Lost Years. A Memoir 1945–1951

Many people found Hayden Lewis attractive, and indeed he could then have been described as handsome; he had a pale romantic

melancholy face which suggested to Christopher a young

nineteenth-century Catholic priest of the Oscar Wilde period. But Hayden wasn’t really a romantic, his temperament was peevish, he sighed and whined and shrugged his shoulders and bitched people in a soft voice. He was one of nature’s underlings, full of envy; his approach was demure until he had detected your weak points and was ready to play on them. . . . In a word, Christopher disliked him intensely from their first meeting and Hayden undoubtedly felt the same way about Christopher. But Christopher had to get along with Hayden for Caskey’s sake, and Hayden had to get along with Christopher.

Christopher worked hard at this, to begin with, even though he knew that Hayden was trying to sabotage his relationship with Caskey by making fun of him. (It got back to him that Hayden called Caskey “Mrs. Reverend,” with the implication that Christopher was a sort of swami-curate.) Later on, there were at least two or three yelling scenes with Hayden––all started by Christopher, when drunk.

But their association always had to be patched up because it was simply too tiresome for them to refuse to see each other, as long as Caskey and Christopher were living together. When Caskey and

Christopher split up, they immediately stopped meeting.

Aside from Denny’s apartment, Caskey and Christopher spent

much of their time together at The Friendship or at Jay’s apartment or in the kitchen of his restaurant.

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The Friendship1 had been doing terrific business throughout the war years and it was still crammed every weekend with servicemen and their pursuers, female and male. It was also the chief neighborhood bar and one of the very few gay bars in West Los Angeles. In other words, if you went in there, you had to be prepared to mingle with all sorts and conditions. I imagine that the more respectable Canyon dwellers had long since decided to stay away.

The noise was stunning, the tobacco smoke was a fog; you always spilled part of your drink as you eased your way through the crowd.

There were little tables you could sit at in pairs, your faces close together, yelling intimacies which no one else had a chance of hearing. This was the scene of Christopher’s courtship of Caskey; they seem to have felt more at ease with each other in such a state of public isolation than when they were actually alone together.

It must have been at this time that Caskey was earning some extra money washing dishes at Jay’s restaurant. Christopher used to come down in the evenings and help, for free. There was always plenty to drink and Christopher quite enjoyed dishwashing; he had done a lot of it while he was with the Quakers and at the Vedanta Center. Jay and his waiters (who were usually also his boyfriends) darted back and forth between the kitchen and the tiny dark dining room, from 1 The Friendship at this period is described in A Single Man as “The Starboard Side.” The sentence about “Girls dashing down from their apartments to drag some gorgeous endangered young drunk to safety and breakfast served next morning in bed . . .” refers to Jo Lathwood’s capture of Ben Masselink. Jo was living at her apartment on West Channel Road (“Las Ondas”), only a few doors from The Friendship, throughout this period, but Christopher didn’t get to know her until later.

Peter Viertel writes about The Friendship and its owner, Doc Law, in his first novel The Canyon. He calls Doc Law “Doc Winters” and The Friendship

“The Schooner Café.” He also mentions the pharmacy which Doc Law ran, right next to the bar. (The wall between them has been broken down now, and the extra space is sometimes used for dancing.)

Doc Law spent most of the daytime in the pharmacy, drunk. His drugs looked as if they had aged to mere dust in their glass jars. Christopher used to say that one could have gone in there and swallowed spoonfuls from all the jars marked “poison” without coming to the slightest harm. Here are two items about Doc from the notebook [mentioned pp. 14‒15, 21, 25] (date unknown): Doc Law, on the oil strike in New York: “They’re a long way from Christ.” . . . I go to Doc Law to plead for some toilet paper, during the shortage. Doc is in a good mood. He is printing an announcement––

something about “a large assortment”––on a long roll of paper, with a rubber stamp and a ruler to keep the letters in line. “Sure,” he answers, “you can wipe your ass with me any time you want to, kid.”

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which they would return with whispered gossip. The place had

already become well known to columnists; there would be at least one movie celebrity among the customers nearly every evening. The chief attraction was Jay’s rich gooey French food. And the dimness of the lighting and the depth of the alcoves appealed to well-known people who wanted privacy. I remember much gossip about Charles Laughton’s visits there with young men. Jay was a perfect host. He knew how to recognize and flatter without making an indiscreet fuss.

On August 14, Japan accepted the Allied terms of surrender. I can’t remember if this was the day on which gasoline rationing was

officially stopped, but I do remember a great outburst of automobile driving––just driving for driving’s sake––about this time. The result was that the Coast Highway was littered with black chunks of

wartime recap rubber which flew off people’s tires as soon as they started speeding.

On August 23, Christopher finally moved his things out of the Vedanta Center and into the chauffeur’s apartment (so called) which adjoined the house the Beesleys were living in, on the Coast

Highway. It was understood that this was to be only a short visit, for Christopher was already planning to set up housekeeping with

Caskey in the near future. (I don’t remember any farewell scene with Swami, and I have no doubt that Christopher did everything he could to make their parting seem temporary and without any

particular significance.)

“The chauffeur’s apartment” was simply a bedroom and a

bathroom. It was right on the highway and the rumble and rattle of trucks at night would have been hard to get used to if it hadn’t been balanced and thus cancelled out by the roar of the waves on the shingle. Christopher found it very snug and he revelled in its complete privacy; it was altogether separate from the house and no noise he could have made would have been loud enough to reach the Beesleys’ ears or make their dogs bark. He could even go in

swimming after dark without their seeing him. What a change, after two and a half years of semipublic community life!

Caskey and Christopher now saw each other nearly every day and often Caskey stayed the night at the chauffeur’s apartment. They spent a lot of time together with Denny, Johnny Goodwin, Hayden Lewis and the Beesleys. (The Beesleys liked Caskey and Denny; Johnny and Hayden they saw only very seldom.) Caskey also met Peggy Kiskadden, Iris Tree and Vernon. As far as I remember, Peggy behaved quite graciously, though she did momentarily enrage

Christopher by bitchily pretending to think that Caskey was the 46

Lost Years

reason why Christopher had left the Vedanta Center. (She knew perfectly well that this wasn’t true, for Christopher had told her repeatedly that he was going to leave, long before Caskey had even arrived in California.) Iris welcomed Caskey without reservations, as she welcomed all her friends’ lovers, and they remained on good terms thenceforward. Vernon, now a confirmed heterosexual,

endorsed this new affair of Christopher’s with condescending amusement, saying, “He’s about your speed.”

On September 21, Christopher finished work at Warner’s

(apparently) and celebrated this by buying a secondhand Lincoln Zephyr convertible, a flashy car which was much better suited than the Packard1 to his show-off role of Uncle to the Denny–

Johnny–Caskey gang. One amusing quirk of the Lincoln was that its speedometer would get out of whack at high speeds; if you were doing 80, it would sometimes climb to 110. When this happened with Denny on board, he would pretend that they were all a bunch of pleasure-mad teenagers of the 1920s, drunk on bathtub gin, and yell “Let ’er rip!” and “Flaming youth!”

On September 25, Christopher was called back to Warner’s, but only for a few days’ work; there was some polishing to be done on the Up at the Villa script. On September 29, it was finished.

This was also the day on which Denny left for New York––the

day-to-day diary notes that he did so “by air,” this being still regarded as a chic and rather daring way to travel.2 Christopher and Caskey took over his apartment from him, moving in that same day.

Christopher never returned to the apartment at the Beesleys’.

Also on the 29th, a visit to a Dr. Williams is mentioned. I think 1 Christopher didn’t trade the Packard in, when he bought the Zephyr. The allowance on it would anyhow have been tiny. Instead, he decided to give it to Hayden Lewis––thereby pleasing and greatly impressing Caskey, as was his intention. This started a tradition, that the Packard must always be given away; to sell it would bring terribly bad luck. And so, during the next few years, the Packard changed owners for free at least half a dozen times. It was a very tough car and lived long.

2 Sometime before this, Denny must have had the Picasso (see April 13, 1944

[in D 1]) crated and removed from his apartment to be shipped east. While he was away in the East––in New York, I think––he sold the Picasso to a private buyer, someone he met at a cocktail party, I believe. Denny was very pleased with himself for having arranged this, and said that the sum of money he got for it was far more than the dealers had offered him. Fact and fiction mingle at this point––I can’t now be sure if $9,500, the figure I give in Down There on a Visit, is correct or not. Anyhow, the picture was eventually resold for something like $40,000. I think it’s now in Chicago, in one of the museums.

[It is in New York, in the Museum of Modern Art; see Glossary under Fouts.]

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this was due to a recurrence of the penis trouble referred to on page 23 of this volume but I can’t remember what the symptoms were exactly, except that they were painful. The constriction, or whatever it was, continued, on and off, until the beginning of 1946, when Christopher had the operation which will be described in due course.

On October 1, Caskey and Christopher started on a long motor

trip in the Lincoln, which lasted nearly three weeks. Their itinerary was as follows:

October 1. They drove to Santa Barbara, stayed with Denny’s

sister, Ellen Bowman. October 2. They drove to Carmel. October 3.

They visited Monterey. October 4–7. They drove to San Francisco and stayed there three days, at the Hotel Richelieu. October 7. They drove to Fresno. October 8. They drove into Yosemite and back.

October 9. They drove through Sequoia Park to Bakersfield.

October 10. They drove to Las Vegas, and visited Boulder Dam from there on the 11th. October 12. They drove to Phoenix, stayed at the Hotel Adams. October 13. They drove to El Centro and had supper in Calexico. (Caskey wanted to drive across the border to Mexicali but Christopher wouldn’t; as he was still a British subject, he was afraid there might be difficulties when he tried to reenter the States.) October 14. They drove to Johnny Goodwin’s ranch, near Escondido. (This was a house called Armageddon, which Johnny had had built for himself. From outside, it looked rather like an Egyptian temple, massive and secret, with a great pillared portal and very few windows. When you entered, you found that the rooms all opened onto an interior courtyard. Johnny had valuable furniture and pictures––including a very striking Miró, one of the few Mirós I have ever really liked.) October 15. They drove to Palm Springs, stayed at the Estrella Villa. October 16. They had dinner with Carter Lodge at La Quinta. October 17. They drove back to Johnny Goodwin’s ranch. October 18. They drove to Laguna Beach and had supper with Chris Wood and Gerald Heard. They drove back to Santa

Monica and Denny’s apartment on October 19.

Oddly enough, I remember almost nothing about this trip; my

memories of the places they went to are connected with earlier or later visits. I remember that their stay with Johnny Goodwin was passed largely in playing guessing games and charades. In one of these, Caskey gave himself the name “Miss Bijou Slyboots”––did he invent it? At Laguna, Gerald Heard was rather cool to Caskey and Christopher; he disapproved of their relationship on principle, regarding it as a betrayal of Swami’s trust in Christopher. (Maybe Peggy had been talking to him about this.) Chris Wood had no such scruples. He approved of Caskey. But, with his usual frankness, he 48

Lost Years

asked Christopher, “Surely he hasn’t got the kind of legs you like, has he?”

On their return to Denny’s apartment, Hayden Lewis moved in

with them. This must have been understood from the beginning to be a temporary arrangement––until, presumably, Hayden could find another place to live, or a job. But the fact that Christopher agreed to it at all shows that his relations with Caskey were still in the honeymoon stage. The apartment consisted of two rooms only, and he must have hated having Hayden around. The day-to-day diary doesn’t say when Hayden left, but he can’t have stayed long––maybe not more than two weeks.

On November 17, they had another visitor, the Willy Tompkins

who had publicly fucked on Denny’s couch at the party in June. He was out of the navy, now, and determined to enjoy himself. Not that he had had such a bad time in the service. Willy belonged to that amazing breed of hero-queens who are able to see war itself as camp.

According to him, the battles of the South Pacific were primarily erotic events; all members of the crew who weren’t actually firing guns would pair off in corners for high-speed sex. Between explosions, you would hear someone gasp out, “Kiss me, quick, I’m going to come!” Even if they were exaggerated, Willy’s stories were none the less beautiful; they were so magnificently death-denying.

One night while Willy was with them, Christopher lay awake (but pretending to be asleep) listening to a conversation about himself between Willy and Caskey. Willy was evidently a bit skeptical about Christopher as a lover, considering his age. But Caskey, more than somewhat drunk, assured Willy, “He’s the best lay on the Pacific Coast!” This testimonial must have impressed Willy, for next day, when the three of them were at the then bare-ass Riviera Beach and Caskey had gone off for a stroll, Willy made a pass at Christopher.

Christopher would have responded with pleasure, but Caskey

reappeared unexpectedly.

On November 22, Caskey, Hayden, Willy Tompkins and

Christopher drove down to Johnny Goodwin’s ranch for a four-day visit. On November 28, Willy left.

Early in November, Prater Violet was reviewed by Time, which said it was “a fresh, firm peach in a dish of waxed fruits.” Also by Diana Trilling, who really and truly liked it; and by James T. Farrell, who discovered it to be so fraught with political irony and analysis of contemporary culture that it couldn’t have been better if it had been written by James T. Farrell himself––as indeed it almost was, by the time he was through describing it. Nearly all the reviews were favorable, and the book sold quite well.

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The Time reviewer reported that he had been told Isherwood was

“now at work on a novel about physically and spiritually ‘displaced persons.’ ” On January 13 of 1946, Philip K. Scheuer published an interview with Christopher in The Los Angeles Times in which

Christopher tells him that Prater Violet was the first of three novelettes about refugees: “They will cover the whole period of immigration between Hitler and the war.” Christopher said that he was then at work on the second of these novelettes. One of them must have been about Haverford, I suppose. Maybe the other was about the Greek island, or about the adventures of the girl who is called Dorothy in Down There on a Visit––I can’t remember. I’m inclined to suspect that Christopher was bluffing when he made these reports. I doubt if he wrote anything much, as long as he was living in the Entrada Drive apartment. One memory of any living place (no matter how

temporary) which I nearly always retain is the memory of the spot where I worked. At Entrada Drive I simply cannot picture it. And besides it seems to me that Caskey and Christopher spent most of their time entertaining, and drinking, and having hangovers in the mornings.

Christopher did do one small writing job at home, however.

Apparently, it took him only one day––December 28. This was a short film outline. It was based on a ghost story which had been told him by a young man named Lynn Perkins. Christopher had met

Lynn Perkins on March 7 of that year; the day-to-day diary doesn’t say where. I think Perkins had wanted Christopher to write this story for him right from the start of their acquaintanceship; he was not only very persistent but quite pretty (though unqueer), which was no doubt why Christopher agreed to do so. Later, Christopher went with Perkins to at least one studio (maybe two or three) and made a sales pitch for the story. I have the impression that someone very nearly bought it.

The Beesleys had left their house on the Coast Highway on

November 11; Christopher and Caskey helped them move into

another one, on the old Malibu Road, just beyond the Colony.[*]

The Malibu Road had few houses along it in those days and Alec was able to take the dalmatians out unleashed and let them run on the long empty beach. The house itself was comfortable though rather small, built of wood with shingles, Californian-British cottage style.

Christopher and Caskey saw the Beesleys several times during the month of December and ate Christmas dinner with them. They must have also had Dodie and Alec up to the apartment, though the day-

[* The Malibu Colony, a gated beach community.]

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Lost Years

to-day diary doesn’t mention this; their visits would anyhow have been brief because they would have had to leave the dalmatians in the car and take turns at visiting and dog-sitting––the dogs were seldom allowed in anyone else’s home. (Even when they were

politely urged to bring the dogs in with them, Dodie and Alec would usually decline, saying that, if they did so, the whole place would be wrecked. They said this with a certain pride––indeed, they liked to think of the dalmatians as being even more violent than they actually were.)

During December, Christopher and Caskey did a lot of

entertaining.1 The day-to-day diary mentions the following guests: Johnny Goodwin, Don Forbes, Dave Eberhardt (see page 11), Bo

and Kelley (see pages 17‒18), Helen Kennedy (Sudhira), John van Druten, Carter Lodge, Chris Wood, Aldous and Maria Huxley,

Peggy and Bill Kiskadden, Salka, Peter and Tommy Viertel, Dick LaPan, the actress Ludmilla Pitoëff and her daughter Anita, Vernon Old (who was having an affair with Anita), Natalia Pascal (who was interested in the Lynn Perkins story), Lynn Perkins, John Cowan and Rob Cartwright,[*] Jay.

John Cowan had been Jay’s boyfriend for a short while; then he left Jay because he had fallen in love with Rob Cartwright, and the two of them started living together. But John had been a familiar figure in the Canyon for some time already––a year at least. He was a big blond boy with an extraordinarily beautiful body. Even Bill Harris acknowledged his beauty and jokingly accepted him as a rival, calling him “The Imposter.” This nickname had been shortened to

“Poster.” Christopher called him “the last of The Great Boys.”

John Cowan was admirably narcissistic. On the beach, he would sunbathe with his trunks off, squeezing them into a ball and placing them so that they just covered his cock, but not his bush. He then would fall asleep or pretend to, make some movement and thus

dislodge the trunks, leaving himself stark naked. There was usually a circle of Cowan watchers lying around him on the sand. John got himself watched after dark, as well, for he strolled around all evening 1 They also went to see the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo three times during its visit to Los Angeles––on November 30 (the opening night) with Hayden Lewis, on December 4 with John Goodwin and Hayden, on December 7 with Bo and Kelley. Among the stars of that season were Leon Danielian (who danced L’Après-midi d’un faune), [Alexandra] Danilova, Maria Tallchief, Nicholas Magallanes, Herbert Bliss. Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial was on the program.

[* Not his real name.]

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in his trunks. If the weather was cold and he was wearing a sweater he would always take it off as soon as he got inside his friends’ homes and sprawl in an armchair with his gorgeous legs wide apart. You couldn’t take your eyes off them.

John had a sister named Rita; she was pretty but loud [. . .]. John and she had terrific fights, they were both as strong as apes and John was often the only person able to remove her when she misbehaved at a party.

Rob Cartwright was dark and fairly nice looking but no one could quite understand what John Cowan saw in him. As a pair, they were known as “Poster and Rattles,” because Rob Cartwright talked a lot.

So, as a matter of fact, did John.

I think I remember that Peggy, when she visited the Entrada Drive apartment, was slightly shocked––for two of the pictures Denny had put up were conversation pieces, to say the least. Both were army posters, warning against the dangers of venereal disease. One of them showed a whore, with a beret over one eye and a cigarette drooping out of a corner of her mouth, standing under a lamppost. This was captioned: “She may be a bag of trouble.” The other was simply a diagram of a penis, with dotted red lines to show the spreading of gonorrheal infection up the urethra and into the bladder.

On New Year’s Eve, Christopher and Caskey gave a party. This

isn’t recorded in the day-to-day diary, and I don’t remember

who was invited––only that, while Caskey made preparations,

Christopher sat compulsively skimming through the last pages of The Past Recaptured because he had vowed to finish Proust before the end of 1945.1

1 Here are [a] few other books read during 1945––from a list in the 1945 day-to-day diary: Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave (a book I have never stopped dipping into, because it contains the essence of Cyril’s enthusiasms and lovable faults––his literary snobbery, his rash generalizations based on misinformation, his confessions of angst and ill health, his Francophilia––it is amazing how readable he is, and in an area where nearly everybody else is intolerable). George Moore’s Evelyn Innes and Sister Theresa. (These appealed enormously to Christopher at that time, with his then vivid memories of the horrors of monastic life. I still find the ending of Sister Theresa tremendous. About the work as a whole, I’m not so sure that it is the masterpiece I once thought it.) Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow (I still find the essay on Dickens very exciting).

