Lost Years. A Memoir 1945–1951

she exclaimed. When Christopher was alone with her on the way home, he tried to talk her out of her indignation––why in the world should she expect him, a well-adjusted homosexual, to switch to women in his old age? What did it matter if he was sterilized or not?

To which Kathleen answered, with an obstinate pout which made her look for a moment like a young girl: “But I want grandchildren!” At seventy-eight, with one foot in the tomb, she could say this––without the slightest consideration for the wishes of the two sons she professed to love! But, of course, this wasn’t Kathleen speaking, it was the matriarch-cunt, deaf to all decency, demanding that its gross fleshy will be done. Christopher gasped at it, awed and amazed and

disgusted. There was nothing more to be said. . . . The deed was signed later, on March 28.

1 Commenting on these character changes in a letter to Christopher, Beatrix wrote that it was “all done by faith.”

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Another memory is of some conversations Christopher had with

Mitty Monkhouse, while they were out on walks, around the back of Lyme Park and over Whaley Moor. Alone together for the first time in their lives, the two became intimate at once. Even the landscape made them feel close to each other, for they were both children of these damp sad beautiful dark hills––“moor born,” in fact. As for the difference in their ages, about seven years, it meant very little now that Mitty was into her thirties. And she evidently needed a confidant.

She told Christopher that she was in love with a man much older than herself. This man loved her too. But he was married and his wife wouldn’t divorce him. Furthermore, his health was very bad; he couldn’t expect to last long. Mitty was urging him to come away and live with her. He was tempted, but still refused to do this because he feared he would only make her unhappy––first, by involving her in a scandal, then by dying and leaving her alone. Mitty’s choice of such an old lover suggested a hang-up on her father, Allan. Which was ironical, because Allan was the most drastic of puritans. He had once forbidden a young man the house because he had playfully kissed Rachel goodnight. And now Mitty had found herself a father

substitute whom Allan would have condemned as the vilest sort of seducer and emotional blackmailer!

I don’t think Mitty needed Christopher’s advice. She had already made up her mind that she wanted to be with her lover, whatever might come of it. But Christopher’s sympathy pleased and impressed her greatly. Perhaps it surprised her too; she knew he had never been married and may have supposed him to be frigid or pure or both.

Christopher soon found himself confessing to Mitty that he knew a great deal about the hazards and problems of unlawful sexual unions, from his personal experience. This intrigued her, of course. She wanted details––still, apparently, not guessing that he was homosexual. Christopher then began to get cagey, which I now regret, because his caution prevented him from introducing Caskey to her on his next visit to England and thus becoming really intimate with her. After these walks and talks on the moors, they seldom saw each other again. I never knew, or have forgotten, if Mitty and her lover ever did go off together.

I don’t think there was much snow during this visit, because

Christopher went for many walks. He and Kathleen shopped in

Manchester and saw movies. Christopher also arranged to have his books (which he had left at Pembroke Gardens in 1939 and which Kathleen had brought to Wyberslegh) crated and shipped over to the U.S.

On April 14 he returned to London and went to stay with John

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Lehmann. John gave a party for him next day––Cecil Beaton, Rose Macaulay, V. S. Pritchett, William Plomer, Rosamond Lehmann and Ian Scott-Kilvert were among those who came to it.1

On April 16, Christopher went to an exhibition of tapestry at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was astonished to recognize one of the pieces as being identical with the Gobelins piece which had hung in the drawing room at Marple Hall. He wondered if it could

possibly be the same, on loan from the museum in the North to which it had been sold. But the curator whom he asked explained to him that the Gobelins state factory in the seventeenth century had turned out many copies of each design. Christopher in his ignorance had supposed that every piece of tapestry must be an “original.”

In the evening, Christopher went with Jack Hewit to see

Webster’s The White Devil. I think of this as having been one of the most remarkable productions of a non-Shakespearian Elizabethan play I have ever seen––but I can remember hardly any details. My overall impression is of roughhouse lust and gleeful cruelty. The miming of the lust would probably seem nothing unusual, nowadays.

But there must have been something truly memorable in Flamineo’s glee and ferocious laughter, after he has tricked his sister Vittoria and her waiting woman into trying to kill him with pistols which have no bullets in them.2 I also remember Vittoria literally spitting in Flamineo’s face––which was strangely exhilarating.

Christopher and Jack Hewit had supper afterwards with Tony

Hyndman. This must have been the first time that Tony and

Christopher had met, since the war. My memories of Tony are

disarranged, but I’m fairly sure that he and Stephen Spender were now no longer on speaking terms. Stephen had told Christopher that Tony was drinking heavily and that he was somehow involved with criminals. (Do I remember that Stephen’s house had been robbed and that he suspected that Tony knew who had done it?) Tony had been to Australia, as stage manager of a theatrical company, I believe, and had made a mess of the job.

Anyhow, Christopher’s meeting with Tony was certainly a happy 1 This may have been the party referred to in Christopher’s “Coming to London” article, at which “an animated discussion of existentialism was interrupted by one of the guests exclaiming piteously: ‘Oh, I’m so cold!’ ” I seem to hear Rosamond Lehmann speaking the line. If she did, this may have been a bit of sisterly bitchery, implying that John, with his well-known stinginess, was depriving his guests of coal which he actually had in the cellar and blaming the temperature on the fuel rationing.

2 Robert Helpmann played Flamineo, Margaret Rawlings Vittoria. [In fact, the play is Jacobean.]

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one. They had been on the best of terms when Christopher left for the United States and nothing had happened to disturb their relationship in absence. Tony looked hardly any older and he was cheerful and affectionate as always. Christopher still found him attractive, but I don’t think they had sex together that night or indeed until Christopher came back to England in 1948.1

1 Stephen Spender started living with Tony in 1932 (I think) and Christopher must have met Tony soon afterwards. They saw a good deal of each other during the next few years––especially in 1935–1936, when Christopher, Stephen, Heinz and Tony went to Portugal together and took a house in Sintra. As long as Christopher was with Heinz and Tony was with Stephen, relations between Christopher and Tony were apt to become strained. In his journal, Christopher accuses Tony of being a born prig and of taking it upon himself to judge Heinz because he sulked. But, in fact, Tony was only priggish because he was imitating Stephen, and Heinz was only sulking because Christopher was being so gloomy about the political outlook. Left to themselves, both boys had quite happy natures, especially Tony.

In the summer of 1937, Christopher went to stay with Stephen at a house Stephen had taken in Kent, near the coast. Inez Pearn, whom Stephen had married in the previous year, was there; and so was Tony. To Christopher, the marriage seemed absurd; it was the sort of relationship Shelley might have had.

Stephen would embrace Inez and then go across the room and embrace Tony.

Tony said laughingly: “You’re like a man with a couple of spaniels,” but he resented Stephen’s behavior; and so did Inez, I guess. Christopher didn’t care what Inez felt; he found her repulsive. Stephen was aware of this, and he slyly encouraged Christopher and Tony to bitch her. I remember a walk they all took together among some sand hills. Inez slipped and fell in the sand, and Christopher exclaimed, “Stephen, your wife’s down!” The tone in which he said this made Stephen giggle maliciously. (Two years later, Inez fell in love with a spotty-faced poet named Charles Madge and left Stephen.) During this visit to the house in Kent, Christopher and Tony naturally found themselves in alliance. Christopher felt that Tony was being humiliated and therefore tried to build up his ego. Tony felt that Christopher was lonely for Heinz, who had been arrested in Germany that spring, and therefore tried to cheer him up.

One day, the four of them were driving home from the beach in their swimsuits. Christopher and Tony were sitting in the back of the car. They were laughing a lot, a bit drunk maybe, and then they started to become conscious of each other’s naked bodies. They groped and jacked each other off.

I don’t think Stephen and Inez were aware of this. But, that night, Tony came to Christopher’s room, and they had sex properly, and next morning Tony told Stephen about it. Stephen couldn’t very well object, but he was surprised and displeased––which was, no doubt, exactly how Tony wanted him to react.

Christopher and Tony later agreed that something very odd had happened––two people who have known each other intimately for nearly five years suddenly find themselves taking part in a seemingly unpremeditated sex act. But the act itself now seems easy to explain; it was a spontaneous ¾ 1947 ¾

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On April 17, Christopher saw Tony Hyndman again in the

afternoon, after lunching with a young man named Neville King-Page. I think Neville must have been a friend of John Lehmann and that Christopher met him at John’s party on the 15th. Neville must have let Christopher know through John that he was anxious to go to bed with him. Christopher seldom turned down offers from

strangers and anyhow Neville was quite sexy, though probably a bit crazy. (He later committed suicide.) But this was Christopher’s last day in London and he had already arranged to take Bob and May Buckingham and their son Robin to supper at The White Tower.

So he couldn’t meet Neville again until late that evening. Neville had recently moved into other rooms and didn’t feel he could trust his new landlady to be understanding. Christopher went up to ask John if he could spend the night with Neville there. Neville waited out on the street. To Christopher’s surprise and disgust, John refused to agree to this, saying that Alexis wouldn’t like it. I’m nearly sure John was lying and that he was merely afraid Neville would make noisy sex with Christopher and keep John himself awake, and then gobble up a huge breakfast. Christopher had to go out and send Neville away. They never saw each other again.

counterdemonstration against Stephen’s marriage. What is much odder is that this pair of old friends were then to discover that they were marvellously compatible sex partners.

In the Portugal days, after some quarrel with Tony, Christopher had written spitefully about Tony’s “primly composed rabbit mouth.” And once he had said to him sarcastically, “If you were my little boy––” to which Tony had answered, “Thank God I’m not!” But now Christopher began to find Tony’s face charming and to be hotly excited by Tony’s strong coarse-skinned white body and thick curly reddish brown hair. And Tony told Christopher that he was a much better sex mate than Stephen had been, because he knew how to lead down from an orgasm as well as up to it.

During the rest of 1937 and the second half of 1938 (after Christopher got back from China) Tony and Christopher went to bed together whenever an opportunity offered itself––either at Pembroke Gardens or on visits to Cuthbert Worsley and Tony Bower, who were then having a big affair. In August 1938 they stayed for a while at Dover and then went over to Ostende where they saw Gerald Hamilton. They always had a lot to talk and laugh about and became very fond of each other and grateful for so much mutually satisfied lust. But their relationship was absolutely without romance––which only meant that Christopher could spend nights with Tony even when he was in love with somebody else. He always fucked Tony; that was what they both enjoyed most. The first time Christopher did it, he found the act so delicious that he was unwilling to wash Tony’s shit off his cock, so he let it stay there till next morning. I think this was the one occasion when Christopher reacted to Tony in a way which could be called sentimental.

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Before leaving London next day, Christopher saw Robert

Medley and Rupert Doone. The day-to-day diary doesn’t say where he saw them or if they had a meal together, nor does it say if Francis Bacon was with them. (Bacon isn’t mentioned in the

day-to-day diary until 1952, and yet I have a strong impression that Christopher had met him before that.) In the afternoon,

Christopher took the boat train to Southampton and went on board the Queen Elizabeth.

The Queen Elizabeth was much in the news, for she had run

aground on a shifting sandbank called the Brambles, as she entered Southampton Water on her previous inbound voyage. Her

passengers had been disembarked in launches and she had been

towed off, which had delayed this sailing for several days. John Lehmann had jokingly said that this was yet another symptom of the collapse of the British Empire. When she sailed next morning (April 19) everybody was on deck to watch her crawling progress through the danger area. As she grazed the sandbank, the water turned brown; but she didn’t stick.

When the seating lists were being made up for tables in the dining room Christopher had hastily cruised around for a tolerable table mate. The young man he picked on proved to be a lucky guess, and every bit as glad to be found by Christopher as Christopher was to find him. His name was John Holmes. During the war he had had an important government job in Canada; I think he had been an aide to the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King.

Every night after supper, John and Christopher would go up onto the boat deck, where it was cold and windy and pitch dark and deserted. If you leaned against the funnel you were sheltered from the wind, and the funnel itself was pleasantly warm. Here they kissed and groped each other and sucked cock and had orgasms, without even taking off their topcoats. It was fun but frustrating because it made them eager to go to bed together, which was nearly impossible; each was sharing his cabin with somebody else. Their only opportunity was during the first serving of dinner in the dining room, for John’s cabin sharer had chosen this, while John and Christopher had chosen the second. One evening, John and Christopher decided to take the risk. They darted into the cabin, tore off their clothes and got in three or four minutes of sex which were wildly exciting because of the haste and danger; then they were interrupted by someone pounding on the door. Christopher grabbed his clothes and jumped naked into the bathroom to dress. It was only the steward, wanting to tidy the beds, but Christopher and John were too badly startled to care to continue.

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When they parted in New York,1 John told Christopher that he was “a very wholesome person.” I think John was inclined to be something of a closet queen. When he called Christopher “wholesome” he was envying Christopher’s relative freedom from sexual inhibitions.

Caskey was waiting for Christopher on the dock with their car (he had driven it from California to New York). Christopher was delighted to discover how attractive Caskey was to him, after their three months’ separation. He felt himself falling in love, all over again. As for Caskey, he appeared to be equally delighted, though in his own very different style. He was at his most sophisticated––urban, well dressed, well groomed, demure, sparkling, flippantly sentimental. His eyes were bright with flattering Irish glances; but the only compliment he paid Christopher was half in joke––he said that Christopher’s hair “looked quite glamorous.” Then he went on to speak of the charming sailor he had spent the previous night with.

Christopher promptly began to brag about the sexiness of John Holmes. Caskey smiled and seemed subtly amused. As they drove off the dock, he pulled the car into a sheltered parking place, threw his arms around Christopher and kissed him.

Caskey had been staying at the Park Central Hotel and had moved from a single to a double room so that Christopher could spend the night there. (Caskey had already had a run-in with the house

detective because of the late-remaining guests he had entertained in his single.)

That evening, Caskey and Christopher went to see Ingrid

Bergman in Joan of Lorraine, which must have been a ghastly play, though I think they were both dazzled into grudging acceptance of it by Bergman’s beauty and stage presence. They also had a meeting with James and Tania Stern. The Sterns were leaving for Europe the next day and Caskey and Christopher were taking over their

apartment for the summer. (Christopher later discovered that Auden was shocked because the Sterns were charging Christopher a rent far in excess of what they themselves were paying for it––I have forgotten how much this actually was. Jimmy Stern was just being Jewish, of course, but Christopher couldn’t say this to Auden in front of Chester Kallman.)

On April 26, Caskey and Christopher spent their first night in the apartment, at 207 East 52nd Street. I don’t think they went to bed until after dawn; it was a long sexless night of drinking and dialogue 1 They landed at about 9:00 a.m. on April 25.

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––slow drinking and even slower dialogue. It remains vaguely but powerfully in my mind as being a high point in their relationship.

The dialogue was about their feelings for each other; that much I’m sure of. But I can’t remember a single line of it. This was quite unlike their normal drunken confrontations (see pages 52 and 60). What made it memorable was that neither one of them was harboring a grudge against the other at that particular moment––for the obvious reason that they had been apart for so long. And, on the positive side, I think both of them were pleased and surprised and rather proud that their relationship remained as good as new. Caskey was at heart a pessimist, with a low opinion of himself––I realize that nowadays much more clearly than Christopher did at the time. Therefore Caskey had probably been expecting that Christopher would return from England feeling bored with him and ready to call the whole thing off. . . . One thing I do remember: this night of drinking didn’t result in either Caskey or Christopher becoming really drunk or getting a hangover. Which in itself seems to prove that its psychological climate was more bracing than usual.

The Sterns’ apartment was just around the corner from Third

Avenue, along which the El[*] still ran, in those days. If the noise of the trains could be heard from the apartment, I don’t remember it as loud enough to be disturbing. The traffic along East 52nd Street can’t have been very heavy, for Caskey was nearly always able to find a parking place for their car, not too far from 207. As long as they were in New York, Caskey did all the driving because Christopher could never grasp the one-way street system––that is to say, he had decided not to grasp it.

It was during their stay in New York that the “nanny” aspect of their relationship (see page 61) began to emerge. Christopher’s excuse for letting Caskey drive was that New York City was

Caskey’s town, not his––for it had been the scene of Caskey’s life before he went into the navy. But, in fact, Christopher wanted to relax and surrender his will (in all matters that weren’t important to him) to a nanny figure who would wait on him and relieve him from the tension of making decisions. (He reserved the right to sulk and passively resist, just as a child does, when Nanny’s decisions didn’t suit him.)

The apartment itself was snug and well furnished; it seemed much more of a home for them than their two earlier habitations. And Caskey, as before, was prepared to make it as comfortable as possible, and to cook for and entertain their friends. Caskey had a great many

[* Elevated train.]

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friends in New York and Christopher had Lincoln Kirstein, Paul Cadmus, Auden, Berthold Viertel, Tony Bower and others. Nearly all their evenings were social.

On May 1, Christopher had lunch with Bennett Cerf. This must

have been to discuss Christopher’s plan to go to South America with Caskey and write a travel book about their journey, illustrated by Caskey’s photographs. (Promoting Caskey’s career as a photographer was Christopher’s chief reason1 for wanting to make the trip; he always dreaded embarking on any travel and only really enjoyed it in retrospect.) Since they now had the money from Judgement Day in Pittsburgh, they could easily afford the travelling expenses, even without the advances on royalties they would get from Random

House and from Methuen.

The lunch with Cerf must have included a visit to the Random

House offices, because I have two vivid memories of that meeting which don’t fit into a restaurant. One is of Cerf seated complacently behind his desk, with his yessing assistants around him. They are discussing a possible title for the book. Suddenly Cerf––that incomparable ass––gets an inspiration; he becomes a Jewish prophet passing the word down from God: “The High Andes! That’s what we’ll call it––“The High” (a slight but deeply reverent pause)

“Andes!!” (Christopher never for one instant considered using this, of course.)

The other memory is of being introduced to Truman Capote.

(Even at this prepublication stage of Truman’s career, it had to be that way around; one couldn’t imagine Truman being introduced to oneself.) Christopher was prepared for the honor by one of the Random House partners, who assured him that this young man,

whose first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was soon to appear, could only be compared to Proust. And then the marvellously

gracious little baby personage itself appeared; Truman sailed into the room with his right hand extended, palm downward, as if he

expected Christopher to kiss it. Christopher didn’t, but, within a few moments, he was quite ready to––having been almost instantane-ously conquered by the campy Capote charm. To hell with Proust; here was something infinitely rarer and more amusing, a live Ronald Firbank character! Christopher came home and raved about him to 1 I now realize that another, surprisingly important reason was Christopher’s desire to impress Hayden Lewis––that smiling sneering spectator and critic of the drama of his affair with Caskey. Christopher was determined that Hayden should have to admit that Caskey’s life was more exciting, more interesting, more glamorous, more fun than it had ever been before he met Christopher.

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Caskey. And when Caskey himself met Truman (on May 21) he

wasn’t at all disappointed. There and then, they accepted Truman’s invitation to come and stay with him and his friend, Newton Arvin, on Nantucket in July.

On May 5, Christopher joined a gymnasium which was run by an

old German named Pilates. It was somewhere over on the West Side, maybe Seventh Avenue.[*] I think that Caskey had recommended it and that Caskey himself had gone to it at one time, but he didn’t rejoin with Christopher. Mr. Pilates was a bully and a narcissist and a dirty old man; he and Christopher got along very well. When Christopher was doing his workout, Pilates would bring one of his assistants over to watch, rather as the house surgeon brings an intern to study a patient with a rare deformity. “Look at him!” Pilates would exclaim to the assistant, “That could have been a beautiful body, and look what he’s done to it! Like a birdcage that somebody trod on!”

