden breaking of the wheel reveals the vengeful motivation of the dancers. Deep down, what drives the Infernal rota is the Sodomites’ violent hatred of God.

Did Isherwood have both the vicious rota and the virtuous giro in mind when he devised the Ballet of the Bombs? Given his early conception of The Forgotten as ‘a sort of modern Inferno, or Purgatory’ (Isherwood 1947–1962, 95), he may well have toyed with the idea of an ironic conflation of the two Dantean dance scenes. What nightmare could be more hideously modern, more in tune with the jangled nerves of the Atomic Age, than the fantasy of nuclear annihilation as an anti-cosmic dance? The Theological Virtues would have to bow out of the scene this time round. They could not have survived the radioactive atmosphere in their descent from Los Alamos to Los Olvidados. An apocalyptic set-piece staged for a mid-century American Inferno, the Ballet of the Bombs may also be read as an Isherwoodian send-up of the danse macabre anticipated by Dante in the dance scenes of Lower Hell. The Sodomites, running counter to the Virtues, perpetually replay the genocidal moment when God punished the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah for their wickedness by destroying the Cities of the Plain in an instant with fire and brimstone. Deep in the Eighth Circle, an even more macabre anticipation of the processional Dance of Death is enacted in the agonizing turns of the Schismatics around ‘the doleful road’ of the ninth bolgia (Inferno 28: 40). Rather than pestilence, war provides the morbid impetus for their savage footing. Instead of a grinning cadaver, a sword-wielding demon presides over their lugubrious march. Though their gore-splattered parade route initially looks like a killing field from Dante-pilgrim’s worldly perspective, it serves as a theatre for God’s otherworldly vendetta against the damned. Like the tresca and rota of the Sodomites, the forced march of the Schismatics turns out to be a grim parody of a dance. Since their mutilated troupe can never be put to death by the sword or put out of their misery by bleeding to death, their peculiar agony is to be wounded by the terrible swift sword of Divine Vengeance only to be slowly healed again by what seems like Divine Mercy—their mangled bodies regaining wholeness, step after painful step, along the ring-road—for no other purpose than to be wounded once more by the demonic surgeon posted at the alpha-omega point of their revolution. As I argue in the next section, the correspondence of the Ballet of the Bombs to these haunting Dantean precedents intensifies the bitter wryness of Isherwood’s Audenesque dramatization of the nuclear arms race for the Los Olvidados talent show.

Alpha and Omega

The Ballet of the Bombs unfolds as a bathetic sequence of wickedly macabre parodies. The intertextual density of the scene is hardly surprising since its fictional livret is embedded in Chris’s extended parody of Dante’s journey narrative. In choosing parody as his primary mode of satirical imitation, Isherwood steals more than a little thunder from the Florentine poet’s outrageous virtuosity as a parodist-cum-psalmist. Dante billed himself as the new David who would dare ‘to cross the line’ in his dance before the Lord (Paradiso 26:117), audaciously recreating the Perichoresis of Divine Love in a mirroring design of sacred and sacrilegious spin-offs.

In the Dantean universe, the voice of Love is never silenced: it breathes forth eternally through the Word of God. Hence, as both Evangelist and Revelator, the beloved disciple John hears Love reading to him from the Scriptures in the glittering conclave of the Stellatum:

The Good that makes this court content

is Alpha and Omega of whatever scripture

Love reads to me either softly or loudly. (Paradiso 26:16–18)

With a booming tone, the Atom Bomb, in Isherwood’s send-up, malevolently echoes Dante’s Johannine tercet as well as John’s own verses on the Divine Monogram ‘ΑΩ,’ which juxtaposes the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet to form a signifier of God and Christ (Revelation 1:8, 21:6, 22:13, 22:16). The echo is blasphemously amplified in the verse that identifies the first dancer at his arrival on stage: ‘I am Alpha and Omega, first and last.’ This opening line also impishly mocks Oppenheimer’s infamous use of verses from the Hindu Scriptures in response to the technological success of the Manhattan Project (Barnett 1949, 133). The scientist’s rebellious answer to fretful theologizing about the Bomb, prompted by his witnessing of the Trinity explosion, was delivered in two self-aggrandizing epigrams appropriated from Krishna’s theophanic sermon as Vishnu to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita (XI 12, 32): ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One’ and ‘I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.’²⁶