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. (At that time, Christopher found something moving in Waugh’s sentimentality and the daringly nauseating phrases he uses, both sexual and religious; they seemed to express a special kind of sincerity. A rereading not long ago rediscovered nothing but the nausea.) Christopher was fascinated by G. N. M. Tyrrell’s Science and Psychical Phenomena (this tied in with his phase of interest in clairvoyants, see page 39). He was 52

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1946

Since there isn’t any day-to-day diary for 1946, I shall have to describe the happenings of that year much more vaguely and

impressionistically. But before I get on to that, I’ll write something about the early stages of the Caskey–Christopher relationship.

As has been said already, Christopher got involved with Caskey partly because Denny had dared him to do it. A bit later, when Caskey and Christopher were already going together, Christopher got another kind of dare––from Hayden Lewis. Hayden warned Christopher, in his soft-voiced mocking way, that Caskey was “a bad boy,” implying that he didn’t think Christopher would be able to handle him. As Caskey’s best friend, Hayden could speak with authority; his warning was impressive, even if bitchily intended. Christopher must have known, even in those early days, what Hayden meant by calling Caskey “bad.” But the challenge excited Christopher far more than it deterred him. Caskey’s temperament, with all its unpredictability, offered Christopher a new way of life. Part of the polarity between them was that of Irishman1 and Englishman.

Their relationship demanded violence. Christopher found that, in certain situations, he could only relate to Caskey by losing control of himself, and getting really angry––which he hated doing because it rattled all the screws of his English self-restraint loose and made him feel humiliated and exhausted for hours afterwards. During these scenes, he would yell at Caskey and occasionally hit him. Caskey, who was stronger than Christopher, very seldom hit him back.2 To have provoked the blow was, for Caskey, a kind of triumph. Even when he got a black eye or a bloody nose, his face would betray a deep sensual satisfaction.

These clashes took place when they were both drunk, but their drinking together didn’t necessarily lead to violence. Much more thrilled by Nigel Balchin’s The Small Back Room, with its harrowing bomb-detonation scene. He also read with interest and admiration James’s “Lady Barberina” and “The Author of Beltraffio,” Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures, John Collier’s His Monkey Wife––but they haven’t made any lasting impression.

1 Christopher always thought of Caskey as being much more Irish than American. Actually, Caskey was also part Cherokee Indian. He himself believed that this strain was dominant.

2 When Caskey did hit Christopher, Christopher seldom hit him back, either.

One such occasion is mentioned in The Condor and the Cows—at Trujillo, Peru, on December 12, 1947.

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often, it made them lively and noisy or intimate and quiet. From Christopher’s point of view, at any rate, drinking was a built-in dimension of their relationship; while sober, he felt, they never achieved intimacy. Christopher spent their first months together trying to get Caskey to make a real unequivocal declaration of love.

But Caskey was cagey––perhaps because he instinctively realized that this was actually, underneath all Christopher’s sweet-talking, a conflict of wills. Christopher felt himself becoming seriously involved and he didn’t want to be, until he was certain that Caskey was involved, too. He was willing Caskey to give way. When Caskey had done so and become his declared lover––well, then Christopher would be able to relax, take his time and decide finally if he wanted Caskey or if he didn’t. Probably he did. He merely wanted to be able to make his decision from a position of strength. He was saying, in effect, “Just because I don’t trust you, that’s no reason why you shouldn’t trust me.”

(Looking back on the situation, it seems to me that Caskey never did quite commit himself. Later on, he told Christopher that he loved him, but these declarations were nearly always followed by actions which seemed meant to contradict them; he would neck with

someone at a party in Christopher’s presence, or he would go out and stay away all night.)

The furthest Caskey would go, during these first months, was to say, “I like you enough.” But Christopher wasn’t discouraged; he had reason to believe that Caskey cared for him a good deal more than he would admit. Hayden reported to Christopher that Caskey had said, speaking of their relationship, “It’s so wonderful to be liked.”

This doesn’t sound wildly enthusiastic, but Christopher was well aware how embarrassing it must be for Caskey to confess to any feeling for Christopher in Hayden’s presence; Christopher was certainly an improvement on Len Hanna but, still and all, he was seventeen years older than Caskey! Christopher thought he could read, in Hayden’s manner toward him, a grudging admission that Caskey had fallen for him, and that Hayden, much as he deplored the fact, could do nothing about it.

Caskey was fond of telling Christopher teasingly, “You’ve got nothing left but your reputation and your figure”––to which

Christopher retorted that this was more than a lot of people could claim, at his age. Once, after they had been to an all-male party, Caskey said, “You know, I looked around and it was amazing––I realized I’d rather go to bed with you than anyone else in the room!”

At the end of some heavy sex making in the Beesleys’ chauffeur’s apartment, Caskey was gracious enough to declare, “That’s the best 54

Lost Years

queer fuck I’ve had in ages!” His compliments nearly always

contained such qualifications.

Caskey made a strict distinction between queer and straight fucks.

If you were homosexual, you couldn’t hope to be graded 1A; his greatest sexual pleasure was in going to bed with basically heterosexual men. He picked them up without difficulty and usually blew them. If he could get to fuck them, that was best of all. He used to say that straight bars were far better than queer bars for pickups.

Caskey’s preferences for heterosexual men irritated and frustrated Christopher throughout their relationship. Caskey went to bed with far more queers than straights, but he never let Christopher forget that this preference existed. Christopher sometimes suspected that it was Caskey’s way of keeping him in line.

If you started to analyze Caskey’s sexuality in psychological terms, you ran into paradoxes. On the surface, he was the most normal, most uninhibited of homosexuals; he seemed very tough yet very female. He loved getting into drag. He loved straight men. But, when you looked deeper, contradictions were revealed. Caskey

despised queens and didn’t think of himself as one. Never, never would he have dreamed of referring to himself as “Miss Caskey.” His attitude to heterosexual men wasn’t at all passive, he wanted to fuck, not be fucked by them. He never approached them with the

mannerisms of a homosexual. Indeed, he told Christopher that, when he was out to make someone, he always dressed “very tweedy, with a tie.” And yet he most certainly couldn’t be described as a closet queen; he declared his homosexuality loudly and shamelessly and never cared whom he shocked. He was a pioneer gay militant in this respect––except that you couldn’t imagine him joining any movement.

Since Caskey refused to regard himself as a queen, one might have expected him to prefer a somewhat effeminate homosexual sex-partner. But not at all. He was seldom attracted by feminine men. In a moment of enthusiasm, he once told Christopher that he was the most masculine person he had ever met––within grade 1B, of course.

This pleased Christopher, although Caskey modified the statement later and then denied it altogether.

Caskey had a love–hate relationship with Catherine, his mother, and a hate–hate relationship with his two sisters. He regarded the American Woman as a man destroyer. Sometimes, only half-jokingly, he would say that he regarded himself as a substitute––no,

“alternative” would be a better word––which he offered to the American Man. Years later, when Caskey was working on oil tankers and often crossed the Pacific, he found that he had no objection to ¾ 1946 ¾

55

having sex with Asian girls. But this didn’t make him any less homosexual.

To judge from a photograph taken in his early twenties, Caskey’s father had been very attractive and very like Caskey. Now (according to Caskey) he was an alcoholic miser with an ugly disposition. He and Caskey quarrelled whenever they met, but Caskey didn’t

altogether hate him––since he was an American Man and Catherine’s victim. I seem to remember that Caskey’s father had made a lot of money by breeding horses. Caskey himself had ridden since he was a child. He loved horses, and perhaps this was the only interest that he and his father had in common. I think Caskey’s father and mother were now living apart.

The question arises, had Caskey been subconsciously on the

lookout for a substitute father and was he now casting Christopher in this role? Yes, I think he was, to some extent. In Caskey’s case, however, the father figure wasn’t to be merely a stand-in for Mr.

Caskey Senior; it was also a father confessor. The Caskeys were Catholics with a streak of black Irish Catholicism, and Bill Caskey, just because he had “lapsed,” was the blackest of the lot. He betrayed this when he declared that he couldn’t stand converts; the only Catholics he had any use for were born Catholics. Once, Caskey came near to asking Christopher right out to be his father confessor

––when he muttered (drunk but nevertheless still embarrassed) that he wished Christopher would tell him whenever he did anything wrong.

Christopher was touched by this. And he was very happy indeed to find that Caskey was religious; it made him realize that he couldn’t have lived with a boy who wasn’t. He didn’t at first mind at all that Caskey took no interest in Vedanta; it was enough that they both recognized the function of a shrine and could therefore kneel down together in any Catholic church.

The trouble was that both Caskey and Christopher were entering upon their relationship with powerful feelings of guilt. Caskey felt guilty not only as a lapsed Catholic but also as a dishonored navy man. (He had a tattoo on his arm which he had acquired during his days in the service, and he wore it as an emblem of nostalgia and a badge of shame. Later, he had another one added to it.) Christopher felt guilty as a failed monk. Neither of them would admit to their guilt, except by the violence with which they reacted against it.

Their guilt feelings were self-regarding at first. But by degrees they began to involve each other in them. . . . There will be much more to say about this, further along in the story.

Nevertheless, despite growing tensions, they managed to have a 56

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good time together. Christopher enjoyed being with Caskey as long as the two of them were alone. Even the entertaining he enjoyed sometimes, at any rate after the guests had left and the strain was relaxed. And his sex life with Caskey was certainly enjoyable, within its limits.

“Limits” seems a strange word to be using, for they did everything in bed which normal homosexuals do––cocksucking, rimming and

fucking. Rimming was the most satisfactory, from Christopher’s point of view, because of its grossness. Caskey had a coarse animal smell which Christopher found exciting, when he was dirty and full of liquor and his fuzzy body was rank with sweat. Licking his sweaty armpits and belly fuzz and dirty asshole brought back memories of the Berlin hustlers––but Christopher had been much more fastidious in his youth, nowadays he was able to enter into the spirit of the thing. (How lucky they both were not to get hepatitis!) Caskey insisted on fucking Christopher, if Christopher was to fuck him.

Christopher was thoroughly in favor of this, in principle; he believed (had, in fact, just then decided) that the true beauty of homosexuality lies in a balanced active-passive relationship. In practice, Caskey didn’t really like being fucked. So Christopher let himself be fucked more and more often, until the time came when he stopped fucking Caskey altogether. Christopher could enjoy being fucked only if he found it possible to reverse gear psychologically and feel that he was giving himself and being possessed. He couldn’t ever quite feel this with Caskey, who was smaller than himself and anyhow, from

Christopher’s point of view, unalterably female. Caskey might be tougher than any bull dyke but Christopher still couldn’t see him as a stud. So the two of them were forced to playact. (They both were aware of this––no longtime sex partners can deceive each other––

though of course they never discussed it.) Caskey would strip and put on a pair of cowboy boots. “You want to get the shit fucked out of you?” he would ask. Christopher would press the sole of one boot against his erection as Caskey greased Christopher’s asshole and his own cock. But, at this point, something was missing and had to be faked––for Christopher must now roll over onto his belly and relax to let Caskey’s cock into him. What was missing was some sort of token (at least) of violence and resistance, some hint of rape. And this was unthinkable. To try it would have been ludicrous. They just had to ignore the gap and get on to the fuck scene as quickly as possible––like actors covering up a joint in a crudely cut script.

Back in Berlin, in 1929, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld of the Institut f ür Sexualwissenschaft had classified Christopher as “infantile,” sexually speaking. This was perceptive. For Christopher then was and has since ¾ 1946 ¾

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remained very much under the spell of his prepub[escent] sexual experiences at St. Edmund’s School.1 If he wasn’t quite infantile he was definitely inclined to be small-boyish. At St. Edmund’s, all of his orgasms with other boys had been while wrestling. (The other boys were probably having orgasms too, but he couldn’t be sure because 1 The statements made in this and the following paragraph raise, but do not answer, the question: Why is wrestling a feature of the Whitmanesque relationship? Here is an attempt at an answer, made after much introspection.

It sounds corny and is embarrassing to put into words––which suggests that it may come fairly near to the truth.

Whitmanesque homosexuality is concerned with the mating of two completely masculine males. One of these males may be younger than the other, but both must be real men––no effeminate intergrades need apply. A Whitmanesque male must have acknowledged another male to be a real man before he can accept him as a lover. First, they must test each other’s virility.

Therefore they have to fight. A sex duel is the necessary prelude to sex play.

But the sex duel isn’t really a fight. The would-be lovers are in no sense trying to destroy each other. They wrestle naked, without weapons. There need not even be a winner and a loser. Wrestling is an isometric exercise; it makes both wrestlers stronger than they were before. And, as they wrestle, they discover and learn to love each other’s bodies.

Sex making can be accompanied by all kinds of pretenses, concealments and theatrical performances. But in the utter nakedness of the sex duel there is no room for a lie; this is basic physical contact. So it can be claimed that you reveal more of yourself and find out more about your partner while you are wrestling with him than while you are making sex. That was how Christopher often felt.

To him, the experience of the sex duel seemed so intimate that he was usually shy about admitting to other people how much he desired it. Among the German hustlers he lost all his shyness, however; that was what made his sex life in Berlin so wonderful. Stripped and locked body to body with one of those sturdy shameless youths, he felt strong and free and uninhibited as never before in his life.

Boxing also could be a form of the sex duel, though the pleasure Christopher got from it was of a different quality, tinged with sado-masochism. At St.

Edmund’s, there were regular boxing sessions, supervised by a member of the staff. Anybody who wanted to fight could volunteer and an opponent would be chosen for him. Christopher found a sexual thrill in the very idea of being matched with another boy––even if it was with a boy who didn’t attract him physically. There was an atmosphere of solemn exciting ritual as your gloves were tied on and the two of you stepped out into the cleared space and faced each other. You were like a wedded pair, joined to fight in the presence of these witnesses. Christopher regretted having to fight in shirtsleeves. He would have much preferred to be naked or at least stripped down to gym shorts. And the fight itself was spoilt by the formalities of competition. The master who supervised the boxing was himself homosexual and no doubt got his kicks from watching it. But he was obliged to keep up the pretense that this thrilling sex ritual was just another good-sport schoolboy game. There were rules and 58

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they always had some clothes on.) Auden and Christopher must have wrestled, during their sex acts. (Detailed memories of sex with Auden––which went on intermittently from 1926 to 1938––are

strangely dim, perhaps because Christopher had to make a mental blackout, switching himself back from a grown-up man to a twelve year old, before getting into bed with him.) When Christopher entered the world of the Berlin hustlers in 1929 and found himself able to act out any sex fantasy which appealed to him, he always wanted to wrestle naked; nothing else excited him as much. Boxing excited him, too; he had a fetishistic attitude to boxing gloves. Many of his obliging young sex partners found all this perfectly natural. (This sort of sub-sadistic sexual violence––which also includes mild nonbrutal beatings with a leather strap––seems to suit the German temperament.) A boy who was basically heterosexual would sometimes suggest wrestling of his own accord, get violently aroused during the fight and have more than one orgasm. Later, he would excuse his pleasure by saying that it was something you couldn’t do with a girl, something for men

only––and therefore, he implied, the only nonperverse homosexual act. When Christopher was taken to Matty’s Cell House[*] in New York in 1938, he asked to be introduced to a German-American

boy––meaning that he hoped for a reasonable facsimile of a Berlin hustler. Thus he met [one boy who,] oddly enough, despite his hang-ups and considerable sexual selfishness, [. . .] did prove to be “German”

in his tastes. He was always eager to wrestle and box. But Christopher now wanted to be fucked or fuck after wrestling, and [the boy] refused to do this. He only liked fucking teenagers. With Christopher, he wanted to lie on top, belly to belly, and come with his cock between Christopher’s greased thighs. This wasn’t ideal for Christopher, but he scoring––at the end of the bout, you had lost or won on points. Christopher was lacking in competitive aggression and he disliked getting hurt. So he usually lost.

[Only one person] ever really shared Christopher’s mystique about boxing.

Both of them were deeply aroused by the shape and smell of boxing gloves and the feel of leather on their bare flesh. [This boy] got excited by the mere mention of the word “fight.” Unlike Christopher, he wanted to punch and be punched hard; if his nose was bloodied, so much the better. Christopher has a vividly erotic memory of sparring with him, early one morning, in [his] living room on Amalfi Drive. [The boy] has nothing on his naked body but the big leather gloves. (“That’s all you ever ought to wear,” Christopher used to tell him.) As [the boy] jumps back and forth, punching and dodging and grinning at Christopher, his erect cock keeps slapping against his belly.

[* Also known as Matty’s Whore House; it supplied hustlers to such well-known clients as Cole Porter and the character actor Monty Woolley.]

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enjoyed it because [the boy] excited him terrifically. He was, in Christopher’s eyes, a genuine teenage stud. (Looking back, I get the impression that [this boy] jumped from adolescence to middle age without ever pausing to be a young man.)

Wrestling and other forms of erotic violence are a feature of what I call a Whitmanesque relationship (see page 13). But Caskey was most definitely not a Whitman character. The love duels of naked camerados had no place in his fantasies. When Christopher suggested wrestling, Caskey was amused, in a grown-up way; he referred to it as “prep school stuff ” and Christopher was so embarrassed that he never mentioned it again––though he sometimes pretended to

himself that Caskey and he were wrestling, in the middle of a sex act.

(The violence between Christopher and Caskey (see page 52) was grown-up violence, full of love–hate––quite unlike affectionate immature Whitmanesque violence. It resembled the fighting of

married heterosexual couples.)

When Caskey and Christopher were getting along well––which

was most of the time, during 1945–1946––their domestic life was placid and curiously polite. They entertained each other with stories and jokes.1 They were very much on their best behavior. They were considerate. They contrived to flatter each other subtly. (I’m trying to describe the impression they would have made on someone who 1 Some specimens of Caskey’s humor (taken from the notebook or from memory): Carlos McClendon (pages 65‒66) had been talking about a rich man he knew, saying what an unpleasant person he was. Caskey: “Why, Carlos, I’m afraid you only dislike him for his money!”

Caskey (looking out of the window at 4 a.m., into thick icy fog): “It’s going to be a scorcher!”

At one of the beach restaurants, there was a notice on the back of the check which asked the customer to state his opinion of the portions, the cooking and the service, choosing an adjective to describe each. The adjectives from which the customer was to choose were—portions: too large, enough, too small; cooking: delicious, satisfactory, fair; service: excellent, adequate, poor. Caskey suggests that the waitresses themselves should be classified as: delicious, satisfactory or too small.

Christopher had been to a puja at the Vedanta Center and been given a whole cake as prasad. At their next party, they served it to the guests. Caskey said: “Do try some, it’s delicious––Chris brought it from heaven.”

Caskey’s humor, like most people’s, depended largely for its effect on the way he delivered his lines. He made jokes with an air of great enjoyment, giggling as he spoke. He pronounced words like “delicious” mockingly and campily. He seldom said anything bitchy. His fun was nearly always good-natured. In fact, he was the very opposite of the sourly witty, deadpan comedian.

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watched them while they were alone together and sober.) Their relationship when sober seems to me now to have been a surface relationship; they make me think of children playing at being grown-ups.

Down below this relationship, on the deeper level of drunkenness, two individuals confronted each other who were neither considerate nor polite. Neither trusted the other. Both were ruthlessly alert to find an opening, a letting down of the other’s guard. Nevertheless, this was intimacy of a sort. It wasn’t playacting. And I think that Caskey and Christopher felt that this confrontation was what really mattered to both of them; it was what held them together.