Pilates had grown tubby with age, but he would never admit it; he still thought himself a magnificent figure of a man. “That’s not fat,”

he declared, punching himself in the stomach, “that’s good healthy meat!” He frankly lusted after some of his girl students. He used to make them lie back on an inclined board and climb on top of them, on the pretext that he was showing them an exercise. What he really was doing was rubbing off against them through his clothes; as was obvious from the violent jerking of his buttocks.1

Pilates was an excellent teacher, however, and Christopher learnt a lot from him, even though Christopher gave up going to the gym early in July.2 I remember only two small pearls of his wisdom. Once, a party of workmen were handling heavy metal objects on the roof of the building opposite. Pilates watched them and commented

disgustedly that their posture and movements were all wrong––if only these men knew how, they could transform their boring work into a scientific workout and build themselves marvellous physiques.

And once he told Christopher, “If you’ll just touch your toes one single time, every day of your life, you’ll be all right”––which made Christopher think of a saint begging some hopelessly worldly

1 Such behavior sounds scarcely credible, but I’m sure memory isn’t at fault here. Pilates was the sort of eccentric character who can get away with murder.

I dare say the girls he did this to were lovers or old friends, who were either excited or amused by him. The gym was often almost empty when Christopher was there, and perhaps Pilates knew instinctively that Christopher would be a suitable audience for his exhibitionism.

2 This may not have been due to Christopher’s laziness. It’s possible that the gym was closed during the summer.

[* 939 Eighth Avenue.]

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householder to please try to remember God for at least one moment during each day.

It was also on May 5 that Christopher saw Forster for the first time in New York. He came to the apartment with Bill Roerick, with whom he had become great friends during the war, while Roerick was in England as a G.I. Caskey cooked supper for them, and the next night he cooked supper for Forster again. The day after that, he drove Forster and Christopher down to Bryn Mawr, where Forster had to give a lecture. Thus Forster came under the spell of Caskey’s charm and efficiency as a nanny. He remained fond of Caskey for the rest of his life.

On May 8, Christopher started what he describes as: “The School of Tragedy. First draft of a novel.”1 This fragment––nearly twelve pages 1 I have discovered (September 1973), since writing the [above] paragraph, an entry in another diary notebook [6w × 81⁄8w, also containing diary “Holland 1935”], dated Good Friday, April 4, 1947. This begins by stating that Christopher has already worked out a draft of a novel called The School of Tragedy sometime during 1946, in Santa Monica. However, Christopher continues, this draft won’t do at all. Its central character is Paul (Denny Fouts?).

The anecdote is “too funny, too clever, too trivial for the subject matter.”

(I don’t know what this means, unless Christopher is referring to an idea he had of writing a story about Caroline Norment’s curious involvement with accidental fires. See the journals, March 1, 1942 [D 1, pp. 212–14].) Christopher goes on to describe a new story line for the novel, moving around the partners in three love affairs. Two of these couples survive in the published version of The World in the Evening––Stephen (called Charles in this notebook) and Gerda; Charles (called Stephen) and Bob (called Roy). The third couple was to have been Sarah (Caroline Norment) and Dr. Kurt Traube (Carl Furtmueller, on whom, in real life, Caroline had a violent crush, until he got engaged to and married one of the American Quaker helpers at the Haverford hostel––his own wife having died a few months earlier). This

“Sarah” would obviously have been very different from the later Sarah!

Stephen–Charles is actually working at the hostel. He has given up his life to social work after an unhappy marriage (to a character like Jane). He has a friendly sex relationship with Gerda, to get her through the period of anxiety and waiting until her husband escapes from Germany and rejoins her.

Stephen–Charles and Gerda then part as loving friends.

Charles–Stephen is a doctor who has a boyfriend, Bob–Roy, in the navy.

Bob–Roy is killed––he never appears “on stage.” Charles–Stephen joins the navy too. (Incidentally, it’s curious to note that Christopher was planning to make Bob–Roy an architect in civilian life––about fourteen months before Christopher met Jim Charlton (see page 159 [and note 1]). I suppose that, when Christopher chose that profession for Bob-Roy, he was thinking of Bob Stagg (see [page 123]). But, before he met Jim, he had never been interested in a young man as an architect. Sarah’s romance with Dr. Traube is the only one 122

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of a large (101⁄2w × 131⁄2w) thin notebook––consists of descriptions of the refugees at the Haverford hostel taken from the 1941–1942

journals and given fictitious names. Its title also comes from the journals. On June 24, 1942, Christopher records that the Schindlers left their room so untidy that Mr. [ Josef ] Stern remarked severely:

“Such people are not fit for the school of tragedy.” Christopher had been delighted by this phrase and had probably been intending to use it for a title, ever since he heard it.

This fragment is just flat-footed reporting and its attempts at humor strike a note of smug condescension; no wonder Christopher soon got bored with it. His second draft, begun on June 17, does at least contain a spark of possible interest; it is in the form of Stephen’s mental dialogue with Elizabeth during the Quaker meeting, in The World in the Evening. But this dialogue, unfortunately, is with the Narrator’s Better Self, or God; it must have made Christopher feel queasy, for he dropped it after two and a half pages. After this, he doesn’t seem to have done any more work on the novel for nearly two years.

These two fragments are written very neatly; they must be fair copies. I remember the little room at the back of the apartment where Christopher’s writing was done, and how he had to keep

wiping the side of his sweaty hand (the weather was hot and humid) to stop it from smearing dirt over the page. Dirt fell unceasingly all over everything, even when the windows were shut. Christopher hated having dirty hands when he was writing. He hated the heat, too. The filthy city with its noise and its horrible climate soon began to get on his nerves. He couldn’t settle down to his novel so he blamed his surroundings and the life he was leading. How could he work in this apartment? He couldn’t even create a literary nest for himself by having his books around him; when they arrived by boat from England, late in May, he had to store them in the cellar of the building because the bookshelves in the apartment were crammed with the Sterns’ books. And how could he work, he said, when he was surrounded by so many friends and going out to so many parties and drinking so much? Christopher often enjoyed seeing individuals with a conventional happy ending. They get married after Traube’s wife dies.

Frau Traube has some lingering disease. Charles–Stephen, who is her doctor, finishes her off and later admits to Stephen–Charles that he has done so.

Christopher made at least three more entries in this same diary notebook––including synopses, lists of characters and seating plans for the hostel dining room. The last dated entry is on June 9, 1947, so they overlap the entries in the large thin notebook.

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––parties he never liked unless they were sexy––drinking was his social anesthetic but hangovers were the destruction of his precious private mornings.

Within three or four weeks––at the very most––Christopher had made up his mind that he couldn’t, wouldn’t settle in New York.

His decision dismayed him, for it seemed to threaten his whole relationship with Caskey. Coming to New York had been chiefly Caskey’s idea. He was at home there, it suited him perfectly and its discomforts he took in his stride. To attack New York was to attack the values he had grown up with.

But Caskey, to his surprise and relief, took Christopher’s decision quite calmly; saying that he was beginning to feel much the same way. Since they were now planning to leave for South America at the end of the summer, they agreed to stay on at the Sterns’

apartment till then and put off discussing where they should live until they had returned from the South America trip, sometime in 1948.

Looking back, I doubt if Caskey was being quite sincere when he said he no longer liked New York. I think he said it to please Christopher. He certainly enjoyed himself there that summer––

much more than Christopher did.

I feel a strong disinclination to write about Christopher’s social life that summer. With a few exceptions, which will be dealt with

separately, it’s just a pattern of names with very few memories attached to them. Well, to be brief––

They saw something of Lincoln Kirstein and Auden, Berthold

Viertel, Paul Cadmus, Tony Bower and van Druten1––Christopher’s friends––but a good deal more of Ed Tauch, Jack Coble, Bob Stagg, Bernie Perlin, Horst, Ollie and Isa Jennings, Ben Baz and Bill Bailey––Caskey’s friends. This was because Caskey’s friends tended 1 On May 25, Christopher records a meeting with John van Druten’s boyfriend Walter Starkey, whom Christopher and Caskey had already met in January (see

[Starcke,] page 81). Starkey had played Thad Greelis in John’s The Mermaids Singing––which ran for only fifty-three performances and was nicknamed by Dodie Smith The Mermaids Sinking––in 1945. John once told Christopher that Starkey had caused him to break a previously unbroken professional rule of his––never to have an affair with one of his actors.

Walter’s family name was actually spelled Starcke. When he became an actor he changed it to Starkey but switched back to Starcke as the co-producer of I Am a Camera, perhaps because he wanted his acting career forgotten. However, John and Christopher went on using the spelling “Starkey” in their letters to each other, as a sort of nickname which interrelated their boyfriends: Starkey–

Caskey. They never wrote or said “Walter” or “Bill” to each other when referring to them.

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to be much more party minded than Christopher’s. Most of them were included in one of two groups, the Tauch group or the

Jennings group. Ed Tauch was an architect and he had a big house divided up into apartments which he leased to other architects, all friends of his and all gay. [. . .] Ed Tauch looked after his tenants like an uncle; he was the only one of these architects who knew how to fix the plumbing, gas, electric light and leaks in the roof. He was quiet, friendly and still good-looking. Earlier on, in his navy uniform, he had been a dreamboat to many. I think Caskey himself had been violently in love with him, but only briefly.

Ollie Jennings was very rich, good-natured, fat. He lived in a fine house at Sneden’s Landing (during the summer, anyhow). He had a divorced but friendly wife named Isa who lived in an even finer house, not far away. So both of them could offer cool luxurious out-of-town weekends, with lots to drink. Ollie’s steady (to use the most unsuitable word possible) was Ben Baz [brother of Emilio, the painter]. Ben was small, red headed, not particularly Mexican looking, extremely lively [. . .]; a commercial artist by profession, quite a successful one. According to Caskey, Ben kept falling in love with people, coming to Ollie and telling him they must part, and then getting tired of that particular person and deciding to stay with Ollie.

Ollie took all this in his stride and continued to love Ben––

which moved Caskey to describe Ollie as “a kind of homosexual saint.” Ben’s latest love was a young man [. . .] about whom I remember only that he was good-humored, adequately attractive but beginning to get plump. Ben’s affair with [the young man] hadn’t split up the household, however. [The young man] came down there to stay, nearly every weekend. He must have been exceptionally tactful.

It was during a weekend at Ollie Jennings’s house that Christopher and Caskey went to have supper with the painter Matta and his wife.

The evening was made memorable by one of Caskey’s outbursts.

Matta, thinking no doubt that he was thus putting Christopher and Caskey at their ease, made some casual reference to the fact that he, too, had occasionally had sex with men. This enraged Caskey, who yelled, “I suppose you think there’s nothing more to homosexuality than just cocksucking?” The Mattas were scared and humiliated; they tried to placate him. This happened on May 17.

On May 27, Christopher got two paintings by Edward Burra on

approval from the British-American Art Center. They were in the same frame, back to back with glass on both sides, so that you could display them in turns. One was a still life of vegetables and/or fruit with (I think) some landscape in the background. The other I can ¾ 1947 ¾

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scarcely remember. I believe it included some of Burra’s mysterious figures with masked or hidden faces. Christopher and Caskey never made up their minds to buy this and it finally went back to the gallery. They did buy a small painting of carnival figures by Obin, the Haitian artist. Selden Rodman, who had brought back a lot of pictures from Haiti, sold it to them. I forget the price, but it was stiff.

On June 15, Christopher went to a Quaker meeting––perhaps the life he was leading gave him an appetite for it, as a contrast. He met Caroline Norment there. I wish I knew what Caroline’s impressions were of this 1947 Christopher. Did she find him as much changed as he felt himself to be from the Christopher of the Haverford hostel?

They had lunch together a few days later and worked hard at being friendly, no doubt. And that was the end of it.

On July 3, Christopher and Caskey went to stay with Horst, at his house in the country (I forget where). Horst’s friend, Jamie Caffery, was a longtime friend of Caskey’s; he had a queer uncle who then was or had recently been the U.S. Ambassador to France. Christopher liked Horst; he was handsome, well preserved, good-humored and good mannered. He had some thyroid pills which made you lose

several pounds overnight; no doubt they were terribly bad for you.

On July 11, Christopher and Caskey set out by car to visit Truman Capote. They drove to New London (which strongly reminded

Christopher of the industrial architecture of Stockport and

Manchester) and spent the night there. The next night they spent at New Bedford. Next day, they took the steamer across to Nantucket.

Truman was staying with his friend Newton Arvin in a small

house in the village of Siasconset. When Truman, in New York, had referred to “my friend,” Christopher and Caskey had pictured some mighty and potent brute as being the most likely kind of mate for him to have chosen. They were therefore surprised to find that Arvin was an intelligent and sensitive college professor, quite nice looking but definitely middle-aged. Arvin welcomed them hospitably and was no doubt pleased to see them, but he didn’t sparkle, didn’t get drunk, didn’t want to go to parties. When they went out visiting, he stayed home and read. Maybe this homebody character was part of what Truman, the gadabout, wanted in a friend; maybe he needed someone to come back to. ( Jack Dunphy, although quite unlike Arvin physically, also avoids party going.) As for the difference in Truman’s and Arvin’s ages, that apparently appealed to Truman.

When he flirted with Christopher, and he did so constantly, he would say, “You’re going to be awfully attractive when you’re a bit older––another five years, and you watch out!”

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As a host, Truman was like a masterful child leading a gang of children; he knew what he wanted, he was determined to enjoy

himself, and he took it for granted that the rest of them would follow him. He never stopped to worry about his guests and whether they were enjoying themselves. And indeed it wasn’t necessary. Nearly always, Truman’s enjoyment swept them along.

Truman leading the outdoor life of Nantucket seemed quite

different from the indoor exotic Truman whom Christopher had

met in New York. Without his elegant freaky town clothes he

looked much less odd and much more robust. He had a squat, sturdy body, golden brown and baby smooth, with surprisingly strong arms and legs.1 He was a powerful swimmer, and he liked cycling and horseback riding.

Several people Truman knew were staying at a house not far away

––it was called Hagedorn House, I think. The host of this house party was Leo Lerman, the magazine editor, an almost classically Jewish Jew, bald, bearded, sly eyed, somewhat rabbinical in his manner, full of hostile mocking flattery, aggressive humility, shrewd-ness, rudeness, taste, vulgarity, wit and fun. He courted Christopher and charmed him, at first; Christopher felt at ease with his shamelessness. (Later they were to quarrel many times and never quite make it up.)

The other people living in the house were (as far as I can deduce from the day-to-day diary) Andrew Lyndon, Harold Halma,

Helmuth Roder and Fritz Mosel.2 I am pretty sure that there were at least a couple of dozen neighborhood gays who were on call when they entertained.

1 While writing this ( July 26, 1972) I heard John Huston in a TV interview say that he’d seen Truman beat Humphrey Bogart at arm wrestling, when they were working on Beat the Devil. Huston described Truman as “a power-house.”

2 I don’t remember anything about the doings of Helmuth (Hellmuth?) and Fritz during this visit. They are mentioned in the 1939 journal, when they were in Hollywood. Helmuth changed his name from Schroeder to Roder after coming to the U.S. Christopher had had a brief affair with him in the old Berlin days––succeeding Stephen Spender, with whom Helmuth had had a much longer affair which ended badly but at least inspired Stephen’s story “The Burning Cactus” and, I believe, his poems beginning “After success, your little afternoon success,” and “Alas, when he laughs, it is not he / But a shopkeeper, who scrapes his hands and bows.” [Spender added a title, “Helmut,” when he later reprinted this early poem; but in letters to Schroeder he spelled the name

“Hellmut.”] Now I come to think of it, I’m nearly certain that the episode in The World in the Evening, when Mariano Galdós says to Elizabeth, “Bleiben Sie liegen,” is based on the actual first meeting of Christopher and Helmuth. (See part two, chapter four.)

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Andrew Lyndon was a longtime intimate friend of Truman’s.

They were both from the South; Andrew’s hometown was Macon,

Georgia. He was slim, soft-spoken, brown eyed, attractively monkey faced, capable of bitchery and probably of cruelty; quite a southern belle. Harold Halma was good looking and well built and much

more masculine; a weaker, nicer character. He was a photographer.

Andrew worked in a bookshop. They had an apartment in New

York. I don’t remember how long they had been living together, but their affair was already on the rocks––that is to say, Harold was still very much in love with Andrew but Andrew had lost interest.

Caskey and Christopher saw Leo Lerman and his guests every day (it appears) during their stay in Nantucket. They had meals together or cycled or went swimming. (The current that swept around that part of the island made swimming exciting but safe; you could float and let yourself be carried by it, very fast and as far as you liked, without ever being taken out of your depth.)

Almost instantly, Andrew Lyndon started to get a crush on

Christopher. Christopher, as usual, was flattered and didn’t discourage him. Truman encouraged Andrew strongly, out of mischief. Leo was voyeuristically entertained. Harold was jealous. Caskey wasn’t; he didn’t even resent Truman’s effort to promote the affair––knowing, no doubt, that Christopher wasn’t serious. And indeed nothing much happened between Christopher and Andrew––there was so

little opportunity for them to be alone together, even for a minute.

One afternoon, Truman, Andrew and Christopher went swimming

in a lagoon, where boats were moored. Andrew, maybe hoping to start something, stripped off his trunks and put them on the deck of one of the boats. Truman promptly grabbed them and swam away

––but not far enough to allow Andrew and Christopher any privacy.

Only on the last night, when Leo gave a party and the lights were turned out so they could play hide-and-seek, did Andrew and

Christopher manage to kiss and grope each other in the dark, but even this was quickly interrupted by Harold.

Next day, July 20, Caskey and Christopher returned by steamer to New Bedford, where they had left their car, and started for Cape Cod. They arrived at Provincetown on July 21.

Paul Cadmus and his current boyfriend George Tooker, Jared

French and his wife were staying at Provincetown for the

summer. So were Don Windham and Sandy Campbell. Caskey and

Christopher saw all of them but not, I think, together. Maybe Paul wasn’t on speaking terms with Don and Sandy––for Sandy had been Paul’s lover and Don had taken Sandy away from him.

All I remember of this visit are two days on the beach with Paul, 128

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Jared and George. It was a beautiful beach and quite secluded; they all swam and lay in the sun bare-ass––until suddenly a sightseeing jeep full of women would come plunging out of the woods, so fast that there was no time to cover yourself with a towel, even; all you could do was roll over on your belly and let them try not to stare at your buttocks. Another, more constant threat on this beach were the stinging flies. The New Yorkers took these as a matter of course, but they made Christopher and Caskey realize how lucky bathers are in California the (almost) Bugless.

Jared French took a lot of nude photographs of Caskey and

Christopher. When these were printed, both of them looked ridiculous––partly because their worst physical features (the bandiness of Caskey’s legs, the narrowness of Christopher’s shoulders) had been unintentionally emphasized; partly because they had been so stupidly posed. Considering that Jared was an artist, he was a surprisingly poor photographer. Or was he merely inhibited by a private misgiving?

Having suggested taking these pictures, did he suddenly feel that he didn’t really know Caskey and Christopher well enough? This would explain an oddness which was apparent in nearly every photograph; the distance between the two figures was wrong. As a pair of lovers, Christopher and Caskey should have been closer together; as non-lovers who happened to be stark naked, they were too close. And what were they up to, why had they taken off their clothes, if not to fuck? They seemed hardly conscious of each other’s presence, dully awaiting some cue or command to move, like animals whose actions are discontinuous and unrelated. The funniest picture showed

Caskey halfway up a ladder; he looked as if he had already forgotten why he had started to climb it. Christopher stood below, ignoring him, with an expression of irritable uneasiness. . . .[*] Jared apologized for the pictures and blamed the camera. Christopher and Caskey called them “hippos mating.”1

On July 26, Caskey and Christopher drove back to New York.