As an epitome of culture production in a radical humanist hell, the Ballet of the Bombs in Chris’s diaristic account is satirically designed to celebrate the death of God, or more precisely, the displacement of God by death. The Bombs’ manic upstaging of each other in a crescendo of macho destructiveness is disturbing because it is entertaining, and it is entertaining because it makes light of the deeply disturbing prospect of nuclear annihilation. The Bombs flagrantly play down the mounting anxiety behind any solemn theological questioning of America’s triumphalist capitalism, the ‘facetious culture’ (in Quant’s theodicy) that secretly manufactures and publicly celebrates the advancing technology of nuclear weapons as the ultimate symbol of modern progress.

The Atom Bomb’s presumptuous appropriation of the Divine Monogram shatters the circular pattern of cosmic rote and angelic giri by breaking the divine continuity of ‘first and last.’ Though the Omega title ‘shatterer of worlds’ suits the character as a figure of death, the Atom Bomb has no right to add the Alpha title to his monogram. He is no ‘creator of worlds.’ The entrance of the Hydrogen Bomb quickly proves that the Atom Bomb may be the first but cannot be the last in the speedy succession of warheads by which the peoples of the world are counting down the steps to their destruction. In the succession of world shatterers, the Cobalt Bomb will no doubt be the last but can never be the first. Should the Omega Boom go off, there would be no world left to destroy and no future generation to destroy it. Thus, in Isherwood’s novel and in its larger intertexual and cultural context, the forward pressure of modern scientific progress rudely reconfigures the unifying rounds of the age-old cosmic dance into a quick-time march—a flash of atomized soloists—to the finish line of mutual assured destruction.

Low Camp and High Camp

Ten years before Susan Sontag published her sibylline ‘Notes on “Camp”’ (1964), Isherwood quietly lifted the queeny usage of ‘camp’ from the dim underworld of gay slang and illuminated its cultural implications in a literary discussion of comic irony. His pioneering introduction of the term into American aesthetic discourse is briefly acknowledged by Sontag in a dismissive aside: ‘Apart from a lazy two-page sketch in Christopher Isherwood’s novel The World in the Evening (1954), it has hardly broken into print’ (Sontag 1964, 275).²⁷ Against the charge of laziness, Isherwood may be defended on the grounds that no other serious male writer in the 1950s (including the vulnerable coterie of screenwriters in the Hollywood Closet) had acted against professional common sense by stepping forward in print to deliver a potentially self-incriminating understanding of the term. That small step took a lot of nerve.

Isherwood’s main contribution to mid-century aesthetics was his apologia for ‘High Camp.’ He offered his first diagnostic analysis of High Camp in a bedside dialogue between an openly gay doctor and a closeted bisexual husband in ‘Letters and Life,’ the meditative middle section of The World in the Evening (Isherwood 1999 [1954], 107–114). As a Wildean aesthete with Platonic tastes, Charles, the doctor, defends his ardent attraction to elegantly artificial art forms by questioning his bedridden friend Stephen’s view that ‘camp’ is a lowbrow label for burlesque mimicry. Stephen admits that he picked up this louche usage ‘in queer circles’ where the glamour of Hollywood goddesses is aped by ‘swishy’ boys in picture hats and feather boas. ‘What I mean by camp,’ counters Charles,

is something much more fundamental. You can call the other Low Camp, if you like; then what I’m talking about is High Camp. High Camp is the whole emotional basis of the ballet, for example, and of course of baroque art. You see, true High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is largely camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love. . . . (Isherwood 1999 [1954], 110)

Only two years after this private dialogue became public with the release of his fifth novel, Isherwood was writing about ballet again in his sixth. Devising the Ballet of the Bombs for The Forgotten was more than a jeu d’esprit for him. It was an aesthetic experiment to test out Charles’s theory of the psychotherapeutic value of High Camp as a cultural anti-depressant.