Taking a relationship apart and finding out what made it work (or not work) is so exquisitely difficult that I shall only be able to do it by slow degrees and ultimately by lucky guesses––if at all. One more idea occurs to me at the moment––namely that the Caskey–

Christopher involvement lacked an element which was present in all Christopher’s similar involvements; it lacked a myth.

What do I mean by a myth? I mean an abstract, poetical concept of the person you are having a relationship with which makes you able to regard him in double focus, either as a private individual or as a mythical representative figure, whichever you like. For example, Christopher saw Vernon Old as Vernon Old but also as Whitman’s American Boy. The contrast between these two aspects was ridiculously great––the hardboiled twentieth-century city youth and the sweet innocent nineteenth-century prairie comrade. Yet it was this myth which made him able to feel romantic about Vernon Old as Vernon Old.1

A myth relationship has to be reciprocal, obviously, if it is going to work for long.2 Did Vernon have a myth about Christopher? I 1 [Another boy Christopher knew] had had one adventure in the classic Whitman style––at the age of fourteen, he had left the city and taken to the road, wandering away down into the deep South. One day, out in the country, several blacks had taken a fancy to him and had forced him to strip and have sex with them by threatening him with their knives. [The boy] admitted that this had excited him, even though he was terrified. He had had an erection throughout the “rape.”

2 There is a demonstration of how a myth can keep a marriage going, at the end of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. When Jimmy and Alison find it intolerable to go on being themselves and still relate to each other, they change focus and become The Bear and The Squirrel in their private myth world. And instantly they are happy and safe, because, in the world of the animals, hatred is impossible; The Bear and The Squirrel can only love each other. They focus their aggression on mythical external enemies.

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believe he did, for a while––and one which wasn’t quite so

farfetched. I believe he saw Christopher as a romantic literary world-wanderer. (R. L. Stevenson, sort of.) And of course, Christopher’s glamor was enhanced by the fact that, when Vernon met him, he was just back from China and a war.

Anyhow, Christopher didn’t have a myth about Caskey. I doubt

if he ever realized this at the time. Or, if he did, he regarded the lack of one as an advantage. He used to think of the relationship between himself and Caskey as being more down to earth and therefore more mature than any other he had previously experienced. The nearest he got to a Caskey myth was in regarding him sometimes as a nanny figure. But a nanny isn’t romantic. . . . Enough about this for the present, however.

I doubt if Caskey had any kind of myth about Christopher. But he did definitely have one about himself. He was constantly aware of himself as a Gemini. Christopher once overheard him murmuring to himself, “You’re a Gemini!” as he gazed at his face in the bathroom mirror. By this, Caskey meant that he was double-natured and that he delighted in his doubleness; that he reserved the right to switch natures at any moment, without warning.

Early in January 1946, Christopher’s penis trouble either got much worse or he got impatient with it––for he switched from Dr.

Williams (see pages 46‒47) to a surgeon named A. D. Gorfain. (Dr.

Gorfain isn’t mentioned in the 1945 day-to-day diary, so this must have been their first contact.)

I remember Gorfain as being young and strikingly handsome, with a supermasculine manner. But Christopher evidently felt at ease in his presence––or was it merely defiant?––for he quite unnecessarily wrote “homosexual” when filling out a medical questionnaire at Gorfain’s office. Gorfain took this calmly enough. He merely asked,

“A strict homosexual?”––which made Christopher smile. Gorfain then diagnosed Christopher’s trouble as a median bar at the top of the urethra, inside the bladder. He assured Christopher that this was nothing unusual and absolutely nonmalignant; it could be removed without difficulty. The date of the operation was set for January 12, at the Santa Monica Hospital.

My memory is that Christopher received this news with relief and also with a certain satisfaction. The relief is easy to understand, for he must have been worried. The satisfaction had a much odder and deeper cause––unless I am inventing this, and I don’t think I am.

Christopher was satisfied because he felt that he deserved some ritual penalty for his failure to remain a monk, and now the penalty had 62

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been imposed and it was such a comparatively light one. (How

perfectly suitable, though––a penis operation for a breach of celibacy!) It wasn’t, I believe, that Christopher felt any actual repentance.

No––it was more like one’s uneasiness over a traffic ticket which hasn’t yet been taken care of.

At that period of his life, Christopher still had a tendency to turn his illnesses into social occasions. He “invited” Sudhira to come to the hospital during the two or three days he would have to be there, and act as his private nurse. Sudhira, of course, was delighted to do this. She spent the nights at the Entrada Drive apartment. She and Caskey drank and were shamelessly Irish together. But Caskey

strongly disapproved of the operation, of Christopher’s attitude toward it, and indeed of all illness. He was, as Christopher used to say, one of nature’s Christian Scientists. His influence on Christopher was excellent in this respect, throughout their relationship, and he did succeed in curbing Christopher’s besetting tendency to hypochondria.

Christopher arrived at the Santa Monica Hospital on the 11th, and was given the usual tranquilizing drugs. He was already all doped up when Dr. Gorfain appeared, greeted him saying, “Hi,

skipper!” and then asked him, “You aren’t planning on becoming a parent, are you?” The reason for this question was as follows—it was Gorfain’s practice to guard against infection during this operation by tying the patient’s sperm tubes, thus making him sterile. Gorfain was about to ask Christopher’s permission to do this. No doubt he explained the situation clearly enough, but Christopher was dopier than he realized. Christopher misunder-stood Gorfain to say, “You aren’t planning on becoming a parrot, are you?” The question seemed to him, in his condition, to be funny but not at all strange. He replied, smiling, “Well, Doctor, whether I planned it or not, I couldn’t very well become one, could I?” Gorfain found Christopher’s answer perfectly sensible––

psychology was not his department, so he probably took it for granted that “a strict homosexual” would be incapable of impreg-nating a woman, and that this was what Christopher meant by not being able to become a parent. Thus the misunderstanding was made mutual.

In Christopher’s notebook, the approach to the operating room is described: “The bed floated down the corridor and up the elevator, like a boat in a water lock.” He had been given sodium pentothal as well as a local anesthetic, and when he became conscious again, back in the ward, he was not only ecstatic but actually hallucinating. He ¾ 1946 ¾

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saw a parrot1 flying around the room. He could also see Sudhira and Caskey standing beside the bed. It was clear to him that they were real and that the parrot wasn’t––indeed he could control its

movements by his will. He demonstrated this to himself, with roars of laughter, making it perch on different objects.

In a day or two, he left the hospital, drove back to the apartment, put on his trunks and went swimming. There was no relapse. Two or three times, he got a scare, because he passed blood when he tried to pee; but Dr. Gorfain told him not to worry about it. There was an unpleasant series of visits to Gorfain during which the urethra was probed and disinfected, and that was all. The wound ached now and then, in the course of the next four or five years, and when it did Christopher would feel mildly nauseated. Dr. Kolisch assured him later that the operation had been entirely unnecessary. Possibly this was true. But, as a ritual penalty, it had served its psychological purpose.

Now that Christopher had been sterilized, he could no longer

ejaculate sperm––at least, not until several years later, when a few drops would, very occasionally, work their way through the tied tubes as the result of an exceptionally violent orgasm. Otherwise, his sensations were the same as usual. And there was one notable

advantage; if he was tired or not really interested, he could now fake an orgasm––since there was no ejaculation anyway, his sex partner could never be certain if he had come or not.

Kolisch also told Christopher that sterilization would make him extra potent sexually for a while and then leave him completely impotent. The second part of this prediction didn’t turn out to be true. But Christopher was indeed very horny during the weeks

following the operation, maybe because his urethra tickled as a result of the disinfection.

Being horny, Christopher took to visiting what were known as

The Pits, on State Beach. The Pits were hollows in some sand dunes which lay far back from the tide line, right below the wall which bounded the yard of the Marion Davies beach house. The shelter of the wall and of the pits, which had been deepened by their

occupants, made a trap for any available sunshine on winter days; this was a perfect place for sunbathing. Since the beach was anyhow chiefly the domain of queers at that time of year, it was not surprising 1 The parrot may have been suggested to Christopher’s imagination by the

“parent–parrot” misunderstanding of the previous day. But it’s curious to remember, in this connection, Christopher’s vision of the parrotlike bird which is recorded on November 12, 1940 [in D 1].

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that the pits were used by them exclusively. Everybody was stark naked and many had erections. At your approach, heads emerged.

You took your pants or trunks off in full view of the audience. There wasn’t much privacy even in the bottom of a pit, for your neighbors were apt to peep over. If you weren’t a bit of an exhibitionist, this was the wrong spot for you.

It was quite the right spot for Christopher. Indeed, he enjoyed the exhibitionism more than the sex he got there. Much of this was with middle-aged men whom he wouldn’t have even considered under

any other circumstances. Only one memory remains of sex with an attractive young man; Christopher blew him, while several other people looked on.

The pleasures of exhibitionism were mildly spiced with risk; The Pits weren’t as sheltered as they seemed. They could be overlooked from the top of the wall. The Marion Davies beach house was then unoccupied, but gardeners looked after the plants in its yard and kept its swimming pool clean. At least one of these gardeners was both inquisitive and prudish. He would appear without warning on the wall––which bordered the pool––and yell abusively at anyone he saw making sex or even merely lying naked below. It was said that he had once called the police; a futile gesture––for of course his intended victims had run away long before they arrived.

Caskey had been told by Christopher of his visits to The Pits and made jokes about them with indulgent amusement. He would never have gone there himself––The Pits belonged in the category of Christopher’s immature sexual tastes. (Not that Caskey ever used the word “immature”; he probably didn’t even think it consciously. But he felt it, and his feeling was expressed by his behavior.) Christopher accepted Caskey’s attitude; I think he himself was embarrassed by his fondness for The Pits and covered this by talking of his visits to them as sexual slumming. Like Caskey, he called the pit occupants “Pit Queens,” without including himself. He and Caskey made up scenes for an imaginary movie: Pit Queen for a Day.1

Although there is no reference to Caskey’s photography in the 1945 day-to-day diary, it’s probable that he had started working at it before the year ended. Soon after he and Christopher had begun living together, Caskey decided to become a professional 1 According to Caskey (in a letter written twenty-five years later and therefore not absolutely to be relied on) The Pits had disappeared by the fall of 1948, when he and Christopher returned to California. Their site became part of the grounds of a beach club, which also owned the Marion Davies lot. Her beach house was torn down but her swimming pool is still in use.

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photographer; it was one of those “good resolutions” you make on entering upon a new relationship or a new year. So Caskey took a course in developing, printing, enlarging, etc., and bought the necessary equipment. I believe the course was at Santa Monica City College and that it lasted about two months.

Christopher was surprised and delighted to discover that Caskey had a great deal of talent; everybody who saw his work––and that later included several famous photographers1—agreed that this was so. Soon he was taking portraits and doing all his own darkroom work, at home.

Among the people who came to the Entrada Drive apartment

during the spring of 1946 were:

George Platt Lynes. He took photographs of Caskey and

Christopher in the apartment and also amongst the big wooden piles on the beach near the Lighthouse Café.

Bob Stagg, a friend of Caskey’s from the pre-navy New York days.

Bob was still in the navy and he was badly worried because he thought he might be sent out to the Marshall Islands for the A-bomb tests on Bikini Atoll which were to take place later that year. In those days nearly everybody except (?) the scientists believed that the results of an atomic explosion were quite unpredictable––maybe all the onlookers would be destroyed, maybe the Hawaiian Islands were in danger, maybe a tidal wave would travel clear across the Pacific and swamp Santa Monica. But Bob wasn’t sent to the tests after all.

He soon returned to civilian life, working as an architect in New York. He was a good-looking lazy friendly young man who drank a great deal.

Carlos McClendon and Dick Keate. They were the season’s most

attractive pair of lovers; both sweetly pretty boys. Carlos, though a blond, was partly Mexican and had a lot of Latin charm. Dick had been a major (I think)[*] in the air force and had flown many missions over Germany. (Christopher used to call him “The Angel of

Death.”) There was a story about his demobilization: Dick, while still in uniform, used to frequent the bar of the Biltmore Hotel,

downtown,[†] and was accustomed to be treated by the bartenders with the respect due to his rank and his combat ribbons. A short while after leaving the service, Dick returned to that same bar, wearing the [. . .] clothes which expressed his fun-loving peacetime personality. One of the bartenders, not recognizing him, exclaimed, 1 George Platt Lynes, Cartier-Bresson, Cecil Beaton, Horst.

[* He was a captain.]

[† Keate recalls it was the Hollywood Biltmore, not the one in downtown Los Angeles.]

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“Get that [kid] out of here!” and Dick was refused a drink. . . . Carlos and Dick were then very much in love––Carlos perhaps even more so than Dick––and they simply couldn’t keep their hands off each other for long. At a party, they [were inseparable].

(The word “party” reminds me of the songs people played on the record players of those days. There have been only two periods in Christopher’s life in which he was acutely song conscious, though for different reasons: his life with Caskey in 1945–1946, and his early life in Berlin. Christopher was aware of the Berlin songs of the thirties because they were in German, which he was eager to learn, and because they expressed for him the glamor of this city he had fallen in love with. He felt the glamor of the American songs also, but the effect they had on him was far more painful than pleasant. “It wouldn’t be make-believe / If you believed in me . . .” “My sweet embraceable you . . .” “Ev’ry time we say goodbye, / I die a little

. . .”1 Sinatra creating his tremendous pauses: “Why does its flight make us stop–––––in the night, and wish–––––as we all do?” Even today, I can recapture something of Christopher’s sensations as he heard them, a sweet but sickening sense of being bewitched, en-trapped, unable to escape. He wanted to escape from this party, these people, this life he was leading––the kind of life which these songs seemed to describe. Did he really want to? Yes, but not enough. For the songs were the incantation of a spell which made him helpless.

He hated them for that. And he copied into his commonplace book a passage from Proust which might have been written expressly to relieve his own resentment:

. . . these tunes . . . offered me their secrets, ogled me, came up to me with affected or vulgar movements, accosted me, caressed me as if I had suddenly become more seductive, more powerful and more rich; I indeed found in these tunes an element of cruelty; because any such thing as a disinterested feeling for beauty, a gleam of intelligence, was unknown to them; for them, physical pleasures alone existed. Within a Budding Grove. “Seascape.”[*])

Ivan Moffat––Iris Tree’s son by her American husband––came

back from the war about this time, to start working on films in Hollywood with George Stevens. He had just married a girl named Natasha [Sorokine] who had lived for some time with Sartre and 1 For some reason which I can’t recall, Christopher associated this song particularly with Caskey. Another Caskey theme song, in Christopher’s mind, was “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

[* “Seascape, with Frieze of Girls” from C. K. Scott Moncrieff ’s 1924 translation, vol. 2.]

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Simone de Beauvoir, as a sort of erotic stepdaughter.1 Natasha was Franco-Russian, large and beautiful and sulky; later she became lively and crazy and a public nuisance. Ivan was then extremely cute and very like Dirk Bogarde. More about them both later.

Michael Hall. He was then an actor, in his early twenties, pretty in a sly, sugary way, almost certainly Jewish though he wouldn’t admit it. 1946 was the year in which he appeared as the son of Fredric March, in The Best Years of Our Lives. Michael didn’t do anything to distinguish himself in the picture. He continued to act after this but never with much success. Later he became an extraordinarily successful, almost clairvoyant collector and seller of antiques; he could find real treasures in a thrift shop. . . . Christopher met him at a party sometime in the winter of 1945–1946. Michael made a dead set at Christopher, coming up to him and murmuring, “I’m extraordinarily attracted.” (Christopher later heard that Jay de Laval had encouraged Michael to do this, presumably because Jay still owed Caskey a grudge for walking out on him.) Caskey was present at the party, I think, but he certainly didn’t mind. Michael’s friend (I forget his name) was present also, and did. Christopher knew he was

behaving badly, but Michael’s attention flattered him, and he took Michael back to the Entrada Drive apartment. When they got there, Christopher found he hadn’t a key. Michael climbed in through the fanlight and opened the door, a feat which appealed to Christopher as being sexily athletic. Michael had a plump, creamy white,

extremely fuckable body. [. . .] they had an enjoyable time together.

And Christopher continued to have sex with Michael from time to time, good-humoredly and without emotional involvement, for

about twenty years [. . .].

Lennie Newman. He made his appearance in the Canyon, as Jay’s boyfriend, sometime in 1946. He was small, blond, cute, full of giggles and screams, a hard worker, a hard drinker, a defector from the Mormons in Utah. Everybody liked him. He had absolutely

honest bleary blue eyes and was so naturally friendly that he even got along with the cops; they didn’t arrest him when they caught him driving drunk. Jay took him on as assistant chef at the restaurant and taught him all his secret sauces. Lennie was probably the only one of Jay’s “lovers” who really loved him.

1 Simone de Beauvoir had been one of Natasha’s professors at a college, when Natasha was seventeen or eighteen. Natasha, who could be very witty at times, later described her as “an alarm clock inside a frigidaire.” De Beauvoir can’t have been all that frigid, however, for she had had an affair with Natasha before passing her on to Sartre.

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Katherine Anne Porter. I am very vague about dates here but it seems to me that Christopher and Caskey got to know her while they were still at Entrada Drive. Perhaps she was visiting Los Angeles because of some projected movie. The image she presented was that of a senior southern belle (she would have been fifty-two), extremely gracious and rather ridiculously ladylike––her “beauty” and her

“breeding” were qualities to which she firmly laid claim and you had to accept them as real if you wanted to associate with her. Beneath these airs and graces, Christopher saw a tough coarse frontier woman, pushy, ambitious, fairly good-natured if handled with proper deference. Christopher and Caskey played up to her and for a while the three of them were almost friends. Katherine Anne treated them like favorite nephews; she even cooked meals for them. Unfortunately, however, beneath Christopher’s deference and flattery, there was a steadily growing aggression. By her implicit claim to be the equal of Katherine Mansfield and even Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne had stirred up Christopher’s basic literary snobbery. How dare she, he began to mutter to himself, this vain old frump, this dressed-up cook in her arty finery, how dare she presume like this! And he imagined a grotesque scene in which he had to introduce her and somehow explain her to Virginia, Morgan and the others. . . . If Christopher hadn’t been drinking so much at this time, he would almost certainly have been able to hide his feelings from Katherine Anne––especially since he knew they were unreasonable and unkind to a middle-aged silly woman who had never done him any harm and who, after all, did have quite a bit of talent. But one evening his tongue got loose and out popped his aggression, accompanied by a drunken laugh: “You know who you are, Katherine Anne? You’re

the Joan of Arc of Texas!” Real, biting insults often have an element of impressionism in them; they convey far more than they actually say. Katherine Anne undoubtedly understood all the implications of Christopher’s phrase, with the mockery and contempt and hostility behind it. Her first reaction, however, was to treat it as a merely impertinent joke; she pulled Christopher’s hair hard, till he yelled.

(This reaction now seems to me rather sympathetic.) After this, they said goodnight––as they would have, anyway, for Christopher had spoken just as she was about to enter the house where she was staying. . . . Next day, Christopher apologized and tried to explain everything away, thereby making the situation worse. Katherine Anne never forgave him. Years later, when they were actually on the same college campus, she refused to meet him. Mutual friends urged her to pardon Christopher. She replied that she had even forgotten what it was that he had said––which may well have been true; what ¾ 1946 ¾

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she had not forgotten was what he had meant, and for that,

apparently, no pardon was possible. . . . Thus Katherine Anne became the first of an oddly assorted collection of people who, for various reasons, made up their minds that they would never see Christopher again. The others: Charlie Chaplin, Benjamin Britten, Cole Porter, Lincoln Kirstein.