1 The vicious tone of this whole paragraph suggests that there is still some soreness in this twenty-five-year-old wound to Christopher’s vanity! But, aside from this, I now see that my condemnation of Jared French as a photographer is unfair by any standards. It wasn’t incompetence that made Jared pose Christopher and Caskey in the way he did. He must have known exactly what he was doing, for the figures in many of his paintings of that period are posed in just the same style.

[* This may be the photograph which appears in David Leddick, Naked Men: Pioneering Male Nudes 1935‒1955 (Universe Publishing, 1997), p. 84, and which belonged to Paul Cadmus and John Andersson. Isherwood destroyed his own copies of French’s photographs in 1957 or 1958.]

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On July 30, Caskey and Christopher had lunch with Anne, one of Caskey’s two sisters. I can’t now remember if this was the sister he disliked less or more than the other; he was basically hostile to both of them. I suppose Caskey had to entertain Anne as long as she was visiting New York; this would explain why he didn’t accompany Christopher and Lincoln Kirstein on a visit to Auden and Chester

[Kallman] on Fire Island that day.

Auden had taken a house in Cherry Grove for the summer, and

Christopher had already been to see him there twice, with Caskey, during June. The house, like most of the others in Cherry Grove, was just a wooden shack. Its window screens were rusted by the sea air, and, since Auden and Chester were the housekeepers, flies buzzed over unwashed dishes, uncollected garbage, unmade beds with dirty sheets and a vast litter of books and papers. Neither of them was at all interested in the ocean or the beach as such. Auden spent most of his time indoors, Chester went out chiefly to cruise the population, which was wild and barred no holds. The one little hotel was jumping. Every time the ferry boat crossed the sound from the mainland to the island, a big crowd of residents would be awaiting it, on the lookout for new faces. Guitars twanged, wolf whistles and gay repartee were exchanged. The passengers were eager for the adventures ahead; they stared boldly at strangers who had taken their fancy. This was Watteau’s Cythera brought up to date—only it was an arrival at, not an “Embarkation for.” At night, the noise from the bar could be heard all over the colony, and couples stumbled out of it and threw themselves down to screw on the sand, scarcely beyond the range of the house lights. No doubt the minority of elderly square homeowners objected strongly to all this, but at that time the only curb on sex activity was an ordinance which put the sand dunes out of bounds––not for moral reasons but because, in the hurricane of 1938(?),[*] the dunes had been the only remaining refuge when huge waves washed over that part of the island; if the dunes were to get trampled flat by would-be fuckers and another hurricane were to hit Cherry Grove, all its inhabitants might be drowned.

Lincoln and Christopher spent the night at Auden’s house. They had to share a bed. Lincoln, for the first and only time, made a pass at Christopher––a half-joking, tentative pass, which Christopher jokingly declined. Christopher was ready to have sex with most males within reasonable age limits, and he certainly didn’t find

[* In late September 1938, the worst storm to hit the north-eastern states in over a century left standing only fifteen or twenty of about two hundred summer houses on Fire Island; there were many deaths.]

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Lincoln all that unattractive. But he hated mixing sex with

giggles.

On August 3, Caskey and Christopher were at Isa Jennings’s

country house, to swim and have supper. Garbo was there, with George Schlee. Noël Coward arrived late and made a big theatrical entrance. Christopher had always been rather prejudiced against Coward––whom I don’t think he had ever properly met. He

watched sourly as Coward moved with the modest graciousness of royalty among the guests. Garbo got a speech of homage which

Christopher thought disgustingly phony and even the lesser lights were presented with a compliment apiece; Christopher had to admit that Coward was inventive, he found a different way of flattering each of them, and each one beamed. Just before Christopher’s turn came, he said to himself, “I wonder what kind of shit he’ll try on me.” They were introduced. Coward reacted strongly. Then, in

an almost loverlike tone of shyness, he told Christopher, “It’s extraordinary––you look so much like one of the great heroes of my youth, Lawrence of Arabia!”

Christopher often told this story later, mockingly. Yet that day was the beginning of a permanent change in his attitude to Coward.

Subconsciously, Christopher started finding reasons to admire him and think him sympathetic. Which wasn’t difficult, for there are many. Christopher, that shameless flatterer, had had his ass tickled by a master, and had loved it. Characteristically, he didn’t bother to remember what compliment (if any) Coward had paid Caskey.

Caskey and Christopher were given a ride back into town by

Garbo and George Schlee. (Caskey and Christopher had come out to the country by train because their car was being repaired.) Christopher was fairly drunk and took this opportunity of attacking Garbo. He told her that her custom of addressing him as “Mr.

Isherwood”––and of refusing in general to address her old acquaintances by their first names––was sheer affectation and arrogance and egomania. Did she actually think that he, Christopher, had to be kept at a distance, lest he should take some advantage of her? Was she really so paranoid? Hadn’t it ever entered her head that there were some people on this earth who didn’t give a damn about her fame or her money or even her appearance––who simply wanted to be

friendly?

I don’t remember that Garbo said anything in reply to this. She was sitting in the front seat with Schlee––a position which made it easy to ignore a backseat scolder. Christopher probably continued until he ran out of breath. Later––no doubt because he felt he had made an ass of himself––he turned his attention to the ever-silent ¾ 1947 ¾

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self-effacing Schlee and began to praise Schlee’s driving in extravagant terms. (Was this done partly to bitch Caskey, whose speeding terrified Christopher whenever Christopher was sober?) Oddly

enough, in retrospect, it is Christopher’s corny compliments to Schlee that I feel ashamed of, not his rebukes to Garbo.

After that evening, Christopher didn’t see Garbo for nearly a year.

But she hadn’t forgotten what he had said to her. When they next met, at Salka Viertel’s house in California, in July 1948, she gaily told Salka, “Mr. Isherwood was very cruel to me, when we were in New York”; as she said this, she arched her eyebrows in an expression of comic anguish. Obviously, she didn’t bear him any grudge. She could afford not to, for she was invulnerable, as far as he was concerned. Nothing he could possibly say could get under her skin. He, who had always found her absurd, now had to realize that she found him even absurder. Indeed, she made this quite clear at a dinner party at Salka’s about two months later, when she suddenly announced to the guests, “Mr. Isherwood has such beautiful legs!” This tribute from a senior love goddess to a queer in his mid-forties seemed farcical.

Everybody laughed. Christopher laughed with them, but only he would savor Garbo’s compliment as a subtly malicious echo of Noël Coward’s. He often quoted this one too, and in the same tone of mockery––nevertheless, his ass had once again been deliciously tickled.

On August 4, Christopher had lunch with Andrew Lyndon and

Harold Halma at their apartment. Harold had to go out immediately afterwards, leaving Christopher and Andrew alone together. It was very hot. After several drinks, Andrew asked Christopher if he’d like to take a shower. This was merely a cue for both of them to undress.

Christopher fucked Andrew. When it was over and they were lying naked on the bed, Harold arrived back unexpectedly early, his arms full of groceries. Maybe he had hoped to catch them, for he didn’t seem surprised. “Oh, excuse me,” he said, put down his shopping bags in the kitchen and left the apartment again. Andrew wasn’t at all dismayed. “I’m awfully glad we did that,” he told Christopher––who got the impression that Andrew’s seduction of him was largely a declaration of independence, addressed to Harold. Christopher put his clothes on quickly and left before Harold returned. He didn’t feel particularly guilty but he did feel embarrassed. To get caught like that––even if Harold had planned it––was humiliating and lacking in style. And Christopher liked Harold and didn’t want to cause him pain. So, three days later––having made sure that Andrew would be away for the evening––Christopher phoned Harold and asked if he might come around. Harold may have felt hostile but he agreed.

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They drank together and the tension eased. Christopher began

making it clear that Harold attracted him. Although Christopher had an ulterior motive, he was quite sincere in this. The very fact that he had fucked Andrew made him hot to be fucked by Harold; he

pictured himself submitting to it as a brutal but exciting punishment, inflicted by the injured party, this muscular sexy young man. In fucking Christopher, Harold would ejaculate the seed of jealousy out of himself and he would no longer feel excluded from the triangle.

. . . However, when Christopher finally asked Harold straight out to come to bed with him and Harold refused, Christopher wasn’t greatly disappointed––for his mission was accomplished anyway; to have made the pass was as good as having let himself be screwed––he had effectively disqualified himself as a sexual menace in Harold’s eyes.

There was a further step to be taken, however. Christopher feared that Harold might tell Andrew about Christopher’s pass, to punish him by making him feel that he had been just another in a long line of Christopher’s lays, chosen merely because he had been easy to get. Therefore Christopher had to talk to Andrew as soon as possible––preferably before Harold told him––and explain why he had made the pass at Harold. In fact, it was several days before Christopher got this opportunity. When he did, he was relieved to find that Harold hadn’t told Andrew anything. Christopher’s fears had been founded on a knowledge of his own character––“man

imputes himself,” as Gerald Heard was so fond of saying. But Harold wasn’t Christopher. If Harold had been in Christopher’s place, I’m sure he would never have boasted to his friends, as Christopher later did, about the affair and the tact he himself had shown in handling it.

At this time, Lincoln Kirstein was going through a phase of tremendous enthusiasm for the sculpture of Elie Nadelman. On August 5, he drove Christopher and Caskey out to a house in the Bronx (maybe it was Nadelman’s former home) in which a lot of the work was stored. Lincoln had filled the living room with a selection of the pieces and he came every day to dust and rearrange them, like a priest taking care of a shrine. Indeed, this art cult was Lincoln’s religion. And how beautiful and noble his half-crazy passionate devotion seemed, compared to the prim knowingness of the ordinary

“art lover.”

Next day, Christopher and Caskey were initiated into another

of the mysteries of Lincoln’s religion. He took them down to

Washington to see a collection of paintings which had been brought over from Germany. I’m vague about the details, but I think that the ¾ 1947 ¾

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paintings had been hidden in a salt mine for safety during the war and that Lincoln himself had been partly responsible for discovering their hiding place. I assume that the paintings had been appropriated from their original owners by high-ranking Nazis like Göring, so that they were now technically stolen property; for Lincoln explained that their presence in the United States had to be kept secret lest the new German government should protest and demand their instant return.

The room in which they were hung was guarded by military police, and Lincoln, Caskey and Christopher were escorted into it by an official of the State Department. I remember the thrill of this contact with the world of Classified Material––but not, unfortunately, anything about the paintings themselves, except that they were all by famous masters. Caskey and Christopher were proud of this privilege Lincoln had obtained for them. They bragged about it to their friends and were therefore disgusted when the State Department changed its policy soon afterward for some unknown reason and allowed the paintings to be taken on tour around the U.S. and exhibited publicly in various cities, before being sent back to Germany.

Christopher and Caskey were now beginning to get shots and

visas, in preparation for their South American journey. Their last month in New York became increasingly social. At Ollie Jennings’s house, Ben Baz had been joined by his brother Emilio and by Luis Creixell from Mexico [. . .]. Then Berthold Szczesny arrived from Buenos Aires with Tota Cuevas de Vera.1 Then Stephen Spender 1 Berthold Szczesny and Tota appear in the last two chapters of The Condor and the Cows, but discretion forced me to leave out some details about Berthold’s background and his relationship to Tota.

Christopher first met Berthold when he [went] to Berlin to visit Auden, in March 1929. Berthold was then a hustler in a boy bar called The Cosy Corner which Auden frequented because it was near to where he was living in the Hallesches Tor district. Christopher fell for Berthold instantly––but not because he found Berthold so very attractive sexually. (In bed they were never quite compatible; Christopher felt that Berthold didn’t really enjoy it and this inhibited him. I think they only sucked cock and belly rubbed.) Berthold’s undoubtedly strong attraction––for both men and women––was that he was so vividly, charmingly, absurdly conscious of his own myth. (In The Condor and the Cows, I call it “The Szczesny Saga.”) He was thus able to make his lovers see him as he saw himself––as the romantic, homeless, penniless wanderer, the Lost Boy who roams the earth, pushed hither and thither by fate, dreamily passive yet able and willing to take care of himself when in physical danger; a boxer, a cowboy, an able-bodied seaman who nevertheless seems poignantly vulnerable and whom everyone is eager to help and protect.

When Christopher returned to Germany a few months later, to stay with Auden at Rotehütte, a village in the Harz Mountains, he had arranged 134

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appeared; he had been teaching at Sarah Lawrence. Then Chris

Wood paid a visit from California. Through him, Caskey and

Christopher met John Gielgud. Through Stephen, they met Frank beforehand that Berthold should join them there. But Berthold didn’t show up. So Christopher made a flying visit to Berlin and found out from the owner of The Cosy Corner that Berthold was wanted by the police for robbery.

Christopher returned to Rotehütte, bringing with him a boy he had hastily selected as a substitute sex mate. (I think he must have been helped in this transaction by Francis Turville-Petre (“Ambrose” [in Down There on a Visit]), for at that time he spoke very little German.) The next day, the police appeared at the village inn where Auden, Auden’s boyfriend, Christopher and the boy he had brought from Berlin were staying. The police were looking for Berthold––no doubt they had been tipped off by someone at The Cosy Corner that they might find him with Christopher. Not wanting to return empty-handed, they cross-examined the two young Germans and thus found out that Auden’s friend Otto [Küsel]––a charming boy who used to wrestle naked with him in a field near the village, to the amusement of the villagers [and about whom Auden wrote two poems, “Upon this line between adventure” and

“Sentries against inner and outer”]––was an escapee from reform school. So they took him away with them, under arrest; which caused Christopher’s boy to decide that Christopher was dangerous to know and that he wanted to be sent back to Berlin immediately.

This was Christopher’s first experience as an honorary member of the criminal class. And it was made more thrilling by a coincidence: while the police were still in the house, the mailman arrived with a letter from Berthold.

Christopher read it under their very noses. Berthold wrote that he was in Amsterdam and hoped that Christopher would send him some money. Being now eager to play a part in The Szczesny Saga, Christopher proposed to Auden that they should go at once to Amsterdam. Auden agreed, though he wasn’t feeling very kindly toward Berthold, who had been responsible for disrupting his life at Rotehütte and getting his boyfriend into trouble. (Nevertheless, Auden made his own important contribution to The Szczesny Saga; his poem

“Before this loved one . . .” refers to Berthold.)

Auden and Christopher got to Amsterdam within a day or two, and had the good luck to run into Berthold at once, right outside the post office at which Christopher had just left a letter poste restante, announcing their arrival. They could spend only a couple of days together because Berthold had no permit to stay in Holland. (Boys would say, “My papers aren’t in order,” and, “My stomach isn’t in order,” in the same plaintive tone, as if both were ailments!) So, after a real romantic German farewell (Berthold was wonderful at them) he shipped out. This was probably his first voyage to South America. Many years later, he told Christopher that he had once jumped ship at Punta Arenas, earned money there as a boxer and then made his way across the frontier and up north to Buenos Aires. Perhaps that was when he met Tota and became her lover. She was a millionairess and a countess and old enough to be his grandmother but as human beings they weren’t mismatched, for Tota was as sweetly silly as he was and her silliness made her seem sometimes almost girlish. As for ¾ 1947 ¾

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and Nan Taylor. Through Berthold, they met Victoria Ocampo.

And, as if all this wasn’t enough, Bill and Peggy Kiskadden happened to be attending some medical conference in New York, and Caskey’s mother came up from Lexington, Kentucky, to help him and

Christopher get packed. The day-to-day diary mentions several other encounters––notably with Mina Curtiss (Lincoln Kirstein’s sister), Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jean Stafford, Harold Taylor (the president of Sarah Lawrence), Jinx Falkenburg, John Hersey, the Countess Waldeck, John Horne Burns.

Christopher’s first impression of John Gielgud (September 10) wasn’t favourable. Gielgud talked bitchily about Dodie Smith––or rather about Alec Beesley, whom he disliked. This put Christopher off him––which Christopher evidently showed, for Gielgud said at a later meeting (in 1948 in London) that he had been aware he had offended Christopher and that he was sorry for it. Thus they became Berthold, it was part of his vanity as a stud to be able to enjoy sex at both age limits. “With a woman,” he once told Christopher, “I get a kick out of being the first one, or the last.”

(Aside from Berthold, only one memory of this visit to Amsterdam remains.

Auden and Christopher toured the harbor and the canals in a launch. At the end of the tour, the passengers were invited to write their impressions in a guestbook. Auden wrote two lines from Ilya Ehrenburg: “Read about us and marvel! / You did not live in our time––be sorry!”)

After this, Christopher didn’t see Berthold again for at least two or three years. At their reunion, Christopher found it odd to be able to chatter away with him in German. Christopher felt at ease with him now as with an old friend, but he had to admit to himself that the removal of the language barrier had robbed Berthold of much of his romantic mystery.

Then, in the mid-thirties, after the Nazis had come into power, Berthold started appearing briefly in London. He was working on a freighter (either Dutch or Belgian) which plied between London and some North Sea ports.

Berthold told Christopher and his friends that they were smuggling refugees into England. They brought only one refugee at a time, and they docked far up the river at a dock which wasn’t carefully patrolled. In the evening, after the customs officials had been on board, Berthold and the captain would get their refugee out of his hiding place and walk him on shore and away from the dock as though he were another member of the crew, coming with them to take a look at the town. After that, he was on his own. Sooner or later, I suppose, he would have to give himself up to the British authorities and appeal for asylum.

Sometime in 1939 or 1940 Berthold managed to return to Argentina. And then Tota and [a male friend] (another of his lovers) set him up as part owner of a factory. Shortly after Christopher and Caskey visited Buenos Aires in March 1948, Berthold got married to an Argentine girl of good family with some money of her own––thus trading in his own myth in exchange for a future of middle-class respectability.

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friends. Perhaps Christopher had been too hard on Gielgud to begin with. But it is still my opinion that Gielgud got nicer as a

person––and better as an actor––as he grew older.

Frank Taylor was a publisher––I think, at that time, he was still with Random House. Nan was his wife. I won’t describe them yet because Christopher didn’t really get to know them until they came out and lived in Hollywood in 1948 and after. This year, Christopher met Frank only twice. I seem to remember that he had a violent crush on Stephen and that they’d been to bed together.

Victoria Ocampo appears in The Condor and the Cows. She is

described fairly, I think, though a bit too politely. What a bullying old cunt!

It was probably in the latter part of August that Berthold Szczesny told Christopher the ghost story which is printed in The Condor and the Cows. “Told” isn’t the right word; it would be more accurate to say that Berthold performed it. He hammered on the door of the apartment early one morning, staggered in and dropped limply into a chair, muttering that he had been lying awake all night, too scared to be able to sleep. Then he let Christopher draw the story out of him, bit by bit––how he had walked into the El Morocco and seen a young man who looked vaguely familiar, a young man in a dark blue suit, rather pale-faced but quite ordinary; how this young man had come over to him from the bar and Berthold had said, “I believe we know each other,” and the young man had answered, “Certainly we know each other; you buried me in Africa”; how Berthold had recognized him then, as a shipmate on a German boat, who had died of malaria and been buried on the bank of the Gambia River; how the young man had added, “But don’t tell anyone, because I’m here on leave,” and how Berthold had felt as cold as ice all over and had run out into the street.

Berthold certainly did look badly shaken that morning, but he kept smiling apologetically, as much as to say that he didn’t expect Christopher to believe all this. The smiles were curiously convincing.