As the good doctor put it, High Camp does not make fun of serious things. It makes fun out of them. Despite Virgil’s instruction to treat the three Sodomites with courtesy, Dante ends up making fun of them. He responds to their show with impudence, throwing shade at the shades. Noting how ‘their nimble legs seemed wings’ (Inferno 16:87), he ushers them out of sight with a bathetic joke: ‘An Amen could not have been said as quickly / as they vanished’ (Inferno 16:87–88). If Isherwood perceived the trio as ancestral members of the Homintern (Woods 2016, 6)—i.e., bitter aggressive-defensive political types still kicking around ‘in queer circles’—their debasement of the angelic dance could be laughed at as an example of very Low Camp.²⁸ If so, might he have read the giro of the Virtues as a divinely comic anticipation of High Camp? While their serene circling contributes to Beatrice’s tough-love therapy session with Dante in Eden, the Christian Graces are not above making serious theological fun out of the flashy effort of the Sodomites to dance like the Saints.

A dramatic impetus towards camp is visibly communicated to the Los Olvidados audience by the colour-coded costuming of the Bombs. The Atom Bomb’s tights must be red for a reason. While the colour would obviously signify Communism in a Cold War political pageant, Isherwood no doubt had a campier (and more chemical) reason for costuming the Atom Bomb in red. The heavy metal uranium, in the form of its naturally occurring fissile isotope uranium 238, supplied the explosive material for the first generation of nuclear weapons (DeGroot 2005, 145; Holloway 1994, 216). But that was not its only use. Uranium oxide from natural uranium ore was used in the production of an orangey crimson glaze for Fiesta Ware, a popular line of American domestic pottery. Because the glaze would cause a Geiger counter to click, the signature hue of the brand was popularly known as ‘uranium red’ or ‘radioactive red’ (Moran 2004, 6).²⁹

Stereotypically coveted by gay collectors, Fiesta Ware also came in the bright colours chosen for the tights of the other two dancers—yellow for the Hydrogen Bomb and blue for the Cobalt Bomb. Cobalt blue has been familiar to oil painters since the late eighteenth century as the name of the much-prized pigment used in the manufacture of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. It was also one of the four ceramic colours carried over into the 1950s after uranium red had been discontinued during the war. Since Fiesta Ware was designed to recall the cheery colours of Mexican artisanal pottery, Isherwood may have had this familiar palette in mind for the Ballet of the Bombs. The Fiesta colours vividly highlighted the preposterous projection of American material culture onto the Mexican setting of Los Olvidados.

If High Camp is for connoisseurs, as Charles advised, then connoisseurs of post-war American ballet may also detect the elevating impetus of camp aestheticism in the choreography invented for the Bombs. The artful silliness of all that the Bombs do (as well as say) in their bathetic enactment of the Nuclear Apocalypse needs little highlighting for postmodern readers used to the radical Sontagian ironies of the Post-Stonewall era. But if the camp virtuosity of the Bombs was not conspicuous to Isherwood’s mid-century contemporaries, it would have become so the moment the imaginary performance at Los Olvidados was compared to actual dance theatre pieces on the same theme from the period. The earnest promotion of international pacifism through dance automatically banished the Muse of Camp from the World Stage.

If any gesture in the Ballet of the Bombs clearly signals the camp intentions of the novelist, it is the Hydrogen Bomb’s ‘winking at the audience’ during his entrance (Isherwood 1956, 85). The stagey wink clearly suggests that the audience shares an unspoken understanding with the performer, but an understanding of what? A gossipy knowledge of queer circles, perhaps? Or a technical knowledge of nuclear reactors? To get the joke about the yellow tights—if the joke were scientific—the audience would need to know something about the various kinds of hydrogen gas. The kind produced by electricity from nuclear reactors is commonly known as ‘yellow hydrogen.’³⁰ Despite the Hydrogen Bomb’s claim to have ‘started a vogue for a swimming costume,’ the credit for that feat must be shared with the Atom Bomb. The first bikini swimsuit, exhibited in Paris on July 5, 1946, was designed by French automotive engineer Louis Réard who claimed that his sexy invention was inspired by news reports about the explosion of an atomic weapon with the code name ‘Gilda’ four days earlier at Bikini Atoll (Schmidt 2012, 14–14).³¹ The femme fatale gendering of this bomb proved to be more ironic than all the drag queens in West Hollywood could have imagined. Though Gilda’s destructive power was relatively small compared to the thermonuclear devices in her wake, the erotic impact of bikini-clad bombshells on beaches around the world is still unrivalled. Isherwood perversely masculinized the Bombs on his infernally diminished version of the World Stage.