Two other acquaintances of that period come to mind. I have

forgotten their names. What I remember about them relates to the nearly fatal auto accident in which they were both involved. I think it happened on New Year’s Eve––which would explain why they

were drunk enough to drive out onto the Coast Highway from West Channel Road without noticing that a truck was bearing down on them. (It seems incredible, now, but in those days there were no stoplights at the intersection, which must always have been

dangerous.) When they were brought into hospital, the doctors supposed that both men––I’ll call them A. and B.––were dead. Both responded to stimulants, however. A. had a broken neck and a

broken leg; B. had a fractured skull and several broken ribs. They needed transfusions, so Christopher and Caskey volunteered as blood donors. B. recovered fairly quickly, A. more slowly. When A. was convalescent, he asked Caskey to photograph him in drag––sitting up in bed wearing a picture hat, with a feather boa draped around the cast on his neck. Christopher greatly admired A. for doing this––he regarded it as conduct befitting a hero-queen. Years later, he seriously considered using this incident in The World in the Evening, when Stephen Monk is recovering from his accident. But it didn’t ring true. Stephen is no kind of a hero; he would be incapable of such behavior.

Sometime in the spring of 1946, Denny Fouts returned from New York. I don’t remember if he intended staying long on Entrada Drive; if he did, it is obvious that the apartment would have been too small for him, Caskey and Christopher, however harmoniously they might have been living together. But that problem didn’t arise, because Denny and Caskey started quarrelling almost at once, and so Caskey and Christopher had to get out. No doubt there was jealousy on both sides, chiefly on Denny’s. It must have irritated Denny to discover that Caskey and Christopher were now seriously involved with each other and that he had therefore lost most of his power as Christopher’s “Satan.” As for Caskey, he had probably sensed, from the beginning, that Denny regarded him with fundamental contempt

––as just another boy, another pawn in the sexual chess game. And 70

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now Denny, that sly old chess player, had made a crude amateur mistake; he had challenged Caskey from a position of weakness.

Caskey saw his advantage and pushed their quarrel to the point at which Christopher had to choose between them.

Thus it was that Christopher’s friendship with Denny ended.

Christopher was sorry, of course. Denny may have been sorry,

too––yes, I’m sure he was. But he accepted the situation with his usual arrogant show of indifference. He was in one of his self-destructive moods, ready to break with anyone who wouldn’t submit to his will. Christopher, who was also capable of such moods, understood this perfectly. Though he had sided with Caskey, his sympathies remained with Denny. Looking back on the two

relationships, it seems to me that Christopher and Denny came closer to each other than Christopher and Caskey ever did.

My impression is that Denny soon left the Entrada Drive

apartment, subletting it to someone else, and went back East again, on his way to Europe. He never returned to Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, Caskey and Christopher hunted around for a place to live. They were very lucky. Almost at once, Salka Viertel offered them her garage apartment. It had just become vacant and they could have it cheap. The apartment was on top of the garage, in a white wooden building which was next to but somewhat behind the house, so that the apartment windows overlooked the garden and had a glimpse of the ocean.

It was small but cheerful and full of light––one long narrow bed-sitting room, plus a bathroom and a balcony on which you could sunbathe without being overlooked, provided you lay on its floor.

This balcony greatly appealed to Christopher, who loved having sex out of doors.

The Mabery garage apartment had other more important

advantages over 137 Entrada Drive, as far as Christopher was concerned. Unlike Entrada Drive, it was relatively private because it was too small to hold a party in and because it was part of an impressive-looking home on a respectable street––beach acquaintances and other near strangers were scared of wandering in there uninvited. On the other hand, if you were in the mood for company, you could get it by merely walking downstairs and into the main house; Salka was always glad to see you and she usually had visitors.

Salka was the most perfect landlady-hostess imaginable. Caskey and Christopher were free to visit her at any time, to use her kitchen, to borrow her books. She welcomed any friend they brought with

them. Yet she would never dream of coming over to the garage

apartment without first phoning to ask permission; and she tactfully ¾ 1946 ¾

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avoided confrontations with the people Christopher and Caskey didn’t choose to introduce to her.

Salka’s “salon” was still in full operation. All sorts of celebrities came to the house, not because Salka made the least effort to catch them but because they wanted to see her and to be with their own friends, who were also her guests. Actually, Salka was a somewhat self-effacing hostess. She greeted newcomers warmly and got them involved in conversation with earlier arrivals, then she disappeared into the kitchen to see how things were going. I remember her most vividly at this moment of greeting; she was strikingly aristocratic and unaffected. Her posture, the line of her spine and neck, was still beautiful; you could believe that she had been a great actress. I think most of her visitors were sincerely fond of her but perhaps they tended to take her for granted. It is slightly shocking to find that, in the indexes to the collected letters of two of her “stars,” Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann, Salka’s name isn’t mentioned.1

Christopher liked living next door to the “salon,” as long as he was free to take part in it or leave it alone. A party anyhow lost some of its horror for him when he didn’t have to use a car to get to it and could escape from it so easily. He found many of Salka’s guests really interesting and he enjoyed introducing them to Caskey. Also, by doing so, he was promoting Caskey’s new career––for Caskey

usually made a good impression on them and thus got to photograph them.

Garbo seldom if ever attended the “salon” and Caskey never got to photograph her, but she was in and out of Salka’s house a great deal, during the daytime. (I think she and Salka continued to discuss film projects, although it was now becoming evident that she didn’t seriously intend to make another film.) Once Garbo had gotten used to seeing Caskey and Christopher around the place, she was absolutely at her ease with them. And, if Salka happened to be out when she arrived, she accepted them as substitutes. Being unemployed, with the whole day on her hands, she was ruthless in her demand to be talked to and walked with. Unlike Salka, she hadn’t the least hesitation in shouting up to the garage apartment and even climbing the stairs, to find out if they were home or not. At first they both quite enjoyed her visits; she was lively and campy and easily entertained. Then she became a nuisance. And one day, Christopher

found himself whispering to Caskey: “Imagine––if someone had told 1 To be fair, I must add that Salka herself, in her autobiography The Kindness of Strangers, mentions Christopher’s move into her garage apartment but says nothing about Caskey. Is this discretion or snobbery? Probably a mixture.

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us, six months ago, that we’d be hiding under this bed, to avoid going for a walk with Garbo!”

Christopher valued his privacy all the more because he had started working again,1 on a project which he found absorbing, even though it involved a great deal of copying. During the summer and fall of 1946, he made a typescript of the handwritten diaries which he had kept from the beginning of 1939 (his arrival with Auden in the States) to the end of 1944. There had been big gaps in his diary keeping; these he now filled with bridge passages of explanatory narrative. He also revised and expanded many of the diary entries.

This produced a typescript of at least 130,000 words––a very conservative estimate.[*]

Christopher found the work absorbing because it was, in fact, a review of his life in America and an apology for his actions and the decisions he had made during those six years––his involvement with Vedanta and the movies and pacifism, his decision not to return to England, his work with the Quakers, his move to the Vedanta

Center and his decision to leave it. The apologetic parts of the journals embarrass me now, but Christopher certainly got some important insights in the process of writing them. And the journals as a whole have been an invaluable quarry of material for books I 1 There was another literary project on which Christopher must have worked during 1946––a translation of Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination which Swami Prabhavananda made and Christopher polished. The book was published in 1947, which means that Christopher must have finished work on it before he left for England in January. I’m sure he didn’t take it with him.

When I think of Christopher at work on the language of Shankara’s brutally uncompromising opening statements, I realize what a profound conflict they must have stirred up in his own subconscious mind:

Only through God’s grace may we obtain those three rarest advantages

––human birth, the longing for liberation, and discipleship to an illumined teacher.

Nevertheless, there are those who somehow manage to obtain this rare human birth, together with bodily and mental strength, and an understanding of the scriptures––and yet are so deluded that they do not struggle for liberation. Such men are suicides. They clutch at the unreal and destroy themselves.

Shankara points his finger straight at Christopher. And what could Christopher reply, by way of an excuse? Nothing. What can he reply now?

Only that he has begun to struggle––very little and very late. (See also page 121

[note], for mention of yet another 1946 project.)

[* “The Emigration,” in D 1.]

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have written since then. It was always Christopher’s intention that they should be read by at least a few other people, so his sexual memories are almost entirely censored. I am filling in some of those blank spaces as I write this book.1

This period at Salka’s garage apartment now seems to me to have been the happiest in Christopher’s whole relationship with Caskey––

I mean, the happiest for Christopher. Caskey may well have felt 1 One episode occurs to me which I may as well record right away, because it has no connection with anybody I shall be mentioning in this book. It happened while Christopher was working at MGM, probably sometime in 1940.

In the men’s washrooms in the Writers’ Building, the partitions between the cubicles which contained the toilets didn’t come all the way down to the ground. In the open spaces between partition and floor, spittoons were placed, filled with water. I doubt if people spat into them, but they were convenient for putting out your cigarette. They also performed a function which certainly hadn’t been intended for them. When you were sitting on the toilet seat, you were able to see (dimly) the person who was sitting on the seat in the next-door cubicle. The water in the spittoon reflected him––or rather, a small section of him.

One day, when Christopher was thus seated, he glanced down at the spittoon to one side of him and saw the reflection of a naked erect cock, standing up out of its bush against a strip of bare belly. As he watched, a hand appeared and began patting it lightly, then stroking it, then gripping it and jerking it.

Instead of just watching and maybe jerking off too, Christopher gave way to curiosity. He wanted to see the face of the unknown masturbator. So he leaned forward until its reflection indistinctly appeared––quite forgetting that, as soon as he could see the stranger’s face, the stranger would be able to see his. The stranger did see it. For some moments, the two of them regarded each other––as wild animals might, on suddenly becoming aware of each other’s presence while drinking from a jungle pool. It was a subhuman confrontation, which excluded all possibility of pretense. It was also a marvellous opportunity.

Christopher might have said, “Let’s jack off together,” or he might at least have reassured the stranger by laughing or making a joke. Instead of which, he sat and stared. The other face withdrew its reflection, and then Christopher saw the reflected cock, no longer hard, being stuffed back into its trousers. Both of them sat perfectly still, listening.

At last, Christopher adjusted his clothes and left the cubicle. But he was still curious. He loitered in the passage, just outside the men’s room. About five minutes passed. Then the door swung open and the stranger came out. He recognized Christopher instantly, turned and hurried away. Christopher had a good look at his face. It was youngish, pale, unmemorable. They must have seen each other many times after this. But Christopher was never able to identify him for sure.

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inhibited there, because he loved entertaining and cooking. But Caskey was busy, too. There was a second, downstair bathroom in the garage building, attached to a room which Peter Viertel had used as a “den.” Salka let Caskey have this bathroom for his darkroom. Caskey was taking a lot of photographs, including pictures in Venice, Ocean Park and waterfront Santa Monica which were to be illustrations in a book which Christopher and he were planning to do about The Beach. (This book never got finished––bits of its narrative appeared in a magazine article by Christopher called “California Story”––later, “The Shore”––but with pictures by Sanford Roth, much inferior to Caskey’s.1)

Christopher must have visited The High Valley Theatre sometime this year. He wrote an article about it which was published in Theatre Arts, June 1947.[*] The theater was in the Upper Ojai Valley and was run by Iris Tree and Alan Harkness. Here are some notes which Christopher must have taken during his visit––of dialogue between the teacher (either Alan Harkness or Ronald Bennett) and his student actors during a class in “the improvisation of psychological gesture”: TEACHER: Let’s have something of a fight. Not physical.

A STUDENT: Something from Noah?[†]

TEACHER: Not as outward as that. . . . Yes, and just one other condition––that the woman is separate. . . . Leave the face free. Do it more through the quality through you. . . . Even for the style, the fists are a little too obvious. Let’s go away and come together––

A STUDENT: I haven’t felt so static since 1943.

TEACHER: Now full tragic style––form a group around the center, with the quality of despair. . . . Now change it to clown style. . . .

Now a fairy tale––once-upon-a-time style. A wonderful little

creature is beginning to take shape, right before your eyes. . . . (To a student) Now, you be like Cornwall in Lear, who very darkly, thickly opposes. No, don’t act it. Yours is a warm powerful will. (To another student) Yours is thinner, but somehow withdrawing from it.

Caskey and Christopher both tended to be promiscuous sexually, but this didn’t, as a rule, upset the balance of their relationship. Their only problems were that they had one car between the two of them and that, if one of them wanted to use the garage apartment for sex, the other had to clear out. This could generally be arranged without inconvenience.

1 This article was published in Harper’s Bazaar, January 1952.

[* “High Valley Theatre,” Vol. 31, No. 6, pp. 64–6.]

[† Translated from Noé (1931) by André Obey.]

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Christopher was much more prone to jealousy than Caskey was,

but Caskey’s sex mates were usually casual pickups and he was always tactful when speaking of them to Christopher; he never made them seem important. As far as I can remember, Christopher only got seriously jealous once, during this period––and even then he had to admit that Caskey was behaving as well as he possibly could, under the circumstances. This was when a sailor named Jack Keohane[*]

showed up unexpectedly from Long Beach, on shore leave. Jack

Keohane and Caskey had been in the navy together in Florida and had had a passionate affair. (Hayden Lewis told Christopher with teasing bitchiness how, when he came home from his own job there, hungry for supper, he would find Caskey and Keohane in bed

together already, and how they would make love all evening till they fell asleep, without eating anything at all.) What had made Keohane extra desirable in Caskey’s eyes was that he had then only just “come out”; Caskey was his first male lover. He could therefore be classified 1A, a Real Man, and, by definition, hopelessly Christopher’s sexual superior. And The Past now gave him added glamor; he was like The Stranger in [Ibsen’s] The Lady from the Sea.

There is no doubt that Caskey was deeply stirred, at first, by Keohane’s reappearance. They went off together to a steambath downtown, after an evening of drinking. Later, there were trips down to Long Beach to visit Keohane there. Once or twice,

Christopher went along and tried to behave well, on the lines of “any friend of Billy’s is a friend of mine . . .” but, when alone again with Caskey, he sulked. Caskey took Christopher’s jealousy as something tiresome but neutral, he didn’t attempt to reassure Christopher; he was frankly under Keohane’s spell and made no secret of the fact that they were having sex together. Keohane himself was pleasant to Christopher but not particularly friendly; he seemed unaware of the situation which his presence created. He was a slim, well-built young man, a bit on the skinny side, fairly good-looking, with a mustache.

Christopher found him neither charming nor amusing and quite

unattractive sexually. As Christopher might have foreseen if he could have looked at the affair objectively, Caskey soon lost interest in Keohane, deciding that he had changed since the old days and was now turning into a queen. As for Keohane himself, this reunion with Caskey probably hadn’t meant all that much to him, even at the beginning, and he could get all the sex he wanted elsewhere. The two of them parted on friendly terms.

But, if Keohane had deflated Christopher’s ego, it was soon

[* Not his real name.]

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reinflated by John Cowan. All of a sudden, Cowan began to show a desire for Christopher’s company. The two of them would lie talking on the beach, passing back and forth a bottle of mixed gin (or was it vodka?) and fruit juice. Christopher liked being with Cowan. Quite aside from his physical beauty, he was very entertaining, a hippie born before his time, a great talker, full of quotations from books he had read, stories of people he had met, charmingly irresponsible and cheerful. He flattered Christopher, asking him questions about Life, Eternity and God––treated him, in fact, as a guru. And then, one day, when they were at least halfway through their bottle, Cowan

announced that there was someone in the Canyon he could really fall in love with, someone he would like to live with, if only that person were free. “Who is it?” Christopher asked. Cowan answered, “You.”

Christopher was overwhelmed, dazzled, delighted. To him,

Cowan was now The Blond––more completely so than Bill Harris

had ever been. And The Blond had chosen him! It was a mythic kind of honor, like being chosen by a Greek god as his human lover.

Without doubt, Cowan was full of blarney and capable of saying anything which came into his beautiful head; Christopher knew this, but it didn’t spoil his pleasure. For Cowan hadn’t spoken as Cowan but as The Blond; and, in the myth world, the words of a god must always come true. It was in the myth world only that Christopher wanted Cowan; the idea of leaving Caskey and setting up housekeeping with Cowan in the everyday world was ridiculous. This Cowan probably understood, as clearly as Christopher did. They went to bed together once––in the garage apartment, one night when Caskey was out on the town. I think Christopher fucked

Cowan, but I’m not sure. What remains is simply the sense of having taken part in a magic act, an act of intense excitement and delight––

which nevertheless didn’t ever have to be repeated, because it was essentially symbolic.

Sometime in 1946, Hayden Lewis started what was to be a long-

lasting relationship with a young man named Rodney Owens. Rod was tall, dark, slender and very good-looking. He was also quite intelligent, funny, campy, charming and eager to be friendly. He and Christopher took to each other from the start––indeed, Rod used to tell Christopher later that he would have wanted to have an affair with him if he hadn’t met Hayden first. The arrival of Rod improved relations between Hayden and Christopher, though it

didn’t remove their underlying antipathy. And Christopher had to admit that, for a while at least, Rod made Hayden nicer; they were desperately in love with each other and, during the first months, ¾ 1946 ¾

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couldn’t bear to be parted even for a couple of days.

As far as I remember, Hayden and Rod went into business to-

gether quite soon after they met. They made ceramics––chiefly or entirely ashtrays––first in their home and later at a small workshop with several assistants. Rod proved to be an efficient businessman. In the course of a few years they became comparatively well-off.

Christopher and Caskey sometimes visited the Manns during 1946, at their Pacific Palisades house. I have a clear memory of Thomas holding forth with his urbane pedantry and good humor, smoking one of his big cigars. The extremely serious operation on his lung––Christopher was given to understand that it might be cancer, but apparently it wasn’t––seemed merely a momentary interruption of Thomas’s work––an interruption which Thomas refused to take seriously. By early June, he was back home safe from the Chicago hospital, still shaky, no doubt, but very much his former reassuring cigar-smoking self. Christopher loved him for his toughness. He had simply made up his mind not to die before his novel was finished. In fact, he lived for another nine years, finished Dr. Faustus and wrote three more novels.1

Toward the end of the summer, the question of Christopher’s citizenship came up again. I believe there had been a test case related to citizenship for pacifists which was decided favorably by the Supreme Court––anyhow, the regulations had been to some extent relaxed. So Christopher was examined and his case investigated, for the second time. I remember a hearing at which he was asked if he would be prepared to load ships in wartime. “Yes,” he said, “if they were carrying food.” “But not if they were carrying arms?” “No––not if they were carrying arms.” “Suppose, for the sake of argument, the cargo was entirely foodstuff except for one rifle?” Christopher looked at the questioner for a moment and then said, “Honestly!” This made them all laugh. Later, it was decided to grant his application––the decisive point in his favor being that he had actually volunteered for noncombatant service in the Medical Corps while the war was still on; he was over military age at the time and knew that the age limit was most unlikely to be raised again, but that didn’t matter!

1 December 20, 1975. Since writing the above, I have read Katia Mann’s Unwritten Memories, in which it is stated that Thomas did indeed have a malignant growth; the specialist told this to Katia, who did not tell Thomas.

Thomas never had any subsequent trouble with his lung, although one and a half lobes had been removed from it. He had no recurrence of cancer. He died of arteriosclerosis.