He then told Christopher that he had made up his mind to go back to the El Morocco that evening. “If he’s there I’ll walk right up to him and hit him as hard as I can, right in the face. And if he’s got a face––if there’s anything there, you understand––then I’ll pay damages, a hundred dollars, five hundred dollars, a thousand dollars

––what does it matter? Only I have to hit him––to be sure . . .”

The next day, Berthold reported what had happened: “I go back to El Morocco and there he is. Just the same as last night, sitting at the bar. And so I come up, all ready to hit him. I think he doesn’t see me. But just when I get quite close, he turns around and I see that ¾ 1947 ¾

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he’s very angry. He says: ‘I told you already––I’m on leave. I don’t wish to be disturbed.’ He says that very quietly, and he sits there looking at me. I can’t do anything. My arms are weak, just like a baby’s. I turn around and go out of the bar . . .”

After this, Berthold told Christopher that he had visited El

Morocco several more times but that the young man was never

there.

I’m not sure if Christopher ever fully believed the story. I think he did almost––though he knew that Berthold could lie with great inventiveness. (The story as Christopher tells it in The Condor and the Cows is itself faked, up to a point––that is to say, it is presented as a single unbroken narrative, because Christopher couldn’t be bothered to explain to the reader that he had heard it in installments.) Some years later, Christopher learned from Maria Rosa Oliver that

Berthold had confessed to her he had made up the whole thing.

Christopher was hugely impressed by all the trouble Berthold had taken; his playacting seemed to show a genuinely disinterested wish to entertain, which is the mark of a real artist.

I don’t remember anything worth recording about Cartier-

Bresson, Jean Stafford, Harold Taylor, Jinx Falkenburg (whose guest Christopher was on her radio interview show) or John Hersey. The Countess Waldeck was a friend of Jimmy and Tania Stern, an

amusing vivacious attractive little woman with (I suspect) a deeply shady side to her character, a sort of female Mr. Norris. I think she was some variety of Balkan Jewess but she had been tolerated by the Nazis and even entertained by a few of them. Under the name of R. G. Waldeck she had written an extremely perceptive book of memoirs centering around a hotel in Bucharest (?) called Athene Palace.[*] John Horne Burns was then quite famous as the author of The Gallery, a book which Lincoln Kirstein admired extravagantly and even Hemingway had a kind word for. A faint darkish cloud hangs over the memory of this meeting; my impression is that Burns got drunk and became hostile and tiresome. But he and “Rosie”

Waldeck remain in my mind as two people I wish Christopher had gotten to know better.

[* Athene Palace Bucharest: Hitler’s “New Order” Comes to Rumania (1943); Waldeck was a Rumanian journalist settled in the USA from the end of the 1920s. Returning to Europe in wartime, she found that in Bucharest she could intimately observe the Nazi style of establishing power. As she writes in Athene Palace, “she had nothing to gain and everything to lose from the victory of an order of which anti-semitism was an integral part” (p. 6). She felt semi-protected by her status as a U.S. citizen, and reveals that she was sometimes duplicitous in order to achieve friendships useful to her journalism. She gave her book an epigraph from Stendhal to protest her underlying integrity: “Shall I be accused of approving these things because I describe them?”]

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Caskey and Christopher went out to the beach fairly often, during this period. There was Long Beach,[*] where they met up with Ollie Jennings and Ben and Emilio Baz. There was a beach I don’t

remember the name of, where people fucked quite openly in the dunes––Christopher once had to step over a couple who were doing it right across the footpath. (You could go to this beach by bus; the driver, when he stopped at the entrance to it, would shout: “All out for Fairyland!”) And there was Fire Island––a long drive plus a ferry crossing but you could do the round-trip in one day.

One of their visits to Fire Island was on Christopher’s birthday.

Christopher had got drunk the night before and passed out. He woke to find himself in the car, with Caskey driving. They were already a good distance out of New York. “The last thing you said last night was, ‘Take me to Wystan,’ ” Caskey told him. “So I’m taking you.”

Christopher was delighted. This was Caskey in his aspect as the perfect nanny.

There is an unusually vivid memory attached to one of the Fire Island visits, probably this one. In the late afternoon, as the time approached for them to leave, a storm was building up. After a heavy stillness, the first gusts of wind began whipping the dry grass of the dunes. These gusts were uncannily strong, they made the grass hiss with a sound exactly like drops of water falling on a very hot skillet.

Christopher remembered the stories he had heard about the

hurricane and was apprehensive. Auden, calm as usual in this sort of situation, insisted on playing a literary guessing game; one of them had to quote a line of verse or prose and the other had to identify its author. I remember that Christopher surprised himself by doing well at this, although his attention was elsewhere. I don’t think there was a storm after all, certainly not a big one.

Their final visit to Fire Island was on September 13. They went down there for one day only, with Lincoln Kirstein, Stephen

Spender, Chris Wood and Berthold Szczesny. Caskey took a lot of pictures of this historic occasion, including a trio of Wystan, Stephen and Christopher posed just as they had posed for Stephen’s brother Humphrey on Rügen Island, fifteen or sixteen years earlier.[†] This was probably the first time that Wystan had seen Berthold since the Berlin days. It was certainly the first time that Wystan, Stephen and Christopher had all been together since 1939. I remember that Chester took a great fancy to Berthold. They were able to communicate fairly well, because Chester could speak Yiddish.

[* On Long Island.]

[† In the Baltic Sea, during the first two weeks of July 1931.]

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At least two of the group photographs shot that day cannot be Caskey’s, since he is in them; they may have been taken by Stephen, since he isn’t. This would explain the ridiculous and yet (I am sure) characteristic pose in which the photographer has caught Christopher; Stephen’s malicious eye would have been quick to notice and take advantage of it. Eight of the eleven people in the picture are lying on the sand, all fairly relaxed. Caskey stands behind them, smiling and striking a campy attitude. Next to him stands Chris Wood, looking down, lost in his own thoughts. Next to Chris stands Christopher. His legs are apart, his fists are clenched, his plump little figure is rigid with self-assertion. He looks at the others as if he were demanding their submission to his will, but in fact no one is paying him the smallest attention.

When one glimpses Christopher off guard like this, it seems

astonishing that more people didn’t find him totally absurd. I do remember that there was a boy––a friend of Ed Tauch’s––who burst out laughing at Christopher when they were on the beach together.

Christopher asked him what he was laughing about and he answered,

“It’s the way you keep strutting!”

On September 16, Caskey’s mother had supper with Caskey and

Christopher. (I’m not sure if this was their first meeting; it’s possible that Mrs. Caskey had been out to California to visit them in 1946, but I don’t think so.) Catherine Caskey was very like her son Bill in certain ways; she was pretty, flirtatious, campy and quite unshock-able, and she had the South in her mouth. She was also a nonstop, indiscreet irrelevant talker, and this embarrassed Bill and drove him into rages. Catherine never thought about what she was saying and she would often repeat reactionary ideas she had picked up in Kentucky and didn’t even believe in. For example, she once told Bill that one of his sisters was refusing to have sex with her husband because she didn’t want any more children and wouldn’t use contra-ceptives. “Poor little Catholic wife!” Catherine kept repeating fatuously, until Bill hit the ceiling. That Catherine was an utter hypocrite as far as Catholic morality was concerned was proved by her acceptance of Bill’s relationship with Christopher. She and Christopher got along together splendidly.

On September 19, Christopher and Caskey sailed for South

America on the Santa Paula, of the Grace Line. Mrs. Caskey,

Matthew Huxley, Chris Wood, Tony Bower, Berthold Szczesny and Paul Cadmus came to see them off. I believe it was Tony Bower who brought them a big bottle of champagne. For some reason, they didn’t get around to drinking it, and, after a couple of days, when the 140

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ship was rolling, the bottle exploded like a bomb. Christopher narrowly escaped getting his face cut.

Caskey and Christopher had had a heavy night of drinking before they embarked, and had left the apartment looking as if it had been searched by the police. Mrs. Caskey spent a couple of days tidying up after them and packing up the things they hadn’t wanted to take with them on their journey.1

■

1 The day-to-day diary’s list of books read in 1947 includes: Back, Henry Green. The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford. The Shadow Line, Joseph Conrad.

Knock on Any Door, Willard Motley. The Gallery, John Horne Burns. Kaputt, Curzio Malaparte. Le Livre blanc, Cocteau. [Attributed to Cocteau who did the preface and illustrations for this anonymous book.] Williwaw and The City and the Pillar, Gore Vidal. The Member of the Wedding and Reflections in a Golden Eye, Carson McCullers. The Rock Pool, Cyril Connolly. The Stranger, Albert Camus.

Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote. Manservant and Maidservant, Ivy Compton-Burnett. (There are a number of others––including some quite distinguished works: On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Juenger, Dirty Eddie by Ludwig Bemelmans, Memoirs of a Midget by Walter de la Mare, The Moonlight by Joyce Cary, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen and The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West––about which I can remember absolutely nothing.) I remembered nothing about Back when I opened it just now (December 6, 1972), and yet I find that it has an ending in Henry’s best and most characteristic manner; no one else could have written it. The Good Soldier (since reread) has left nothing in my memory but its claim to be “the saddest story I ever heard”––which seems to me absurd and perhaps even deliberately campy; Ford’s disingenuousness is part of his charm. The Shadow Line is another unmemorable work by a beloved writer; Conrad combines startlingly realistic moments of physical experience (the tropical raindrop falling on his face in the midst of the spooky calm) with the artificiality of a cultured foreigner talking English at a literary tea. Christopher was much moved by Knock on Any Door when he read it; this was his idea of a sad story. He fell in love with the hero and wrote Willard Motley a fan letter. The Gallery has left me with a strong sense of the Italian wartime atmosphere, which is certainly something––but that trashy, traitorous liar Malaparte has left me with a series of myths about the war which still haunt me as though they were great art. Le Livre blanc? Christopher had heard about it long before he read it, and was a bit disappointed. Cocteau’s love act with the boy through the transparent mirror is the only image which has remained with me. Christopher wrote a blurb for The City and the Pillar, but he didn’t really like it, even then; he much preferred Williwaw. Capote’s books have always seemed to me to be mere skillful embroidery, unrelated to himself and therefore lacking in essential interest. Christopher never truly appreciated McCullers until he worked on a screenplay based on Reflections, in the sixties. It is, in many ways, like a French novel and owes a lot to Faulkner. But McCullers has something that Faulkner and the French haven’t––fun. The Stranger is a French novel and nothing but a French novel; one of the classic bogus masterpieces of this century. Christopher had been put onto Compton-

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And now The Condor and the Cows takes over. The doings of

Christopher and Caskey are described in it, more or less, up to March 27, 1948, when they left Buenos Aires on a French ship called the Groix, bound for France, via Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro and Dakar.

1948

The 1948–1956 journal[*] begins with an entry on April 11, 1948, written on board the Groix, the day before they landed at Dakar.

It is a pity that Christopher didn’t begin earlier and include a description of April 1, the day they spent ashore in Rio as the guests of [some acquaintances]. I still faintly remember the first glimpse of that fantastic coastline––Christopher’s delighted incredulity as the harbor mouth and the Sugar Loaf came into view and he said to himself, “It’s not true, I don’t believe it!” (Five years later, Christopher felt the same thing when he got his first sight of Monument Valley.1) [One of the acquaintances] was an obsessive sexualist; he kept a chart showing the number of boys he had sex with each month and how many orgasms he had with each. He

and [his companion] were superhosts; after driving Caskey and Christopher all around the city and giving them a magnificent lunch, they brought them back to [his] apartment where an incredibly handsome youth was waiting. I think he was Japanese-Irish-Negro, such blends being fairly common in Rio. Christopher and Caskey had a hasty conference, since it was obvious that good guestmanship required one of them to go to bed with him. Caskey said Christopher Burnett by the Beesleys, who adored her. Christopher admired her then as I admire her now––neither more nor less. It is delightful to visit her in her elegantly, ironically furnished literary mansion; but she never lets you see what’s outside it. Christopher had hated The Rock Pool when he first read it, in the thirties. Rereading it in 1947 he loved it, and has loved it ever since. His early dislike of it was probably due to left-wing snobbery. He was quite certain that he knew what kind of a book Connolly ought to write, and this wasn’t it. It wasn’t socially conscious––or rather, it didn’t deal with the kind of characters you were supposed to be socially conscious about.

1 Nevertheless, the two experiences were essentially different. Rio inspired an aesthetic excitement, Monument Valley [in northeast Arizona and southeast Utah] a primitive religious awe.

[* “The Postwar Years” in D 1.]

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should do it. Left alone with the boy, Christopher was embarrassed at first, chiefly by his fixed though not necessarily hostile scowl and his disinclination to talk even Portuguese (of which Christopher remembered anyhow only a few words). Christopher tried to excite him by sucking, licking and biting but without apparent success

––until the boy suddenly turned Christopher over, greased his ass, got an entirely convincing hard-on and fucked him slowly and most satisfactorily.

The journal entries of April 11, 12, 13, 17, 19, and 20 describe the increasing discomforts of the overcrowded ship and Caskey’s and Christopher’s consequent Francophobia. Caskey was even more

emphatic than Christopher about this; his attitude was so evident that the French passengers didn’t dare kidnap him, as they did Christopher, to take part in the line-crossing ceremony and get daubed with flour and water and dunked.[*] But Caskey nevertheless condescended to go up on the boat deck every night with a French beau. They only kissed, because the Frenchman was so afraid of being caught if they started any serious sex making.

On April 22, they disembarked at Le Havre and went on by train to Paris, where they stayed a week––visiting Denny Fouts, running into Auden and Chester Kallman and also meeting Gore Vidal for the first time, quite by chance. These happenings are pretty well covered in the journal. Relations between Denny and Caskey were

adequately polite but tense underneath––I dimly remember a semi-quarrel between Christopher and Denny on their last evening (the 29th); I think it was because Denny had casually suggested that Caskey should take some money and pick up a packet of opium from a “connection” who was waiting outside the restaurant. Christopher found this outrageous and refused to let Caskey go, saying that the police might well be watching the pusher, in which case Caskey would get arrested. If my memory is correct, Denny’s suggestion was an entirely characteristic act of aggression. (An altogether different but recognizable version of this scene appears in “Paul.”[†]) This was their last meeting with Denny; he died at the end of that year. Shortly after Christopher had left Paris, Denny sent him one of his sour-sweet little letters, saying, “I hope you and Billy will go on being as happy as you seem to be.” Denny obviously didn’t hope it.

Christopher’s journal entries don’t betray the fact that he found Gore Vidal sexually attractive, and that Gore was flirting with him.

[* Travellers crossing the equator for the first time are tried at a mock “Court of Neptune” and subjected to joke punishments.]

[† In Down There on a Visit.]

¾ 1948 ¾

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On April 29, Gore asked Christopher to come and have breakfast with him at his hotel. (I don’t remember how Gore avoided inviting Caskey but he did, and this was probably one of the causes of the hostility which soon developed between them.) Just as Christopher was walking along the corridor toward Gore’s room, its door flew open and a young man ran out, collided with Christopher and

dashed past him to the staircase. Gore laughingly explained that there had been a misunderstanding. When Christopher’s arrival was

announced on the house telephone, Gore had told the young man

––with whom he had spent the night––“Mon ami vient.”[*] The

young man had taken it for granted that the “ami” was an enraged lover, so he had jumped into his clothes and tried to escape. Gore received Christopher sitting in bed in his underclothes. Later, when he got out to go to the bathroom, Christopher saw that he had very sexy legs. They flirted all through breakfast, but neither was about to make the first move, so nothing happened.

On April 30, Caskey and Christopher crossed to England. In

London, they stayed first at John Lehmann’s house and later in a Kensington hotel, the Tudor Court. The journal describes a big champagne party given at the offices of Horizon on May 7, at which they met Arthur Waley and Lucian Freud, a supper with Henry and Dig Yorke on May 9 and a lunch with the Cyril Connollys, Rose Macaulay and Raymond Mortimer on May 11. On May 13,

Christopher went up to stay at Wyberslegh. Caskey remained in London, where he had already made himself popular with several of Christopher’s friends, particularly the Yorkes, Keith Vaughan, John Minton1 and Alexis Rassine. Later, Forster invited him to come and stay at Cambridge.

1 Caskey was more Minton’s friend than Vaughan’s. Indeed Minton was an ideal playmate for Caskey, with his wild high spirits, fondness for the bottle and generally erratic behavior. I think he found Caskey attractive. He did a drawing of him which is very flattering. Vaughan certainly liked Caskey too, but Vaughan was always shy and taciturn––all the more so when Minton was around. Christopher, at that time, would have loved to go to bed with Vaughan, but Vaughan definitely wasn’t interested. No doubt Christopher’s enthusiasm for his paintings pleased Vaughan, but I believe he rather despised Christopher as a human being. There is a coldly contemptuous reference to Christopher in Vaughan’s Journal and Drawings, as he appeared to Vaughan during a dinner party at John Lehmann’s on February 25, 1952: “C.I. casual, rather rasping in speech, sentimental, looking like a dehydrated schoolboy.

Enormously interested in the superficialities of life.” [The dinner was February 24, 1952.]

[* “My friend is coming.”]

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In the journal, on May 17, Christopher remarks that he hasn’t yet seen Richard, who had gone off to stay with the caretakers at Marple Hall, just before Christopher’s arrival. According to Kathleen, Richard had worked himself into a fit of jealousy of Christopher. I can’t remember that Richard had shown any signs of jealousy during Christopher’s 1947 visit, but he undoubtedly did remain jealous of Christopher as long as Kathleen was alive.

On May 18, Caskey came up to Wyberslegh. He was on his best

behavior and helped Kathleen in the kitchen. His easy southern manners impressed her favorably, but I don’t think she really warmed to him. She was shrewd enough to be suspicious of his campy

politeness, which now and then became a send-up of everything female. When Richard returned to Wyberslegh on May 20, Caskey tried hard to make friends with him too. Richard responded, up to a point; but he too was suspicious, merely because he regarded Caskey as Christopher’s ally.

Caskey and Christopher were at Wyberslegh until June 6––except for a two-day trip to London (May 22–23) to see Truman Capote, presumably because Truman was in England only on a brief visit.

Caskey took a lot of photographs during his stay––of Lyme, of Marple Hall, of Wyberslegh and of the Stockport viaduct, which he greatly admired. One day he went into Stockport alone and began shooting the viaduct from various angles, running up and down flights of steps which lead to the river that flows beneath it. His movements must have seemed eccentric––photographers do often

behave very oddly when they are at work––for he was stopped and questioned by police officers who were on the lookout for an

escaped criminal lunatic. This was probably John Edward Allen, “the mad parson.” Christopher’s journal refers to him on May 29, but without mentioning Caskey’s adventure.1

On June 7, the day after their return to London, Christopher and Caskey travelled down to Aldeburgh in Suffolk for the festival. This was the first year it was held. Forster and William Plomer lectured and Celia Johnson and Robert Speaight gave a poetry recital. But the stars were Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. Ben played the piano, Peter sang, and Ben’s opera Albert Herring had its first performance.[*]

This was their hometown and they were putting it on the map.

1 This entry is the last one made during their stay in England. After it, there is a gap of more than five months in the journal. [ John Edward Allen had escaped from Broadmoor the previous July; see D 1, pp. 405–6.]

[* In fact, Albert Herring had premiered at Glyndebourne the previous June and been performed at Covent Garden and abroad.]

¾ 1948 ¾

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Christopher still felt warmly toward both of them and would

continue to do so. No doubt Ben was already beginning to assume the airs of royalty, even then, but Christopher had spent so much time among musicians that he took their grandeur for granted––he would have been far less tolerant of such behavior from a fellow writer. Did he regard musicians as a slightly inferior artistic caste?