Though the dancer cast as the Atom Bomb could have ‘done’ Rita Hayworth, performing her sultry Latin American dance in Gilda, he ‘does’ Oppenheimer instead, quipping, ‘I am Alpha and Omega’ (Isherwood 1956, 85).

The brief cue for the Cobalt Bomb to break in ‘after doing some high jumps with heavy percussion accompaniment’ provides the only explicit link between movement and music in the Ballet of the Bombs (Isherwood 1956, 85). Though various kinds of leaps typically add excitement to the solos performed by male dancers in classical ballet, the high jumps in this solo seem to lack the gravity-defying lightness and agility expected in an échappé sauté³² or a grand jeté.³³ The Cobalt Bomb is hardly a danseur noble. His attack is athletic, propulsive, brutally modern. When he lands a leap, presumably it is with a booming thud marked by ‘heavy percussion.’ From Isherwood’s worldly-wise viewpoint, which is close to Auden’s in The Age of Anxiety, the Ballet of the Bombs should be appreciated as a work aspiring to the status of High Camp in so far as it is a ballet about something, and that something, the nuclear arms race, would have been taken as seriously as love or religion by most mid-century Americans regardless of their degree of engagement with the rarefied tastes of balletomanes or baroque opera buffs. The ‘underlying seriousness’ of the artful camping at Los Olvidados is revealed in the dancers’ sequential representation of the nuclear arms race instigated by the scientists at Los Alamos. The rapid development of new and ever more destructive weapons for the nuclear arsenal is quickly traced by the trio along a brief timeline of hyperbolic progress that can only end in cataclysmic bathos. At the start of the dance, with the bumptious entrance of the Atom Bomb, the American Century is symbolically inaugurated. The terrifying weapon is solely wielded by the world’s first Superpower (even if America’s nuclear ascendency was to last for only four years after the destruction of Nagasaki). In the middle of the ballet, with the wink of the Hydrogen Bomb, the irony of mutual assured destruction is silently flashed to the audience before the ‘great big boom’ on Bikini Atoll echoes in the second quatrain. At the end of the ballet, with the Cobalt Bomb’s performance of a virile sequence of ‘high jumps,’ the traditional exhibition of a male dancer’s spectacular leg power (shown to full advantage in tights) evokes the excitement of aerial bombardment or the fear of radioactive fallout in the high atmosphere. At the same time, the flashy moves of the finale draw satiric attention to the masculine power plays behind the intensely competitive, but ultimately futile, build-up of nuclear weapons on both sides of the Iron Curtain. If classical ballet in Moscow or New York is ‘largely camp about love,’ its infernal parody in Los Olvidados is largely camp about death.

From May 20 to July 10, 1956, while Isherwood was testing his resolve to turn his Dante novel into a comic tour-de-force, the United States conducted six further tests of thermonuclear weapons at Bikini Atoll in the Operation Redwing series. Vibrations from the South Pacific were repeatedly detected by seismographs in Southern California that summer, providing an ominous subliminal accompaniment to the tap-tap-tapping of Isherwood’s typewriter during the composition of the Los Olvidados episode. The aesthetic result of his audacious regendering of the usual Hollywood bombshell act is a blast of High Camp, and given what’s at stake, it is very high indeed. Perhaps only Dante’s angelically coloured yet costumeless incarnation of the Virtues takes camp to an even higher level, the supreme level of elegant artifice in excelsis, where the lost hope of the heights is comically restored on an island in the South Pacific at some remove from Bikini Atoll.