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So, on November 8, Christopher went to the court downtown to

be made a citizen. Peggy Kiskadden insisted on coming with him, as a sort of godmother. They found themselves part of a crowd of several hundred people––a number of them presumably pacifists, since this was (I’m fairly sure) the first opportunity for a pacifist to become a citizen, in the Los Angeles area. Because of the crowd, Christopher couldn’t see the judge and could hardly even hear him.

And now, after all his protests and explanations, he found himself required to take the ordinary oath of allegiance, without any modi-fication whatever. He did so, reflecting that his objection to it was already a matter of record. After the ceremony, he used the privilege of a newly made citizen of the U.S. to rid himself legally forever of his two middle names.

This day, November 8, was also the sixth anniversary of

Christopher’s initiation by Prabhavananda. And it was to be the day of the first opening of I Am a Camera, out of town, at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951.

Late in December 1946, Christopher and Caskey flew down to

Mexico City to spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve. They visited the pyramids of Teotihuacán, Cholula, Puebla and a little town called Tepoztlán (maybe it’s big and well known, nowadays) on a side road off the main highway to Cuernavaca. Tepoztlán impressed

Christopher more strongly than any other place he saw on that trip.

They arrived at sunset and went up onto the roof of the church, from which there was a long descending view through a gap in the hills to the coastal plain. Christopher experienced a moment of stillness and calm, sitting on the roof, which he can still dimly recall. He was drunk, as usual, but neither too much nor too little, and he had “that sense, which comes so seldom and so mysteriously, of having reached the right place at exactly the right moment.” (I quote from a magazine article––too slick to be worth reprinting in Exhumations––

which Christopher published in Harper’s Bazaar, June 1947. Caskey’s photographs to illustrate it were rejected. Without consulting Christopher, the editors substituted for them an idiotic would-be-elegant art-posed picture of some gesturing boys and girls on a staircase, which had nothing to do with anything.)

While in Mexico City, Christopher and Caskey spent a good deal of time with a young painter [. . .] and his friend, an architect, whose name I have forgotten. [The painter] had a brother, [. . .]

whom Caskey had known in New York. [The painter] was

attractive, good-natured and “gay in a melancholy way” as so many Mexicans are. One night, when they were all drunk, Caskey kissed ¾ 1947 ¾

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him and Christopher got suddenly jealous and slapped Caskey’s face. [The painter] was delighted. He embraced Christopher, exclaiming, “That’s what we Mexicans are supposed to do––you are a real Mexican!” Back at the hotel, Caskey and Christopher made it up in a highly emotional scene and Christopher fucked him, which was unwise, because Caskey was having an attack of La

Turista. This is the only occasion I can remember in my life when, as they say, I hit the jackpot.

I don’t remember that Christopher got La Turista on that trip, but he suffered at first from the altitude. He had palpitations, which he cured with some drug he was sold by a chemist––I think it was digitalis. Soon after, to his dismay, he felt definite symptoms of an attack of flu. Not wanting to succumb until he had to, he went along with the others to visit the church of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Christopher stood for some time watching the worshippers who

hoped to be healed of their sicknesses, as they approached the shrine inch by inch on their knees, up the nave from the west door. The look on some of the faces moved him profoundly and his eyes filled with tears, but he could never have joined them; he didn’t even feel that what they were asking for was right—according to his own beliefs. . . . It was only much later, when they had gone on to Teotihuacán and were climbing a pyramid and Caskey was saying,

“We don’t have to worry about those human sacrifices—they only use virgins!” that Christopher suddenly realized his flu symptoms had completely disappeared.

On New Year’s Eve, they didn’t go to bed at all, since they were to leave early next morning. They drank and danced at a succession of bars, ending up in one which was called The Paricutín.[*] (“As explosive as its name,” Christopher says politely in his article, but I don’t remember that anything dramatic happened there.)

1947

The 1947 day-to-day diary records that Caskey and Christopher left Mexico City by plane at 6:00 a.m. on January 1; I’m not sure how long the flight to Los Angeles would have taken, according to schedule. Their first stop was at Guadalajara. On the way there, they

[* After the volcano; see below.]

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got a glimpse of the real Paricutín, then a very young and notorious volcano (not quite four years old), smoking furiously. Between Guadalajara and Mazatlán, the plane was caught in a thunderstorm over the mountains and tossed about. I don’t know how much

danger it really was in, but the situation seemed very alarming—

because of the flashes of lightning, the bumps and sideslips, the glimpses of rock through the clouds, immediately below, the cries of passengers and the falling of baggage from the racks (in which it should never have been stowed, anyway). At first, Christopher was only anxious—thanks to the dullness which remained from last

night’s drinking and to the presence of Caskey beside him. (For Caskey was a seasoned veteran of the air. While in the navy, he had gone out on weather planes as an observer and had once circled down over a hurricane.) But now, glancing at him for reassurance, Christopher saw that he too was anxious and maybe even scared—it made him look sulky. Immediately, Christopher became terrified.

And, after this experience, he lost confidence permanently. He has never felt at ease in any plane from that day to this.

When they reached Mazatlán, they were told that the plane had engine trouble—presumably because of the beating it had taken in the storm—and that there would be a delay. They stayed there most of the day, then made a slow calm flight up the western coast, stopping at Hermosillo and Mexicali. They didn’t arrive at Los Angeles till midnight.

Christopher now had less than three weeks before his departure for England. I imagine that he must have been in a considerable flap about this trip and more than half dreading the prospect of it. But such emotions are quickly forgotten. The day-to-day diary is full of names of people he saw—I no longer remember who some of them

were. [Bertolt] Brecht (whom he now definitely didn’t like) is mentioned, Hayden and Rod Owens, van Druten and Walter Starcke,

the Beesleys and their friend Phyllis Morris,1 Cyril Connolly (who 1 Phyllis Morris, an English character actress, was a friend of the Beesleys. They had invited her to come over and stay with them, to recuperate from the wear and tear of the war years. Phyllis was eager to come but she dreaded the journey because she was subject to seasickness. Finally, she decided to fly, reasoning that her agony would be much shorter than on a boat. Once airborne, she discovered however that she was capable of an airsickness so acute that it made the Atlantic flight seem longer than a voyage. When they put down at Gander she was beside herself and felt she could go no farther. So she ran away and hid behind a hangar. They found her there before takeoff. Phyllis begged them hysterically to let her stay where she was and freeze to death, or ¾ 1947 ¾

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must then have been almost at the end of his visit to the U.S.), Charles and Oona Chaplin, Chris Wood, Aldous and Maria Huxley, Jay, Bo and Kelley, Iris Tree, Peggy and Bill Kiskadden, the van Leydens, Tim Brooke, Nicky Nadeau, John Mace. There was also

Swami, whom Christopher visited several times, taking part in the Vivekananda Puja on January 13.

Sometime toward the end of 1946, Christopher started working

with Lesser Samuels on a treatment for a movie story. The story was originally Samuels’s idea and I don’t think Christopher contributed much to it—it wasn’t at all his sort of subject matter. But Samuels was fond of Christopher and evidently got some kind of psychological support from collaborating with him. The story was about a young iceman who invents one of the first automatic refrigerators and a girl art student who falls for him and does a painting of his head attached to a nearly nude body she has copied from a Michelangelo print, thus causing a scandal. Period, the early nineteen hundreds. Samuels gave it the title Judgement Day in Pittsburgh. They finished it on January 6.

On January 17, Salka gave a farewell dinner for Christopher, to which the Huxleys, the Kiskaddens, John van Druten, Phyllis Morris and Garbo came. Garbo may have made this social appearance as a gesture of friendship toward Christopher, or because Aldous and Maria were invited. I don’t remember anything about the evening—

no doubt Aldous gave his expected performance, Peggy was bright with Maria, Bill was courtly with Salka, Phyllis was thrilled to be in such grand company, John was watching Garbo and wondering what she was thinking and what he was thinking about her.

Among the final preparations for Christopher’s journey was a visit to the British Consulate downtown, also on the 17th. Although Christopher had already travelled on his U.S. passport to Mexico, he still couldn’t quite see himself as an American citizen. He found it strange and slightly disagreeable to face the fact that he now needed a visa before he could set foot in England.

January 18: “Saw Swami for breakfast. Tea with Beesleys. Supper with Bill at Romanoff ’s.” These were, so to speak, the last rites.

Christopher had to get Swami’s blessing—all the more so because of the guilt which he still felt toward him (and would feel for many years to come). He had to see the Beesleys, because they were to be his “audience” on this trip—far more than any of his other friends, else to give her a general anesthetic to knock her out for the rest of the journey.

Refusing to do either, they dragged her back to the plane. Needless to say, she survived, but I believe she was later trainsick, all the way from New York to Los Angeles.

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they could imagine how he would feel on his return to England, they would identify with him in his adventures there and wait eagerly to hear about them. He and Bill Caskey had to have their Last Supper at Romanoff ’s because it had become their luxury symbol during the past months. They very seldom indulged in the extravagance of eating there, but they would sometimes drink at its bar and watch the celebrities.1

January 19 was the anniversary of Auden’s and Christopher’s departure for China in 1938 and of their departure from England for the U.S. in 1939. It’s possible that Christopher deliberately fixed this same date for his return journey––I’m not sure, but it would have been like him to do so; that was his kind of superstitiousness. Salka shed her easily provoked Jewish-Slavic tears when they said goodbye.2 Christopher cried too. And at the airport there was another big goodbye scene. He hugged Hayden and Rod as well as Caskey and strode away with restrained pathos to board the plane. But there was a hitch. For some reason, the passengers were told to leave it again; so Christopher came back and rejoined the others. He fancied, rightly or wrongly, that this anticlimax pleased Hayden––that Hayden enjoyed his slight embarrassment at having to stick around talking until the plane was ready and then make a hopelessly undramatic second exit. By the time he took off, it was about 5:30 p.m.

This was the first and shortest of three delays on Christopher’s journey. The second was caused by bad weather; Christopher’s plane had to land at Buffalo and Christopher had to travel down to New York on the train. He finally arrived there at 8:45 p.m. on the 20th.

Auden and Chester Kallman put him up for the night at their

apartment. Next day, he left New York at 1:00 p.m. for England, via Gander and Shannon airports. At Shannon there was a third delay of 1 On one of their visits to Romanoff ’s bar, Christopher had met John O’Hara.

As I recollect it, the bartender pointed O’Hara out to Christopher and Caskey, and Christopher rashly decided to introduce himself and offer O’Hara a drink.

O’Hara was gracious at first and even paid Christopher some compliments on his work; then, turning suddenly aggressive, he snarled, “I suppose you’re going to write about us––and you’ll get it all wrong––you people always do––”

(“You people” may have meant The English, or possibly The Queers.) Thus unfairly glimpsed, O’Hara seemed a very usual sort of red-faced alcoholic Irishman, spoiling for a fight. Christopher sincerely admired Pal Joey but it’s possible that O’Hara found his praise somehow patronizing, especially since it was offered with a British accent.

2 The goodbye was extra tragic for Salka because Christopher and Caskey had already decided to settle in New York, for a while at any rate, when Christopher returned from England.

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about six hours. He reached London (Bovingdon Airport) at 5:00 in the evening of January 22, and it must have taken him at least another two hours to get to John Lehmann’s house in South Kensington.1

Christopher wrote an account of this journey a few weeks later in letter form, calling it “A Letter from England.” He sent it to Harper’s Bazaar but they didn’t want to publish it. Ten years later, he revised it, for a series of articles John Lehmann had planned, called Coming to London. “Coming to London”[*] was reprinted in Exhumations.

My memories of the reunion with Morgan Forster, Bob

Buckingham, Joe Ackerley, William Plomer etc., at John’s, that first evening, are dim––I’m not even sure who was actually present, for more meetings took place during the days following and all are blurred into each other. I do remember2 Peter Viertel being there (with Jigee, I think)––and that Christopher was keenly aware of his presence as the only outside observer of Christopher’s welcome home. Lehmann, in The Ample Proposition, says that Christopher was

“nervous about the way he would be received.” This is probably true, up to a point––but it is also true that Lehmann would tend to overestimate the degree of Christopher’s nervousness. Lehmann, in his heart, felt that Christopher ought to be nervous and penitent, because he hadn’t stayed in wartime England––and, incidentally, been available to help Lehmann with his publishing projects.

1 31 Egerton Crescent.

2 Or do I? Strangely enough, the day-to-day diary doesn’t record that anyone was at John Lehmann’s to greet Christopher, on January 22. A meeting with Forster is mentioned on the 23rd and a party on the 24th, to which Peter and Jigee Viertel did come, as well as Henry “Green” Yorke, William Plomer, Alan Ross, Keith Vaughan, Joe Ackerley, William Sansom, William Robson-Scott and no doubt many others. Also on the 24th was a lunch party, which included Rupert Doone, Robert Medley and Louis MacNeice—who presumably weren’t able to be at the cocktail party later.

My guess is that Forster, Bob Buckingham, Joe Ackerley and William Plomer really were there on January 22, but that the Viertels maybe weren’t––in which case, my memory could easily have transferred them from the party on the 24th and superimposed them on the earlier scene. Anyhow, Peter Viertel was greatly impressed by the welcome that Christopher got from his old friends, and he later told Berthold Viertel so. Had Peter been half-expecting that Christopher would be spurned by them? Ridiculous as this sounds, it’s just possible that he did expect it––as a Jew and as a disciple of Hemingway (who had repaid his devotion by fucking Jigee, so it was said) Peter had an exaggerated view of the shame and horror of being a “deserter” from your tribe. I think he really liked and even admired Christopher, but that he also felt, deep down, that Christopher was “dishonored.”

[* As Isherwood retitled the piece for Lehmann’s book.]

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Lehmann now obviously saw himself as having been a quite

important part of the war effort on the home front––and Christopher was willing to offer him all the respect he demanded, being now doubly a guest, in Lehmann’s house and on Lehmann’s island.

Lehmann was, and always had been, a bit of a pompous ass with delusions of importance, but Christopher saw how vulnerable he still was, how insecurely assertive of his mediocre talent. Christopher remembered how Auden had once parodied Yeats’s line, “Had even O’Duffy––but I name no more––”[*] as “Had even Lehmann––” As long as he could laugh at Lehmann––and that would be always––

Christopher could go on being fond of him.

None of Christopher’s other friends showed the least sign of

requiring his penitence. If they thought of him as having deserted them in their hour of need, they never let him guess it. Neither then nor at any later time was Christopher aware of receiving any insult or snub, direct or indirect, from anybody he met in England.

After Lehmann had shown Christopher to his bedroom, that first night, and left him to undress and go to bed, a strange thing happened; Christopher became aware that he was quite violently homesick. This wasn’t a disguised longing to be with Caskey and it wasn’t specifically related to California or any other part of the States that he knew––it was simply a sudden hunger for the taste of something American; even a hamburger might have satisfied it––except that he couldn’t stand hamburgers. As it was, Christopher hunted around Lehmann’s bookshelves and found a book which seemed to be exactly what he had been hungry for: An American Tragedy. For hours he lay greedily rereading Dreiser and loving, as never before, the look of American place-names and words. . . . This experience was never repeated. While in England on this and later visits, Christopher felt homesick now and then, but in a different, more usual way; he simply wished he were back in Santa Monica.

On January 231 Christopher went to the branch of the West-

1 I don’t know if Alexis Rassine had been at the party, the night before. The day-to-day diary only mentions him on the 23rd, when he, John and Christopher went to see the film of Gide’s Pastoral Symphony. Alexis was living with John; he had the top floor of the Egerton Crescent house as his own self-contained flat. John was fond of telling how, when Alexis came to see John there for the first time––they had known each other for at least five years before this––he had looked around and declared, “I want to stay here always”;

“And, as you see,” John would add, leering at his audience, “he has!”

Alexis spoke English without any trace of Polish accent––I think he had spent much of his boyhood in South Africa––but he had a graciousness which

[* “Parnell’s Funeral.”]

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minster Bank at which he had had an account since the 1930s. To his delight and amazement, he found that the interest on his deposit had built it up, through these eight years, to a total of more than a thousand pounds. The bank manager was worried about this, because the account now belonged to a citizen of a foreign country and ought to be declared as such to the Bank of England, in accordance with new regulations. The manager frankly didn’t want to be involved in so much paperwork. And he took it for granted that Christopher would rather not be billed for delinquent income tax. He therefore urged Christopher, in tactful roundabout language, to please withdraw and spend his money as quickly as he conveniently could––so that he, the manager, might officially forget it had ever existed.

Christopher was quite ready to do this. Since he wasn’t allowed to take the money out of the country and put it into an American savings account, it could only be used for entertaining and giving presents to himself and others. This was enjoyable. Christopher’s friends were pleased and amused by his extravagance but not

embarrassed––for after all he was a Yank now and one expected Yanks to be rich and generous. But, with the best will in the world, Christopher couldn’t get rid of his money as fast as the bank manager would have liked; the last of it wasn’t spent until his third visit to England in 1951.

Speaking of Christopher as a Yank gets me onto the subject of his accent. Lehmann writes (in The Ample Proposition) that Christopher perhaps didn’t realize how much his accent and some of his

mannerisms had changed, since they had last seen him. Christopher says nothing about this in his “Letter from England” article, although he dwells on the absurdity, to his ears, of the British accent: “Surely, I thought, they are doing it on purpose?”

It now seems clear to me that it was Christopher who was “doing it on purpose.” I suppose he had tried, more or less consciously, to adapt his speech to western American, ever since his arrival in California. But he hadn’t succeeded in doing much beyond altering his vowels; his speech rhythms remained British. When he spoke in public, ladies would beg him never to lose “that lovely English lilt”––which annoyed him, of course. The only result of his efforts to acquire a “new voice” was that Americans often took him for an Australian! As the years passed, and Christopher settled down in his seemed foreign. He was very much mistress of the house. He didn’t appear to be what is actually described as effeminate but rather to belong to a third, intermediate sex. He and Christopher got along well together from the start and even flirted a little, in a polite heterosexual way.

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adopted environment, he had gradually relaxed and stopped caring how he sounded.

But the return to England presented another kind of challenge. In California, Christopher had felt challenged to conform; now he felt challenged to be different. He had to prove to the English that his emigration had been a serious action, that he had put down roots and become, at least partially, American. (To prove, in other words, that he had deliberately changed countries, not merely run away from home.) Christopher, being what he was––a born playactor––could only express all this by thinking himself into an Anglo-American persona, expressly designed for his English audience, complete with accent and mannerisms. This persona was usually accepted at its face value by strangers during Christopher’s first postwar visits to England. Shopkeepers would often ask him, “Staying over here long, sir?” A girl at the office where he got his food-ration coupons said sweetly, “It seems so silly to have to call Americans aliens.” Friends tended to be amused or slightly skeptical, however. Lehmann notes that, “These changes did not [. . .] show themselves continuously,”

and adds, “I had the impression [. . .] that he was, in spirit, being pulled to and fro across the Atlantic all the time.” Forster used to laugh at Christopher affectionately for pronouncing Bob Buckingham’s name as “Barb.”

In the article, Christopher writes about London’s shabbiness––the peeling plaster, the faded paint on buildings, wallpaper hanging in tatters from the walls of the Reform Club, pictures still absent in storage from the National Gallery, a once fashionable restaurant (Boulestin’s[*]) reduced to “a dingy squalid hash joint.” But I don’t think “shabbiness” is an adequate word. It now seems to me that Christopher’s impressions went in much deeper. Indeed, he quotes William Plomer’s remark, “This is a dying city.” Plomer was wrong, historically speaking, but he was right in suggesting that postwar London gave you a sharp reminder of mortality––all the more so if you had just arrived from Los Angeles.