Maybe. He certainly claimed the right to be friends with them without showing any particular interest in their work. And, in Ben’s case, Christopher’s attitude had been very much that of an elder and wiser being, when they were both young, although the difference in their ages was only nine years. Perhaps Ben had always resented this condescension. If so, he took an awfully long time to show it. During their days together at Aldeburgh, Ben made himself charming to Christopher and to Caskey whenever he had a spare moment amidst his many responsibilities.

Aldeburgh itself left vivid impressions in Christopher’s mind: the embattled look of the houses along the pebbled beach, confronting the menace of the sea which will one day swallow them; the rugged old martello towers, built to confront Napoleon, a menace who never materialized; the strong smells of boats and fish and the hard brightness of the flat land in the windy east-coast sunshine.

On June 10, Christopher and Caskey returned to London and

went to stay with Cuthbert Worsley. They were there for the rest of the month, meeting friends and going to parties, plays and films.

On June 16, Caskey went down to Brighton and spent the night; someone had probably invited him. Christopher had supper with Tony Hyndman and this was most likely the night (or one of the nights) when they had sex together. The sex was as enjoyable as it had been in the old days, only now it was Tony who fucked

Christopher. On the 16th, Christopher also saw Gore Vidal, who had just arrived in England, at John Lehmann’s. Lehmann was publishing an English edition of The City and the Pillar and was trying to get Gore to agree to some expurgations––which he finally did, under protest.

Tennessee Williams must have arrived at almost the same time.

Christopher and Caskey saw him and Gore at John Lehmann’s on

June 18. This is the only mention of Tennessee in the day-to-day diary for that month––yet I have a memory of Tennessee, Caskey and Christopher together in a cab at night; it is foggy, and Tennessee exclaims, “We are the dreaded fog queens!” and utters his screaming laugh. Whereupon, all three of them begin to elaborate on the fantasy––how the respectable citizens shudder and slam their shutters and cross themselves as the dreaded fog queens ride by, and how one 146

Lost Years

darling little boy disregards their warnings and looks out of the window and sees the fog queens and they are absolutely beautiful, so he shouts to them and begs them to take him with them, and they do, and he is never heard from again.

A day or two later, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal decided to pay a visit to Forster at Cambridge. Neither of them had met him. In a letter to Christopher, dated June 25, Forster writes: “Tennessee Williams got up too late to reach Cambridge. Vidal arrived and I wish hadn’t, as I disliked him a lot.” It appears that Forster took great pains to show Vidal the sights of Cambridge and that Vidal, far from displaying the proper enthusiasm, seemed totally uninterested; all he would talk about was his own career and his rivalry with Truman Capote. The climax of Forster’s indignation was reached in the Great Court of Trinity, when Vidal glanced around him and condescendingly commented, “Pretty!”[*]

Caskey and Gore Vidal had their inevitable clash. It was at a party.

Caskey got drunk and told Gore that he was a lousy writer––which was unfortunate, because Gore naturally suspected that this must be Christopher’s private opinion which Caskey was merely echoing.

I’m not sure what happened next. Caskey certainly said many other nasty things. I think Gore hit him.1 The quarrel was patched up, but the ill feeling remained.

On June 20, Cuthbert Worsley gave a party. I am only guessing but I believe it was during this party that Christopher got a phone call from Gottfried Reinhardt at MGM. Gottfried wanted to know if

Christopher would be willing to come back as soon as possible and work on a film about Dostoevsky called The Great Sinner, which he was producing. Christopher said yes; the only condition he made was that he wanted to travel by boat and train, not by plane. Gottfried agreed to this extra delay. What I can clearly remember is

Christopher’s enjoyment of the dramatic moment when he returned to the room in which the party was being held and casually told Cuthbert and his guests: “That was Hollywood. They’ve offered me a film job.” Sensation!

A genial but basically unpleasant society queen named David

Webster took up Christopher and Caskey in a big way; I think he 1 It may seem odd that I can’t remember such simple visual facts more clearly, but no doubt Christopher was stupid drunk on this as on so many similar occasions.

[* According to Vidal, he and Williams had met Forster––at a party John Lehmann gave for the two Americans––and the visit to Cambridge was made at Forster’s invitation; Vidal published his own account of the episode in Palimpsest: A Memoir (1995), pp.

190–1.]

¾ 1948 ¾

147

was the business director of the Covent Garden opera house. He invited them to two parties and a lunch within the space of five days.

At the first party, on June 27, a cute radio and nightclub entertainer named Cliff Gordon gave a really brilliant black comedy act:

Churchill’s speech on the day England lost the war. (Christopher had met Cliff Gordon about ten days previously and gone with him to the steam bath in Jermyn Street, where they had had exhibitionistic sex in front of an excited old man; on another occasion they had fucked at Gordon’s flat––after which Gordon, who was a hypochondriac, had become worried because Christopher didn’t take regular syphilis tests, as he did, and had talked Christopher into being examined by his doctor. This doctor, who was the coy type, later informed Christopher of the negative result of the test by cabling to him in Los Angeles the single word, “Congratulations.”) Webster’s second party, on July 1, was a very grand affair, full of theatrical and ballet stars. Introducing Christopher and Caskey to Alicia Markova, Webster said, “I don’t think you’ve met the Isherwoods?” which was characteristic of his would-be-daring vulgarity. But he failed to amuse or startle Markova; she behaved as if he had said nothing unusual. (Or did she merely assume that Caskey was Christopher’s son?) Further along in the evening, Christopher was sitting on a couch holding forth to a couple of fellow guests about Anton Dolin’s performance in the ballet Job, which he had seen the day before.

Dolin, said Christopher, was amazing––nearly stark naked, he had executed great leaps up and down a flight of steps; he was as agile as a boy and his body looked magnificent––“And to think,”

Christopher added, “he was born the same year as me!” At the other end of the couch, slumped and silent and seemingly in deep

depression, was a grey-faced withered man who might easily have been in his sixties. Looking at him closely now for the first time, Christopher recognized him with a shock of embarrassment. It was Dolin himself.1

On July 2, Christopher went up to Wyberslegh again, for a short 1 Christopher had had a slightly different kind of shock at the end of the same ballet matinée. The other ballet on the program with Job was The Clock Symphony and Christopher had been dazzled by a young dancer in it named Alexander Grant, whom he hadn’t seen before. Grant’s solo had seemed to him to express the very essence of joy. As he jumped and twirled, joy flew from him in sparks, igniting the audience. As soon as the curtain came down, Christopher hurried to Webster and asked to be introduced to this magic creature. After some delay, Alexander Grant appeared, deathly pale, on crutches. He had turned his ankle right after his first entrance, and every step he had danced had been in agony.

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farewell visit. The day-to-day diary doesn’t say that Caskey came along, and probably he stayed in London. On July 5, Christopher returned. He and Caskey spent their last few days in England staying at John Lehmann’s house with Alexis Rassine. John was in Paris but came back before they left.

On July 6, Christopher and Caskey travelled down to Trottis-

cliffe(?)[*] to see Graham Sutherland; Caskey wanted to photograph him. I don’t remember who gave them an introduction to him; I’m pretty certain they hadn’t met before. He was dark and handsome and friendly and his wife was charming. (I remember hearing, maybe much later, that their otherwise happy marriage was saddened by the fact that she was unable to have children and they therefore as strict Catholics felt bound to refrain from sex. This was probably sheer fiction.) While Sutherland was showing them his studio, they noticed a watercolor landscape lying, along with other discarded work, on the floor. They offered to buy it. Sutherland told them they could take it, saying, “If I ever come to the States and run short of money, you can give me a hundred dollars.” (This never happened.)

That evening, back in town, they had supper with Morgan and

Bob Buckingham. It was perhaps on this occasion that Forster took Christopher aside and asked him gently not to drink so much. “You always seem a bit dazed, nowadays,” he said.

On July 7, Christopher had lunch with Berthold Viertel. This was the fifth time Christopher had met Viertel in London; and they had met about the same number of times in New York––sometimes with Elisabeth Neumann, whom Viertel married in 1949. There has been nothing to say about him here, for he was no longer an important figure in Christopher’s world. As Christopher became increasingly detached from his own German-refugee persona (which belonged to the post-Berlin years of travel around Europe with Heinz) Viertel had lost his power to make Christopher feel guilty and responsible for him. On Christopher’s side, strong affection remained. But Viertel’s huge old-fashioned ego, his demand to be respected as a German Poet and Thinker, his masochistic Jewishness––“I wanted only to keep the wound open,” he had declared in one of his poems––had made it hard for Christopher to go on being intimate with him; it was just too much trouble.1

1 If this sounds brutal, here’s what Beatrix Lehmann wrote to Christopher many years earlier (1938?) while she was having a sort of love affair with Viertel: “Absence of poor old B.V. for a few days––really like coming out of a madhouse into a green field.” [Almost certainly January 1938.]

[* A village in Kent; pronounced “Trosley” by locals.]

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This was to be their last meeting. Though Viertel didn’t suspect it yet, he was about to begin enjoying the five most successful years of his life––directing plays in Zürich, Berlin and Vienna, among which were translations made by himself of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Rose Tattoo. During that period, Christopher came back to Europe only once, and then their paths didn’t cross.

Viertel died on September 24, 1953.

On July 9, Christopher and Caskey sailed on the Queen Elizabeth for New York. They landed on July 14. Caskey had decided to stay in the East for a while before returning to California. He was going to visit his mother in Kentucky. Christopher left next day for Chicago on the Twentieth Century.

The eight hours you had to spend in Chicago between trains were always a challenge to adventure. This time, Christopher determined not to waste them wandering around the Art Institute. So he looked up steam baths in the phone book, chose one whose name, printed in extra black letters, suggested that it would be big and busy, and called a cab to take him there. The cab driver, a fatherly type, asked him if he wasn’t a stranger in town. Christopher said yes, he was. The driver said that was what he’d guessed––because the bath

Christopher had mentioned wasn’t the kind of place he’d care for; all manner of bad characters hung out there. “I’ll take you to a nice quiet place,” he added, “where you’ll be comfortable.”

To Christopher, the driver’s meaning seemed obvious; the bath Christopher had picked was queer. So he hadn’t the courage to insist on going there. Cursing his luck, he let himself be taken to the nice respectable quiet place the driver recommended. It was called The Lincoln Baths and was in the midst of a residential district. When Christopher entered, he was a little surprised to find a very obvious (black) queen who took his money, grinned archly and told him to

“have a good time.” But far bigger surprises followed. The “bath”

could hardly be described as a bath at all––for there was no steam in the steam room. It was just a shabby dirty warren of cubicles, nearly pitch dark and quite crowded; everybody was cruising. Christopher didn’t have much of a good time because the clients were mostly his own age. But this, at least, was an adventure––and an utterly mysterious one. What had been in the taxi driver’s mind?

At six that evening ( July 16) Christopher left on the Super Chief, after having seen and fallen for Montgomery Clift in The Search. On July 18 he arrived back in Los Angeles. I think Hayden Lewis and/or Rod Owens must have met him at the depot downtown. They were

now living in the Santa Monica–Ocean Park area, which was

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probably why Christopher decided to take a room at a tiny hotel called the El Kanan, on Ocean Avenue, quite near them.1 Relations between Hayden and Christopher were much better now that

Caskey was absent. But Hayden couldn’t resist making put-down personal remarks. “You’re fat as a pig!” he exclaimed, on first seeing Christopher. A couple of weeks later, when Christopher was feeling proud of having lost weight, Hayden told him, “My dear, you look like a scarecrow!” Rod Owens was always friendly.

Christopher’s room at the El Kanan was dark and small––all the smaller because Christopher had to keep his bicycle in it; there was no other safe storage place. He used it only for going to bed in.

Christopher reported to MGM for work the morning after his

arrival; it happened to be a Monday. It was delightful to have Gottfried Reinhardt as his producer again. (Looking back, I can still say that Gottfried has been my favorite boss––leaving Tony Richardson out of the running, because the relation between a writer and his director is different.)

The Great Sinner2 is listed in its credits as having been based on an original story by Ladislas Fodor and René Fueloep-Miller. I’m pretty sure that Christopher never saw this story, if indeed it ever existed in writing. What he was required to start working on was an already-completed first-draft script which had been put together by

Reinhardt and Fodor. (René Fueloep-Miller never appeared––for all I know, he was in Europe or dead.)

The story idea was basically nothing more than an adaptation of The Gambler––putting Dostoevsky himself in place of the story’s narrator.3

1 Caskey had the Lincoln Zephyr convertible with him in the East, if he hadn’t already sold it and bought the station wagon in which he later drove back to Los Angeles. Did Christopher rent a car until his return? I don’t think he did.

So maybe Hayden and Rod let him use the old Packard. Their business was already doing well, and no doubt they now had at least one other car of their own. Aside from this, Christopher could get to MGM on the trolley car which, in those days, ran right past the El Kanan and along Venice Boulevard. And there was a bus which shuttled between MGM and Hollywood. Two days after his arrival, he bought a bicycle. This was useful for getting around Santa Monica and sometimes he rode to the studio on it.

2 This title was later to provoke sneering smiles from many of Christopher’s acquaintances; they all assumed, when they first heard it, that this was a typical piece of Hollywood vulgarity. Actually, The Life of a Great Sinner was Dostoevsky’s own title for a series of autobiographical novels––a project which he never carried out.

3 In The Gambler he is called “Alexey Ivanovitch.” In the screenplay the name Dostoevsky is almost never mentioned; he is called “Fedor” or “Fedja.” Polina is called “Pauline.”

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Thus it is Dostoevsky who falls in love with Polina and becomes a gambling addict through her influence. Finally, after descending to the lowest depths of addiction and even (this was Gottfried’s addition) planning––though not actually committing––the murder of the old woman pawnbroker out of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky cures himself by writing a story about his experiences, which is presumably The Gambler.

It’s possible that Christopher wouldn’t have accepted this assignment so lightly if he had had time to find out more about it and think it over. But the glamor of a job offer by long distance phone was powerful in itself. And then there was the salary, and the free transportation home––and the immense satisfaction of having been remembered and wanted and asked for.

The reunion with Gottfried was like being welcomed back into a cozy Jewish-Viennese club; Christopher felt absolutely at his ease.

Ladislas Fodor also belonged to the club, he was a Hungarian Jew who had spent much of his youth in Vienna. But Gottfried and

Fodor were very different. Gottfried was intelligent, sad-humorous, idealistic, basically honest and capable of frankness. Fodor was full of smiles and schmaltz, smoothly witty, crafty and capable of ruthlessness. Sometimes, with his slanting, almost oriental eyes and heavy sleek mustache, he looked like a comic Stalin. Christopher didn’t trust him for one instant, but that was unimportant. They skated gaily together on the thick ice of professional politeness.

Christopher was given to understand by Gottfried that he was free to rewrite the dialogue of the first-draft script and to reconstruct its story line in any way he wanted. Gottfried also told Christopher that Fodor wouldn’t interfere with him, and indeed Christopher was left alone when he was working in his office. But Fodor was meanwhile in conference with Gottfried, unpicking Christopher’s work of the previous day and restoring the script more or less to its original form.

Fodor even fought to preserve his creaky foreign-sounding dialogue; Christopher was merely allowed to polish it. All this was done tactfully and smilingly and with charm; there were never any quarrels.

Christopher argued sometimes, but he usually had to agree that this rewriting of his rewrite was necessary, under the circumstances. They were short of time––the picture was due to start shooting early in October––and the first-draft script was at least shootable; it was corny and slick but it made cinematic sense.1

If Christopher had had several months and complete freedom to handle this story idea in his own way, he would have tried to create 1 Fodor got first credit on the completed film, and justly so.

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a more lifelike Dostoevsky character––a role for a character actor, not a romantic lead––eccentric, ugly, violent, shameless, farcical. He would have tried to make the love affair with Polina an enslave-ment, a bizarre addiction, instead of a cool-blooded pretty Viennese romance. He would have thrown out the neat little Fodor–

Reinhardt triangle with the casino director, who ends up behaving like an English gentleman. But, alas, he knew already that the Dostoevsky character was to be played by Gregory Peck!

Christopher had always been a model employee. He despised

amateurs like Brecht who, when they condescended to work at a film studio, whined and sneered and called themselves whores or slaves. Christopher prided himself on his adaptability. Writing a movie was a game, and each game had a different set of rules. Having learned the rules, Christopher could play along with enjoyment––

especially if he had a fellow player like Gottfried Reinhardt who was enjoying himself too. Once Christopher had accepted the fact that this game was to be played according to the Viennese code, he became almost as Viennese as Gottfried and Fodor. I have no doubt that some of the script’s most Viennese touches were contributed by him, though I can’t remember which they were.[*]

[* Isherwood left the following note nearby but unnumbered:] On July 20, 1948, a well-known herpetologist named Mrs. Grace Wiley was being interviewed by a photographer (from Life magazine?), at her home, which was somewhere in the Los Angeles area. She was showing him her pet cobras. One of them, newly arrived from Sumatra, became annoyed by the clicking of the camera. Mrs. Wiley decided to put it back in its box. As she reached out to do this, the cobra bit her in the hand. She remained calm, forced the snake to release its hold, put it into its box and told the photographer where he could find the serum which she kept in the house. But the photographer was so nervous that he dropped the vial containing the serum and broke it. He then took Mrs. Wiley to a hospital in Long Beach. However, the only snake-bite serum available at the hospital was rattlesnake serum. Rattlesnake venom destroys the red blood cells; cobra venom attacks the nerve centers. So this serum couldn’t help Mrs. Wiley. She died, ninety minutes after being bitten.

This tragedy made a strong impression on Christopher, because of the fascination–aversion he felt toward snakes and because he had once met Mrs.

Wiley, at a snake show to which Vernon Old had taken him, several years earlier. He remembered that she had exhibited two black cobras in a cage, which also contained her purse. Wanting to take something out of the purse, she had put her hand into the cage and casually pushed the cobras aside, giving them light smacks on their noses.

Gerald Heard had known Mrs. Wiley quite well and had visited her at her house where, with his usual sangfroid, he had sat drinking tea while the cobras crawled freely about the room. Gerald reported to Christopher that Mrs. Wiley had assured him she never had any trouble with her snakes because, “You see, ¾ 1948 ¾

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Christopher’s first four weeks on The Great Sinner were busy but uneventful. He worked all day at the studio, Mondays through

Fridays, and sometimes stayed on there with Gottfried and Fodor till nearly midnight. Gottfried would get food sent up from the commissary and they would drink and talk in his office or watch films in the projection room. (One evening, they ran two costume pictures, because both were set more or less in the same period as The Great Sinner. During the Vivien Leigh version of Anna

Karenina, Christopher closed his eyes for what seemed like a couple of seconds. When he opened them again, he was shocked to

discover what liberties the director had taken with Tolstoy’s story; there seemed to be several unfamiliar characters. . . . He had slept right through into the middle of Max Ophuls’s Letter from an

Unknown Woman!)

In the evenings, Christopher had supper with Hayden and Rod

more often than with any of his other friends. They were his nearest neighbors, their company was relaxing and their interest in studio gossip was unfailing. (Like most people who are in the midst of a project, Christopher found it easier to talk about The Great Sinner than about anything else; all other topics required extra concentration.) Christopher also saw Peggy and Bill Kiskadden, Salka Viertel, Lesser Samuels, Vernon Old, Klaus Mann, Chris Wood, van

Druten, Tito Renaldo,1 Carlos McClendon, Jay de Laval and a

they know I won’t hurt them.” Much earlier in her life, as a teacher of natural history, she had been afraid of all snakes. To overcome her fear, she had made pets of the nonvenomous species and had later begun to handle rattlesnakes and cobras. She had been bitten several times. Gerald rightly praised her as a great exponent of nonviolence. But it must be admitted that she was sometimes unprofessionally careless. A lady who works at the Santa Monica Public Library has just told me ( January 12, 1973) that Mrs. Wiley got fired from a job in the East because she let some venomous snakes out of their cages in a laboratory, with the result that they escaped from the building and terrified the neighbors.