On January 25, Christopher left Euston at 12:20 p.m. for Stockport.

In “A Letter from England” he writes: “I travelled on an express train which was very fast, admirably punctual, horribly dirty and so old that it was probably unsafe. Several times, I thought we should leave the tracks. There was practically no heating except in the dining car, and we all kept our overcoats on.” This was, as it turned out, the first day of a snowstorm which thickened into a long-drawn-out series of

[* Le Boulestin, Southampton Street, Covent Garden.]

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blizzards. England was to be paralyzed by them for weeks to come––

and by the coal shortage and the rationing of gas and electricity which they caused.

I am almost certain that Richard [Isherwood] didn’t meet

Christopher on the platform at Stockport station. Perhaps

Christopher had asked him not to; perhaps he was feeling hostile toward Christopher. (There were many exhibitions of Richard’s hostility on later visits; the two brothers only became friends after Kathleen [Isherwood] was dead.) Christopher arrived at four in the afternoon and took a taxi out to Wyberslegh Hall.

Kathleen didn’t seem to him to have grown much older, but

Richard’s appearance shocked him. Richard’s face looked mad and somehow psychologically skinned, all its protective coverings stripped away down to the raw, the quick of defenseless misery. He didn’t look his age; he was fresh faced and bright-blue eyed, with thick curly hair––a once beautiful boy who had deliberately (as it seemed to Christopher) made himself ugly by refusing to have the gaps in his yellow teeth filled and by playing the village idiot, staring and grimacing and muttering and breaking into screaming laughter.

His clothes were aggressively dirty, stained with food and smeared with coal dust. He took so many laxatives for fear of constipation that he would sometimes shit in his bed. His red nose dripped constantly and he kept snorting back mucus. Also, he had a hacking smoker’s cough. His cough and snorting were undoubtedly exaggerated in order to embarrass Kathleen and claim her attention.

When she tried to tidy him up, he submitted to her like a child. But he was neither childish nor mad; he was a sensitive, intelligent soul in torment.

Christopher embraced both of them when they met. He had

seldom if ever done this with Richard before––he hadn’t known in advance that he was going to do it; yet hugging Richard was beautifully “in character” for the 1947 Vedantic-American Christopher whom he had travelled six thousand miles with, to present to them.

Richard reacted with shyness, pleasure and irony. “A very warm welcome!” he exclaimed, to nobody in particular. Kathleen later wrote in her diary (which Christopher would not read until twenty-three years later) that Christopher’s face looked “so kind.”

Little old Nanny sat by the kitchen fire, bright-eyed but infirm, chuckling at Kathleen’s novice attempts at cookery. Kathleen and Richard waited on her. Nanny seemed unaware of American

Christopher; she treated Christopher exactly as she had treated him in the 1920s, as the young man fresh from college who had bossed her and accepted her service and her flattery as a matter of course.

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Nanny adored Christopher. Kathleen she perhaps hated, deep down.

Richard she rather despised. It was sad that she was now ending her life with them, in this uncomfortable house, but where else was she to go?

Christopher had written to Kathleen, shortly before this visit, saying, “You will find me quite domesticated,” and promising to give her a hand with the housework and the cooking. But

Christopher thought of housework in terms of American kitchens and labor-saving devices. The dirt of Wyberslegh appalled him. And soon he was paralyzed by the cold. The snow lay deep all over the hills; many of the lanes were blocked. The gas pressure was kept so low by the authorities during daylight hours that it was scarcely worth lighting the gas fire. The kitchen was the only warm place in the chilly old house, but Christopher couldn’t work there. He sat shivering in an overcoat in his bedroom, writing his “Letter from England” article and then rewriting his article about the trip to Mexico. (He also wrote a hard-core sex story about a sailor whose nickname was “Dynamite.” Getting horny was a way of raising his body temperature––until he lowered it again by jacking off.) It was too cold to sit still, reading. Books numbed your hands when you opened them; they were actually clammy. In his efforts not to freeze, Christopher held his arms pressed against his sides and shuffled about with hunched shoulders like an old man. He probably suffered more than any of them, with his thin Californian blood. Kathleen seemed to thrive on blizzards. And when men and women came into the

kitchen from the adjoining farm buildings, stamping their feet and rubbing their hands, as they told how England was “cut in half,” how you couldn’t get through to Scotland, how the army was using

flamethrowers to melt the drifts, Christopher was aware of their deep, almost unconscious delight––that characteristic British delight in a “National Emergency.”

Kathleen was violently opposed to the Labour government and

ready to blame it for everything from the coal shortage and the lack of cooking fat to the weather itself. Christopher, who was equally violently pro-Labour, had to be tactful about this. He had made up his mind, in advance, to keep his mouth shut when necessary, and I think he succeeded. But this visit must have been quite a strain on him, in many ways. He was at Wyberslegh from January 25 to

February 28. Between the two dates in the day-to-day diary twenty-four spaces are empty, suggesting blank claustrophobic snowbound days on which Christopher yearned for a letter from Caskey and occasionally had hysterical spasms of fear that he would get sick and die before he could escape from this prison, his birthplace. On ¾ 1947 ¾

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February 7, he made his first trip into Manchester and booked a ticket on the Queen Elizabeth for his return to New York. This was more than two months ahead of sailing, but trans-Atlantic traffic was heavy at that time and he didn’t want to take any chances.

Nevertheless, Kathleen and Christopher got along well together.

He had so much to tell her and she was as good a listener as ever. At seventy-eight, her mind was clear, her memory excellent and her hearing perfect. She was even prepared to be interested in Vedanta.

Through Christopher’s letters she had already formed her own

mental pictures of many of his friends; she “liked the sound of ”

Peggy Kiskadden and Dodie and Alec Beesley, the Swami she

regarded with respect, Gerald Heard she mistrusted. (Gerald’s

“second in command,” Felix Green, had visited Wyberslegh during the war to bring news of Christopher, and both Kathleen and

Richard had been repelled by his slick charm, glibness and re-ligiosity.)

Kathleen and Christopher went twice into Stockport together and once into Manchester, to shop1 and see the art gallery. (You could get a bus into the city from the bottom of the hill below Wyberslegh, but I remember that, on one of these outings, the bus was late or they had missed it, and that Christopher stood beside the road and thumbed a ride, California style. They got picked up almost at once.

No doubt British drivers had become accustomed to the hitchhiking gesture, when it was made by American G.I.s. And then, of course, Christopher was with an obviously respectable old lady. Anyhow, Christopher greatly enjoyed treating Kathleen to this bit of

playacting.) On February 1, Kathleen and Christopher had tea with some of the Monkhouse family. Mrs. Monkhouse still lived at the top of the Brow, in the ugly red house which had once been the home of beautiful John, her younger son, whom she called “Mr.

Honeypot” because of his thick yellow hair. In those days, John was a long-legged hockey-playing teenager with an adorable heartbreaking grin, and Christopher had a terrific crush on him. In those days, Allan Monkhouse was alive and leaning against the sitting-room fireplace; he looked like a noble old dog and had a

1 In the “Letter from England,” Christopher quotes some miscellaneous prices: Twenty cigarettes––2 shillings 4 pence. A hairbrush––38 shillings. A rubber sponge––1 shilling 9 pence. A natural sponge––22 shillings. A pair of lady’s walking shoes (very good quality)––39 shillings. A first edition of R. L.

Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston––10 shillings 6 pence. One hundred sheets of carbon paper––20 shillings. He adds, “In other words, some things are very expensive, others are more or less normal.” Presumably, the expensive items are the hairbrush, the natural sponge and the carbon paper.

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Shakespearian quotation to fit every occasion. In those days, Rachel, the elder daughter, was mooning around, her big reproachful eyes1

stuck into a handsome but irritating red pincushion face; she had a terrific crush on Christopher.

Kathleen and Christopher’s hosts at the February 1 tea party were Mrs. Monkhouse, Patrick her elder son and Mitty her younger

daughter. Mrs. Monkhouse was now getting senile and losing her memory. Patrick had a high-up post on The Manchester Guardian and was probably one of the half dozen most distinguished-looking men in England. (Glancing into a mirror at the age of seventeen, he had once joked to Christopher, “No one could call me handsome, but I think I might be described as brutally impressive.”) Mitty (Elizabeth) was the youngest member of the family; she had been a small child during Christopher’s adolescence, so he had never taken much

notice of her. Now she seemed to him to be an unusually intelligent and charming girl. He wanted to get to know her better. I don’t remember that he felt the same curiosity about Patrick, the friend of his youth. Patrick and he still had a great deal to talk about, they were cordial and respectful of each other’s achievements; but Christopher (and no doubt Patrick also) was aware of a gulf between them. Quite aside from Christopher’s desertion of England, and of the North Country which was still Patrick’s home, there was the embarrassing memory of their confidences, in the days when Christopher had told Patrick about his feelings for Mr. Honeypot, and Patrick, who was then an ardent though chaste boy-lover, had shown Christopher his homosexual sonnets. Patrick and Christopher could agree in their liberal politics, but Patrick belonged to the Establishment. Patrick certainly knew about and doubtless accepted Christopher’s continued homosexuality––from a distance. But he was solidly a family 1 In 1947, Rachel’s eyes were still reproachful with frustrated love––no longer for Christopher but for Wyberslegh. Rachel had lived there as a tenant with her husband, sometime toward the end of the thirties. Then her husband had gone to the war and she had had to move to a cheaper and smaller home. The house had been let (or maybe sublet by Rachel) to an elderly lady who was still there when Henry [Isherwood] died in 1940 and Christopher made it and the rest of the estate over to Richard. I forget exactly what complications followed, but I believe Rachel encouraged the lady to refuse to leave, hoping thereby to make it easier for herself to move back into the house when the war was over.

“She behaved as if she owned it,” Kathleen told Christopher indignantly.

Rachel had no legal case whatever. Richard, as the owner, had merely to wait until the elderly lady had found another place to live. In 1941, he and Kathleen took possession of Wyberslegh. But the feud with Rachel continued. (This may explain why she wasn’t at the tea party.)

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man. He might have hesitated to let Christopher meet his sons (if any) unchaperoned.

On February 27, Christopher got a cable from Lesser Samuels in Hollywood to say that his agent Meta Ries(?)[*] had sold their movie story, Judgement Day in Pittsburgh, for $50,000.1 This news seemed all the more marvellously improbable because it came to him from the tiny stone post office in High Lane village. Christopher plodded down through the snow to send his reply. “Kiss Meta passionately from me,” he wrote. He was aware, as he handed in the cable form, that he had wanted to amuse the people in the post office, just as much as Samuels. They smiled as they read it, but were they really amused? Christopher’s joke was in an idiom quite foreign to them.

What made them smile, probably, was their pleasure in the glow of wealth and success given forth by Mr. Richard’s Brother––who was, after all, still their property, a local boy born within the village bounds, despite his eccentric self-exile amongst the weird two-dimensional creatures of the cinema screen.

On February 28, Christopher travelled down to London. After being shut up in Wyberslegh for more than a month, the prospect of

spending two weeks in London––even a ruined and frozen London

––seemed wildly exciting. It was like the beginning of the holidays, when he was at school.

Christopher stayed the night of the 28th with Stephen and Natasha Spender. They saw Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and had supper at The White Tower. I remember that the performance, with Ralph

Richardson, was excellent. The White Tower, known in prewar

days as The Eiffel Tower, had been a favorite haunt of Christopher’s; his memories of it went back to the time when he was the Mangeots’

secretary, and Augustus John used to eat there and draw on the tablecloths. It was crammed, now, and expensive and chic. The food was probably of inferior quality but the restaurant was still cheerfully brilliant with lights and mirrors––and Christopher was anyhow in a mood to enjoy himself to the utmost.

Stephen was immensely entertaining, as always, and bitchier than ever––an amused spectator of Christopher’s social comeback.

Christopher was very much aware of his own role and he played it with enthusiasm. Even the cold merely gave an edge to his appetite 1 The film was made by RKO and released in 1949, with the title: Adventure in Baltimore. Its leading players were Shirley Temple, Robert Young and John Agar.

[* Meta Reis, wife of film director Irving Reis (1906–1953).]

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for company. I think most of the people he met were sincerely pleased or at least curious to see him. The wartime military

Americans had long since gone back home. There were almost no tourists. Christopher was a New Face. They could tell him their old air-raid stories and he listened goggle-eyed. He admired or was suitably shocked by everything they showed him. Toward the end of his visit, Stephen told him, with typical malicious hyperbole,

“You’re the most popular man in England.”

March 1. Christopher had lunch with Jack Hewit at the Café

Royal. Then he met Forster and shopped for books. He had supper with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. He went to stay with Forster at his flat in Chiswick.

Christopher’s lunch with Jack Hewit must have been embarrassing

––at the beginning, at any rate. Christopher had behaved very badly to Jack in 1939––going off to the U.S. and leaving him under the impression that he would soon be sent for. It’s impossible now to be quite certain, but I would say that Christopher never had any intention of sending for Jack. I think Christopher had grown tired of him before leaving England and was merely afraid to tell Jack so because Jack was so much in love with him and so emotional and potentially desperate. At most, he thought of Jack as a kind of understudy who might conceivably be called upon in the event of a highly improbable crisis––that is to say, if Christopher was unable to find himself an American boyfriend. But Christopher had Vernon Old already waiting for him in New York. And, very soon after his arrival, he and Vernon became seriously involved with each other.

This was partly because Christopher realized that Vernon had taken it for granted that they would live together as lovers, whenever Christopher returned.[*] He couldn’t possibly disappoint Vernon, who was so young and pretty and who thrilled him sexually. It was much easier to disappoint not-so-young, not-nearly-so-pretty, tiresome, devoted Jack––who was now on the other side of the

Atlantic and whose steamship ticket would cost a lot of money. So Christopher felt guilty but let the months go by––either not writing to Jack at all or writing evasively. In May he travelled out to California with Vernon on a bus. In June, they moved into a house in the hills, 7136 Sycamore Trail. It was here that a shameful long-distance phone call with Jack took place. I think Christopher must already have hinted to Jack in a letter that he must stop expecting to

[* Vernon Old calls this a convenient but inaccurate memory. He says that he never assumed, nor even thought, that he and Isherwood would live together on Isherwood’s return to New York.]

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join Christopher in California. Anyhow Jack called Christopher, in tears. I can remember that Christopher took the call lying on the bare floor––the house was scantily furnished––writhing about in guilty embarrassment. Jack sobbed that he was frightened, that there was going to be a war, that Christopher had made him a promise, that Christopher had got to help him. And Christopher told him no.1

Shortly after this scene, or maybe even before it, Guy Burgess––by virtue of his status as ex-lover––went into action to defend Jack’s rights. He made a bad mistake, however, in trying to pressure Christopher through Forster––as a letter from Forster to Christopher (dated June 17, 1939) shows.2 This was the last Christopher heard of Jack Hewit for several years. I don’t remember how or when contact 1 When Christopher first met Jack Hewit—or Jacky, as he was usually called––Jack was having an affair with Guy Burgess. Jack flirted with Christopher and Christopher responded and suddenly found that Jack was very serious about it. He ought to have pulled out then but he didn’t. Instead, he committed himself to taking Jack with him to Brussels, where he and Auden were spending the Christmas and New Year’s Eve of 1938–1939. Guy Burgess made a show of minding about this––Christopher was sure he didn’t really, for Guy was surrounded with boys. (Christopher himself found Guy attractive and would have preferred him to Jack Hewit as a sex partner, any day, but Guy didn’t reciprocate.) Guy asked Christopher if he was in love with Jack, so Christopher had to assure Guy that he was––though he doubted it, even then.

(Although Christopher was a born flirt––like Kathleen, but with the difference that he always followed through sexually––and although he was vain of his conquests, the experience of finding himself loved without being able to respond always reduced him to panic.) I remember that he felt this panic in Brussels about Jack, and confessed it to Auden. Nevertheless, he let himself be nudged and coaxed by Jack into promising, or more-than-half promising, that they would live together in America. Auden greatly approved of Jack as a lover for Christopher, saying that Jack had a “truly feminine soul” and would make Christopher settle down and be properly domestic. I think Auden identified with Jack, a little. For he too had been in love with Christopher.

2 Dearest Christopher,

At a Cambridge commemoration dinner this week, Guy Burgess,

supported by Anthony Blunt, came fussing me because you had behaved so badly to Jackie. As I dare say you have, and they then wanted me to read a letter from you to him which they had brought to the banquet. This I declined to do, to their umbrage. I could not see why I had to, when neither you nor J. had requested me to do so. G.B. was insistent I should write to you, which I should have done in any case. He is a most cerebral gangster.

I wrote not long ago to J. suggesting a meeting, but had no answer and now understand why and am glad he did not answer. I guess the situation and feel very sorry for the boy. This much I will say, that now you know you can miscalculate, you will be more careful another time. Have you to provide for him at all?

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between them was re-established. Maybe Christopher phoned Jack after his return to England. Maybe he had been asked to do this by a mutual friend. Anyhow, Christopher came to the lunch date on

March 1 knowing that Jack had forgiven him.

Christopher found that Jack (who must now have been in his

middle thirties) had aged a good deal. In 1938, Jack had had a sturdy but fairly slim body; now he was plump and piggy faced. Jack was painfully aware of this; his humility about his lost looks was touching but also off-putting, sexually. He flattered Christopher by declaring that Christopher hadn’t changed at all. (This may well have been more or less true. In 1938, Christopher had already passed through the phase of deterioration which begins around thirty. In 1947, he still hadn’t reached the next phase, which begins in the late forties.)

I am inclined to feel irritated by Christopher, because the

memories he has chosen to pass down to me are chiefly of compliments paid him, of sex encounters and suchlike, while his meetings with (so-called) valued friends seem to have left only faint impressions. Christopher undoubtedly thought of himself as being capable of strong and loyal friendships, and he has been so described by others (e.g. Forster and Stravinsky). But the fact that he can’t remember more of what Forster and the rest of them said, implies a basic inattention, and inattention implies indifference. Of course, Christopher himself must have been doing much of the talking––

answering questions about his life in California. All that he remembers about Forster’s Chiswick flat is Eric Kennington’s

exciting pastel of Mahmas with his fierce eyes and naked dagger––the original of one of the illustrations to [T. E. Lawrence’s] Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Forster was sweetly affectionate, gay and funny. He hadn’t

changed since Christopher had first met him, in the early thirties.1

Neither had their relationship. Christopher was still a little in awe of him. Not because he thought of Forster as a great writer and as his particular master––he did, but this didn’t make him uneasy in Forster’s presence; Christopher, who spent so much of his life playing the teacher, found it pleasant and relaxing to become a disciple, now and then. It was as a human being that Forster awed him. Forster 1 The first of Forster’s letters in my collection is dated October 12, 1932.

Forster and Christopher must have met while Christopher was in England that year––between August 4 and September 30. I think they were introduced by William Plomer. In the first letter, Forster calls Christopher “Isherwood,”

adding, “we do drop ‘Mr.,’ don’t we?” But it isn’t till 1935 that Forster starts calling him “Christopher.”

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demanded truth in all his relationships; underneath his charming unalarming exterior he was a stern moralist and his mild babylike eyes looked deep into you. Their glance made Christopher feel false and tricky. Christopher reacted to this feeling by trying to make Forster laugh. He usually could; the uneasier he felt, the more sparkling his comedy act became.