1 I don’t remember when Christopher first met Tito––but it was before he left California in January 1947. From now on, they saw each other fairly often.

Caskey had known Tito longer than Christopher had––in New York, before Caskey went into the navy. Tito, when young, had a well-made exciting brown body and dark Mexican good looks. In those days his air of sadness––the sadness of the Indio triste [sad Indian]––was charming; later it turned to obstinate pathological melancholy [. . .]. Tito, when Caskey met him, was going around with Cole Porter––perhaps as a sex mate but more probably as one of the decorative nonsexmaking attendants with whom Porter liked to surround himself. Caskey told Christopher that once, one rainy afternoon when there was nothing else to do, he and Tito had gone to bed together and 154

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few others. Peggy––like Berthold Viertel––already belonged to Christopher’s past, but she didn’t realize this yet, and neither did Christopher, altogether. So she still had a certain power over him.

Even while Christopher was entertaining Peggy with anecdotes

about his South American trip, he felt himself becoming in-

voluntarily apologetic. He hated this but he couldn’t help it. What was he apologizing for? His defection from the Vedanta Center, and his life with Caskey. He wasn’t really apologizing to Peggy, though.

He knew very well that she disapproved of Caskey and of all his other boyfriends, past and to come. But that was neither here nor there, for she also disapproved of the Vedanta Center––and for the same reason. Christopher’s sexual and religious associates embarrassed her equally; both groups, from her point of view, were shoddy, second-rate, not to be mentioned in nice society. . . .

Christopher rejected Peggy’s moral judgements in advance, yet he perversely went on seeing her and telling her about himself. Because his life made him feel guilty, he needed disapproval of it by a dogmatically stupid woman, a woman whose disapproval would

reassure him. Poor Peggy! Christopher had given her an ungrateful role to play––a role which was very bad for her own character, for it brought out all her self-righteousness. When Christopher got cured of his guilt, several years later, he stopped seeing her altogether. She was well rid of him, and he of her. They were both of them remarkable and even admirable people, but their

relationship had been founded on falseness from the start; they could only have acted sincerely as declared enemies. I must blame

Christopher far more than Peggy. For years, he had been using her made sex for several hours with great enjoyment.

As for Christopher, he felt much sympathy, even love for Tito, despite Tito’s tiresome moodiness, which sometimes expressed itself in attacks of asthma. During August and September, Christopher twice stayed the night at Tito’s apartment; the two of them wanted to make love to each other because of their mutual affection. The memory of it is pleasant though the sex acts themselves weren’t satisfactory.

Tito was an actor. About that time or a little later, he played the part of Jennifer Jones’s young brother in John Huston’s We Were Strangers. In the movie, Tito gets shot and dies in Jennifer’s arms. I have a memory of another evening (I think, in 1949) which Christopher spent with Tito, while Tito was suffering from asthma. Christopher pretended to be Jennifer Jones. Embracing Tito, he murmured in a would-be Cuban accent: “Manolo, Manolo––don’t die!” which made Tito laugh in the midst of his choking.

The strongest bond between Tito and Christopher was that Tito was religious. He became a follower of Vedanta and a disciple of Swami. More about this later.

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for his convenience and involving her in his neuroses; if he had had an elder sister, he would have used her in much the same manner.

Well––enough of that.

Thomas Mann, in a letter to Dr. Theodor Adorno (reprinted in

Mann’s Letters), writes on July 12, 1948, that Klaus is “physically restored” after an attempt at suicide1 and is staying at Bruno Walter’s house along with his sister Erika, “who is giving him spiritual care.”

Thomas continues:

I am somewhat angry with him for having tried to do that to his mother. She is understanding about everything––and so am I.

That has spoiled him.

The situation remains dangerous. My two sisters committed

suicide, and Klaus has much of the elder sister in him. The impulse is present in him and is favored by all the surrounding circumstances––except that he has a parental home he can always rely on, although naturally he does not want to be dependent on it.

It is a good sign that he curses the publicity that followed the incident on the grounds that “this makes it so hard to start over again.”

I don’t know just what Thomas Mann meant by “all the surrounding circumstances” which “favored” Klaus’s impulse to suicide. Did these include Klaus’s homosexuality in general and his boyfriend Harold Fairbanks in particular?

I don’t think Klaus had known Harold Fairbanks very long before Christopher met Harold; the three of them had supper together for the first time on July 27. Harold was a merchant seaman. He was well built (though in danger of fat) and quite good-looking. He drank a lot. He could be very amusing or sullen or aggressive or sentimental, switching his moods suddenly and often. When he was drunk and encountered one or more sexy young studs in a bar, his favorite challenge was, “Fuck or fight!”––he didn’t seem to mind being beaten up, at all. He was definitely homosexual [. . .].

If Klaus talked to Christopher about his suicide attempt, I don’t remember what he said. Obviously, Klaus must have found the

subject embarrassing. I imagine that one could only talk freely about one’s own attempted suicide to someone who had tried it himself.

Christopher, on the other hand, was a confirmed self-preserver.

On the surface, as always, Klaus was bright, witty and seemingly interested in what was going on in the world around him. He had a lot of courage and he tended to keep the melancholic side of his 1 Klaus had slashed his wrists but his condition wasn’t serious.

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nature hidden. I don’t think that he got much moral support from any of his love affairs. Certainly not from Harold Fairbanks, who was fond of him no doubt but much too unstable to be able to take a lasting interest in other people’s problems.

How seriously did Klaus feel himself involved with Harold? I

don’t know. But I’m sure that Klaus’s realistic pessimism convinced him there was no future in their relationship. He did however make a scene of jealousy when he found Harold sitting drinking with Christopher in Christopher’s room, late at night. (Harold also had a room at the El Kanan and Klaus used to come and sleep with him there sometimes.) Christopher and Harold weren’t, in fact, doing anything sexual, but Christopher rather wanted to go to bed with him and Harold realized this and would probably have said yes if Klaus hadn’t shown up. He and Christopher weren’t really attracted to each other, merely compatible; they got along well together from the start. Between them, they calmed Klaus down––it was easy to convince him that his suspicions had been false, especially since he had been drunk at the time. Next morning, he and Christopher were friends again.

Harold Fairbanks used to spend a lot of time on the beach.

Christopher often joined Harold there when he could get away from the studio, which was of course only on weekends. I think it must have been on Saturday, August 14, that Christopher first met Jim Charlton. They met on the beach, I’m fairly sure, but it wasn’t a pickup. Maybe Jim already knew Harold.1 Anyhow, they got talking and that evening they had supper together.

When Christopher met him, Jim Charlton must have been about

twenty-seven years old.2 But he still seemed boyish. He was larger than Christopher but not above medium American size. He had a white smooth-skinned body, strong though not heavily muscled, with little hair on it. Big shoulders, sturdy arms and legs, very small buttocks. He couldn’t have been described as handsome but he was funny looking and cute. He had a long, oddly turned-up nose, big teeth, a ready grin, blue-grey eyes with a mistrustful look in them, and 1 No, says Jim ( July 3, 1973), he was with Jo and Ben Masselink, not Harold, when he first met Christopher. Ben Masselink and Jim had been fellow students at Taliesin West; and Jim had had an unrequited crush on Ben.

2 Twenty-seven was my own guess. Since I wrote it, Bill van Petten has told me he once saw Jim’s passport and it stated that he was born in 1917, meaning that he was already thirty-one in August 1948 (his birthday was on April 8).

Later ( July 1973), Jim himself told me he was born in 1919. Which of them was telling the truth? A passport is impressive, but Bill is perhaps unreliable.

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a deep growly voice. He wore his brown hair short but not cropped or crew-cut. His clothes were of the army surplus type, cords, a blue work shirt, a leather jacket, sneakers. He always seemed very clean. At the same time, he had an unusually strong, musky body odor, which Christopher was soon to find delicious and intensely sexy.

I suppose that Christopher must have discovered, on the day of their meeting, the following basic facts about Jim––that he was an architect1 and at present employed on a fairly large job, the building of about a dozen houses in the Brentwood area; that he had been trained as an architect at Frank Lloyd Wright’s two centers, Taliesin North in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona; that he had joined the air force during the war and had been sent to England but not until the fighting was nearly over; that he was the only child of a widow and was unmarried and homosexual.

Jim knew about Christopher’s writing and had read some of it, I think; I forget which book or books. He wasn’t an ardent Isherwood fan, however, and Christopher had the impression (later confirmed) that their immediate rapport was a here-and-now affair; it had nothing to do with previous literary admiration, as far as Jim was concerned. This pleased Christopher, of course. And, as that evening progressed with the discovery of more and more topics and tastes in common, Christopher was finally moved to a drunkenly frank statement, “You know, I really like you!” Jim grinned and gave Christopher a mistrustful but pleased look, then turning his head aside, he growled, “You’ll find I’m a lousy lay.” Christopher was amused but taken aback. He hadn’t meant this as a pass. (If he had wanted to get Jim in the hay, he would have led up to it much more gradually; indeed he almost never made a direct pass until he was certain of success, because it embarrassed him to be turned down.) He had had no reason to think that Jim would agree to go to bed with him––Jim had been talking romantically about a long-ago love for a teenage boy––and Christopher had felt no particular desire to go to bed with Jim. However, now that the whole situation had changed within a couple of seconds, Christopher found himself intrigued, curious and quite prepared to follow through. For some reason, Jim couldn’t come back with Christopher to the El Kanan then and there; they agreed to meet again the next night.

1 At that time, Jim hadn’t actually got his diploma; he didn’t get it until several years later. My impression is that he was an absolutely competent designer and draftsman but that he perhaps, in those days, had to rely on one of his colleagues or a builder with practical experience to tell him if his projected house would stand up and keep the rain out.

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Jim’s statement that he was “a lousy lay” may have been meant as a flirty come-on; however, Christopher found that he had had

surprisingly little sex experience for his age. He had had almost no serious involvements, either with men or women. Since moving

to California, his only contacts had been while cruising the coast highway in his car; he picked up hitchhiking servicemen and bought them drinks, after which they sometimes let him blow them. Jim was extraordinarily persistent in his cruising––if necessary, he would pick up half a dozen prospects in the course of one night––but he was also strangely shy when he had to make the pass, so every score cost him a maximum effort.

While staying in Arizona, Jim had met Max Ernst the artist. Ernst had told him that he was the kind of boy who ought to be fucked every day. I don’t know if Ernst had meant literally fucked by another man or merely that Jim should get himself laid by a person of no matter which sex. Anyhow, Christopher did literally fuck Jim, for the first time in Jim’s life. (“You took my cherry,” Jim later growled.) I have only one clear memory of Christopher’s first sex encounter with Jim––the uncoy, entirely matter-of-fact way Jim took off his clothes, almost before Christopher had had time to close the door of his room at the El Kanan. He was like an athlete eager to start playing a game. Having undressed, he threw himself naked into bed, as if plunging into a swimming pool. Nakedness made him seem very

young, almost babyish; a baby who was also a puppy.1 He giggled, bit, kissed, licked, sucked and bounced up and down on the mattress.

He wouldn’t even pretend to be serious. While Christopher was inclined to verbalize the situation, paying his partner compliments, uttering erotic words and generally talking up the orgasm, Jim said nothing. He came easily, without fuss––after which he would usually make some nearly inaudible wisecrack.

Jim was highly potent. He could have two or more orgasms (as he later demonstrated) with anybody who wasn’t altogether repulsive.

Many of his subsequent sex mates told him that he was “insatiable.”

But Christopher nevertheless got the impression that his behavior in bed was affectionate rather than lustful. He loved kissing. He would kiss and hug you almost indefinitely, if you didn’t insist on going further. He was never in a hurry. Jim’s childlike affectionate playfulness was touching and curiously innocent––it made him delightful to go to bed with. But Christopher had to admit to himself that, as far as he was concerned, Jim lacked one important sexual virtue; he 1 Christopher decided, very early in their relationship, that Jim was a Dog Person. Indeed, it was impossible to think of him as being any other animal.

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was too wholesome to be really exciting, his sex making was

vigorous but bland. (Here, I am trying hard to be objective––

which Christopher ceased to be, after the first time they had sex together. Thenceforward, Christopher’s reason for wanting to continue going to bed with Jim was simply that Christopher had fallen violently in love with him.)

What had made Christopher fall in love with Jim? The most

comprehensive answer I can think of is that Jim appealed to him as The American Boy, a boy out of Whitman’s poems. Jim was in many ways a much better specimen of a Whitman American than Vernon Old. Jim, like Vernon, was a twentieth-century town dweller, but it was easier to imagine Jim living in the country and the nineteenth century. Jim had a much more poetical feeling for landscape than Vernon had––though Vernon cared more for animals. Jim’s descriptions of western canyons and deserts and forests were graphic and full of poetry for Christopher. And Jim, despite all his hang-ups, seemed more spontaneous and therefore more like a Whitman boy than

Vernon––at any rate in bed, which was where it counted most. You could imagine Jim as a “Tan-Faced Prairie-Boy” lying all night out of doors kissing Whitman under a blanket. Whereas Vernon would have soon started to complain that he was getting sleepy and that Whitman’s beard tickled.

Self-reliant solitude is one of the chief characteristics of Whitman’s wandering American Boy. Christopher saw this charac-

teristic in Jim and it moved him deeply. Later, he tried to describe it when writing about the character he called Bob Wood1 in The World in the Evening:

What struck me chiefly about him, always, was his quality of

loneliness; and this was even more apparent when he and Charles came to visit me together. When, for example, Bob was fixing our cocktails, his slim figure with its big shoulders bending over the bottles would look strangely weary and solitary, and he seemed suddenly miles away from either of us. He was like a prospector preparing a meal in the midst of the wilderness.[*]

For Christopher, born on an intimate little island, The American Boy embodied his country’s fascinating and challenging aloofness.

Christopher felt challenged to break through this aloofness and make 1 Bob Wood isn’t a portrait of Jim, however; he is described as a crusader, a potential revolutionary––which Jim certainly wasn’t and isn’t. But Bob is described as being one of the Dog People.

[* Part three, chapter three.]

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a closer contact with Jim––and yet he didn’t really want to, for that would have destroyed much of Jim’s romantic appeal.

Even after Christopher had known Jim for years, he remained

deeply impressed by Jim’s self-reliance. He was always able to look out for himself and keep himself occupied––he was never at a loose end. When Christopher came to visit, he would find Jim drafting plans for a house, or making a model of a plane, or drawing nude teenage boys, slim, crop-headed and snub-nosed, who grinned as they played with each other’s cocks. (Christopher called them Charlton Boys; they all looked a bit like Jim.) Jim was also an efficient cook and a neat housekeeper. Whenever he moved into a new apartment, no matter how shabby and temporary, he would

make it recognizably personal––painting it in amusing colors, fixing up odd lamps and covering the walls with striking pictures and clippings from magazines. If Jim felt restless, he would take off in his car and explore some remote stretch of country, all on his own.

Once, when he had gone swimming in an irrigation ditch in the desert, miles from anywhere, he had discovered that he couldn’t climb back up its concrete walls and had been trapped there for hours until someone happened to come by. On another occasion, he had been climbing a cliff by the seashore and had fallen. He had had to drive himself home with his leg broken.

Jim had been born in Reading, Pennsylvania. But he preferred to recall the fact that he had been conceived at Love Field in Dallas, Texas––since both the name and the state sound more romantic.

Jim’s parents had been living near Love Field at that time because his father was a pilot in the Army Air Corps. When air postal service began, he flew mail. He was killed in a crash while Jim was still very young.1 The example of Jim’s father may possibly have predisposed 1 Here are some additions and corrections, based on conversations I had with Jim in December 1972, since writing the paragraphs [above].

Jim’s father flew into a mountain during a storm. His dead body showed almost no external injuries, only a bruise on its chin. Jim is apt to talk as if his father’s accident had been a subconsciously willed suicide––because he was bored with his wife, Jim implies––and a peculiarly inconsiderate one, since it made Mrs. Charlton so afraid of losing her child as well as her husband that she kept Jim at home with her and tried to prevent him from making friends with other boys. Jim blames his mother for his early shyness and inhibitions.

“When I was at Wright’s, I was going crazy,” Jim says. “I used to wander around the desert behind Taliesin with a copy of Wolfe’s Of Time and the River. At night, the moonlight was pink.” The planes he saw, on the day he decided to join the air force, appeared out of a wash [i.e., a dry stream bed]. They weren’t in formation. They were flying very low, each following ¾ 1948 ¾

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Jim to join the air force, but that wasn’t the way Jim told it. He described how he had seen two planes appear suddenly out of a canyon, in Arizona, and soar up into the sky doing aerobatics, and how he had decided, then and there, that he must fly too. In other words, Jim’s enlistment had been for aesthetic reasons––it had nothing directly to do with admiration for his father, and nothing whatever with patriotism.

In his flying stories, Jim always made fun of himself. He told how, soon after he had started to solo, he had decided that it would be beautiful to fly over a neighboring lake and dip first one wing tip and then the other in the water, so as to leave ripple-rings right across its surface. He hadn’t managed to do this, however, and had come to his instructor for advice. The instructor had told him he was an idiot and very lucky––if he had succeeded in touching the water with his wing tip he would have wrecked his plane.

When Jim was finally sent to England, he flew several times over Germany, but the Luftwaffe was by then practically nonexistent and he was never in combat.[*] Once, however, while he was over

Berlin––he found he wanted to pee. You had to do this into a special container and it was awkward because of the lack of space. Jim somehow got himself entangled in his machine guns and unintentionally fired them––which brought several of his fellow pilots whizzing down out of the clouds, thinking he was being attacked.

If Jim had been just another good candidate for the role of

Whitman American Boy, Christopher would have fallen for him

anyway; but what made Christopher really love Jim, and go on doing so long after his feelings had ceased to be romantic, was his view of Jim as an essentially ridiculous character, even a bit of a fake.

its individual course, hopping over rocks and clumps of cactus.

At that time, Wright was feuding with the draft board, trying to stop it from taking away his pupils. He declared that their work with him was of far greater national importance than fighting. As a result, some of them ended up in prison. And Wright himself lost several clients, who thought him unpatriotic.

When Jim joined the air force, it was because he wanted to fly, not to fight.

He avoided being sent overseas for a long time. He moved from one base to another, flying all kinds of different planes and enjoying himself enormously.

Then Jim’s great friend became depressed, thinking he was losing his looks and getting old; so he grew careless and crashed. He was found lying dead in a relaxed attitude, without external injuries, like Jim’s father.

Jim’s father had an identical twin brother. They were both great athletes in school, but the brother was the smaller of the two. Jim’s father was nicknamed

“Horse” and Jim’s father’s brother was nicknamed “Colt.”

[* But see Glossary under Charlton.]

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For one thing, Jim was apt to talk like a male impersonator, in a voice which was too deep for his physique and too butch for his I.Q.

He must have worked on this voice a lot when he was younger and eager to adjust to the air force. Also he had a pseudomasculine mannerism which he often affected while telephoning; he would ring your number, say hello so that you knew who was calling and then remain silent until you said something in reply. Christopher (and many others) had the impression that this was a game; Jim’s silence was a challenge. When two tough guys confront each other, it is traditionally the weaker who starts talking first. Jim was playing the hero in a western movie.