On March 2, Christopher was driven around town to see some

of the bombed areas, by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. At this time, there was still a special kind of rapport between them and Christopher because, at the beginning of the war, they had been in America and had discussed with him the possibility of staying there; they were both pacifists. At length they had decided to go back to England, however, because neither of them wanted to settle in America permanently.1

I remember nothing about the visit to the bombed areas––or

rather, my memories can’t be disentangled from memories of

photographs I’ve seen. For instance, St. Paul’s and its surrounding ruins is largely by Cecil Beaton. My only clear personal memory doesn’t belong to that visit––it is of ringing the doorbell of a house, one night, for a long time, and then peering in through a window and seeing the moon, shining down into the roofless empty shell.

From the street, as I approached, it had looked as solid and lived in as any of its neighbors.

On March 3, Christopher went with Forster to supper at the sadly down-at-heel Reform Club and then saw Les Enfants du paradis, which was having a big success. I can’t remember what either of them thought then of this hateful film.

On March 4, Christopher moved to John Lehmann’s house. He

had lunch with Brian Howard and Sam Langford, Brian’s lover.

Brian had met Sam during the war, so Christopher hadn’t seen him before this. (Brian’s previous lover Toni, whom Christopher had seen such a lot of in the thirties, in Holland and Portugal, was now in the States, married to a rich woman.) The lunch was lively and 1 I forgot to mention that Christopher had supper, that evening, with Bob and May Buckingham. This was probably the first time that they had an opportunity to talk much, although Christopher had seen Bob and possibly also May immediately after his arrival in England. I remember Bob, with tears of laughter running down his cheeks, describing how funny May had looked, being blown down the passage of their house by bomb blast during an air raid.

May laughed too, though in a more ladylike way. Their fun about this, and other such experiences, was beautiful. Bob himself had won some decoration for his bravery in saving people, at the time of the Blitz. He was a hero of the most lovable and admirably no-shit sort.

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drunken. Christopher nearly always got along well with Brian; and he found Sam cute and refreshingly uncomplicated, after sulky Toni.

I’m pretty sure that this was the occasion on which Brian impulsively decided that he must give Christopher a precious stone––or at least a semiprecious one; I remember it as being golden yellow, so it may have been a topaz. The gift seemed princely and somehow characteristic of Brian’s Jewish-Oriental persona. Since their lunch had been late and long, they arrived at the jeweler’s just at closing time.

The iron curtain-gate was being lowered in front of the door. But Brian ducked under it and insisted, with his usual high-handedness, on being served. Christopher had no earthly use for the stone; later he gave it to Caskey, who carried it around for a while in his billfold.

I don’t know what finally happened to it.

That evening, Christopher had supper with Cyril Connolly and

his wife––this was his second wife I suppose, the successor to Jean; anyhow Christopher hadn’t seen her before.[*] Not one word remains to me out of what must have been a brilliant display of Connolly talk, literary in-jokes, literary scandal, and the latest literary ratings of contemporary writers. No doubt Christopher was drunk as usual. What I do remember, that night, is a blizzard. (There must have been some snow all the time Christopher was in London, but the memory of it is attached only to two or three events.) Christopher had great difficulty in finding a taxi, and, when he did, the driver announced that he refused to venture north of Regent’s Park;

Christopher got the impression that the center of the city was surrounded by a vast snowdrift. Luckily for himself, he wanted to go south. I remember he later described to John Lehmann how the taxi driver had burst forth into a sort of Shakespearian soliloquy, addressing the blizzard and defying it to do its worst––but I don’t remember the taxi driver actually doing this. It was probably one of Christopher’s fantasies. Lehmann was very easily entertained by such talk––which was one of the reasons why Christopher liked being with him, despite his phases of pomposity.

On March 5, Christopher went to look at Keith Vaughan’s

paintings, which were in a gallery where Keith had just had a show.

Christopher admired them greatly and was planning to buy one. In the evening, Lehmann took him to see Alexis Rassine dance in Les Patineurs at Covent Garden.

On March 6, Christopher had lunch with Gerald Hamilton. This

was at a flat which Gerald had rented in Glebe Place. Their reunion was strange and comic. When Christopher entered, Gerald embraced

[* Lys Lubbock; see Glossary under Connolly.]

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him hastily and said, “Before we talk, I want you to read those––”

and he indicated a pile of papers set out in the middle of the dining table, “It’s all in there––you’ll see when you read them––I’ve been accused of being favorable to the enemy––it’s the most utter libel and I was able to prove it––the first casualty in any war is Truth––all I did was try to stop the war––”

I forget how much Christopher knew about Gerald’s case beforehand. The facts (according to Gerald’s book, Mr. Norris and I ) were that Gerald had tried to leave England without an exit permit in 1941 and go to neutral Ireland in order to persuade the Vatican through its representatives in Dublin to negotiate a peace.1 His letters were intercepted and he was arrested and interned by the British, in the same prison (Brixton) as Sir Oswald Mosley the fascist leader.

After a few weeks, he was released, however, because the authorities decided that the terms he had suggested as a basis for a peace conference were not “favorable to the enemy,” and that he had therefore not been guilty of “an act prejudicial to the defense of the realm.”

I’m sure Christopher only pretended to study the case for Gerald’s defense. In his eyes, Gerald was always guilty––and the seeming nobility of his motives on this occasion only made his behavior look more suspicious. Christopher didn’t care whether or not Gerald had intended to commit high treason––if you were going to associate with Gerald at all, you had to wink at much worse crimes than that.

So Christopher declared himself convinced of Gerald’s innocence and made only one reservation––he refused absolutely to meet Sir Oswald Mosley, who was now at liberty and Gerald’s good friend.

Gerald found Christopher’s scruple quaint. When Christopher called Mosley a fascist, Gerald said gaily that he hadn’t heard that word in a long while; it was now only used by Pravda, when attacking British liberal left-wingers.

Gerald Hamilton had a young man with him, as usual. [. . .] He seemed charming and simple and quite devoted to Gerald.

Christopher said to Gerald, “I always say to myself there must be some good in you, or you wouldn’t be able to get such nice boys.” Gerald was delighted; he loved being talked to in this tone. He repeated Christopher’s remark to [his companion], who grinned.

John Hayward lived in a flat in a house on Cheyne Walk, which is only a short distance from Glebe Place. Christopher went on there 1 Mr. Norris and I says that Hamilton had considered escaping to Ireland with a party of Catholic sisters, disguised as a nun. Ronald Searle made a drawing of him in nun drag for the book.

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after his lunch with Hamilton. John Hayward had been at Cambridge at the same time as Christopher, but I don’t think they had met then.

Christopher knew Hayward as a friend of Auden. Shortly after

coming down from Cambridge, Hayward got some rare paralytic

disease. The doctors told him he would die of it within a year or two, but he didn’t. The paralysis somehow arrested itself, leaving Hayward in a wheelchair, very thin, with twisted limbs, a rigid torso and spasmodic puppetlike movements. Just the same, he had his own charm and dignity; he was distinguished looking, despite his big slobbery lips, because his large grey eyes were so intelligent. He was a scholar (among other things, he had edited a book of selections from Swift), a critic, a great talker and a close friend of T. S. Eliot, with whom he was then sharing this flat. When he went out to

dinner parties, as he often did, he would be lifted into a taxi seated in his chair. He was said to be quite a ladies’ man and heartless in dealing with his girlfriends, jilting them one after the other. It was supposed that he managed to fuck them somehow.

This was the first of Christopher’s postwar visits to John Hayward.

Thereafter, until Hayward’s death, they met whenever Christopher came to England. Hayward was very good company and loved

exchanging gossip. He had one extraordinary and embarrassing

characteristic; he nearly always spoke of himself as though he were a normally able-bodied person. He once told Christopher, “Well––at least you and I can congratulate ourselves that we’ve kept our figures.”

Telling a story, he would begin, “As I was strolling down Bond Street––” Talking about the flu, he said, “And then, after feeling miserable for weeks, there comes that marvellous morning when you wake absolutely tingling with health and you jump right out of bed––”

On March 7, Christopher had lunch with William Robson-Scott,

his close friend in the 1930s––especially during the miserable time in 1937 after Heinz’s arrest and imprisonment. (It was in gratitude for his moral support that Christopher had dedicated Lions and Shadows to William, the following year.)

But now, to everybody’s amazement, William had gotten married; his wife had several children by a previous husband. I’m assuming that this had already happened before Christopher’s return to England, although I can’t be certain. I only remember that people later said of Robson-Scott that he had started to avoid his former friends––maybe because his wife disapproved of queers. So the conversation between him and Christopher was probably constrained; Christopher longing but not daring to ask: “Does she whip you like your boyfriends used to?” No memory of it remains.

That evening, Christopher had supper with Jack Hewit and then ¾ 1947 ¾

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went to stay with him at his flat. My recollection is that Jack wanted Christopher to spend at least several days there, and that Christopher, because he still felt guilty about his treatment of Jack, had agreed to do so. But, as it turned out, Jack’s flat had only one bed and it was very small. Christopher had made up his mind to have sex with Jack, if Jack wanted it; and Jack did. I can’t actually remember what happened that night. I’m almost certain that Christopher managed to get an erection and to fuck Jack. But Jack didn’t excite him at all, now, and he was well aware that Jack would get a crush on him all over again if he stayed around. So he made the excuse that he couldn’t sleep with another person in such a small bed––actually Christopher could sleep anywhere, in the right company––and told Jack he was moving into a hotel. To make up for this, he saw Jack as often as he could manage, during the rest of his stay in London.

On March 8, Christopher got a room at Oddenino’s Hotel, just off Piccadilly Circus. That night, he had supper at the Reform Club with Guy Burgess. What actually happened during their meeting will remain a mystery––unless Christopher’s letter about it to Forster survives and is produced by his executors.1

1 In answering Christopher’s letter, Forster wrote (on March 21): “I saw that wisp(?) in the distance, Guy Burgess. His meeting with you seems to have gone as I expected it would.” (If Forster did indeed write “wisp”––the handwriting is unclear––his description of Burgess seems so unfitting as to be perhaps ironical. Burgess was solidly built, even sexily plump. But perhaps Forster meant that Guy’s nature was treacherous and capricious, and therefore like a will-o’-the-wisp.) [The question mark is Isherwood’s, but his reading, “wisp,”

appears to be correct.]

In the same letter, Forster refers to the gigantic volume of Don Quixote with illustrations by Gustave Doré which Christopher had just given him. It was so bulky and heavy that it couldn’t be mailed; it had to be sent to Cambridge by railway express (or whatever that service was called in England). Forster had remarked to Christopher that he admired these particular Doré pictures, but Christopher’s gift of it to him was really a kind of practical joke. It was accompanied by a note which began: “As a souvenir of our last meeting, I am sending you this tiny volume. . . .” I suspect that Forster found the joke just a trifle vulgar. Christopher’s extravagance didn’t amuse him, as it amused Christopher’s other friends. On another occasion, he mildly reproved Christopher for overtipping at a restaurant.

Forster himself was just about to leave for the United States on the first visit of his life. He ingeniously used the Don Quixote to evade the currency regulations, making Christopher the following proposition: “Can I give you a cheque for fifty pounds? . . . The fifty pounds would be, you understand, payment for a copy of Don Quixote, illustrated by Gustave Doré, which you sold to me.” Christopher must certainly have agreed to this, and given Forster the equivalent of fifty pounds in U.S. dollars when they met again in New York.

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All I remember of the evening is that Christopher was very

drunk––so drunk that he had no idea how he finally got back to his hotel. After the Reform Club, he and Guy and a young man named Peter Pollock went to several pubs and nightclubs. My impression is that Guy was friendly at first and then hostile––I don’t know if this had anything to do with Christopher’s treatment of Jack Hewit or not; probably it was just plain hostility. Maybe Guy saw Christopher as a potential convert to communism who had lost his nerve and sold out to pacifism and religion. (When Christopher had met Guy in 1938, Guy had admired Christopher as an orthodox revolutionary writer––on the strength of “The Nowaks”![*] As for Christopher, he had never taken Guy seriously as a communist, and was even more amazed than most people when the Burgess–Maclean scandal broke, in 1951.) Sometime late that night, Christopher fell down a fairly high flight of stairs when leaving an upper-floor club. He told Forster that he suspected Guy had pushed him, but I don’t think he believed this. Anyhow, Christopher was drunk enough to fall properly and avoid getting hurt. Burgess and he never met each other again.

On March 9, Christopher had lunch and supper with the

Upwards. This was an altogether happy reunion. With Edward and Hilda, Christopher and Kathy, Christopher felt completely accepted.

He was their friend, and that was that. What Christopher valued in both Edward and Hilda was their simplicity; Hilda was certainly intelligent, Edward had one of the subtlest, clearest, most perceptive minds that Christopher had ever come in contact with. But what made Edward different from most of the other people whom

Christopher would have described as intelligent was that Edward lacked a certain fashionable urban sophistication; down in their drab little home on Turney Road in Dulwich, he and Hilda seemed quite out of the swim, like country cousins. When Edward talked about London literary figures and their writings and sayings, he seemed to be viewing them from a great distance––although, as a matter of fact, he went into town and met some of them, from time to time.

The Upwards’ political life was also an expression of their

simplicity. They didn’t advertise their activities, didn’t use left-wing jargon, didn’t make a show of righteous indignation or enthusiasm; they just went ahead with dull routine jobs, attending meetings, selling the Daily Worker, etc. (I’m not sure just when it was that Edward and Hilda got into an argument with the British communist

[* First published by John Lehmann in New Writing and later as part of Goodbye to Berlin and The Berlin Stories.]

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party and decided to leave it, but I think they were still party members in 1947.)

Their married life was equally simple, or seemed so. They had grown middle-aged together; Hilda was pleasant looking but in a take-it-or-leave-it style and her toilette certainly never went beyond keeping herself tidy; as for Edward, he was losing his hair and had a complacent belly. Edward was a devoted father, but not in the exhibitionistic possessive way that many people are. Christopher and Kathy appeared to be healthy, happy and fond of their parents.

And here was Christopher, their guest and their polar opposite––

or so he seemed to himself; queer, Peter Pannish (Peggy Kiskadden’s adjective), individualistic, exhibitionistic, liberalistic, fickle, promiscuous and an incurable gadabout. And they didn’t condemn him––

far from it, they wanted him to be exactly what he was. They were intrigued by his friendship with Garbo, his association with the Quakers and even his adherence to Vedanta. They found nothing to disapprove of in his clothes or his appearance. When Christopher took off his jacket after lunch to help with the dishes, Edward remarked that Christopher still had “a wasp waist,” and he did so without the least hint of bitchiness.

And when, after lunch, Edward and Christopher were alone in

front of a dim gas fire in the baldly public sitting room (totally visible to everyone who walked by along the street), Christopher lost awareness of everything but their relationship, which hadn’t changed in any important respect since Cambridge. What their relationship was and had always been about was the writing of books. They had been writers then, they were writers now. Edward was worried now about his work-in-progress. So was Christopher. Both had reason to be. Christopher’s amorphous idea for a novel wouldn’t take final shape for another five years; Edward’s In the Thirties would give him trouble for fourteen, bringing him to the verge of a nervous breakdown. But, as long as they were together, these problems seemed fascinating and exciting; discussing them was an unmixed pleasure.

On March 10, Christopher saw Mr. [Alan] White at Methuen’s

(with whom he was to become very friendly during the next years) and then had lunch with William Plomer and his friend Charles

[Erdmann]. This was the first time Christopher had met Charles, and now I can’t remember just what William told Christopher about him. My impression is that Charles came from somewhere abroad, was in fact a refugee. William’s attitude toward him was humorously protective; he conveyed the impression that he had somehow got stuck with Charles and must make the best of it, since Charles couldn’t take care of himself. And yet it was clear that he was fond 102

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of Charles in his own strange way; they had jokes together and sometimes scuffled like children. Charles was small and dark and strongly built, with an odd ugly-attractive face; probably he was very lively in bed. William suggested by the way he treated Charles that he was mentally retarded and I guess he was (is), though I can’t remember Charles actually saying or doing anything to demonstrate this. I am deeply fond of William––though I haven’t seen him in years. He seems to me to be one of those people who make life more bearable for everybody around them; he would be wonderful in a lifeboat with the survivors of a shipwreck, adrift and uncertain of rescue. What is unusual in William isn’t his strength only but his humor, it is the humor of a person who is capable of intense

suffering. You are aware of this always, and therefore his fun never jars on you or seems trivial and out of place, no matter what the circumstances are. Some of William’s friends complain of his

secretiveness, and particularly of his tendency to keep his public and private lives in two clearly marked compartments. This may explain his choice of a lover (or however one should describe him) like Charles, who isn’t presentable and doesn’t anyhow want to be

presented.

At that time, Charles was doing a little private business, dealing in watches––which were then hard to come by. Christopher bought

a watch from him, as a present for Christopher Upward. When

Christopher was born, Edward had asked Christopher to be a

godfather––or the equivalent of one; Edward, as a staunch leftist atheist, refused to use that word.

That evening, Christopher went with Stephen Spender to see The Winslow Boy. I still remember it because of Emlyn Williams’s

magnificent performance,1 and because of the icy coldness of the theater. The audience was small, and it huddled together in the middle of the stalls, wearing overcoats, mufflers and gloves.

On March 11, Christopher moved from Oddenino’s Hotel back

to John Lehmann’s. He had lunch with Brian Howard and Sam

Langford and the three of them went afterwards to look at Keith Vaughan’s paintings at the gallery. Christopher had already picked out the one that he thought he liked best, but he wanted a second opinion, so he asked Brian which one he would choose. There were (I think) more than twenty paintings available. Brian took his task very seriously––he could be passionately serious about any game, and 1 Particularly at the end of act two, when he reduces the Winslow boy to tears by cross-examining and bullying him, and then tells the Winslows: “The boy is plainly innocent. I accept the brief.” [The play is by Terence Rattigan.]

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this was one, because Christopher hadn’t told Brian which his choice was. After nearly an hour and many hesitations and changes of mind, Brian pointed to Christopher’s chosen picture. It was a moment of triumph for them both, and one which somehow strengthened their friendship. Christopher immediately bought the picture. (It was very small––a painting of two bathers (I think that was the title), one of them powerfully masculine, the other a woman perhaps, their bodies lit by an odd apricot light with green shadows.)

After this, Christopher had a drink with Ian Scott-Kilvert1 and 1 Christopher had first met Ian in 1927, when he was hired by Ian’s mother as Ian’s private tutor. Ian was then eight years old. Ian had an elder brother, Derek, who was a much prettier and duller boy; he was already at a boarding school and only came home for the holidays. And they had a little sister named Pam who later (I think I was told) became beautiful and wild. Ian’s mother had recently remarried. Her husband’s name was Lang. Soon after Christopher started work at the house, Mrs. Lang discovered, by means of private detectives, that Mr. Lang was queer. This caused Mrs. Lang to speak her first great memorable line: “Oh, Mr. Isherwood, beware of men!”

Ian appears in Lions and Shadows; he is called “Graham.” Strangely enough, Christopher had just finished correcting the proofs of this book when he met Ian again, after a ten-year interval, on November 20, 1937.

That meeting and some of the others that followed it are described in my 1937 diary. But a few important details are lacking, including the letter which Ian wrote Christopher on November 21. Christopher calls it “astounding,” but adds that he “can’t make out, or daren’t make out, what it really means.” It must certainly have been some sort of a declaration of love, but no doubt it was written in an involved, ambiguous neo-Jamesian style––ambiguity was Ian’s way of flirting. The sincerity of the letter itself was never questioned by Christopher, despite its tone. However, I suspect that Ian had fallen in love with a situation, rather than with a live person. To meet your boyhood tutor, whom you’d thought of as a senior if sympathetic adult, and find that he’s really not that much older than you are, still lively and sexy and famous into the bargain, and quite prepared to be that groovy incestuous elder-brother figure you’ve been looking for––wouldn’t that seem wildly romantic? Wouldn’t the meeting itself seem somehow fated––the work of some power “stronger than either of us,” to which you could only surrender? As for Christopher, he must have felt the same way, for he was reminded of James’s story “The Pupil.” He was also tremendously flattered. I don’t think any previous boy had so appealed to his sexual snobbery. Ian was The Blond. He belonged to Christopher’s social class (even if his mother was vulgar as shit and maybe even a Jewess), he was adequately intelligent, he was an athlete with beautiful legs (he had actually, or very nearly, got a Cambridge blue for running), he was the younger-brother figure Christopher had been looking for since he had lost Heinz. And this young public school and university Adonis had actually fallen for Christopher and made the first move! Christopher’s first reaction was: how shall I ever rise to such an occasion? I think he meant this sincerely––and yet––when I ask 104

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then supper with Jack Hewit. Ian was regarded by several people as being a victim, like Jack, of Christopher’s heartlessness––but Christopher himself didn’t feel at all guilty about Ian. When myself: “Would Christopher have fallen for Ian if Ian hadn’t written that letter?” I find, to my surprise, that I doubt it. For Christopher, Love was essentially “the art of the possible.” He seldom wanted what he couldn’t get, and never wanted it for long.

In the 1937 diary, there is no description of Christopher’s visit to Mrs. Lang.

He was invited to dinner and Ian assured him that it was very important he should show up in a dinner jacket; Mrs. Lang expected it. Christopher hadn’t owned a dinner jacket in years, he regarded them as the livery of the bourgeoisie; but he now overcame his leftist prejudices and bought one for the occasion. (This dinner jacket he later took with him to China, to wear at the British Embassy and elsewhere. Then, in 1941, a Quaker helper at one of the work camps for Okies in the San Joaquin Valley asked Christopher if he knew of a tuxedo they could use for amateur theatricals. So it was there that Christopher’s last dinner jacket found its last home––the few he has had to wear since then have always been rented.)

Mrs. Lang received Christopher graciously but rather as though he were a former servant of hers who had since pulled himself up in the world by his bootstraps and almost become a gentleman. Her opinions hadn’t changed and her heavy makeup didn’t look a day older. Christopher was as charming as he knew how to be. He avoided looking at Ian, taking it for granted that he must be half dead with embarrassment. I don’t remember that Christopher and Ian ever really discussed Mrs. Lang, at any time during their relationship.

Christopher went with Ian on a honeymoon trip to Paris, from December 9 to 14. The trip was sanctioned and partly financed by Mrs. Lang, who regarded it as a resumption by Christopher of his duties as Ian’s tutor––Paris was educational. Mrs. Lang even telephoned Kathleen, perhaps to find out what her attitude was toward their sons’ friendship. Kathleen certainly realized by this time that Christopher didn’t accompany young men to Paris just to show them Notre Dame. And when Mrs. Lang cooed, “After all, your Christopher was the first man in my Ian’s life,” Kathleen must have smiled somewhat sourly––as she did later, repeating the remark to Christopher himself. This was Mrs. Lang’s second, and last, great line.

Christopher and Ian certainly had sex during their stay in Paris, and I suppose they had had it in Cambridge before that. What is significant is that I can’t remember anything about it, what they did or how it felt. These memories must have been censored because Christopher found them distasteful, they didn’t fit into the love story. I suspect that Ian was passive and rather frigid. I’m sure Christopher never got to fuck him. I even think I recall that Ian admitted that his feeling for Christopher wasn’t primarily physical––

implying that his feeling for Nik Alderson [a previous lover] had been. . . . This is not to say that Paris was a disappointment to either of them. Quite the opposite. The 1937 diary contains the following bit of dialogue (which took place in the bus on the way home from Croydon Airport): “He said that he didn’t believe Paris was an episode. ‘You’ve domesticated me already.’ I said I ¾ 1947 ¾

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Christopher got back from China in July 1938, Ian hadn’t been waiting eagerly, as Christopher had expected, to pick up their affair at the point where it had been interrupted––despite all the long hoped so––but that during the next nine months things might change. ‘Why should they?’ he said. ‘They haven’t changed in ten years.’ ”

After they had been back in London for a short while, Ian reported to Christopher that Mrs. Lang had been quite shocked to learn from him that he and Christopher had shared a room at the Hotel Quai Voltaire. The very fact that Mrs. Lang had questioned Ian about this suggests that she was beginning to suspect that Christopher was having sex with him. (Earlier than this––or was it maybe later?––she had found a love letter from Nik to Ian or from Ian to Nik which had upset her terribly. Finally, Christopher became convinced that Ian’s carelessness and indiscretion about his sex life must be partly deliberate, motivated by a subconscious urge to confess everything to his mother. So Christopher asked Ian to destroy all his letters, promising that he would destroy all Ian’s. Christopher kept this promise––to my great regret.) From then on, Mrs. Lang began raising obstacles whenever Ian and Christopher tried to arrange another trip together.

(Another detail omitted from the 1937 diary is the fact that Christopher had at least one, perhaps several meetings alone with Nik Alderson. Unfortunately I can’t remember anything about this––except that the atmosphere was fairly friendly. Nik could hardly blame Christopher for what had happened. And indeed he and Christopher couldn’t be regarded as ordinary rivals in love, they weren’t competing; what they were and what they had to offer differed too widely. As for Christopher, he was sad to have caused pain, even indirectly, to such a beautiful creature. If he could have soothed Nik’s hurt feelings by going to bed with him, he would have done so most enthusiastically.) The 1937–1938 diary stops on December 30 and the next entry is on July 30, after Christopher’s return to England from China and the U.S. So there is no record of Christopher’s final days in London or of the huge party given on January 18, the night before his and Auden’s departure (at which Brian Howard got into a fight with somebody or other, exclaiming, “I refuse to have my friend insulted by the worst painter in England!”). I don’t remember when, or under what circumstances, Christopher and Ian said goodbye to each other.

But I know that Christopher was playing it very big indeed as the departing hero. Christopher had been a departing hero throughout most of the previous autumn. On November 19 he had written: “I must recognize the possibility (quite apart from any pleasing romanticism) that I may die in China. I must live these next two months as if I were certainly condemned to death, quietly, sensibly, working hard, making my preparations. . . .” It was as a departing hero that Ian met him and was able to fall in love with him––which only goes to show that the posturings of which one is later most ashamed can seem endurable or sympathetic or even lovable to another person. On November 29, Christopher agreed to go with Auden to Spain, before going to China, as members of a delegation of writers and artists. But this visit was postponed, so they couldn’t take part in it.

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romantic letters Christopher had written him during the journey. In fact, he had gone off for a holiday in Greece. Ian remained lukewarm until the late autumn, when he suddenly regained his interest in Christopher and wrote to him, quoting from the poem by Yeats,

“Oh! Solomon! let us try again.”[*] But Christopher wasn’t in the mood. He had met Jack Hewit, for one thing; for another, he was still thinking about Vernon Old in New York and including him in plans to return to the States. When Christopher went down to visit Ian at Cambridge, shortly before leaving to spend the 1938 Christmas holidays in Brussels with Auden and Jack Hewit, he had definitely decided not to get further involved. Ian may have sensed this, for he came on very strong, rolling about with Christopher on the sitting-room floor and urging Christopher to come up with him to bed.

Christopher wouldn’t, and I don’t think they had sex again. Perhaps Christopher did tell Ian some love lies before he sailed for New York in January 1939, or perhaps he didn’t. Anyhow, after Christopher had gone, Ian seems to have played a big public scene as the deserted heartbroken lover. And, since he was so young and pretty, he got a lot of sympathy from various people, including Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears.

Their reunion was friendly but cagey and polite. Ian was married now, to a girl he had known a long time; she was an American

named Elizabeth––I think that Christopher had met her, after he arrived in the States. When Ian announced his marriage in a letter to Christopher, Ian said of her that she was the only person who really about the cooling-off between Ian and himself. Christopher seems to think that their attitude toward their relationship was at fault: “We built a wonderful sham cathedral around our friendship.” He also blames the influence of Mrs.

Lang. And he writes, “I must remain free, I must be ready for Heinz if he needs me”––which sounds like rank hypocrisy, considering how large Vernon Old already loomed on the horizon. No, the simple truth was, Christopher had realized that Ian wasn’t the right lover for him.

Presumably, Ian was making the same discovery about Christopher, though more gradually, because he was young and inexperienced. Suppose he hadn’t made it? Suppose he had been there to meet Christopher on the dock at Southampton and had convinced Christopher that he still loved him?

Would Christopher have been so dazzled that he would have silenced his own doubts? Would they have remained together through the Munich crisis and the next eleven months, right up to the outbreak of war? It’s improbable but just possible. In those days, Christopher’s plans were all provisional. If he had had someone to stay in England for, he might never have gone to America.

[* From “Solomon and the Witch”: her last line after the lovers realize their union has not been perfect enough to bring about the end of the world.]

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deserved to have him––no, I can’t have got that correctly, but it was the sense of whatever phrase he used, meaning that she had waited longer than anybody else. And now they had a son.

Christopher didn’t feel guilty in Ian’s presence, but he did feel somewhat intimidated by him. For Ian was doubly a hero. As a

conscientious objector, he had gone to Africa with the Friends’

Ambulance Unit, where he had narrowly missed being killed. (Nik Alderson, his beautiful young lover whom Christopher succeeded, had been in the same unit and had been killed by a bomb.) Later, Ian had lost his pacifist convictions, joined the army and been ordered––

because of his classical education––to act as a liaison officer with the Greek guerillas, fighting behind the German lines in Greece. “How did you get there,” Christopher asked Ian respectfully, “did you jump with a parachute?” “I was dropped,” Ian answered, casually, yet with a certain note of reprimand, as if correcting an error in phraseology by Christopher. He was no longer pretty but rather beautiful; he looked austere and repressed. He told Christopher, “I can’t see that you’ve changed in the least.” This too sounded like a reprimand, as though Ian were telling him that he was uncured and perhaps incurable. But all this was below the surface. Their conversation was largely literary, and Ian was polite about Prater Violet and enthusiastic about writing in general. He didn’t appear to feel that he’d outgrown the taste for it. They also exchanged several nervous jokes, at which Ian laughed in the way which used to charm

Christopher. But there was no communication and couldn’t have been any, unless they had taken off their clothes. Which––as Ian kept signalling, rather too insistently––was absolutely absolutely absolutely out of the question.

On March 12, Christopher saw Gerald Hamilton again for lunch

––one of the props of Gerald’s newly rediscovered Catholicism, Monsignor Barton-Brown, was with him––and Edward and Hilda

Upward again for supper. In between these meals, he was reunited with Eric Falk. Like Ian, Eric found Christopher’s appearance unchanged, but he chose a much more pleasing way of saying so;

“My God!” he cried, “have you made a pact with the Devil?”

Christopher, not surprisingly, decided that Eric had changed very much, for the better. (He later told Olive Mangeot that he had seen in Eric’s face something he had never seen there before––real goodness.) Not being in with the Devil had cost poor Eric something, however; he already looked like an old man, bald and wrinkled.

On March 13, Christopher went to Cheltenham, to stay with Olive Mangeot. She was living there with Hilda [Hauser] and Hilda’s 108

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granddaughter, whom they had named Amber because that was her color. During the war, Hilda’s daughter Phyllis had gone out dancing a lot with American soldiers. A black G.I. had raped her, outside a dance hall. Phyllis was prepared to go to the base and identify the man. But, as she was on her way there, the American officer who was escorting her told her that the wartime punishment for rape was death. So, when Phyllis was confronted with the lineup, she said she couldn’t recognize the rapist. (No doubt this was what the officer had hoped she would say, and the reason why he had told her about the death penalty.)

Phyllis had the baby but she also had a violent revulsion against it––maybe its appearance triggered a delayed shock reaction to the rape, maybe she hadn’t expected it to be so obviously Negroid; Amber looked far less than half white. Phyllis refused to have anything to do with her. It seemed that Amber had been lucky.

Instead of a whining, complaining, self-centered mother, she had got an adoring fat dimpled grandmother who was a marvellous cook––

not to mention a charming home and an equally adoring “great

aunt,” Olive.

Hilda herself didn’t seem to have changed one bit since the old days at 21 Cresswell Place. (In Lions and Shadows, she is called

“Rose.”) Altogether, this was a very happy family, with Olive contributing just a faint breath of communistic priggishness––only a breath, because priggishness was so deeply against Olive’s nature.

Olive and Christopher didn’t get into any political arguments during his visit, but he was obliged to refuse to contribute to some party fund and tell her he couldn’t support the party in any way, as long as it sanctioned the disgraceful treatment of homosexuals in Russia.

Another not entirely convincing communist, Sally Bowles now

become Jean Cockburn, was either staying in the house or living nearby (I forget which) with her daughter Sarah. Christopher found Jean also very little changed in looks, though much in manner; she was a bit of a red bore, until you got her off the party line. Gerald Hamilton had told Christopher that Jean had once said of Claud

[Cockburn], Sarah’s father: “He’s the only man in the world I couldn’t possibly go to bed with.” But that was long, long ago, before the Spanish Civil War and Jean’s political enlightenment and her stay in Madrid, where she was said to have shown remarkable courage during the bombardments.

On March 14, Olive Mangeot and Christopher had lunch with

Wogan Philipps and his wife Cristina. Wogan had once been married to Rosamond Lehmann. He was a handsome powerfully built man,

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quite wealthy, with a charmingly open, enthusiastic temperament.

He had been wounded in the Spanish Civil War, while driving

an ambulance (I think). He and Cristina had a farm somewhere in the neighborhood. Like many farmers at this period, they were employing prisoners of war, German or Italian, to help out. From the point of view of the prisoner, such a job was extremely desirable; he got paid for it and he didn’t have to go back at night to the prison camp if his employer would give him room and board.

Wogan and Cristina told Christopher at lunch that they had been employing a young German POW (whom I’ll call Kurt; I forget his real name). They had become very fond of Kurt; he was a good

worker, always cheerful, simple, innocent, sweet natured, a typical German peasant boy––or that was how he had seemed to them.

Then, a short while ago, the camp authorities had ordered Kurt to leave the farm and return to them. When Wogan protested, he was told that they had discovered that Kurt had a very bad record; as a member of the S.S., he had taken part in a massacre of civilians, somewhere in Russia. The camp authorities told Wogan that it

wasn’t their job to try war criminals; their position was simply that farm work outside the camp was a privilege only to be granted to prisoners of good character. Kurt obviously didn’t deserve this privilege, so Wogan would have to pick someone else. Wogan had answered that he and Cristina couldn’t believe this about Kurt; they had got to know him well, he was incapable of such a crime, there must be some mistake. All right, the authorities had told him, if that’s how you feel, you may be present at Kurt’s hearing; he will be given every opportunity to prove he’s innocent.

The hearing had been set for that afternoon. Wogan asked

Christopher to come with him to the camp, saying that the hearing would be in German, which he didn’t understand well; he wanted Christopher to translate for him when necessary.

When Christopher first saw Kurt, he appeared to be exactly as Wogan had described him, a sturdy smallish peasant youth with a pretty face and apple cheeks, innocent and healthy. If there was any slyness about him, it would be merely sexual, Christopher thought; he would probably be good at slipping noiselessly out of his room at night and sliding into someone’s bed. At the moment, he looked subdued and sad, as was only natural, but not guilty or anxious.

The examiner had come down from London. He was an English-

man but he spoke German fluently. He impressed Christopher

as being a real expert at his job. He talked quietly, he didn’t bully, he made no show of moral indignation––if anything, he seemed

faintly amused, though his face remained unsmiling. Obviously, he 110

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had studied Kurt’s case in the minutest detail. He asked Kurt if he had ever been a member of the S.S. Kurt admitted that he had, but added that he hadn’t volunteered for it, he had been drafted.

“Where were you inducted?” the examiner asked. “In Dresden.”

(I’m using names that come into my head; I don’t remember the actual ones.) “Where was the barracks that you had to report to?”

“On the Wilhelmstrasse.” “You’re quite sure?” “Yes, I am sure.”

“Because that was where they took the volunteers. Draftees went to the barracks on the Kaiserplatz.” Thus the examination proceeded, step by step. The examiner appeared to know every move Kurt had made; every lie he had told. It became steadily more obvious that the accusation against him was true. Kurt denied everything at first. Then he turned sullen. Two or three times, his face showed a glimpse of rage, like a defiant, cornered animal.

There were no tears, no appeals to Wogan for his sympathy. When the hearing was over, he went out of the room without looking at anybody. Wogan was shaken and upset. Even Christopher had

become involved. He felt he had witnessed something ugly and

terrible, an unmasking. Just for a moment, the fact of the massacre––and of Kurt’s part in it––seemed obscenely present, right there in the room. And yet nothing much had actually happened.

The authorities had proved their case, but Kurt would almost

certainly never be punished; he was one among thousands. To be shocked that a boy who looked like Kurt could have done such a thing––that was sheer sentimentality. Why shouldn’t a murderer be pretty? All that had been demonstrated here was a hideous but homely truth: that most of us live quite comfortably with the memory of our vilest acts; and that, if they are discovered, we are angry and humiliated, we curse our stupidity and are heartily sorry

––that we got caught.

On March 15–16, there was a tremendous gale; to Christopher, it seemed the most violent he had ever been in. On the 16th, he went with Olive and Jean to the movies. Being out on the streets was quite dangerous, for tiles were being blown off roofs and, once, a large shop sign came crashing down, close to them. Inside the cinema, the noise of the storm was so loud that it distracted your attention from the screen; it even began to seem possible that the building itself might be in danger. Olive was scared. To make her laugh,

Christopher said, “Try to pretend it’s only an air raid.”

The storm brought floods which closed roads and railway lines, thus preventing Christopher from going to Stratford to see Beatrix Lehmann, who was appearing there in the Shakespeare season. That uncanny chameleon was playing Viola, Portia and the Nurse in

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Romeo and Juliet on successive nights.1 Instead, Christopher went directly back to Wyberslegh, on March 17.

I have few memories of this second visit, although it was nearly as long as Christopher’s first––exactly four weeks. One memory is of a session with Mr. Symonds, the family lawyer, about the drawing up of a formal deed making over the Marple and Wyberslegh estates to

Richard; this was at Mr. Symonds’s office in Stockport on March 24.

Symonds told Kathleen and Christopher––Richard, I’m nearly sure, wasn’t present––that Christopher’s gift of the estates to Richard couldn’t be regarded as absolutely unconditional, because there was always the possibility that Christopher might have a child who would claim a share. In such an event, said Mr. Symonds, the child’s claim might well be upheld by the court. It was typical legal teasing––

Symonds positively smacked his lips as he spoke––and Christopher was delighted to be able to shut him up. “There is no possibility,” he said, “of my having a child.” And he went on to tell them all about the median bar, and Dr. Gorfain’s surgery and his consequent sterilization. It seems obvious to me now that Christopher hadn’t told Kathleen about this earlier because he knew instinctively that it would upset her. If so, it was extra unkind of him to do it in Mr. Symonds’s presence. His motive was spite against them both, as representatives of the heterosexual majority. How dared they assume that he should want to have a child, anyway? Nevertheless, the violence of Kathleen’s reaction took him by surprise. She seemed to regard Christopher’s sterilization as a crime quite equal to that of abortion, and she cast all the blame for it on poor Dr. Gorfain. “He ought to be put in prison!”