Although Christopher made affectionate fun of Jim’s male

impersonations, he privately found them sexually attractive. But he couldn’t admit this even to Jim. He would have liked Jim to play the stud in bed, but Jim never playacted there; he dropped his affectations with his clothes. He would fuck Christopher as readily as he would let himself be fucked, but neither of the two positions was symbolic, as far as Jim was concerned––this was simply a matter of give and take. So Christopher was reduced to indulging his fantasy in secret, during the act. With Jim’s cock inside him, he told himself: “The big fighter pilot was naked on top of him, raping him, fucking the shit out of him . . .” etc. etc.

When Christopher met Jim, Jim had already been worried for a

long time by the shape of the tip of his nose. He had wanted to have it altered, but the plastic surgeon whom he had consulted had pooh-poohed the idea, telling him that he would do better to go to an analyst and find out why he disliked his nose. Jim had followed the surgeon’s advice and consulted a number of analysts, without getting any definite answers.

Jim’s current analyst––a Jewish family-father––kept urging him to take up family life, with all its responsibilities and joys. He represented homosexual life as being irresponsible, immature and wretched, by contrast. He drooled over the satisfaction he got from washing his baby’s diapers. Jim related this to Christopher, obviously wanting him to speak up for the opposition. Christopher did so, with enthusiasm.

He poured scorn on the analyst and refuted his statements, and Jim was delighted. What Christopher didn’t realize until much later was that Jim was far more disturbed by the analyst’s propaganda than he would admit. Jim secretly felt that he ought to get married and support a family. And he certainly wanted to have a son––who would grow up to become a Charlton Boy. Maybe Jim had fantasies of going to bed with him. (A few years after this, Jim begot a male baby and married its mother, thereby [also] acquiring stepsons. [. . .])

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But, for the time being, Jim accepted Christopher as his mentor.

He was much impressed by the number of people Christopher had been to bed with––Christopher could no longer state an exact figure but he guessed at one, I think it was somewhere in the four hundreds.

Jim immediately vowed to beat this, and, within two or three years, he reported that he had done so.

Throughout the rest of August, Christopher and Jim met when-

ever they could. Sometimes, Jim stayed the night at the El Kanan.

Christopher introduced him to Hayden and Rod, who were flat-

teringly envious. Hayden said, “Where on earth did you find him?”

Rod made a pass at Jim in the men’s room of the restaurant where they were celebrating Christopher’s birthday.

On the first weekend of that September, the 4th and 5th, Jim and Christopher went on a trip. They drove down to Laguna Beach,

where Christopher had reserved a room at a motel. The room had a double bed in it. “I’d thought it was to be for a man and wife,” the motel manager said, eyeing them suspiciously. They assured him it didn’t matter, and started undressing as soon as he had left. “Let’s go to Laguna and fuck,” Christopher had said, and fuck they did for the rest of the afternoon, until it was time to have supper with Chris Wood.

Next day, Sunday the 5th, they drove all day, visiting the Capis-trano Mission, Lake Elsinore, the Observatory on Mount Palomar and Warner Hot Springs before returning to Laguna Beach. In a note in the journal, when he is restarting it on November 6, 1948, Christopher describes September 5 as having been “one of the happiest days of my life.” Why?

Christopher used to be fond of saying, at that time, that happiness is simply the breaking of contact with pain, since it is in our nature to be happy whenever the reasons for being unhappy cease to exist.

A highly subjective statement which smells of Disneyism, it is perhaps true in this particular instance. If Christopher was especially happy that day, it was basically because he had no immediate woes or worries. He was in perfect health. He was earning plenty of money at the studio. He had the clear conscience of a wage earner on holiday who knows that his work is up to schedule and is giving satisfaction to his employers. He was released from all the anxieties which arose whenever he was with Caskey. At the same time, he had no reason to be anxious about Caskey in his absence, for Caskey wrote regularly and would soon be returning to California.

But all this was on the negative side merely; the negating of causes for unhappiness. On the positive side was Jim himself. On this day and for this kind of outing, he must have seemed to Christopher to 164

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be the absolutely ideal companion. Christopher was fascinated by Jim’s conversation and by his stories about his life. He found Jim romantic, ridiculous and delightful. He was hot for Jim and knew that Jim would have sex whenever he wanted it. Above all, he

realized instinctively, even then, that Jim wouldn’t present any problem in his relations with Caskey. Christopher felt he could let himself go and indulge his crush on Jim to the utmost, because there were no strings attached to him.

Jim probably felt very much the same way about Christopher.1

While they were together at Lake Elsinore that day, Jim muttered,

“No wonder people fall in love with you!” The way he said this made it sound like an accusation––but that was as near as Jim could get to sentiment. He certainly found Christopher exciting to be with.

And he enjoyed going to bed with him. As for the existence of Caskey, I’m sure that didn’t worry Jim. Being a Dog Person, he could attach himself to a couple just as readily as to an individual.

Which is what he later did.

The next weekend, Christopher got three whole days off from the studio, September 11–13. On the 11th, Jim and Christopher drove to Laguna Beach again; this time, they stayed with Chris Wood. On the 12th, they drove down to Mexico and stayed at the huge old Hotel Pacifico in Ensenada. They had some drinks and then decided to take a shower before supper. Under the shower, Jim grabbed Christopher and began kissing him. They must have kissed for at least half an hour without stopping. Then they dried themselves, fucked and fell asleep.

Several hours later, Christopher awoke and, as he did so, had a minor psychic experience. It is described in The World in the Evening (part two, chapter three):

There was a night . . . when I’d woken from heavy dreamless sleep after making love with Jane, and hadn’t known who or where I

was. I’d seemed to be looking down, from some impersonal no-

place, at our two bodies lying in each other’s arms on the bed. I could swear that I’d actually hesitated, then, like a guest at the end 1 What I wrote here may well be more or less true. But, years after writing it ( July 26, 1977), I came upon this entry in my 1960 diary (August 17); it puts our 1948 meeting in a slightly different light:

A rather wonderful evening with Jim Charlton last night. We got nearer to our old relation than in a long while––largely because he didn’t whine and complain so much of Hilde. . . . He says that when he first met me––when I assumed I was cutting rather a glamorous figure––I was forever complaining about my age and failing powers. Now he finds me much more active and less sorry for myself, and even better looking!

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of a party who looks at two overcoats, not sure for a moment

which is which, before I’d decided, “That one’s mine.”

(There is, of course, one falsification here. Stephen, in the novel, is said to be looking down on a male and a female body––not on two male bodies, as Christopher was. Could one actually be in doubt as to one’s sex? I suppose it’s possible. But that wasn’t Christopher’s experience.)

Next morning, they went on the beach––huge and (in those days) deserted. Christopher admired Jim’s powerful swimming. (He was also a daring surfer.) As they drove back toward the border, Jim suggested stopping near the edge of a big cliff overlooking the sea.

Jim had explored this cliff on a previous visit and said that its slope was full of small hollows where you could lie hidden and sunbathe––in other words, fuck. Christopher vetoed this idea––I

forget why, but I am sorry he did, because this would have added another happy memory to his memories of their trip. Making love with Jim in the open air always seemed particularly suitable; he was not only a Whitman Nature Boy but also a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, who opened his houses––including their bedrooms––to the outdoors.

This was the period in which the Wright Revolution was making its influence visible at the grass roots level; all over the Los Angeles area, soda fountains and hot-dog stands began to appear which were crude but recognizable distortions of Wright’s style. Until Christopher met Jim he had known nothing about the Wright

philosophy and would probably have dismissed it as pretentious double-talk if it had been explained to him by an academic outsider.

But with Jim it was different. He was an authentic disciple. At the Taliesins he had seen a vision, and Christopher could respect visions.

Wright’s slogans and phrases didn’t repel Christopher when Jim repeated them; they seemed part of Jim’s lovable absurdity.

Christopher sometimes accused Jim of not wanting people to live in the houses he designed––because people were so messy, they choked the rooms with furniture, cluttered them with cooking pots and books and violated the purity of their wall spaces by hanging pictures.

Jim grinned, half admitting that this was how he felt.

At the same time, Christopher admired Jim enormously, just

because he was a truly dedicated architect. Jim made Christopher understand, for the first time, the interrelation of landscape and architecture and taught Christopher how to look at architecture in a new way, as an expression of various philosophies of life. (When they drove back from Mexico, that day, Jim showed Christopher the

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dining room of the old Coronado Hotel.) Jim even dreamed

architecture. Often, when he and Christopher had been sleeping together, he would wake up and describe in great detail some vast building and its adjoining gardens in which he had been dream-wandering, drawing pictures to show Christopher exactly how it had looked.

Part of the fun and excitement of being with Jim was that he felt free to inspect any building which was under construction. If people were at work on it, he would enter with such an air of authority that he was very seldom questioned. He would climb all over it, occasionally uttering scornful grunts or exclaiming, “Jesus!” or kick-ing disgustedly at its walls. Sometimes he would go so far as to knock over an insecure partition, saying indignantly, “What’s this goddam thing supposed to be for?” or, “Who do they think they’re kidding, for Christ’s sake!”

The next weekend, Saturday the 18th and Sunday the 19th, was the last that Christopher and Jim spent together. They didn’t leave town.

On Monday the 20th, Bill Caskey arrived. He had bought a station wagon (secondhand) in the East and had driven it out to California.

The station wagon had been christened “The Blue Bird” by its

former owner, and its name was painted on it. (Later, when people asked Caskey what “The Blue Bird” meant, Caskey would answer

with his southern grin and drawl, “Honey, we bring happiness!”) Caskey had found a driving partner to come with him, a boy

named Les Strang.[*] In his first enthusiasm, Caskey had written to Christopher that Les was “like a blond German discus thrower.”

Whereupon, Christopher had become jealous and had written back to Caskey that he didn’t want to meet Les, if Les and Caskey were still having an affair by the time they arrived in Los Angeles.

Christopher’s jealousy seems quite sick, considering his own

involvement with Jim––even now, I’m at a loss to explain it.

However, Caskey replied reassuringly––from some town on their route––that he had already lost his romantic interest in Les, who was

“behaving like a mad queen.” I seem to remember that one

demonstration of Les’s mad queenishness was that he had [shat] in the corner of a motel bedroom!

Christopher took a larger room at the El Kanan for Caskey and himself, until they had chosen a house to rent. Their first night together, Christopher found that he couldn’t make love to Caskey at all; his memories of sex with Jim were still so powerful. Caskey took

[* Not his real name.]

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this very calmly. Either he minded but was determined not to show it, or he knew instinctively that Jim wasn’t a real rival. If the latter, he was absolutely right. When he and Jim met, a few days later, they became friends at once. Indeed, it was as if Caskey had established, there and then, a ménage à trois agreement with Jim. That winter, whenever Caskey wanted to go out for the night, or to bring in someone to sleep with, he would say to Christopher, “Why don’t you spend the night with Jim?” I don’t think that he and Jim had sex together––at least not often. Jim wasn’t his type. As for Caskey and Christopher, their sex life was resumed almost immediately, without any further hang-ups.

The house which Caskey and Christopher decided to rent was 333

East Rustic Road,1 down in the bottom of Santa Monica Canyon. It belonged to Lee Strasberg, the director, and his wife Paula, and was fairly adequately furnished. I don’t remember how much the rent was, but undoubtedly Paula Strasberg drove a hard bargain; she was a real Jewish landlady––who, at the same time, kept protesting that she was an artist and didn’t understand business. There was a sagging bridge over the creek; it was the only entrance to the house and Caskey and Christopher were obliged to get it repaired. Mrs.

Strasberg avoided paying for this by ignoring the letters Christopher wrote her about it. She also ignored the problem of a rust-eaten old car which a young actor friend of hers had abandoned on the creek bank beside the house. Christopher had to pester him for months before he bothered to find its pink slip, and then someone had to be persuaded to tow it away. (A teenager finally did and then proceeded to spend several hundred dollars, making it driveable.)

Caskey and Christopher moved into the house on September 28,

and at once started receiving visitors. That same night, they had Jim Charlton, Hayden Lewis and Rod Owens to supper. Caskey was

happy to be cooking and entertaining again.

Next day, Lesser Samuels came down, to discuss an idea he had had for another film story. The day-to-day diary doesn’t give a title, but I think this must have been The Easiest Thing in the World. More about it later. Christopher was still working on the script of The Great Sinner but only intermittently; it needed just a few finishing touches.

On October 1, the day-to-day diary says vaguely that Christopher went “to see [a friend], with Phil Curry.” I think Phil Curry was a lawyer and that this must have been a visit to the downtown jail, where [the friend] was under arrest. He had got into trouble because 1 The house is described in A Single Man; Rustic Road is called “Camphor Tree Lane.”

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a teenager he had had sex with had later denounced him. The

teenager was, in fact, no innocent rosebud but an experienced hustler who had been picked up by the police and had got himself off the hook by naming names. Frau Mann rose magnificently to this

occasion. She too went downtown to see [the friend], and declared to all and sundry that she found the idea that he ought to be punished absolutely ridiculous. “Absolutely ridiculous!”––I can still hear the brisk indignant tone in which she said it––this famous and highly respectable old lady defiantly heckling the Los Angeles police on behalf of her son’s [. . .] friend. However, despite her efforts, [the] poor [man]

got sent to a prison camp. Christopher and Klaus Mann visited him there on December 19. He was released on February 12.

On October 6, shooting began on The Great Sinner. On the 9th, Christopher temporarily finished work at MGM. Stephen Spender stayed that night with Christopher and Caskey, so this may have been the day when he came out to the studio to watch the shooting. It was a scene in Gregory Peck’s attic room. He is lying asleep, exhausted after an epileptic fit. Ava Gardner (Pauline) enters, rearranges his bedclothes, then becomes aware that the desk is piled with pages of manuscript. To quote from the screenplay: “In happy surprise she whispers under her breath: ‘Fedja . . . you’ve written.’ ”1

Admittedly, Ava Gardner’s diction left something to be desired.

Stephen bitchily pretended that he thought she said: “Fedja . . .

you’re rotten.”

During the early days of the shooting, Christopher spent a lot of time on the set. At first, he and Gottfried both had high hopes of Robert Siodmak, a director they greatly admired. But it soon became evident that Siodmak felt somehow ill at ease making this costume picture. He didn’t seem to understand the style of the period or the kind of acting that should go with it. Even his lighting was wrong, it suggested one of his modern thrillers. When the doctor came into Peck’s attic, the set was so dark that you couldn’t see it. And then the doctor spoke his line, “I need more light”––which made everyone who watched the rushes roar with laughter. The scene had to be reshot.

1 Some of the stage directions in the screenplay have obviously been written by Fodor. Here are three samples: “These are the 1860s, an age when gaslight is young, as is the melody that brightly fills the scene. The fashions are charming, the décolletés daring, but the shape of a feminine leg is still a secret.”

“And once more his whole army of gold is thrown into battle. . . . The silence is ghostly. The whirling ivory ball carries destiny.” “Near the windows is the Baccarat table. . . . Surrounded by a wreath of empty chairs, it looks expectant

––as though waiting to welcome the return of its nightly guest.”

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Christopher had had such misgivings about Peck before the film started shooting that he now reacted in the opposite direction, simply because Peck didn’t immediately disgrace himself in his first scenes.

Christopher tried for a while to believe that Peck was going to be very good, and he said so to all his friends. Ivan Moffat had soon perfected a fiendish imitation of Christopher describing Peck’s performance: “It’s really wonderful, you know, because he does it so simply. He opens his eyes and he says, ‘I’ve seen Christ’––just like that.”

I should write something about Frank Taylor (see pages 134–136) at this point. Frank Taylor had now settled in Los Angeles and was working as a producer at MGM. He was tall, skinny, boyish. His hair was very short and he dressed neatly, in Ivy-League-college-kid style, usually wearing a bow tie. He had professionally sincere blue eyes and lots of Madison Avenue charm. He was quite desperately

enthusiastic about everything which he believed to be “in,” at any given moment. A positive thinker, he abounded in money-making schemes so grandiose that one kept expecting him to become a

millionaire. His sexuality was compulsive and rather scary, he pursued his (always male) prey like a spider and seized it with his long, obscenely thin arms and legs. His wife Nan tried desperately to keep up with [. . .] him. She was small and (I guess) cute. [. . .] They had, at that time, three or four small children, all boys. [. . .]

I have tried to say the worst things about Frank Taylor first, so as to get them off my chest. Having said them, I can admit that

Christopher very often enjoyed being with Frank and found him intelligent and amusing; very often agreed with him politically, for he was a model liberal; very often felt his charm. On two occasions, while drunk, he actually had sex with Frank[*]––though it isn’t an experience I care to dwell on.

What really repelled Christopher––and what repels me today––

about Frank was something which was none of Christopher’s

business; his dishonest, tricky bisexual posture. Frank bragged about his homosexual affairs and even sometimes demanded that they

should be respected as serious love dramas. At the same time, he became maudlin over his marriage and his responsibilities as a father.

Stephen Spender is deeply false in the same way, but not nearly as disgusting as Frank, because he is too shrewd to parade his sentimentality in public. They are both utterly untrustworthy––but then, one should know better than to trust them. On the positive side,

[* Frank Taylor stated that they never had sex and that he did not find Isherwood physically attractive.]

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they were useful to Christopher as partial models for one of his worst and one of his best literary characters––Stephen Monk in The World in the Evening and Patrick in A Meeting by the River. I believe Frank Taylor took Stephen Monk personally and was offended. He never spoke of this to Christopher, but, after the book was published, they gradually lost contact. Stephen Spender wouldn’t have been offended––he isn’t petty in that way––though he may well have been hurt. But the bond between Stephen and Christopher was and still is too tough to be broken––whatever they may write and say about each other.

On October 14, Christopher brought Frank Taylor an outline for a movie he had written with Klaus Mann; it was based on the life of Han Van Meegeren, the painter-forger, and his dealings with the Nazis. This project was entirely Klaus’s idea; he had studied Van Meegeren’s career while he was in Holland. Frank wasn’t interested; or, if he was, he failed to interest the front office. On November 12, Thomas Mann (see Letters of Thomas Mann) wrote to Klaus, “The starry-eyed one seems to have failed––anyone who counts on the movies is throwing himself on Satan’s mercies.” (“The starry-eyed one” was evidently a family nickname for Christopher. Whether it just meant that his eyes were bright, or whether it referred to his supposedly excessive optimism, I don’t know.)

On October 18, Christopher says in the day-to-day diary that he worked on The Condor and the Cows. He had already written some of this––the first two chapters were finished on board the Groix, but probably little or nothing since then.1 Christopher didn’t finish chapter three until November 15.

On November 6 and 7, there are two more entries in the

1948–1956 journal––the first since May 29. They refer to a party given by Caskey and Christopher on November 4 and to the

marriage of Vernon Old and Patty O’Neill[*] on November 5, with Peggy Kiskadden and Christopher in attendance. The guests at the party were Jay Laval, Bill Bailey, Hurd Hatfield, Roy Radebaugh (better known as Richard Cromwell the actor), Lennie Newman

(see page 67), Hayden Lewis and Rod Owens, Roger Edens (who

was a high-up in the music department at MGM) with [a friend] Don Van Trees, and Jim Charlton. Jim now came to the house regularly, 1 There were however at least six articles covering different phases of the trip which Christopher had written while he was still in South America. These he quoted from directly or rewrote when he worked on the book itself. The articles appeared in various magazines during 1948 or the early part of 1949.

[* Not her real name.]

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often bringing a boyfriend with him and later screwing him in one of the two upstair bedrooms. Sometimes he showed up without

having been invited; freeloading is a characteristic vice of Dog People. At thirty-eight, Radebaugh still had some of the cuteness which had made Richard Cromwell one of the homosexual pinup

boys of the thirties.1 Now he had given up his movie career and taken to sculpting. He was a touching, sweet-natured tragic character who drank too much. He had a violent unrequited crush on Rod

Owens. He was to die of cancer in 1960. Lennie Newman was still cooking for Jay Laval at his restaurant. Lennie had become Caskey’s favorite drinking companion. They spent many evenings out on the town together.

Vernon Old and Patty O’Neill had been living together for some time already. I seem to remember that Christopher actually urged them to get married––or rather, urged Vernon to marry Patty, who needed no urging. If Christopher did indeed do this, his motives must have been largely malicious. He must have been harboring a grudge against Vernon, who picked up lovers and dropped them

again with no regard for anything but his own convenience.

Christopher must have wanted to see Vernon hog-tied, for once, by marriage.[*] And this suggests that Christopher himself was feeling hog-tied and therefore envious and resentful of other people’s freedom.

In the journal entry of November 6, Christopher writes that,

“Caskey is endlessly busy, home building. . . . He never ceases to carpenter, sew, paint, cook.” Christopher adds, “Sometimes I ask myself uneasily, what will happen when the home is built?”

Christopher says nothing against Caskey here but he goes on to express a lot of guilt and self-defensiveness about their way of life:

“I’m being confronted, at last, with the problems of the Householder

––and who ever dares to say they are less than the problems of the Monk? . . . No doubt the life in Santa Monica Canyon is empty, vain, trivial, tragic, indigent of God. But that’s no reason not to live here and try to do the best you can.” The best Christopher could do was to make japam (not very regularly), see Swami now and then, and keep assuring himself that he would restart his novel as soon as 1 I particularly remember a general fluttering of English hearts over him in Lives of a Bengal Lancer, 1935.

[* According to Vernon Old, Isherwood remembers wrongly. Old recalls that Isherwood derided marriage as “an old-fashioned and bourgeois thing to do, and couldn’t imagine why we wanted it. Yet, he arranged a tiresome reception at Salka Viertel’s which everyone dreaded, but went through with to please him. I remember that Caskey fell asleep.”]

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his bread-and-butter chore, The Condor and the Cows, was finished.

Meanwhile he continued to drink too much and his guilt pressure continued to build up.

Christopher also refers in this entry to the surprise victory of Truman over Dewey in the elections––which took place, that year, on November 2. Like Salka, and many many others, Christopher

rejoiced in the discomfiture of the pollsters even more than in the defeat of Dewey.

On November 19, Brad Saunders is mentioned for the first time.

Brad was a very tall blond, amusingly attractive, more than somewhat crazy young man who had served with distinction as a pilot in World War II. He was queer, sexually wild, [. . .] and a joker. He looked deceptively “nice” and upper-class, especially when his pretty gold hair was smoothly brushed and he was wearing a uniform––he was still in the air force, or at any rate [in] the reserve. His father was (I think) a general, a good grey career soldier, courteous, intelligent.

Brad’s brother,1 a handsome heterosexual dark boy, was an avowed communist. His existence was a serious blot on Brad’s military record, but one of the most impressive things about the Saunders family was that neither Brad, nor his father and mother, would express even a formal disapproval of his doings. They saw him frequently––I believe he had an academic job in San Francisco––and they publicly defended his right to his own political opinions.

At that time, Brad was having an affair with Jay Laval. On

November 25, Brad invited Christopher and Caskey and Jay to a party at his parents’ house. So I guess General and Mrs. Saunders were as broad-minded about Brad’s queerness as they were about his brother’s communism.

On November 29, Christopher finished chapter four of The

Condor and the Cows.

On December 9, he finished chapter five.

On December 16, Denny Fouts died in Rome. I don’t remember

exactly when or how Christopher got the news. A letter written to Christopher by John Goodwin from Agadir, Morocco, on January 9, 1949, refers to a cable Christopher has sent him––so Christopher must have heard about Denny earlier than this. In his letter Goodwin says that he last saw Denny in Rome in November.2 Denny had had 1 Named Henry(?)

2 About this visit, John Goodwin writes: “. . . once I told him very brutally that why he had lost all his friends (as he constantly complained of it) was that he was not himself any more. He asked in his strangely rational and yet hazy way just in what way was he different. It was hard to tell him for I meant really saying that he was not at all rational, that his habits of lying abed and living a ¾ 1948 ¾

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a friend with him, Tony Watson-Gandy. It was Tony who later

came to Paris, met John again and told him about Denny’s death.

“He had found Denny dead in the john and immediately rushed him to a hospital in case he should still be alive. There was an autopsy and it proved to be his heart. He apparently had had a bad heart for a long time and since I had left Rome he also had had a bad case of flu. It was not suicide nor drugs. Of course people will say so and it really makes no matter. Tony said that his face showed no pain so that it must have been a sudden attack without agony.”1

On December 18, Christopher finished chapter six––and was

therefore more than halfway through the book.

Gian Carlo Menotti is mentioned in the day-to-day diary as having come to supper that night. Menotti and Christopher had met each other for the first time back in July or August, when they were both working for MGM. Christopher was charmed by Menotti’s

vitality and they saw each other often. When Caskey arrived home, Menotti promptly made a pass at him, unsuccessfully. Christopher was a little annoyed by this but then decided that Latins will be Latins and must be excused.

On December 22, Ben Bok and his girl Coral were married, and

Christopher was at the ceremony. Peggy disapproved of Ben’s

marriage even more than she had disapproved of Vernon Old’s. She told Christopher in a tone of deep distaste that Ben and Coral were only getting married because they wanted sex so badly. Peggy also found Coral’s family [not to her liking].

On December 23, Christopher went to Swami’s birthday lunch at the Vedanta Center. In the evening, he had supper with Jim

Charlton at the Santa Inez Inn. This may just possibly have been the kind of Poe existence made it difficult to share anything of the world with him.

But he seemed to see finally what I meant and for a week until I left, though his habits didn’t change, he wanted to live, which was something he hadn’t cared one way or another about for a long time. He was seriously considering going to England or America to a psychiatrist which I was all for, even though I admitted to him and he agreed that they were only a very last resort.”

1 A sequel to Denny’s death was described to Christopher much later––it may be partly untrue: Tony Watson-Gandy was said to have adored Denny and to have done his best to look after him as long as Denny was alive; but Tony refused absolutely to take drugs. However, after Denny’s death, Tony found a hypodermic syringe and some heroin in Denny’s suitcase. In his misery and grief, Tony decided to try it. As a result he became a dope addict. He went back to England and died a few years later.

Tony took Denny’s dog Trotsky back with him. And so that adventurous dog life, which began in a conscientious objectors’ camp in the California mountains, ended in one of the stately homes of England.

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occasion of a scene which Christopher later adapted for The World in the Evening1:

While Christopher and Jim were drinking at the bar, before

supper, they attracted the notice of two large drunken men. The men had probably guessed that Jim and Christopher were queer. They were intrigued and aggressive. One of the men said to Christopher,

“How about us throwing you in the pool?” Christopher told them to go ahead, adding that he was in the mood for a swim. He wasn’t at all afraid of the men, for their attitude was basically flirtatious; little as they were aware of this. The pool was heated, and Christopher was drunk enough himself to welcome the prospect of a dip and a mild scandal. One of the men picked him up in his arms, and began

walking out of the bar. Christopher didn’t offer the least resistance.

He was showing off for Jim’s benefit. Jim tried to interfere, but the other man blocked his path. Everybody in the bar was watching. A bartender uttered a ridiculously ineffectual warning that the pool was closed for swimming after sunset. Now, however, the manager or some other authority figure appeared and boldly told the man who was carrying Christopher that he was causing a disturbance. This was Christopher’s opportunity to dominate the situation. Loud and clear and British, he said, “This gentleman is not annoying me.”

This wasn’t bar-room humor, so it failed to get a laugh from the bar guests––it merely puzzled them. It also puzzled and somehow

deflated the high spirits of Christopher’s would-be ducker. He put Christopher down and staggered off.

On December 28, there was a party on Stage 15 at MGM to

celebrate the end of shooting on The Great Sinner. I don’t remember anything about this party. Christopher probably got drunk to deaden his embarrassment at having to project optimism amidst his fellow members of this losing team––for it must surely have been evident by now that The Great Sinner would be a loser, or at best a nonwinner.

On December 31, Christopher saw the New Year in at Salka

Viertel’s. I think Montgomery Clift was there among others and that this was the night when Clift insisted on drinking blood brotherhood with Christopher. They had met several times already––Clift having been introduced into the Viertel circle by Fred Zinnemann who had directed him in The Search. Whenever Clift and Christopher met, they playacted enthusiasm for each other, but they were never to become real friends. Maybe Clift found Christopher cold and

standoffish. Christopher found Clift touching but ugly minded and sick.

1 Part three, chapter one.

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It seems strange that Caskey and Christopher spent this New

Year’s Eve apart––and ironic that Caskey spent it with Jim Charlton.

Maybe Caskey was going bar crawling and Christopher just didn’t want to come along. It doesn’t seem likely that they had actually quarrelled because, on New Year’s Day, they drove up to Ojai, taking Jim with them, and all three stayed the night at Iris Tree’s ranch.

1949

On January 4, Christopher’s books arrived from New York.1 All this while, they had been stored in the cellar of 207 East 52nd 1 The day-to-day diary’s list of books Christopher read in 1948 includes: The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, The Bostonians ( James), The Mint (T. E.

Lawrence), Nostromo (Conrad), Le Sabbat (Maurice Sachs), The Loved One (Evelyn Waugh), Hindoo Holiday ( J. R. Ackerley), End as a Man (Calder Willingham), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (Dylan Thomas), Ape and Essence (Aldous Huxley), I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith), Cry, the Beloved Country (Alan Paton), The Seven-Storey Mountain (Thomas Merton), The Plague and Caligula (Camus), The American People (Geoffrey Gorer), No Exit (Sartre), A Treasury of Science Fiction (edited by Groff Conklin). There are more thrillers listed this year than usual, probably because Christopher did so much travelling and therefore required travel reading.

Christopher got interested in Steffens through knowing Ella Winter and her terrifically sexy son Pete Steffens. He found the Autobiography very curious; there is something a bit fiendish and inhuman in Steffens’s personal liking for the men he exposed and ruined. The Bostonians is still my favorite long novel by James––indeed, the only one I really like. Christopher read The Mint while staying with Victoria Ocampo at Mar del Plata (see The Condor and the Cows

[chapter ten]); it hadn’t yet been published. It was a bit of a disappointment to him, since he had been expecting something prodigious, but it left many vivid new impressions of demure, humble-arrogant, masquerading Lawrence––

about whom Forster, after hours of reminiscence, had sadly delivered the verdict, “One didn’t altogether like him.” Christopher found Nostromo noble and masterly but unmemorable. Le Sabbat, which he noticed by chance in a Buenos Aires bookstore, appealed to him as sex gossip about people who interested him. He had never heard of Sachs before and liked his shamelessness.

He read the book in French; there was then no English translation. He passionately hated The Loved One for its condescending attitude toward California. Later readings, while working with Tony Richardson on the film, have convinced me that this is a mean-minded, sloppily written production, 176

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Street. The Sterns had long since reoccupied their apartment there, and Jimmy Stern had written Christopher a letter telling him that the cellar had somehow been flooded and that he was afraid some of Christopher’s books were damaged. So Christopher was prepared for a shock, but not sufficiently. When he saw several of his especially beloved volumes stained and crinkled and cracked, he shed tears. Later he got a few of them rebound, but this seemed to destroy their identity.

On January 6, Christopher went back to MGM for additional

work on The Great Sinner and stayed there till January 13. During this week, he saw a rough cut of the whole film. I don’t remember what probably Waugh’s worst and utterly unworthy of his talent. Hindoo Holiday must have been a rereading. I wish I could remember what Christopher thought of it in the light of his now increased knowledge of things Indian, but I don’t. End as a Man was an exciting discovery and the beginning of Christopher’s (more or less) constant enthusiasm for Willingham’s work.

He loved Portrait of the Artist, particularly the chapter called “One Warm Saturday.” He was shocked by Ape and Essence, feeling that Aldous’s besetting distaste for the world and the flesh had gotten quite out of control here and produced something cheap and nasty. Against his will, he had to agree with Peggy Kiskadden on this. Peggy, as usual, had no qualms about expressing her opinion unasked for; she told Aldous exactly what she objected to. Christopher kept his mouth shut. But he was forced to say something complimentary to Dodie Smith about I Capture the Castle, though it seemed to him mere magazine writing. Cry, the Beloved Country was recommended to Christopher by James Stern. The opening seemed so technicolored that Christopher nearly put the book down, but he read on and was tremendously moved. In the November 6 journal entry, Christopher says that he is reading The Seven-Storey Mountain and that he is repelled by Merton’s Catholic arrogance. But he was also attracted by the very grimness of the Trappist death to the world––which is admittedly far more terrifying but also perhaps easier than trying to be a monk at the permissive Vedanta Center. Christopher admired The Plague; it seemed to him altogether different from Camus’ fakey Stranger. He read into it an antiheroic, anti-Hemingway message––that suffering and death are not romantic and that even a brave and noble doctor would much rather not have to fight a plague. Caligula is dimly remembered for one funny scene in which the emperor holds a poetry competition. Christopher thought No Exit as phoney as L’Étranger. He was delighted with Gorer for saying that, while the European male fears that the homosexuals will seduce his children, the American male fears that they will seduce him. Groff Conklin’s science fiction anthology was recommended, I think, by Gerald Heard. (Gerald’s story, “The Great Fog,” is in it.) The Conklin anthology Christopher read first was the one published in 1948; later he got an earlier one, published in 1946. The story which made the greatest impression on Christopher was Lawrence O’Donnell’s “Vintage Season.” These books were his introduction to the new school of science fiction writers.

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work he did––some of it may have been on passages of narration, in which “Fedor” is presumably quoting from the novel he has just written about the experiences shown on the screen.

On January 14, Jay Laval and Brad Saunders left for the Virgin Islands. Jay had been hired to organize and open a chic restaurant there and he took Brad along as his assistant. Meanwhile, Jay’s restaurant in the Canyon stayed open, with Lennie Newman doing most of the cooking. I believe the Virgin Islands restaurant was a success; but Jay’s association with Brad wasn’t. They quarrelled, and their affair was over by the time they returned to California.

On January 25, Christopher was called back again to MGM. He

worked there for three days.

On January 29, he finished chapter seven of The Condor and the Cows.

On February 4, he worked at MGM for one day only. I think

this may have been a day on which they were recording the

narration passages. These, of course, had to be spoken by Gregory Peck. But there was one scene which required a different male actor’s voice over the shot. Fedor, down and out, goes into a church to pray. Then be becomes aware of the sound of coins being dropped into the poor box. He is tempted to steal from it and is just about to do so when he thinks he hears a voice, coming from the carved figure on a nearby crucifix. It shames him, and he withdraws his hand from the box.

This voice was to have been Frank Morgan’s; he had played a part in the film––Pitard, a ruined gambler who shoots himself and later appears to Fedor as a ghost––but Morgan didn’t show up that day because he was sick. (He was to die a few months later.) Since Christopher happened to be in the recording studio and this was an emergency, someone (maybe Gottfried) suggested that he should speak the lines. And so, more or less in a spirit of fun, Christopher took on the role of Christ at five minutes’ notice.

In order that his voice should reverberate spookily, they made him stand in a small concrete passageway which led to one of the exits.

He was given a hand mike at the end of a long cable, like an

announcer. Since he couldn’t see into the studio and watch the screen on which his scene was being projected, they rigged up a signal light to let him know when to begin. Whenever the light went on, he was to speak his lines––until they got the reading they wanted.

For some reason, the keep-out sign outside the exit door hadn’t been switched on, so Christopher was in constant danger of interruption. Once, just as his signal light flashed, the exit door opened and a young carpenter came in. There was no time for explanations.

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Christopher fixed the carpenter with an authoritative glare and told him accusingly: “And they divided my garments among them––and they cast dice for my robe.” When telling this story later, Christopher used to say the young man looked panic-stricken, fearing that he was confronted by a religious maniac. I doubt this. What does strike me now, as I write it down, is––how beautifully suitable it was that the young man should have been a carpenter!

On February 12, Christopher finished chapter eight.

On February 21, he went to the Good Samaritan Hospital, to

watch Bill Kiskadden operate. Christopher’s relations with Bill had always been somewhat strained. He sensed (and was later told

definitely by other people) that Bill didn’t like him. I think Bill was even physically repelled by Christopher, finding him creepy, unnatural, a faggot. But Bill and Christopher had to keep on polite terms with each other as long as Christopher went on seeing Peggy.

They both worked quite hard at this, and they found a topic for communication in Christopher’s amateur interest in medicine. So Bill invited Christopher to come and see him at work. It was a challenge maybe, from Bill’s point of view; he may have thought that Christopher would either back out or turn squeamish and have to leave the operating room. Christopher had no such qualms. Having seen a leg amputated, an abdomen slit open and a skull trephined, he was convinced that no surgical sight could upset him.

But there is something uncomfortably personal about plastic

surgery on the face; it is only too easy to identify with the patient. So Christopher did feel squeamish two or three times that morning, though he didn’t give Bill satisfaction by showing it.

The patient was a truck driver––Bill Kiskadden didn’t as a rule do cosmetic operations; he repaired the victims of industrial accidents and car wrecks. This man had been driving his truck somewhere up in the mountains when an emergency arose which

forced him to choose between colliding with a small car full of people and swinging his truck off the road into a steep slope. He swung off the road and the truck turned over and his face was smashed against the steering wheel. Now Bill Kiskadden was

working to get his nose back into its proper position; it had been knocked crooked. The patient was completely conscious.

Christopher felt a qualm as Bill took a hypodermic and very slowly and deliberately sank its needle into the tip of the truck driver’s nose. The truck driver uttered a groan and exclaimed that it hurt.

“I know it hurts,” Bill told him, “it hurts like hell. That’s what you get for being a brave man.” Bill said this in a nice friendly doctor-to-patient tone––and yet there was something about the look on ¾ 1949 ¾

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his face which convinced Christopher that what Gerald Heard had always maintained was true: Bill was a sadist.1

At this point there is a group of four more entries in the 1948–1956

journal, on February 20, March 1, March 2 and March 3. They refer to the Ramakrishna birthday puja at the Vedanta Center which

Christopher attended and a party he and Caskey went to at Thomas Mann’s house (both on March 1). Also (March 2) to Christopher’s difficulties in starting chapter ten of the South American book––he had finished chapter nine on February 24. There is also a reference to Peter Watson who was then in Los Angeles with his friend

Norman Fowler; Christopher and Caskey had been seeing a lot of them.

Christopher doesn’t say anything in the day-to-day diary about his work with Swami on Patanjali’s yoga aphorisms––translation and commentary––which was later to be published as How to Know God.

However, in the March 2 entry in the journal, he writes: “Swami’s way ahead of me,” which shows that they must have been working together for some time already.

The only really significant feature of these entries is that they twice mention the difficulties Christopher is having with Caskey. This is the first time that Christopher has even admitted in writing that there are any difficulties and his tone suggests that he is trying hard to minimize them. Indeed he presents the whole problem as though it were a mere lack of consideration by Caskey for Christopher’s comfort and convenience. Christopher complains that Caskey stays up, from time to time, playing the record player all night––it seems that this usually happens when they have had a party and Caskey is drunk. Christopher writes:

It is a most curious deadlock––arising, apparently, out of an emotional blind spot in Caskey. He absolutely cannot understand why I mind being kept awake. And I absolutely cannot understand how he can keep me awake, even if he doesn’t understand why.